Bob and Susan Arnold

WORKING THE AUTUMNAL WOODS
Vermont

Here we are / here you are

setting up the villa of bucked stumps to hand-split, all rock maple






taking care of our son's puppy Junior Pilot, a kiss






a full tree split, stacked cairn, walk the ground






tools of the trade & helper





an apple a day....






in the bowl of sunshine





maple splits & a little beech added in



finis




all photographs by Bob Arnold except where he appears, then Susan Arnold took over. October woods c/o of Vermont. Planet Earth. No cellphones, no roads, tell time by the sky. Wood cut and split for winter 2011.

NO WAY OUT

I was with Sweetheart yesterday on the rounds between NH-VT hospitals and the battery of her tests. This is all a ragged trail continuation for a year and a half now fighting Lyme disease and one mysterious ailment followed by another that has come with the bugger. You'd rather not be a head-case, if you don't mind, but you are. I am, perhaps, more than Sweetheart as I try to protect her, get her to appointments, swim salmon up-river with the medical riff-raff. More tests tomorrow: a CAT scan. Next week the colonoscopy. The staff are all middle-aged women and devoted, the doctors are these things locked in their cells. They won't give an inch until they've supplied the insurance companies with a galaxy of costs and put the patient under the proverbial thumb. The new-fangled hospitals are all like cheap coated luxury motels. The elderly decked out on the mezzanine floor in box seats, piped in music of some sort, shit head carpet, junk art on all the walls. The whole contraption just breathing in and exhaling out two scummy words: heart and cancer. There's no evidence of real heart anywhere, just the flagging one. But like I say, the ton of pleasant professional women as receptionists and nurses etc are holding the whole place up. And probably back at home, too. They are truly a new salt of the earth quality all to themselves. There's a million ways into the place, wide glassy doors, but no way out.

(so get playful)

I went into another hospital two days later and gave three vials of blood. It should do me for the next 4-5 years or so, except for the prostate which I stay up on. Though I am reading more on the iffy of all prostate tests. I decided to do all the tests to be a good sport while Sweetheart is dragged into her own test after test — be a true companion during this miserable rut. The nurse on call was extremely pleasant. She saw the new Flannery O'Connor biography I had as traveler with me for all the waiting I would be doing that morning and asked immediately what I was reading. I put Flannery down on the bench nearby and pointed back at the book and said "Flannery O'Connor", the same way Columbus said "America". With pride. She said O I don't know her work, should I? I said you most definitely should, but later I realized as with Celine or Beckett even Flannery has to ride with a footnote: can you take artificial niggers and the violent who bear it away? If not, don't go reading. She then asked me why I would read such a book...was I a teacher or?...and the words stopped there and her eyes widened as she searched mine. The coast looked clear so I told her I was a writer. Being a very pleasant woman she said "Oh" and really meant it. She then asked if it was possible to find my books in the local libraries and I told her it would be and I drew a map on my palm just where the books were in the library, what shelf, last dusted and how long the books have sat there untouched. I told her there were a few libraries in the area with said books of this blood giver. I also offered that the fine book store on Main Street had my books. She didn't look ready for me to tell her the store also had Cid's selected poems and it's been there for two years. Untouched. Even after Sweetheart put it on display (taking down someone like Heaney who has had enough exposure). All the while this was going on the poor woman couldn't find my vein. Well she found it, but it kept "slipping away". She dug deeper and poked a bit harder. I saw her walk in at 9:30 and she took me in at 9:40 so I was her first patient and I was only sorry she had to get a slippery one so early in the day. She told me I would probably bruise and I smiled knowing she was going off at the end of the day to buy all my books and start her poetry library...what's a bruise?

Bob Arnold says, if you can muster it, go to a doctor with a song in your heart

JOHN LEVY

Rory Fingerlin Reading

Last night the American poet Rory Fingerlin read at Thompson Hall. This reading was co-sponsored by The English Department and The University’s Legalize Pot Now Association (LPNA). Fingerlin, author of the poetry volumes FINGERLIN IS FINGER-LICKING GOOD (1992) and KAFKA FOR DUMMIES AND OTHER INSTRUCTIONAL MANUALS (2002), read new poems from his work in progress, IF I PLACED MY IDEAS IN CARDBOARD BOXES AND DROPPED THE BOXES IN QUICKSAND WOULD THEY GO ANYWHERE DIFFERENT?

Fingerlin was introduced by Michael Butler Smith, who praised Fingerlin’s poetry for its “zany unpredictability” and its “extraordinary noise-scapes, possibly the most musical poetry written in English in the last decade.” Near the end of Smith’s lengthy introduction he read Fingerlin’s poem, “Hot Air Balloon Filled with Llamas and Ostriches Floats Above Pot-Smoking Tourists Visiting Mount Rushmore” in its entirety. Smith ended his introduction by singing a song he wrote about Fingerlin’s poetry, accompanying himself on banjo.

