MY FAVORITE BOOK FOR SPRING

THE THOREAU YOU DON'T KNOW

What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

ROBERT SULLIVAN (Collins)

Look at the cover design and drawing of this book — yes, judge a book by its cover! — and this one is a winner. The wry smile and almost a wink from a many petaled thorny one Henry David Thoreau.

Now looking over my near half-century Thoreau library, with all his books, the tome Journals, all the biographies and scholarly books, the Emerson tribute, the Channing biography, and of course the two books still running current today and where Robert Sullivan wisely skinny-dipped in and out of for his own Thoreau portrait: Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau, and Robert Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of Mind. What I like about the Sullivan is it is new, somewhat brash, opinionated, respectful, quite thorough on Henry of Concord with its bits of Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Fuller, even his time away from home when within the vicinity of Whitman; in other words the author is a whipper-snapper so he knows a whipper-snapper. We haven't had a book on Thoreau in any part of the modern era quite like that and since Ellery Channing's slim volume, which I always liked. Channing described Thoreau's hut on Walden Pond as a "wooden inkstand" because of how much writing he got done while out there. This new biography complements that juicy image.

Just to imagine the changes during Thoreau's short life time — and he died at about the same age as Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, Flannery O' Connor, DH Lawrence, Jack London — in other words in the prime of life — in 1830 when Thoreau was a boy there was 23 miles of railroad track in all of America. By the time he died, thirty-two years later, there were 30,000 miles of track. A time of expansion, as colonial agriculture was being overwhelmed by the early stages of industrial capitalism. Here was a young writer grown into the woods and fields with such a passion for words and meaning that he pored over the 17 dictionaries he owned when in from the outdoors.

His masterpiece Walden (and others like myself would argue for all his Journals, the seed bed of all his writings) earned Thoreau $96.60 in royalties. The shimmering classic even managed to go out of print in the author's lifetime, but Thoreau convinced a publisher just before his death to reissue the book, and it's been sailing in print ever since. It was from Bronson Alcott where Thoreau borrowed an ax to begin work at Walden Pond, and from this same close friend he caught his last cold in 1861 which marched ahead into influenza, then severe bronchitis, and Thoreau was never well again. He was dead within a year.

As for the hut at Walden Pond — when the "experiment" (of less than two years) was over with, Thoreau sold the hut to Emerson (whose land it was perched on) who then sold it to the farmer Hugh Whelan. Whelan took the whole hut and put it up onto a cellar hole he dug by hand (there today near Walden Street in Concord) where it started out as a shed, then part of a larger building which is no longer anywhere. Vanished into thin air. No plaque or memorial. The very best history of America is under your bootsoles, ignored, hidden away, circulating in the fields and streams.

My very favorite story about Thoreau from any book or scholarly study, is how when he only had a few weeks left to live and the family had moved his bed downstairs to the parlor so he was available for visitors, and they came and came. His friend H.G.O. Blake came, too, all the way down from Worcester. On ice-skates.

An excellent companion essay might be "The Thoreau Problem" by Rebecca Solnit from the new anthology American Earth, ed. Bill McKibben (The Library of America)



~ In Memory ~

Deborah Digges

REIDAR EKNER







Abode of the Giants; Circuit Route


1. WAY WEST

On our way west
several ridges to ascend, and to descend from,
slowly, on serpentine highways
where big trucks pull heavy trailers,
trailers bringing farm raised salmon
from the western fiords

Sudden waterfalls from steep cliffs
close to the road, chockingly

Further to the west
after passing thru many tunnels
Eagle´s view: down below,
in the rain, bridge with pylons
over a narrow water

2. VOICES

The next day, in Bergen, at a festival,
we listen to a handful of well known Scandinavian poets,
all women, reading to an expert local audience
One of them, a thin intellectual,
letting loose a current of disconnected statements
Then a punk poet in black, past her prime,
rapidly reading cut-up sentences

Last, Pia Tafdrup from Denmark
reads from her new book, intensely,
in her melodious voice. She tells us
of the death of her father, tells us
of Tarkovski´s emblematic horses,
in Stalker, and elsewhere; remembrances

The day after, given the chance,
we continue straight to the north; a ferry
brought us to the other side of Sogne, king of the fiords

3. SOGNE FIORD

Waking up to a sunny day: hardly a ripple
on the wide water. White cruiseships returning
from the east, bound for the sea, pass
on the opposite side. Snow on the ridges

In the valleys, apple orchards in bloom
The smell of flowers, trees cut low
like in vineyards, row after row,
bringing to mind Nicolai Astrup,
the local Joelster painter, second only to Munch

4. WATERSHED

Further north, after many turns, up
the high valley to check
one of the arms of the Jostedal glacier,
Nigard, rapidly shrinking, faintly blue

Then over the watershed, near the top
of the Scandinavian peninsula: Jotunheim,
the abode of the Jotuns, the Giants,
close to 2.500 mtrs. Pinnacles straight up from the ice
and the dazzling snow. Others like teeth in the jaws
of a wolf

The highway walled in by barriers of snow

After the shed, the road runs parallel to the river
for a while; suddenly you discover that the water
is running the other way. I've often noticed this,
in many regions. The river downwards, the road upwards,
or vice versa. Strange phenomenon, in the mountains
Trust the water; believe in your senses …

Going back south by the Gudbrand Valley
On the slopes farms with huge barns
in red and white; the Logen River
broad and impressive. This is the main artery
of all the land to the east of the mountains


At the Boe River. Telemark, Norway June 6, 2007

It was a happy day when Reider sent this to me as a gift to place into the Origin I was editing and wanting certain folks all together. In some arenas, poets like skateboarders like apple pickers, still have the look and act of the tribe. Born in 1929 in Gavle, Sweden, since 1997 Reidar Ekner has lived in Norway. His 30 books of poetry, essays and many translations, also includes his passion for Ekelof, consisting of 9 published volumes.

