Category: Poets and poetry

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

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poem Dissection 101


Via bubbl.us, via Never Neutral.

Poem dissection, like frog dissection, isn’t as straightforward as it may at first appear. Take, for example, Matsuo Basho’s famous haiku about a frog. Are the relationships between the ideas in the poem generative, associative, or a mixture of both? Here are two possible ways to map them, which strike me as equally valid.

So obviously with longer poems, many of the routes become quite arbitrary indeed.

bubbl.us diagram of a poem
Click the image to see a larger and more legible version.

The best I can say about this exercise is that it helped me discover a relationship between two ideas in the poem that I hadn’t consciously recognized, the one between ‘it wants to go home with you’ and ‘there are no motels in this vacancy.’ Whether this will be of any real use to me if/when I get around to revising the poem, I don’t know, but in general I do find that, while the intuitive mind ought to be paramount during the original drafting, the analytical mind should take over during editing and revision. So as far as the author is concerned, this sort of exercise can’t hurt, even if it looks like a bloody mess to everyone else.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fly in a Broken Window

fly-in-a-broken-window

Via Magnetic Poetry Online Kits (hat tip: sister AE). Also influenced by Tiel Aisha Ansari. Yes, I know I’m not an artist!

I was honored to have inspired the prompt at Read Write Poem this week with my “Blue Jeans” magnetic poem. You can find links to the other responses here.

While Shuffle Words compositions are constrained by the small number of total words, the problem with Magnetic Poetry Online’s Poet Edition (which sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) is the limited number of good verbs. Whoever put their word collection together seems to have been under the impression that poetry is chiefly concerned with nouns and adjectives.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Public Poems: condensed version

Public Poems word cloud
(click on image to enlarge)

[audio:http://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/public-poems-condensed-version.mp3]

Some people don’t “get” poetry because they’re exclusively visual thinkers. For many others of a more practical frame of mind, the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of words into lines, stanzas, and units of meaning constitutes the main stumbling-block. Debates about how to reach those kinds of folks are anything but academic if you’re on a committee charged with selecting and presenting poetry to an indifferent public.

Well, I’m here to help. I’ve taken the complete texts of the first ten poems in my Public Poems series and run them through Wordle (thanks, John) which discards the most common words (a, on, the, etc.) and puts all the others into a configurable word cloud, a variation on the tag clouds familiar to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time online. I then made an audio recording of the cloud (here’s a download link for those who can’t see the Flash player above). This sort of thing could be broadcast over a public address system at regular intervals wherever the poetry clouds are displayed, with results perhaps comparable to the well-known consequences of backmasking on vinyl records of heavy metal music back in the 1980s, only without the sacrifices of family pets. From these dense clouds a kind of condensation would take place, poetry falling like rain on the parched soil of the imagination. Or not.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Morning porch noodling


Video link

What is wrong with me that I so rarely listen to recorded music anymore? It’s not that I prefer to make my own music; weeks can go by without me picking up the harmonica. But I don’t feel especially deprived, either, because I hear birdsong all day long, interspersed with train whistles and other sounds. And I do love that.

Even more pleasurable, to me, is the feeling of what I can only call musical sobriety. Back in the days of my musical addiction, 15 and 20 years ago, if a record wasn’t playing in the background, I didn’t feel right. And it seemed as if I had to play tunes I liked in order to drown out the annoying tunes that would somehow get lodged in my head on infinite repeat — so-called ear worms.

That turned out not to be the case. Now that I rarely make a point of listening to recorded music, I rarely get ear worms, either. When I do pick up the harmonica, I generally play the same couple dozen tunes, but that’s O.K. I’m quite comfortable with the idea that I’ll never be a real musician. Even at the height of my music addiction, I could never stomach the endless repetitions that true practice entails.

By the same token, I don’t suppose many musicians can fathom how we writers can stand to go over and over the same few words until we get them right. Writing poems and practicing songs seem as if they should be closely related practices — they have, after all, a common origin, and are still closely allied in most oral traditions. But for me, as a free verse poet, melody is a serious distraction. Now that I’ve finally gotten the incessant tunes out of my head, I’m able to hear the sounds and rhythms of language much more easily. Poems come to me now like they never did before.

