Via Negativa

September 29, 2025September 29, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 39

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: an imagined history of the Green Man, anti-capitalist work poetry, the dactylic hexameter line, and much more. Enjoy.

September 28, 2025September 28, 2025 by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape, with a View of Robots and Sheep

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

The little food delivery robot pauses
on the corner of campus to cross the street. 
     Its body is a white rectangular box the size 
of a child's toy wagon. It has a lid that locks, 

ultrasonic sensors, a curb-climbing system,
a message flag. Czech writer Karel Čapek's 1920 
     science fiction play "R.U.R." was the first 
to use the word robota, Slavonic for servitude

or forced labor. Slave, in other words. A company 
creates a cadre of robota from organic matter— the play 
     describes vats of bones and brains, funnels with 
skin; nerves, arteries, intestines (whose?) 

and soon, the world economy is fully robot-based. 
But just like in many fantasies about artificial life, 
     the robots turn against the humans, until only one 
is left: the clerk of works, who works with his hands 

like a robot. What happens next? The human clerk
tells a pair of gendered robots that they are 
     the new Adam and Eve, and must go forth 
to remake the world. One problem: they don't

have the formula for manufacturing more of
themselves. I saw an ad in which delivery 
      robots, named after interplanetary
spacecraft, deliver factory samples as well

as food orders. One cuts through a brick court-
yard, leaf-dappled. Another runs along a raised
      path perhaps with a tray of broccoli and
beef while below, sheep run through a field.

September 28, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Wild faith

(Lord’s day). Waked early, and fell talking one with another with great pleasure of my house at Brampton and that here, and other matters. She tells me what a rogue my boy is, and strange things he has been found guilty of, not fit to name, which vexes [me], but most of all the unquiett life that my mother makes my father and herself lead through her want of reason.
At last I rose, and with Tom to the French Church at the Savoy, where I never was before — a pretty place it is — and there they have the Common Prayer Book read in French, and, which I never saw before, the minister do preach with his hat off, I suppose in further conformity with our Church.
So to Tom’s to dinner with my wife, and there came Mr. Cooke, and Joyce Norton do also dine there, and after dinner Cooke and I did talk about his journey and Tom’s within a day or two about his mistress. And I did tell him my mind and give him my opinion in it.
So I walked home and found my house made a little clean, and pleases me better and better, and so to church in the afternoon, and after sermon to my study, and there did some things against to-morrow that I go to the Duke’s, and so walked to Tom’s again, and there supped and to bed with good content of mind.

a rogue as unquiet as a rose

never a prayer
never a hat off to joy

the mind I found in my mind

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 28 September 1662.

September 27, 2025September 27, 2025 by Luisa A. Igloria

Hometowns

They start talking about who they were
before they became what they are today.

They say they feel so lucky to have made it
out, given how life is terrible there today.

There are no more trees on the hillsides;
only new construction everywhere today.

And the graft! The corruption! Even the dead
can be unearthed from their resting places today,

after their skin and bones have melted away.
Even a mausoleum niche can be resold today. 

You pay to be interred only to find out more fees
are due— for final burial in the soil another day. 

A man hands out shiny half dollar coins and crisp
two dollar bills as if he's running for office today.

Outside, rain batters the coast. With rising winds,
not even the biggest umbrellas give shelter today.

September 27, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Handed gentry

Up betimes and among my workmen, and with great pleasure see the posts in the entry taken down beyond expectation, so that now the boy’s room being laid into the entry do make my coming in very handsome, which was the only fault remaining almost in my house.
We sat all the morning, and in the afternoon I got many jobbs done to my mind, and my wife’s chamber put into a good readiness against her coming, which she did at night, for Will did, by my leave to go, meet her upon the road, and at night did bring me word she was come to my brother’s, by my order. So I made myself ready and put things at home in order, and so went thither to her. Being come, I found her and her maid and dogg very well, and herself grown a little fatter than she was. I was very well pleased to see her, and after supper to bed, and had her company with great content and much mutual love, only I do perceive that there has been falling out between my mother and she, and a little between my father and she; but I hope all is well again, and I perceive she likes Brampton House and seat better than ever I did myself, and tells me how my Lord hath drawn a plot of some alteracions to be made there, and hath brought it up, which I saw and like well. I perceive my Lord and Lady have been very kind to her, and Captn. Ferrers so kind that I perceive I have some jealousy of him, but I know what is the Captain’s manner of carriage, and therefore it is nothing to me. She tells me of a Court like to be in a little time, which troubles me, for I would not willingly go out of town.

