Poets and poetry – Page 86

January 19, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Snowball’s Chance revisited

Go here if you want to read along, though I don’t think you’ll need to. There are no clever special effects on this one, just my normal speaking voice at an average tempo.

This is a thoroughly re-written prose poem or lyrical essay that I first posted here over a year ago. I hope long-time readers don’t mind these recycled posts. After three years of blogging, one begins to feel a need to start rescuing some of the better near-misses and making something a bit more durable out of them. And in any case, it’s always fun to revisit earlier pieces and reimagine the things they describe. Editing isn’t merely a matter of changing and erasing, it seems to me. By fully reinhabiting a piece, one can add the sort of depth and richness that come from mixing multiple tracks in a musical recording. Sounding it out loud, of course, can be a real help in the editing process whether or not one chooses to interpret this analogy literally.

January 10, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Madeleine Hennessy

I had often wondered what happened to Madeleine Hennessy. Back in July1979, when I was twelve, my father returned from the American Library Association’s annual convention with a small bundle of literary magazines and one poetry chapbook that he’d picked up at an exhibitor’s booth — probably from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (now the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses). The magazines, all published that year, included Wascana Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares and Shenendoah. The chapbook was called Pavor Nocturnus and Other Poems, by Madeleine Hennessey. It was published by an outfit called washoutchapbooks in Schenectady, New York.

This was my first poetry chapbook, and I was entranced. My brothers and I were putting out a quarterly nature magazine at the time, so I had an interest in well-produced zines and zine-like publications. Pavor Nocturnus was perfect-bound, 32 pages long, and printed on heavy stock. The illustrator, Ed Bruhn, was given his own brief bio at the end. The front matter credits him not only with the cover and photography, but also with something called radiation field photography: five, full-page, enigmatic images of tree leaves seemingly in the process of dissolving into the page.

Of the author, I learned little other than that she was, apparently, young, and that some of the poems in the book had originally appeared in other places: Shaman, The Hollow Spring Review, Yankee, The Greenfield Review, and Ploughshares — in fact, the very issue of Ploughshares included in the bundle. The back cover was graced by a blurb from Joseph Bruchac, the prolific Abenaki Indian author and storyteller and long-time editor of The Greenfield Review: “The landscapes of memory, magic and sorrow are mapped in these poems of Madeleine Hennessy’s with both power and grace. PAVOR NOCTURNUS is a strong first book of poems and one which I’m glad to be able to recommend.”

Memory, magic and sorrow: yes. The magic, in particular, was something I appreciated. My favorite poets at the time were, as I recall, Loren Eisley — better known as a science writer — and Robinson Jeffers. I hadn’t yet discovered those two great wellsprings of inspiration for post-war American poets: Tang and Song Dynasty Chinese and medieval Japanese poetry; and 20th-century Spanish and Latin American poetry. Pavor Nocturnus may well have been my introduction to a kind of understated-yet-dramatic, surrealist-tinged style which, all these years later, seems to have become my own, as well. I’m not good at describing poetry, but let me give a few examples so you’ll see what I mean — and why I was so taken with the book.

In “Prizefighter,” Hennessy writes in the “expected voice” of another — a new technique to me at the time.

The world is roped
and flat
and fisted.
I embrace you
and pummel.
Pulled away
I pummel again.
I go for
cheeks and flank,
your dancing
face bubbles and splits.
You go down
among blows,
broken. Arms curling
back to mama.
I hear the roar,
the count.
Sounds of money.
Hands are upon me
unclenched.

I really liked the way she wrote about poetry in a couple of pieces, suggesting that it is something dangerous and vital and not merely an artifact on the page:

Poems I have not written
I have not written for you.
I might see
those hooked letters catch your skin,
the soft ones curl around each limb.
In my kitchen
pouring the tea
the curve of the handle
would break your hand and spilling,
the white pages scald your eye.
(“Poems Not Written”)

These mornings
wake with a bomb.
I rush in my flannels to read

the maps that were my poems.
My bladed tongue agitates the wireless;
who is digging trenches along my bones

wearing a gas mask instead of a face?
(“Pavor Nocturnus”)

Growing up in the country, I was always on the lookout for poems that offered an unsentimentalized view of wild nature. Some of the pieces in Pavor Nocturnus satisfied this craving. One appeared to have been written in response to Robert Frost’s most famous poem, which I had committed to memory a couple years before:

A loss is consuming the road,
the step of a girl not taken.
She haunts the long tunnel of leaves,
she aches with both hands
and dreads the sky’s domestic turnings.
(“Something of a Loss”)

There was a lot in the book that was over my head, but that didn’t turn me off — I always kind of enjoyed getting lost. For example, I’m not sure what I got out of this description of a falconer’s longed-for catch, brought back by the falcon:

It would glitter before you–
a handful of light
in the shape of water,
some patched shadows
with light as borders.
You’d see filaments
tilting in trees, and learn
the secret light-breathings
of leaves.

