CZESLAW MILOSZ ~

Notebook: Bons By Lake Leman

Red beeches, shining poplars

And steep spruce behind October fog.

In the valley the lake steams. There is snow

Already on the hillsides of the other shore.

Of life, what remains? Only this light

So that the eyes blink in the sunny noon

Of such a season. People say: this is,

And no capacity, no artfulness

Can reach beyond what is.

And memory, useless, loses its power.

Kegs smell of cider. The vicar mixes lime

With a spade in front of the school.

My son runs there on the path. Boys carry

Sacks of chestnuts gathered on the slope.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,

Says the prophet, let my right hand wither.

Underground tremors shake what is.

Mountains crack and forests break.

Touched by what was and what will be,

All that is crumbles into dust.

Violent, clean, the world is again in ferment

And neither ambition nor memory ceases.

Autumnal skies, the same in childhood,

In adulthood and old age. I won't

Stare at you. And you, landscapes,

Nourishing our hearts with mild warmth,

What poison dwells in you that you seal our lips,

Makes us sit with folded arms and the look

Of sleepy animals? Whoever finds order,

Peace, and an eternal moment in what is

Will vanish without a trace. Do you agree then

To abolish what is, and pluck from movement

The eternal moment as a gleam

On the current of the black river? I do.

— Bons, 1953

____________________________

Czeslaw Milosz

Poet in the New World

Poems, 1946-1953

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT HASS AND DAVID FRICK

Ecco, 2025

THE FORMAL IMAGINATION OF POETRY ~

R E A D      M E

A fine poet, interesting thinker,

acknowledgeable in the ways

of poetry, but not one to draw from

any poet other than compatible to the usual syllabus;

the most Hass let's his hair down is drawing an example of

Ted Berrigan and Jackson MacLow —

no Bob Kaufman here, Thomas McGrath or Janine Pommy Vega.

Where Hass has intrigued me the most are his informal

and off-the cuff introductions he presents from his post at the

University of California Berkeley reading series.

THE BLACK MOUNTAINS ~

At the next bend the bus broke free of the mountain's cold shadow,

turned its nose to the sun and crept roaring upwards.

We were packed in. The dictator's bust was there too,

wrapped in newspaper. A bottle from mouth to mouth.

Death, the birthmark, was growing on all of us, quicker on some, slower on others.

Up in the mountains the blue sea caught up with the sky.


TOMAS TRANSTROMER
translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton

Tomas Transtromer
Selected Poems
edited by Robert Hass
Ecco

____________

One must, by now, tip the poetry hat to the likes of Robert Hass, who I don't know from Adam, but who I have read complete over the last 40 years. . .never mind his diligent work as editor, teacher, translator, and with an overall terrific track record in the service of poetry, the poem, the poet. Cheers!

LAND OF LITTLE RAIN ~

Mary Austin

[The Land of Little Rain] "It aims to be, first of all, a meditation on place, though the place itself is also effaced a little, and is two places actually, which you can find by consulting a map: the arid country east of Bakersfield, California, where the San Francisco Valley ends in the transverse range of the Tehachapi Mountains, and the long narrow valley east of the Sierra Nevada that runs from Bishop in the north through Big Pine and Independence (note the name: the author of this book lived in these towns — Independence had a population of three hundred — at the age of twenty-six, having left her husband, and taught school to earn a living and tried to raise her retarded two-year-old daughter, without child care, while she worked, and tried to write) and Lone Pine, and south to the Coso Range and the Slate and Quail and Granite Mountains, places you cannot see much of now, since they are home to a U.S. naval weapons center and access is restricted. It is no surprise that the book she wrote is, save for the dreamy idyll of its last chapter, a cool-minded mediation on freedom and necessity, adaptation and survival."

~ Robert Hass, from his essay, "Mary Austin and The Land of Little Rain"

What Light Can Do

(Ecco 2012)

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people.  It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant: as if they moved on some stately service not needed to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls."

~ Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain







Owens River Gorge and the White Mountains looking SE from Swall Meadows in the Eastern Sierra foothills




 

Owens Valley

 Lone Pine Peak w/ the Alabama Hills in the foreground

Mt. Williamson, Owens Valley, California

Owens Valley and Wheeler Crest

Old wagon road down Sherwin Grade near U.S. 395, Mono County

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL ~

Pepper Sprayed ~ Elizabeth Nichols holding strong at Occupy Portland (Oregon)

Most recently this photo, which is quickly becoming an iconic image from the movement, has gone viral. It shows Occupy Portland protester Elizabeth Nichols getting hit directly in the face with pepper spray by Portland police. The shot was taken by Randy L. Rasmussen, a photographer for the Oregonian, during Thursday's protests.

The picture itself has been called a lot of things, but intriguingly enough, the most accurate description of how it was taken is that it was an accident. Ramussen explained in an interview with the Oregonian that he didn't even know he had captured the scene until he saw it appear on a computer screen when he returned to the office.

But Elizabeth Nichols, the woman being hit in the face with the spray, certainly knew what happened (though she didn't know it had been captured on film). Nichols won't soon forget the incident, regardless of the photo.

From the Oregonian:

Nichols said a policewoman jabbed her in the ribs with a baton and pressed it against her throat. That made her angry.

She yelled at the officer, saying she was being mistreated. That's when another officer shot her with pepper spray. A photo by The Oregonian's Randy L. Rasmussen, which flashed across social media websites, shows Nichols was sprayed from a few feet away.

"It felt like my face, ears and hands were on fire," she said.

UC Davis, California, November 18, 2011

&

UC Berkeley, California (Robert Hass):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Huffington Post

photo: Randy L. Rasmussen
ny times

RIPRAP AFTER 50


Riprap by Gary Snyder
Origin Press, Kyoto Japan, 1959

MID-AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN

LOOKOUT

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rock and meadows
Swarms of new flies.


I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

Riprap by Gary Snyder
Counterpoint, 2009

[click on image above for film ~ 1-1/2 hours]

Dear A —

Many thanks, again, for putting into my hands this You Tube on the Gary Snyder ~ Riprap 50 years happening at Berkeley. It wasn’t the one I had thought I might have seen earlier last year, when Snyder did read during the Lunch Poems series. A fine reading from a brilliant man and storyteller.


Of everyone involved in this one-and-a-half-hour ceremony, Robert Hass and Lyn Hejinian seemed most with-it for an audience. Hass traipses through his thoughts like some hobo, but I like that about him, a befuddled thoughtfulness. I’ve watched him do this with an Amiri Baraka introduction and others in this same Berkeley location. I believe he is a fine teacher, still a teacher. Lyn Hejinian is refreshing, spry, girlish, erudite, humble and nicely playful with all themes she touches onto in her own talk. She makes Snyder’s prehensile approach to nearly everything, seem more like she is the dharma bum.


This is to take nothing away from Snyder's overall fellowship and willingness to be involved with a gathering — he comes to play. His chuckle throughout his reading and remembrances is endearing and almost the final sign of a benign hermit senility — he who laughs at his own jokes. He's now old enough and wise enough and embraces that devil-may-care enough to be meeting his young trail guide self and summing it up with a grin and one more chuckle. He's as sharp as any watchdog, as cunning as any stellar jay.


But not one mention to Cid Corman from Snyder on the 50th anniversary of Riprap? That's unfortunate, maybe even personal. Not that I'll lose any sleep, but it would have been both professional and historical to give a wave to its original publisher, who made this small book and all his small books out of small dreams and probably some begging. Again, Hass knew how to take care of this oversight. And when Snyder spoke of how much more “famous” he is in China than in America, well that was about enough for me. Likewise, having endured the sad and quite unprepared Michael McClure offering. Ah showbiz.

In a better world I would wish kudos given to all golden California boys and girls and especially spreading attention back onto Kenneth Rexroth and Jaime de Angulo, the forefathers here of any deep ecology movement.


The poems are beautiful, blue-skyed, and complete. The less said the more said. Or as Ornette Coleman once put it: "You feel this, you play this."