Category: Riffs

Streams of consciousness, automatic writing, running at the mouth, and/or beatings of dead horses.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The writing life and other absurdities

What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other.
Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

***

i tire myself out
pretending to have a body.
everyone worships feelings
they don’t have names for
but no one is talking about it.
love is a burning house we built from
scratch.
love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Ode to Northern Alberta”

***

Randomly missing my long-dead grandparents. OK well three of them. (But also honoring the memory of the one I don’t miss.) Between my ancestor reverence and my Daoist tendencies, I clearly should’ve been a Chinese peasant.

***

Ravens are always trying to bullshit you. One just drifted high overhead without flapping its wings, croaking HAWK…HAWK…HAWK. (2 May)

***

***

How long will earth
hold me in its tender mouth? I count backwards
from 100. An orange cat weasels by. Robins
scrap over a rosehip. I have no idea what I’m counting.
Lance Larsen, “Two Horses in a Field in Mid-December”

***

Perhaps it’s fitting that modern masters of haiku in English are unknown even to most of the already tiny minority of Americans who read poetry. Humility, I’m coming to recognize, is absolutely central to the art. As soon as you think you know more than the haiku, it’s over. You’ve written a senryu at best.

***

The uneven stanzas in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are simply cata strophic.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Why haiku are hard to write + another walk with the camera

So many otherwise competent contemporary poets struggle to write decent haiku, and it’s worth asking why. Part is miseducation, sure: academic workshops seem to be passing on a view of haiku that’s about 30 years out of date, relying on dodgy translations of the pre-modern masters and helping entrench misperceptions already out there in popular culture (morae=syllables, haiku is a poetic form rather than a genre, haiku must be written in three lines, haiku are easy exercises for beginner poets, etc.). There’s very little awareness that an English-language haiku and tanka tradition even exists. Most academic libraries don’t subscribe to haiku journals. And so on.

But observing my own difficulties even after trying to correct for all of that, I think there’s also a larger problem: modern lyric poets are acculturated into a mindset that is somewhat at odds with the mindset required to compose effective haiku. We’re trained to wrap things up for the reader, to be clever, to aspire to the sorts of insights that could be didactically expressed if need be. We’re better at talking than we are at listening, despite lip service to Pound’s dictum “show, don’t tell,” and many have only the most superficial knowledge of the natural world (to the extent that that’s still central to modern haiku). We’re also trained to look for metaphor and simile—not typically an overt feature of haiku—and to favor in our imagery what Bakhtin called the classical body over the vernacular body, which I think militates agains the kind of earthy realignment between self and other proposed by the best haiku.

Then there’s the problem of how we think of ourselves as writers, strongly favoring the Romantic ideal of a lone creator rather than a collaborator or better yet a participant in creative, game-like exchanges. It’s no wonder that modern haiku culture tends to attract experimental rather than mainstream academic poets.

***

The other day I said something about not being into haiku as a lifestyle. But I don’t know, giving up coffee for green tea and going on long walks whenever possible seems about as haiku-lifestylish as one can get. Maybe what I meant was I’m a loner. That might be true. And as I just alluded to, haiku composition is a fundamentally social art-form. That’s one reason why competitions proliferate, for the festivity and sociability of it. Group composition exercises and similar get-togethers were, and I think still are, at the heart of haiku school formation and publication culture in Japan, and I gather they’re also pretty important in the US, the UK and elsewhere. It’s not unusual for the editors of haiku journals to propose edits even to very well-established writers; the focus is on the haiku rather than the writer, which I quite like.

***

This morning was actually kind of pleasant for walking. The really crushing humidity didn’t come until mid-afternoon.

discovering
another pants pocket…
the sun goes in

vireo nestlings
yellow beaks open wide
for my shadow

via Woodrat Photohaiku

***

The true bards of this era are the advertising jingle writers and political sloganeers. They are the ones whose words infiltrate our dreams and shape our sense of the possible.

*

Thinking about how millennials made, like, a half-turn away from irony. They’re LARPing as sincere people.

(“Is that true, or did you just make it up?” I’m a poet. Take everything I say with that in mind.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Otherworldliness

box turtle

The other world is shrinking as our own loses species and resilience. Instead of faeries it’s just some nihilistic crypto bros sharing torture porn on the dark web. If technology and society continue to develop along their current trajectories, I expect scientists will figure out a way to read thoughts within a generation, in which case privacy becomes obsolete, and AI will presumably be running most things by then, so at that point I expect any concept of a hidden place, or indeed a sacred place of any kind, becomes literally unthinkable.

Plus, so many people are using hallucinogens now, it shouldn’t be long until all the psychedelic visions are used up, and people will have to watch old Looney Tunes animations instead.

***

Writing without writing

I’ve been accused of having my head in the clouds. Well, today it’s true—my head is in a cloud of mosquitoes. So much so that I am forced to use the microphone to record this, rather than standing still long enough to type it out and turning into a pincushion for bloodsuckers. So far, the dictation software on the iPhone Notes app seems to be working pretty well, although I’m surprised it’s not attempting to transcribe the incessant whining of the mosquitoes.

