Via Negativa

March 24, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Jetsam

From a blog on the other side of the world
comes an unblogly thing:
a piece of poem set in a concrete slab
at the edge of the sea, cast up on the rocks
like the sole survivor from a wreck of words,
or as if the poet’s voice, like Alberti’s,
couldn’t take fresh water in its gills
& had to be restored to its native salt.

Something about a poem in a public place
disturbs me. Every time I’ve spotted one
among the advertisements on a city bus,
I’ve had to look away. It’s like
surprising a couple in flagrante delicto,
or overhearing someone’s cellphone conversation
with their therapist. At least with a reading,
merciful silence follows, & the bare podium.

Then there’s this business of objectification.
Poems grow like agates in the dark,
each according to its own mysterious rules.
Like agates, they are common & impossible to market.
But marketing needs the claim of uniqueness
more than anything, so poetry
gets pressed into service to provide ballast
on the ship of foolish products & bland commodities.

Poets, however, are taught to value the concrete.
Seeing such weighty jetsam,
I conceive a sudden ambition for my own work:
to see it published up on the ridge
on some ostentatious boulder, enough in the shade
that lichens of every crustose & foliose form
would find my lines ideal for a slow, private,
thoroughly absorbing read.

March 23, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Unsafe socks

You’re never far from a road in Pennsylvania. Fifty-eight percent of forested habitat lies within 300 meters of a road or permanent opening, such as a Starbucks parking lot. As a result, our wild areas are uniquely vulnerable to invasions of non-native, exotic species of all types. Ever since last month’s discovery of a healthy, mated pair of wool socks in the wild, I’ve been on the lookout for further evidence of a breeding population of feral socks.

The evidence found to date remains somewhat ambiguous. The above photo shows an obviously mismatched pair of socks in a multiflora rose bush adjacent to the parking area for a small parcel of public land in an old field-mixed hardwood/conifer forest ecotone. Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) is an aggressive colonizer of forest edges and disturbed sites, and its use by the escaped socks (Soccus vulgaris) demonstrates the kind of perverse synergy not uncommon among invasive species. For example, a study of the effects of exotic plant species on soil properties in New Jersey found that they created conditions highly favorable to non-native earthworm species. The earthworms combine with the invasive plants to help push native wildflowers, salamanders, and other vulnerable inhabitants of the forest humus toward extinction. Another example would be the way feral housecats (Felis domesticus) provide nearly irresistible targets for all-terrain vehicle riders (Homo magniclunes), luring them much farther from the bar and deeper into the woods than they would otherwise venture. Together, cats and ATVs put a real hurtin’ on dwindling populations of neotropical migrant songbirds.

So yes, the socks are cute and cuddly – everyone likes socks, don’t they? But the woods are not the right place for them. If you accumulate too many socks – and I know from experience just how easy that can be! – please dispose of them in a responsible and humane fashion. Especially if they stink.

March 22, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

An opening

A new theme at qarrtsiluni is open for submissions: an opening in the body. The editors are Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, an accomplished poet, along with my favorite author of all time, that rascal Anonymous. As Rachel explains it, they are interested in “physical bodies, orifices both natural and artificial, or corporate bodies, or communal bodies, the body of the church, a body of work, any kind of body that can open in any kind of way…”

In other words, the theme is very much open to interpretation. Have at it!

March 21, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Fish tales

This entry is part 42 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I have been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. On Sunday, I mistakenly wrote that the eponymous “Eternity’s Woods” was the last poem in that section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, forgetting that there was one more (and hoping, I guess, to make an end of it). Oddly, my poem in answer to “Eternity’s Woods” seems to anticipate the forgotten final poem, which follows. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

The End Circulates in the Wide Space of Summer
by Paul Zweig

I
We hardly speak.
You have been here so long
You are like another leg or arm.
We trot across the ice,
Approach the book, and enter it.

