The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.
— Diane di Prima
About Me
I’m Robert van Vliet. I grew up in the Twin Cities. At one time or another, I’ve lived in (among other places) Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, NYC, and PDX. For most of that time, I felt like George Bailey if he had managed to get out of Bedford Falls. Stickers on my suitcase, stamps in my passport. But eventually I discovered to my surprise and dismay that to be happy, I need four sharply delineated seasons — especially if two of them are seemingly endless and absurdly brutal in their extremes. So I have returned to St Paul, for good.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
— Cavafy
Over the years, I have been, among other things, a typographer, a tutor & substitute teacher for middle school & high school, a singer/songwriter, and a repair technician for Macintosh portable computers. Oh, and I was also a customer service representative way back when people still bought things using land-line telephones and glossy four-color catalogs printed on paper and bound with staples. A writer’s résumé.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
— James Wright
You can find a list of poems I’ve published online here. My debut chapbook, This Folded Path, is imminent in early 2023 from above/ground press. Also, my first book of poetry, Vessels, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2024. Details to follow!
I participated in Thomas Whyte’s ongoing Poetry Mini Interviews, which appeared in five parts over the course of five weeks in March and April of 2021: one, two, three, four, and five. (You can find some outtakes and fragments here)
You can read about my typical writing day here, at My (Small Press) Writing Day, curated by the hardest working man in poetry, rob mclennan. (Typical, that is, until May of 2022, when I moved, upending all my daily routines for the first time in years…)
I am also a peripheral member of the Poetry Blogging Network.
The interior life is often stupid.
— Annie Dillard
I own lots of books and I’ve even managed to read a few of them. (I would definitely not blame you if, upon learning that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow eight times (so far), your reaction was to back away with an expression of mild horror. You have like a million books, your TBR pile is an overflowing shelf — and you’re thinking of reading that thing again? Really? Yeah, well: I think those last hundred pages are actually starting to make sense. Or maybe that’s just the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in…)
I made the wrong mistakes.
— Thelonious Monk
Since the mid ’80s — aside from some wretched day jobs, and a dark period in 1996–98 — I have only used Macintosh computers, and almost exclusively portables. I was disappointed by the iterations of the Macintosh portables after about 2012, so I clung to my late-2011 13″ model like Ishmael to the coffin. Then Apple finally announced a recall program for their atrociously fail-prone butterfly keyboards, so I upgraded to a 13″ Retina MacBook Air. It served me in a very blandly annoying way for several years, but I recently traded it in for an M1 14″ MacBook Pro. Absolutely the best Macintosh I’ve ever used.
The first things I install on every new Mac are Quicksilver, 1Password, and Cocktail. When I write on my Mac, I use either Scrivener, Bear, or iA Writer, depending on the project. And on my iOS devices, it’s Bear and 1Writer. But almost everything starts in Drafts (especially now that full actions support has come to the Mac OS version…).
That said, I’d rather use paper notebooks and journals. You probably should, too. Not only do they lack intrusive ads, and will not track you, but they also don’t require batteries. And I promise that you’ll think better, you’ll own all your own content, and they pose an almost insurmountable challenge to online hackers.
I tend to use woodcased pencils — especially General’s Cedar Pointe, Pacific, or Goddess pencils (as well as a refreshed supply of my beloved FaberCastell American 2.5). But the rest of the time I use any ballpoint lying around, because life’s too short.
Let us boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning; and foster all originality, though, at first, it be as crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots.
— Herman Melville
About this Website
This website is built using Blot. All the pages are Markdown documents in a Dropbox folder. I write and edit them using either iA Writer or BBEdit on the Mac and 1Writer on my iOS devices.
For more information about the analog tools I’m using at any given time, see this page.
Email me, if you are so inclined, at rnv at omg dot lol.
A man sets himself the task of drawing the world. As the years pass, he fills the empty space with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
—Jorge Luis Borges