But it’s certainly an interesting challenge to try to appreciate the beauty of the forest on a rather nice June afternoon from inside a cloud—not the cloud of unknowing mystics talk about, but perhaps a similar sort of impediment. Perceiving beauty amidst misery is kind of what I try to do in my poetry, after all. A winter wren is warbling in his usual spot in the depths of the hollow right above the stream, and just hearing that is nearly worth all the trouble. And it helps that there’s an escape route: straight up the side of either ridge. The mosquitoes peter out about two-thirds of the way up. Then it’s just hot and humid.

***

I wrote a whole lot about haiku and poetry this morning and it felt good to get it out of my system, but for now I just want to share a few more photos from today.

wood turtle on a bridge over the Little Juniata River

eight-spotted forester moth
box turtle

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The mower against gardens reading Tadić

Out of nowhere, the question came to me: Why are you not reading Novica Tadić right now? And you know, I didn’t have a good answer for that.

I’d been about to head out for a walk, but I’d just been mowing the lawn for an hour and a half, so it’s not like I needed the exercise; I just wanted to go up in the woods. So here I am in my favorite close-to-the-house spot in the oak forest—close enough to carry a camp chair—with three volumes of Tadić in my lap, two translated by Charles Simic—Night Mail and Dark Things—and one translated by Steven and Maja Teref, Assembly. A hen turkey is going past with some chicks, by the sound of it, less than 100 feet behind me, but I can’t see them among the lowbush blueberries. A red-eyed vireo drones on and on. When the wind blows in a certain way, one of the nearby trees squeals, rubbed raw by the fallen corpse of a comrade.

And so to Tadić. The first poem I open to reads almost like a translation of a modern tanka:

AS I WATCH

through smoke rings
I see a yellow tongue

a crested sparrow hawk
swoops down
Novica Tadić, Assembly, tr. Steven Teref & Maja Teref

Mosquitoes are beginning to find me, and I them. I doubt they appreciate my findings, which are very heavy-handed.

I’m guessing that poem was from Tadić’s 1990 collection, Sparrow Hawk. Simic also translated some of the poems from that collection, including “Apple”:

This morning
I cut an apple in half
and found there
the familiar signature
of the last
dictator

In the sky
a jet plane
was leaving a white trace
just then
Novica Tadić, Night Mail: Selected Poems, tr. Charles Simic

I love how effortlessly he suggests the analogy between airplane and animal emissions, and how it draws a literal and figurative line under the whole thing.

There’s a twin-prop plane going over right now, a sound I rather like—I guess because it triggers memories of happy summer days when I was a kid and no day of freedom could ever be long enough. A world away from the Yugoslavia of Tadić’s youth, I’m sure.

Still not keen on the sound of the lawnmower, but it’s a vast savings in time over hand methods to achieve my goals, which are to provide the garden with mulch and compost. For years we didn’t own a working lawnmower, just used the tractor and brush hog to whack down the grass in front of the parents’ house every few weeks. Two years ago when my brother was living with me he got Dad to agree to get a new push/powered mower, and initially I was not a fan, because I do much prefer looking at a weedy meadow to an utterly domesticated would-be monoculture. Only this spring did it occur to me to wonder whether the mower might have an attachment to catch mowed grass so I wouldn’t have to rake it. It might, and it does!

The thing wouldn’t run after only two years of sitting idle, but our neighbor Troy, who understands engines and anything mechanical in a Vulcan mind-meld kind of way, determined that the problem was the poorly formulated gasoline they sell these days with too much ethanol in it, so its carburetor needed some special magic which he took it away to perform. The mower was healed a few days later and has been working fine ever since.

I hadn’t mowed a lawn in decades, and had forgotten just how meditative it can be. I haven’t settled on a fixed time to do it but today the grass was plenty dry enough to cut during what I think of as my peak creative time, mid to late morning, which used to find me at my laptop but nowadays usually finds me on a walk. Well, mowing lawn with this kind of mower is a walk, too, albeit at one mile an hour.

And the finished product! So green and uniform (if you squint and ignore all the broad-leaved plants)! And two days later, if it’s a rainy summer, you’re already seeing unevenness creeping back in… I can see how the mania starts, this very American rage for order amid the increasing chaos of our lives.

Just heard a weird scream from up on the powerline right-of-way. Must go investigate.

*

Well, of course I didn’t find anything, so I filled a small collecting bag with sweetfern leaves and carried on with a walk. For one thing, I need breezier spots to stop and write now that the mosquitoes are out.

Today is not a day for photography. I don’t know why. Is this flatness I see in the light, or in my head?

Yellow cinquefoil — something else with fond childhood associations. I might be more of a forest creature now, but I clearly spent a lot of time in old meadows as a small child in Maine, but also here. I was pleased to notice, the other week when I was stalking the wild asparagus, that there’s still a half-acre of brome among the acres of goldenrod above the barn, where as kids we spent countless hours playing in the long grass.

