Don’t you just hate it when a blogger writes a provocative title for a post that turns out to be little more than a link? Me too — sorry! But there’s kind of an interesting discussion going on at Open Micro, and I think it would be helpful to those of us who try and write haiku (or 17-syllable American sentences, for that matter) if we could hear from a few more perspectives. If you’re primarily a reader, for example, what makes a haiku satisfying to read? Do you even notice how many syllables it has? Stop on over and let us know.
Trees and desert
Sorry for the slow and intermittent site performance lately — we’re doing our best to address it, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Or if we are out of the woods, we’re lost in the desert instead, inching along under unknown power like the sailing stones of Death Valley. And as it happens, Via Negativa posts are featured in two fabulous new blog carnival editions, each a pleasing blend of art and science: Carnival of the Arid #1 at Coyote Crossing, and Festival of the Trees #32 at treeblog. Stop on over if you get a chance. Hours of exploring await.
Open Micro
Yes, I know my photo blog is down. Shutterchance, the host, sent around an email saying they had experienced massive server failure, and were working hard to try and reconstruct files. It doesn’t sound too encouraging. And I know that Via Negativa was out of commission for close to a day. My blog host and patron, Matt, suggested that’s because I had over 30 active plugins, and the server couldn’t take it. So I’ve been cutting plugins right and left and holding my breath. No more ShareThis, no more silly word count in the footer, no more Table of Contents. (Did anyone ever actually use ShareThis? If so, for what?)
There for a few minutes yesterday morning, even The Morning Porch was down for maintenance, which meant that all three of my personal blogs were MIA at the same time. Scary. What to do?
Well, create a new site, of course. Check out the new group blog for micropoetry, Open Micro.
Most people use microblog services like Twitter and its open-source counterpart Identica for updates on their daily activities, and that’s fine. Some people use them for hilarious bon mots — I try to follow as many of those as possible. At qarrtsiluni, we use Twitter and Identica to help disseminate news about the magazine and our contributors. There are even some novelists taking advantage of the medium, trickling out new work one or two sentences at a time — enough of them that a new word has been coined for the genre, twitterature. But some of us simply enjoy the challenge of trying to create complete poems or prose-poems within the strict confines of a single microblog post of 140 characters, spaces included.
There are actually quite a few haiku writers on Twitter, though of course not all of them take the art too seriously. But it was actually the much less populous Identica whose recent addition of groups sparked the creation of Open Micro. Some of us on Twitter and Identica had long been favoriting other people’s most lyrical notices and hoarding them in our Favorites pages (mine are here), but with the ability to create a Poetry group page came a new idea: wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow combine all our favorites pages into one?
That’s essentially what Open Micro will do. We’re trying to be careful to get permission for everything we post, though this isn’t as onerous as it sounds, since any micropoem by a fellow contributor is fair game. The group will probably add a few more members, but what we really need now are readers. Stop on over! And be sure to bookmark it, so that the next time Via Negativa vanishes into the ether, you’ll still have something to read.
Taking back the country
Over at the cassandra pages, my qarrtsiluni co-editor Beth Adams has been filing reports from D.C. for the past several days: Sunday, Monday, Monday night, and Tuesday. The scene in the capital today certainly sounded like a festival of the dispossessed.
The TV coverage, apparently, didn’t show what really happened: when Bush was introduced, a “boo” arose from all those millions of people that must have been completely audible; it was extremely loud. And when his helicopter lifted off, a cheer arose along with millions of uplifted arms, waving goodbye (quite a few, I’d say, with middle finger raised) — all the length of the Mall. I was a little surprised, and didn’t participate in the booing, but it was not so much rudeness as it was a spontaneous shucking off of a tremendous burden and source of despair, and an acknowledgment that this man never represented us, he was not of us, and Obama is clearly someone entirely other. The day for me was all about being part of that tremendous crowd who felt that America was being taken back, repossessed, by the people who have felt so disenfranchised all this time. Their presence, and the fact that they had traveled so far to be there, was not just a personal desire but also a statement to the world that there actually is another American spirit, and it’s still alive.