A NEW BOOK BY BOB ARNOLD FOR SPRING



New! from Bull Thistle Press
Greg Joly, printer & publisher

Bob Arnold's Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky, letterpress printed and published by Greg Joly at Bull Thistle Press in Jamaica, Vermont, has an interesting background.

To begin with, Greg drew from 35 years of Bob's poetry. What fascinated him was how the poems he wanted, all written simply with square lines, could in fact be printed backwards.

Bob showed Greg how this worked when they were reading together on New England roads, streets, bridges & byways, earning money for Katrina victims in New Orleans, and one of Bob's poems "Dogs In Snow" came up and Bob read it, and then as a lark he read it backwards. Greg perked up at that event. Bob shared how a letterpress printer and publisher, Michael Tarachow, once upon a time while setting the poem for Bob's book Habitat, revealed how the poem could work forwards and backwards. Maybe it is a quirk with letterpress hand-printers but they love this sort of thing. No surprise, Greg did too.

He went home that night and began to work over Bob's poems. When they were together the next week to do another reading, Greg arrived with a handful of papers all typed of Bob's poems from many books. He had arranged the poems as a backwards method. Bob put on the finishing touches.

Sure enough the poems were rebuilt nearly without missing a word, and there was a new sense and delivery and meaning to the poems. Not a different meaning — the subjects stayed intact — just a whole different song and sound and suspension on the page. Almost an immediate language experiment, dare we say? This is what Greg and Bob followed with, and over the next three years the book was formed. We don't think there is a selected poems out there quite like this one.



HOW TO ORDER

Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky
by Bob Arnold

Unsigned edition ~ $25
Signed ~ $32

Shipping & handling $3.50
International mailing, please inquire

Payable by credit card, Paypal or check
Available exclusively through Longhouse

Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers
1604 River Road
Guilford, Vermont 05301
802-254-4242

CHARLES OLSON ~ POLIS IS THIS

Charles Olson and the persistence of place
a film directed by Henry Ferrini




As Robin Blaser termed Charles Olson's life & work — it was "a moral project". This film complements that quest. The many participants include Jonathan Williams, Amiri Baraka, Blaser, Diane Di Prima, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Chuck Stein, Robert Creeley, Susan Thackery, Michael Rumaker, John Sinclair, Gerrit Lansing, plus narration and thoughtful readings of Olson by John Malkovich, when not Olson himself. Also some prized Gloucester locals, one of the now grown up 'kids' from Maximus, Vincent Ferrini, and Pete Seeger patiently explaining how it may have been Charles Olson that put the bug into getting Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory published. Olson's son Charlie shows up and wins me over. The sloppy sea side and strong-willed wooden buildings of Dogtown looks absolutely beautiful.

This is part one of six parts to a remarkable film. For more, please go to this website

RENE DAUMAL


MEMORABLES
Translation: Louise Landes Levi

Remember: your mother and your father, and your first lie, the
indiscrete odor of which crawls in your memory.

Remember your first insult to those who made you, the
seed of pride was sown, the crack glistened, breaking the
night one.

Remember the evenings of terror when the thought of the
void scratched your stomach, and always returned like a vulture,
to nibble you and remember the morning of sun in the room.

Remember the night of deliverance, when, your untied body
falling like a veil, you breathed a little from the incorruptible
air; and remember the clammy animals that took you back again.

Remember magics, fish and tenacious dreams - you wanted to
see, you stopped up your two eyes in order to see, without knowing
how to open the other.

Remember your accomplices and your deceits, and that great
desire to leave the cage.

Remember the day when you split open the web and were
taken’ alive', fixed in place, in the uproar of uproars the wheel of wheels
turning without turning, you inside, always snatched up by the same
immobile moment, repeated, repeated, and time was making one turn
only, everything turned in those innumerable directions, the time
curled up backwards - and the eyes of flesh saw only a dream,
there only existed the devouring silence, words were dried skins
and the noise, the yes, the noise, the no, the visible howl and
darkness of the machine denied you - the silent cry, 'I am' that
the bone hears, form which the stone dies, form which that which
never was believes to die, - and you were reborn in each instant
only to be denied by the great circle without boundaries, all pure
all center, pure , except you.

And remember the days that followed, when you walked like a
bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the
infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.

And above all, remember the day when you wanted to throw
out everything, no matter how, - but a guardian kept watch in
your night, he kept watch while you dreamed, he made you touch
your flesh, he made you remember your own, he made you gather
your rags, - remember your guardian.

Remember the beautiful mirage of concepts, and moving words,
palaces of mirrors built in a cave, and remember the man who came,
who broke everything, who took you with his rough hand, pulled you
from your dreams, and made you sit in the thorns of the full day
and remember that you do not know how to remember yourself.

Remember that you have to pay for everything, remember your
happiness but when your heart was run over, it was too late to
pay in advance.

