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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Join the Via Negativa Poetry Month book club!

On March 2, I announced plans to again read and blog a book or chapbook of poetry a day throughout April. Many thanks to all who sent review copies (and if I promised a copy of Odes to Tools in return, I’m planning a trip to the post office soon!).

A number of people expressed interest in my regimen, but understandably, only a couple indicated they might be following suit. Today I want to invite y’all to join me and Kristin Berkey-Abbott in a somewhat more modest undertaking: to read and discuss just four books of poetry next month, one a week. Here’s what we’ll be reading:

Week #1: Diane Lockward’s Temptation by Water
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Rattle)

Week #2: Luisa A. Igloria’s Trill and Mordent
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Galatea Resurrects)

Week #3: Ren Powell’s Mercy Island
(Publisher’s page, Amazon.com, review in Velveteen Rabbi, review at Carolee Sherwood’s blog)

Week #4: William Trowbridge’s Ship of Fool
(Publisher’s page (be patient), Amazon.com, review in Gently Read Literature)

We welcome participation in any form, but we encourage you to borrow or purchase all four books and read them at your leisure. Kristin and I will both be blogging our responses (which may or may not resemble traditional reviews), and if you’re a blogger, we encourage you to do the same, and let us know about it so we can interlink. Discussion can take place in multiple blog comment threads. Critical responses are welcome as long as they are constructive, not snide or dismissive.

Kristin and I will also be interviewing each of the four poets by phone for the Woodrat Podcast, insh’allah. If you are able to read the books in advance of our phone calls, we’d welcome suggestions of what to ask and which poems to have them read on the podcast. So here’s when we’ll be doing that: April 9, Diane Lockward; April 13, Luisa A. Igloria; April 23, Ren Powell; and April 25, William Trowbridge. Also, I could be persuaded to include one more person in those conference calls, so let me know (bontasaurus[at]yahoo[dot]com) if you want in on any of them.

A word on how we selected these four. I emailed Kristin the complete list (as of a couple weeks ago) of books I was planning to read next month, and we went back and forth about it. Obviously we are both guilty of bias in favor of friends and poets who are active online. Some friends didn’t get considered because we didn’t learn about their new books soon enough. But I will be looking for podcast guests long after April… including, I hope, my co-conspirator in this, who is a wonderful blogger, poet, and theologian, and seems remarkably sane for a Floridian.

Finally, for those of you who can actually contemplate parting with favorite poetry books, I want to echo Kristin and put in a plug for a Poetry Month-related initiative by Kelli Russell Agodon which I strongly support in theory if not in practice: the Big Poetry Giveaway 2011.

Basically, bloggers give away 2 books of poems at the end of April. The first can be your own book, and the second is to be a FAVORITE book of poems of your choosing.

People will come to your blog and leave a comment saying they’d like to win your book and at the end of the month, you randomly choose two winners and mail them out the books.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Colonists

We’re in a ramshackle farmhouse in the far north, a half-dozen of us, sleeping at odd hours because there are no clocks and the sun never sets. Though ostensibly this is a writers’ colony, we think we might be stars in a covert reality TV show, a la The Truman Show. How else to explain the complete psychological profile and multiple photos required in the submission process, and the rule that we only wear certain brands of clothing? Anything can be a camera these days — and besides, who ever heard of hummingbirds above the Arctic Circle?

I find a window no one’s looked out of before. It shows me a twelve-story Chinese pagoda in flames that do not consume it as long as I watch. Perhaps the flames are really autumn leaves, pulled upwards by extreme low pressure. Someone else needs to see this, I think, but the nearest writer turns out to be sound asleep, though his pen still inches across the paper. I go outside to look for the pagoda and get lost in a maze of streets. Eventually I come to to a town square with a big bank clock. 12:45, it says. If that’s a.m., I’ll go to a bar. If it’s p.m., I’ll go to a coffee shop.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Nanopressing, bombs not food, and carnivores after dark

Nanopress Publishing: alternative poetry publishing, with gravitas
The indefatigable Nic S. has set up a website to advocate the new model of poetry publishing she’s pioneering with her own book, Forever Will End on Thursday (which I’ll be blogging next month).

