Sherry Chandler

Anniversaries

It’s ours, today, but it’s also the anniversary of the first publication of Walden.

In which spirit you might want to read:

“Off the Grid”: The growing appeal of going off the grid

America Goes Dark

What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life

Failed State

To ‘cast or not to ‘cast

At DMX Zone, Linda Goin asks the question, Why Use Audio in Your Blog?

In the context of her article, she makes these observations:

To hear a poet read his own words is like watching an artist explain all the elements and principles of design in a painting or illustration.

. . .

Unless poetry can be made accessible through sight and sound, poetry and the poet could easily slide into oblivion, marking modern and historic poets less accessible than fossils.

Linda highlights several blogs and web sites where poetry and audio are joyfully melded, and I might mention that she gives a very nice plug both to Sheri L. Wright’s radio broadcast From the Inkwell — I love this statement about Sheri:

Her blog doesn’t reflect her poetry as much as her trains of thought – and some of those trains are powerful, with locomotives that could push you back a few feet with the blow-back from their passing.

— and also specifically to my interview with Sheri, which is available in the archives. In that interview, I talk about my enthusiasm for poetry podcasts.

And, by the way, you can find some audio files of me reading poems linked from my poetry page. Here for example, and here, and here, and one of my favorites here. And leave us not forget my own reading at qarrtsiluni (see below).

Linda also provides several links to how-to files on creating podcasts, so I suggest you click on over and give her article a read.

You might also want to read Dave Bonta’s Literary podcasting made simple with WordPress.com

Dave is an editor at qarrtsiluni, an online magazine that publishes a podcast along with the text of the poems they feature. Lately, he’s been reading the print edition of their Economy issue, and he fell to contemplating the effect of hearing those poets read:

I continue to feel that the combination of text and audio players on the same virtual page is a wonderful thing, even if not every author is the best interpreter of her own work. . . .

I might not have remembered every nuance of every poem and story in the Economy issue, but to my surprise and amusement I did remember many of the poets’ voices, and heard them in my head as I read through the print edition. Of course, a Scottish accent is pretty memorable for a Yank like me, but I found I remembered the accents of many of the other poets too: Alex Cigale’s precise consonants, Tom Sheehan’s age-mellowed Boston accent, Eileen Tabios’ hilariously seductive reading of “Post-Coital,” Monica Raymond’s world-weary, vatic cadence in the closing piece, “Economies.”

I think the fact that I was still able to conjure these up a year later is a pretty strong testimony to the power of audio to focus attention. The [Christian Science] Monitor article mentions Socrates’ dismissal of written language in passing, as a way to call into question the seriousness of these new criticisms of electronic media, treating it as self-evident that Socrates was just a conservative old fart. But Socrates was right, as any number of studies of contemporary oral societies have shown: dependence on writing systems has harmed our memories and fundamentally altered our ability to listen and thereby internalize language. Heard speech is alive in a way that printed words are not, though our ability to record and now digitize it does alter its ephemerality, if not quite its relationship to time. The druids too opposed literacy, for much the same reason as Socrates, but they took a huge gamble in doing so and essentially lost: what we know of them today is largely what was written down by their enemies. And would anyone remember Socrates if not for Plato?

Dave draws no conclusion here as to whether slow reading or micropoetry is the salvation of humankind. Like me, he samples all of it and finds different joys in the different media. One thing I really like about internet publishing, as I mentioned in my interview with Sheri Wright, the one that Linda Goin was kind enough to recommend, is its capacity to present a reading of the poetry with the text.

A couple of other places where poets are using audio in creative ways:

Mike Snider is podcasting poems from his book manuscript Other Voices. Mike works in form and you’ll find some rare ones in this collection, like the rubliw.

Brenda Clews is a Canadian poet and dancer who experiments with audio multitracking and video to produce some fascinating performance poetry.

A chapbook on the level

I’ve probably made it clear here that I find Emerson difficult to read. It seems to me that he is long on words and short on meaning. Not only that, but in light of subsequent events his high-flown language and high optimism seem like so much moonshine. Take these excerpts from “The Poet”:

Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. . . . The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. . . . For poetry was all written before time was.