Remember the friend who spread out his reason to gather
your tears, spurting from the frozen source, violating the sun
of spring.

Remember that love triumphed when she and you knew how to
submit to its jealous fire, praying to die in the same flame.

But remember that love is of no one, that in your heart of
flesh is no one, that the sun is of no one, blush seeing the
swamp of your heart.

Remember the mornings when grace was like a raised club
that led you,submissive through yours days, - happy, the cattle
beneath the yoke.

And remember that your poor memory let the golden fish flow
between its numbed fingers.

Remember those who say to you: Remember - remember the
voice that said to you: don't fall - and remember the dubious
pleasure of the fall.

Remember: poor memory, mine, the two faces of the medallion
and its unique metal.


1943

.......................................................................................................................................

Translation: Louise Landes Levi (reprinted with permission of the translator)

Originally printed in Relationship, MAITREA 5,Shambhala, Berkeley & London, 1974

BOB ARNOLD







ZEN SNOW



Before the big snowstorm arrives I want
Everything cleaned up and out of the way

This may mean you
This may mean me

URSULA K. LE GUIN

She Remembers the Famous Poets


Quand vous serez bien vieille, le soir, à la chandelle . . . (Ronsard)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep. . . (Yeats)



Now I am old and grey and sit alone beside my fire,
I think of lovely boys I knew when I was young and fair.
And some of them wrote poems about my eyes and their desire,
My winsome Irish Willie and my gallant French Pierre.

It makes me smile to think about how we made love, and all
The tender things they told me, as I gaze into the flames
These winter nights; but, Lord! I never can recall
A single word of all they wrote, or even their last names.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of many works of enviable scope and craft — science fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and intriguing interviews. Go seek! The poem above is from the Longhouse title Four Different Poems pictured below.

JOHN LEVY







Jimmy’s Girlfriends and His Late Mother

(for my Father)



It is the third call from Jimmy in one day. Sam tells him that he has talked to Mike, Jimmy’s probation officer.

“Yeah, what’s Mike got to say?”

“Mike says he won’t recommend reinstatement on probation because you absconded five months ago and picked up that misdemeanor charge for marijuana when you were arrested. Plus, when you saw the police you ran and they had to chase you.”

“It’s up to Judge Goosed Berries, right? Not Mike!”

“Judge Dandurry. Yes. But Mike’s recommendation will influence Judge Dandurry. And it’s not as if I have a magic wand I can wave over Mike’s head to change his mind.”

“It’s your job to get me out of jail! Margaret got paid back, Ellen saw to that. Margaret got every penny back.”

“That’s why you got a good plea, Jimmy. That has already been taken into account. But you did steal checks from Margaret and she didn’t get paid back until I cut that deal for you and Ellen paid Margaret. Now what we are dealing with is that you reported to your probation officer once, only once, then went on the run.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re talking like a prosecutor, man. Mike wanted me to live in a halfway house. No way. I want to go live with Ellen again. Or Katie. I’m not sure.”

“Even if the judge would let you out of jail, you wouldn’t live with Ellen again. She called Mike this morning and told him about her felonies." {continued}

To read, or print out for free the complete story, please link to this PDF

The poet John Levy makes his living as a public defender in Tucson, Arizona. He has begun to write fiction for the reading pleasure of his father, and the above story is his first from a work-in-progress: "Moon Ache, Crack Cocaine in a Boom Box". These stories will be loosely based around the State Criminal Defense System. John is the author of many books of poetry: Among the Consonants (1980) as well as a book of prose We Don't Kill Snakes Where We Come From: two years in a Greek village (1994). A new book of poems from First Intensity has recently been released — Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs.

BOB ARNOLD








A ONE~LINER~OCEAN~LINER



Hello Mike,

I like your taciturn yet friendly one liner letter. Let's try one.

I just worked an hour on tablesaw ripping out cleats for faraway cottage.

Did this in the woodshed and not tool room so to make no mess.

I recently spent two days cleaning out the tool room and renovating.

The cleats will go into the circumference shelving at faraway cottage.

Shelving I'll build that circles a room, high up, above the many windows.

It will hold 466 books!

While I was on that Susan prepared the leek/veg soup, rooms aroma.

Then she went to hang up fresh wash in the snow & wind & sun.

I could see her from the cottage where I pulled my sled of lumber.

Her hair blowing. The snow has 1/4 melted enroute to faraway cottage.

For a brief moment I was pulling sled over grass. Different sound.

Later, after breakfast (soon) I'll pull my tools up in the same sled.

Carson called and said he'd be out in the afternoon.

He's taking two girls out for breakfast and one is having a birthday.

Lucky guy.

He'll be out when the mud will melt up and be bad in the roads.

River beside him, though, where he drives. Sounds of Spring.

We have a dead red oak standing right beside a utility pole and wires.

I've had a guide line in the tree all winter to pull up a work rope.

Today's the day.

With rope lasso'd in place I'll cut at the stump and Carson will pull the tree.

Must be done now because poison ivy circles the tree under the snow.

Want the snow, not the ivy. Can also use the wood of course.

Prince was recently on a show playing as well as Hendrix.

I counted 5 piercings, maybe, in each ear. Studded.

Keep lounging — the secret to enjoying your next work week in the woods.

