READERS PARADISE

These are just a few of the books / music on the nightstand or packing with us on road trips. Some are old timers brought out from the golden shelves, others are brand new for Spring 09. All should be bought used or new and preferably from independent booksellers, or from your local library, or read free that rainy day in Barnes & Noble. Take charge, reader! Kindle is for sissies! A real book in hand or pocket or satchel is man's best friend. Stroke a book.




Rae Armantrout
Versed
(Wesleyan)









Equals

As if, after all,

the thing that comes to mind
squared
times inertia

equaled the "real".

2.

One lizard
jammes headfirst

down the throat
of a second.

Clayton Eshleman

The Grindstone of Rapport
selected poetry, prose & translations
(Black Widow Press, www.blackwidowpress.com)

I'm most fond of early Eshleman poems — long before the clap-trap of alchemy and self-analysis inflicted his poems, these are best left for prose ruminations where he is far superior. There is a brotherhood in all of this book that comes through with a power and a force to reckon with. An involved artist of many talents, Eshleman ranges well and often fearlessly — from editing original matter like Caterpillar and Sulfur publications, into literary and philosophical essays and inquiries, pushed with a passion for all-lands poetry and translations where an alchemy of sorts is finely tuned. This is a book to own and fuss with and pass along.






Alec Wilkinson
The Protest Singer
(Knopf)

In Washington DC there are many monuments and portraits in oils hung on display and millions have walked before them — a showcase of leadership and goodwill, and in some cases thieves and downright murderers in sheeps clothing. One day America the beautiful may wake up and show a portrait for all to see of Pete Seeger, an American lad who crossed all the world singing songs of freedom and civil rights. Easy songs. Songs as lullabies and things to whistle to. And he had the greatness to sing the songs of many others and believe in those even more than his own. A great great caring soul. Alive at 90 years of age just like the gods planned it for us.






Robert M. Thorson
Beyond Walden
(Walker)

Things about kettle lakes, glacier deposits and emerald water (as seen at Walden Pond) are some of the subject matter here — but it's only a jumping off point for this fine geologist's mind to mull over civilization and how one evolves and perhaps withstands and hopefully provides. Water doesn't just run through one's fingers here.





Gideon S. Golany
Chinese Earth-Sheltered Dwellings
(University of Hawaii)


I first took notice of earth dwellings in China where those were burrowed in and making habitats in the Great Wall. Yaodong (below-ground habitats) have been used continuously in China for the last four centuries and today house more than forty million Chinese. This book's detailed survey of the culture and adaptation by the inhabitants is one for the ages. Well-paced illustrations and text work take you on a journey, and mostso provide lessons for modern architecture, urban design, and survival.







Stephen Addis
77 Dances
(Weatherhill)



Simply exquisite — the first book on Japanese calligraphy by poets, monks and scholars that shows the Momoyama and Edo periods (1568-18680) in large format illustrations. The Zen, the haiku, the landscape, the gossamer. Less talk, go look. The author is a thoughtful practitioner himself and trail guide.








Lew Welch
Hermit Poems
(Four Seasons Foundation)













I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a
bell does





TOWNES
For a Steve Earle recording — singing like Steve Earle, with hand claps and yells and sometimes as if through a bullhorn — this isn't disappointing. But since he is singing all Townes Van Zandt songs, he's about ruining every song with all of the above. It's a mottled mess. Of the two-disc CD, head for "the basics" CD. Townes Van Zandt sparkled and generally reached the backside of heroic. He wasn't singing his songs, he was giving them to us. Hand delivered. Listening to his good friend try his ever-loving best to even attempt a delivery is all heart and with thanks. But now go to the originals and be scared to death.






Journal of the short poem, No. 7, Spring 2009
NO/ON, edited Philip Rowland
Minami Motomachi 4-49-506
Shinjuku, Tokyo, 160-0012, Japan
noonpress@mac.com


A Japnese bound treat of special wonder. Now 7 issues, over years of practice and particular care. The poets range internationally and move well together.



take care
of being
taken care of
of the moment
by the moment
for the moment
— Sheila E. Murphy








Thomas Meyer
Kintsugi
(Punch Press
810 Richmond Avenue
Buffalo, NY. 14222-1167)


Done up in the full glory once championed by Jonathan Williams at Jargon Press — bold stroke cover design and title page with no misunderstanding where you are about to be engulfed. Here is this long poem/reverie, even personal prayers, by Thomas Meyer, gentleman and long time companion to Williams. New publisher in Buffalo, Punch Press has done this well. Robert Kelly has come forth with an introduction. With visual images by the one and only Erica Van Horn. Kintsugi — the practice of repairing ceramics with gold-laced lacquer to illuminate the breakage. One lover speaks to another's passing.




All dogs bark his name.
He who has gone

there from here
past time's gap. Jumped.




Lorine Niedecker
Immortal Cupboard

Living for years in the solitude of rural Wisconsin, poet and experimental writer Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), chose what many might see as a lonely path. Out of her very deliberate and austere lifestyle came a poetics of observation so acute that some literary critics have described her as the 20th century's Emily Dickinson. Taking cues from Niedecker's work, filmmaker Cathy Cook combines original live-action footage, animation, archival images and the poet's only audio interview (with Cid Corman) to unfurl the poet's psychological and physical landscape. Through a repetition of images, text and sounds that mirror Niedecker's own processes and forms, Cook gives new voice and visibilioty to the extraordinary works of this very private poet. Longhouse will soon have DVD copies of this excellent film available.