I’m not trying to suggest, however, that what works for me might be good for anyone else. British poet-blogger Dick Jones says that playing in bands for a few decades improved his writing enormously. It sounds as if his initial motivation differed a bit from mine; I never had much ambition to “set the world alight with my deathless prose and incandescent verse” the way Dick says he did when he was young. Playing bass in public sounds like just the medicine he needed.

Audiences identify with the vocalist or adulate the lead guitarist; they don’t notice the bass guitarist. He plunks alone, shadowy & monosyllabic behind the fireworks. So I stood on the left of the drummer, laid back on the rhythm and just enjoyed the simple process of getting to grips with a musical instrument.

And, over time, this attention to the medium over the message had its kickback into writing. For the first time I started to write poems principally for the sake of the statement made and the craft of putting it together.

Dick and I may have been following parallel courses, though. Because it seems to me that we’ve each stumbled on a discipline that has taught us a little better how to listen.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Precursor to “The Morning Porch”

Indexing my Butternut Chronicle series from November 2004/1998, I was amused to rediscover what I had written by way of an Afterword:

In [the butternut tree’s] absence, I don’t know that I could really gather enough material for a daily front porch chronicle. I have of course recorded a number of observations in these virtual pages, and someday there might be enough to gather into a small chapbook. But the gap between the porch and the edge of the woods is too large – about 75 feet – for close observation of whatever goes on there, and I don’t like using binoculars.

Ha! It does show, however, that the idea’s been brewing for a while now — since 1998, at least. In the Afterword I also speculated about why that early journaling attempt had run out of steam so quickly, suggesting that it was because the focus was too diffuse, and I should have zeroed in on the butternut tree and its inhabitants.

The relative longevity of my current project, however, probably owes more to the brevity of the entries than to the temporal focus. It’s like running a marathon in daily, 50-yard-dash installments. And with that brevity — strictly enforced by Twitter — comes a reliance on lyrical touches, because how else to make such miniatures compelling? I’m still not much of a journal-keeper — not compared to someone like Tom Montag with his Morning Drive Journal, for example, which is in its fifth year now, with entries that are neither unlyrical nor Minuteman-short. Ah, well. Fortunately, this race is not to the swift. The one that is — well, may the best rat win.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cutting a hatchet

I started to write a footnote to the previous post, but pretty soon it was longer than my poem, so I thought it deserved its own post.

Gary Snyder’s poem “Axe Handles” introduced a lot of American readers to a critical passage in the Confucian classic The Doctrine of the Mean, attributed to Confucius, who was himself quoting a folk-poem from the ancient Shi Jing. With the assistance of James Legge’s bilingual edition and my trusty Chinese-English dictionary, I’ve attempted my own translation — I hope it isn’t too much of a hatchet-job. (Fu can mean either axe or hatchet, of course. I prefer the latter here because I think a shorter-handled tool is at issue, though “axe” is certainly general enough to include hatchets as well.)

To cut a handle for a hatchet, what do you do?
Without a hatchet in hand it can’t be done!
In taking a woman to wife, what do you do?
Without a go-between it can’t be done!

Cutting a hatchet, cutting a hatchet,
The pattern is close at hand.
As soon as I laid eyes on the lady,
The serving vessel was ready to perform.

Folk poems tend to be earthy, and I see no reason to assume that this one is any different. If this were a country blues song, we’d take it for granted that “go-between” and “serving vessel” were both examples of double entendre. I guess it’s also possible that both were meant literally, and the only subsidiary analogy here is between woman and serving vessel (bian dou, “an ancient food container,” according to my dictionary. It would be a great help if I knew what one looked like). But in that case one would be left wondering about the violence of the hatchet-cutting image.

For the passage in the Doctrine of the Mean (13:1-3), I’m going to chicken out and just quote Legge this time. I’m sure there are better translations, but this is the best of the three I happen to have on my shelf (including the execrable one by Ezra Pound which Snyder references).

The Master said “The path is not far from man. When men try to pursue a course, which is far from the common indications of consciousness, this course cannot be considered The Path.

“In the Book of Poetry, it is said, ‘In hewing an ax handle, in hewing an ax handle, the pattern is not far off.’ We grasp one ax handle to hew the other; and yet, if we look askance from the one to the other, we may consider them as apart. Therefore, the superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

“When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.”