The nanopress is a single-publication, purpose-formed poetry press that brings together, on a one-time basis, an independent editor’s judgment and gravitas and a poet’s manuscript. The combination effectively by-passes both the poetry-contest gamble and the dwindling opportunities offered by existing poetry presses, while still applying credible ‘quality control’ measures to the published work.

Join the discussion about this new paradigm at Nic’s blog — in particular, a post titled “Nanopress poetry publishing: Avoiding the publisher’s cycle of need.” Beth Adams, Ren Powell, Sarah Busse, and Rachel Barenblat are among the contributors to the comment thread so far.

The Washington Post: “In the Mideast, U.S. policy is still driven by realism” (Eugene Robinson)
Is it realism, or is it surrealism? It is certainly frustrating the way we never seem to have money for anything but destruction. We can only laugh to keep from crying: The Daily Show for March 21 was devastating.

The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: “The House of Words (no. 1)”
Novelist and poet Marly Youmans kicked off what she promises will be a 25-part series “on persisting, giving up, and other topics” connected with the writing life.

Giving up writing is easier than persistence because–surprise!–nobody much will mind if you give up. It’s not like giving up a job with a salary; there are few reproaches, and in fact many of your near-and-dear will heave great buffalo sighs and snort with relief. People will be glad to think that you may be a solvent person some day, rather than a struggling writer with the usual garret, heaps of foolscap, and bargain Toshiba laptop.

The New York Review of Books Blog: “The New American Pessimism”
Charles Simic is smarter than your average poet.

They say the monkey scratches its fleas with the key that opens its cage. That may strike one as being very funny or very sad. Unfortunately, that’s where we are now.

t r u t h o u t : “Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs”
But Gaddafi promised he’d only use them on terrorists!

NewScientist: “Fake tweets by ‘socialbot’ fool hundreds of followers”
“The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill.” Good idea. I’ve heard that terrorists can use Twitter and Facebook to foment unrest.

xkcd: “Beauty”
It’s not every day that I get to read a web comic about my favorite organism, the dog vomit slimemold.

O: Maria Shriver interviews Mary Oliver
I’m not entirely sure who Maria Shriver is — some sort of Kennedy, apparently — but somehow she managed to lure the famously reclusive poet out of her shell. (And I’m pleased to see O magazine devoting its April issue to poetry. Here’s the New Yorker’s review.)

Finally, here are a couple of videos from Plummer’s Hollow that complement this past week’s podcast, “Creatures of the Night.” Thanks to our neighbors Troy and Paula for doing such a great job documenting the local wildlife with multiple trail cameras and sides of venison for bait.


Watch on YouTube.


Watch on YouTube.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Silence

This entry is part 8 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear silence, the deeper I fall into your
soundproofed well, the clearer I hear
these arias: beyond the window, a rapid
scrabbling of claws on bark; indoors,
a waterfall miming a moving drape.
The clicking of the laundry cycle, tinkle of
a brass bell in the shade of the dogwood tree.
Has the reaper come, has the harvest
started? Whether or not I am ready, the grain
explodes from its golden husk. And still I crave
the warmth more than the amber in the cup;
and still I am in love with the zest of oranges,
that opening of light crosshatched with blue above.
I’ve kept fingernails, eyelashes, hair; dried stumps
that fell shortly after birth from my daughters’ navels:
the smallest things that tether us tightly to this world.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Theodiocy

In my dream, God was a jerk. I was a lawyer for the plaintiff: a man who had been crippled by a strange disease that turned him into a blue lizard. I hadn’t expected to talk to the big guy Himself, but I rose to the occasion. I suppose you know what I’m here for, I said. God had shapeshifted into a middle-aged, bearded white guy — an exact replica of myself, in fact. He imitated my every gesture like an obnoxious street mime. I began to lecture. Why don’t you act your age? Just as you have to obey the laws of physics, you’re not above ethics, either. He smirked. Homo sapiens is one species out of billions, a failed experiment, He said. But this universe — is it not also one of billions? I asked. Surely there must be other gods, then. If you’re not careful, one of them will hear our cries, come over here and kick your ass. He glowered. I took off down the stairs as fast as I could.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ghazal with a Few Variations

This entry is part 7 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

She rinses her face and smooths her hair. The street
comes to life, the smells of morning from the coffee bar.

