Category: Publications

New haiku hither and yon

Posted on Posted in Publications, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

A batch of haiku and haibun that I wrote last summer specifically to send out—some with darker imagery, influenced by my regular consumption of death metal—has met with mixed reactions from editors: acceptances from tinywords, The Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Drifting Sands Haibun (as previously noted) but no bites from Acorn, Whiptail, Rattle, or Contemporary Haibun Online. The one in tinywords appeared back in October:

monitoring the dead zone blue crabbers

The image came from a lengthy article in the Chesapeake Bay Journal, an essential source of environmental news for anyone living in the Chesapeake watershed.

My haiku in The Heron’s Nest came about in the approved manner, however: an encounter in nature prompting a nearly instantaneous response, in a haiku all about responsiveness.

night bird—we startle as one

I’m grateful to the editors of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America, for selecting this one for their Winter 2024 issue:

being measured for a coffin first snowflake

This had been included in the batch I sent to Modern Haiku, but editor Paul Miller chose this one instead:

unrivaled in my kitchen cricket

I love and read all these journals whether I place work in them or not, so it’s fun to feel as if I’m taking part in building something bigger than ourselves. That something being, I think, no less than a complete reassessment of how we in the West relate to nature: seen no longer as something apart from humans but a spontaneously self-organizing cosmos, “of itself thus” as the two-character compound for “nature” in Japanese and Chinese may be translated. But that’s a topic for another post.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning, for those who might be curious, that I do not necessarily hold my best haiku to send out. If I get an idea for a photo haiga, that sucker is going up on my photoblog and on social media right away, because I think sometimes the immediacy of haiku is more important than anything else. And by sharing these kinds of haiku more widely, with people who aren’t already up to speed with the modern understanding of Japanese short forms in English, my hope is to enlarge the tent of modern haiku readers and creators.

Pepys Erasure Project, Vol. 1: back to the future

Posted on Posted in Publications, WritingTagged 2 Comments

Another year of Pepys erasures, done and dusted. And before New Year’s for once! And as I’ve done every year since 2017, I’ve compiled the erasures into a PDF, free for download, samizdat-style circulation, and remixing. Here’s the link. (And if you’ve missed any of the others, you can find all the download links in the last sentence of the top-of-page description of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project.)

Painting of Samuel Pepys as a young man by John Hayls
Painting of Samuel Pepys by John Hayls

Looking again at this painting of Pepys, I’m reminded how much older than him I am this time around: three decades, instead of just the two I had on him last time. But it’s hard to tell how much that might’ve influenced the inevitable change in my perspective on Mr. Pepys, as I’ve gotten to know him over the course of this ten-year-long ‘deep misreading.’ In general, though, my wonderment at people in my own life who resemble Pepys in their energy and ambition has only grown with age, as the erasure project has assumed an increasingly significant role in my otherwise shambolic existence, now that I’ve reached a level of mastery I could barely conceive of ten years ago, when I was still just entranced by the process of erasure and posting any old garbage in my typically impulsive manner. But in defense of my 47-year-old self, Pepys was just a side project at the time, something to be fitted in around other, more exciting projects… which I’ve half-forgotten and can’t even be arsed to look up right now.

I remain deeply grateful to my then-partner Rachel for getting me started on the whole thing, so we’d have an excuse to read it together. Those were great times. But reading my 2013 erasures every morning this year was painful, I’m not going to lie—so many wince-worthy lines! Fortunately, Luisa Igloria and I had plenty of other content, so readers didn’t abandon Via Negativa in droves. I don’t expect I ever would’ve had the nerve to start blogging like that if Luisa hadn’t already joined.

Look at me reminiscing like some kind of geezer! LOL.

I dimly recall that it was partway through the summer of 2014 that something clicked and finally figured out where I was going with Pepys, so I’m excited to see what happens with the project this year: will I be able to coast a little at some point, and just polish previous drafts? There have only been about a half-dozen times when I’ve been able to do that so far. Regardless, I hope to keep going in this till I have PDFs for all ten years of the diary. But I have to tell you, I am already champing at the bit to get started on my next erasure project, and if you know me, you can probably guess what book I have in mind. Superstition prevents me from saying anything further.

Anyway, enjoy the PDF, and do consider sharing it with anyone who might enjoy it. Happy New Year.

Two recent online pubs and a summer conference!

Posted on Posted in Conferences, Meta, Publications1 Comment

Yep, it’s that laziest/most inevitable of writers’ blog posts: popping up after a long absence only to present a boring list of recent writerly accomplishments. But! I spent all afternoon on a redesign of this here website which I’d been putting off since 2018, so I’m feeling pretty good about myself at the moment.

