Category: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting

This entry is part 50 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

All these years. How many years?
Ten? Eleven? That’s great. No,
I don’t have a portfolio. How great
that you could spend so much time
on vacation. White sands. I was there
just once: centuries ago. No, I’ve never
been to that Marina. I saw your pictures
in the infinity pool. That’s cool. It’s hard
to take time off; it catches up to you. I’ve
often wondered, why are all the people in
your photos, in restaurants all the time?
And everyone with a cell phone. The waiter
is a vegetable vendor? He’s putting himself
through school? I’m tempted to ask if he
will stock my mother’s pantry every Monday.
At her age, she prefers fruit and green
leafies. She texts me every few weeks
to say her cupboard’s getting bare: Send
money. Where’s that tree with bills
clipped to the leaves, which passersby
hardly notice? I’m gripped by spasms
that keep me from falling asleep at night.
And when I do, I dream of accountants
pursuing me with an abacus in each
hand. They’re dressed in grim or grey,
but the beads click like hungry teeth in day-
glo colors. You know I’ve never been good
at numbers. I used to know but have forgotten
how to reckon by them— something about ones,
tens, hundreds, thousands: expenditures
on one hand, omissions on the other.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Do poetry videos reach larger audiences than poems on the page?

In her most recent Friday Video/Filmpoem post at Rubies in Crystal, featuring Glenn-emlyn Richards’ animation of a poem by Eleanor Rees called “Saltwater,” Brenda Clews describes a recent attempt to turn an audience on to videopoetry:

I treated a group to a series of video/film poems, only a few, because they tired very quickly — poetry is demanding enough on the page, let alone strung at you in a video where you can’t slow down, re-read, consider before moving on – but someone said, the one with the woman, the drawing, the ocean, that one was my favourite. In unison, they all agreed.

I commented that I was struck by her claim that video/filmpoems are actually more demanding than poems on the page. So many people make the opposite claim, especially about animated poems. Here, for example, is how the folks at Motion Poems promote their efforts to potential donors at Razoo.com:

Contemporary poetry is a mystery to most casual readers: they rarely read it, and would have a hard time discovering great new poetry on their own. We think that’s a shame! So…

MOTIONPOEMS subverts that paradigm by giving casual readers a new way to discover poetry … as short films! That way, they can be distributed virally and on YouTube, in social networks, in classrooms, and in broadcast and film media. [ellipses original]

In close to three years of sharing videos, animated and otherwise, at Moving Poems, I’ve seen steady traffic but nothing to suggest I’m reaching very far beyond the existing fan base for poetry. The most popular videos tend to be those for Latin American poets, in particular Vicente Huidobro and Julia de Burgos. This makes sense: poetry is actually fairly popular in the Spanish-speaking world.

Of course, I do suck at promotion. With the names of poets included in the post titles at Moving Poems, and a reasonably good PageRank, the site is practically guaranteed to land in the first page of Google results for most poets I include. So O.K., I’m drawing in people who are already interested in poetry. But since I don’t use tags to describe the contents of the poems — something I’m reluctant to do on the grounds that it reduces a poem to the sum of its ostensible subjects — it’s very unlikely that, for example, someone interested in the Liverpudlian waterfront would land on my post of “Saltwater” (or Brenda’s, or Glenn-emlyn’s original upload at Vimeo), unless they did some very creative Google video search.

So yeah, doing things like using more descriptive tags could bring more traffic… but would that really enlarge the audience for poetry, or just disappoint more people looking for, you know, information? The question remains: Is mere conversion to the film or video medium enough to overcome the general reluctance of English-language readers to challenge themselves?

On YouTube and Vimeo, the most popular poetry videos in English tend to be either those for poets who are already popular (relatively speaking), such as Billy Collins and Rumi, or for videos that make a simple point extremely well and go viral as a result, such as a kinetic text animation for a spoken-word piece by Taylor Mali about people’s reluctance to express firm opinions, or Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s powerful statement on “How to Be Alone.”