Grab your ankles, press your forehead to your knees.
I used to be able to slide a raised leg along the barre.

Sometimes I’m seized with a longing for what I don’t know.
They indulge me when I sit in the dark at the local bar.

Just when she thought she’d cleared the tests, they called
her back. Don’t you know they’re always raising the bar?

His voice on the phone, now husky with age— how long
since he whispered in my ear in a college bar?

Thirteen cattail heads in the shallows, like swizzle sticks;
water clear as vodka— You’d think this was a poetry bar.

A couple wanders in; a blinged-out dude in cowboy boots. The street
philosopher, red-lipsticked waitress. All this in one night, in a bar.

The days are getting longer. Soon we can sit on the deck, drinks
in hand, watching the sun torch sheets of water beyond the sandbar.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Luisa turns 100! (posts, that is)

Luisa A. IgloriaYesterday’s poem, “Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here,” was Luisa Igloria’s 100th post at Via Negativa. What started as a spur-of-the-moment response to one of my Morning Porchisms at Facebook, re-posted here back on November 20, has blossomed into a regular feature — and a very impressive display of poetic virtuosity and persistence by a master poet. For the first couple of weeks, Luisa wrote poems in response to random posts from the Morning Porch archives, but soon settled into her present pattern of writing daily in response to that morning’s entry. The fact that she has been able to keep it up, with all her duties as a college administrator and a mother, and produce poems of consistently high quality is nothing short of remarkable.

I remain deeply honored, but I can’t say I feel any special burden of responsibility to write better entries as a result. Lord knows I probably should; I’ve written some stinkers! But experience has shown that Luisa is very good at making lemonade out of lemons.

Back on December 27th, I noted:

It’s interesting what this collaboration is doing to our shared geographies. The blizzard missed us here in Central Pennsylvania, and I’m not sure how many ravens are found in Luisa’s neck of the woods. But there’s no reason why poems that take the natural world for their subject should be held to a stricter standard of nonfictional reportage than other poetry. In the world of these poems, Luisa and I live on the same street.

A couple days later, Luisa added some details about her process:

I always try to respond to each post new and without premeditation, trying to keep my mind limber and not dwell too much or too long or agonize over things. I’m trying to develop a better receptivity to the things that present themselves as occasions for poetry. … Visits to The Morning Porch are helping me immensely.

She wrote a bit more about her use of “found poems” and other material in poetic composition in a note included with her January 23rd post.

[L]ike a magpie I’m drawn to shiny stuff, language winking at me. I’m inclined to think that this is really the area where we work hardest to mine that “originality” that is so highly prized. All this of course has something to do with notions of appropriation, and can often lead to the question of how comfortable writers might feel in “taking” or “taking over” lines, words, language priorly or in some other form used by others. Someone famous was once reputed to have said, “Good writers imitate; great writers steal.” It’s a tough job because all our cultural and other conversations are so rife with intersubjectivities and intertextualities. I think I much prefer what happens to my writing when an interesting bit of information, an arresting line or image that I’ve found, triggers the desire for a deeper kind of poetic engagement and I find some entry point, some latitude to invent and explore its complexities further.

One thing I’ve learned about Luisa is that she’s not terribly good at numbers. Neither am I. But who can resist their manas? Thus we mark Luisa’s 100th post… and her 108th Morning Porch poem overall (a few posts combine several poems). I copied and pasted the text of all 108 poems into a document for the sole purpose of gleaning some additional statistics. MS Word counts 13,639 words altogether, or 75,747 characters counting spaces — the equivalent of 542 tweets. Had they in fact been posted to Twitter, they probably would’ve required between 575 and 600 tweets to avoid breaks in the middle of words and lines. This is of interest as a basis of comparison with the tweet-length Morning Porch entries. It means that Luisa’s poems are on average close to six times longer than the posts that spark them, which sounds about right.