Which of course refutes one of the prime arguments for mowing vast swathes of suburbia: the children need somewhere to play! Bullshit. Get them to download some good nature ID apps and send them on a scavenger hunt. Scavenger hunts helped preserve Mom’s sanity whenever we three boys became too much of a handful. And it was all field guides back then, in the waning decades of the second millennium.

I suppose any writer’s children would quickly become acquainted with the out-of doors, let alone a nature writer’s kids. We were doomed from the start.

*

I’m now at the high point on the southwest corner of the property, a maturing oak–black cherry ecotone. I had thought last winter I might like to have a bench up here, but now with the leaves out and everything alive with the wind, I like the spot I’d chosen much better as it is, a circle of trees with only a few clumps of native grass and some random seedlings in it. It looks like a high point should. A very low high point to be sure, but let’s allow it some dignity. I need to fight the urge to domesticate wild places.

*

Watching a male scarlet tanager at eye level 50 feet away. When he flies, I feel an almost physical pang. I might say I’ll never fall in love again, but how can that be true when I fall in love several times a day?

I find in reading Tadić some excellent guidance, as I thought I might:

SPADE

To live without any news
in the boonies
like any wretched, luckless person.

Go to town and buy a spade
as if intending to turn over a garden.

Instead, find your humble place
in the village graveyard,
swing high and dig yourself a grave.

Set it up, decorate it, write on it.

Find your humble place
in a world gone mad.
Novica Tadić, Dark Things, tr. Charles Simic

In the blues, I believe that state of mind is known as “down so long it looks like up to me.” And maybe that’s where I am, but you know, I feel fine. Like, yeah, that-R.E.M.-song fine. And the poem has an odd resonance of the videopoem-of-place I posted at Moving Poems this morning. My Father’s Bones by Zoe Paterson Macinnes, who grew up on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides and talks about knowing from an early age exactly where she would be buried.

I wonder sometimes if my life would’ve been more coherent if I’d chosen a more conventional lifestyle. As it is I’m resistant enough to herd behavior that I’ve never gone full lifestyle with any of my passions. For example I’m obviously very interested in Japanese short-form and diaristic literature as a model for my own writing, but I’m not going to go all Zen and turn my weedy front garden into the Daisen-In.

Though I would kill for the chance to visit Kyoto and see some of those temples again. It’s a myth that Zen played a major role in the haiku tradition, but certainly if you idolize Basho in particular, Zen might be a good fit for you. I was always way more of a Pure Land guy (to the extent that I was into Buddhism at all) because c’mon, Shinran was like a Japanese St. Francis, a truly inspired populist. Zen was for the Samurai oppressors.

*

I do have to smile at some of my parents’ choices of spots for their benches. Who else would place one next to a vernal pool, which in normal years turns into a damp spot in the woods by the end of June? Though last year it never dried up at all…

big ripple—
a tadpole trying out
its legs

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Snakes and lawyers

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

Leaving the house to drive Mom to the lawyers’ to sign papers yesterday, I stepped on a six-foot-long black rat snake stretched across my front stoop. they are lovely people these lawyers, but sometimes life throws you a potent metaphor (i’m not gonna say sign).

There are at least two snakes of this size in and around my house, which as an *ahem* historical building, slapped together by farmers in 1865, is very much a semipermeable membrane open to all manner of wildlife. so the snakes while predatory on nesting birds—haven’t heard a peep from the Carolina wrens behind the fuse box in about a week—are still a better deal with the devil than a free-roaming cat would be

At the lawyers’ we got into a brief exchange about the way legalese while seemingly anodyne and boring actually represents a nonviolent distillation of conflict and confrontation. I said something to the effect of anyone who’s ever read the Icelandic sagas knows this and the head lawyer smiled sweetly and said not everyone understands that about us. it amuses me to think that the most Viking-like people in State College PA aren’t the fire fighters or even the violent drunken partiers after a Penn State game but a firm of property lawyers, expert at avoiding feuds between neighbors and keeping families from dissolving into open warfare.

the snake was fine by the way. or seemed to be—immediately drew itself into a tight coil with as much dignity as it could muster, then slithered at top speed toward its hole in the laundry room wall

Between sleep deprivation in the morning, the lawyers in the early afternoon, a rare late-afternoon nap and thunderstorms in the evening i never had time for a proper walk let alone the abbreviated three-mile version of it i was trying to squeeze in before dark (a great way to keep up daily walking during a heat wave). so it didn’t feel like a real day.

funny how whatever we do becomes how we define ourselves. it’s as if this has become my real job now. (because, thank Whomever, my mom is still in a robust state of health)

I haven’t read Stephen King which is probably good because i do sometimes find myself murmuring lines from the title track to Anthrax’ 1987 classic Among the Living:

I am the walking dude
I can see all the world

Cartoonish lyrics for the most part—Anthrax were never what you’d call sophisticated—but i still find this part vaguely interesting:

Good versus evil
The stand to vanquish evil
Man can only live one way
That place right in the middle

—a less Manichean worldview than, say, Black Sabbath in “War Pigs”

i had forgotten that Anthrax was with Metallica during the fateful tour for Master of Puppets on which Cliff Burton, their genius bassist and the working-class conscience of the band, was killed in his sleep when their tour bus went off the road.