Screenshot of The Summerset Review - masthead and Table of Contents

First the publications. I had one of my Pepys erasures in The Summerset Review, Summer 2023 issue. It was one that I had shared as a screenshot on social media, where the editor saw it and contacted me. This is obviously not the norm—most literary magazines still insist that all submissions be complete web virgins, despite the crying need for editors to do the opposite and actively hunt down good internet content, because lord knows none of the rest of us have the time. But knowing the situation, I haven’t bothered to submit the erasures anywhere since I’m hardly going to stop posting them to Via Negativa. Like the online Pepys Diary I draw from and link to every day, these are free cultural works available for reprint and remix by whomever, whenever.

Drfting Sands cover with a photo of egrets taking flight from a marsh

I was pleased to land a new haibun in one of the few journals devoted to the genre, Drifting Sands—Issue 22, July 2023 [PDF]. I think this is the second time I’ve submitted there, and both times they took the submission immediately, so cheers to them.

That appeared a few days after the Haiku North America conference, which I am just now realizing I should talk about as well. Except come to think of it I did already post about it on Moving Poems Magazine, where you can read the text of my talk and then click through to watch the haibun videopoetry festival I presented there for a rapt or at least politely not dozing audience of haiku poets at a grand old 19th-century library in Cincinnati. I do not do conferences the way one is supposed to, staying up till the wee hours and skipping sessions to schmooze. Nope, I was laser-focused on surviving my own presentation (mission somehow accomplished, despite an air delay) and then enjoying the rest of the conference exactly the way I wanted to in my anti-social way, which meant attending the nerdiest talks, browsing the book sale slowly at least four times, talking to as many old women as possible because they have the best stories, walking around town aimlessly taking pictures because I am a flaneur first and foremost, avoiding alcohol, going to bed early, and getting lots of sleep. Didn’t quite succeed on that last one, but I did better than I’ve ever done before at a conference or festival.

It was wonderful to get to meet and listen to some of the best poets working in the genre, but that’s the nature of small conferences, I guess. I mean, I was actively avoiding doing the whole access thing altogether, and my first morning there I step into an elevator and strike up a conversation with the editor of the leading journal in the space. Crazy! But appropriate for the English-language haiku community, which I’ve found to be very egalitarian, reminded regularly by the results of their many contests, which are always run blind, that anyone can and frequently does win top honors. Beginner’s mind is prized rather than condescended to. A very interesting subculture.

I was going to say something about the new Dear Human at the Edge of Time anthology I’m in, but maybe I’ll save that for another post as it is getting perilously close to my bedtime. I’m probably not quite done tinkering with the website, but I think the design will stay, and definitely the new site architecture with a re-conceptualization from pages about books and videopoem cycles with the blog on the front page, to a portfolio arranged as a visual array of different projects, both completed (those books and videopoem cycles) and ongoing (Pepys erasure project, walking poems, The Morning Porch, the poetry blogging digest). I just think that’s a far better way of presenting myself online. This particular theme will probably age out in about five years, though, at which point I’ll have to knuckle down and learn how to use the new sitewide editor on WordPress (replacing the customizer which I’ve honestly always hated) because, I say to myself, guys even more challenged than me figure this stuff out. It’s just boring and fiddly. Which is why I put this redesign off for five damn years.

New videopoem by Marc Neys

Posted on Posted in Publications, VideopoetryTagged ,

I’m quite taken with this new videopoem, based on one of my own recent poems, that my friend Marc surprised me with yesterday. It happened in the usual way: I write a poem in an afternoon, Marc spots it on my blog or in social media, a lightbulb goes off, and he spends another afternoon composing a new film, music and all. Two solitary older guys in different parts of the world living for that absorption into the creative zone.

The text of the poem is on Via Negativa.

Haibun in Drifting Sands + a new Failed State review

Posted on Posted in Publications, ReviewsTagged , , , , 2 Comments

Last month, I was pleased to place a haibun in Drifting Sands: A Journal of Haibun and Tanka Prose. “Another World” is unusually personal for me, and grew out of a much briefer post on Woodrat photohaiku. It appears in Issue 13, which was guest-edited by Adelaide B. Shaw. Thanks to her for the swift acceptance — and for pulling together a great issue which I’m delighted to be a part of.

Then this evening I was thumbing through the reviews at the back of the latest issue (53.1) of Modern Haiku, and look what I found!

Failed State review in Modern Haiku 53.1

This was a surprise, because I sent them a copy of the book last summer and when a note didn’t appear in the fall issue, figured it hadn’t passed muster and forgot about it. This is, I must say, considerably kinder than I expected. Thanks to Contributing Book Review Editor Peter Newton for taking the time, and for being so generous. Modern Haiku reserves full-length reviews for books of or about haiku proper, which is completely understandable. What’s impressive to me is that a journal of its standing still considers self-published collections for review — one indication of just how down-to-earth and DIY the English-language haiku scene still is. Even the major haiku publishers are just one- or two-person operations, I think. So it’s cool that a book like Failed State can be evaluated on its own merits.