Then you would be falconer,
then a master.
Your arm extended
beyond itself
into its own clear shape.

A love poem dedicated to someone named Tom did nothing for me, though it now strikes me as excellent. But a number of poems privileged the perspectives of children, such as this one about a team of landscapers:

They call to one another
and pause,
eyes of neighborhood children
in the hedges.
They consider fencing
against the rabbits, their hands
a threat of metal.

Dirt collapses like a dream,
a shift in purpose
toward borders and rows.

We watch.
The marigolds poised,
symmetry of measured grasses.
Everything ravaged to order.
(“The Landscapers”)

I was a little taken aback by the ease with which Hennessy mythologized herself in a few of her poems. This seemed of a piece with the poems in others’ voices, suggesting a fluid boundary between self and other, observer and observed. I think this made a big impression on me, because I was kind of a strange little kid (hard to believe, I know!) who spent a lot of time pondering metaphysical questions, such as whether the self is a real thing or a purely social fiction. (I eventually decided in favor of the latter.) My favorite poem in the book was the one that also appeared in the thick, Vol. 5, No. 1 issue of Ploughshares:

Letter to my Mother

This may come as a surprise to you
but as a child
I belonged to another family.
And even as your child I knew it.

They lived on the side of a mountain
in a thin house of boards.
The walls went many ways.
I learned to walk at angles,
to come and go
without a crash.

Each morning I slopped water
from the well
to the screams of another mother.
We had a father who had a car
that he parked on a slant
near the slanted house.

Mother, when I was your child
I wondered about this other family.
I woke alone and they appeared:
children scrambling
on the tilted porch,
mother yelling at the well.

Probably every child fantasizes about having been somehow switched at birth or given up for adoption, and dreams about a different life where all his or her desires would be met; I know I did. This poem struck me with its implication that the speaker’s apparently real childhood was, in fact, the fantasy of some much less well-off child. I went to school with kids like that, and my parents had told us repeatedly not to resent their occasional bullying or meanness — we were to assume that they came from “bad backgrounds,” whatever that meant. “There but for the grace of God go I” was (and still is) one of my mother’s favorite expressions.

So whatever happened to Madeleine Hennessy? As the years went by, I kept expecting to see reviews of her books, or at least encounter more of her work in literary magazines. Back in 1979, she was one of a crowded field of talented young poets just beginning to make a name for themselves. Among other poets appearing with her in the Ploughshares Special Poetry Issue that year, I see from the Notes on Contributors that Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh had just published their first books, while Linda Gregerson and Jorie Graham are only described as having published poems in a few other magazines. The Winter 1979 issue of Shenendoah — the other thing in the bundle that really caught my fancy — included a three-page poem by a then-unknown Louise Erdrich.

When I first began using the internet twenty years later, I did a search for “Madeleine Hennessy” and couldn’t find anything (other than, eventually, the Ploughshares listing). I repeated the search last November, and something finally turned up. It was an obituary from The York [Maine] Weekly, 2002.

Madeleine Joyce Hennessy, 53, of Trumbull, Conn., died Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at her home after a courageous battle with cancer.

Born Sept. 18, 1948, in Syracuse, N.Y., she was the daughter of Richard and Doris (Howe) Hennessy of Cape Neddick.

She was a member of the Trinity Episcopal Church in the Nichols section of Trumbull. As warden she was instrumental in the development of the Trinity memorial garden. Madeleine was a dedicated member of the adult choir, and participated fully in the life of the church.

Madeleine always loved written language. As a little girl, words and their power fascinated her. She began writing poetry before the age of 10. An outstanding high school English student, she won the English medal upon graduation from Notre Dame High School. Madeleine majored in English and earned a BA degree from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 1970, where she was also named in “Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities.”