His death profoundly impacted the thrash-metal community in which he was a highly regarded figure, and the members of Anthrax dedicated their new album Among the Living to his memory. In 2012, Ian said in an interview that part of the reason ‘… the album sounds so angry is because Cliff died. We’d lost our friend and it was so wrong and unfair.’

Wikipedia, “Among the Living“

with Cliff out of the way, the remaining assholes in Metallica were free to sell out and became the most famous thrash metal band in the world. Anthrax remained much more of a niche band, sounding like a cross between Dio, Exodus, and the Beastie Boys (who were part of the same NY hardcore/skater scene from which Anthrax emerged)

I am honestly not sure who i am blogging for at this point. the Venn diagram of metal heads and poetry heads has very little overlap i’ve found. astonishing that there’s any really. it involves mental toggling between the delicacy of perception required to appreciate (let alone compose) a haiku or a sonnet, and a much more blunt-instrument approach to language, with value placed on shock effect and sometimes deliberate obscurity. often metal lyrics are just flat-out bad writing. but there are three points I’d make about that:

  1. most popular music lyrics aren’t very good either. even a lot of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s lyrics are pretentious twaddle. let alone Puccini or Nat King Cole.
  2. prioritizing catchiness leads to very different lyrical choices than prioritizing subtlety and insights. and as impenetrable as thrash may sound to the uninitiated it is all about the riffs. bands learn how to write in such a way as to practically compel moshing and, um, extremely emphatic nodding along
  3. alternating between registers is something that traditional audiences all over the world seem to have loved, whether you’re talking about West African or O’odham epic recitations, comedic Kyogen performances in between the high seriousness of Noh, or, you know, Ben Johnson, Marlowe and them

the ancient peonies are in bloom in my disreputable front garden, which with the irises open as well looks about as good as it ever gets:

i transplanted the peonies from the front yard of our former neighbor Margaret McHugh, a descendant of the original settlers in Plummer’s Hollow. they were getting overwhelmed by wisteria (the peonies not the settlers, unless someone was buried in front of her house). i find their soapy smell interesting though not as much as Mom does—she dove nose-first into a big peony bush outside the lawyers’ office yesterday. sadly i failed to snap a photo in time.

the peonies’ timing is always excellent: just before a big rainstorm. assuming their goal is to flop over and return their ants’ delicate handiwork to the earth as quickly as possible. Alternating registers, innit. Buson once likened a rotten peony bloom to a hell mouth:

閻王の口や牡丹を吐かんとす
Enma-Ô no kuchi ya botan o hakan to su

the King of Hell’s mouth:
peony petals ready
to be spat out

与謝蕪村 Yosa Buson

Hiking in the rain again. I’m dry above and soaked from the knees down, which is wonderfully cooling. The rain comes with a breeze—the edge of a storm no doubt.

returning
the foot to its footprint
bear-flipped rock

Here’s a life hack to spend less time on social media: post about hiking until the algorithm starts showing you outdoors-related gear, then click on some of those ads. if you’re suggestible like me you do run the risk of spending money, but you probably needed new shoes or ultralight trousers anyway. the flip side is that every time you log into instagroan or facebonk you’ll be reminded to go for a walk instead

placing my phone in my shirt’s left pocket to keep it dry and feeling the warmth of its processor against my heart, this small computer many times more powerful than the room-sized supercomputers which our high school computer class assumed were the future…

(yes, my rural Appalachian school system had a computer room from the late 70s on. the Tyrone Area School District is legitimately progressive in many respects being run by basically liberal Republicans, though i suspect they would not appreciate that label. they work hard to not only graduate but also educate poor and working class kids: still not nearly enough, but better than any other school in the area including State College, if the results of universal, standardized tests are any indication)

(i remember those tests, or at least an early version called I believe the California Achievement Tests, which we not only didn’t study for but weren’t informed about in advance, just like an IQ test. I had aced the latter because of my upbringing: i knew how to talk like an adult, use big words and charm the tester. it was very subjective. i felt guilty about my placement in the gifted program knowing that everyone is gifted more or less the same and that the way we decide whose gifts matter is deeply unfair to people without either the gift of gab or an analytical mind. the CAT which we took in the 8th grade was a much more humbling experience, showing me to be as off-the-charts bad with some mental skills as i was off-the-charts good at others. they handed the results out in art class, for some reason, so kids from all tracks got to compare results, which ended up being extremely educational. I remember the kid across the table from me, a quiet, really genuine kid named Mark whom i’d gotten to know fairly well by then, showing me the bar chart of his results and asking me in a troubled voice, “Dave, does this mean I’m stupid?” and me with my gift of gab showing him mine, an almost perfect opposite to his: No Mark, i said, it means you’re really smart at these absolutely critical skills that well-spoken idiots like me sometimes like to pretend aren’t as important, just because we are so bad at them. [i forget exactly how they broke down intelligence but what Mark was brilliant at and i sucked at were mechanical/engineering-type stuff, and the reverse was like creativity and communication])

