Here it is—my first word of Blog. Wait, that was it. There. Now, no. Slithery little beggar, that first word. Well, I guess there is no word, and no here.
When I read blogs, I always thought the blogger was right there—typing away.
“Sunny day, scalp itches, kettle’s whistling.” That’s the point, no?
Web Log. Date stamped. Drafty. Provisional. The Blogger Is In— or as much as could be downloaded—which turns out, by fantastical coincidence, to be the same dosage found in non-blog writing.
Writing, says I, takes time. No, not takes: Consumes. Lays Waste to. It is to time as Kong is to a banana. And the worst is poetry.
In a poem the poet situates themselves. In a blog, the reader does so. You peruse this on a certain morning, (or 17.5 seconds of it—the average blog read) munching your cereal and banana, and I attest it was composed close to that day. We agree to breakfast contemporaneously, to the extent that our shared fruit deprives you and I of the same natural light.
But beyond that, no guarantees for the week. For all I know, what we are reading on Monday, December 8, 2014, may have been dunked in Styx, not Trix. But whenever it takes place, I'd like us to join a dialogue among genres.
Here's the cover of a new book coming out this Spring from Etruscan, a dialogue between Bruce Bond, a poet, and Aron Wiesenfeld, an artist. It’s called The Other Sky.
In his introduction to The Other Sky, Stephen Dunn writes, "Aron Wiesenfeld’s paintings have a haunting clarity and odd beauty, and Bruce Bond is a gifted lyric poet. Between the two artists is a kind of call and response. The paintings invite speculation, and thus the lyric poet is driven to imagine and tell the stories that are behind them. In other words, Wiesenfeld activates in Bond the narrative poet. The result is a rare collaboration of sensibilities. Both artists seemingly hide nothing from us, one with a kind of photographic sureness, the other with syntactical precision. Both like to be clear about the mysterious."
Here is a paired image by Aron Weisenfeld and poem by Bruce Bond from The Other Sky.
The Delta
If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet.
You are not you anymore.
You are a girl standing in a pool
of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.
There are laws of heaven and those of place and those
who see the sky in the water,
angels in ashes that are the delta’s now.
They say if you sweep the trash from your house
after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are
going by foot, bring a stick,
a third leg, and honor the great disorder,
the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.
Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there
is a little water in things
you take for granted, a little charity
and squalor for the smallest forms of life.
Voodoo was always mostly charity.
People forget. If you shake a tablecloth
outside at night, someone in your family dies.
There are laws we make thinking
it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a
floodplain by the Mississippi
that once poured slaves upriver to the fields.
We are a hurricane in the making.
We could use a magus who knows something about
suffering, who knows a delta’s needs.
We understand if you want a widow
to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes.
He is not himself anyway and walks
barefoot across a landscape that has no north.
Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog,
a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind,
a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless,
than you will ever be.
--Bruce Bond
And for another dialogue among genres, here is a radio interview I did about the oral tradition and the small press world with Erika Funke of Wilkes-Barre NPR.
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