UPDATE: Be sure not to miss her final Reflections on the Inauguration.
American conquistadors
Don’t miss “Men Without Weakness.” Dale’s take on imperialism is very much like my own, and I link it here to provide perspective on my ongoing series, Postcards from a Conquistador. Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman were cut from the same cloth as Hernán Cortés, I think.
The cold blue eyes look down history, finding us with contempt. He gave up drinking whiskey when he found that he liked the taste of it; he gave up reading the newspapers when they started to praise him. He did take pride in winning battles, but he knew it was a sin: the victories belonged to God, not to him. In winning a battle he found spiritual ecstasy: it was, maybe, the only token of God’s love he would ever believe.
Though I suppose Dale’s perspective, like my own, must’ve been shaped by leftist critiques of imperialism, this post could just as easily have been penned by a disciple of Ron Paul, and I like the fact that he tries to get inside the heads and hearts of men who are all too easily dismissed as monsters, or adulated by latter-day partisans. By the end of it — it’s not long — you’ll also understand why Dale named his blog mole, after the homebody protagonist of The Wind in the Willows. Go read.
Old trees, new ornaments
Festival of the Trees #31, the New Year’s 2009 edition, is worth an extended visit at Rock Paper Lizard. As Hugh says, ’tis the season to take down the Christmas tree — something we just got around to doing this morning up at my parents’ house. Dad kindly undecorated the tree, leaving me with the simpler task of carrying it outside.
If you feed wild birds, discarded Christmas trees make very useful shelters from hawks and inclement weather. I nestled this year’s tree among the skeletons of previous Christmases, four of them, in varying stages of decomposition. Even without the needles, thin, tangled coats of weeds and grasses still offer some protection. The Christmas tree is truly a gift that goes on giving. When I came back with my camera to snap the above picture less than five minutes later, a half-dozen white-throated sparrows flew out. No sooner had it been stripped of the usual myriad of fake bird ornaments than the real thing moved in.
*
I’ve just been reading about TreeYoga. I got all excited at first, but it turned out that this was really boring old PeopleYoga — the trees are merely used for a form of non-lethal hanging.
As in the yoga posture (asana) of the Tree Pose (Vrksasana), TreeYoga beckons us to reflect upon a core principle of yoga — balance. Like trees, yogis can now root themselves into the earth and extend gloriously up to the sky. There is great beauty and playfulness in the flowering shapes of yogis sprouting from trees.
If the accompanying photos are any indication, the dangling yogis do indeed resemble some kind of strange fruit. The official TreeYoga website refers to trees as “yoga partners,” which strikes me as presumptuous in the same way I find tree-hugging presumptuous: how do we know the trees really want to be hugged or enlisted as partners?
Still, people have been meditating in or under trees for a very long time, and as I’ve written here in the past, many Central Pennsylvanians practice an annual tree-based meditative activity that probably resembles quite closely the paleolithic, ancestral form of meditation. And because they spend such long hours up there, staying as still as they can, they’re rewarded with all sorts of great wildlife sightings. One of the hunters on our property saw a bobcat from her tree stand this year; another saw a fisher. There were several red fox sightings, which surprised us a little because we haven’t seen any in two or three years, and had assumed they’d all been killed or driven off by the coyotes. And quite regularly of course the hunters draw the attention of small flocks of winter birds. I can only imagine a chickadee’s reaction if it saw a human hanging upside-down, chickadee-fashion, with the help of a TreeYoga swing.
25 things about Via Negativa
- Almost every year, I think Via Negativa’s birthday is coming up on the 20th. Every year, it turns out to have been the 17th. The problem I guess is that I think of the first post as having been in late December, although it was really the middle of the month. So given that I can’t even remember that much, I can’t vouch for the complete accuracy of everything that follows.