[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]

* * * *

The Fish Swims Under the Mountain of the World

Sunrise, & the wren’s song bubbles
up from his feet. He dances on the wall
as the ridge turns crimson. Watching from
the window, I feel the heaviness in my chest
lifting like a field stone flipped by the plow,
turning its unmarked cheek toward the harrow.
This world was never a text. With the spring
plowing, arrowheads swim to the surface
of the field adjoining the large sinkhole
down in the valley where an underground stream
briefly exposes itself to view. You can follow it
back under the bedrock in growing darkness,
hunching farther & farther over until you’re down
on all fours & the water meets the ceiling
with a final gurgle. I think of this whenever
the sky in a poem shivers under the knife
of a wing. Some hide is forever being flensed.
Practiced fingers turn the outside in,
or pull & sever a slick fish-shape from
the mother of flint. What flesh did those stone
points seek, so near the valley’s own gullet?
The hunters left no record on the cave walls
that hundred-year floods wouldn’t have erased,
but elsewhere, a few pecked images remain:
dream creatures carved on riverside cliffs, or
on the spines of ridges hundreds of miles long,
these sinuous swimmers. Yesterday morning,
I walked the ridge crest as far as the gap
& stood watching the sun shimmering on the river
& glancing off the windshields of trucks
in the quarry beyond, back-lighting
their plumes of yellow dust. In a month
& a half, this view will vanish behind
a screen of leaves, & by midsummer,
the field next to the cave will be thick
with the rustle of corn, product of 8,000 years
of continuous editing. I come home to
the blank page with my gaze full of distances,
thinking of a fish buried under a hill
so the Three Sisters – Squash & Beans & Corn –
can sing their names into memory another year,
the pattern of scales replicated in the grain.
I too used to garden that way,
& could again. It’s spring. The first
mayflies are rising. Something leaps.

March 20, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The song sparrow’s song

As I headed out on a walk this morning, I snapped a picture of this male song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) in full throat. Song sparrows hold forth virtually year-round, but in my family, for some reason, we tend to typecast them as prophets of eternal spring. For example, in her book Appalachian Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), my mother noted under March 13:

Song sparrows are almost always with us, but March brings them in to pack their breeding territory as tightly and as early as possible. Despite the weather, which today was hazy and cold, they all proclaimed, “Hip-hip-hurrah, boys! Spring is here!”

Mom claims she got this mnemonic from an old National Geographic record. I’m here to tell you it’s not widely attested in the popular literature. But someone named Tomm Lorenzin has compiled a helpful BirdSong Mnemonics page that includes our family’s favored onomatopoeia (albeit with an extra hip) alongside two others: Maids-maids-maids-put-on-your-tea-kettle-ettle-ettle (the mnemonic Thoreau preferred), and Madge, Madge, Madge pick beetles off, the water’s hot.

As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

I try to avoid reading music criticism as a general rule. The following passage from the Birds of North America Song Sparrow monograph (No. 704, Peter Arcese et. al., Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Academy of Natural Sciences, 2002) wouldn’t seem out of place in the liner notes for some old Eliott Carter record:

Song a varied series of 2-6 phrases; 3 or 4 phrases common. Introductory phrases usually with 1-20 pure notes or complexes, but [Citations omitted.]

One nifty thing about song sparrows is that, unlike with many songbirds, the human ear can easily distinguish between the songs of individual birds. Considering the abundant variations within a single bird’s repertoire, and the variations between the many regional dialects, there’s no wonder birders can’t agree on a single onomatopoeic interpretation. But the “spring is here” business may not be pure fancy. I think Frank Chapman (Bird-Life: A Guide to the Study of Our Common Birds, D. Appleton and Company, 1910) captured the essence of it in his description of what was then known as Melospiza fasciata:

His modest chant always suggests good cheer and contentment, but heard in silent February it seems the divinest bird to which mortal ever listened. The magic of his voice bridges the cold months of early spring; as we listen to him the brown fields seem green, flowers bloom, and the bare branches become clad with softly rustling leaves.