…and taking my phone right out of my shirt pocket again to type all that. Oh look, it’s stopped raining already!

brightening sky
a red eft hurries back
under the leaves

Dear diary reader, today after i got back from my walk i felt a sudden pang—i wanted to be making an erasure poem! going on a treasure hunt for fragments of fossil poetry in a coalface of prose. I miss it.

also when i took my sodden trousers off two ants tumbled out. that’s taking closeness to nature a little too far! i said to myself—then remembered my trousers had been doused with Permethrin. Poor ants.

Later, sitting on the porch, i was struck by how closed-off the forest edge looks now that all the leaves are out. Once inside, sure, it’s all green mansions, but from the outside, it’s a wall. so radically different from the view the other five months of the year when the leaves are down and it’s so open—more welcoming on the one hand but less inviting on the other. Talk about shifts in register.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woods queer: thoughts in a thunderstorm

a coyote in motion tends to remain in motion. a coyote at rest may or may not stay at rest.

In the beginning there were no coyotes in Pennsylvania, merely wolves. And behold, the wolves as top dogs had no sense of humor, so were easily trapped and shot out. We made that dog-shaped hole in the land. Coyote saw that hole and filled it, but not before reinventing coyoteself via repeated romantic encounters with Canadian timber wolves and thus became this uniquely Eastern Coyote phenotype which is larger more social and culturally a lot cagier around humans than their western counterparts, which makes sense—the west is way less overrun with people by and large

also, and this is of equal importance, over my lifetime a domestic dog-sized hole has emerged as our culture has changed around dog-rearing norms. when i was a kid it was exceedingly common for country people (including us) to have dogs just sort of run loose much of the time. though if they chased deer they ran a high risk of getting shot by an outraged hunter. coyotes are just way better at not getting shot. and they don’t chase deer they know they can’t catch

i mean i love dogs but let’s admit it, even the hardiest of mongrels bear the scars of centuries if not millennia of inbreeding. they’re loyal faithful and wet nosed but they’re not very bright

you know how to tell a coyote track from a dog track? the coyote track will be arrow-straight for long stretches. they’re out in the woods, or whatever, for a reason, they’re not tourists. i assume any wild dog would eventually develop similar habits were it able to survive, but few can on their own

packs or more likely family groups of feral domestic dogs were still a fairly common thing in the 1970s when i was a kid, but didn’t last long into the 80s, not around here. a century earlier feral dogs were common in the cities but now coyotes fill that niche too. i read all about it on the internet somewhere but right now i’m more committed to finishing this sentence than to doing a simple web search. and that’s the level to which blogging has sunk these days. deplorable. this idiot can’t even be arsed to deploy capital letters

turning off spellcheck on your phone is possible by the way. why follow the Man when you can be a free spirit, a leaf on the wind, an idiot with an umbrella in a thunderstorm

Wish it would hurry up and rain though. I’d look like less of a dumbass walking under this umbrella.

What? It keeps the mosquitoes off.

Question from @dylan20 (Dylan Tweney) on Twitter: does that actually work for mosquitoes? Reply from @morningporch (Dave Bonta): not all species, sadly. not the fabled Aedes vexans. but many of the meeker sort. and definitely deer flies and gnats. those Victorian ladies with their parasols were on to something

maybe blogging from here on out will be zuihitsu aka my Twitter feed meets Woodrat photohaiku minus some of the photos.

or maybe it’ll just be random BS I type into my phone not unlike the foregoing

i am still thinking about my eight-minute close-hand observation of a black-and-white warbler on my front porch this morning. she just completely ignored me, even after i started filming, so intent was she on gathering soft and silky oddments to line her nest, which is almost certainly not in the top of the tree where i saw her fly afterwards but in some hidden spot on the ground at the base of a tree or rock or under a bush. such un-warbler-like warblers. like friendlier, better looking nuthatches. (sorry nuthatches but you do look like the offspring of an unholy union between undertakers and bats)

here she is hoovering up some stuff beside my primitive end table with a copy of my latest poetry read, by the wonderful if occasionally terrifying Cynthia Cruz

shit this thunderstorm is going to hit, I’d better start walking back

it wouldn’t do to get my phone Max all wet. my precioussss

back before the worst of it—which now becomes my evening’s entertainment. the people who came up with the idea of a front porch understood what makes life worth living!

