MARGARET FULLER ~

 

R E A D   M E

     Library of America 2025

NOAH KAHAN ~

 

Mercury Records, 2023

SHIKI: THE GLASS CLOUDING ~

 

Glass Window Tanka

sickroom

the glass door

I peer through —

can see sparrows

flying to the little pine

shut in the sickroom

the glass window

winter sun shining in —

lucky buttercup

blooming

morning and night

ueno woods lie across

the glass window —

I'll never be

tired of seeing

shut in for winter —

clouds cleared

in the glass door,

and I can see

tabi socks drying

crystal, glass door

I look through —

the house across, the roof

I can see

shepherd's purse blooming

thought I'd see

snow — the glass

in the glass window

clouded, I did not

see snow

out the window

I can see

even insects —

panes of crystal glass

are miracles

shut in the sickroom

out the window

the glass window

on the clothesline

I can see a crow cawing

crow perched

on the line —

does it look through

the glass door,

see me writing and caw

always lying

down — O, blessings

to you who put in

glass for me,

crippled here

crystal carriage

in the piling

snow —

I don't think I'll go

to the silver fields

glass put in,

waiting for snow —

tomorrow I'll see

snow piled

on the trees

dawn, outside

I see the snow —

someone

wiped dew

from the glass

Ugly Duckling Presse

            2024

ADAM AND EVE IN PARADISE~

 

R E A D   M E

       New Directions 2025

JED THE FISH ~

 

J E D   T H E   F I S H

 ( J E D   G O U L D )

DAVID THOMAS, PERE UBU ~

 

D A V I D   T H O M A S

THE SOUL CONVEYS ITSELF IN SHADOW ~

 

R E A D  M E

     Stenen Press

     2024

ROBERT CRUMB ~

ALL OF IT :

April 23, 2025

 

THE ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE POETRY ~

 

R E A D   M E

A treasure, truly. 

Poets well drawn and well built biographies.   

But, in the chapter "Affiliates" —

where is Cid Corman?

     The University of North Carolina Press

     2025

Night Landscape in Nelson County, Kentucky

ah, Moon, shine

thou as amber in thy

charred keg, hickory sky . . .

still as a still, steep

as a horse's face

JONATHAN WILLIAMS

A Piece

One and

one, two,

three.

ROBERT CREELEY

Calm down

what happens

happens mostly

without you

JOSEF ALBERS

from Twenty-Four Love Songs

20

When I heard the public story

of how they'd thrown away

their wedding rings, and how

the rings had been picked up

by the garbage men and taken

to the dump, and how laughing

finally they went out with flashlights

and found them that night I wondered

did they put them back on?

ED DORN

Imagine Inventing Yellow

Imagine inventing yellow or moving

For the first time in a cherry curve.

M.C. RICHARDS

Nine

It's not what

you think

it's something

else.

CYNTHIA HOMIRE

The Huron

I swam the Huron of love, and I am not ashamed,

It was many saw me do it, scoffing, scoffing,

They said it was foolish, winter and all,

But I dove in, greaselike, and swam,

And came up where Erie verges.

I would say for the expenditure of love,

And the atrophy of longing, there is no cure

So swift, so sleek, so fine, so draining

As a swim through the Huron in the wintertime.

RUTH HERSCHBERGER

THE COMPLETE HAIKU / BASHO ~

 

R E A D   M E

     University of California Press

2024

HIDDEN LIBRARIES ~

 

L I S T E N

         Lonely Planet 2024

EARTH DAY ~

 

Earth Day

We met like this, on this day

and our life's work together

maybe who knows has saved it,

together with so many others

whose persistence stays the worst,

the few who do what they can

is enough; the love they bear

for all the living and the faint

translucent vision of a future

filled with sharing, a future

with men no longer on the take,

filled with planetary kindness:

those hopeful few, those brave

persistent few, a tiny band

that may have saved us all.

One Day

Listen! It's all so ordinary

mostly nothing happens

quotidian they call it

then one day grey fox

grabs a rabbit so quick

right outside my window

I watch her take off with it

and then we all return

to that ordinary day

_____________________________

Clifford Burke

Being Didactic

Desert Rose Press

2025

EARTH DAY 2 ~

 

     THE BLUE PLANET    
     A film by FRANCO PIAVOLI 1982

J.H. PRYNNE ~

 

N E W   L E F T    R E V I E W

R E A D   M E

       Bloodaxe Books, 2024

___________________________________

Land Flown So Few

Now known nor new, one mend or mind attune

how so for more to do, where lend and saw

by law in sound, to fend or done where found,

to send in pair and bond, low or snow-bound,

land flown so few, as near to kind or there

and bind, appear by care in fund. Or end.

