Dave Bonta

@davebonta.bsky.social

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Poet and web publisher from the northern tip of southern Appalachia specializing in erasure poetry, ecopoetry, videopoetry and modern haiku. Books include Ice Mountain: An Elegy; Failed State: Haibun; and Breakdown: Banjo Poems. https://davebonta.com

An erasure poem from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 6 July 1663, selecting this text: up early writing out of pleasure how the words find a design in my thought and the way to a morning’s dark music
down under repair our own little dish and the time again gone to little purpose I believe in little in a little green yard where night will call things into question
Erasure poem text: a sandwich for dinner in a car park there is a test every day on how to live a quiet which neither ear can ever own
photo of a page with this text: IV THE IN-EAR-DEVICE sprouts a bloom, you are its year, you are dis- cussed by the tongueless world, one in six knows this. ————— THE HALFGNAWED pennant devours all lands away from the sea, all seas away from the land,
A block of greyed-out text with selected words in black comprising a new text, given also in proper, lineated form below the source text: my word for god is hope bless me in my dirt my work will be to walk in the way of the wicked I take the city train god preserve us into my bed
they renounce the brother
nobody knows and lock
the doors to heaven I believe in the crowd
but the crowd only believe
in fashion what is required of us
is to know this world
and not a fur of words I walk a little
on my bread and cheese
a careful fly
the newly gilded Oval Office
MIKE JOHNSON USHERS IN 'RED HEIFER' APOCALYPSE
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 13 July 1662. The text: "yesterday is my church and tomorrow my hole I long to speak my mind to a stone some discourse of management in our office of fire
Erasure poem from the Diary of Samuel Pepys from 8 July 1662: Saké after dinner I make up a god give the war an old boot to eat I am anyone with saké I work till daylight
The sequence is unclear to me, but it seems that after periods of drinking and depression, his sister urged him to enter a mental sanatorium in Waldau, and although doctors couldn't agree on a diagnosis, finally settling on schizophrenia, he would live incarcerated in mental hospitals in Waldau and later Herisau for a quarter of a century, until his death. He spent his days at menial tasks such as sorting beans and making paper bags; he read magazines and took long walks, especially at night. He declined a room of his own, choosing to sleep in the asylum barracks. Although he showed no outward signs of mental illness, he refused to live in the world again, and when asked by a visitor about his writing, he famously answered: "I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad." The later poems are dated from 1924 to 1933, spanning the years..
two tiger beetles of species Cicindela sexguttata having sex on a log
A passage from the Diary of Samuel Pepys with the text grayed out except for selected words, which form the following poem: "we in the sea know / whether to be otherwise // things of night / bells of fire or arrival // but an indifferent heart / is a luxury"
cover of a book with a photo of s DMV waiting room where the TV is showing flames, above the title , Failed State
mouse, squirrel, and deer tracks in one small patch of snow
screenshot of the beginning of a poem called “Animal, vegetable, mineral, mist”
screenshot of a selection from the Diary of Samuel Pepys presented both as greyout poetry and as a an erasure poem reading "all the sun for myself / a pie I never tasted // I am captain of this day / enough to wing it"
erasure poem derived from the Diary of Samuel Pepys for 13 March 1661: ear to the sea a grammar of home and joy father and mother till weary and away to my paper-thin bed