1. take a brief nap after coming in from the porch, before the caffeine from my tea kicked in
2. make a cup of coffee from the small supply of beans in my freezer
3. open my email and see how Tim Green had laid out my latest contribution to Rattle‘s “Poets Respond” feature. I needn’t have worried, it looks great:

Here’s the link for it on the web.

I honestly did not expect them to take it. Something about the poem seemed off to me, and it felt as though I was simply repeating a formula that had worked for me last time, in 2021: a linked-verse-type poem about US military imperialism. But Tim and Katie suggested a couple of edits, including amputating the opening verse, which I was happy enough to agree to. I’ll put it on the back-burner for a while, and see about possibly revising the opening before posting it to Woodrat photohaiku next April 1, if I remember. Though like all poems in this weekly series from Rattle, I’m responding to current events:

Oh for a silent spring, and not one filled with explosions and implosions and the unhinged Truths of Mad King Donald! But imperial conquest of one sort or another has been going on for more than 500 years, and spring whether silent or otherwise is mostly a parade of invasive species now.

This was my third magazine acceptance of the year so far — a streak I don’t expect to last — and I’ve had a few other publications over the past many months since I last posted an update on such things, but I’ll hold all that for another time because the Protestant ancestors are hissing in my ear not to be so focused on myself on today of all days! But I would like to say how gratified I am that Rattle editors actually understand Japanese-derived forms such as haiku and linked verse. I don’t know of any other prominent American literary magazine where that would be the case, since the academic types who dominate lit mag culture largely refuse to engage with the English-language haiku community, which as a result has become ghettoized. In this environment, Rattle forms an invaluable bridge. I also admire their business acumen, and love getting a single-author chapbook bundled together with each new issue: for a book-collector like me, that makes a subscription irresistible, even if up to 75% of the contents of the magazine don’t interest me, which is sometimes the case when they go heavy on narrative poetry that isn’t nature-focused.

I’ve been meaning to write something in essay form about what it means to be a culture worker in a time of imperial collapse, though possibly I get into politics often enough in the Pepys erasure series that folks don’t really need to hear anything more from me in that regard. If this rain stops, maybe I will plant some trees instead. I have 24 red spruce ready to go into deer-proof cages in the hollow…

It’s one thing to have work that you submitted appear in anthologies; it’s quite another to have your already published work selected for an anthology, without having to submit or ever know about it! You just get a polite request in your inbox one day for inclusion in an annual anthology series that you’re happy to have an excuse to read through. It was a thrill to appear in Haiku 2025 from Modern Haiku Press, edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, because Haiku 21, their original volume that started this series showcasing more experimental haiku, has been such a huge influence on me. They chose a monoku I’d had in Frogpond,

being measured for a coffin first snowflake

And more recently, I was honored again to get a request for inclusion in the annual Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, titled Turtle Dreams for 2025. They wanted the text of a monoku that had appeared as part of a photo haiga in whiptail:

day moon the weight of a stone in my pocket

Needless to say, this gives me another reason to keep submitting to haiku journals! But it’s also helped me understand why I am so uninterested in submitting to most regular literary magazines: at the end of the day, I know I won’t resonate with 80-90 percent of their contents, and therefore I’d have difficulty even summoning the enthusiasm to brag about it on social media, let alone post about it here. By contrast, I’ve been noticing as I’m reading Turtle Dreams that I seem to average about one “wow!” for every two-page spread of four or five haiku, which to me makes it well worth the price. And when your disposable income is as limited as mine, that’s a real consideration. I can go on eBay or visit Webster’s Bookstore in State College, PA, and for less than ten dollars pick up a poetry collection by an individual author whose work I know I’ll like, so spending the same or more on an issue of a literary magazine is rarely an attractive proposition.