Patti Smith
twelve


Ample time now for you to have listened to the Steve Earle noted above and either agree with me, or be sick of me, and to substitute the Patti Smith cd in your play list. This is exactly what we did the other day in the hot sun while on a job painting a house — the Smith and not the Earle got us through the late day strtetched hours of finishing up fussy cornice and window trim painting. Smith does twelve cover songs here that she has pretty much grown up with, as we have, as her crackerjack band has, and the familiarity and play-to-invention shows. Highlights occur with Hendrix, Neil Young, the Stones, even Tears for Fears, George Harrison (The Beatles), Allman Brothers, and these days few do Bob Dylan better than Patti Smith, and probably her turn of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit is the best track on the cd. Her take on The Doors, Paul Simon, and the Airplane don't quite hit it. But with each song you can finally hear the words! Leave it to a poet.



Agha Shahid Ali
The Veiled Suite the collected poems
(Norton)














SNOWMEN


My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath
arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.

This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.

No, they won't let me out of winter,
and I've promised myself,
even if I'm the last snowman,
that I'll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.


and forthcoming, early Fall 09
Will Alexander
The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
(New Directions, 2009)



Loxodrome - or rhumba line - the word origin from the French 'point of compass' or the Dutch ' space, room'. The imaginary line (made imagined by Alexander's nautical cosmotics) across the earth's surface bisecting all meridians at the same angle, this being the standard mechanics for plotting a ship's course on a map. With Will Alexander's book of meditations, or homages in grip with Cesaire or on the horns of Sun Ra, we have one lone Sri Lankan sailor, traveling eastward from Madagascar to Sri Lanka, with invasive spectres / amidst the constellations, where one calls the monsoons hermits.


I look through myself
as through the wayward rum of the Sufis
& near the Maldives I know
some greater apparition will appear
unlike Gianini
at the core like a singular upward double
crossing the inward "Chinvat Bridge" *
the crossing point to "the beyond"
unlike the force that corrupts the eyes from without
creating its force from strict material biotics

I am carrying the inks which dissolve the corruption of the gravid
with their weighed negative conservation
with their glossary of urns that imprisons
& denies the sacred impediment
the susurrant infamy which listens

therefore I've cracked
the inner botulism doors
the profane obtrusion
the egalitarian as mystery

as I wander
I travel across the core at eclectic meridians
never canceling my wavering
my dread
my magnetic "failure to observe"*

*Chinvat Bridge: In Sufism 'the threshold of the beyond'
*failure to observe": inaccurate recording of a 'series of events because of divided attention...'



Enjoy the Reading, the Music, the Sparks!

in memory

David Carradine
David Bromige
Harold Norse
William Witherup

JANINE POMMY VEGA






MAJIK’S MALA
( for Harris Breiman )

Majik’s mala click clacking in a quiet room
jerky moves of the bone beads slipping
down the string
Places you wouldn’t think pain knew about
open up, we are re-instructed:
Mother Buddha’s string of beads,
and a hopeful puppet in her sixties
still on the lookout for freedom
It may not come climbing mountains
as before, or plumbing the depths
and positions of sexual nature
It may not come running high speed
through the woods like a dog in the summer hemlocks
May not come trekking out to find death sitting alone
in infinitudes of winter
But in slowly giving up, in the hand unclenched
the personality cooked like soup
inside the skull
Come all you who are hungry
Come and eat.
Too long fixed in place, the body
becomes an ironing board,
a bicycle standing against the wall,
it creaks into use, the slow spokes,
screech of legs propped up in the living room
Locked in a photo frame one has time
to observe mortality click clack
it is not unhappy.


No fixed opinion
when fluid motion is yanked away
it might just as well be heads
as tails click clack
these things do not matter.
Freeze frame of Majik Labdrom’s mirror
the absurdity of us marching dignified
to a graveyard one step two step Oops!
off the curbstone, down like a man in profile
The Punch and Judy Show
to a crowd of San Francisco children
Wap! He’s down! Wap! He’s up again!
click clack click clack clack
An umbrella opens, the taffeta hangs tattered
the spokes like a ribcage sing
in the wind
Fluid moves so rare we notice now
when they come up, like animated movies
Gooy drops his gumball down the sewer
Minnie holds onto her hat as she plunges skyward
off the cliff like a kite.
No references, no grave demeanor
considered opinions melt in the soup bowl
of the skull, click clack
Hey! Comes a moment, Hey!
No limping, no hunched shoulders, no stiff elbows
a body is moving easily over the landscape
Hey, what happened?
Majik Labdrom in meditation
her mala serenely around her neck
each bead in motion, in static grace
each bead in fluid motion.


Majik Labdrom, pronounced ladron,
like a Puerto Rican second story man,
The nice thing about God as a thief
is she takes it from you
willing or not, knowing or not
she takes it, you wake up one morning
and it’s all decided: mobility (or good looks
a perfect ass, a capable memory)
has disappeared.
Coming out of sleep, the chrysalis
kicks off its cocoon, the (choose one)
praying mantis katydid grasshopper’s
arms and legs are littered across the plain
and works of art, the diamond rings
are swimming down in the muck with the snails.

Willow, NY, January 13, 2005

Majik Labdron: Female “Mother” Buddha. Inventor of the chod ceremony, she is often depicted dancing, usually in a graveyard.

Mala: String of prayer beads, worn around neck, or on wrist, or in hand. Each bead can be used for a repetition of the mantra.

Poet, translator, teacher, Janine Pommy Vega is the author of Poems to Fernando (City Lights) to newer titles from Black Sparrow, Godine, and many presses. Long a champion of the underdog, the imprisoned, and the songful, she has made her homes on the west coast, east coast, South America, the Catskills, and traveled much of the world.

