Via Negativa

August 4, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

On beyond paper

Several years ago I went on a fungus-writing spree, scouring the mountain for the shelf fungi with creamy white undersides known as artist’s conks. I used a sharp nut pick about half the diameter of a pencil to scratch poems into the surface. The first result of my experimenting is above. The illustrations were simply copied from pen-and-ink sketches I found in back issues of Pennsylvania Game News magazine. I got successively fancier with the calligraphy on each one, culminating with this:

It occurs to me that many of my Morning Porch pieces are just the right length for fungal inscriptions; it might be an interesting way to make a collection of them (with photos posted to the web, of course). The trouble is, I don’t think we have too many more good shelf fungi in the woods. They are actually somewhat scarcer than one might expect.

Birch bark might be another option, though we don’t have too many paper birches on the property, either. My only experiment along those lines was with some inner bark from a dead yellow birch, picked up off the forest floor in an old-growth forest in the Adirondacks years ago. I used it for one of my favorite quotes about poetry, and had it hanging on the wall beside my writing table for a long time.

Writing on natural surfaces is something that’s always interested me, though I admit I find it hard to like spraypaint on boulders. The particular attraction of a hornets’ nest, of course, is that it is literally paper, manufactured by insects out of the same material that we (unfortunately) still use for most of our own paper: wood. Indeed, it was from watching paper wasps that 18th-century scientists first got the idea of switching from rags to wood fibers as the primary source for pulp.

It’s worth remembering, though, that the original paper (etymologically speaking) was papyrus — a woven mat of flattened reeds. The word “bible” derives from a Greek word for the inner bark of papyrus. The early Chinese wrote on long slivers of bamboo before they invented the first true paper, while in ancient and medieval Europe, animal skins proved to be durable, reusable writing surfaces. One explanation for the flowering of literature in rural medieval Iceland, aside from the long winters when public readings were a major form of diversion, is that there was a glut of calfskin from all the dairies. (I love this example, by the way, because it proves that you don’t need urban civilization for a literary culture to flourish. Human settlement in medieval Iceland consisted entirely of scattered farms; there wasn’t even a single village.)

But one of the earliest writing media has proved to be the most durable of all: the clay tablet, favored for cuneiform inscriptions in ancient Sumeria. Burn a library of clay tablets, and you only make them harder. I also find a lot of appeal in the idea of clay as a writing medium. So my ultimate fantasy publishing project involves working with a potter to devise some sort of letter press for wet clay, and grinding out limited edition poetry tablets that way. Attractively glazed and fitted with wall hangers, I suspect they’d sell much better than chapbooks or broadsheets. And barring a lot of guys with sledgehammers, they’d probably survive the collapse of our civilization. I doubt the same could be said for texts on the internet.

August 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Limited Issue

If you can’t see the slideshow, or if you’re on dial-up, go here.

For what it’s worth, this was not drafted in advance. The materials suggested the arrangement of words as well as the text itself. A few “pages” did tear mid-write and had to be re-written. I used almost every scrap of hornets’ nest I had on hand.

August 1, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Heat Lightning

Among the living, I would be pelagic, a petrel teetering on fixed wings above a fleet of sailfish. Among the petrels, I would be a fulmar, & ward off threats to my one-egg hoard with deadly projectile vomit. I am held here by a morass of trivial recollections, like Rachel pinned to her camel-hump stool by the guilty pile of gods hidden beneath it. I remember a line in a novel I read decades ago that sparked an enduring self-consciousness about the crescents of dirt under my fingernails. I remember as a kid discovering a lone raspberry cane out in the field that was dotted with dried & shrunken fruit — that feeling of sadness at a minor treasure even the sparrows overlooked. I remember hearing a Chopin piano sonata once when I was so sleep-deprived that the mere effort of listening made my chest ache. The black and the white keys were equally painful. I’ve forgotten most insults & humiliations except for those I perpetrated, which fill me with a baleful light, like an all-night laundromat. I remember, because it’s still embarassing, how old I was when I finally realized that heat lightning was nothing but ordinary lightning, too far to hear & hidden by the curve of the earth.

July 31, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Becoming Israel

Genesis 32:24-32

It’s the night before the reunion with my brother the savage whose people & whose flocks infest the land. I isolate myself like a woman in her monthly time. But through the tent wall, through furs, through woolen blanket & robe, another pair of hands find mine & begin to push.

This is contact almost at the level of pure symbolism, but still a kind of arousal occurs. Some slave girl, perhaps, ambitious for a piece of the inheritance? I bump up against a maybe hip & thigh — something warm & solid with just a little give.

Who are you on the other side of sleep? Are these truly hands? Are you even human?

By way of answer, I am crushed in a sudden embrace. A hot harsh breath in my ear: this is no sweet angel. Now I am throwing punches hard enough to stun a ram. Now the curtain falls away & I am face to face with the darkness between the stars.

Ah, but we keep each other close as adversaries must, skin burning skin, grinding into the stony earth. I will not be anyone’s bitch. I will never say Uncle. I will survive until morning, & limp fully blessed into the glare of meeting.

July 29, 2008 by Dave Bonta

WALL-E: Descartes Meets Rabelais

I digest, therefore I am. Mere consumption leads to stasis and death, but the self-aware machine builds phallic temples from the products of its digestion and outfits a shrine with fetish-objects from the civilization of the consumers. Life happens. Love happens. The consumers experience wonder, and start giving a shit.