Of course, there are a few haiku in each of these two anthologies that strike me as overly cerebral, overly obvious, or otherwise not entirely successful, and that’s typically my experience when reading the journals they’re drawn from. But my heart breaks a little sometimes when poets far more talented than me post about how excited they are to finally land a poem in some literary magazine synonymous with establishment stuffiness. I find the haiku journals, by contrast, full of fresh and exciting work that often evinces real knowledge of the natural world. And that’s an increasingly rare thing.

I was recently honored to have a poem of mine selected for an ekphrastic, geographically-themed book-arts project called Uncharted Territories, in cooperation with the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey. If you are in any position to make charitable donations, the group behind it has launched a fundraising campaign to cover printing, binding, etc., including honorariums to artists and poets. Here’s the prospectus:

Steamroller Group, in collaboration with the HUNTERDON ART MUSEUM and RIVER UNION STAGE invites a living dialogue among poets, printmakers and book artists in service of creating artwork that speaks to the relevant issues of our time. This project, the first in a proposed series, will incorporate imagery created by artists responding to the written word, using a variety of traditional printmaking techniques. Broadsides will be handbound into a limited-edition artist book and exhibited in a group exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ.

THEME:

“Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.” History of Cartography – Wikipedia

From the earliest maps carved into tusks and bones or painted on cave walls to Google Earth, maps have provided a guide to understand the physical world we inhabit. In recent years, as social media replaces journalism, physical maps have been replaced by navigation apps. Often, we have no idea where our bodies are located on this planet or what direction we are facing at any given moment. We now rely on a disembodied voice to tell us where to drive and when to turn. The big picture is obscured. We have once again become flat earthers. If you do not know where you are, how do you find your way? Can we find direction without a firm relationship with the ground on which we stand? Is our physical body relevant when most information is created by unknown or invented sources? Have we given up on self-navigation as we move through this ever-complicated world? Do we rely solely on technology to free us from the burden of charting our own territory?

PART I: POETRY

Steamroller Group has collaborated with Vasiliki Katsarou to curate a collection of 20 poems that explore ideas of navigation, being lost, being found.

PART II: PRINTS

Steamroller Group invites you to create a print in response to one of the selected poems. Each artist will be given one poem and is free to determine how that poem is visually interpreted. The artist will be responsible for producing an edition of 80 prints using traditional printmaking methods to fit into an allotted 9.5” x 8.5” space on the 9.5” x 13” paper provided. The artist may work alone or with a team / printshop to assist in printing their edition. (The artist will not be responsible for placing the text of the poem inside their graphic—the poem will be printed by the Steamroller Group via letterpress on the face of the broadside after the artist completes their edition.) There will be a kick-off event at HAM in June 2025 for the artist to collect the paper and one of the curated poems.

PART III: THE BOOK

Part III will entail the binding of the prints and poems into a limited-edition collaborative artist book using the individual broadsides of print and poetry. This will be done by Steamroller Group. Digital versions may be created and available for online purchasing.

The project will culminate with an exhibition of broadsides at HAM, Summer 2026.

Click through for the list of participating poets and artists.

Thanks in advance if you’re able to help out (and no worries if not — I can’t afford to donate myself).

That was certainly the case with each of these volumes. As an ecopoet, it was gratifying to share space with work that spoke to real issues I care about. I liked the field-guide aspect of A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, and loved the online component of Dear Human, hosted by the wonderful Wick Poetry Center.

But Keystone Poetry was the stand-out for me as a collection — an actual page-turner, I thought. And I seldom have that reaction to any anthology. But the editors, Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple, were experienced: they’d brought out an earlier anthology of Pennsylvania poets called Common Wealth 20 years ago, and that was also very good. Both anthologies avoid the trap of trying to be a definitive anthology of Pennsylvania poetry, by focusing on the state rather than on poetry per se, and looking for poems that capture it in all its cultural and geographical diversity. This is in fact how I got in, despite missing the regular submission deadline (because I had no idea the anthology was happening): they saw they needed more poets from my area, and asked my friend Todd Davis (also one of the editors of A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia) for recommendations. I sent along an older poem about an explosion from a limestone quarry, which turned out to be a good fit.