It was stuff like this that discouraged me for many years from even trying to become a poet.

So when I have had too much of such bombast, it is a comfort to turn to a poet whose work is quiet and grounded. Such a poet is Dave Bonta and his Odes to Tools (Phoenicia Publishing, 2010). The twenty-five poems in this book contemplate the contents of the workshop, whimsically, philosophically, but never with self-aggrandizement.

Some samples:

from Ode to a Shovel

Digging with a shovel
always makes me hungry.
It’s too much like a spoon, I suppose,
& the soil is too close
to food here: heavy, brown,

& as full of foreign objects
as any stew.

from Ode to a Bucket

As a bucket ages,
its galvanized surface
takes on the look
of new ice — that blue-
white jigsaw puzzle —
or a flock of cranes.

Humble objects, a bucket and a shovel, as are the other tools considered here: a spirit level, a socket wrench, a hive tool. Yet it is a joy to see these simple objects through the eyes and language of this intelligence.

These poems do come from the center, and they show you where it is more convincingly than does Emerson. Makes me understand why I prefer Thoreau, a man who seemed much more grounded and aware of the world around him. After all, Dave can speak in a bit of the Emersonian style. Here he is describing how these poems came to be:

I think they were an attempt to come up with a lyrical critique of teleology — the belief that nature or history can be explained by some sort of ultimate purpose or design. Sometime in my late teens, when, like a lot of earnest young people, I was wrestling with questions about the meaning or purpose of life, it occurred to me that that line of questioning itself might be flawed, because it assumes that we are somehow tools, products of a toolmaker — someone with an ultimate plan for us. This notion, comforting as it may be to some people, fills me with dread: to think that your role in life is intrinsic, unalterable, utilitarian!

But then with these poems, I was asking, what if one actually IS a tool? Doesn’t a favorite tool often become more than just an instrument of the worker’s will?

These poems were originally posted on Dave’s blog Via Negativa, and they can be read there still. They can also be read from an image of the book through an interactive tool at the publisher’s site, where you can also hear Dave read a sampling.

So really, there is no need to buy the book. It is licensed under Creative Commons, in line with Dave’s belieft that poetry should be free for all. And yet, at the thoroughly reasonable price of $4.95 $6.95, why would you deprive yourself of the joy of this attractive volume, an artifact, a tool, in its own right. (I confess, though. I traded for mine. Dave is open to trade.)

I do want to mention that the book is written

For the veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) and the biologists who documented its tool-using behavior

Confessions

Upon the occasion of W. S. Merwin’s being appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, the NY Review of Books posted a link to this article by Charles Simic, Confessions of a Poet Laurate. It was published in April of this year. He had some surprising things to say:

Over the years, I had read too many essays by literary critics and even poets, which proclaimed confidently that poetry is universally despised and read by practically no one in United States. I recall my literature students rolling their eyes when I asked them if they liked poetry, or my old high school friends becoming genuinely alarmed upon learning that I still did. Patriotic, sentimental and greeting card verse has always been tolerated, but the kind of stuff modern poets write allegedly offends every one of those “real Americans” Sarah Palin kept praising in the last election.

During the time I served as the poet laureate, however, I found this not to be true. In a country in which schools seem to teach less literature every year, where fewer people read books and ignorance reigns supreme regarding most issues, poetry is read and written more than ever. Anyone who doesn’t believe me ought to take a peek at what’s available on the web. Who are these people who seem determined to copy almost every poem ever written in the language? Where do they find the time to do it? No wonder we have such a large divorce rate in this country. I won’t even describe the thousands of blogs, the on-line poetry magazines, both serious ones and the ones where anyone can post a poem their eight-year daughter wrote about the death of her goldfish. People who kept after me with their constant emails and letters were part of that world. They wanted me to announce what I propose to do to make poetry even more popular in United States. Unlike my predecessors who had a lot of clever ideas, like having a poetry anthology next to the Gideon Bible in every motel room in America (Joseph Brodsky), or urging daily newspapers to print poems (Robert Pinsky), I felt things were just fine. As far as I could see, there was more poetry being read and written than at any time in our history.