I do think there’s an extent to which online poems in whatever form are helping to create a larger audience for poetry among those who have always kind of liked poems and/or enjoy an intellectual challenge, but may not be in the habit of sitting down to read poetry books and journals. That’s been my experience over the years with a number of sites, most notably this one, where I think one key to success has been my pattern of interspersing poems with other, more popular kinds of content (photos, personal or nature essays, brief polemics, etc.). This is the kind of thing blogs are good at: People come for the other stuff, develop an interest in the author, and eventually start reading the poems, too.

But if I ever thought that making and posting videopoems would enlarge the fan base for poetry here, I lost that illusion a long time ago. My videopoems usually average around 100 views — one quarter of what a poem in text form gets. That’s not as skewed as it sounds, since Vimeo only logs views from people who watch all the way to the end, and I don’t of course have comparable statistics for people who read a poem all the way through. The actual number of thorough readers may not be much more than 100 per poem. But the evidence so far does not suggest that Via Negativa visitors are more likely to take in a poem just because I’ve envideoed it.

So while I fervently hope that the animators at Motion Poems and similar projects are successful in bringing new audiences to poetry, I do tend to agree with Brenda that more elliptical or experimental film/videopoets will have to work at least as hard as traditional page-poets to reach an audience in the Anglophone world.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ice and Gaywings

Ice and Gaywings
click to order from Phoenicia Publishing

At qarrtsiluni today we announced the publication of a new collection of poems: Ice and Gaywings by Kenneth Pobo. This might be of interest to Via Negativa readers for several reasons: the book was selected as the winner of our 2011 chapbook contest by VN contributor Luisa Igloria; the cover includes one of my own photos of gaywings (AKA fringed polygala) in bloom; and most importantly, the poems themselves are meditative, understated, urgent, and full of details about the natural world. Though Ken and his partner live in eastern Pennsylvania, they’ve been visiting the Wisconsin north woods for many years, and this collection is a sort of love letter to that part of the world. Let me just quote what Luisa had to say about it:

The experience I value most in reading this collection is the way its language (never romanticized) and tone (never overwrought) allows me to settle with increasing depth into the poems’ rhythms and precise observations — about the natural world, now only partially reclaimable from so many forms of artifice; about the intrusions of contemporary urban life and culture; about histories older than us that haunt and shadow place. And finally, its urgent reminder to listen, look, and learn to dwell again.

You can read all the poems at the online version of the book, which has been one of my projects this autumn. I’m kind of pleased with how it turned out. I enjoy the challenge of making online collections of poetry that people will want to browse. Last year, for Clayton Michaels’ Watermark, I hit on the idea of taking the abstract artwork we used for the cover of the paper edition and dividing it up into smaller images, a different one for every poem, with little arrows for navigation icons. It seemed essential to give each poem its own page, so it would room to breathe. This year, however, I started off looking at horizontally scrolling themes, and though I didn’t end up going that route (maybe next year!) it did push my thinking pretty far outside the usual box. I ended up adapting a WordPress theme designed for software documentation, with all the poems on one vertical page which expands or collapses, accordion-style, as the titles are clicked. (I did add permalinks below each poem for those who desire a more pristine reading environment — or just need the link.)

I hope readers don’t find this javascripty behavior too distracting. What I really liked about the design was the way it kept distractions to a minimum. Thanks to this unique arrangement, I was able to dispense with sidebars (or bottom bars) altogether — in WordPress terms, this is a site with zero widgets. I kept the page menu to a bare minimum, and decided not to hack the theme to add chronological posts back in; a static page would do fine for the news section, I thought. Anyway, I won’t bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say I had a lot of fun, even if I did have to re-do much of my work after I was kicked off my former webhost two weeks ago. Go take a look — and settle in with a cup of tea for a nice long read.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Letter to Mrs. Vorreyer’s English class

Hello from Plummer’s Hollow! Thanks for all the postcards. I am gratified and humbled by your response to my poem, and I’m amazed by how many of you say you enjoy writing. When I was in 7th grade, I think I was one of two or three kids in the entire school who liked poetry.