BOB ARNOLD









CYCLE



It must be Spring
You said so when I took apart the last

Wall of firewood and broke out of the woodshed —
Spring Has Sprung ! is how you greeted me big smile and all

The peepers are alive in the pond with sunshine
The windchimes won’t quiet down

Is it warm enough to paint the house?
Will spinach and lettuce take to the ground?

When I heave my sledgehammer onto caked ice
At the north door, will it shatter and be gone?

Will you ever feel healthy again?

These are the new questions of Spring
After months and months of deep winter answers

BRINGIN’ IT ALL BACK HOME

To John in Tucson & many other friends ~
No need to ‘pretend’ you are family — you are !

And we are eating fine and well and hardy, even on the road. Thanks for asking. We manage to find a salad bar or some nutrient grain muffins. Yesterday morning, gone at 5:30 A.M., we were no time in Manchester Village, and it was 30 degrees and nothing at all was moving in sleepy tourist town except we did notice small lights and movement in a tiny cafe off from a bookshop (closed), where two young women were busy as bees at work making delicious bakery goods and teas. It couldn't have been more ideal. I noticed through tiny windows on the sidewalk one of the women decorating bread slices with the gummiest pesto spread. She already had lunch on her mind. They had an apple crisp at a very reasonable asking price, and I asked! Susan and I knew this occasion would never be beaten during the day and the day was just raring to go. Sunlight rising over the frosted roofs, job traffic making a go, maintenance trucks and the small compacts now everywhere on rural roads. Hardly anyone drives an old clunker like we have at home until you get deeper into the mountains and the last of the farm lots, and that's where we were heading after the apple crisp and Susan's muffin. Love a place that has maple syrup for your tea. Love a town that offers all-day breakfast. Newburyport, Ma. on the coast line has such a dark windowed breakfast place. We were there the day before. We had come down from the White Mountains that morning to the sea, borrowing the traits of evolution, those mountains still in Susan's hair. My sister Sherry, dead by her own hand, the lost one, right with us, with her mementos we brought along.

This last day of the 4-day road marathon to bring my sister home to New England (from Florida) we went straight up the eastern flank of the Green Mountains. As a young woman she went to college in these mountains, until a musician arrived on campus with his band and stole her away. We’re talking the 1960s. If you look on the map the state forest roughly spreads from Whitingham in the south to Stowe in the north, along routes 7A and 100. That was our partner trail.There is heaven between Manchester and some miles south of Rutland. Rutland has gone to the dogs, but the downtown still has the rough edges of old Vermont meets new age and some ability to make things work properly. The outskirts, like all outskirts now, junked up for the madcap middle-class. The torque to America's rise or downfall. It takes only a few seconds to scram out of the cheesy outskirts, and a savannah returns of maple trees and lilacs everywhere, a bonus year. The apple trees can be boasted about, too. It'd be easy to take the slip and slide ride from Rutland over to Woodstock and eventually Hanover, but the traveler would be cheated out of real Vermont — that's when you turn onto rocky tar-pitted bump shattered route 100 and head north along the Greens...into Stockbridge, Rochester, the mellow grasslands tucked around one corner of the road and what's left of a farm site. Now a Ford dealer is nicely abridged into the barn. The four corners of farm-life is still intact, and that slows the very modest neighborhood traffic down to a full-stop, a nod or wave and maybe even a smile through the windshields. Open the vehicle windows, a cardinal is calling. The sunlight has just crashed its wave over all the pasture. Cows all gone. Cow people all gone. The dandelions are a week behind ours blown to white seed further south at home, so the yellow flower, so abundant, is lionized and terrific. I'll have to get out somewhere along the line and pick one for Susan.

We've got about an hour, tops, between one brash civilization focal point where all the traffic has been left behind, and where we'll pick it up again. In that hour will be small-town — modest libraries with sunken weird hours, unpainted buildings and worn steps leading up into a room with dim lighting. The only place you'll find old cars and old trucks. A child outdoors happy playing with a stick. Women in mens clothing. No latte cafes, no gourmet pizza, no new-age spin. But here's the slow walking thought moments of Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker, so slow it flashes. The new cars are speedy and compartmentalized, so the occupants blink and ask, "Was that a town?" Yes, it had a small village green, buildings old white with forest spruce trim, massive stone steps and foundations. Clothes on a rope clothesline. Maybe no cellphone reception — we left those self-yakkers miles back. The only reception worth your morning are the waterfalls surprising us and originating from a hemlock stand. The sign on a boardwalk access to one of the two falls proclaims one is about to cross upon a facility that is not maintained and one does so at one's own risk. Then I see how well it has been maintained with new spruce rails and bedding. Once upon a time the boardwalk wasn't even here and one traveled to one's desire by a footpath. I see the old footpath, and after enjoying the snow melt froth of the dominant waterfall, which reminds us somewhat of Nevada Falls in Yosemite, we climb over the hand rail and head up the footpath to the wilder and less showy cascade of water. The real mccoy. The one that makes you feel sexual and inspired and just your size. You seem to have reached this spot illegally. The water here is purer than the water inside yourself. Drink some. It's come from the bluest sky of long long ago.

late May 09

A VISIT WITH J.D. WHITNEY






COUSIN CROW:

I know
-----you
know I’m
here.
-----Tell
your friends.



~



COUSIN FOG:

No sense
looking
--------far.
Here we are.


~



COUSIN STUMP:

Where
more of
-------you
once
stood
I
sit.