The obvious next question is how much of it is any good? More than one would ever imagine

By the way, you’ll find a podcast of Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s interview with Charles Simic and Leatha Kendrick here.

On a related note, Nic Sebastian has been doing a fine series of interviews with the leading lights in poetry blogging on the subject of Poets & Technology. I’ve quoted some of these interviews here previously.

This week is Dave Bonta’s turn. Dave is strongly in favor of poets posting poems to blogs. He has published his Personal Blogging for Writers: A Manifesto, which begins:

Thanks to weblogs and other modern content management systems, a poem, essay or story can now be written in the morning and published the same afternoon. Does this spell the end of polished writing? Not judging by some of the highly polished books I’ve read by active bloggers, many of them derived in whole or in part from blogged material.(1) On the contrary, I have seen people become better writers as a result of blogging, myself probably included. Writers have always done some of their best writing in a white heat of inspiration, and blogging can either aid or hinder this depending on the personality of the writer and his or her approach to blogging: it can just as easily be a tool for artistic exploration as an agent of distraction.

Many writers prefer to use blogs merely to share news of their publishing success elsewhere, and that’s fine. But I think those with a more exhibitionist streak are missing out on a great deal of fun, and poets in particular — who are almost invariably exhibitionists, let’s face it — are missing an unparalleled opportunity to connect with audiences they might never otherwise reach. But there’s a risk, too: that they will be so seduced by this new medium that they won’t want to go back to jostling for publication in snooty print magazines no one reads, and their professional reputations will suffer as a result.

In answer to Nic’s question, What do you dislike most about how other poets use technology?, Dave says:

I get frustrated with some poets’ reluctance to post drafts of their work to their blogs because they don’t want to ruin their chances of getting published elsewhere, but I can understand why they do so. My frustration is directed more toward the literary magazine editors who refuse to consider previously blogged work.

I don’t publish drafts and I have been reluctant to join some of the excellent online critiquing groups, such as The Waters, just because I don’t really want my drafts out there. (Added: This isn’t so much because of publication — though that’s part of it — but also because I am sometimes embarassingly bad. I think slowly, and it takes me a while sometimes to see the most egregious blunders.) But I’m old and conservative and I probably am missing out on an opportunity.

Added: Take the micropoetry, for example (see Twitter feed above). I started doing that in blatant imitation of Dave’s Morning Porch. But as I’ve done it over the last year or so, I find the discipline of putting something out there every day challenging. It makes me look around me. Some days I feel that it is as flatfooted as an elephant, but that will be the day somebody responds with cheers. So, I think, maybe I’m not always the best judge of my own work. There’s something to be learned from immediate feedback from a reader base. But a little 140-character taradiddle is non-threatening. Putting a whole poem out there is something different.

But you should read Dave’s postings of poetry at Via Negativa. His work is an argument for posting poetry. Also read the rest of this fine interview and take a look at the whole series.

Community

Over at Very Like a Whale, Amy King answers Ten Questions on Poets and Technology, with advice on using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. She begins like this:

Technology offers a variety of platforms for disseminating one’s work. Some are difficult to master, but most are not. Poets who don’t want to spend tons of time convincing a handful of big-name publishers their work is worthwhile should master just a few platforms like blogs (I prefer WordPress.com) or writer-friendly DIY sites such as Red Room and She Writes, and even the self-publishing mediums now readily available like Lulu.

Women in particular might consider knuckling down and forego the fear of “going public” independently (i.e. no publisher to do your PR, which is rare anyway). We’ve been modest and quiet far too long. We need more women’s voices, styles and revelations in that literary landscape, from what I’ve seen.

