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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rabelais, Bakhtin and the Zuni

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. One of the biggest differences between my blogging then and my blogging now is in the proportion of prose to poetry, which was almost 180 degrees from what it is now. And I was so much more, um, opinionated back then! But I like to re-read posts like this one from time to time to remind myself of what I believe — or would believe, if I believed more strongly in the importance of belief. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)

Laughing in church:

Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques?

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Essential

“…rare, singular, unattainable, but:
here” ~ seon joon

Tonight, after the reading,
someone asked the poet
in the red shirt and black
motorcycle boots which writers
had influenced her the most—
and she replied by recalling
how she had gone to school
during a time when everyone
was lionizing all these great
women poets who had killed
themselves: Plath of course;
and Sexton (who was her teacher).
Then one day a substitute came
and turned on this light—
and she realized one could be
a good poet, even a good,
angry, feminist poet,
and still love life.

 

In response to cold mountain (61).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exchange

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. My niece Eva featured in some of my most popular posts that year and the next. I also used to write a lot more posts that mingled poetry and prose, as this one does. Not sure why I ever moved away from that format. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)

Purlieu:

The art museum’s smallest room
is filled with miniature landscapes.
I pause in front of each
& hoist my 8-year-old niece by the armpits
for a five-second look.

[…]

Later, she watches from
the back seat of the car as
a ten-dollar bill change hands. Giggles.
“They hold the money
as if it were fragile!”
she whispers in my ear.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Own

This entry is part 4 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

All this beautiful, heavy hardwood furniture—
the slab of polished mahogany that serves
as coffee table, the long-leaved dining table
and its matching credenza from Spain, the grand
piano in the living room that we are thrilled
to play Bach, Gershwin, “Chopsticks,” or
Sondheim on— belongs to our landlady.
To rent her digs, the deal was that we had to live
with all her stuff. We looked around at what
we owned— six folding bookshelves, three
computer desks, a couch, a few lamps picked up
at Service Merchandise or Target, a microwave and
microwave cart, our daughter’s sleeping pallet;
and many, many bankers’ boxes filled with books—
and said something like Easy come… or perhaps
We can’t take it with us when we go. And one
of the friends who took over our possessions quoted
from song or scripture that part about our cares
being worth more than those of white-throated sparrows
singing in the field, all the while assessing
the quality of a set of china on which he had designs.
But it’s ok, really— We look after the place as if
it were our own, and thank our lucky stars for so many
windows— the upstairs ones are great for reading
our books or writing late, by late summer light. We pay
utility bills when they are due, change the batteries
in the smoke detectors, take the lint out of the dryer
screen. We vacuum and mop beneath the beds and chairs,
in hard to reach corners where hair and dust balls
consolidate the interest they will secure in final lien.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Blastocyst

This entry is part 34 of 34 in the series Small World

At first, in the fallopian tubes,
the zygote is little more
than a clump: morula,
named for its resemblance
to a mulberry.
Then fluid fills it
like a balloon, a whole
lot of nothing.
That’s when the mother’s
body moves it
& it takes root in the womb.

This is the call & response
of matrix & matter:
for creative work to happen
you need that opening
without & within.
The stem cells form,
ready for anything.

*

I think this may be the last post in the Small World series. (If you’re reading via RSS or email, here’s the link to the whole series.)

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

We woke and the world was colder,

This entry is part 3 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

We woke and the world was colder,
the season progressing steadily

toward winter— the line of trees
more shorn of green summer cover,

only the ivy persisting over thin-
skinned clover— as if the bones

of earth were chiseled finer,
our cue to take out sweaters

from the back end of the drawer—
And even the tiny moths I saw

alight upon the still-steadfast, still-
flowering clump of sage and lavender,

slowed their wings in the shadow
of the sun’s pale alabaster—

Nights grow longer; so we learn to keep
best what lasts through now and later.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dead leaf (videohaiku)


Watch on Vimeo.

I had fun watching and filming a woolly bear caterpillar this morning. The text of the haiku occurred to me as I was filming. The word “frass” may be slighty obscure, but I hope it’s obvious from the context what it means. Caterpillar droppings are hard and dry — not at all the image that “shit” or “excrement” conjure up (though my mother does have a t-shirt with a drawing of a caterpillar and the message “frass happens”).

As with other videohaiku I’ve done, I find that, in contrast to regular videopoetry, a straightforward, “naive” relationship between footage and text can succeed as long as the text is saved for afterwards. The effect, I hope, is to reproduce something of the process by which a haiku is born: close observation yielding a sudden insight (though in this case, arguably, my insight was not especially profound). This is the first time I’ve added music to the soundtrack of a videohaiku; usually I just use the ambient sound, but that was marred this time by the camera scraping against the concrete.

The time equation might be of interest. In all, it took me three hours to make the video and an hour and fifteen minutes to upload it. Of that time, only about three minutes were spent polishing the text of the poem. So the filmmaking took about 60 times longer than the writing. (And then I spent some 25 minutes adjusting the settings on Vimeo and composing this post. Sure would’ve been easier just to post the damn haiku!)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Lentil

This entry is part 33 of 34 in the series Small World

(Lens culinaris)

Until the lentil lent
its Latin name, the lens
went unknown among us,
despite being the apple
of our eyes. Now it is
the legume that lags
in popularity:
we’re more apt to wonder
what microscopic folk
might be peering blindly
up from the soup,
& suspect every
lenticular cloud
of hiding a flying saucer
from the distant bulging disc
of an armless galaxy.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Talisman

You couldn’t stare, open-mouthed,
at the pock-marked moon, expecting
an amulet to drop like dawn’s first perfect
pearl of dew, did you? And you didn’t think
the heart of the lotus— or that red, red heart
hidden in the fronds of the tropical tree—
would give up its treasure without exacting
a price from you? Who knows how many nights
you’ll need to stand there, just like in
the legend: opening your mouth, your guts,
your insides to the punishing dark,
before some jury says Enough, no more,
she’s done her time, let her off easy now?
The only thing I know most days: that stubborn
pebble called hope, impossibly stuck in my craw.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Thimble.