- My gateway drug to blogging was Yahoo Geocities. I still have a webpage there, which is usually the second result for a Google search of my name. And I haven’t touched my proto-blog there, the page of essays I wrote in 2003, originally sparked by the invasion of Iraq. Note that the brief apologia at the bottom of that page already contains the germ of my blogging ethos:
[M]y most memorable prose, I think, has been written on the run, or off the cuff. It’s fairly disposable–but maybe that’s the point. As long as it biodegrades in a timely manner. And gives off a pleasant fragrance, thanks to all the spirits of the invisible wild: yeasts, molds, fungi, bacteria. Whatever works.
- When I started blogging, I didn’t anticipate any need for comments. (And the original Blogger/Blogspot didn’t have any; you had to hack in a Haloscan commenting system. Which, in early January 2004, marked my second CSS/HTML hack, after learning how to code links for the sidebar.)
- When I started blogging, I didn’t think there were any other bloggers covering religion, philosophy, or poetry. The first such blog I found — by using a blog directory (Blogarama, I think) and looking under “philosophy” — was the cassandra pages. Five years later, I remain close friends with its author, Beth Adams, and co-edit qarrtsiluni with her.
- “Via Negativa” is probably not the best name for a blog. Not for this blog, at any rate. I quickly dropped what I had thought would be my primary focus — religious agnosticism, broadly defined — but kept the name because regular readers had already gotten used to it. I decided that if the name tended to weed out people who avoid any hint of negativity, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being near the bottom of most alphabetized blogrolls was a bit more of a problem.
- I started my very first side-blog in 2004 — Dead Raccoon. It was also my first microblog, though I’m not sure the term had been invented yet. It consisted of almost daily absurdist political bon mots, filled with cynicism and black humor. I killed it after a few months, because I realized I didn’t have very many original political insights, and most of the time I really don’t know what I’m talking about.
- The indirect successor to Dead Raccoon was a cartoon called Words on the Street, which began as a text-only feature called Diogenes’ Tub. The idea to make it into a cartoon came from a reader who at the time used the pseudonym the Sylph (and who was also, I believe, Via Negativa’s very first commenter, though all those Haloscan comments are gone now). A big part of the reason for doing it originally was to break up the text — Via Negativa had virtually no other illustrations until I started taking and posting photos in 2005. Diogenes the bum still puts in an appearance from time to time (as at the top of this post).
- My first two years as a blogger were my most ambitious in terms of average post length and number of series. (I’ve subsequently been able to put most of the latter into fully functioning series, with archives in chronological order, thanks to the fantastic Organize Series plugin for WordPress.) What happened I think was that I had a certain number of ideas I had to get out of my system. Once I did so, I noticed an unexpected real-life side-effect: I began to feel much less of a compulsion to turn every conversation into a lecture or a harangue. I’m not trying to claim that that impulse has completely gone away, but I believe I’ve mostly broken the habit.
- I began blogging an epic poem, Cibola, on January 3rd 2005 and finished it up six months later. Those posts were interspersed with almost-daily Words on the Street cartoons as well as my regular blog posts. I think I scared off a lot of readers that year. Nowadays, I do just as much stuff online, but it’s spread over several different sites.
- Via Negativa is part of an informal “class of 2003,” which includes a number of blogs still in my blogroll. Blogging first hit the internet-using mainstream that year, I guess, and the war made a lot of us look for a bigger soapbox. My first meet-up with other bloggers was in New York City in February 2005, where we convened to see Christo’s Gates installation in Central Park. I blogged it, of course. So did Lorianne and Leslee, not to mention Diogenes.
- I moved off Blogspot on April Fools Day, 2006. My main reason was the lack of categories, which I dearly wanted in order to make my burgeoning archives slightly more accessible. I think it was at least a year and a half later before Blogger finally introduced categories (“lables”). It was hard to leave more than two years’ worth of comments behind when I moved. I really felt bad about that.