And then this:

Poetry survives because it’s primarily about human connection and interaction as mediated by words and what that entails (the latter being a complex multitude I cannot possibly outline here). Technology is making it possible for us to get the word out, in a variety of formats and styles, to more people daily. Some of us plug away at proliferating poetry. I do. I’m invested in setting an example of someone who does not apologize for wanting others to engage with her through the poetic. Poetry is transformative, where culture can stagnate and water down to the lowest form and function, if you let it. So why not use that technology to spread the poetic? Technology is neutral; it’s what we do with it that’s going to make or break us, so to speak.

If you’re a poet looking for community, check out Big Tent Poetry

Big Tent Poetry aims to create a fun, inspiring, motivational and supportive community for poets at all levels of writing. In addition to a weekly writing “Prompt” and a weekly “Come One, Come All” gathering for poets to share their work, Big Tent Poetry provides writing challenges, revision activities, columns and reviews

One of the interesting features of this new site is a forum of blogging poets, the sideshow barkers, who will inlcude Robert Peak, James Brush, and Dave Bonta, among others. As Dave says:

[My ideal would be a] decentralized internet where we all have our own sites (whether blogs proper or sites on Tumblr, StatusNet, etc.), subscribe to each other’s feeds, and link and comment back and forth with the enthusiasm now reserved for Facebook and Twitter.

O.K., that day will probably never come. But Big Tent Poetry’s mode of operation definitely contributes to the dream of a decentralized social web. Carolee, Deb and Jill have made the wise decision not to try to line up a bunch of regular columnists, but instead get a bunch of us to agree to send along links whenever we write something poetry-related, and let them decide whether to feature it on the site. They have dedicated a whole third ring (the circus kind, not the Dantean kind) to collect such contributions, and I’m pleased and honored that they chose my piece about Poetry Reading Month as the second entry there. I like the idea of Via Negativa as sideshow and me as its barker. And I’m in good company — see the complete list of barkers on the site’s About page.

Illustrating another form of community, Poemeleon has released their collaborative issue, which explores various permutations of collaborating — poet with artist, poet with actress, poet with poet (with poet with poet), even reviewer with reviewer. the issue aslo includes two fine essays on collaboration by Martha Deed and Millie Niss and by Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn begins:

One of the most rewarding things about being a poet is, for many of us, the pure pleasure of discovering and getting to know other poets. Our relationships often have a way of blossoming into a remarkably supportive community– a flock of enthusiasts who find joy in talking poetry, reading poetry, arguing poetry, and sharing with one another the poetry we’ve written.

I’ve found, in fact, that if a poet hangs around long enough with kindred souls, chances are excellent that somebody, sometime, is going to suggest a poetry collaboration project. In other words, someone will decide that if two or more of us team up, pooling our talents and energies, the result will be something wonderful, publishable, and more than the sum of its parts.

That person will be wrong.

Well, maybe not entirely wrong. I admit to possessing a strong sense that the odds are stacked against the true success of most poetry collaborations—at least in terms of their real artistic merit, and the likelihood of their being read and appreciated by others.

Why do I come to such a grumpy, unsubstantiated conclusion?

Read the essay to find the answer to that question and also to find some examples of collaborations that Marilyn considers successful.

And, because poets are part of the community at large, I recommend you read Robin Kemp’s Dispatches from Saints & Sinners 2010: Part 1 The Oil Spill

Back in my hometown of New Orleans, I’m sitting at Rue de la Course at the corner of Carrollton and Oak, shaking off the late-night arrival and waking up to continued universal agitation over the oil spill in the Gulf. As a former CNN newswriter and environmental reporter for Gambit, I’m in the unhappy position of reading some of my poems, grounded in this city and its surrounding wetlands, through this new lens.

. . .

National coverage of this story has been spotty at best. The spill’s impact began to seep into CNBC’s consciousness yesterday—as a story on possible seafood price increases in New York—as if the question of what the spill means for all Americans were not one of benthic depth. We tend to think of North and South, East Coast and Gulf Coast, as universes apart, yet our lives are far more interdependent than regional allegiances would have us believe. The hundreds of thousands of dead baitfish I saw (and smelled) yesterday at low tide in Ocean Springs, MS have everything to do with Saints and Sinners, with our literature, with queer survival, with human survival. Our coast has been queered, and not in a good way. Some people don’t care whether we live or die. From the point of view of those who live and work in New Orleans and the Gulf South, who “we” are has spread its dark sheen across a far wider surface in recent weeks.