~



COUSIN GRAVITY:

Yes:
-----just
this little
tug
to
hold me
home
but
nothing more
yet.



~



COUSIN POISON-IVY:

For the berries
birds we love
love
----we
could almost
love
you.



~




COUSIN MOSS:

Surely
-------they
thank you—
those
shaded
stones you
fur.



~



COUSIN SUN:

Giving
shadow.
------Having
none.



~



COUSIN ANT:

All
---your
intricate
cities
-----down
where we can’t
see.



~



COUSIN COYOTE:

I see your shadow
goes
-----where it wants
without you.



~



COUSIN BEAVER:

Ah!
----The
sound of
one
----hand
clapping.



~



COUSIN CATERPILLAR:

Do you
know
----how
far you’re going?



~



COUSIN HOUSEFLY:

Of course
--------you’re
welcome here--
hear
-----our
name for you.

This is from JD Whitney's Longhouse booklet Cousins — not only a small book of poems, but what could be, and so is, an exceptional and easy-to-the-touch book for children. Sit in a circle and enjoy these.

MARSDEN HARTLEY






TO THE NAMELESS ONE



You, who have power over
everything obscure
Listen — come over here; sit by
my side
and let me say the things I want
to say—
I want nothing in the way of artificial
heavens—
The earth is all I know of wonder.
I lived and was nurtured in the
magic of dreams
bright flames of spirit laughter
around all my seething frame.

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) American painter and poet and one who has never been replaced, wrote this poem late in his life taking stock of all around him, and still all around us.


in memory

Robin Blaser
Sherry Taylor

DEAR —

The world turned over and cried since I heard from you last. You may have felt a twinge? Heard a cry? Felt the wind shift. Made you wonder. An owl, or was it a hawk? the head shape was closer to an owl and it was midday when it flew low across the road and right in front of our truck yesterday as we drove out to town. Owl at this hour, or even a hawk....we said nothing but Susan thought of her father slowly dying in Albuquerque, but that may not have been right either. She didn't say anything and neither did I, but the image stuck for hours. In town we found some fine papers for my next little book and special papers for a booklet going to Norway. An arts council wants an immediate 25 and they want it by early next week, and we said certainly we would accommodate. The earnings pay for more real stuff. The ones on the point each and every day. The hawk, the owl. Amy's had a window seating and we took it and spoiled ourselves with my turkey sandwich with all the fixings, a lovely tomato soup for Susan, a fat bowl of NE clam chowder for the boy from Greylock. We still had enough time in the day to get back home, change duds, mow all the lawn and really sweat it up. Susan said we did the whole thing in 50 minutes. On the weather map it showed rain was coming from Utica, so that meant it would be here in 2 hours. It got here early, by an hour and a half. It must have been the lightning bolts and boosts of thunder that was aboard? We finished work just in time. I was cutting those fine papers from town as the rain thundered down upstairs on the steel back roof. If you were talking to me, I wouldn't have heard a word.

A week ago this same day I was at Camp Becket seeing my boyhood haunts and forests, and what was it that took me next door to Chimney Corners Camp, where my sister Sherry once upon a time went as a camper? Where I watched her ride a pony and my parents lifted me up into her lap on the saddle and around and around the corral we went. My sister always looked good in a cowboy hat. I played my first ping-pong here, outdoors, fresh green painted table tops with white frame out lines. Any time you want to play a game. Hundreds of girls in pigtails, glasses, white and green camp clothing, the cheeriest faces. My sister was one. I'm stopping for a moment to look around the campgrounds, easily a month before it opens, and so not one little girl is around. I can imagine them all coming out from under the trees and over the grasses and running running because they are young and they can. Yeah, that was my sister, too. 50 years ago.

That was exactly a week ago. Today it is the hawk or the owl flight, some omen. The moon will be full. The spring rain had lightning, quite unusual. We finished watching Last Chance Harvey and I was still taken by the concentration and sure handling by Emma Thompson about a single and mature woman just not wanting to be hurt by love. Not again. Not this time. Not ever again. Yeah, that was my sister, for a long time now.

The phone rings almost on cue. The hawk, the owl? Here's my Floridian mother with a voice I've never heard before. With a voice you don't want to hear. It isn't even a voice. It's a sound from the wilder depth or edge of civilization. Now you want to hear it more than your own heartbeat because it is your heartbeat. Your mother, of your sister, is telling you that her first born is dead and no one knows why. Someone had to cut her hair from the blood holding her to the kitchen floor. The mail had piled up. The trash cans were never brought back in all week. The neighbors thought she was away. Relatives were everywhere around. Someone's baby, sister, aunt, cousin, mother was dying right under their noses, right before their eyes, and she was doing it in the convenient bauble of modern life — where we talk a blue streak for miles on cell phones and forget who to touch

touch

touch

touch

The sheriff will say something

The autopsy will focus

The family will gather

The ashes will be buried


Some one will forever be recognizing this one missing for the rest of their lives, but she's not there

~ BA

A 12~HOUR SONIC RIDE




We’ve done many many long rides through the mountains for decades and everywhere USA ~ Canada with fresh water at the window, blue sky horizon, late night stars on the brink of things, and often with nothing but the air between driver and passenger. The look one to the other. This was all there on this ride, but not yet warm enough for windows open, we did a 12 hour sonic ride to say goodbye to a very long winter and hello to the brightness to new, young leaves hazing the hillsides all around. Springtime.

Left this morning driving out of the woods at 6 with a golden coated fox leaping right in front of our car. Far enough ahead to get a good look at the movement — something wild. Lovely lighting to its coat. Little did we know we would see this again in about 10 hours.