Madeleine’s first post-college job was with the Schenectady County Department of Social Services. She began in 1970 as a child welfare adoption worker and was promoted to foster care case supervisor before resigning in 1984 to move to Connecticut and to raise her first child.

While living in Schenectady, Madeleine developed her talents as a poet. For more than 10 years Madeleine was a member of a local poetry group, where her contributions as an insightful critic were considered invaluable. She was a contributing poet and on the editorial board of The Washout Review, a quarterly magazine published in Schenectady. Madeleine also published regularly in Yankee Magazine. Pavor Nocturnus and The Christmas Poems of Madeleine Hennessy are her two self-published poetry books. While extending her talents as a poet, Madeleine developed an interest in newspapers. Her career path included positions such as a nursery school teacher, editing and proofreading, and she was a consultant for various companies. Most recently, she was employed by Micro Warehouse as senior catalogue manager, where she was loved and respected by her coworkers. Madeleine was a devoted mother and was dearly loved by her many friends. She was an inspiration to all who knew her.

Besides her parents, she is survived by her daughters, Caitlin Anne Smolinski and Julie Grace Smolinski of Trumbull; a sister, Doris Blaisdell and her husband, Thomas of York; two brothers, James Hennessy and his wife, Sandy of Newton, N.H., and Richard Hennessy and his wife, Joelyn, of Madison, Miss.; a brother-in-law, Jeff Blum of Westport, Conn.; her devoted companion, Gerry Lemay of Milford, Conn.; several nieces and nephews.

She was predeceased by a sister, Mary H. Blum, in 1996.

Funeral services were held Saturday, March 30 in Connecticut. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent in her name to Trinity Episcopal Church Memorial Garden Fund, 1734 Huntington Turnpike, Trumbull, CT 06601, or to the Connecticut Higher Education Trust, P.O. Box 150499, Hartford, CT 06115, to benefit the education of her daughters.

It’s sobering to to think that a poet of such talent and vision might choose obscurity, devoting herself to family and community rather than the “arm extended / beyond [her]self / into its own clear shape.” How many others are there, I wonder, who have made the same choice?

__________

All images in this post are by Ed Bruhn, from Pavor Nocturnus

January 6, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

No epiphany on Epiphany

Cross-posted with shadow cabinet.

Experimented last night with making recordings of myself reading poems. I forgot how damn difficult it is to get that right! And without a live audience, it’s hard to muster the necessary, tense energy. For some reason I decided to record Dump in the Woods — I guess I thought it would be fun to read. I posted the result, but then after listening to it myself, changed my mind and took out the link.

Re-read After Word this morning and found the whole prose part, about the poem set in concrete, too wordy. There’s no reason to include stuff that I feel even a little iffy about, so I cut it. As for the part that remains: I like it, but looking through the VN archives later, realized that I’d used a very similar image in the thing about Roentgenisdat. So if at some point I decide to put that one into the game, the other might have to sit out.

Then I got a strange idea: Why not try going through VN using the “Poems and poem-like things” category pages? Right away, I found some recent pieces that I had already forgotten about. The Wait, Landmark, Blast Area, Advice for Prospective Troglodytes, and Diet Plan all made the cut after a few changes.

I’m beginning to think that 2006 may well have been my best year for poetry yet. If so, I’m not sure what the cause might be — maybe just that I found myself increasingly willing to shirk on everything else in order to write. I do know this: the kind of work I am engaged in on shadow cabinet is no substitute. There’s too much ego in it, and not nearly enough reward, compared with the out-of-body experience of actually writing a poem.

During lunch, Mom spotted a bright white spot moving along the top edge of the field and realized it was our hunter friend P.’s bleach-blonde hair. She stopped and stood in place for about five minutes, and we figured she was out with her two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, who would’ve been hidden by the tall grass. But then when she started moving again, she walked rapidly up into the woods, and we decided that she was participating in a deer drive instead.

In a normal winter, it would’ve been her dark clothing that caught our attention, not her light hair. This year, not only is there no snow, but the temperature was 56 degrees at dawn. It hardly feels like winter at all.

Today is Epiphany, and therefore also the end of the Feast of Fools and the sovereignty of the Lord of Misrule. Starting tomorrow, things are supposed to return to their normal order. Poets — and all other foolish epiphany-mongers — take note.