Since there are 51 of you and there’s only one of me, I hope you won’t mind if I respond to you in one, big letter. I was really impressed by how many great lines, original insights, and eye-catching designs you guys came up with. It seems as if this kind of wondering (what if ghosts/aliens/dragons etc. were real) is a good way to get in the habit of questioning your preconceptions and trying to see things from radically different perspectives — two very useful habits for writers and artists to get into.

I know you aren’t expecting critiques, but I do want to mention a few of my favorite lines from the poems:

  • Anthony B., about spirits: “They would walk with humans/ like a man about to touch a porcupine.” Great comparison!
  • Agatha K., “What nobody knows about angels”: “Their wings are ill-fitting.” Angels are usually thought of as perfect beings, so it’s refreshing to think of them this way.
  • Magdalene H., “If Ghosts Were Real”: “They would fear most the day you would come join them.” Good idea to implicate the reader in the last line.
  • Ryan T., “Spirits”: “They try to communicate with you to warn you of their presence” A subtle way of suggesting the paradoxical nature of their existence, especially when combined with the last line: “They are afraid of the silence of death.”
  • Finn V., “If There Were Aliens”: I like the hint of reference to our society’s on-going political debate over the status of undocumented immigrants in the lines “They would speak only English// They would be afraid/ of what is beyond.” Not only is it interesting and unexpected to say such things about space aliens, but it gets the reader thinking about xenophobia generally, and the role it might play in our lives — without actually telling anyone what to think or making any explicit political pronouncements.
  • James M., “If I Knew a Ghost”: I love the image in the opening line — “He would be warm and free as a worn-out sofa.”
  • Brett B., “Ghosts”: “Their lips are cracked beyond repair.” I really like that for some reason. Also the bit about Jarritos! I guess I like poems that are funny and serious at the same time. That’s not always easy to pull off.
  • Jasmine M., “If Aliens Came to Earth”: I kind of agree with the suggestion that beings from another world might be more intrigued by our oceans than anything else!
  • Stella L., “Would Ghosts”: “Would they run through the street/ like a plastic bag/ being pulled elsewhere by the calm wind” I’ve always liked the sort of everyday uncanniness of those so-called urban tumbleweeds, so I think connecting them with ghosts is a good idea.
  • Emily O., “Mermaid Under the Sea”: I like “She would have eyes that changed color/ as often as the tide.” It’s a good trick to make people think you’re writing about one thing while really, or in addition, writing about something else — in this case, the sea. Poems work best when we don’t understand them completely after the first reading.
  • Terry D., “If You Could Actually Ride a Unicorn”: “You would notice the fleas in the fur.” I love the hyper-realism in this portrait of a mythical being. As with Agatha’s angels, focusing on the imperfections makes it seem more tangible.
  • Selin T., “Broken Ghost”: “A ghost is like a secret/ for it has left its home/ and will never return.” I like the way this gets me thinking about secrets as well as ghosts.

poetry postcard flags 2

Now let me take a shot at answering your questions. A few of you wondered how long it took me to write the poem. I don’t remember for sure, but probably no more than a couple of hours. Or, since I’ve been writing poetry for almost 40 years, you could also say it took me 40 years to write it, since everything I’ve learned in that time shapes each poem I write.

Several people asked where I got the ideas for the specific images and comparisons in the poem. I don’t remember with absolute certainty, but let’s see… I find potatoes a little creepy with their eyes that turn into sprouts — they have a life after death, so to speak. So that’s probably where that came from. With the missing eyebrows, I think my guiding idea was that ghosts would be incapable of emotions such as surprise or anger, so they would have no need of eyebrows to raise or wrinkle.

Why banks and stock exchanges? These are ghostly places to me because they are concerned entirely with money, which is the ultimate in spookiness since on the one hand we’ve made it essential to survival, but on the other hand, it doesn’t really exist. Besides, why would ghosts hang around cemeteries? Do the living hang around the hospitals where they were born?

I’m not entirely sure where the part about stepping into traffic as into a cold mountain lake came from. It’s the part of the poem I’m proudest of, though. As for “ah,” I like both its ubiquity as an expression and its ambiguity. I picture ghosts as being equally common, ambiguous and bland. A ghost would never do something as melodramatic as moan, you see.