I can catch a whiff of your baking bread way up from here.

all's well, Bob

In memory of Natasha Richardson & Ronald Tavel

NEW BOOK

THE BEATS, a graphic history (Hill and Wang) edited by Paul Buhle Text by Harvey Pekar, Nancy J. Peters, Penelope Rosemont, Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins, Tuli Kupferberg Art by Ed Piskor, Jay Kinney, Nick Thorkelson, Summer McClinton, Peter Kuper, Mary Fleener, Jerome Neukirch, Anne Timmons, Gary Dumm, Lance Tooks, Jeffrey Lewis

Since the Big Top is burning down, what better time to bring back the mad and beautiful voices in the wind that predicted much of the firestorm? A history of the Beats and later edges bohemia Post-WW2 /1950s highlighted with biographical portraits of three standup guys: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S.Burroughs. Except for Neal Cassady the depictions aren't that well drawn (John Clellon Holmes with beret and goatee?) but the heart is right. The drawings pick up wonderfully in the spirit for Kenneth Patchen, Gary Snyder and the "Beat Chicks". We're missing a likewise two-page spread for Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline and Lew Welch, but at least they nabbed Philip Whalen, Lamantia and Tuli Kupferberg! If it takes a comic book for a new audience to discover On the Road, Howl and Naked Lunch then so be it. As Pekar says, gazing out at us from a frame, "We all tried to imitate it."


FILM

IN BRUGES (D: Martin McDonagh)



Making a way — hands down, there is no film like Sexy Beast. None before and none perhaps ever, until In Bruges came around. I won't go into it all now, though I'm passionate about the film. It's an Irish gamer and has a winning side (one of a handful of Irish films that nails-it) and cinematically it is a thrill ride of everything technically astute while the entire film is running backwards, forwards, sideways at once. Perhaps? Who cares, it's a wonder, an absolute wonder toy of movie making. The actors, the main three, are supreme. As with Psycho, no one should give away the gist of a film — In Bruges is much the same. It was made to be opened up, meaning you opened up, your whole being while watching. There is a third film, in a short list of: never-been-made-before, and that would be Withnail and I. Blow my mind all three films hail from the same British Isles, a fighting term, I know, but I'm using it anyway just to point to a location. Most often these films are detested at first run. By the second and third viewing you're defending them with every inch of your life.

MICHAEL GIZZI







AT GO FIGURE FARM


Clodhopping round the country dressed in steel
He punches a coachman in the side
Look at those ribs like the hoops of a barrel
A singer transfixed on the head of a pin
Verse is out of the question
A dull detonation shakes the ground
A few guys unloose their fireflies
His nose falls off and becomes a ball of dust
A stiff-bosomed white shirt opens the door
Two pilgrims quarrel in hurried whispers
Sex complex as the eyes of insects
Easily dazzled by round objects
Two chicken hawks plunge into a copse
If we want a little whiskey we can sell a few eggs

— for Bernadette

Here's one from Michael Gizzi's newest book of poems New Depths of Deadpan
(Burning Deck). He's been publishing since 1973 and editing
journals and books from lingo, Hard Press and currently with Craig Watson the imprint
Qua Books.

ANDY CLAUSEN







Counsel to a Black African Immigrant


I have little credibility where they call it cred, on this issue
My hair is straight, my face and color are mostly Caucasian
I have opened myself to all people
I have agreed and disagreed with everyone I met
Let me tell you where I was, when I came on the boat
A few years after the war with maybe 5 words of Anglais
-------gleaned from Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele oaters
--------------cowboy movies, "Steeck em up! Yes, mam!"
Gripping my mother's hand, my link to understanding
-------sensing a fear in her I could feel in my bladder
--------------in my feet
Behemoth buildings marginalizing the sun
-------so many times taller than ever seen
--------------in Villein, Jambes and Dave, my villages
-------across the Meuse over the bridge from Namur
--------------our city in Walloon Land
I expected the Land of our Saviors to unfold
-------like a glamorous movie of ice cream, soda pop
--------------fabulous toys, Chevrolets & Fords
-------great movements of rapid color & chrome
My eyes saw what my mind couldn't wrap
-------concrete grey faces, the hugeness
--------------the speed, the way the people did not look
-------the language made me chew my tongue

We went to the famous train station
-------and headed for Reno Nevada, it would take days
I know it took us long to find the train
-------and I remember my mother being very nervous
On the train, a man, dressed all in white
-------carried our bags, a man darker of skin
--------------than any I'd ever seen, with luminous eyes,
-------very red gums and a tooth of gold
--------------spoke French to me
I reckoned a very important man he
I wanted to be his friend, I loved him
I wanted him to be our guide, his smile
-------would replace fear

In your country, in Africa, is the wealth
-------the products, the celebrity of America
-------mythologized like some Golden Street Utopia?
Glorified like in my cinematic 5-year-old visions?
Well, I'll tell what I think I know, what I think I've
-------learned in my half century here
No matter your accomplishments, your learnings,
-------your good intentions, your traditions & lineage
--------------in your old home
Here you will be another descendant of slaves
Until you speak, the policeman, the grocer, the neighbor
-------the bosses will think you came from the hood
--------------the ghetto, the Other Culture
You will have to have money and spend it
-------to gain visibility and even then
--------------the cultural spiritual economic war
-------that has smoldered and raged inside chests
--------------of muscle and blood
-------since the first Africans landed here in chains
--------------will suck you in
There is the chance, a prevailing, omnipresent chance
-------you will be the man gunned down reaching
--------------for his I.D.
The cops saw a black man, therefore a dangerous man
-------in a car, if you are driving a hooptie,
--------------an old beaten vehicle, you will
--------------be suspicious, a suspect
-------if you are driving a new modeled car
--------------you will be suspicious, a suspect
-------if you are friendly with a white woman
--------------you will get looks, and eyes of all varieties
--------------all emotions and many will scorn
--------------some will deride, few will praise
--------------fewer will treat you as an okay human
There is a big history, a largely untaught history
-------a white washed history, that will be part of yours
--------------and it has become a matter of life or death
You will learn this is how it is
-------in every big city, on every street