Chapter 13 concludes with an elaboration of the principles of reciprocity and absolute sincerity — or so Legge translates these key Confucian concepts. Since discovering and becoming a lurker at Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy Blog several months ago, I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of just how hotly contested these sorts of translations tend to be. I think it’s safe to say that the image of the hatchet handle appealed to Confucius because it spoke to his emphasis on ethical self-governing in the here-and-now. I love the way he derives the Golden Rule from this — especially since that seems (to me at least) to have been far from the mind of the original poet. My only, neo-Daoist criticism here concerns the fittingness of the image of carving itself. I don’t question the necessity of hatchets and hatchet-handles, but it seems to me that we can learn even more about how to conduct ourselves in the world from a contemplation of the uncarved tree. I admire the Talmudic way the Doctrine of the Mean borrows and reads into passages from the Shi Jing. But uncarved poems have a unique resonance and radiance that no single interpretation can ever quite do justice to.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Storytellers

They are on vacation with their oldest granddaughter, who will turn 12 in a few days. En route to the historic district of one small city, a building collapses half a block ahead. A huge cloud of dust rises up; traffic slows to a crawl. The grandparents take a quick glance and look away, but the girl watches intently as emergency crews pull a body from the wreckage. “He’s still alive,” she announces.

They decide not to take the walking tour after all, and continue driving to the next state park. As soon as they get out of town: “Tell me another story, Grandpa!”

“He makes up these exciting adventure stories, starring boy and girl detectives just about Eva’s age. I don’t know how he does it,” Mom tells me later. “I can’t do that. The only stories I can tell her are things I remember — true stories. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make things up the way your Grandpa does.’

“I told her about England — I was just a couple years older than her when our family went over there. She wanted to hear all about it. I told her about the friends I made, and how everyone revered the teachers so much. I explained the way the school system was back then, how kids’ futures would be determined by what kind of high school they attended. She didn’t think that was right.

“And of course I told her stories about the relatives, dwelling on the parts that I thought would interest her. I told her about that time back in Maine, waking up at 4:30 in the morning and telling Bruce, ‘Nanna just died,’ and finding out the next day that she had, at that exact time. And then when we were singing hymns at her funeral, bursting into tears when I got to the third verse of ‘Beneath the Cross of Jesus.’ It turned out that had been Nanna’s favorite verse of any hymn. It is a very pretty tune.” She starts to sing it.

I take, O cross, thy shadow
For my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than
The sunshine of His face;
Content to let the world go by,
To know no gain nor loss,
My sinful self my only shame,
My glory all the cross.

The granddaughter’s eyes go wide. She wonders if she will be that clairvoyant herself when the time comes. That night at the motel, she and her Nanna stay up late watching a DVD of the old musical “Oklahoma.” Grandpa watches a little bit of it, then retires to the bedroom. Too much tension and violence, he says. It would disturb his sleep.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What it was like

garage

The world outside of the story made no sense whatsoever — that’s why, as soon as they learned about something, they worked it in as best they could.

The twelve crows flying over the cathedral became twelve crows flying over the cathedral, just like that.

There was a balloon hanging from a tree, thwarted in its efforts to return to the ground. No, wait — it was only a traffic sign in another language.

A little girl in the back seat watched her father handing money out the window to a policeman and marveled at the gentle treatment accorded those dirty scraps of paper.

The roadsides were decorated with empty beverage containers, empty take-out boxes, empty plastic shopping bags advertising Everyday Low Prices. “Garbage in, garbage out,” intoned the priests. Junk DNA was found to account for over 80 percent of the human genome.

People talked. You couldn’t meet a trucker alone at the end of a deserted road without somebody finding out about it.

Fishermen’s tales were not to be believed — especially after the one that got away didn’t come back, ever, and the fleet rusted in the harbor.

No matter what happened, there were children watching. People claimed to love them, won their trust, then did despicable things to them — and for some reason, people didn’t talk about that. Some things simply remained outside the story.