MALAPARTE ~

 

R E A D   M E

     New York Review of Books

     2024

THE MAVERICKS LIVE ~

 

Denver Botanic Gardens

July 29, 2019

MAC GAYDEN, NASHVILLE GUITARIST~

 

MAC  GAYDEN

Rick Diamond/Getty Images for The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

ROBERT FRANCIS ~

 

Summons

Keep me from going to sleep too soon

Or if I go to sleep too soon

Come wake me up.  Come any hour

Of night.  Come whistling up the road.

Stomp on the porch.  Bang on the door.

Make me get out of bed and come

And let you in and light a light.

Tell me the northern lights are on

And make me look.  Or tell me clouds

Are doing something to the moon

They never did before, and show me.

See that I see.  Talk to me till

I'm half as wide awake as you

And start to dress wondering why

I ever went to bed at all.

Tell me the walking is superb.

Not only tell me but persuade me.

You know I'm not too hard persuaded.

_______________________

Robert Francis

A Certain Distance

Pourboire Press 1976

NAJWAN DARWISH ~

 

To That Room

And I return to that town,

to that house,

to that room,

the bones of the dead beneath me;

they know me

though I do not know them.

I'm surrounded by the books and papers

of other dead;

I know them

though they do not know me.

This earth: the remains of strangers

naturalized by death.

I return

because one must return,

because the dead must rise again.

A Distant Country

How many bedrooms do I need

to get a bit of sleep?

How many chairs

to sit myself down?

How many roads

to walk back to you,

my distant country?

This time I've gone

and I'm not coming back.

Your job, now, is to slip out,

lovesick and afraid,

and come in search of me.

Lightning Writes Poetry

Lightning never sits down at a table

to write poetry,

yet it is poetry's only embodiment.

It lights up the whole universe

then disappears.

What poet hasn't dreamed

of becoming lightning?

As For My Singing

"Sing, sing before we slit your throat."

Did they think fear

would disturb my song?

True, I was scared of life,

but death

is the last thing I'm afraid of.

Why would a free man fear

to meet a friend?

So let our embrace be tinged with blood.

As for my singing in this moment,

I want it to be perfect.

My freedom lies in this:

No matter what they do,

the murderers still

cannot disturb my song.

______________

Najwan Darwish

No One Will Allow You Tomorrow

translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Yale Univ. Press, 2024

A BOOK IN THE HAND ~

 

‘Book brigade’: US town forms human chain to move 9,100 books one-by-one

A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefront

R E A D   M E  

MARKUS WERNER ~

 

R E A D   M E

Like reading Hrabal, and no one is Hrabal —

a treasure

DUDLEY LAUFMAN ~

 

Little House Under the Hill

He said his grandma was a twin and she

and her sibling were born out of wedlock.

Their mother was a sister at that

place up on the hill. Folks there were

celibate. The twins were born in that

cottage hidden in the woods below.

They never knew their father, shame of it.

Could have been one of the brothers although

most of them were too old. Most likely

one of them hired hands come up from town,

the herdsman or that travelling farrier.

You never know, makes you wonder now,

how many of us here have kin that age

who sprung to life from that little cottage.

___________________

Of Course the Money Musk

Dudley Laufman

Wind in the Timothy Press

2025

TERRENCE MALICK ~

 

R E A D   M E

       University Press of Kentucky

        2024

STONE WALL WORK IN MARCH ~

 

Here's a stone wall I built in March 2025 when two days of thaw slipped in for a moment and I got to work. I was widening a bar-way ten-feet and had to tear down the stone corner you see and rebuild. Tricky. The stone wall run in the background I built in the early 80s. The mound I'm standing on was leveled by shovel and all the stone pulled out of the ground and from an old stone wall in the way went into the new wall I am standing beside. The ground was still blocked with frost and going at it a little at a time each day removed the mound. Even before any of this work could be started there were two four foot high snow banks to shovel away and base ice to melt. Now three weeks later two full days of snow is back since March won't let go. Once it does, a full truck load of 3/4 stone will arrive and we'll get this bar-way looking pretty.

[ BA ]

  photograph by Susan Arnold

SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND DESPOTS ~

 

R E A D   M E

University of Chicago Press

2024

N.H. PRITCHARD ( THE MUNDUS ) ~

 

 R E A D   M E

  M U C H   M O R E

Primary Information

2024