So hip-hip-hurrah, boys and girls – and Happy Equinox!

March 19, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Woods and water

This entry is part 41 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I have been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the next to last poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Eternity’s Woods
by Paul Zweig

I
I have come to this house
Of soft angular stone, wondering
How much must fall away before I have nothing.

[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]

* * * *

Water

I have sought to borrow inspiration
as others borrow comfort
from strange lovers. Let me

press my ear, I said, against
the scallop shell at the base
of your throat. Let me hear

the throb of the surf, & dream
of ships. What were we
talking about, again? I caught

nothing but a swallowed sob,
a corrosive drip. Compostela
remained a day’s walk away from
the Cape of the End of the Earth,

which was of course pure hype.
Right here in the hollow
where I grew up, I have heard
water trickling under the rocks,

& once my brother & I even dug
for it, four feet down through
a jumble of sandstone. When
we quit, the water sounded

just as loud as it had before
we started. I used to search
for a clearing in the woods
where, when the wind stopped,

the only sound would come
from a hidden spring. But
I didn’t want it ever to be found,

not even by me. Solitude
has since become my deadliest habit.
I don’t know what I am doing

here, talking to a dead poet as if to
my better nature, dreaming of poems
that would taste as good as water.

March 19, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Radiation

In revisiting a too-brief response to a comment from Maria about light (in reaction to Friday’s post on angels), I thought of radiation: a broader and more ambiguous concept than light. It came into my head because I had just been reading the headline story about new discoveries based on studies of cosmic background microwave radiation. After editing my comment, I remembered Sandra McPherson’s second book of poems, Radiation (Echo Press, 1972), and got it off the shelf. It begins with the following epigraph (translated by McPherson, I imagine, since no credit is given in the Acknowledgements). I hadn’t read this in at least five years, and was startled to see an idea I had thought to be my own (“we are what exceeds us,” e.g.) given such complete and eloquent expression. I don’t know the exact provenance of it, but as the online quote sites demonstrate, Paul Valéry was a brilliant epigrammatic thinker.

The color of a thing is that one which, out of all the colors, it repels and cannot assimilate. High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina. All summer long the leaves hold in the red. Charcoal gobbles all.

To our senses things offer only their rejections. We know them by their refuse. Perfume is what the flowers throw away.

Perhaps we only know other people by what they eliminate, by what their substance will not accept. If you are good, it is because you retain your evil. If you blaze, hurling off sparkles and lightnings, your sorrow, gloom and stupidity keep house within you. They are more you, more yours, than your brilliance. Your genius is everything you are not. Your best deeds are foreign to you.

– Paul Valéry

March 17, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Concerning the angels

Favored first prodigies, creation’s darlings,
mountain ranges, peaks, dawn-red ridges
of all genesis, – pollen of a flowering godhead,
links of light, corridors, stairs, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of rapture, torrents
of unchecked feeling and then suddenly, singly,
mirrors: scooping their outstreamed beauty
back into their peerless faces.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (Edward Snow, tr.)

They are the leaves,
leaves destroyed because they wanted to live forever,
because they didn’t want to think for six moons about what makes a wasteland,
because they didn’t want to know why a drop of water insists on hitting a naked skull already nailed to bad weather.
– Rafael Alberti, Sobre los ángeles (Mark Strand, tr.)

As for me, I prefer the trees. But many are those who long for more anthropomorphic channels between earth & sky, who nurse a wordless craving for some being of light to precipitate out of solution & stroke their head – good dog – & clothe them in garments as full of the atmosphere of another world as any spacesuit.

