iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

fireflies in my dream house there are no walls #haiku #monoku

Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

This morning's fun discovery: ichneumon parasitism of caterpillars used as a metaphor for ideological conversion in a 2000-year-old Confucian text.

from Yang Xiong, "Putting Learning into Practice," 19:1: "When the caterpillar dies and it encounters the wasp, the wasp prays over it, saying: 'Become like me, become like me.' After a while, it does come to resemble the wasp! How quickly did the seventy disciples come to resemble Kongzi!"

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

What it's all about for me. #writing #poetry #erasure www.vianegativa.us/2026/07/avoc...

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

the YouTube algorithm gets me

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Pleased and honored to have these very brief poems selected by two of my favorite online journals. This first was based on a real encounter sitting in the woods this spring (the fox never did see me). The second is not autobiographical but came from memories of the '90s.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Yesterday's dubious #erasure poem from @samuelpepys.bsky.social www.vianegativa.us/2026/05/dubi...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Our carnivalesque politics helped birth this latest #erasure from @samuelpepys.bsky.social www.vianegativa.us/2026/05/bark...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Today's erasure from @samuelpepys.bsky.social reminds me that the #erasure process is not entirely unsuited to the commposition of deeply personal lyric poems, like this one about the death of my father five years ago, which I've really struggled to write about. www.vianegativa.us/2026/05/for-...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

The latest erasure poem from Pepys www.vianegativa.us/2026/05/sett...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I’m imagining trying to explain to my 19-year-old self, when I picked up this collection of Shiki’s #haiku in a Kyoto bookshop back in 1986, that someday when I’d forgotten all my Japanese I’d be able to read it by pointing a phone at it

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Today’s erasure from Pepys (which borrows some ideas from the first draft of ten years ago) www.vianegativa.us/2026/04/brok...

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Today’s erasure poem from Pepys. This is kind of a nod to tradition—specifically the long tradition of poets saying obviously unhinged things about spring and/or change in general. www.vianegativa.us/2026/04/budb...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

I wasn’t going to try for a religious poem today (it wasn’t Holy Saturday in Pepys) but it kind of almost went there anyway www.vianegativa.us/2026/04/cons...

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Yesterday's #erasure poem from @samuelpepys.bsky.social www.vianegativa.us/2026/03/quag...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

This morning's #erasure #poem FWIW www.vianegativa.us/2026/03/folly/

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

'Pero él prefiere su estilo de vida Habita el sí que está dentro del no' —Ulalume González de León Inhabiting the yes inside of every no is precisely what I aspire to! I am liking González de León's metaphysics in Plagios. She’s more to my taste in that regard than her colleague Octavio Paz.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

And I mean it's not as if there aren't prophetic bits

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,

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I love having Pierre Joris' 2-volume Celan translation on the top shelf of my bookcase, as if it were the Bible itself

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Another year of Pepys' Diary, another free erasure poetry compilation: www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/u.... And if you’d like to download any of the other years, the links are all in the description at the top of the project’s homepage: www.vianegativa.us/category/poe....

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Today's erasure poem at Via Negativa. The Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28 or 29) commemorates the mass slaughter of infants ordered by King Herod in Matthew 2:16-18. www.vianegativa.us/2025/12/feas...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Can we older writers still take biblical literacy for granted? This morning for the first time i added a note to the bottom of a blog post explaining a biblical reference that, 25 years ago, I would’ve assumed any reasonably well-educated reader would catch. www.vianegativa.us/2025/12/gone...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

ashes ashes a kind of gauze over the gaze photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan • CC BY-SA 4.0 #haiku

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

My latest erasure poem appears to be in the voice of maybe an urban planner? You tell me. I just find 'em. www.vianegativa.us/2025/08/in-t...

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

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

One of the fun things about specializing in erasure poetry is that I often come up with poems that are a bit over my own head. Here's today's. www.vianegativa.us/2025/08/comm...

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

I feel like a declaration of martial law can't be too far off now

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

love this chyron from today's Breaking Points

MIKE JOHNSON USHERS IN 'RED HEIFER' APOCALYPSE

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

This is how to do a poet photo! via @robmclennan.bsky.social robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/07/12-o...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Today's erasure poem from @samuelpepys.bsky.social www.vianegativa.us/2025/07/fire...

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

reminding myself that not everything i write has to be relevant or address The Crisis in some way, that it's ok just to have fun in a poem www.vianegativa.us/2025/07/sake/

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

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Talk about a sense of vocation! Carolyn Forché on Swiss German writer Robert Walser, from blacklawrencepress.com/books/oppres...

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..

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

putting the sex into sexguttata

two tiger beetles of species Cicindela sexguttata having sex on a log

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Watching the sun come up over a Walmart from the window of a motel so characterless I don't even remember the name of it, somewhere near California

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

This spider on my porch just now: "Although the species was first described in 1842, females were first described in 1980.[3] This results from the male's behavior of wandering about in search of mates, while females, which reside in tubes, are rarely found." en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphodro...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Today's erasure poem from the Diary of Samuel Pepys: all alone in a chest I found a fine ship the war has little boys in fear of death but hope is old and thin a light in a well www.vianegativa.us/2025/06/salv...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

tell me a dead thing and I believe in that heat of discovery I would have a fish we bought it all the cheat and the war and the nothing but night tomorrow Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 4 June 1662. #erasure #poetry

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

www.levernews.com/thanks-to-tr...

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

A very good mail day! Grateful to eBay sellers who import new books from the UK. I've been reading Wendy Pratt's blog for several years, but this is the first collection of hers I've picked up, and it's excellent.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

I guess there's never been a better/worse time to promote my 2020 collection of #poetry FAILED STATE. The review is from Modern Haiku. davebonta.com/failed-state/

cover of a book with a photo of s DMV waiting room where the TV is showing flames, above the title , Failed State

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Looking forward to this sequel to Penn State Press's earlier anthology COMMONWEALTH. This time, one of my friends in academia remembered to tell me about it, and I guess they were short on poets from my area, so I'm in with a poem referencing limestone quarrying.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Twitter's Grok now does literary analysis of tweets with the click of a button. This is just the sort of fatuous, point-missing BS I can remember generating as a hung-over undergraduate student of comparative literature.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Today's erasure poem from @samuelpepys.bsky.social at Via Negativa www.vianegativa.us/2025/01/wint... in the fine clear frost this winter makes us I find my mind better spend less time lost

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

something I've been struggling to articulate. yes.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

from the ridgetop above my house, i can see three snow squalls, one to the east, one to the west, and one to the south. looks like the sun is shining off to the north. it's bitchin cold with a howling wind. i love it.

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Christmas bird count… learning every song of the wind

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Dave Bonta @davebonta.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Tosca kicks ass. I’ve never been the biggest Puccini fan, due to the absurd Orientalism of Madame Butterfly and Turandot, but this opera is a tautly told story firmly on the side of the people rebelling against a police state, and Lise Davidsen slayed in the title role today in the Met simulcast.

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