Uncharted Territories

Posted on June 12, 2025June 12, 2025 Posted in PublicationsTagged Hunterdon Art Museum, River Union Stage, Steamroller Group, Uncharted TerritoriesLeave a comment

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 In recent years, as social media replaces journalism, physical maps have been replaced by navigation apps.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).

Anthologized

Posted on June 8, 2025 Posted in PublicationsTagged A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, anthologies, Dear Human on the Edge of Time, Keystone PoetryLeave a comment

Each year since 2023, I’ve had a poem in a different anthology, starting with Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (voted “Best Poetry Anthology” in the American Book Fest’s annual Best Book Awards); last year’s A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia; and now Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. While such experiences might be par for the course for less outsider-y poets, it’s new to me, and I can’t help compare the experience to being published in magazines, which is often kind of a let-down, given the semi-ephemeral quality of even a print journal, which just seems destined for the trash at some point. Submitting to an anthology offers the possibility of a collection I’ll actually enjoy owning and reading.

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

Diving into the Wreck

Posted on February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 Posted in Stuff1 Comment

the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun

Adrienne Rich’s powerful poem is more necessary than ever. There is so much wreckage — and so much need for divers. Don’t despair, my writer and artist friends. There’s still a lot worth salvaging.

Vocation

Posted on February 1, 2025February 1, 2025 Posted in WritingLeave a comment

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.

Like a nest of shadows

Posted on January 28, 2025January 28, 2025 Posted in Stuff, WritingTagged erasure poetry2 Comments

A print in snow of a bird of prey's wing feathers and body from where it dove after some small prey animal.

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?

Pepys Diary Erasure Project, Vol. 2: 1661

Posted on December 31, 2024December 31, 2024 Posted in Publications, WritingTagged PepysLeave a comment

Another year of Pepys erasures rolled up into a free PDF. And before New Year’s for the second year in a row—a testament to my greater discipline this time around.

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.

Keeping up with myself

Posted on November 13, 2024November 14, 2024 Posted in MetaTagged WordPressLeave a comment

Some weirdness during the update to a new WordPress version today, in which the front page content wouldn’t show until I monkeyed around with the database, caused me to give the page a critical look when I did finally get it back. The problem is, with the 17″ laptop screen I’m using these days, the project thumbnails go four across rather than three, as on my notebook, and I only had nine of them. Time to add three more, which wasn’t hard: I’d never had one for Moving Poems (d’oh!), the Plummer’s Hollow website, or my half-hour compilation of videohaiku, Crossing the Pond. Fixed.

I do still really like this approach to an author site. Writers who focus mainly on traditional publication can get by with a simple biography plus books list, and I envy that. But I’ve always divided my time between different kinds of pursuits and I like representing that visually in a way that suggests order and balance when in reality, of course, chaos prevails.

When I first started thinking about a redesign of this site, back around 2017, I pictured a front page with a large single image of me in the woods. The problem with such images is that they include many, many pixels; it’s hard to scale down a forest shot so it loads quickly. But for some reason I thought I needed visual unity, and I was even prepared to capitulate to society’s focus on the poet rather than the poetry, which I’d always resisted. Now I’m glad I dragged my feet on that, because I like this slight decentering of the author on his own page. There are many things that matter to me, and here are some of them.

I’m no Whitman, but I do embrace a small multitude. We converse daily.

Self-assessment

Posted on June 10, 2024June 10, 2024 Posted in Politics, Stuff

To truly be a good person, you have to have low standards. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say a friend shows you an utterly terrible poem that they have just written. You have to be able to read that terrible poem and, because it was written by someone you care about, focus in on the one thing about it you like, and let that one little bit of radiance suffuse the whole poem, so you can say to your friend with utmost sincerity, this is wonderful.

I am not a good person.

Still moving

Posted on May 12, 2024May 12, 2024 Posted in Web workTagged Moving Poems, SiteOrigin, WordPress8 Comments

Back from the dead! It feels strangely personal like that to me, this undertaking I’ve been involved in for two weeks now after I inadvertently destroyed the web magazine Moving Poems, which had begun the way so many good things do, on a whim and an impulse, became far more influential than I’d ever expected or even perhaps wanted, and died in a moment of panic. Here’s the video I featured long ago in its very first post:

Moving Poems was actually two interlinked websites, one for the extensive library of poetry videos, the other for news and opinion pieces about the international poetry film and videopoetry scene. Between them, they had garnered several thousand posts from more than 40 contributors since I founded the site on the day before my birthday in 2009. The main site had gotten infected with malware, and I paid someone to clean it up and thought the problem was solved a month ago, but the hackers had already taken over its companion site and by the time I figured this out had effectively seized control of it. In my panicked reaction, I managed to correctly export all the posts from the news side, but I deleted the database for the main site. Gone!