- One of the irritating things about Blogspot is that it doesn’t retire domains when someone deletes a blog. So cyber-squatters snatch up newly cleared domains like mine in order to take advantage of the incoming links, even if they never put up more than a single post. And if they then encode instructions to search-engine bots not to spider their site, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine will restrict access to all its archives of one’s own site. Moral: Never delete a Blogspot blog. Clear the archives if you need to, but keep at least one post there redirecting visitors to your new site.
- Since April 1, 2006, Via Negativa has been hosted free of charge by my cousin Matt Albright, who grew up nearby but currently lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and three daughters. Matt bought lifetime server space for a website some years ago, but has never had time to put up more than a CV for himself. My dad’s site, Peaceful Societies, piggybacks on Matt’s website as well.
- Matt’s also the guy who got me into digital photography when he sent me his old camera in late February 2005. I had blogged about an icestorm, and he wanted to know what it looked like. The Via Negativa readership at the time was divided about whether the addition of photography would be a good thing, but eventually I think they all came around.
- My first Blogger blog used a template with the sidebar on the left, but within six months I switched to a right-hand sidebar and it’s been that way ever since.
- I’ve been on-again, off-again with stats counters, which means I really have no idea how many people have visted Via Negativa over the years. I seem to average about 10,000 page views a month. The best month for which I kept records clocked in at just shy of 30,000.
- I am still routinely surprised that anyone stops by here at all, though. Sometimes Via Negativa readers even make me things and send them through the mail, which astounds me. At times, I like to tell myself that blogging makes me a useful and productive member of society. But probably the reality is that Via Negativa and my other online projects are a drag on the economy, by helping diminish the productivity of office workers.
- I passed my one millionth spam comment at the beginning of this month (see the counter at the bottom of the page). That’s since August, 2006 when I installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin. I’m told that’s a pretty meaningless figure, but so too are a lot of the other metrics that bloggers use to try and assess their blog’s value or importance. Via Negativa has gotten 9,392 legitimate comments since moving to WordPress. (That figure includes my own responses, though.)
- I’ve written some 1,138,000 words in 2,270 posts (not counting the 218 Smorgasblog posts, since they’re just quotes). That’s the equivalent of ten or eleven novels, I guess.
- Aside from Cibola, I’ve made two e-books of poems that originally appeared in Via Negativa, Shadow Cabinet and Spoil. I’m not real crazy about either one of them; I just enjoy creating websites.
- Via Negativa posts have been translated into foreign languages twice that I know of. Blogger Agustin Fest translated Should poetry be open source? into Spanish, and Poetikon translated the first half of Poem for Display at a City Reservoir into Norwegian. Very very flattering.
- All my work here is licensed under a copyleft statement designed to permit everything except taking my work and claiming it as your own, or preventing other people from modifying something that you have made from something here. Creative remixing is just another form of translation, as far as I’m concerned — something to be welcomed. I also decided a while back not to care about the scrapers who take fragments of text from Via Negativa (along with tens of thousands of other sites). I don’t understand why some bloggers get so worked up about that.
- The relative lack of focus on personal stuff here has less to do with any desire for privacy than the plain fact that I bore myself. And as a poet, first and foremost, I am more interested in self-mythologizing anyway.
- Blogging has had a really positive effect on my writing. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing poetry since I was seven, my poetry writing has become much more fluid and sure-footed over the last five years, I think. I’ve written more than 540 poems and translations for Via Negativa, and in the process have grown much more comfortable with sharing relatively unpolished work. And I’m fond of telling people who wonder why I blog that as a poet, I have found a much larger and more varied audience online, through blogging, than I would get in most print journals — to say nothing of the ability to interact with readers. I’m also pleased with some of the prose I’ve churned out, as well as the posts combining photos and text which are perhaps most typical of the non-political blogging medium.
- Fewer than half a dozen Via Negativa posts have ever included numbered lists.