December 17, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

I’ve been to the ERPA

Last night, in chatting with an environmental consultant, I learned a dandy new acronym: ERPA. That stands for Engineered Rock Placement Area. It refers to the artificial mountains created from the rubble of bedrock blasted out to make room for a new highway, Wal-Mart, or other envelopment. Such piles are “engineered” in the sense that some specialist tries to minimize their effects on the local hydrology, keep them from collapsing, etc.

The specific ERPA my friend was talking about will consist of highly acidic mountaintop rock removed for a certain local highway cut and placed in the adjacent valley, where it will tower over the new highway and an adjacent railroad line and creek. I am being vague here because he asked me not to quote him about the tenuous chances of its success as a long-term environmental solution.

I just liked the fact that “ERPA” sounds like a burp — a gross and embarrassing discharge resulting from too-rapid consumption — and that it rhymes with “Sherpa.” From what I gather, one might well need a Sherpa guide to scale this thing by the time they’re done with it.

It’s been three years now since I began work on my own ERPA, Via Negativa. The previous spring, I had begun writing essays to post to my then-new Geocities site, and forwarding the links to a number of email contacts. Many of the essays I was writing were in response to the Iraq invasion — a catalyst for many people to start blogging in 2003, it turned out. From time to time, one of my hapless email victims would tell me I needed to start a blog, but I’d pooh-pooh the suggestion.

The main thing that kept me from jumping into blogging as soon as I found out about it was my impression that blogs consisted mainly of political and social polemics. Where was the poetry? I didn’t want to narrow my focus like that. When I finally did start a blog in mid-December 2003, I had the notion — erroneous, as it turned out — that I’d be doing something largely without precedent. I aimed to write a “celebration of the unknown, the unknowable, and the mystic experience,” as I put it at the time. But within two weeks I was straying beyond this self-imposed limitation, and by late spring, I had pretty much abandoned all pretense of having a thematically unified blog. In the meantime, though, the name Via Negativa had stuck, as names will do.

I went with Blogger because it was free. After about three weeks, I figured out how to add a commenting system, which Blogger didn’t provide back then. Suddenly, with comments coming in, and my own participation in conversations at other blogs, the writer’s life was no longer a mostly solitary affair. I started getting valuable feedback that went beyond the polite or enthusiastic applause one might earn at a poetry reading, or the occasional responses from email correspondents. And of course I discovered plenty of other bloggers working in similar territories, writing about faith or lack thereof, about nature and place, about art and philosophy and what they had for breakfast. I found myself in a blog neighborhood that felt both compatible and invigorating, as if I had just entered a graduate program at some elite university.

This past year has seen the biggest changes since I started blogging. Via Negativa moved to its present location on April Fool’s Day, changing URL and software platform in the process. I discovered the wonders and challenges of blogging with open-source software, something which, as an anarchist of sorts, I deeply believe in. I started a sideblog, Smorgasblog, and saw myself become a much better reader of other blogs as a result. I helped start a blog carnival, Festival of the Trees, with Pablo of Roundrock Journal, and with Beth Adams (the cassandra pages) took over the managing editorship of qarrtsiluni.

Less than a week ago, I began to assemble a new collection of poems derived mostly from Via Negativa, a project which I am calling shadow cabinet. I’ve gotten so used to doing things online, it seemed natural to put it together as a website, using a WordPress.com template, rather than just a dull document in MS Word. This has led me to think about the difference between blogs and other kinds of websites, especially as it relates to publishing poetry. The apparent stasis of a regular website — to say nothing of a book — aids in the perception of poetry as finished creation, an illusion central to our appreciation of any art. The dynamic nature of blogging, on the other hand, helps us see poems as ephemeral expressions of a continually evolving creative process.

I think it’s fair to say that blogging has made me a better writer, more disciplined, less prone to spend all my time polishing what I’ve already written. As I noted in a comment to a recent post about blogging and writing at the cassandra pages, because I try and post something at least once a day, six days a week, I’ve learned to be a little more easy-going in what I write — less prone to try and pack everything I want to say into one poem or essay. Much as I dislike Billy Collins, I have to agree with the quote that appears on the front page of Poetry Daily: “The urge to tie a poem to a chair and torture a confession out of it lessens when poetry arises freshly each day.”