Yay, puppies!

Posted on Posted in PublicationsTagged , , , , 4 Comments

page from Modern HaikuIt’s been nearly four months since I’ve posted here. What’s been happening? Let’s see. I had a haiku in a new journal called Trash Panda; a short linked-verse sequence in the Poets Respond feature of Rattle online; and a haiku in Modern Haiku 52.3 (Autumn 2021), my first acceptance there. Yesterday, my weekly poetry blog digest at Via Negativa got a nice shout-out on the Planet Poetry podcast. And today, my videopoem collaboration with Luisa Igloria, “Neolog 2021.0,” appeared in Atticus Review.

It feels weird to stop there, with the sort of boring, dry post that I almost never excerpt for the aforementioned blog digest. But in other respects my life has been turned completely upside-down and it’s difficult to write about. I have been toying with the idea of starting a private journal, though after nearly two decades of public blogging, the idea seems a bit bizarre, despite all my work with Pepys’ diary. Mostly what I’ve been doing is going for walks hither and yon. If you want to know about that in (slightly) more detail, you’ll have to follow my photo+haiku blog.

I can share that I have a new personal mantra. Whenever things start seeming too bleak and meaningless, I murmur “Yay, puppies!” as enthusiastically as I can, reminding myself that we still live in a world where puppies and rainbows are possible. Also, not all puppies are dogs. Some of them—the lucky ones?—get to be coyotes, and trot through life avoiding as best they can that violent trickster H. sapiens.

four coyote puppies outside a culvert pipe
photo: Zac Garrett (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Failed State released to public marketplace + new reviews

Posted on Posted in PublicationsTagged

You can now purchase Failed State from your local bookstore—or from Amazon, if that’s your thing. The self-publishing platform I used, Blurb, gives the option of either selling books from their site, or releasing them to distributors and online retailers. The advantage of the former is that the author gets to keep all the profits, but once my initial flurry of sales to friends and social media contacts died down, it made sense to let at least the paperback edition get proper distribution, so that’s what I’ve done. So far, only one additional sale has occurred as a result.

More rewarding have been the responses from readers, such as Julene Tripp Weaver, who wrote a very kind appreciation on Goodreads. It begins,

Don’t miss Dave Bonta’s most recent book, “Failed State,” filled with smart, concise, political haibun and erasure poems. So many of these either burst my heart open or made me bust out laughing.

And blogger James Collins wrote a very thoughtful review at Love During Wartime, which concludes:

This may sound like a frightening journey, but it is worthwhile. Join Dave Bonta in exploring these dreams and confronting these nightmares. In the end, you might find yourself at the center of the world, on a front porch, admiring the woods.

Both reviews are of course linked from the book’s official page here.

Rewilding: a Marc Neys film from Failed State

Posted on Posted in Publications, VideopoetryTagged ,

Watch on Vimeo

Filmmaker and composer Marc Neys surprised me yesterday with this great new adaptation of one of the haibun from Failed State. He may be semi-retired from making videopoems, but he doesn’t seem to have lost any of his mad skills. His impressionistic style really fits the poem, I think. I was also chuffed to hear the poem read in someone else’s voice. Here’s the text:

The wolves have finally come to me for advice. Avoid making eye contact with saints and ranchers, I say. Stick to the suburbs where no one else goes to hunt. The wolves are tired; their tongues glisten like the neckties of bankers crowded into a London tube carriage at rush hour. In the window of the building opposite, a white cat levitates on a sudden carpet of arms. The headline in the Evening Standard reads, Is Your Child a Psychopath? It’s More Common Than You Think. My love has taken five sharp sticks from her bag and begun to knit me a sock. What big toenails you have, she says.

autumn lake
gang members lower
their voices

*

Pasting this in just now, I discover a typo, the first I’m aware of in the book: voicies. Nuts! Guess I shouldn’t have blown off Blurb’s typo-finding tool (which seemed tedious because of course it was flagging every word not in its apparently quite limited dictionary). Live and learn.

Speaking of Blurb, some people might’ve noticed the irony that I didn’t in fact include any blurbs on the book. I sort of feel like blurbs are superfluous on physical books of poetry in bookstores or at live events, because people can just leaf through a book and make up their own minds. If sales are mainly or exclusively online, the author and/or publisher can just update the book page(s) with favorable quotes as they come in from readers and reviewers, and I’ve started to do this on Failed State‘s page here. I’ve also added some more of my own video adaptations to the bottom of the page: Killing Time, Ornithology, and Falling, the latter two newly edited to include the haiku. You can also watch all eight videos on Vimeo. (I’ll add the two films by Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg, In West Virginia and Flag Country, when they’re made public. Right now they’re both still making the rounds of festivals.)