Mutating the Signature
Submissions are open for a new qarrtsiluni theme, Mutating the Signature. This is a process- rather than a subject-oriented theme, requiring all submissions to spring from a creative collaboration between two or more people. Be sure to study the theme description carefully before submitting. The deadline is January 15, and we expect to start publishing the first pieces for the new issue shortly after January 1. It seemed like a good way to kick off the new year. The guest editors, Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore, have been going great guns at their own collaborative poetry experiments, as readers of their blogs will know, so they seemed as qualified as anyone to edit such an issue.
The current issue, Journaling the Apocalypse, will continue through December. In fact, we’ll have to pick up the pace of posting if we’re going to fit everything in. Suffice it to say that we have many more good things in store — and if the holiday season doesn’t seem like the best time to contemplate the apocalypse, all I can say is you haven’t gone shopping lately.
***
Shortly before Halloween, I tried my hand at collaborative poeming with Dana. We used Skype IM, and followed a procedure based on the surrealist game called exquisite corpse, which seemed appropriate to our subject: vampirism. Or, as Dana would have it, hemotophagy. We wrote alternate lines, and each of us saw only the second half of the preceding line. Here’s what I saw:
Hemotaphagy
We walked arm in arm on the sunset strip, red at night
___________________ inside me, my mouth parts
like a coffin lid lined with velvet & redolent of formaldehyde
___________________ carotid, its point of bifurcation
the wye-shaped crossroads of all my midnight appointments,
___________________ my hands, how I lap up
everything your heart has to say in its simple syntax.
__________________________without enormous effort,
like typing a heart smiley in lieu of using that dread word
____________________ attack, my bending over you,
mother of my suffocation nightmares, homeothermic swamp.
________________________ handkerchief, stuff it in my blazer.
It’s a gloomy affair, this filling of my coffin-sized hole
__________________________ My desires coagulate near your wounds,
plaster for that red fresco where my shadow lost its way.
Then came the reveal, as they say in TV land.
Hemotaphagy
We walked arm in arm on the sunset strip, red at night
blood the only hunger inside me, my mouth parts
like a coffin lid lined with velvet & redolent of formaldehyde
I feel for your common carotid, its point of bifurcation
the wye-shaped crossroads of all my midnight appointments,
skin pulled taut between my hands, how I lap up
everything your heart has to say in its simple syntax.
This is living: to take you without enormous effort,
like typing a heart smiley in lieu of using that dread word
fang. This is not an attack, my bending over you,
mother of my suffocation nightmares, homeothermic swamp.
I wipe up the access with a handkerchief, stuff it in my blazer.
It’s a gloomy affair, this filling of my coffin-sized hole
will never bring satiety. My desires coagulate near your wounds
plaster for that red fresco where my shadow lost its way.
I found this quite a bit wordier than I was used to dealing with — which was more my fault than Dana’s — so when we finally returned to the thing a couple weeks later, I left all the heavy lifting up to her. After half an hour or so, she came up with the following edit (ignore her account of events at the link):
Hemotaphagy
I
My mouth parts to reveal velvet lining
redolent of formaldehyde.II
I feel for your common carotid,
its point of bifurcation,
the wye-shaped crossroads
of all my midnight appointments.III
Skin taut between my hands,
I lap up your heart’s simple syntax.IV
To take you without enormous effort,
without using that dread word “fang.”V
Mother of my suffocation nightmares,
homeothermic swamp.
I wipe up the excess with a handkerchief.VI
This gloomy affair. This filling of my coffin-
sized hole will never bring satiety.VII
My desires coagulate near your wounds,
plaster for that red fresco
where my shadow lost its way.
Being the contrary sort, I tried to see if I could make a poem using the words that didn’t appear in her edit. I had to add a bunch more words. I’m not sure the result could still be considered a collaboration. But it was fun!
Now You See It
We walk arm in arm
on the sunset strip,
red at night like a plush coffin lid,
like a cartoon heart used as a glyph
to stand in for that dread word
as I bend over you in my blazer
& count to ten.