Last year at this time I did a quick survey of the immediate blog neighborhood, but now that I keep the Smorgasblog, that doesn’t seem as necessary. I would like to thank all my enablers (see Credits page). Thanks for reading. It’s been a real pleasure, and I hope to stick around for many more years. In ten days — wood willing, knock on God — I’ll be getting a new (to me) computer, many times faster and larger than what I have now. So starting with the New Year, I’ll have the space and ability to back up files much more effectively, shoring up this mountain of rubble against collapse.

December 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

One shot

So there I am, searching for an image to serve as a header for the Festival of the Trees coordinating blog. (I had decided to switch to a theme with less annoying fonts.) It’s late morning, and I’ve been going through my photos for close to an hour. I’m getting frustrated, because I only have a small number of what I’d consider acceptable tree photos, and none of them look much good cropped to banner dimensions. I’m also feeling some frustration at the fact that I haven’t done anything that you might call creative so far today.

I glance up and find myself gazing out the window at a sudden snow squall. I relax and watch the swirling flakes for half a minute, then on an impulse, grab my camera and go out on the front porch. With the camera on wide angle and natural light settings, I shoot three pictures almost at random. Snowflakes are already beginning to hit the lens, so I scurry back inside. Reviewing the pictures on the LCD display, I delete two of them right away. But it occurs to me that the third — a shot into the sun, which was half-hidden by a scrim of snow cloud — might well yield a good banner image. I upload it to the computer and look at it in Photoshop, and sure enough, at about 50 percent magnification, there are plenty of likely banner-size images. I crop and save three in quick succession, and the first one I try at the Festival blog looks fine (I keep another in reserve at Flickr, just in case). It fits the season, which is nothing if not festive. Only after the photo is up and in use as the new header do I take the time to look at it more closely — the kind of looking that would have to precede image-making in almost any other medium than photography.

Sketch artists may draw a fairly negative moral from this story: look how totally inattentive one can be and still end up with a half-decent photo! Snapshot photography is obviously an invitation to semi-distracted, careless looking rather than genuine seeing.

All that may be true. But I am ridiculously pleased that I managed to get a good image largely “unencumbered by the thought process,” as they say on Car Talk.

Is it fair to say that I was inattentive, though? I don’t know. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure that I had the image I wanted to take already in my mind’s eye before I went out on the porch. Looking at the two images I got out of the one shot I saved, it’s evident that a couple things were working in my favor: the snowflakes were effectively backlit by the almost-shining sun, giving maximal contrast with the trees behind them; and the fact that it was the edge of the woods, as opposed to somewhere in the middle of it, meant that there were plenty of outstretched branches to suggest motion and energy.

I’m dwelling on this not to blow my own horn — I really don’t think of myself as anything but the rankest of amateur photographers — but because I’m fascinated by the creative process. In the close to two years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve found myself taking fewer and fewer shots of each subject. Quite often, the first picture snapped turns out to be the best, and I know it when I take it. But quite often, too, I’ve been looking at the subject for a good long time before I get the camera out. Take the recent deer skull pictures, for example: the skull sits right outside my door, in the lilac bush above my stone wall. I’ve been looking at it for months. The view from my porch? I take it in for at least a half-hour every morning.

I watched myself on Sunday, when I went for a walk around the mountain with the camera. As usual, I took a certain number of shots of things simply because they looked cool, and more or less knew when I took them that they wouldn’t be keepers. I got close with a couple, including a strikingly grotesque red maple tree that I’ve been photographing off and on for months without success. I think I may have the right angle now, but probably the light needs to be different. I spent a lot of time standing and looking at things, and found that simply by gazing with no particular expectations, a couple of times a viable shot would appear. One of the better photos featured a clump of turkey-tail fungi I’d never noticed before, and I took it with very little deliberation. But I’ve photographed other clumps of turkey-tail fungi, so quite possibly I already knew what angle to shoot from.

Has photography made me a better writer? I don’t know. More than anything, I suppose, it provides me with a creative outlet when I don’t feel up to writing, and the results often make good writing prompts, too. (This post doesn’t count, being more analytical than creative.) Has it changed the way I look at things? I doubt it. But I think it has reinforced some of the lessons I had already learned from three and a half decades of writing poems: to trust my impulses, and to work with whatever comes most readily to hand.

I’d be interested in hearing from other writers who have taken up photography. What, if anything, do you think you’ve learned from it?

