Well deck the halls and call it a holiday! A terrifying new age of the self-repairing machine is nearly upon us and I persist in writing haiku and obscure erasure poems, published mainly on my own blogs. I persist, in other words, in the face of full-on Christian authoritarianism verging on fascism, as a dilettante nature poet and backwoods flaneur. Which sounds unusual unless you’ve ever been to the Appalachians. This is a region that seems to specialize in weirdos of all descriptions, and I am proud to be one of them. I suppose as residents of a national sacrifice area, people develop an especially acute sense of our existential precarity: Rust-Belt rejects, spare parts for broken-down engines. And regardless, here in the United States of America, to live in any place for too long makes you weird. Where’s your ambition?! The Treasury Secretary says that if we can’t afford to live where we live, we can simply move elsewhere. But if there’s one thing fascists hate, it’s anything and anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. To them, a drone that acts as its own mechanic sounds absolutely brilliant, despite or perhaps because of its obvious disincentives for keeping humans around. This is a time for makers everywhere to rebel against the suffocating conformity driven by algorithms and an ecocidal, xenophobic police state. In 2026, I intend to double down on all the sorts of things that machines will never learn to do. In other words, I suppose, I resolve to be as human as humanly possible, and I invite you to join me in what seems like an extremely modest and achievable goal: simply continuing, against all odds, to be odd. Happy Holidays.

Almost any block of expressive English-language prose I’ve ever examined can be found to include one or more poems containing some reasonably sound and original insight, metaphor, or word-play. This is so persistently amazing to me as their discoverer that I am tempted to speculate that truths about the human condition might actually be encoded within the language itself!

But then I come down to earth and remember that this maybe only works because English grammar is so stripped-down and flexible. It’s worth speculating in how many other languages erasure poetry would even be feasible for more than a few heroic, novelty efforts. I refer to this suitability for erasure poetry as shlang, a word embedded in the phrase English language. A highly inflected language such as Russian could be said to have little shlang, whereas one with no real declensions and verbs that can be left out might have moderate to high levels of shlang, presuming the writing system is (or in the case of Japanese, can be) phonetic rather than symbolic.

Nevertheless, the mental model of discovery or sculpture rather than production ex nihilo offers, to me, a much more realistic sense of what it is we’re actually doing when we engage in any kind of creative writing: playing within preexisting mental and linguistic frameworks, even as we push to “make it new.” That wondrous feeling of rightness you get when you’re in the zone and hit upon some new-to-you formulation: if it feels as if it comes from outside you, that’s because it does, however thoroughly you’ve internalized the rhythms and patterns of the language, so that they seem as natural as your breathing and the normally unheard beat of your pulse.

And then there’s the way we read when we’re in writing mode, with full attention and the temporary submersion of the ego to the flow of words. I’m trying to make that my baseline for all the poetry reading I do. It’s actually not terribly difficult, compared to the effort of attentively reading a more workmanlike block of prose with an eye out for shlang. As usual, St. Emily said it best:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

the world is still radiant
gold threading a velvet Elvis

tufted titmice and dark-eyed juncos
foraging under conifers

a shy red squirrel making
a high-pitched growl at me

Dad’s gravestone with a gory fresh
garland of songbird feathers

the gift of the present
can never be kept

but only gestured toward
or danced or sung

and in return one can only
for a while remain present

and find a few words
to delight other ears

I am a poet—which is to say, a deliberate simpleton. 

A poet is the opposite of a seer. An unseer, if you like. A false prophet. 

The central purpose of poetry isn’t to persuade, but to enchant. A poem’s pronouncements should be taken as seriously as the pronouncements of the wren in your garden. 

Beware of poems about ‘ah ha!’ moments. The challenge is to produce such a moment for the reader or listener, not merely to describe one. The good news is that ordinary language is brimful of such moments for those who really learn how to listen. It’s a kind of magic, how rhythm and word-music alone can coax new growth from the language’s root metaphors.

Through song, through saying, through story and play, the ageless myth passes from mouth to mouth.

The best thing about my erasure poetry practice is that it allows me to exceed my own abilities as a poet on a fairly regular basis. Take today’s poem:

music ended
like a nest of shadows

we hear simply
the night

I still don’t quite understand this, and therefore I feel confident that, left to my own devices, it would never have occurred to me to write it. But I love its elusiveness. It has the quality of some of the Eastern European poetry I most admire, somehow simultaneously playful and glum.