Andy Clausen was born in Belgium and brought to Oakland, CA. by his mother when he was two years old. He'll tell you he has had "300 apartments, 300 jobs and 200 cars", some of those jobs being in the construction field and teaching in schools and prisons. Andy is one of the dynamic examples of what came with poetry after Ginsberg, Corso and Bob Kaufman— an excellent showing may be found in one of his books 40th Century Man. Longhouse has published Andy's postcard poem to a Wobbly, and his foldout booklet Design, dedicated to his close friend Janine Pommy Vega.

A WOODSHED POEM by BOB ARNOLD

S -P- R- I -N- G
-- -
E- Q--U--I- N- O -X !

WHERE CABIN FEVER & SPRING FEVER MEET

FLORIDA ORANGES MAILED TO US IN VERMONT

I PAINTED AS SMILING FACES

ELIZABETH ROBINSON






from Blue Heron



v.

Eye saw through the stranded
shore

and creature large and blue
saw, and forced

eye back.

Foxy, the creature circled
itself, circled

itself in vine and water,

its blue and gold throat.

Radiant as
iris around pupil,

slippery enclosure
the grove of

sight makes. Were
vision purely hostile

the eye blurs, swallows,

---------forces back the stream,

the blue, covert green.

Elizabeth Robinson has a lovely following of poetry books in print — Apprehend, Pure Descent, Under That Silky Roof are an excellent start to a reading. Longhouse published from Blue Heron in 2007. She is also active with presses and forms of sharing poetry with other co-editors — EtherDome press is but one that showcases chapbooks by emerging women poets. Once of the Bay Area, Elizabeth now lives with her family in the high sky of Colorado.

~ LONGHOUSE VISITS ~

Bill Porter (Red Pine), Bob Arnold, Susan Arnold
March 2009

Okay — here we are recently in town, one day after a slush storm — Bill Porter (Red Pine) has just come down from up north Vermont on the morning bus. He's a long way from home, but he came prepared. Since he has never been to Brattleboro before, I suggested we meet at Amy's Bakery, a fine local hangout of tourists-meet-flannel. So Bill made for himself a hitchhikers cardboard sign, and within five minutes he said he had a ride and was carried from the bus station into town. Nothing like a self-reliant friend. We had missed one another when he was last in Vermont five years ago, and this time we wanted to nail it. Fresh from a session of poets and zen over the weekend in Montreal ( I was generously invited to be a participant but for family reasons couldn't get away ), Bill came down with good cheer for me from fellow friends, plus some gorgeous books as a gift from Myoko; and I thank you Myoko! Poetry is especially lovely for this. Bill presented the books over a table of tea and utensils and sandwiches with a window full behind us of RR tracks, iced over Connecticut River and Wantastiquet Mountain standing strong.

Please check out Bill Porter / Red Pine's 2006 title Dancing With the Dead Language, Poetry and the Art of Translation from Longhouse. Plus his many other titles from Copper Canyon, Counterpoint and Empty Bowl. Each one an exhilaration. If you're heading off to a desert island or mountain cave you might want to take along The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, or, Poems of the Masters.

Since 1971 I have been logging book, music, film reviews and rural-to-town commentary from Woodburners We Recommend. Susan tells me my chief readers are folks lost a moment looking for more information about their woodstoves. Sorry. The ‘Burners continues on another part of the Longhouse website. Woodburners On-Fire! will be a more concise overview — as if you have stopped on our back road and asked for instructions on how to get out, and instead I speak to you one of these reviews. Go well.

remembering

SNOOKS EAGLIN
KON ICHIKAWA
BILL HOLM






CHINA / POETRY


David Hinton, translator / Classical Chinese Poetry (Farrar)

You're on your way to go have a meal out, a pretty good meal at that. For me it would be two meals at the cost of this book (including a loved one across from me) and still I'd say skip the meals and buy this book. Your body will be all the wiser when you have that third crack at eating out and now you can go with new Chinese friends and their 500 poems spanning three millennia in your belly. Roughly drawn from 1500BCE to 1200 CE, maybe the richest period in Chinese history. David Hinton has been working a long time with his Chinese fellow travelers, it shows in every step of this book, the choices, like stones placed. The introductions for each poet and historical favor are so rewarding the book and poems will never step back into a remembered section. It is now.




MUSIC FILM / DVD

Donovan : Sunshine Superman

A little gem that grows & grows, 3 hours long, on Donovan as Sunshine Superman, but really a journey that works and shows a sixties icon survivalist ala 1962-2008. It makes a terrific case of what happened to a sixties icon 1960s-to-now. Donovan ever articulate pulls you in, if you don't mind a millionaire constantly referring to himself as a "gypsy". It's small potatoes when you consider some of the real gypsy songs he's written and sung for decades. His earliest songs rise out of Celtic lore, the Beats and looking for a beauty that works splendidly. Dylan, the inventor of snark for generations to come, is the opposite pole. Yet he is mercurial as an immense art form for a handful of amazing years that still haven't touched the ground. I think it's high-time the two troubadours did one last concert together and allowed everyone in for free.