October 30, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Poetry and laughter

One of the most peculiar aspects of [spasmodic dysphonia] is that victims are typically unable to have conversations in their normal voice. Yet they can speak under different circumstances, such as just after sneezing or laughing, or in an exaggerated falsetto or baritone, or while reciting poetry…

–Rachel Konrad, “Hampered by rare syndrome, Dilbert cartoonist talks again” (Associated Press, Oct. 27, 2006)

I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, “That’s too much nonsense,” but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry.

Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.

For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of every sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that the poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right.

–Kay Ryan, “A Consideration of Poetry” (Poetry, May 2006)

September 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

If I were you

for Dale

What if you opened your morning paper and found nothing but poems — lyrical and satirical, surrealistic and realistic — illustrated by photos straight from an art gallery?

What if your scrambled eggs rhymed with your orange juice, and your coffee made you think of a nightcrawler’s ladder into the earth?

What if your partner’s sleepy good morning lit up the kitchen, like a human-scaled version of the third verse of Genesis?

What if the house sparrows scrapping on the sidewalk seemed as worthy of attention as Odysseus and Achilles, and twice as heroic?

What if, when the sunrise hit your rearview mirror, you were to marvel at the daily coincidence of clarity and blindness?

What if the voices on the radio blended with the traffic noise like a stream into a river, the turbulent knowledge of particulars loosed into a more impartial capacity to reflect?

What if the bits of trash along the freeway were shards of a sky that has been busy falling for well over a century, while the whole world has been too distracted to notice?

What if the parking lot filling up with cars looked like one half of a balance sheet, and you made your way into work thinking, Here comes another eight hours of inventing new rules fast enough to keep people from noticing it’s just a game?

What if the fax machine’s incessant tongues of paper were really prayer flags, intended to intercede with the angels of grief?

What if the printers and photocopiers were retooled looms, weaving sails of paper, piecemeal, for some incessant Armada?

What if the tech support guy were an authentic guru, every one of his seemingly dry instructions pregnant with allegory?

What if the soft cubicle walls reminded you of albumen, and the clicking of keyboards sounded like the tapping of beaks against shells, under the florescent lights of an enormous incubator?

What if, every time someone inserted a card into a machine, some small animal on the other side of the earth died an anonymous death?

What if time were money?

What if all the potted plants were replaced with very slow moving, green mimes?

What if, in order to pass from room to room, you had to perform a small ritual that included striking your knuckles at chest level against a removable section of wall, naming yourself, turning a small wheel at navel height, and executing a brief dance with a large, flat slab of dead tree flesh?

What if you put in your two-week’s notice just for the novelty of the thing, and discovered to your surprise that you would miss your fellow workers in all their pettiness, their chemical odors and imperfect beauty?

What if you rested your forehead briefly on the steering wheel and remembered how it felt to be five years old?

What if the unplowed fields of corn stubble along the highway were graveyards for the wind, parceled out into individual breaths?

What if the names and numbers on the signs were all in a foreign language, imposed by conquest?

What if the car kept heading straight for home at a mile a minute, your arms and legs operating smoothly in its service while you sat and watched, incredulous as a child at a magic show?

What if you found the words for all these things, and said them, and instead of laughing, people thanked you for saying what they too had often felt but hadn’t really thought about until this moment?

September 21, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Who has ears to hear, peep this

for Teju Cole

The kingdom of poetry is like a man who, having hired an expensive prostitute & taken her back to his apartment, kneels on the threadbare carpet in front of the chair where she has deposited her shed garments & lifts them one by one to his lips, weeping, while she sits in the kitchen wrapped in a blanket, eating General Tso’s Chicken straight from the box.

September 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Triptych

The secret teachings of January smolder in the twelve directions of the clock & turn to fly ash in the alchemist’s spoon, the one with a mother-of-pearl grip like an old-fashioned .38. They are not hidden — their noise is the noise of the world — but they’re easy to miss, just as a painting that moves us once might prove, on subsequent viewings, unable to escape our recollection of being moved. You might hear them & not realize it until the next morning, when the eastern sky begins to prickle under its hairnet of bare branches, the ambiguity of figure versus ground prompting a sudden consciousness of loss. For god’s sake, put the kettle on, says the wren.