We'd be 12 hours on the highways and back roads all day in a rental car which would swoon as its own sonic ride. I'll list the songs and artists with us all the way north up the great quiet interstate of Vermont, one of the finest in the country but taken for granted by most Vermonters. Few finer and cutting the edge of tree line and rivers unless you are in Idaho or Wyoming. We've seen them there. Depending on the hour you can be alone on this highway of pasture hills and sweeping curves; in fact somewhere way north a sweeping curve glides us out of Vermont and right into the high brow of New Hampshire, western edge of the White Mountains, town names Bethel, Franconia, Bethlehem. Gas is $1.99. Bananas are 49 cents a pound. These are the biggest signs in downtown Bethlehem. Curiously it’s the poetry capital of New Hampshire — and long before I knew that, or really the reason why — it had me with its alpine architecture, stone churches and modest mansions, many abandoned or long up for sale, with wrap around to-die for verandahs or ship size cupolas somehow balancing atop old homes, scalloped in wonder finish carpentry and decked out with windows all around. Looking to mountains. The people who built these, lived here, all gone. The side streets ticky-tacked together with temporary vehicles and residents. Not much is talking one to the other. The trees on the street look lonesome. The ancient villas and arcadia imagination is just lasting because it was formed and realized and built by folks who loved this world and made it stick in granite and snow. A little girl walking from school looks lost in a desert. After this town with no cops to be seen, and a sign celebrating poetry, and the mountain yodel — the next town is cheap stuff, nothing but cops in cruisers, big trucks storming through. Every town in the mountains is hanging on to a slippery slope. And either crooked with justice, or just a last piece of benevolence pie. You gotta test it to see which one it is. Buy some gas and say hello. Try those bananas. Step into the library and be greeted, or stared at.

It was solid music while driving, and driving was the key. Around all the Presidentials, the highest (Mount Washington and Adams, I much like Jefferson, too) still deep ribbed with snow. The ravines look fierce. The cog rail is probably running and we should have probably hopped on and gone up but instead we hiked the boulder isolation and snow melt river rushing down from Ripley Falls. The rocks had just come out of snow.

Road kill: 1 raccoon, 1 groundhog, and what do you know: brother golden coated fox somewhere in the mountains. Same as the one this morning. Our flash in the pan. Two turkeys crossed, one at a time, wide berth interstate without mishap, all with the timing, wisdom and pace of old codgers. Last thing, one roadside porcupine, dead ‘asleep’, with its 30,000 quills.

In Gorham two women sit out in the sun on folding chairs in front of the open bay garage door of their service station. They don't look shocked any longer that they aren't doing business. The warm sun is richness and business for right about now. People up here get by on day by day, though some already have woodpiles ready for next winter. An old woman gives her long and narrow garden spot in the yard, just where the sun falls the best, a long hard stare. I wonder what that will do? I see she already has brush poles up for her peas and some trellis for raspberries and the bed has been turned. She could care less about the highway that hollers by. She was here first.

Just like the soft spots of the Canadian Rockies, or Yosemite, where we have peeked in at their villas for the wealthy, there is at least one grand hotel in the White Mountains. If done right you can slip in and slip out and pay for nothing and still stick your feet into their bubbling warm spa for ten minutes, watch your girl sway her hips against the cellar pinball machine and win bonus games, then pack your breakfast in and sit on rocking chairs just where Babe Ruth sat and enjoy your meal in the free as can be sunshine. Getting it good is just asking for enough.

I selected a good handful of CDs from 100s of compilations I made over the years and let them fly as we flew. I jotted down some titles; others are a note to the musician(s) only...running out of paper to get every title down. It was a 12-hour sonic ride and this is why ~