those people being enslaved West Africans in the Caribbean. same brilliant people who gave us the banjo. that’s two African things that everyone thinks of as purely Appalachian or Southern. well nothing is purely anything of course, but racist folklorists did a bang-up job of excluding indigenous and African contributions to Appalachian culture in their zeal to portray it as a largely Anglo-Celtic backwater. i realize i’m at the northern end of Appalachia (though only half-way up the Appalachian mountains) but there were a hell of a lot of grandkids of Eastern European and Italian immigrants in my high school class. just like anywhere else in the US. to say nothing of all the Germans who came into the area about the same time as the Irish, just higher on the social scale. and there used to be a tiny AME church in Tyrone that was close to 100 years old. a larger Black population now than in decades but they’ve always been part of the mix here. and John Henry was the most Appalachian dude ever, so, ya know…

the earlier Ulster Scots did have a preference for the mountains but i’m not sure whether that’s because they felt a unique bond with the landscape as is sometimes alleged or just because they didn’t have much of anything and had to settle for land no one else wanted. then because they were on poor marginal soils tended to specialize in the one thing that could turn a profit: growing corn and making whiskey.

when i was a kid we used to find so many century-old whiskey bottles lying out in the woods where people tossed them when they were empty. probably loggers and colliers, men and boys who lived in the woods: wood hicks. i suppose i’m a hick in that tradition though without the whiskey or quite as much hard physical labor or tree butchery. so not at all really.

but like the word redneck, it’s weird that hick became an insult. and there are so many others for county people: hayseed. bumpkin. peasant (said in a certain way). hillbilly. local yokel. native. savage. wild man. Hermit is one of the few jokey epithets that’s not an insult. but then it’s not exclusively rural, is it? you can be a hermit anywhere and an increasing number are. together in our aloneness, alone in our togetherness, sounding irritatingly like a new-Age Sufi

when i was a kid, my parents used to joke about the possibility of going woods queer—like year-round cabin fever, basically. it would be absurd and probably offensive for me to claim that as my gender identity. but i can see having it as my epitaph, if anyone bothers to make me a tombstone. it’s pithy.

Dave Bonta
1966-2066
woods queer

I mean it’s so much better than tree hugger, which has been taken over by neoliberal techno greens (a term i just made up but which is absolutely a real category)

when you live on a mountaintop, you quickly learn to unplug all modems, computers and other sensitive electronics during a thunderstorm, imagine if we had a so-called smart home. our dumb asses would be running around all the time unplugging and fussing over things. slaves to the machines we made to serve us. weighed down worse than ever by Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles.

(just because “London” is in every secondary school curriculum in the English-speaking world doesn’t mean it isn’t still a very deep, very heavy, and may i also suggest very metal poem)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

April Diary 16: deer trails

river in November light between bare woods and mountain
This entry is part 16 of 31 in the series April Diary

 

the thing about erasure poetry is you don’t get a blank page to stare at

but if you keep looking ideas will emerge like deer trails in the woods, some petering out after a few dozen yards, others leading you to things you never would’ve seen otherwise

today’s raw material for erasure was short and relatively lacking in concrete imagery so my choices seemed few. interestingly for a process that might appear to be pretty far removed from anything confessional, it was only when I allowed myself to express some emotional honesty that it turned into something like a poem. or at least something good enough to blog

finished Charon’s Cosmology so it’s on to Simic’s next title with Braziller, Classic Ballroom Dances (1980)

this is one i don’t think i’ve read more than once before, and a long time ago at that—the least familiar of Simic’s early books. that’s what a difference it makes never to have owned it

on this current Simic binge i’m paying attention to how and how often he writes about the natural world. a lot of straightforward ecopoetry bores me after a while but the people mixing in surrealism often don’t appear to have much to say. when Simic writes specifically about nature he does appear very much to have seen or heard what he’s writing about, and there’s usually a point of view being expressed. and he uses language from natural history in poems that aren’t strictly speaking about nature, such as “Species” in Charon’s Cosmology — not prominently but it’s part of the mix

Peaceful Kingdom

The bird who watches me
sleeping
from the branch of an apple tree
in bloom.

A black bird
for whom a strange man
gathers rocks
in the ruts of the road.

*

And among the willow trees:
water
before water made up its mind
to be water.

My sister says if I drink
of that water I will die . . .
That’s why the heart beats:
to waken the water.
Charles Simic, from Classic Ballroom Dances

i have strong feelings about the whole peaceable kingdom thing a purely colonialist ideal of a tamed and sanitized nature devoid of wildness but Simic’s deceptively simple poem exposes the violence and danger that always lurk just beyond the frame. and also the possibility…

the ending reminds me a bit of the way the legendary blues pianist Jimmy Yancey would always switch from whatever key he was in to B flat for the last few notes of a piece: less dissonance than wildness, an opening toward something other

i used to spend a lot more time in the woods after dark. but some time last summer i got tired of being snorted at by deer, squeaked at by weasels, chittered at by flying squirrels and once even run into by a fox (i think). the night creatures need time without what must be the incredible stress of having humans close by

so i still go for walks at night sometimes but i don’t sit out in the woods nearly as often after dark and mostly stick the porch

just as i finish that sentence the barred owl says who! as in who do you think you are