Balloons were released with notes attached. They often travelled for hundreds of miles before some mountaintop tree managed to snag them. I found a few myself, over the years.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Manifest Oh

I’ve been working on an artist’s statement of sorts for the About page of Visual Soma. I must confess I’ve always considered artist’s statements to be a little self-indulgent, not to mention superfluous: if the art can’t speak for itself, what good is it? It seems especially presumptuous for a rank amateur like myself to consider writing one. On the other hand, I can rarely pass up a good opportunity to propagandize. This starts out promising enough, but soon turns, Dr. Jekyll-like, into a manifesto.

The vast majority of my photos have been taken within a mile of where I live. For me as a poet and an editor, photography is a spiritual practice, a training in how to see, how to frame and edit, how to find the poetry in ordinary things. I’m especially interested in the challenge of making photos in which the roles of figure and ground are reversible, or even nonexistent. Philosophically, I feel we must get beyond a perception of nature as mere scenery. Gorgeous wall calendars from Sierra Club and the like offend me at a very basic level; nature porn does nothing for the cause of conservation. Indeed, to the extent that it helps sell SUVs and houses in subdivisions, it actually makes things worse. We must get people to appreciate their own back forty, or the vacant lot down the street — only then do we have a chance of convincing them that every part of this planet is a work of art in which we participate and are continually remade.

I can hear the protests already: “Easy for you to say — you live on top of a mountain!” Well, yeah. But I love photos of human landscapes, too, and if I lived in town I’d probably specialize in them. The thing is, I don’t think it’s quite as easy taking compelling photos in the woods or fields as it is in a city, where the colors are so much brighter on average, where the symmetries are obvious, and everything is built to a human scale. Let’s face it, urban environments are pretty damn stimulating! In less human-shaped visual milieux, one needs to constantly shift one’s perspective and scale to avoid monotony.

One obvious and increasingly popular solution is macro photography. Some months back I was struck by a blog post from the professional photographer Mike Moats, in which he answered the question, “Why Macro?”

When I started in nature photography, I like most new photographers wanted to shoot landscapes. I went out east to the White Mountains, and to Acadia, went west to Yosemite and came home with some really nice images, but when I was home between trips I wasn’t able to shoot as much as I wanted due to the lack of great landscapes like I saw on my trips. I started to look at macro photography as a way to spend more time shooting near my home. I was shocked at the amount of images I came home with on my very first trip into the woods. I’ve spent many years of my life exploring past the end of the pavement but have never really taken a good look at the interesting life all around me. When I started to study my surroundings for subjects they were everywhere. I have some great parks with diverse environments within twenty minutes of my home but I also found many subjects within my own yard.

In another post, though, he admits that the easy subjects can literally dry up at certain times of the year, leading to photographic slumps.

Most of the vernal ponds (where I shoot my floating leaf images) are starting to dry up due to the lack of rain so this leaves me shooting the wooded areas. When I’m out looking for images I’m always scaning for subjects that have contrast. Contrast in color makes for some great images and also sells very well for me. The problem at this time of year is that the woods has very little color contrast, everything is GREEN!

One of these days, I will get a macro lens attachment for my camera. But I think the not-quite-macro level is interesting too. We can generally tell what we’re looking at right away — as opposed to, say, some of the extreme close-ups of weed-creatures from photographers such as the amazing Doctor Swan — but the scale is just different enough to give us pause. We’ve seen moss or mushrooms like that before — when we were three. It seems just barely possible that we might still, decades later, recapture that kind of seeing without preconceptions, through eyes undulled by weariness, heartache and boredom, and provoke that primal Oh.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Hidden messages

dancing grass

Call for Submissions: Hidden Messages

The world is full of hidden messages, real and imagined: the letter concealed in the stem of a pen, the meeting place coded into a newspaper ad, information sailors derive from the weather, destinies astrologers divine from the stars, art drawn on the walls of catacombs, the farmer who finds signs in the behavior of livestock, the teenager who hears joy or doom in the seemingly random order of radio songs, people speaking freely among strangers who don’t know their language, the vast distance between what is meant and what is said.

This issue of qarrtsiluni is interested in hidden messages: the ways they’re concealed, the moments they’re revealed. The “messages” we’ll collect for the issue can come in any form: poetry, story, painting, photograph, essay, fragment, memory, code, and, for the first time, film.

Does our world conceal a great secret, or is it always struggling to speak? What hidden messages have you found? What do you dream of finding? What messages have you concealed?

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