Why this work? Its language is admirably concrete, with recurring words and turns of phrase shaped by the exigencies of Pepys’ original shorthand. In thought and content it stands at the beginning of the modern era: the first truly confessional piece of literature by a man equally fascinated by religion and science, and whose curiosity encompassed everything from music-making and theater to mathematics, accounting, politics, fashion, and carnal pleasures. And last but not least, the 1899 Wheatley edition is available online in a website that is really a model for how to present literature on the web. It was my desire to read it day by day that led to this project, which I view not as erasure but as discovery—a kind of deep (mis)reading. Pepys was a sexual predator and an architect of British colonialism who personally profited off the slave trade, so any less than an engaged, critical reading of the diary, in this day and age, would be irresponsible. From a secret diary, these are the secret poems hidden even from the author himself.

I began compiling the erasures into free ebooks in 2017. Here are 1664, 1665, 1666, 1667, 1668 and 1669. From my second go-round starting in 2023, here are 1660 and 1661.

Visit Via Negativa to subscribe to the daily email digest (which also includes Virginia poet laureate Luisa A. Igloria’s brilliant daily poems) using the form in the sidebar, or simply browse the Pepys Diary Erasure Project archive.

Additional video/film versions of my erasures include my Carnival and Arsonist; Anatomy by Marie Craven; and 5 X Samuel Pepys by Marc Neys aka Swoon.

Once a week, I spend a day trawling through the poetry blogs and compiling a digest at Via Negativa (archives here), and since mid-2023, also at a dedicated blog on Substack called ReVerse. While I can of course only read a small selection of the blogs that are out there, I try to keep things varied, in terms of content as well as geographical origin, though most of the English-language poets I follow are either in the US, the UK or Canada. As someone who’s never really believed in nation-states, I’m happy to do my part to help bring poets together and build international poetry community and solidarity. I’ve appreciated the assistance of the Poetry Blogging Network listing hosted on Kelli Russell Agodon’s blog, as well as UK blogger Matthew Stewart’s regular reviews of British poetry blogs at his site, Rogue Strands.

I tend to compile the digest in one sitting, in 4-6 hours, and publish on Monday late afternoon EST.

Since 2008, a daily microblog from my front porch while I caffeinate in the mornings. I don’t think of it as poetry, really, though plenty of readers take it that way: present-tense observations, kept as succinct as possible, with an emphasis on nature because of where I live. Pick up a free email subscription in the sidebar at morningporch.com if you’d like them in your inbox. Otherwise, you can simply follow me on Mastodon where I cross-post. Welsh artist Clive Hick-Jenkins let me use a crop from one of his paintings for the header.

For many years, I adhered to Twitter’s 140-charcter limit, but when that doubled I slowly began allowing myslef to write somewhat longer entries. I still keep most of them below 150, though.

One fun feature is the “on this day” archive, where visitors to the site can compare all the observations I’ve made on a given day of the year. Here, for example, is August 17:

Sun in the treetops. A doe and her fawn are consuming the future of the forest, one oak or tulip poplar seedling at a time. The doe burps.
2008

Dawn fog lifts and pauses, so it’s clear to a height of ten feet, then white, then the crescent moon. A red-bellied woodpecker’s slow chant.
2009

When I move my head, the hummingbird darts in for a closer look, leveling her long samurai bill at my neck, my ear, my glasses.
2010

A male and female goldfinch glean seeds from a tall bull thistle. She eats in silence while he in his loud yellow suit chatters on and on.
2011

A hummingbird sits on the tip of one of the dead cherry’s few remaining twigs, like a fat green leaf with the stem pointing the wrong way.
2012

Five nuthatches land in the walnut tree and begin scuttling up and down its trunk in the pouring rain, poking and probing the furrowed bark.
2014

Still cool at sunrise. A large beetle zooms past. Faint noise from the highway. The desultory calls of a red-eyed vireo.
2015

A yellow tulip tree leaf lies face-down on the porch floor. Nearby, an assassin bug crouches like a martial artist when I move my foot.
2016

Sunrise hidden by clouds. Towhee and cardinal’s usual soliloquies. A mosquito sings her need into my ear.
2021

The sun finally struggles out by midmorning. Rain-dampened vegetation glistens like a salamander’s skin.
2022

Sunrise filling every cloud’s belly with pink as the Carolina wren trills over and over—once for each cloud, it seems.
2023

During the Covid pandemic, I returned to my childhood love of long walks. I don’t count my steps or anything like that; it’s primarily about being outside for at least four hours a day, to such an extent that I’ve acquired a notebook computer and an internet hotspot so I can do most of my web work in the woods when it’s nice out. But the exercise, it turns out, really helps my aging brain stay engaged. My phone has become my primary notebook as well as my camera for both still photos and video, and I soon developed a new approach to composing poetry that has me working en plein air. Strongly influenced by haiku and renga, as well as my increasingly minimalist erasure poetry, these are nevertheless free verse, almost invariably in couplets. I tend to make them with an eye to sharing on Instagram and Facebook, where pretty pictures generally guarantee an audience. Some but not all of the photos get included when I post the poems to Via Negativa, where you can find them posted under Nature/Ecology.

I like to tell people I’m engaged in ecopoetic mapping—a fancy way of saying I’m writing poems about all my favorite local places (and some farther afield), and hope eventually to present them on a dedicated webpage with an interactive map, in addition to one or more printed collections, if I can find a way to keep costs down on full-color printing.

Here’s a film based on one of my walking poems from early spring, by my friend Marc Neys, a Belgian composer, artist and filmmaker.

Fundamentally, I suppose, this project represents an attempt to account for the miraculous, which is all around us if we care to see.