poems on natural materials

December 4, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Poetry habitat

Slideshow link – direct link to the photoset

O.K., so why am I attempting to improve on nature by writing poems on seashells with a permanent marker? Once again, this is Dana Guthrie Martin’s fault. Who else, learning about the plight of hermit crabs, would immediately think, “Poetry to the rescue!”?

Did you know that, worldwide, hermit crabs are experiencing a housing shortage? About 30 percent of all hermit crabs live in shells that are too small for them, and up to 60 percent can’t find homes that are the correct size in the spring when they experience their growth spurts.

Artists like Elizabeth Demaray have called attention to this problem and are creating alternative housing for hermit crabs. She points out that two factors seem to be involved in the housing shortage: environmental pollution and the collection of sea shells. Elizabeth’s work led me to think about my own role as a poet and what I might be able to do to help. Some of my poet friends and I thought it might be nice to invite people to send us any sea shells they’ve collected over the years – no questions asked.

We’ve set up a PO Box where people can mail in their shells for use in the project. We’ll take the shells you send us and write poems on them (in nontoxic ink of course) before whisking them off to beaches and placing them on the shore so hermit crabs can move into them.

Visit Dana’s new site Shore Tags [dead link; removed 11/09] to learn more about how to contribute to this project, including what kind of shells to send, how to contribute poems even if you don’t have any shells, and what kind of markers to use if you decide to try your hand at a couple yourself, as I did.

Now, I’m sure my more utilitarian-minded readers are wondering why the heck hermit crab shells would need to have poems on them. Surely the crabs don’t give a crap. Couldn’t we get more shells to more crabs more quickly if we skipped that step?

Well, I suppose. But it seems to me there’s nothing wrong, and everything right, about asking givers to put a little of their heart, soul, and imagination into their gifts. If charity and welfare have become bad words, I think it’s because they perpetuate such a gulf between donor and recipient. The recipient of charity always risks becoming an object of condescension, and the utilitarian approach further reinforces the objectification, I think. It’s weird. We take it for granted (ha!) that dependence on charity is an unfortunate thing, even though every living being is utterly dependent on the grace of God or Lady Luck at every moment.

Hermit crabs actually teach this lesson better than most organisms, come to think of it. They are by nature naked and homeless and dependent on other creatures for shelter… not unlike a certain, virtually hairless species of ape trying to live in a temperate climate.

To suggest that we can and should learn from the beneficiaries of a conservation project is to go at least part-way to restoring a balance between donor and recipient, don’t you think? It’s no longer just a one-way exchange. And by entering the imaginative space necessary to make poems for another being, one engages with that being in a whole new way. So my hope for the Shore Tags project is not just that it will help thousands of crabs find better, more comfortable habitat, but that, by encouraging children, especially, to contribute their most prized skills as human beings — the power to make art and find meaning — it will help inculcate a deeper respect for the rest of creation. Given such respect, perhaps, we might not have collected seashells so heedlessly in the first place. It might’ve occurred to us to wonder if they were really ours to take.

August 4, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

On beyond paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Limited Issue

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

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