July 28, 2008September 23, 2012 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.

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.

July 27, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Poem for Display in a Vacant Lot

This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series Public Poems

The concrete dreams
of bindweed & beggar-tick,
burdock & wineberry,
gravid mosquito mothers,
copperheads, a wild rose
equipped with grappling hooks.

The concrete wants to be loved,
not merely walked upon.
It wants to go home with you,
clinging to your pants leg,
or at least take a bite
your skin will remember.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The concrete was our gift
to an unimproved land
where woods & weeds ran riot.
At best, we might condescend
to preserve some open space,

a light-green stripe across the grid.
But the pavement, too,
begins to bulge open.
There are no motels in this vacancy.
The flag of our alienation
goes down to kudzu.

July 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Palimpsest

At last the author relinquishes his hold on the book he has been struggling to finish for almost a century. There’s a sound like the rapid turning of pages, or the beating of wings.

Two vultures were circling low above the treetops, as if in a slow-motion chase. I watched their shadows move through the forest, sliding up and down trunks and gliding over the shiny leaves of the laurel. On a cool morning, they were looking for light and warmth like everyone else. They were looking for a lift.

It’s not the vultures’ fault if their very name provokes fear and revulsion, simply because we are ashamed of where we came from. We too are scavengers with naked faces and an aesthetic preference for clean, straight bones. In the middle of the day, when the predators retreat to the shade, we venture out, alert to the crushed leaf, the snapped twig, the blood-dark berry. Stark contrasts are pleasing to us. The savanna — half grass, half trees — was our founding parchment, and we return to that garden every chance we get.

At this very moment, in some back garden in Damascus, a brand-new tree is struggling to be born.

July 24, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ode to a Shoehorn

This entry is part 24 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

A shoehorn’s a sort of
spoon-shaped chute
for the foot,
not for the shoe.
Or at best, a social lubricant
between the two,
with or without
the Freudian interpretation.

Boots are for those
who toot their own horns,
sporting as we know
the handy bootstraps,
which give the so-called
self-made men
a better metaphor for rising
to their own occasion.

July 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Having a Cow

name of god

At the busiest bus stop in the heart of the affluent college town, a middle-aged black woman flanked by bulging plastic bags sits and rails at an enemy no less real for being invisible. The passersby — students, professionals, mothers headed for the public library — lower their voices, murmuring into their clamshell phones. Those without phones mutter prayers. Those without Jesus take a strong sudden interest in the weeds sprouting through a fissure in the pavement, this thin and brittle lid on green disorder.

In the news, the former Bosnian Serb leader and instigator of genocide, Radovan Karadzic, turns out to have been hiding behind a bushy white beard and glasses all this time, selling New Age snake oil. The webpage of his alter ego, Dr. Dragan Dabic, apparently intends no irony with the English email address, “healingwounds@dragandabic.com.” At the bottom of the page appear “10 favorite ancient Chinese proverbs as selected personally by Dr. Dabic.” They include “He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them” and “The one who gives up his own, should dig two graves.”

In the news, the name of God appears in Arabic on several pieces of cooked beef in northern Nigeria. Thousands flock to see what local mullahs proclaim to be a sign of the universality of their religion. What was it like for the cow, grazing in the near-desert with the One Name growing like a tumor, thick enough to appear on three eventual cross-sections of muscle tissue? Did it burn? Did it give off light? In which part of the cow did the deity inscribe His miraculous autograph? The reports do not say, and I hesitate to hazard a guess. I recall that the second and longest sura of the Qur’an is called Al-Baqarah, “The Cow.” It takes its name from the fawn-colored heifer sacrificed by Moses at God’s command.

Responding to a relayed message about a fawn trapped in the deer fence around our three-acre wildflower sanctuary, I find instead a bluejay with what looks like a broken neck, lying on its side in the middle of the trail and bleating like a fawn in distress. I run back to the house to get the .22. Later, I try and tell dad it was a jay he heard. “Heard? I saw it, from out in the field! A light-brown, mid-sized animal, thrashing about.” But later, when he went back to check, the fawn had disappeared — escaped on its own. Perhaps the shot from the other end of the exclosure had given it the strength to break free.

Among the stones at the side of the road I notice three purple stars: Deptford pinks, blooming on two-inch stalks. Are they merely stunted by the harsh conditions, or do they represent a new, road-adapted strain? Natural selection is constant, the scientists now tell us; significant evolution in weedy plants can take place in as little as seven years, and among animals, “fewer than 40 lifetimes.” Seven, forty: such Biblical numbers! This presumes, of course, that the populations are subject to large-scale die-offs or other extraordinary stresses: prolonged droughts, the sudden arrival of competitors, the use of pesticides. That too seems Biblical.

The jay was hardly the first bird mortally injured by flying into the fence. In the seven years since we erected it with the help of our hunter friends (who had a vested interest in creating a permanent demonstration of their value to us), we’ve found a ruffed grouse, two sharp-shinned hawks, and a red-tailed hawk that all seemed to have died that way. Lord knows how many more bodies were carried off by scavengers before we could find them. In trying to protect a small patch of woods from the deer, we end up killing birds. Losing predators such as sharpies and redtails is especially bad news from an ecological standpoint, though at the same time the revitalized understory should make much better nesting habitat for migrant songbirds.

The chipmunk is in the tree again.