GERALD HAUSMAN ~

ISLAND DREAMS by GERALD HAUSMAN

Selected Poems 1968 ~ 2015
chosen & edited by Bob Arnold

New and available now from Longhouse ~

160 pages
 Perfect bound softcover

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GERALD HAUSMAN

Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers. — Jack Spicer


Okay, now that we have the game field established, start pitching, that means you dear reader. Long green grass stretches before you.

You hold in your hands the ultimate catcher’s mitt of poetry, written over six decades of the poet’s life — imagine six decades. As the editor, I one day asked the poet, as if I was coming by for a cup of sugar, “Say, why not send to me all of your poems written and published over all of your life.” Like I was asking for nothing at all. Well I was asking for nothing at all since the best of poetry is spun out of thin air. The best poetry reads like an umbrella being put up in the rain. What a terrific function! What a way to stay dry! What a balance of dryness and wetness. What aptitude! Let’s go for a walk.

The poet wasted no time, and I knew he was a poet because his lover for life, Lorry, helped him get together all the poems in their sun-baked island home in Florida and in a matter of only a day or so I had all the poems before me, in my catcher’s mitt. Or I was going to make a pretty perfect catcher’s mitt. It would be poems that were lived and made in different locations like Florida, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, New Jersey, New Mexico, California, the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, along a horse trail, swimming in the bowl of a lake, holding a daughter’s hand, listening awhile and awhile longer.  Gerald Hausman could have been famous, and in fact he is famous because he lived the life he dreamed of with one woman, his children, little bits of money and lots of beans and good chili, with an insurmountable energy for storytelling and writing children’s books, and publishing other people’s books, and traveling the simpler paths, where you never run into funny fame and fashion. You make poems like a baker makes good bread. Everybody eats.

You may even forget you are a poet, until another poet tells you —
 you are.

Well over forty years ago I first found the first published books of Gerald Hausman, like folded up into birch bark they were, and they were poems of the time that could be written on the softest subjects and with the most delicate care. There was such hope. It would be the easiest thing to share if only you could find a pitcher and a catcher — and if you did, and they were good at what they did —  the rest would fall into place. People would come, a crowd would gather and watch, cheer, and they’d play into the night. 

Bob Arnold

OTHER NEW TITLES FROM 

LONGHOUSE

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Bob Arnold's first 

children's book

"R a i n   B e a r"

~ $12.95

LORINE NIEDECKER

  

A Cooking Book 

~ $15

CARSON ARNOLD
If I Blinked Through
These Windows

Collected Music Writings     
a big soaking book of youth     

 ~ $20

 




J.D. WHITNEY
Sweeping The Broom Shorter

Selected Poems    

~ $15

two different covers ~ take your pick!

BOB ARNOLD & JASON CLARK

 Sapline     
maple sugaring in Vermont    

~ $12

 

ROBIN MAGOWAN

The Garden of Amazement 

Scattered Gems After Sâeb 

~ $15

 

 

MALCOLM RITCHIE
Small Lines On The Great Earth

poems from Scotland    

~ $15

BOB ARNOLD
My Sweetest Friend  

poems from brother to sister     

~ $15













DUDLEY LAUFMAN
The Islandian 

Poems & Fables
journey to another land  

 ~ $12

CID CORMAN
of 
Volumes 4 & 5

edited by Bob Arnold 
 848 pages perfect bound

~ $50
 plus $7 priority mail

BOB ARNOLD   
Go West

c'mon! travel westward by train 
in a full book of photographs
& poems


 ~ $15

OPENINGS 
by JAMES KOLLER

selected poems 1959 ~ 1985 
edited by Bob Arnold 


~ $12.95

BOB ARNOLD  
Start With The Tree

150 photographs by Susan Arnold
a lifetime of building & marriage      


 ~ $20

FORTHCOMING   NEW   BOOKS   BY   BOB ARNOLD   &   KENT JOHNSON

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