Joseph M. asked, “Why do you write poetry? Do you just like writing it, or do you want to tell a message, or what?” A mixture of both, I guess, but more than that, I write poetry to find things out. It’s my way of trying to make sense of the world — and to find out what I think. Usually when I begin a poem I have little idea about where it’s going, but attentiveness to the sound and rhythm of the language and to the ideas behind the images that come to me as I write takes me in new and unexpected directions. I think the feeling a writer gets after writing a successful poem probably isn’t too different from what a scientist feels after making some new discovery: a great deal of excitement and wonder. I live for wonder.

Many of you asked where I get my ideas, or what inspires me. The short answer is everything. I’m curious about everything and read as widely as possible, especially nonfiction — and other poets. That’s critically important, too. As is regular engagement with the world outside my door. There are some poets for whom writing is primarily a game with language, and that’s fine, but for me, it’s about connecting with the world and with other people.

Does living in the mountains help me write? Yes, I suppose so, but anyone with an internet connection has to be wary of distractions! I also need to travel now and then to avoid the feeling of isolation one sometimes gets living in the country, though the internet really helps in that regard. I don’t think it’s easier to write poems about nature than about people — if anything, the opposite is probably true. My favorite poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, who just won the Nobel Prize, manage to write equally well about both.

Mary K. asked if I set out to write about ghosts in a way no one had written before. No, it’s really just a mental habit which I’ve had ever since I was a kid: if everyone else says one thing, I’ll say the opposite.

What was the hardest part about writing the poem? I don’t remember for sure, but I seem to recall the lines in the middle were the ones I spent the most time on. (Unfortunately, since I draft everything in Word, I don’t keep any paper trail of my changes the way I used to when I wrote everything out by hand.)

What is the hardest part of writing in general, for me? Getting started. Often all it takes is a word or a fragment of an idea, though, to spark something good.

What do I do when I get writer’s block? I’m not sure I ever have, but I do go through somewhat dry spells in which I would rather take pictures or make videos than write. My response is to go ahead and do that — eventually I’ll get tired of it and go back to writing. Also, having a daily blog habit is a great spur to regular writing.

How hard is it to edit a magazine? Not hard, but very time-consuming. And of course making the decision to curate other people’s work does mean I have to give up some of the time I might otherwise spend writing my own. But I think it pays off, because I learn so much from reading other people, and that ultimately enriches my own work. The hardest part is having to turn away good work because there just isn’t quite enough room for it. But at the online magazine I edit, three-quarters of the time I have other people editing issues and making those tough decisions, and all I have to do is arrange the issues and create a podcast.

How do I make money off my poetry? I don’t! Sadly, there is almost no money in poetry publishing in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, this is liberating in a way, because it frees me to give my poetry away online, and let people use it to make other works of their own, as long as they give me credit somewhere. Thanks to this attitude, I’ve been able to embark on a number of creative collaborations with other writers and artists. So while it would be great to be able to make a living doing this, there are many other ways besides money to measure success.

Jack R. asked about building an audience: how do you get people outside your family to read your work? First of all, if some of your family members do read your work, you’re more fortunate than many writers. There are lots of online critique groups, though I’ve never tried them myself. Facebook can be a decent place to share writing. I’m personally fond of blogs, though I realize blogging isn’t for everyone. The most important thing to remember I guess is that if you want other writers to read your work, you have to read theirs. A surprising number of people never seem to grasp this.

I think that answers almost all your questions. Thanks for all your kind words about my poetry, and I’m glad you were able to use it to spark your own writing.

Last night when I told a blogger friend about your postcards, she suggested I get a needle and some yarn, put them on a string and hang them from my front porch like Tibetan prayer flags. So I did. It was a breezy day, and if the Tibetans are right, I guess that means the spirit-forms of your words are drifting all around Central Pennsylvania by now. After a couple hours, I took the cards back inside for safe-keeping.