It was interesting seeing the presses’ differing approaches to promotion and intellectual property. University of Georgia Press acquired full rights, which was deeply upsetting — I’ve always been a big believer in open content, and share all my online work under a Creative Commons license, but it was too late to pull out by the time I learned about this arrangement. It was also the one poem I struggled to write, spending months on rewrites in a process completely alien to my normal way of writing, and I think it shows in the result, which strikes me as labored and wordy. So even if I do at some point get off my fundament and produce a Collected Poems, “Chestnut Oak” won’t be in it, so I won’t be forced to ask the press for reprint permission for my own work.

By contrast, “Father Roach,” the poem I wrote for the Dear Human anthology, came about unexpectedly, prompted by a friend’s late-night story and written in a couple of hours, in my usual way. As with so many human endeavors, the trick is to get out of one’s own way by trying not to try — philosopher Edward Slingerland’s deft interpretation of the ancient Chinese concept of wu-wei. Always easier said than done.

If you’re a beginning or (god help us) “emerging” poet, you may be saying to yourself, “Ah-ha! So he knew the editors somehow!” Yep, none of this is fair, and that’s just how the world works. One of the editors of Dear Human was Luisa Igloria, my co-author at Via Negativa. I can tell you, however, that I do not know the editors of the next anthology I’ll have work in, which I didn’t even have to submit to! The writing life is full of these little surprises, it seems. More on that when the time comes.

In the meantime, if you’d like to see why I’m raving about Keystone Poetry, you can order it from the publisher and get 30% off with the code NR25. And if you live anywhere in the Keystone State, consider buying a second copy to donate to your public or high school library. Here’s the publisher’s description:

From Philadelphia to Erie, and from the shale fields to the coal mines, Keystone Poetry celebrates the varied landscapes and voices of Pennsylvania. This collection brings together the work of 182 poets who, with keen eyes and powerful language, commemorate the hometowns, history, traditions, and culture of the Commonwealth.

Organized geographically, the poems traverse county lines, ancestral lineages, and thematic concerns—as well as gender, racial, and socioeconomic barriers. The poems in this collection seek to bring the reader close to home while fostering the discovery of new places and a deeper understanding of all those who live in the Keystone State.

Keystone Poetry also includes resources for teachers. Drawing from this collection of place-based literature, high school and college educators can use students’ hometown experiences to make disciplines such as literature, composition, creative writing, history, geography, sociology, political science, and psychology more engaging and accessible.

• To delve more deeply into class discussion, see “Let’s Talk About It,” a helpful aid for individual or group reflection.
• To fuel creativity, access “Let’s Write About It,” a practical guide to inspire writers of all levels.

link

I’ve settled into a routine of starting work on the erasures second thing in the morning, right after I come in from the porch. Most of the time this leads to a satisfactory poem in less than two hours, though there are occasions when I have to keep coming back to it throughout the day. Regardless, I always start by looking at what I came up with ten years earlier, and this year I’d say at least 75% of the time I’m able to reuse something from my first go-round.

It’s a real morale-booster to see how much progress I’ve made as an erasure poet over the past 12 years, though I sure don’t mind it when my earlier draft doesn’t need much work, and I hope to find a lot more instances of that in the coming year.

You can find the download links for all eight volumes compiled so far in the top-of-page description of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project at Via Negativa.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

I love this new videopoem by Belgian artist and composer Marc Neys. The fact that it’s based on one of my own poems is gravy.

Speaking of gravy, here’s a very meta few seconds of video I shot a month ago on a whim: a snippet from Marc’s previous adaptation, SOME FACTS ABOUT PARADISE, viewed at the very spot where I wrote the poem:

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.

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.

It’s always great to get on the local airwaves. Thanks, Todd.