Fingerlin mounted the stage and surprised the audience by announcing that he is studying tap dance and wanted to perform a dance he had just finished creating a few days earlier. After what can only be called a stunning performance, with a number of brush steps and flea hops, Fingerlin informed us that what we had seen and heard was based on the meter of two of his favorite Shakespeare sonnets.

Fingerlin then read “A Dozen Written In Tiny Spaces Above Earth,” a suite of twelve poems that he wrote in air plane bathrooms this last month as he flew from campus to campus on his latest whirlwind reading tour. He said he set himself the following challenge: he would enter the bathroom and write furiously until the moment someone knocked and/or pounded on the door. Some of the poems end mid-word.

All twelve of these poems begin with self-portraits written as he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. The poems proceed in wild and varied streams of consciousness, full of peculiar images and rhymes and insightful (frequently Freudian) reflections on his fellow passengers. After Fingerlin finished reading the twelfth poem of this suite, he received a standing ovation which lasted two minutes and 41 seconds. In an interview I conducted with Fingerlin after the reading (to be published in the university literary magazine later this year) he said this suite of poems has received standing ovations after every reading and noted that our ovation lasted 17 seconds longer than any other standing ovation he has received this year. His wife, who accompanies him on all of his reading tours, is his time-keeper. She times not only any standing ovations but all tap dance performances. In addition, she signals to him when he has been on stage for exactly 90 minutes, at which time he finishes whatever he is doing and asks the audience for questions.

During the Q and A session following the reading, one member of the audience asked Fingerlin if he had created any other original tap dances. Fingerlin revealed that he has also finished a brief dance based on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” After the same member of the audience pleaded with Fingerlin to perform it, Fingerlin obliged. The dance began with a 27-second soft shoe then accelerated with a 19-second patter after which Fingerlin dropped to all fours and joined a rattle with his shoes to a slow melancholy riff employing both his ring-studded hands. He rolled onto his back, appearing very much like a beetle on its back waving its appendages uselessly. The standing ovation for this performance lasted one minute and 23 seconds.

After getting back to his feet, Fingerlin responded to questions about the nature of inspiration, the state of the economy, his series of 84 haiku about Tiger Woods, his recent editorial (published by The New York Times) about thematic trends in contemporary American poetry, and the differences between metrical concerns in poetry and in tap dancing. Next he graciously thanked the overflow audience and did a remarkably rapid front shuffle step all the way out to the lobby, where he signed copies of his books for the next 52 minutes.

We have already begun trying to raise money to have Fingerlin return to the campus next year. Any and all interested donors should call LPNA between midnight and 2 a.m. any night (Sundays included).

~

John Levy makes his bread & butter as a public defender coming to the aid of those down & out in the Tucson Arizona region. His books of poetry & prose include Among the Consonants (Elizabeth Press),We Don't Kill Snakes Where We Come From (Querencia) Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs (First Intensity) and The Nightest (Longhouse). A family man, John is married to the artist Leslie Buchanan and is right this minute working on his first novel.

JONATHAN GREENE

NEW CONTEXTS FOR OLD WORDS

VIRGIN BACKS LONDON MARATHON

VEDANTA COULD STILL MINE

RICH PROFIT SEAM IN INDIA

KARMA COMES STANDARD

Not the Virgin Mary, but Sit Richard Branson’s Virgin Money, part of the Virgin Group, sponsoring the race for a five-year deal worth £17m, Weekly Telegraph, May 21-May 27, 2008, p. 31

Not the Hindu scriptures such as the Upanishads but the mining company, Vedanta Resources,

Weekly Telegraph, May 21-May 27, 2008, p. 33

Not karma as in Hindu and Buddhist thought, but software that is included when you buy

a Kanguru Eco Drive, MacConnection Catalogue, v.294c

Jonathan Greene has long been the proprieter, typographer, designer, and chief bottle washer with Dobree Adams at Gnomon Press from the Kentucky River watershed. His many books have been found in the best poetry collections since the 1960s. His skill at harvesting just the found-words, as above, is a craft shared with his once Appalachian neighbor and friend Jonathan Williams.



and from the editor: In Memory today of Will Inman's passing

PURPLE JAPANESE IRIS

poem by bob arnold, art work by Jacqueline Laufman, photo © susan arnold

A sidewalk poem done right on the spot — one of Bob's poems as he read it and the musician and artist Jacqueline Laufman heard it and drew the poem onto the street. Just one of those heralded moments in an October once upon a time, when Dudley & Jacqueline came to town to read poetry and play music on the street with us that day to raise money for Katrina victims. Many years later and many are still waiting for recovery. The poem washed away by the rain. Where are we now?