And no doubt it’s in part thanks to my scattershot reading of poetry in translation that I was able to recognize this as a poem in the first place. But the relative briefness of the source material severely limited my options: that’s key to the success of this poem. I’ve had so many similar results from shorter entries over the past 12+ years of this project, that it’s made me more cautious in how I indulge myself with the longer entries, too, slowly building new quirk-recognizing muscles.

Here’s what I made from the same entry ten years ago:

After music,
the painter at last
is like an honest shadow
angry to hear of night.

Nice effort, earlier me. But you clearly have little idea what you’re doing yet. Therefore you’re overcompensating by trying too hard.

You need to work on letting go of your own authority in this shared authorship. Why should only Pepys get erased, and not yourself as well?

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.

Avoiding the whole po biz scene as I do might seem brilliant to an outsider, but it does mean there’s a lot of pretty basic stuff I’ve had to work out on my own. For example—and this is always a big one for me—why bother to put my work out there at all? Since the writing itself is what gives me so much joy, why not just live for that?

Well, it occurred to me just the other day that while I may not need an audience, the work does. It needs that appreciative Hmmm! or that doubtful Hmmm. Because avoiding self-satisfaction is absolutely essential in order to safeguard what skill I’ve managed to build up. I mean, that’s the task of every serious artist, isn’t it? To remain critical of one’s own work without losing awareness of its quality. And it’s hard to maintain a realistic sense of the work’s quality without at least occasional feedback.

Also, I owe it to the creative energies that produced it to share the work widely, because such energies feed off of conviviality; it’s in my own interest as an artist to keep the virtuous cycle going. It’s a leap of faith, of course, and sometimes feels about as meaningful as writing my poems in the snow with a stick.

Although that can be meaningful, too, if you’re a child walking home from school and you write messages in the snow of your driveway for your father to read when he drives home. Years later, Dad told me those were some his favorite memories from raising kids.

It helps to know your audience.

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 my filthy, bird-safe windows, especially when they’re being caressed by cedar-tree shadows on St. Lucy’s Day. The antique bottles are there so I can still savor the look of light through glass, and are of an age with the old springhouse in the dirt-mediated view they frame. The one on the right lies on its side because its bottom is round; it was made to serve as ballast in a sailing ship. They are green because of the presence of iron oxide, considered an impurity. Glassmakers went to great lengths to remove it so they could achieve the sought-after clarity, only to decide a century later that colored glass was better for preserving the contents of the bottle from the harmful effects of ultraviolet and infrared light. But the process they settled on in the interim generated initially clear bottles that slowly turned purple with age. When my brothers and I were kids, we collected whiskey bottles of this type from the old farm dump and all over the mountain, and I still sometimes find shards of purple glass out in the woods, disinterred by frost heave, and think about the lives of those who left them there—colliers, quarrymen, loggers, hunters, hard-working sorts living on the margins of society and doing what they knew to give the hard hours a bit of a glow. Because life can be pretty fucking grim, you know? They say between 365 and 988 million songbirds die each year in the U.S. from flying into glass windows so clean they can’t distinguish their reflections from reality. They simply haven’t evolved to process images in that way. Meanwhile, we humans are drowning in a similarly unnatural stream of images of our own volition. Yesterday after supper my mother and I were comparing notes on our respective grieving processes (for Dad, for the earth) and I said something like, every day I don’t wake up bleeding out in the wreckage of my home in an open-air prison is ultimately a good day, and Mom said yes, exactly that. There’s no escaping the imperial blowback; I’ve been expecting it all my life: the retreat into warring camps, the rise of authoritarianism, the quiet setting aside of the First Amendment ‘for our own protection’ from the barbarian hordes… it’s here. I’m sticking to my guns as a pacifist and free-speech absolutist. But I do notice in myself an increasing suspicion of our story-telling instinct, seeing so many people with seemingly unimpeachable faculties of perception and analysis, as certified by multiple institutions of higher learning, fall for the most absurd fabrications because they’re well told, they like/trust the teller, and it reconfirms them in some strongly held prejudice about scary Others. Few are willing to abandon their screens, leave the house, and exercise their brains and bodies in the open air. For prisoners or inhabitants of concentration camps, of course, that isn’t even an option. And I’m guessing we will soon reach a point when it will be hazardous to do so nearly everywhere, whether because of dangerously high temperatures, smoke from wildfires, or new tick- and mosquito-borne diseases. Someday I may have to wash my windows so I can enjoy the outside from inside, and learn how to construct seductive story-lines instead of erasure poems and haiku. But right now, engaging with the world through lyric poetry feels like a healthier response. Through all the tumult and the strife, as the old folk poem puts it, how can I keep from singing?