Best?

Several days ago, Laurie MacKellar sent me a link to this article by David Alpaugh in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In many ways, “The New Math of Poetry” can be read as just one more diatribe against MFA programs, small magazine publishing, and the glut of mediocre poets that keep the truly brilliant out of print. I’m not much interested in that point of view. For one thing, though I don’t have an MFA, I’ve often in my life been one of the poets advised to stop writing and get a good job. Not, however, in academics. Academia kicked me to the side of the road many years ago. It was a blow that hurt for a long time but I did get over it.

But I see the other side of the argument that poets should have “real” jobs, not cushy academic “professional poet” jobs. I’m here to tell you that a “real” job takes a lot of time and energy and training. It is not easy to be a poet when you have a 40-hour-a-week job. Not, mind you, that college writing teachers have it all roses either.

So I figure that any poet, MFA trained or not, who thinks, as Alpaugh argues

that writing and performing “poetry” is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame

will soon be disabused.

Dave Bonta calls Alpaugh‘s article rubbish, saved only by the refutations in the comments (of which there are, at this wriitng, 53). He points, in particular, to comment 22 which refutes this statement:

You can’t pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a “chapbook” for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of “publication.”

by pointing out that anybody who owns a guitar and knows maybe three chords can play at an open mike any time they want to but nobody’s gonna invite them to Lincoln Center. In short, comparing any open mike to a performance at Lincoln Center is just bad logic. The kind of thing I would have failed in freshman comp. Open mikes are open, whether you be a violinist or a poet. Or should that be Alpaugh’s usage, “poet.”

On the other hand, as one who has judged a fair number of local contests and read for local small publications, I’m here to tell you that there is, indeed, a lot of mediocre poetry to plow through. And a friend I have who shall remain nameless is wont to say that, while bad fiction is unfortunate, bad poetry is deadly.

This argument goes on. It’s not going to be settled by one definitive article in The Chronicle. And I have poetry to write. So, as I said, big yawn.

What does interest me, though, about Alpaugh’s article are statements such as this:

For those who protest that most of these thousands of journals can be dismissed as marginal—that we need pay attention to only a handful of “prestigious” ones, like Poetry and The New Yorker—may I suggest that there could be a few Blakes or Dickinsons swimming with the guppies in that wide prosodic sea? If a truly titanic poet were to appear, wouldn’t one of the less visible but more adventuresome journals—Retort Magazine, say (“we favor the cutting edge over the blunt of the handle, the avant-garde over backward walking”)—be more likely to be his or her publisher than would status-conscious professional journals like Ploughshares and American Poetry Review?

or this one:

Such “anthologies” are less harmful, however, than those that actually pretend to select the “best.” David Lehman and the guest editors of Scribner’s Best American Poetry (hereafter known as BAP) have been protesting for years that they are just trying to publish a bunch of decent poems. Yet year after year, their title continues to make its glittering promise, with a cynical wink at sales.

The notion that a guest editor or team of screeners would read 100,000 poems is absurd. A look at the journals BAP routinely draws from gives a good clue as to methodology. In BAP 2008, for example, just 10 of the 2,000-plus journals and magazines available for consideration accounted for 37 of the 75 poems selected—49 percent. As in past issues, BAP 2008 privileged Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and a dozen or so other recurring publications. The probability that such a sliver of journals would continue to yield the lion’s share of the “best” American poetry year after year were objectivity in play is unlikely.

I am not much interested in the relative merits of poetry by Ted Kooser or John Ashbery (see comment 26 on elitism).

What I read here is that the old gatekeepers are no longer in control. That maybe, in some sense, there no longer are any gatekeepers. The game preserve is wide open.