For the next 24 hours or so I just walked around in a daze. But once I accepted the gravity of the situation and all but gave up hope, solutions began to suggest themselves to me — solutions that still involved several days of manual data entry, but because I am an utter slob and never clean out my email inbox, I was able to recover several years of lost posts from the weekly MailChimp newsletter that’s automatically generated from the RSS feed. That was after figuring out how to wrest control of a four-year-old backup of the site from the proprietary software I’d used to migrate it to its now-former, disastrous web host. Fortunately, there are a hell of a lot of forums out there where geeks are very generous with their time. Thanks to them, I was able to recover the site.

In recent days, I’ve been cheered to discover that the WordPress theme we’ve been using for the main site since 2012, the Origami theme from a small shop called SiteOrigin, has recently been revived and updated—I hadn’t been getting the updates simply because I was using a discontinued premium version—so any security concerns that I had had about continuing to use a potentially compromised theme pretty much vanished.

SiteOrigin appears to make much of their revenue by selling a premium version of their WordPress page-building plugin, which has been fairly widely adopted, apparently—a number of other theme developers have built themes designed to work with it. My main concern is that it remain under active development so the developers live long and prosper and I can keep using the same goddamn theme forever, because like nearly every aging person I am tired of continual upheaval for novelty’s sake, simply because a carnival economy must continually generate new circus tricks.

But yeah, page builders! Never used one before, but here’s a case where I had to learn a new thing in order to continue having an old thing. In order to fully merge the video library and the magazine into one, coherent website, I knew I needed to keep the two separate for browsing and indexing purposes, which in WordPress terms means one database, two loops. Hand-coding this in php would’ve required me properly learning php and I’ve always been too lazy to do that. But then I learned that the new full-site editor in WordPress included a query loops block, so I spent a day flailing around and trying to teach myself how to use one of the new themes, only to find the next day that I couldn’t get the site editor to load for me at all! After a day of trying everything, including contacting the geeks at my hosting company, I gave up.

And it was only when I gave up that I realized that I could do all this with the SiteOrigin page builder. The next day, a WordPress bug fix and security update solved my issue with their obviously buggy new full-site editor, but I went the SiteOrigin route anyway and have mostly been having a blast in the days since. The new architecture required two new, top categories in the hierarchical native indexing system; once I’d done that, it was easy to construct a new front page with a carousel-style slider for the latest News and Views posts, followed by a full-column selection of the five most recent posts from the Video Library, with pages for each archive in the top menu bar alongside an index, which includes three native taxonomies we’ve always used to further categorize the videos by poet, filmmaker, and nationality of poet. My dad was a reference librarian. The apple may not have fallen too far from the tree.

The latest major WordPress update included a ton of free web fonts, so I spent a happy day playing with them until I realized that I’d best go with the boring Noto Sans font for the headings, because Moving Poems post titles sometimes include characters in non-Latin alphabets (for videos in foreign languages with English subtitles, such as this one) and Noto is by far the most internationalized family of Google web fonts. I badly wanted to use my favorite Google display font, Josefina Sans, but I’d already put that to good use in my Woodrat photohaiku blog, so I’ll just have to be satisfied with that. For the title font, I think I’ve settled on a very lightweight version of the same font I was using before, which is called Oswald—the contrast with 700-weight Noto Sans is pleasing to my eye.

I can’t deny I’ve been having fun, at least for the past five days or so, after it became clear I’d be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do at the site, but had put off because I thought it would be way too much work. And perhaps it has been, but we’ve been blessed with a string of rainy days so I suppose I’ve put them to fairly good use. Inputting the last four years of posts one by one at the beginning of the month, when the weather was warm and mostly gorgeous, felt like necessary penance for my carelessness and dereliction of duty as a web publisher, by not taking security more seriously and not having regular, scheduled backups. I hope I’ve learned these lessons well enough to preserve Moving Poems and my other websites until such time as I can gracefully retire. I’ve been grateful for the kindness and support of Moving Poems’ other contributors and readers.

It’s been kind of revelatory to see how much of my identity is wrapped up in web publishing. Just because I’ve managed to avoid the career treadmill doesn’t mean I’m entirely free of that quintessential American equation of self-worth with what I do: post stuff on the web and write poetry. No wonder I feel as if I’ve brought myself back from the dead.