Bob Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell"
Steve Earle, City of Immigrants
The Turtles, You Showed Me
Link Wray & The Wraymen, Walkin' with Link
Deon Jackson, Love Makes the World Go Round
The Byrds, So You Want to Be a Rock n' Roll Star
Rolling Stones, The Last Time
Van Morrison, Brown Eyed Girl
Madeline Bell, I'm gonna make you love me
Rising Sons, By and By (Poor Me)
Gene Clark, So You Say You Lost Your Baby
Kaleidoscope, Pulsating Dream
John Kay & the sparrows , Square Headed People
Spirit , I Got A Line On You
Moby Grape, 8:05
Ruby & the romantics, Our Day Will Come
Leonard Cohen, The Future
Jerry Butler, I dig you baby
Jeff Beck, Shapes Of Things
The Hollies, Sandy
The Troggs, Love is all around
Morphine
Eileen Jewell, Rich man's world
Steve Earle, Jericho Road
Swan Silvertones, "oh mary, don't you weep"
Mimi & Richard Farina, Pack up your sorrows
Sonic Youth, i'm not there
Van Morrison, my bucket's got a hole in it
Freddy Fender, noche de ronda
Willie Nelson, senor
Ali Farka Toure / toumani diabate
Nabiha Yazbeck, astahel
Angelique Kidjo, naima
Richie Havens, tombstone blues
Letterstick Band, yi-rrana
Radiohead, 15 step
Virginia Rosa, la vai alguem
Zulya, lullaby
Eliades Ochoa, tribute to the cuarteto patria
Milford Graves
Mimi & Richard Farina, bold marauder
Townes Van Zandt, "I'll be here in the morning"
Roy Harper, forever
Radiohead, reckoner'
Billie Holiday/organica remix, summertime
Jesse Winchester, Dangerous Fun
Muddy Waters, My Home Is In The Delta
Arthur Big Boy Crudup
Doc Watson & Merle Travis, Way Downtown
Mike Seeger & Bob Dylan
Rodney Crowell
John Lennon
Iris DeMent, I Don't Want To Get Adjusted
Michael Hurley
David Blue
Victor Jara, "manifesto"
Roy Orbison
Buck Owens
Jack Kerouac
The Spinners
Roland Kirk
Roy Rogers & Dale Evans
Perry Como
Martha Wainwright, "Faraway"
Djivan Gasparyan
Virginia Rodriques
Almeda Riddle
Rachid Taha
Lars Hollmer
Dolores Keane
Jackson C. Frank
Traffic
John Jackson
Ramblin Jack Elliot, South Coast
Ramblin Jack Elliot, If I Were A Carpenter
Tim Hardin
Bob Dylan, Boogie Woogie Country Girl
Anthony & the Johnsons, "Knockin on Heaven's Door"
Opal
John Barry
Henry Mancini
Ennio Morricone
Frank Hutchison
Gene Clark, Gypsy Rider
Mississippi John Hurt
Jim Ringer, Tramps & Hawkers
Nat King Cole
Cesaria Evora, recordai
Mario, "pireotissa"
Tortoise
Ween, "japanese cowboy"
Sleater-Kinney, what's mine is yours
Son House, country farm blues
Juke Boy Bonner, houston beat
Hank Williams
Mary McCaslin, "my love"
Moby, run on
Johnny Farmer, death letter"
Fanfare Ciocarlia (romania)
Billy Bragg/Wilco, "way over yonder in the minor key"
Gonda Manakovska (kosovo)
Van Morrison, what makes the irish heart beat
Agathonas Iakovidis
Gare du Nord, pablo's blues
Nabiha Yazbeck, astahel
Bap Kennedy, drunk on the blood of christ
Trad. music Auvergne, France
Theodosia Stinga
Rev. Gary Davis (anything)
Petshop Boys, vampires
Curtis Mayfield, super fly
Vashti Bunyan, window over the bay
Johnny Rivers, memphis
Maria de Barros
Rico Bell
Cat Stevens, if you want to sing out, sing out
Morrissey, pregnant for the last time
Glenn Campbell, "Witchita Lineman"
Tim Buckley
Joe Brown
Nick Drake, "Things behind..."
Bettye LaVette, "down to zero"
Jimmy Driftwood, Tenn Stud.
Jimmy Driftwood, He had a long...
Guitar Slim, Quicksand
Bo Diddley
ZZ Top, "my head's in Mississippi"
The Waterboys, "on my way..."
Alison Krauss/Robert Plant, gone gone gone
Linda Thompson, "All I see"
Sarah Vaughan
Emmylou Harris, "All my tears"
Merle Haggard/Jimmie Rodgers
The Beatles, "I am the walrus"
Pop Staples
Beach Boys
Dion, "the wanderer"
Elvis, "Suspicion"
Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling..."
John Coltrane "Blue train"
John Lee Hooker: Live
Lightnin Hopkins
Jimi Hendrix
Greg Brown, "China"
Ravi Shankar
Woody Guthrie (anything)
Peterpaulmary, "500 miles"
Carson Arnold, "Morning Dance"
Leo Kottke/Mike Gordon "from spink to correctionville"
Eliades Ochou y el Cuarteto Patria
Barbara Lewis, "Baby, I'm yours"
Solomon Burke, "everybody needs somebody to love"
Don Covay, "seesaw"
Doug Sahm, "At the Crossroads"
Archie Bell & the Drells, "here I go again"
Clarence Carter, "slip away"
Donny Hathaway, "the ghetto"
Betty Wright, "clean up woman"
The Spinners, "i'll be around"
Ben E King, "supernatural thing part 1"
Andrea Echeverri, "baby blues"
Ana Moura, "as vezes"
John Prine,"hello in there"
Chris Issak, "Wicked Game"
B-52s, "rock lobster"
RL Burnside, "It's bad you know"
Berlin, "take my breath away"
Fats Domino
Kim Richey
The Romantics, "what I like about you"
Jefferson Airplane, "turn my life around"
Blondie, "heart of glass"
Iggy Pop
Fine Young Cannibals, "she drives me crazy"
Joshua
Judy Collins, "since you asked"
Dusty Springfield, "no easy way down"
Habib Koite
Donovan, "The Mountain"
Joe Cocker, Feelin’ Alright
Mama’s & the Papa’s, Twelve Thirty
Desmond Dekker, Fu Manchu
John Lennon
Ann-Margaret
Nina Simone
Neil Young
Jimmy Reed
Billie Holiday
Franco, "Celio"
Jesse Thomas
Love
Santana, Soul Sacrifice
Judy Henske
PJ Harvey, "The Mess We're In"
Spacemen, Come Down Easy
13th Floor Elevators
Duke Ellington, “Oclupaca”
John Fahey
The Carter Family, “John Hardy...”
Sandy Bull “Carmina Burana Fantasy”
Jerry Lee Lewis, Deep Elem Blues
Skip James, Hard Time Killin Floor Blues
Charlie Musselwhite, Christo Redemptor
The Pointer Sisters, Fairytale
Sun Ra
Mira Billotte, "as I went out one morning"
Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes
Lou Harrison "for Strings..."
Louis Armstrong
Thelonious Monk
Hole
The Doors, (let your children play)
The Supremes, come see about me
Bob Marley
Toots & the Maytals
Buddy Holly
Johnny Cash/June Carter
Johnny Cash, "Hurt"
Rodney Crowell
Dock Boggs
Roscoe Holcomb
The Delmore Bros., “I’m lonesome without you”
Gato Barbieri
Otis Spann, I got a feeling
Nirvana
Barred Owl (calls)
Canyon Wren (calls)
Hermit Thrush (calls)
Sam Cooke, a change is gonna come
James Brown (4 of his best):
it’s a man’s man’s world
(do the) mashed potato pt. 1
papa don’t take no mess pt. 1
king heroin
Shantel “Bucovina”
U2, New Year’s Day
U2, Desire
Los Lobos, "Mas y Mas"