my hands all morning meet
to put things in order

grow to be a company
with great hope

like the lord and lady
of a nothing little town

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 27 September 1662.

September 26, 2025September 26, 2025 by Luisa A. Igloria

Eventually

 
A child, soaked to the skin, clears a stopped 
drain on his street until water can flow at last.

The eye of another storm hovers above the coast,
yet no one has been raptured yet/at last.
 
But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spun
candied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last.

Thieves walk the streets in statement suits—
brazenly believing this is their time at last.

Who'll remember when and where and what 
survived, when the trials end at last.

On our very last day, before our departure, 
will there be a break in the rain at last?

September 26, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Maximalist

Up betimes and among my workmen. By and by to Sir W. Batten, who with Sir J. M. are going to Chatham this morning, and I was in great pain till they were gone that I might see whether Sir John do speak any thing of my chamber that I am afraid of losing or no. But he did not, and so my mind is a little at more ease. So all day long till night among my workmen, and in the afternoon did cause the partition between the entry and the boy’s room to be pulled down to lay it all into one, which I hope will please me and make my coming in more pleasant.
Late at my office at night writing a letter of excuse to Sir G. Carteret that I cannot wait upon him to-morrow morning to Chatham as I promised, which I am loth to do because of my workmen and my wife’s coming to town to-morrow. So to my lodgings and to bed.

my hat is gone
that I might see more

the partition pulled down
to make more

art that cannot wait
upon hat or lodging

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 26 September 1662.

September 25, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Indentured

Up betimes and to my workmen, and then to the office, where we sat all the morning. So home to dinner alone and then to my workmen till night, and so to my office till bedtime, and so after supper to my lodgings and to bed.
This evening I sat awhile at Sir W. Batten’s with Sir J. Minnes, &c., where he told us among many other things how in Portugal they scorn to make a seat for a house of office, but they do shit all in pots and so empty them in the river.
I did also hear how the woman, formerly nurse to Mrs. Lemon (Sir W. Batten’s daughter), her child was torn to pieces by two doggs at Walthamstow this week, and is dead, which is very strange.

to work till night
among the corn
they shit in an empty river

I hear the dogs

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 25 September 1662.

September 25, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Blessing

orange leaves
lost in fog
a tree frog peeps

bracken ferns
bleached as old bones
quiver in the rain

pores open
nostrils flare

for the heaven-scent
of ground
after drought

raindrop-
dislodged leaves
flutter down

between rain-
darkened trunks
like bright feathers

as if from
a bird of fire
hidden in the clouds

the rain thickens
drowning out
all other sound

but when percussion
rushes too much
it turns to mush

you could stew in a tin-
roofed house
and listen

September 25, 2025September 23, 2025 by Luisa A. Igloria

A Crown of Dust

(a cento)


14

                 everyone fears midday.
and waiting.

I am writing about you.
If you are looking for me, I am home

My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,

The vision is closing in like a tight dress.

Past futures and future futures
wing. A serrated song with a split tongue of onyx feathers.

What is a nation that does not save

I hug and hold harder and harder

There is a voice and it answers:
Hello, my name is mostly water.
the day could do without

me.

Line sources:
Tada Chimako, Ayesha Asad, Jane Kenyon, Marie-Andree Gill,
Denis Johnson, Morgan Parker, Evelyn Reilly, Ed Pavlic,
Claire Schwartz, Kim Hyesoon, Tina Chang, Andrew Hemmert,
Taylor Byas