Best wishes in everything you do,

Dave Bonta

poetry postcard flags 3

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear solitude,

This entry is part 12 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

what is it like to live by oneself?
I can no longer remember, or if I ever
truly did. Surely it can’t have been

in the short month intervening after I
graduated from college and then got married,
believing that was the only way I might

finally make a life, something of my own.
Neither can it have been in the years
I went to graduate school, the first time

after my second child was born; and then again
when my third child turned three— Roommates
down the hall sharing the bathroom,

sharing the fridge and kitchen (though also
cleaning duties). And at home, with growing
children and extended family, never any

door that one could keep closed for too long.
I didn’t really mind, but also welcomed
summers when I could slip away by myself

to visit a friend, go to a writing retreat,
work free of the coils of schedules and
routines for two short weeks. Oh the joys

of breakfast at 11 and bedtime at 3, a walk
with no other purpose than the walk itself.
On the other hand, my pathologist friend

in Chicago, who’d lived by himself for over
thirty years, sometimes told me how he wished
for human sounds in the middle of the night,

in the empty bedrooms of his tastefully
furnished flat— how he’d scan the trees
bereft of birds and their call and response,

how sometimes he’d flush the toilet in the guest
bathroom at random times of day, just to hear
the water gurgling before eddying away.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Kay Ryan on nonsense, poetry, and knowledge


Watch on Vimeo. The Lannan Foundation has also uploaded a video of the reading that directly preceded the conversation.

I usually share other people’s videos only on Facebook or (for poetry-related stuff) Moving Poems, but the length and via negativistic content of this conversation might make it a better fit here, I thought. I love what Kay Ryan has to say about poetry and knowing, and about knowing and making stuff up. You have to watch the video to really get a feel for how unseriously she takes herself, but I spent some time this morning making a transcript of a few of my favorite parts of this conversation, which occur somewhere near the middle. This helps me understand a little bit better what I do myself in my writing — especially the part about the need for coldness.

*

Kay Ryan: “I think nonsense is extremely close to poetry. Nonsense — I figured this out when I was fairly young — nonsense operates by rules. You cannot have nonsense outside the context of sense. It, uh — it’s in tension with sense.”

Atsuro Riley: “You like to make a statement in your poetry. You’re quite willing to do it, you like to do it, you seem insistent upon it — ”

Ryan: “A lot of them are bogus, though. They’re bogus. You know. I like the fake — I think you pointed this out! — the sort of, you know, the pedant, the mock polemic. Yeah. And they’re just ridiculous, you know. Like uh, oh, what’s the one about the, uh, extraordinary lengths… Oh yeah, right — I don’t know, uh, ‘Extraordinary lengths are always accompanied by extraordinary distances.’ And, you know, that’s just such a stupid thing to say! I just love to say something like that. I, uh —

“Well, let me explain that. I like to make — well, boy, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I think that I’m really interested in something that is so hard to perceive. Like light coming from the furthest star. It’s, it’s, it’s very frail when it gets here. Very frail. But looked at another way, it’s incredibly strong, ’cause it’s gotten all the way here from the furthest star. So it’s something incredible strong, but we’re getting just a little bit of it!

“So what I do, what I try to do with this thing that I can just barely perceive, is to jack up the intensity like crazy. Make a cartoon out of it? You know. Make a diorama, have puppets do it. You know — overdo it. I’ve gotta magnify it because it’s — and I have to sound more sure than I am. Because — because I don’t know. I only a teeny tiny bit know! Maybe. I’m trying to know. So I build up — I build something that I hope has a lot of, uh — well, as my step-daughter would say, flavor-punch. I like flavor-punch. I love Southwestern food! But I like to give a lot of color. And reality. Of course it’s all specious, but, uh, you know — ”

Riley: “But to help you think through the question.”

Ryan: “To help me think, yeah. It’s like setting up — and I think you said, too — ”

Riley: “Magnified conundra.”

Ryan: “Yeah. And little, uh, models. You know? Einstein — and I always like to connect myself with Einstein! — Einstein, you know, worked in the patent office. Before he was — before he thought his really great thoughts. And I think it shaped his mind to a certain degree. That business of seeing in terms of models. And I think that that’s what we do in poems. (I mean, not just me, but — ) We make a model, and it’s really a model for something different. I mean, this is the model, but it’s really trying to talk about that starlight somehow. That little thing we just know with some interior part of our brain, to which we have very little access.”