UNFORGETTABLE / POETRY

Ron Padgett, Great Balls of Fire (Holt)

There was an open kitchen window with an apple pie cooling on its sill once upon a time for American poetry and it ran wild through the streets. Not revolutionary poetry, but true anarchy, with childhood and lots of play and brightness poetry. It lasted a few years. The same year as Woodstock, the same year as Manson, is the year I'm thinking about. Exactly 40 years ago. I remember spotting this book up on a bookstore shelf and where I lived in small town it had to be quite a bookstore to carry such a book and it was such a bookstore. Of course it went out of business, just like this book was never seen again with its star-spangled cover of white stars on blue background all over the dustjacket and even the same on the cloth and over all the endpapers, too! Someone in the design dept., at Holt had a great deal of fun with this. Joe Brainard was of course the artist. He even wrote the jacket blurb about the poet and it continues to be one of the best definitions of a poet going. And the poems? The poems were fully American bred gone once to France and doused head to toe and sent back home again. Sort of like what you get when looking at Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Everything about the book still makes it one of the very best from that second generation NY School, and a stark original post Frank O'Hara. The poet's photograph on the back jacket flap is of a happy kid. Where'd you see one of those in the poetry slums lately?

Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and he always will be a poet. I don't know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don't think anyone else does either. It is something deep and mysterious inside of a person that cannot be explained. It is something that no one understands. It is something that no one will ever understand. I asked Ron Padgett once how it came about that he was a poet, and he said, "I don't know. It is something deep and mysterious inside of me that cannot be explained. — Joe Brainard

note: there was a revised version of the book issued by Coffee House in the early 90s, and while worthwhile as most Padgett titles are, it ain't the same high. The original cloth edition is a wooden puppet sort of toy. Unmistakable.

WOOD CULTURE

Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood (belt sander races, blind woodworkers & baseball bats), Harper Collins

You better be damn good with a name like Spike on the subject of wood. And he is. With an estimated 10 billion acres of forest on this planet, the author sets forth sharing his own experiences as a woodworker, visiting wood terrain from toothpick factories (one cord of wood maketh 7, 500,000 toothpicks, no kiddin') to logging champs, precision wood turners, and even Academy Award nominees for outstanding performance by a wooden structure. There's plenty of photographs, an index, resources page and an author's photograph I trust. He looks like he'd be good on his toes.

BILL PORTER / RED PINE ~ CHINESE BRIDGES ~ NEZEN

Ronald G. Knapp & A. Chester Ong, Chinese Bridges (Tuttle)

Here are two fascinating books written from the depths of on-foot China. The backcountry. The splendid book of bridges hikes deep into the past, long before mathematical design was applied by engineers and instead indigenous craftsman worked the natural wonders of timber and stone. Viewing the covered wooden bridges of southern Zhejiang and northern Fukian, the so-called "rainbow bridges" is all one will need to capture some fulfillment of the practical, majestic and even daring. Follow that up with peeks at the log fested Jiemei Bridges and the temple perched aboard the Jingxing Bridge swallowed in Cangyan Mountain and one will wonder what sort of people, culture and traditions are held fast here. Many of these bridges and principles are found nowhere else in the world.

Bill Porter, Zen Baggage, a pilgrimage to China (Counterpoint)
For any poor boy with no money to get to China, the book of bridges leafed open on your lap with delicious visuals, while reading Bill Porter's no-nonsense Zen Baggage, is just the hardware for a cheap-seat pilgrimage. Porter, also known as the translator Red Pine to streams of readers of Buddhist poetry and sutras, returns in 2006 with his walking stick, on a pilgrimage from Beijing to Hong Kong to sites associated with the first six patriarchs of Zen. Don't ask what Zen is, just dig in, read and listen. Listen further after you set the book down for a rest, since Bill Porter also tries to get his rest, massages for his trail bumped back, visits with most anything and anyone interesting along the way. This is a field report like few modern disciples move themselves to live, withstand and write. It's got the ancient glory. Minced nicely within the passage are flashes of personal introspection and autobiography — it's only in the very last pages we learn Porter's father was a bank robber out of Arkansas, with a gang that got all shot up in Detroit where only his father survived. After prison and renewal in Texas and later Los Angeles for his dad, Bill Porter was born. The young man had his own varied stages, AWOL in the armed services, some years in a Chinese monastery, the very jagged procession that often comes with enlightenment. Few books bow to reverence and ordinary matters as well as this one. Walk into it.

POETRY

Eliot Katz
Love, War, Fire, Wind
(Looking out from North America's skull)
art by William T. Ayton

Narcissus Press, 498 Primrose Hill Road
Rhinebeck, NY 12572
info@narcissuspublications.com


I wanted to share this tiny poem from a big book of great long poems and prose cycles spanning from the BC backwoods visits Eliot makes to his loved one in a fire tower summer job site, back to the mean streets and grand streets of New York City and New Jersey where for many years EK worked as housing advocate for homeless families. Check into all his other poetry titles, none will set you wrong.