(which is slightly unfair because they are the friendliest of owls)

I don’t like to write about poetry i don’t like so i guess i won’t, other than to say that whether or not a book has been widely hyped seems to have little relation to whether i’ll end up liking it, except insofar as the hype is based mainly on what the poems say rather than how they say it. i don’t care if we align 100% ideologically, if your poetry is too didactic i will stop reading

such a serene experience taking a leak in the nearly full moonlight

gray rat of a cloud get away from my moon

a dove cries out in its sleep

Posted on by Dave Bonta

April Diary 14: cardinal, coyote, owl

river in November light between bare woods and mountain
This entry is part 13 of 31 in the series April Diary

 

Dear April there’s a cardinal nesting beneath my bedroom window

she’s sitting on three speckled eggs

our first hot day. sitting on a bench in the woods where i swear the same two or three bluebottle flies keep landing on me no matter how many i kill. no wonder people used to believe in spontaneous generation

the Zang Di book has already proved its utility as a flyswatter. well done Zephyr Press

Stir-fried pork and asparagus is a starting point for poetry.

Zang Di (tr. Eleanor Goodman)

i like this guy. his mind moves in interesting ways

this too in the middle of a well-used trail is language

coyote calling cards

hypothesis (clears throat): the invention of symbolic language by humans was essential to make up for the lost richness of meaning our more distant ancestors accessed through their noses

there’s a profusion of trailing arbutus blooms this year like nothing we’ve seen here in 52 years. not sure why. though i do have some hypotheses…

it’s maybe a bit unusual in the modern world to know exactly where you’ll someday be buried. i noticed today a porcupine has been littering the ground all around with spruce twigs (they’re messy eaters)

my future gravesite
old puffball
blowing smoke

barred owl calling up in the woods, just one disapproving-sounding who! at a time

for years, my ex heard me talking about bard owls and wondered what made them so poetic

sitting just inside the edge of the woods is a completely different experience from sitting on my front porch less than 100 feet away. a more vulnerable experience, especially after dark. a humbler experience

(when did humility stop being a virtue asks the old crank)

the porch offers the remove of civilization. a roof blocks most of the sky—it’s no wonder suburbanites long ago ditched porches for back decks

Posted on by Dave Bonta

April Diary 13: wildflowery

This entry is part 14 of 31 in the series April Diary

 

out on a spring wildflower-gazing expedition southeast of here with my Mom all day. we saw twinleaf, cut-leaved toothwort, trout lilies, hillsides covered with Dutchman’s breeches and spring beauties, and more hepatica than I’ve ever seen in one place before

a surprisingly large, intact stand of eastern hemlocks included stumps that were still alive at least a decade after they were cut, kept on life support by their adjacent relatives, continuing to grow scar tissue over the amputations year after year

we talked about life and death, family and friends, the state of the planet etc. on a gorgeous (and WARM) day

it’s undoubtedly good for my poetry to take a day off from it now and then. i might have enough brain power left to bang out an erasure poem before i go to sleep but it isn’t looking good, and i’ve abandoned another poem i’ve been working on off and on for the past two days because while it was highly clever it lacked any original insight, and while i’m sure i could still get it into decent shape i know it would never spark joy. so following Marie Kondo’s advice I am throwing it out

in today’s mail a new translation of a new-to-me contemporary Chinese poet, Zang Di: The Roots of Wisdom. it looks great. here’s part of the publisher’s description:

Zang Di (臧棣) is widely acknowledged as one of the leading poets and literary critics of his generation. In this new bilingual collection of his work, The Roots of Wisdom, he uses rich, emotional language to explore the natural world, including his beloved Weiming Lake at Peking University — his “Walden.” The lake has been a muse for him for more than 30 years. While Zang Di’s detailed observations often begin in nature, they go on to unearth insights into human psychology, relationships, contemporary life, and the mysteries of language.

Zang Di maintains a prolific writing practice (he composes one poem each day), and his unique style draws not only from nature but also from his extensive reading of Chinese and Western literature, and his travels through several continents.

here’s how the title poem concludes:

The wind arrives, and its casualness is conflicted; in the name of white clouds
are traces of those wild geese you like. People’s words fly, with no concern for direction.
The rain departs, and the vastness is lonely not paltry.
Your tears are rainbowed bandages.
These tangled things are again and again the apex of emptiness,
but they still plant their roots deep in a life of poetry.

overall, Zang Di’s poetry appears to have a higher density of abstractions than i’m used to, but with just enough concrete imagery to give me something to sink my teeth into, i hope

Posted on by Dave Bonta

April Diary 12: flowers in hell

This entry is part 12 of 31 in the series April Diary

 