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THIS WEEK TO PETE SEEGER (MAY 3)
& ON-DECK YOGI BERRA (MAY 12)

FRED JEREMY SELIGSON








CHERRY BLOSSOMS



Just lean against
cherry blossom trunk
to write this



~




Wind, voices
blowing
through
blossoms



~




No bag needed
w/ all these
poetry pockets



~




Doesn't see me sitting
— that's a very big blue,
gold-winged bird



~




White petals
make a stripe
on this dirt road



~




Can't see temple
for the blossoms



~




Somewhere
down there
water's trickling



~




Down there
through pines
azalea pinks



~




Smell's
getting
stronger —
all combined
flowers



~



3 paths
like veins
meeting
your beating
heart



~




Pumpkin bee
can't get around,
nor can I — sits
on arm, "Hey
it's not your flower!"



~




A petal bridge
across

Long ago Jeremy Seligson called Susan at her job, because we had no phone at home in our cabin along the river and said Cid Corman was recommending he visit us since Jeremy had some plan in his head to move to Vermont. It was smack dab in the middle of mud season, and so that visit never did take place, but Susan came home with the message. Jeremy would eventually move to Vermont, and we did meet when Cid came to Bennington College to give a reading. I remember bunches of other friends there that night: Lyle Glazier, Stephen Sandy, David Giannini, Gerard Malanga (had a photography show up at the same time: double your pleasure). After Vermont, I believe Jeremy took off for South Korea, where he stayed in close contact with Cid and Shizumi in Kyoto, and to this day continues a one-man band of modest poetry flavor. A man of deep peace activism. I enjoyed the Spring when he sent to me dozens of cherry petal poems, and on the spot I selected a baker's dozen of the most pungent which I am sharing with you here. Yes, it's springtime whenever I open this little Cherry Blossoms booklet.

Wish I had someone to share
these blossoms with ...
well, how about you?

BERKSHIRE DAY






As to a few days ago — a good time was had by all. We were up and out of here (dark woods and river) at 4:30 AM for the Berkshires. Over the Mohawk Trail. I knew we'd come back through Hawley, it's quiet little villa along its own woodlands in the evening. At the book sale we had to be in a line already forming from the night before! so no matter we were there at daybreak we were still back aways in line. Book dealers bring boxes the night before and leave them as their place in line. Others rent motel rooms for a quick first-step. We drive through the night. The tickets handed out by 7:30 and still not that many were there. A friend of ours had a basketball and that's all I had to hear bouncing around since we were at a school and the hoops had two good nets. One hoop, though, looked like Shaq had done a jam on it. Bad tilt. My friend didn't seem to miss much despite the tilt. I invited over a few other middle-aged guys who hadn't touched a basketball in 40 years and tossed them soft passes and before you know it they were feeling a little younger and hitting a few at close range. That killed one hour. Susan sat in the sun enjoying herself. The sale wouldn't start until 10 in the morning but by then we all had our tickets and the sale would be a 3 hour workout for us and we fetched a half-dozen boxes of books. After that we bicycled the campus edges of college town. A few guys playing a good game of tennis.

In the afternoon we knew we had been saving up a full year of no junk food so we could hit Pedrins Dairy Bar, the very place I went to with my family every weekend through the summer of my childhood. Hotspot early 1960s. I still think it's the best, or one of the best, fish n chips or clam roll or milkshake with fries hangout in all the Berkshires. Susan and I ordered then put down the tailgate on the truck and ate up on the tailgate. Legs swinging. All that was missing was Pacific Ocean. That's all.

Junk now in us we headed deeper into old Adams town and we tooled all my old bicycle haunts on the way to the cemetery where yearly we go to plant more flowers at my parents graves (mom not yet in there) and clean out their etched names in stone of grit and lichen. We do it with a plastic knife from the dairy bar. Mount Greylock happens to look terrific from this location so we took off our socks and boots (sandals Susan) and lay in the sun right near the graves. I believe I fell asleep for a few minutes sinking a bit down into the labyrinth of father.

Next stop was to head back into Adams and check out the place...what a misery watching a once vital town shutting down store by store and the sidewalks virtually empty. I remember crazy soda jerk joints, a red bold facade Woolworths, bowling alley upstairs, pool hall, cops walking the beat (now one young cop on bicycle), kids kids kids everywhere. Shiny oil smell hardware stores. The train passing right through the heart of Main Street. A RR worker standing outside the caboose always giving us a wave. Vanished. I hadn't been in Miss Adams Diner in 45 years and never have taken Susan in, so we went in for coffee and pie. Susan had the coffee and I had tea. The waitress was new in town (1985) from Texas and never heard of my father's lumberyard right behind her diner just about, or my great grandfather's great log yard. There was an old lady with puffy white hair in for shepherd's pie at 4 in the afternoon and I have a sneaky feeling she knew about that lumber place. It's funny, on the way out to the cemetery I saw this same woman out in her backyard hanging laundry and I said to Susan: "See that old woman, she's probably the age of my mother and has probably never left town. Hanging wash." An hour later she's right behind me in a booth listening. Small town.

