Friday, April 30, 2021
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Monday, April 26, 2021
POETS WHO SLEEP #48 ~
P O E T S W H O S L E E P
Sunday, April 25, 2021
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Friday, April 23, 2021
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
THERE IS NO EXILE WHERE THE HEART IS PURE ~
There Is No Exile Where The Heart Is Pure
( for Pablo Casals )
Behind the barn, the first week of March, on a bright
morning after long rain,
the windy cedar tree
turns round and round in the sunlight.
A winter horse
rubs himself on the corner of the barn.
Little pieces of cedar glide down where the ants are
calling home their old senators who
have failed utterly.
Coming home, carrying suitcases full of noise,
they pass through small American towns.
On the barn wall,
rusted nails bleed; and in fences, in hinges, in boards.
The horse (I think of Casals in exile!) plays
a suite unaccompanied in the silver cedar boards.
Inside,
the stranded hay-wagon shudders.
Between its floorboards
seeds
trickle to the earth.
A dry dusty odor mingles with festering dampness,
and a hand —
blue ridges and rivers coming and going through it —
rests on the white sheet of the windows.
My grandmother
comes to swing open wide the huge
double doors,
doors like drifting continents,
and a wedge of healing sunlight
slips into the barn before her.
_____________________________
Robert Sund
The Hides of White Horses Shedding Rain
Copper Canyon Press, 1981
there never were enough Robert Sund poems —
it's strange, each time I type out Robert Sund's
name it shows up as Robert Sung — as if he is
returning (as I type) or has indeed returned —
to the Sung Dynasty, where of course he belongs.
This book, signed by Sund, I have no idea where
it came from — maybe a good friend, a lucky find?
here in New England — far from the Sund home of
Washington State — where as I boy in the late 60s I
had already found his masterpiece Bunch Grass
and crowded the book into my work lunchpail as
a great companion with me at midday. "Whatcha
got there, Bob, the book. . .what's bunch grass?"
I'm finding out. . .
[ BA ]
Monday, April 19, 2021
POETS WHO SLEEP #47 ~
P O E T S W H O S L E E P
Saturday, April 17, 2021
LARRY EIGNER ~
"Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation"
B A S I L B U N T I N G
I enjoy any book by or about
L A R R Y E I G N E R
including by academics going on & on
in the long run it seems where
the outsiders —
and Eigner was one,
like Philip Whalen —
will be rescued and petted
by the academic Red Cross
but perhaps keep in mind
what John Berryman
once wrote to Ezra Pound
then residing in St. Elizabeth's Hospital
far from the academy,
"Thirty years ago the
("intellectual") public knew nothing,
at present it is only too damned
apparently familiar with every-
thing — among others, with all
of you. . . There is a whole school
of now-academic criticism
to be broken down also (Ransom,
Winters Tate Blackmur Warren), which I
am convinced is stifling talent."
John Berryman 1947
________________
New Mexico, 2020
Friday, April 16, 2021
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Monday, April 12, 2021
POETS WHO SLEEP #46 ~
P O E T S W H O S L E E P