Dave Bonta's utilitarian odes - Rachel Barenblat

Dave Bonta is prolix. He posts a lot of poems to his blog, Via Negativa. (Here's one from this week: October dusk.) He also podcasts. And he's author of the recently-published Odes to Tools (Phoenicia Publishing, 2010), a chapbook of poems which speak to, and for, the contents of his workshop. Here's one of those odes:

Ode to a Socket Wrench

Better than all power tools
is the socket wrench:

its accommodating nature
its chrome-plated steel
its handling of torque.

It can make a complete revolution
from the smallest arc

& as if time could turn
in either direction
with the click of a lever

the past screwed down
the future loose

a spring-loaded finger
clicks against
the gearwheel’s teeth.

In Bonta's hands, the most prosaic items -- a claw hammer, a shovel, a bucket -- are elevated, their hidden humanity revealed. Every now and then he rhapsodizes about a tool which isn't strictly utilitarian -- his "Ode to a Musical Saw" offers the couplet "no longer restricted to the harsh / amens of service," which I love -- but most often he writes about the basic things you might find in an average garage workshop. The titling of these poems is surely a nod to Pablo Neruda, and the comparison doesn't go amiss.

What makes these poems work is their juxtaposition of mundane objects with breathtaking leaps of imagery. "Ode to a Compass" describes the compass as "shiny & dangerous, / a headless ballerina / with one wooden leg." Now that I've read that, I'll never see the scribing of a compass the same way. At their best, that's what these poems offer -- new eyes through which to see old and familiar things.

One of Bonta's other projects is the literary journal Qarrtsiluni, about which I'll say more later this week. Though I'll mention now that one of the things I like about Qarrtsiluni is their embrace of audio in addition to print. True to form, Bonta's released an audio file of himself reading the whole chapbook, all 25 glorious odes, which is online here. [mp3]

What do you work with? Could you write such poems to the everyday objects of your trade?

(If you like Bonta's poems, pick up the chapbook -- on the publisher's webpage there's a link to their online store; a copy costs a mere $6.95 -- and support a small independent press while you're at it.)