Sitting To Praise

I am sitting down at my kitchen table
to write a praise poem
for the people of my country,
the people and the oceans —
some of the people,
and the future oceans cleansed.
I am sitting to celebrate the way Americans
have responded since 9/11
by recognizing the value of every human life,
only that's not what really happened.
But it happened for some Americans,
so I'm celebrating you —
You know who you are.

2003

MILITARY PEACE

Captain Paul K. Chappell
Will War Ever End?
a soldier's vision of peace for the 21st Century

Ashoka Books/Rive Books, 8 Gray's Farm Road, Weston, Conn. 06883 www.rive.com

Joining the deep ranks of other war veterans like Dwight Eisenhower and George Orwell who have fought and worked for peace, this son of a Korean-Vietnam vet, and himself a West Point graduate and Baghdad soldier, sets down a concise treatise of historical fellowship. It's battle tagged and reasonable.

MUSIC / CD

The Rough Guide to YODEL

It's snowing tonight in the Vermont woods, not a light showing anywhere as I step out into the fresh boreal stuff and just feel like, well, yodeling! Did you know some of the finest yodelers are women, with great names that many of us know like Cathy Fink, Laura Love, Gillian Welch and my favorite Carolina Cotton. Ed Sanders has yodeled on record, so has a truck driver by the name of Mike Johnson. I know Hank Williams yodeled, though his ghost didn't make the cut here. Often termed textless vocalizing, but then so is screaming. Yodeling is far sexier.

FILM / DVD

Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven

This is my choice over the winter of a recent film I'm recommending to you. I've seen it twice now. I'd watch it a third time with you. Thanks to Eero whose watching and excitement took me back to the film again. Friends do this for friends.



Roman Polanski, Knife in the Water

Nearly 50 years old! and fresh as a daisy. Roman Polanski's very first film with characters and a story line that has barely aged a day. It's enigmatic sexual theme of threes-a-crowd aboard a ship of marriage has been tried a million times, but few as well as this one. Crisp black & white photography with virtuoso handheld camera work by Jerzy Lipman.

Samuel Fuller, White Dog

From a true accounting and book by Romain Gary. Charges of racism long kept this film out of circulation — in the hands of master storyteller/filmmaker Sam Fuller we receive the full bravado, by way of a white Alsatian trained to attack any black person. A "white dog". Through the dog, Fuller bravely reveals the disorder and fierce conditioning that runs amok through the human universe. As usual, this director was years ahead of his time as his simple and precise story line grabs the truth by the throat. With an interesting cast including Paul Winfield. Ennio Morricone takes care of the rest. Now a well earned Criterion classic.

ART /JOSEPH CORNELL / H.C. WESTERMANN

Kirsten Hoving
Joseph Cornell and Astronomy
a case for the stars (Princeton)



Yet one more entry into the vast mindset of American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). Standing with his work solo — no guides, no text — just you with the art, one creates their own halo of wonders. Each year now a guide book seems to appear, the best often composed by women (a soft spot for Cornell anyway) delving into the sacred regions of the artist's persuasions: film-work, cosmic collages, hand-built boxed marvels and the regular fantastical. It may be a bottomless well what books are yet to come. Reach for the stars.



H.C. Westermann (Abrams)

One shouldn't move away from Jospeh Cornell without tipping a cap to HC Westermann, another box sculptor magnifico, who fashioned all of his work with the skill of a cabinetmaker. Like Rockwell Kent, an artist who built with his own hands his own house and studio, it may have been what nailed Westermann with a fatal heart attack in the bargain as royal workaholic. Painter, sculptor, draftsman, builder, WW2 marine who experienced the drowning of 2000 seaman resulting years later in his series of Death Ships.

MUSIC / LP ~ CD

Joshua Burkett, Where's My Hat?

Right now I have spinning Joshua Burkett’s latest recording Where’s My Hat? From its opening sounds, powers of invention, delicate and grousing, this recording lifts me into its world. Am I lying? Is that a bagpipe working with acoustic guitar skimming off some percussionist self sound? For the first time ever I am hearing Josh’s voice — distinguished words, I mean. In previous recordings his voice could be bird flight, wind under the door, eerie and whispering, the sea from a distance. And the songs don’t noodle and drift self-consciously into a personal no man’s land. There are borders and this musician bounces against them with a playful and dead serious ambition. Harmony wants to be on the plate with dissonance. It’s about making sense. It’s about visiting us with a smile. So far only distributed as one-of-50 from Feather One’s Nest (I have number lucky 7) handed to me by Josh right out of his traveling satchel when I walked into his used record store (Mystery Train of Amherst, Mass.) I believe Karen Dalton was playing on the turntable. A few stragglers had come in from the cold. Fourteen songs, all recorded at Gold Studios over some years, and of course wishing for a blue sky world.