Riley: “Let’s talk about coldness. What is it in a poem — I’m not sure I exactly understand — and, um, why do you like it?”

Ryan: “Well, I mean I think it’s just constitutional. I think — I think one of the things that we do when we write, or one of the things I’ve done, is try to make a world I could live in. You know? I make in my poems a world that is, uh, congenial to me. ‘I like how she thinks!’ You know? It makes me feel at ease to articulate those things. It, uh — I can make a world that has the rules that I want. And I think that, as most people here [in the audience are], I am sensitive. I feel under… I am too stimulated. There’s too much coming in all the time. There’s too much heat. There’s too much closeness. There’s too much personal. There’s too much giving away of secrets. There’s not enough, ah, distance. There’s not enough chill. And if I can do my small part to add a little coldness and distance to the world, I will not have written in vain.”

[…]

Ryan: “I discovered a long time ago — and it seems so counter-intuitive, but I found that I had to start writing about things when I was just on the front edge of knowing about them. I mean, just — I hardly knew about them. If I waited, I would be paralyzed by knowing too much. And I, I couldn’t write. There always has to be a large sense of, ‘Oh, I’m just inventing this.’ But then later you can look back and say, ‘No actually I wasn’t inventing it. I still think that I, that there’s something there that I will stick with.’ But I always have to write it before. And if I’m overwhelmed by knowledge, or feeling, or something, it’s just no — I just can’t write.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 44: Reversible books


watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo

The Woodrat Podcast returns from summer vacation with its first ever video episode (but don’t worry, this will remain mostly an audio show). I wanted to do a bit of a show-and-tell with some poetry books published as reversible, upside-down or tête-bêche books, including, most recently, Triplicity by Kristen McHenry and Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington, forthcoming from Indigo Ink Press.

Additional links:

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mole


Watch on Vimeo.

If you’ve been following this blog for even a little while, you must’ve noticed snippets from a blog called mole in the Smorgasblog and seen comments from its author, Dale Favier. Dale’s one of my oldest friends in the blogosphere (we’ve even met twice in person!) and he claims it was my example at Via Negativa that first got him to try his hand at modern poetry. (He had been primarily a fan of Victorian and Middle English poetry before that, so I think “modern” means “anything that doesn’t rhyme.”) Dale’s first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out in September from the U.K.-based Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. You can read what Luisa Igloria wrote about it on the publisher’s webpage.

With Dale’s book fresh in my mind, a sighting of a hairy-tailed mole in the lawn in front of my parents’ veranda on Monday morning seemed providential: videopoem material for the mole blogger! (See the Plummer’s Hollow blog for the full, 15-minute video and a few quotes about the largely unknown life of this mammal.) But figuring out which poem to envideo proved surprisingly difficult; several were a pretty good fit, but none was a perfect fit, I thought. Finding the right soundtrack was even more difficult, and consumed many hours. I’m not convinced that the trip-hop instrumental I finally settled on was optimal, but I think it works fairly well. A mole out foraging on the surface after daybreak does seem like an apt choice for a poem about mortality. There are a whole host of predators that could dispatch it at any moment — foxes, coyotes, weasels, fishers, feral cats, owls, hawks — especially considering how blind it is, and how close it let the three of us human watchers get.

I hasten to add that lack of awareness is not a characteristic I associate with Dale Favier! But vulnerability — perhaps, yes. I was a little more succinct than Luisa, but here’s the blurb I wrote:

Dale Favier is a new kind of American Buddhist poet, one less concerned with wisdom than compassion and desire, and as comfortable with the fables and paradoxes of the West as those of the East. His poems sing, chant, weep, declaim and delight. Earnest to a fault, yet always ready to indulge in foolishness and absurdity, Favier wears his erudition lightly and takes risks that few professional poets would take: “They have not written this in books;/ they would not dare; they have their suppers to earn.” Johan Huizinga wrote in Homo Ludens that poetry “proceeds within the play-ground of the mind,” and “the true appellation of the archaic poet is vates, the possessed, the God-smitten, the raving one.” Favier is one of the few modern poets I know who seems to fit this ancient mold. Opening the World documents no mere dalliance with ideas, but a life-long, passionate struggle with gods and mortals, love and death.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