The Texan blond was going all hog wild about the old Polish Church (what I called it as a kid because that's what it was). It turns out they have gorgeous stained glass in the church and it's another place I haven't been inside for almost a half century...I suggested to Susan we climb on our bikes and head out to see the church. We get there at just the hour for mass and a vigil because It seems the church is being closed down. There's a rift down the center of town between those who want to close down all but one Catholic church in town for lack of funding etc., and keep the one center-piece church on the main street as all-purpose church. The heartbreak is what to do with this magnificent Polish church. The interior (we knocked on the door and got inside) is stunning glass work, and the 'marble' columns. I got up to them inches from my eyes and I swore they were marble, so has every architect who has visited. Not so. Wood. And since the church was built in 1905 it's a good bet all the wood for the building, and these sterling, scalloped marble columns, came from my family's lumberyard. Now I wish my father was alive to talk to me. There's a custodian in the church working hard to keep the church open and vital and he asked us to sign a petition and we did gladly. He also did a double take when he asked my name. Suddenly we were flooded with familiarity of a known goodness once in this town. He was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1965. I was in 1970. He went. I went elsewhere. Almost 40 years later we're talking. Trying to save a church built by people long gone. The craftsmanship eternal.

Ah, so we got on the bikes and rode out the dusk by going up to the old baseball field (Russell Field) where I once hit a line drive through short stop and brought in a winning run. Same baseball diamond they flooded every winter and we ice-skated for hours under floodlights. I'd stay so late skating with my middle brother Scotty that he'd be crying from the cold by the time we hiked back home. Not a big hike now as I look around from the field over the old buildings and up a few side hill streets, but a barren and frigid Sahara Desert to an 8 year old, in the cold dark of 20 degrees. Susan and I swing by it all on dirt bikes taking the uphill to the golf course and around an old neighborhood I always loved because there is this miniature sort of Lombard Street (San Francisco) that comes down from the golf course to the library and into the center of town all over again. Full circles are all about a small town. All the steeples, built by Italians and French and Irish and always the Polish.

ONE WORD FOUND


After a long winter that shook things with ice and extensive tree damage for many starting in December, then the deep snow and cold and early dark weeks piled up one against the other for months. And don't forget 5 miles of mud roads no matter whichway we left the house, just recently. By the time we came to Spring, and it does come, there is that one morning the sunlight changes its angle and the birds notice this before anyone. Hear the difference in their song. Even the river seems to run less with snow melt and more by the energy of new growth. Out in the big yard we took to raking long before the snow was gone. We'd work every day wherever the sun had melted and take up the wet leaves for compost and a million small branches and lift up the rubble of stonewall top rocks that spilled off and rake smooth all the wood ashes spread over ice paths during the season. After a full month of this snow melt and raking the yard is now almost dry of snow. There always remains the diminishing snow pile by the north door that never leaves until almost May. While raking the hosta bed today, the long one on the eastern side, near the long woodshed eaves, I found a word in the debris. The only word I raked up all Spring. It could have been any word. I could have invented any word. No need for inventions in such a world. Here's the one I found as it found me.

A WALK WITH JOHN MARTONE







you follow train tracks come to a sheep pasture





RR
tracks

sheep
pasture

house
trailer

ceme
tery

inter
section






grazing
sheep
facing

evry
way

my
compass






sheep

---------pasture
---------------------pattern






18 sheep & cloudless sky






sheep
& rain

also
kin






stand & watch
3 horses also
stand & watch







stream
boulder

sheep
color






somebody's roof at home in this stream






walnut leans

-------------over stream

------------------------listening








graveyard's
an
other
flock
above
sheep
pasture






graveyard

---------obelisk fell

---------------------perfectly west






year's first monarch suns on a headstone






monarch

-----------on headstone

-------------------------- about to

------------------------------------ topple








headstones leaning

-------------------one against another

--------------------------------------against a cedar









all winter

-------------nest stayed

---------------------------one piece








winter left

-------------a clean cup

-------------------------nest








sheet-plastic-

------------------storm-window too
-----------------------------------------in nest






you set
a stone urn
upright






somebody walking toward you just vanished


~

All the above, just in, is from compass by John Martone and scarce in any edition. This is but one section from the new book. Many of John's finest books, booklets, sleeves, sheets, broadsides etc., are from jaunts, hikes, walks, on-foot strategy of eye and hand coordination from the neighborhood garden, midwest woods, fields and streams.

JEFFERS ~ THE CARMEL COAST
LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL

Rereading recently Lawrence Clark Powell's Robinson Jeffers, the man & his work (Haskell House) originally published by Primavera Press of Los Angeles, with the decorations by Rockwell Kent, foreword by Jeffers himself, one is holding in hand one of the gorgeous masterworks of California. Powell has been forgotten by way too many readers, mostso the new young readers who could delight in his slow down world of book lore and customs and embracing books and writers whole to his chest. All his books are a singing testimony to the love of writers, books and libraries. He didn't sit on a tenured post or busy his days with writing grant proposals — he got up off his fanny and went to visit the writers he advocated and literally moved in for awhile with the family of man and took his notes and sharpened his eye and dirtied his brow. In Jeffers' case, he swept himself up in the legends of the rocky Carmel coast, going inland too with those sunny creviced hillsides. Forgetting Jeffers or Powell is forgetting the physical literary landscape. I like this map that comes along with the book. It tells many stories, deepens some myths, clears the eye to where-what-is while reading Jeffers. Take a look. Go find the poems. Click on the map to make it bigger.

~ In Memory ~

J. G. Ballard

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.