VERMONT HISTORY

Greg Joly (text), Rebecca Lepkoff (photographs)

ALMOST UTOPIAThe Residents and Radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont, 1950. (Vermont Historical Society)

There will always be people who are termed 'different' - here's a whole book of them - and I believe it will become a quiet classic all its own. Great books are sometimes made as if from flesh filling some vacancy asking for them, or a place or space and often a need, and this is one such book. Its subject hasn't been quite documented before and it's dealing with an endangered species - communitarian homesteaders in the southern Green Mountains of Vermont at the dawn of the Korean War. A time in Vermont before paved roads, Ben & Jerry's, and even hippies. The stalwart team of Scott & Helen Nearing have already practiced their homestead craft here for a good twenty years and in fact are the catnip attraction for this new leg of rough & ready back-to-landers, war resisters and dreamers. Without breathing a word Rebecca Lepkoff's delicately wrought black & white photographs will tell a tale of oil and water between the natives (residents) and the radicals. These photographs are as fine and defined and situated as any Walker Evans ever snapped working with James Agee, and that's saying something. The finest portrait photograph of Scott Nearing you'll ever see, and he's smiling nevermind, is in this book. I've strolled through a few bookstores and have spotted this unique album on display amongst other clutter, and each time the appearance of Ruth Stark's photograph, in galvanized black & white, walking toward me strong-arming not one but two hardback chairs, has me stop and look deeper. The tarpaper shack, rusted stovepipe, shoddy roof, variance of paint and trim, rugged grass, and a woman in floral dress with a boxer's gaze. What's not to like? so come hither. Here's how Greg Joly invites us in and acutely describes the terrain: Almost Utopia presents a photographic portrait of one Vermont community poised on the edge of modernity: It's the summer of 1950, the Pike's Falls neighborhood of Jamaica in the southern Green Mountains. Rebecca Lepkoff, a New York photographer, is drawn to this place by the presence of idealistic back-to-the-landers gathered around the Forest farm experiment of long-time radical thinker and political dissident Scott Nearing and his new wife, Helen Knothe. She proceeds to take pictures of everything she sees. I love a book that cuts to the chase and then works patiently at unwinding the spool with brilliant photographs and a crisp, knowledgeable text. One gets the feeling that Rebecca and Greg are most at home with the radicals and love it when they can spend some time with the natives, who barely pay them any mind. You see, you truly can't get there from here. But Lepkoff, miraculously, does catch the elixir in one photograph, untitled of course, frontispiece to the opening chapter "Upon This Foundation". If you know anything, you'll know this when you see it.

Lastly, MUSIC /DVD

Johnny Cash & Roscoe Holcomb: Rainbow Quest

In the age of "Twitter" — and I'm sure to come Ditter and Zitter — where one doesn't need to worry about conversing with whom one doesn't wish to converse with (the ultimate Me! Tool!), slip away into the stream with Pete Seeger and his old black and white mid-1960s TV show Rainbow Quest, where he perched on a simple wooden rocking chair around a table with guitars and banjos and musician friends like Roscoe Holcomb (Kentucky mountain singer of the high lonesome sound), Jean Redpath (Scotland), June Carter (Carter Family lineage) and Johnny Cash (a wild beanpole, before he refined) and listen to great music and conversation from the ultimate un-twittered ones. They, in fact, learned their lessons from all walks of life and unfiltered messages coming forth. It made for original wonders.

Long Winter...& Almost Spring ~ See You With More Books & Such Down the Road

YIN-LUAN

(late T'ang)
translated by Mike O'Connor








In Szechuan Seeing Off A Friend To Lu Mountain


You’re traveling
at the fragrant time of spring

on the Szechuan road
where all the hills are blooming.

Ten li of stream bank,
five li of flowers,

and two or three peaks
in snow above clouds.

You’ll be on Lu Mountain,
at my old home,

where, in my absence,
pine trees are ten years taller.

When you finally
arrive at the mountain,

please ask the birds
if they remember me.


Lu Mountain is in Chiangsi Province. A li is roughly three miles. Only four poems of Yin-luan are extant.

Mike O'Connor's poems and translations are all over our house — books, chapbooks, booklets and in letters over years & years. Long a resident of China and the Pacific Northwest, he has been associated with the very fine press Empty Bowl. At the very least his books The Basin and The Rainshadow may be mined out of our bookshop. Go take a look.

MARK TERRILL



UPSIDE THE MORNING


-------I catch myself catching myself
standing in the garden
in the throes of thinking
if it's beauty that gets a hold on us
or us that gets a hold on beauty.
-------Compared to the tiny green bug
crawling down my arm
my metaphysical ineptitude
is about the size of a small car.
-------I look over toward the shed
and see you standing there
tending to your seedlings
with almost unconscious devotion,
framed in an opening in the trees,
now uppity lush and leafy green
-------in the first burst of spring,
backlit and gloriously golden-edged
by the morning sun, like some kind of
highly charged radiant fauvist miracle,
and can't help but wonder just who
-------has a hold on what.

Mark Terrill is a California boy of the sixties now living a long while out of country first as a seaman going port to port (staying awhile in Tangiers, Paul Bowles etc) and setting up home with Uta in Germany where he beats out of iron impressive translations, poems, book reviews and melds nicely his love for music and literature by keeping associations with both. A new book of poems, The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express is making the rounds.

RAE ARMANTROUT

PERFECT



Perfect red roses
coaxed
to frame a door

beyond which
a couple bickers –

and why not?


*

Dusty webs – yes!

A ray of sun
touches a hill

and I understand
the noise
faces make.


*

In paradise
where “is”
is different,

where tangled
white knots
at the end of a rug

are also some bright
curls of surf

We encourage all readers to search out Rae Armantrout's work through her many books and one poem at a time. A full book experience may be had from one poem. This poem is drawn from Rae's Longhouse booklet Concentrate, and we showcased her poems in the Origin, sixth series, a quintet of issues.

T R U T H !

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