La fin d’une affaire

The sadness of discovering that a poet you’ve loved for years no longer speaks to you, that her lines no longer resonate — how can this be? Could you have been wrong all along, hearing things that weren’t there? (But poetry is always about what isn’t quite there, isn’t it?) Has reading too many other poets with a markedly different aesthetic spoiled you for hers? You keep taking that one book, your former favorite, off the shelf and trying again, to see if maybe you just have to be in the right mood. But if so, that mood no longer comes. How could you ever have found such dull and predictable work exciting?

Even as you wonder this, it occurs to you that perhaps your craving for excitement and diversion marks you as a shallow reader, a poor listener. You try reading a poem as slowly as possible, pausing often to let the words sink in. Nothing. Gradually you begin to realize that, right or wrong, the heart cannot be ignored, and whoever’s fault it may be, this once great pleasure, this astonishment, will come no more.

And then, three books away on the shelf, you notice one you’ve never opened since the day you brought it home from the book sale…

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Typewriting

This entry is part 18 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology
typewriter by Darwin Bell
photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY-NC license) - click to enlarge

Writing is hardly an innocent act. I remember with what force I had to strike the keys of my dad’s old manual typewriter when I was a kid. How the ribbon would rise to the occasion like someone throwing himself between an assailant and his victim, absorbing the blows. And as the ribbon ran dry, how the type would slowly fade, prompting me to pound the keys harder and harder, pummeling the paper, turning the letters into pale, shallow graves.

The first time I used an electric typewriter, it felt like cheating. It was in 4th or 5th Grade. I was typing up a parody of the movie Jaws — “Lips,” which we would later perform in appropriate costume. One of the kids who’d volunteered to help on the play sat and watched my two-finger typing, studying me closely but not saying a word until I was done. “I think I understand how you’re doing that now,” he said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a kind of magic trick.

I took touch typing as an elective in high school, and of course we used nothing but the most modern IBM Selectrics. That was in 1982, I think. But when I started at Penn State two years later, it was nothing but the old manual for me. I figured as long as I had a newish ribbon and a sturdy, erasable bond, that was good enough. And in my own writing, watching a poem take shape letter by letter and word by word… I find myself almost salivating now as I recall the pleasure of that tactile experience. Poems were things that you hammered out by hand, which is perhaps how poets were able to unironically refer to poetry-writing classes as “workshops.” And most lyric poems being fairly short and the look on the page difficult to grasp with too many hand corrections, it was easier to just keep hammering out new drafts. I have a huge file box upstairs filled with nothing but those abandoned prototypes, like the empty larval shells of cicadas. The final drafts sit in a nicer, metal tomb downstairs, beside my writing table. It’s hard to simply throw out a handmade thing.

After we bought the adjacent property here in Plummer’s Hollow in 1992, we had the melancholy task of going through the derelict house where our neighbor Margaret had lived almost until her death the previous year. Among her possessions were three typewriters from her youth in the 1930s or 40s, when she had pursued a secretarial career in New York City. They were huge and black, archaic as ringer washers or Model T Fords. By that time I had switched to a word processor and was happy to have put the typewriter era behind me, so when a friend mentioned he collected typewriters, I passed those machines onto him without a second thought. Now I kind of wish I’d kept one of them as a conversation piece.

Around that same time, I had some people up for a party, and they all had a good laugh at the ancient, hulking, hand-me-down of a PC I was using. It must’ve been at least ten years old! I used WordPerfect 6.0, and only a Courier font because that’s what typing was supposed to look like. A few years later, I finally upgraded and put the old beast out to pasture — literally. I didn’t know then about the heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in circuit boards, cathode ray tubes and the like. So now it sits in a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere out in the goldenrod patch we call a field.


Prompted by Beth’s latest post, “Process,” at the cassandra pages.