I prefer the complex currents of the human or animal face. Reflections seen in still water are both greater & lesser than what they reflect: greater because of the invisible life that swarms within them & the bubbles of methane, lesser because – well, you know…

Tree: the very sound of the word directs our thoughts to the topmost twigs. Limbs, trunk – the homology with the human body suggests either headlessness or inversion, unfinished business or a fall from grace. But at the end of a wind-thrown tree one sees only rocks & soil gathered in a clutch of roots: a losing hand. There was never any inversion; there was never a mirroring. Again & again we mistake the messenger for the message. (What message?)

As for me, I prefer the fruit. The blossom is so urgent, so full of future. Think of the crimes it has licensed with its wasp-thin song of love & death. Long after the clouds of scent have dissipated, the limbs bend alluringly under the weight of sugar.

Bark. Skin. Scales. Feathers. Chitin. Fur. Moss. Lichen. Grass. Heath. Forest. Tree. Bark.

As for me, I prefer fat. Skin, bone & muscle all have their acolytes, but if the body stays confined to its barracks, who will fight the endless war on supper? Go tell your guardians of perfection: We are what exceeds us.

March 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Magic 101

Do you believe in God? A lot of people consider this a meaningful question.

But how you choose to answer it, I’m thinking, tells me much less about your general worldview than your response to another, more basic question: Do you believe in magic?

I do.

Oh, not the Gandalf and Harry Potter kind where you wave a wand or utter a spell and achieve measurable, verifiable results. If that kind of magic could be shown to exist, it would become indistinguishable from any other science-based technology – and thus it would become boring. To me, at least. In any case, it would forfeit all claims to magic. Magic must be mysterious, or it’s nothing.

The kind of magic I believe in is, I suppose, virtually indistinguishable from so-called ordinary life on a good day. It’s the way things appear if they can be seen without some of the myriad barriers, veils and filters we use to project the illusion of a separate self. It’s the way things look under the influence of a bit of cannabis or a stretch of meditation: wonderfully strange, a little eldritch, perhaps, but beautiful in their profusion of possible meanings, their lack of clear boundaries.

Things that can’t be spoken of without in some way diminishing them would all be examples of what I’m calling magic. You know what I’m talking about.

I like to maintain that there are two basic kinds of thinking necessary to sane and healthy living: analytical thinking and magical thinking. The first is reductive, and partakes of the logic of discrimination, based on what Aristotle called the Law of the Excluded Middle: x can’t be both x and not-x. The second is dialogic and intersubjective, and involves one in a logic of participation.

One way of thinking doesn’t need to be wrong in order for the other way to be right, though seeing any given problem or phenomenon both ways at once will likely give rise to paradox, due to the inherent limitations of language. The urge to persist in creating symbolic representations uniting the two has given rise to myths and rituals, through which – as Levi-Strauss once noted – one tries to grasp the world as a synchronic totality. Thus, for someone with a religious mindset, like me, magical thinking ultimately prevails.

But I think it’s important to remember that minds come in many different varieties; a fundamentally analytic worldview can just as easily lead one to perceive beauty, order, and goodness. At root, the distinction between magical and analytical thinking may be an artificial one – who knows? I suspect that each may be the best antidote to too much of the other. To be human is to inhabit that paradox so succinctly voiced in the opening chapter of the Daodejing: “Free of desires, one observes secrets; having desires, one observes boundaries.

“These two are ultimately the same,” Laozi proclaimed. See what I mean?

Or is that just so much mumbo-jumbo?

March 15, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Questions for St. Isidore

Does the glass cactus bloom for a velvet bee?

If our days are numbered doors, does each door open on a different life?

Why did the coyote cross the road?

When they’re alone together in the broom closet, do the dust mop and the vacuum cleaner ever do the dirty?

Why must the poor always give more than the rich, who regard every gift they receive as a payment justly due, and every payment they owe as an unmerited gift?

Take a lesson from a Slinky: is life really an upward spiral, or a measured series of descents, ending in a snarl?

If you have too much time on your hands, does it spread down your arms like a luxuriant pelt?

Why should one walk the golden street in slippers? Why not in boots?

St. Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet.