TUCKED IN ~

Hello, Susan here — while Bob is tucked in recovering from the flu, let me tuck in this review from Gerald Hausman on Bob's new book Stone Hut.

It's a warming note for a bone chilling deep snow end of February.

____________________________________________________

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Once again Longhouse Publishers in Vermont has produced a book exquisite in design, fat enough to be a feast, pretty enough to just wade around in, and deep enough to dive into and stay with for days and weeks and even months on end. Could be it's the first of its kind, a scrapbook novel that is also a how-to and a mystery -- how did he do it, and how does he make rocks balance like Thor?

Author Bob Arnold is a poet, well-known for well-crafted verses of the back country. But Bob Arnold the builder, the stone mason, the rock wall maker is for those of us lucky enough to have gone walking on his grounds or dining in house with his lovely wife, Susan. 

I've known these guys a very long time, but frankly it takes a long time to know people who have the woods in them. They are like trees you love to look at, and you can give them a good hug, but that doesn't mean you know them. It takes years to do that and even then there's more mystery below the bark.

Well, there are years upon years in this shining, stunning photographic book of buildings, walls, stones, woods, flowers, lakes and of course trees. It's a book of family built with love, and like each rock, hand-held and sort of loved into place, it's a book that couldn't have come in a night or a day. It's taken Bob Arnold a lifetime to write it as his life was written around him in loving circles of tribute to his wife and son.

The beauty of this book is that it is truly a scrapbook novel, as solidly true as stone and bark. And it's not about one house, it's about many, and all made by the same man,woman, and son. If you want a life you have to make one. This is the story of a family who did just that. 

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/

Posted by Gerald Hausman at 1:15 PM

http://geraldhausmanstoryteller.blogspot.com/2014/02/once-again-longhouse-publishers-in.html 

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bobarnold.html

MAEVE BRENNAN ~

Maeve Brennan
The Visitor
Counterpoint, 2000



http://thehairpin.com/2013/08/of-long-winded-female-writers-and-role-models-remembering-maeve-brennan

NEBRASKA ~

Just watched Nebraska which hits the nail on the head repeatedly. Probably won't win much; nails don't much any more. At the age of 9 I learned fast and furious the essence of a nail. I spent weeks on end picking them up in the nail room of the old lumberyard learning the difference between common, box, penny, galvanized, cement coated, tapered, cut. By learning that nails were different at age 9 I quickly learned people were different. The carpenters that came in and I watched who was neat and who wasn't. I picked up after the slobs. Later saw their work. Sure enough. 

BA


"Nebraska"
a film by Alexander Payne

PACO DE LUCIA ~

Paco de Lucia

 ( b. 1947 Algeciras, Spain ~ 2014 )

GAO XINGJIAN ~

click onto images to enlarge

ROGER GILBERT-LECOMTE ~

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte died on December 31, 1943 at age 36 in Paris from tetanus caused by a dirty needle. According to the poet  David Rattray, "A morphine addict, Lecomte had been jabbing the needle into a thigh muscle through a pair of dirty trousers."
Another source has stated experiments with carbon tetrachloride led Lecomte to a visionary poetic encounter (felt in the poems below) and an early death. He's gone. The poems are here.

In 1933 Lecomte published a book of poems titled La Vie l'Amour la Mort le Vide et le Vent (Life Love Death Void and Wind). The book went forgotten except for a rave review by Antonin Artaud.  Lecomte's only other book was a 1938 privately printed tiny volume, Le Mirror Noir (Black Mirror).

http://www.rogergilbertlecomte.com/

Testament


I come from afar in the marches of night
          Much farther than one might imagine
My story is slight in the city of light
          Well known in the deserts of famine
With her teeth and her nails she's everywhere
          I let her mangle me
But her eyes say I'm a piece of slime
          And she will strangle me
And if my berth tonight I choose
          In the havens of misery since
I never knew how to refuse
          Misery's blandishments
To the bottom of the heap I slide
          With neither pisspot nor candle
But oblivion's obscene solicitudes
          To me alone a lovely scandal









To the North Wind


Alive yet not alive you crawl in stone
Prisoner of an air castle
Lover in a dream
Crushed in advance
By the heavy heavy
Marble anchor of the
Death you have been howling for for a hundred centuries
In the ravagaes and corpses you embody
Alert scarecrow wicket in the north wind
Giddily dancing in a cold sweat
On a footing of slippery air where your weight is the weight of fear

A burst heart empty of blood and woe
Caught in frozen air
At the stony edge of space
Sealed for eternity in the crystal icebox of the sky. 









Holy Childhood
           or
Concealment of Birth


I'll speak of the dark:China doll
Buried in the floor of a false forgetful forest
Where skeletons dressed as spiders dance
Lacework of dead leaves
I'll speak of the dark
To dank caves
Mushroom beds eyes glowing in the blackness
I'll speak of the dark to coiled snails
I'll speak of the dark
To rain to soot
To the circle of moonwater motionless at the bottom of a well
To barrels rolling in the cellar at midnight
When the white lady moaned
I'll speak of the dark
On the blind side of mirrors
I'll speak of the dark
Of immortal torture
Of most ancient despair
In the absence of a universe
And should a light shine
I'll speak of the light
I always see when falling asleep
That woman stretched
On the ground weeping
An admirable death's head
Veiled in black the murdered hope of childhood
An evil scowl flaps its wings
Next to the empty blood-soaked bed
The mother will have to hang
For the crime of a former life
Restored to its point of origin the stillborn child
Will never believe the lie of broad daylight
    Black air never entered its lungs
Without making its nostrils quiver and its eyes
Widen at the horror of awakening
Having let go of life before even existing
It returns to the place it came from
By a thread linking its belly button to the top of the sky
To crystal fountains of wondrous emptiness



______________________

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Black Mirror
Station Hill
http://www.stationhill.org/products-page/all/black-mirror

PHILIP BERRIGAN ~

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/philip-berrigan

POSTCARD 27 ~

art by jeff steinberg

Remembering an important moment in the Hurricane Katrina tragedy

GEORGE MITCHELL BLUES (1967) ~

W.G. SEBALD ~

• 1988 After Nature
•  
• 1990 Vertigo 
•  
• 1992 The Emigrants 
•  
• 1995 The Rings of Saturn 
•  
• 1998 A Place in the Country
•  
• 1999 On the Natural History of Destruction 
•  
• 2001 Austerlitz
•  
• 2001 For Years Now
•  
• 2003 Unrecounted 
•  
• 2003 Campo Santo 
•  
• 2008 Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001
•  

LEG UP ~

 

A Burrowing Owl near Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil. It is standing on one leg.

 

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM ~

Imogen Cunningham and Twinka (Thiebaud) at Yosemite (1974)
 photo : Judy Dater



__________________________________________________________



Born in Portland, Oregon in 1883, Imogen Cunningham bought her first camera when she was eighteen years old — a 4 x 5 inch view finder — although she lost interest with her first fling as a photographer, she picked the camera up again in 1906 after an encounter with the work of Gertrude Kasebier. By the next year she was working with ethnologist and photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis in his Seattle studio. A life of photography ensued — brilliant botanical pieces, nudes, portraits, wild and industrial landscapes. A fascinating long life, the photographer passed away in San Francisco in 1973.

__________________________________________________________________

Ansel Adams, Yosemite Valley 1953







Edward Weston and Charis Wilson Weston at Point Lobos, 1945





 

Self-portrait in 1863 Costume, 1909

Black and white lilies 2, 1920s

 Callas, 1925





 

Dream Walking, 1968

Frida Kahlo Rivera, 1931

Kenneth Rexroth, Poet, and Mariana Rexroth, 1953

Martha Graham 2, 1931

Cary Grant, Actor, 1932

Evan Connell, Writer, 1956

 Imogen!

Ruth Asawa, Sculptor, 1963

Self-Portrait With Grandchildren in Funhouse, 1955

Sherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Prall, about 1923

The Poet and His Alter Ego, 1962

(james broughton)

Zebra, about 1921

My Father at Ninety, 1956

Navaho Rug, 1968

 

Self-Portrait With Morris Graves 1, 1973

The Dream, 1910

Tree at Donner Pass, 1925

Wynn Bullock, Photographer, 1966



http://www.imogencunningham.com/