Dear April it’s been a day spent largely in my head a commodious place since i haven’t stuffed it full of facts or indeed much of anything with a practical use

walking down the mountain i was thinking about something the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen once said: “In an age of tiredness” he said “I write for the half-tired”

there’s definitely a class angle to the accessibility vs. difficulty debate (which for many of us is also an internal debate) though here in the chronically overworked US, sleep deprivation cuts across class lines. it’s more inescapable though for those near or below the federal poverty line. for members of the professional-managerial class it can be a bit more volitional

the point is as an insomniac i am intimately acquainted with all the ways that sleep deprivation can interfere with concentration and aesthetic appreciation, to say nothing of the mind’s overall speed and ability to function

with my strong preference for shorter lines and stanzas and for direct, more colloquial diction perhaps i too write for the half-tired

i do not believe in ever writing down to people which is i’m afraid how some on either side of the debate perceive accessibility. but
(insert winter wren trill here—i’m close to the stream)
gnarly or unfamiliar ideas can be presented in ways that invite a reader in and experimental language can be presented in a way that’s fun—see Christian Bök’s Eunoia or pretty much anything by Gary Barwin

it’s the cliquishness and austere aesthetics of a lot of avant-garde work that turns people off. if you doubt that people without college educations can appreciate difficult art, i’d invite you to consider the extreme metal underground, where in many genres complexity of composition is fetishized by the still largely working-class fan base. i believe the same was true of bebop in its day. you don’t need an expensively educated elite to have sophistication in the arts

all that said, there’s no denying the deep anti-intellectualism of anglo-american culture. what poetry does do well commercially tends to be pretty straight-forward fare, whether prosy free verse, rap- and Beat-influenced spoken word, or artistically arranged motivational poster copy

it’s quite a late spring. the first round-leafed hepaticas are finally fully out in Plummer’s Hollow after just a few hours of warmer sunshine this morning. now it’s clouding over again

i tell myself i don’t need any more hepatica photos but it isn’t a matter of need

first hepaticas
will the circle be
unbroken

that haiku came a bit too easily. hope i’m not unconsciously plagiarizing someone!

also the first stinking Benjamin is out of the ground, green blade stained with mud

the best vistas must now contain something dissonant, tacky or even garish or else risk becoming cliché

bright red roof
the devil is just a hard
working cook

(is that even a haiku?)

(does it matter?)

no one ever talks about how Africa is giving birth to a new sea

also, two of the greatest poets i ever knew never published a book. one stopped writing altogether i suspect. brilliant but troubled. how fortunate must of us are to be neither

i say i’m talking to myself but i’m not — in the same way you say you’re talking to god but you’re not

(maybe that’s why i’ve begun to resist capitalizing i)

no ideology can ever be a perfect map to reality. i feel this is something that poets and physicists should intuitively grasp and it always bothers me when they don’t

places are the best mnemonics. they’re irreplaceable that way

when global corporate monoculture eliminates the last corner of local quirk and the same suite of hardy invasive species grows everywhere, what will happen to memory?

i suppose everyone will be on THC by then so it will be a moot question

i sometimes get really angry when i hear about texts or speech intended to be private, for a single person’s eyes/ears and ephemeral being nevertheless recorded and eventually shared. if this angers you too, prepare to be outraged when you find out how all the classic Zen ko’ans came to be

the collected ko’ans of masters such as Yunmen and Linji are unique gems of world literature and i’m so glad we have them. but a significant part of their opacity is down to us not knowing every intimate detail of the master-student relationships that gave rise to them. at their origin in other words while still conundrums intended to lead to breakthroughs they weren’t necessarily quite as mysterious as they seem today

mystery like many products of fermentation gets better with age

April shower
that heavenly odor
rising from old leaves

i really love how the flat thin soles of my shoes let me feel the smallest contours of the earth

trail running is a strange subculture of exercise freaks but they make some good products

but i wanna say to anyone who does like to run through the woods: imagine if you slowed down and got to know the trees and flowers so well that you began to see the natural world less as a passive environment to discover yourself in and more as an endlessly fascinating series of unique neighborhoods to lose yourself in—likely the way you already imagine cities. imagine walking at one mile per hour and feeling it’s much too fast.

imagine there’s a heaven and you’re in it
it’s easy if you try
but it’s also possibly a pointless exercise in privilege
hell isn’t exactly beneath us but we do manage to keep it out of sight most of the time
above us only the vacuum of space

which puts me in mind of Issa’s famous haiku

in the midst of it all
with hell yawning under us
gazing at flowers

that’s my version but you should try your own

yo no naka wa
世 の 中 は
world’s midst as-for
jigoku no ue no
地獄 の 上 の
hell’s on-top-of’s
hanami kana
花 見 哉
flower viewing!

all of which has me reaching for Baudelaire

he sits right next to Basho on my bookshelf

Time and nature sluice away our lives.
A virus eats the heart out of our sides,
digs in and multiplies on our lost blood.
Charles Baudelaire, from Flowers of Evil (Robert Lowell translation)

so. much. more. metal.