For some people this concept, with its implication of chaos, is frightening. It leads them to conclude, as Alpaugh does:

Every now and then someone asks me, “Who are the best poets writing today?” My answer? “I have no idea.” Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable.

This statement strikes me as somewhat naive in its belief that in the past the best poets have always been saved. I always have to wonder, for every Dickinson saved, how many were lost?. Maybe my point of view is skewed by my feminism and the lack, until recent years, of women’s names in those great anthologies of the past that Alpaugh mentioned.

On my desk is a worn college anthology titled Seventeenth Century Poetry and Prose. Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Jonson, Marvell, Milton—all of the great poets of that century, and all of the minor ones (as well as some now considered unreadable) are represented there.

(See all the women included? Aphra Behn?)

Or naive in its implication that somehow if there were fewer people — more courtiers maybe? — writing poetry, they’d be writing better poetry.

I’ll admit to being old enough myself to wonder whether I can ever break through the chatter and find readers.

But in fact I do have readers. And oddly enough I have influence, in a limited sphere. As Dave Bonta is fond of pointing out, he gets more readers posting his poetry on his blog than he would get were he published in many prestigious print magazines.

And just this morning, a commenter told my friend Mark Brown how grateful they were that he posted one of his poems, “Kissing the Ugly,” on Facebook. The commenter said:

Years ago when we met at a . . . reading I asked you for a copy of it, which I kept in my wallet until the paper fell apart. Now I can print it out again for my bulletin board.

Small fame, yes. And I’m sure we’d all dance like Snoopy to get into a volume of Best American Poetry. (Well, maybe not Dave.) But even BAP is no guarantee of immortality. Do we write for some mythological future or for the now?

What some of us may see as a breakdown of standards, a loss of the old gatekeepers, others of us may hear as the tinkling of the glass ceiling as it shatters.

(Yes, I mixed my metaphors but I didn’t compaire open mike at Al’s Bar to the stage at Lincoln Center.)

(No offense meant to Al’s Bar. I’ll read at their open mike.)

I’ll leave you with this quote, which as far as I’m concerned, redeems Alpaugh’s whole article:

BAP editors recognize the need to throw in a maverick journal or obscure poet or two each year to make it look like they are fulfilling the grand promise of their title. Although Scribner wants readers to believe that they are purchasing the “best,” David Orr, in The New York Times Book Review, could be describing the entire series when he writes that the poems selected for 2004 “run the usual gamut from very good to slightly dull to what-were-you-thinking.” Pinning the word “best” on such a “gamut” could win an award for Best Chutzpah.

Neuroesthetics?

Who knew?

From Tim Parks at the NY Review of Books Blog, a report on Neuroesthetics: When Art and the Brain Collide, a workshop conference at IULM University Milan, wherein Semir Zeki was the star speaker:

What Zeki was trying to demonstrate was the brain’s response to ambiguity, a major element in most aesthetic experience. He showed slides of the Rubin vase, the Kanizsa cube and triangle, and Isia Leviant’s “Enigma.” In the case of the vase and the cube, the brain could only see only one of the two alternatives at a time, but it could never shake off the other and would keep switching back and forth, without resolving the issue, a characteristic that Salvador Dali had exploited in his “paranoiac critical” paintings. He went on to show slides of which parts of the brain were activated when responding to such stimuli.

“If you tell me,” responded Ron Chrisley, “which circuits of a computer are active when its chess program moves knight to queen’s bishop three, you haven’t told me much, have you?”

It was that kind of conference.

. . .

What was most disturbing was the rather crude notion of “aesthetic experience” that the scientists seemed to entertain. The word “beauty” was used as if we knew what it meant.

. . .

When I remarked in the closing discussion that none of the speaker’s experiments had tackled the word, the poem, the novel, or more generally the aesthetic of narrative, a voice behind me cried out, “Thank God!”

__________

Maurice Manning says he can’t talk about metaphor without using metaphor. Maybe we can’t define beauty without just showing the world something beautiful.

Today, we might begin with Temptations of Solitude, an ekphrastic collaboration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Dave Bonta.

Dave explains the collaboration here.