multimedia poet from the sticks
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earth Day: what a bizarre concept! How sad that we need to put a day on the calendar to recognize the ground we stand on, the matrix without which we are nowhere and nothing. That said, it has made me reflect this morning on time and the uses to which we put it, as our civilization—a cross between a death cult and a Ponzi scheme—consumes ever more of everything.
Over the past month I’ve been spending more time on web work than I have in years, re-learning WordPress in the course of building a whole new website to welcome people to our square mile of mountain land. Poems have been far fewer as a result, but I don’t mind: it feels like necessary work. As a long-time blogger, writing in public helps me think out a new approach to land management and public relations. But this project wouldn’t have come together in the way it has without all those daily walks I’ve been taking, which have helped me work out a vision for Plummer’s Hollow over the past two years.
How does that happen, exactly? What is it about going for a walk that helps clear out the mental underbrush? The connection between literal and figurative path-finding seems real. And when you are writing about the place where you‘re walking, inspiration starts to feel as literal as an in-drawn breath.
I think the homepage is more or less finished now, if you’d like to go visit. It’s, um, a bit more text-heavy than most website homepages, but you know me. We’ll be using the blog not just for news (its current label in the navigation menu) but to flesh out conservation ideas as well. Pick up a free subscription if that sort of thing interests you.
One thing I never anticipated about growing older is how attached I would become to ordinary possessions, how reluctant I am to replace things that genuinely need to be replaced. I tell myself that this is rational behavior: manufacturing is in a terrible state, that’s not my imagination! Whatever new thing I get will almost undoubtedly be worse. But, like, this perfectly ordinary pair of scissors that I’ve been using to trim my beard and mustache once or twice a week for the past 30 years is getting so dull now that it causes me actual physical pain, yet I still can’t bear the thought of replacing it. Fundamentally, I guess I just don’t hold with the passing of time. It’s wrong and I don’t like it.