I pasted the document into WordCounter.com and asked for a list of the 100 most frequently used words (excluding a, the, to, etc., and counting different forms of the same verb as one). Here’s that list, with the number of uses in parentheses.

water (42) day (40) tree (38) know (37) how (37) one (36) through (31) snow (30) want (28) come (28) open (27) dark (26) over (26) little (25) wind (25) say (24) might (24) still (24) new (22) air (22) window (22) night (22) can’t (21) down (21) long (21) just (21) light (21) blue (20) back (20) against (20) leave (19) make (19) world (19) way (18) away (18) under (18) small (18) green (17) white (17) go (17) sometime (17) sky (17) though (17) time (17) above (17) today (16) every (16) cold (16) rain (16) hand (16) i’ve (16) once (16) see (16) thing (16) dear (15) woman (15) sun (15) walk (15) morning (15) cloud (15) ear (14) old (14) it’s (14) heart (14) find (14) shadow (14) last (14) branch (14) body (14) tell (14) thin (14) gather (13) off (13) look (13) again (13) color (13) think (12) hair (12) turn (12) three (12) bird (12) did (12) glass (12) ring (12) wing (12) read (12) closer (12) head (12) around (12) wood (11) never (11) face (11) love (11) fall (11) two (11) voice (11) much (11) part (11) paper (11) ground (11)

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here

This entry is part 6 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear doppelganger, where in the world
have you been traveling? When I am
cleaning house, sometimes I come
upon bits and pieces of your wardrobe:
crystal teardrop earrings, those pumps
of sumptuous leather, that airy, off-
the-shoulder frock. And in the back
of the closet, what are those old
letters tied with ribbon, from Diego
and Hans, and Frank? Here, today,
there’s heavy frost, bare dirt in
the garden— though I hope one of us
might have remembered sometime ago
to put bulbs in the soil. Motes of snow
revolve like lazy angels, backlit by
the sun. I make wishes, missing your
carefree laughter, your joie de vivre,
the way you entered any department
store and charmed the discounts off
the hapless young clerks who wouldn’t
know what just hit them. Come back
soon— I have a Mozart cake with three
layers of Bavarian cream, and I promise
not to work on weekends (unless there’s
a real emergency). I dream of water-
colors, the stippled backs of fish in bright
green water, myself a little raft sailing away.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 35: Creatures of the night

spring peeper, northern saw-whet owl, and American woodcock
Spring peeper, northern saw-whet owl, and American woodcock

It may feel and sometimes even still look like winter out there, but spring is on the march (so to speak). This is perhaps most evident after dark. Join me and some other folks for a night-time ramble through the March woods and wetlands of Central Pennsylvania. We’ll listen to a woodcock, a saw-whet owl, some creature whose identity I’m not certain of, spring peepers, and herpetologist Jim Julian from Penn State Altoona. Julian, an expert on seaonal wetlands ecology, leads the annual Vernal Pool Tour of the Scotia Barrens, sponsored by the Clearwater Conservancy. We all squish about looking for wood frogs and spotted salmanders on a cold and rainy night.

Note by the way that Woodrat podcast episodes can now be embedded on other websites and forums. Grab the code right below the player.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Photo credits, l-r: Norman Walsh (CC BY-NC), Dave Darney/USFWS, Tom Tetzner/USFWS. Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Miniatures

This entry is part 5 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

The dog is scratching at the door
to be let out. The window sash
begs to be lifted, the walls want to toss

their shadowed murals out into the yard.
The water wants to drain away
from the yellowed tub. Do you hear

the high-pitched whistle of waxwings
passing overhead, the lower registers of air
wound through a labyrinth of trees? The child

creases the paper once and once again—
There are mountains and valleys, somewhere
a sea; chalk-white sails that one can hardly tell

apart from the crested foam of waves.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 24 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.