And now I am sipping slow clarity with my tea. A half-grown kitten crouches down in the grass and turns to stone. The blacker the cat, the better the chance of its survival in the wild, so what’s all this nonsense about bad luck? If you know me at all, you know how fond I am of the way the world eludes our efforts at interpretation. If reality is my bible, then I confess to the most extreme form of literalism: no bird is an omen. The arrangement of tea leaves in a pot is nothing but art, pure & unrepeatable! The one-sided conversation of a sleepwalker forces us to listen as an infant must; it does no good to drill new ear holes in the mask we long ago acquired as an inducement to love. â€˜The music of what happens,’ said great Fionn, â€˜that is the finest music in the world.’*

If you can’t decide on a quarry, you’ll never be much of a hunter. Or so I gather. You might be wondering why I started out talking about January, but it’s simply because that’s when the contrasts are sharpest, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun — on rare occasions when it shines — is at the best possible angle for photography. Shadows turn blue against the snow, which can otherwise cause blindness, & a sufficient depth of snow or ice traps blueness for slow release on cloudy days. Sky versus ground: one is as good as the other in my book. Though their tracks are everywhere, seeing a coyote right now would simply be too much to hope for, I remember saying to myself in the last seconds before the shape at the edge of the woods averted its muzzle and hauled ass up the hillside: unmistakeably bear. Inexplicably awake.
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*Quote from the Fenian Cycle, translated by James Stephens in Irish Fairy Stories and reprinted in John Montague, ed., The Book of Irish Verse (Macmillan, 1974)

September 14, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

How the anthropologist learned to tell stories

The natives are getting restless at the poor quality of the anthropologist’s stories. In all his years of schooling, he never stopped to consider how difficult the informant’s job might be: anthropologist and informant were two very different things, he’d thought. But in Imbonggu society, one listens in order to learn how to embroider. And if he wants to hear their stories, he has to tell some of his own. That’s how it works.

So the anthropologist, an American, tells them about Paul Bunyan, about George Washington. Well, they can see how a big blue ox would make giant footprints, but so what? What’s the upshot? And they can certainly understand how a young man might want to test parental authority by chopping down a valuable tree — so far, so good. But the punch line completely eludes them. He told the truth? Why? Perhaps these white people simply lack the imagination to tell a good story!

Then the anthropologist happens upon a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. What the hell, he says to himself, I’ve tried everything else — why not the author of “The White Man’s Burden”? So the next time his neighbors drop in to share the warmth of his hearth, he regales them with Just So Stories. They’re delighted. “The white man can tell stories after all!” they whisper.

When he first headed off to the New Guinea highlands, his parents were distraught. They and everyone else back home were afraid he would get eaten by cannibals, just like Michael Rockefeller. Well, who doesn’t want to eat the rich? But the anthropologist was just a poor graduate student then. Not much to him. He had that lean and hungry look.

After he settled in among his hosts, he was shocked to find that they quite agreed with his parents: the countryside swarmed with cannibals and sorcerers! They infested all the surrounding clans, not to mention people farther away who spoke incomprehensible gibberish — topsy-turvy places where people laughed when someone died and wept inconsolably at the purchase of a new truck. Once, when he returned from a prolonged trip to the coast, his neighbors shrieked and hid, thinking that they must be seeing his ghost.

No, the Imbonggu were unanimous: the anthropologist was only really safe among the Imbonggu. He had nothing to fear but his own untutored cravings. Because white men are themselves notorious eaters of flesh — or so he heard one mother tell her child when the child would not behave. She was making noise when she should have been listening to the grown-ups’ stories, and now it was time to frighten her into submission. Be quiet, child, said the mother, or the white man will eat you!

Her daughter looked skeptical, so the mother elaborated. Hadn’t she seen how their airplanes swallowed human beings through gaping holes in their sides? Every year, young men from the villages get on airplanes and fly away to Port Moresby, never to return. Or, if on rare occasions they did return, they wore the white man’s clothes and wristwatch and carried machines that played the white man’s music: clearly ensorcelled. Their souls had been stolen to flavor some rich white man’s stew.

The child backed away from the anthropologist, her eyes big as platters. Did he not arrive on an airplane? her mother hissed.
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Based on the stories anthropologist William E. Wormsley tells on himself in his marvellous book,THE WHITE MAN WILL EAT YOU! An anthropologist among the Imbonggu of New Guinea, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.

For more tales about the learning process, be sure to visit qarrtsiluni at its brand-new home.