The only hunger that matters now
can hide in a silk handkerchief
& reappear in a deck of cards:
club, diamond, spade.
You learn to dig.
In one final transmogrification, I ran the text of our rough draft through Wordle to produce the image at the top of this post, symbolically releasing the words and ideas we’d been playing with. That’s kind of what “mutating the signature” is all about, I think.
Festival of the Trees 29: Bring out your dead
Welcome to the Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead edition of the Festival of the Trees! No forest is more full of the dead — or more teeming with life — than an old-growth forest, and what could be spookier than a swamp? So for illustrations this time I’m using some photos my brother Mark Bonta took in his adopted state of Mississippi last spring, on a visit to the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area. It’s not a so-called virgin or primary forest, since some trees were cut there a century ago, but the biggest and oldest trees were left because they were hollow. Mark says the preserve contains hundreds of giant baldcypress trees with a typical diameter at breast height of 10 feet, as well as the state — and possibly national — champion baldcypress, which is considerably larger than the “average” specimens in these pictures. The best time to visit is in fall, when woods are no longer flooded. Continue reading “Festival of the Trees 29: Bring out your dead”
Morning Porch, the book?
UPDATE (10/20): You can now subscribe to the Morning Porch via email.
The Morning Porch will be one year old on November 5, and I’m starting to think about what I want to do, if anything, with my first year’s worth of jottings. I think I’ll probably keep up the discipline — it’s a good exercise and a great way to wake up — though it’s possible I could change the form or focus a little. It’s also a fun way to participate in the Twitterverse and defy its reputation as a repository for disposable ephemera.
Though I’ve always thought of my Morning Porch tweets as prose, many readers have taken them for poetry, so I decided to see whether they might pass muster as short poems. The following were selected using the Random link, and all I’ve done is rearrange them, swap in ampersands, and change the punctuation here and there. What do you think? Do they work better as prose or as poems? (I’ve linked the dates to the original posts in case anyone wants to compare.) If I were to enlist the help of one or more editors and publish a book of these, would you buy a copy? If the answer is “probably not,” don’t be shy. I am supremely lazy and would be happy for an excuse not to bother.
Feel free to use the Contact form or leave anonymous comments if you prefer.
***
December 6, 2007
Clear and very cold.
I hear squirrel teeth
on walnut shell.
The Carolina wren’s happiness motor
turns over once, twice, then putts to life.
*
July 24, 2008
Fast-moving showers; the light
changes from minute to minute.
A distant rumble
turns out to be an A-10 Thunderbolt II.
Our modems are safe.
*
April 7, 2008
Gray sky, the smell of rain.
Two insomniac screech owls
exchange trills.
The low-frequency thumps of a grouse.
An enormous silence.
*
August 26, 2008
The hollow sound of claws
on loose bark:
another furious squirrel chase,
this time in the dead elm.
The chaser pauses to lick its genitals.
*
January 11, 2008
Hard rain. Under a monochrome cloud ceiling,
the colors are intense:
laurel green,
tree-trunk sable,
dried-grass yellow,
leaf-litter rust.
*
October 12, 2008
BAM. BAM. BAM.
The red crest of a pileated woodpecker
flashes into view from
the dead side of a maple, sunrise
orange on the hill behind.
*
January 2, 2008
I sweep snow off my chair,
then look up to see the crescent moon
appearing & disappearing behind the clouds.
Trees creaking in the dark.
*
December 23, 2007
Thick fog at dawn,
gray against the snow.
Slate-colored juncos call back & forth:
Where are you?
A wind comes up.
*
September 15, 2008
Where daffodils bloomed in April,
goldenrod sways—
a more worldly yellow.
The distant hurricane
makes a roosting monarch flap its wings.
*
April 3, 2008
The feral cat is back from
wherever it goes for the winter.
It crouches on a fallen limb,
eyes fixed on the weeds,
gathered for the spring.