Poetry Month: Problematizical by Dave Bonta

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Problematizical

Up, and to the office, where busy all the morning, and then at noon to the ’Change with Mr. Hater, and there he and I to a tavern to meet Captain Minors, which we did, and dined; and there happened to be Mr. Prichard, a ropemaker of his acquaintance, and whom I know also, and did once mistake for a fiddler, which sung well, and I asked him for such a song that I had heard him sing, and after dinner did fall to discourse about the business of the old contract between the King and the East India Company for the ships of the King that went thither, and about this did beat my brains all the afternoon, and then home and made an end of the accounts to my great content, and so late home tired and my eyes sore, to supper and to bed.

which to be
a ropemaker or a sun

the old East India Company
or the rains

no end of accounts
to tire my yes

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 25 January 1668.

Author: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) often suffers from imposter syndrome, but not in a bad way — more like some kind of flower-breathing dragon, pot-bellied and igneous. 

 

Be that as it may, all of his writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the "share alike" provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).

 

 Published in Via Negativa 

 

Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead. Dave Bonta founded the site in 2003 and Luisa A. Igloria joined seven years later. Guest authors contribute as well. Both poets are based in the eastern United States, at least part of the year: Dave in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, when he isn’t in London, and Luisa in the Tidewater area of Virginia, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. Dave writes, among other things, daily erasure poems from the 17th-century diary entries of the odious but fascinating Mr. Samuel Pepys, while Luisa has been writing and posting a poem a day since November 2010, often in response to Dave’s posts here or at The Morning Porch.