PURPLE JAPANESE IRIS




Where you stand

They just about

Touch your lips




BOB ARNOLD

REMEMBERING MERCEDES SOSA

July 9, 1935 – October 4, 2009

photo © bob arnold

DAY OFF

Yesterday was wonderful after we left the hospital and dropped off one more of Sweetheart’s medical tests. Now the day was ours! We drove north to a college town and arrived at 9 a.m., just in time to freeze in a bakery that took all day to warm up. When we returned at 5 o’clock in the afternoon to find an evening sweet to share on the ride back home, the bakery was now too warm. Very Goldilocks. The town is the closest place we can think of to the film Pleasantville. It is all collegiate. There are no rough and ready folks anywhere, and if there are, they stand out. The streets are almost paved in gold. The Barnes & Noble was accepted by the town but it is not allowed to call itself Barnes & Noble; it remains The College Bookshop. Though it is not. The quality of books has gone downhill since it was The College Bookshop and all of the charm of old ivy league intellect and color has been misplaced by a bland Starbucks counter. What once smelled like books that Bennett Cerf once touched, now smells like Betty Crocker. Same initials, but.

All day we walked the streets, side neighborhoods, into the trees and sun-felt campus, nibbled foods, paged through a ton of new books — JG Ballard stories, photography by Eggleston whom I love, a Denis Johnson crime caper, Wendell Berry farming essays, and I scuttled through the new issue of Poetry (hit & miss) and Paris Review (pretty darn good). We then went back to the college campus and tracked down the exhibit room for Dr. Seuss, an alumnus. Nice room but really for that burst of Seussian energy, it's all bottled up. A friend recently told us the true outdoor world for Seuss is at the Springfield, Massachusetts museum quadrangle, a spot on earth jumping with Seuss characters. We’ll have to have a look. Believe it not, the shaggy Appalachian Trail plows right up through the main street, but it’s completely invisible, except when a starry-eyed wanderer is caught all bundled-up and booted on a street corner waiting for the light to change. In downtown Pleasantville. If you are ever in this town, and stuck, we can tell you where every free bathroom is.

A New England boy, Bob Arnold believes you love and fight to save the small town.

LAST MAN STANDING

photo © bob arnold

FARMER

A beautiful pickup truck with the fanciest side mirrors on both doors. It seemed like 3D. This is the truck the heavy set worker arrived in. The t-shirt was gray and molded over a barrel chest and double barrel gut. The arms the size of my thighs. Something happened along the years because he couldn’t hide the limp. He was coming to measure up a wood pellet furnace. I could tell he didn’t know all that much about the furnace except he burned pellets in his own wood pellet stove. He knew the pellets were shipped to the northeast from the Rockies, Pennsylvania and somewheres in Canada. Canada always gets a “somewheres”. It’s a big place. Since he didn’t know much about pellets, and his body was a steady workers, I asked him what he did before pellets. “Farmer.” One word sufficient. But said with the great tongue of a cow so it sounded like “Fah-mar”. I suddenly loved the word more than ever. He said he once had a farm called River Maple. And I said my wife and I for 35 years have passed the large barn sign for this place and always wondered why it wasn’t Maple River. “Well, which came first”, he asked me, “the river or the maple?” I said, “The river — it feeds the maples to grow.” He smiled at that, as if his grandfather who gave the farm this name once explained it to him this way when he was a boy. Yes, he suddenly looked boyish as we said goodbye when he left.

Bob Arnold likes the fact that every single word in this little yarn is true.

NOW IN VERMONT

photo © susan arnold

SOMETHING




Isn't it something how the gentle breeze just doesn't stop

In the woods with us the sound of leaves

Out on the ocean an eye-field of waves

On the prairie the prairie

Nobody can stop it

Nobody

Bob Arnold was once told by a developer — ‘nobody’ lived out where he lived in the woods — developing was a piece of cake. So Bob & friends organized about 500 nobodys to attend a meeting of developers to say hello.

WORK CREW

photo © bob arnold

THOUGHT



When I was a lumberyard worker, bored out of my mind, I’d find a cool spot in the shade and hole up there and think awhile, even read

Today I landed in a lumberyard looking for luan and found a bored big worker and from a long way off I could tell he was twittering with his Twitter

Such a big guy looking like he was playing with his thumbs

ON FIRE



I spoke to a small Irish fellow today who likes to drink and work on gas heating. We were thinking of hiring him for a job here. Something I could work with him on. His hourly wage is extremely reasonable, which was one of the attractions, and he is the foreman of our gas co. He would do this as moonlighting, thus the cut rate labor cost.

“Any Saturday is good”, he said. “But catch me before the heating season begins in late summer.”
I nodded.

Then he mentioned how he blew up a gas job where most of his body was a ball of flame. Another worker was fortunately on hand and pushed him out and rolled him onto the grass. Still, “the flesh on both my arms were dripping off. I could bring you the pictures. You'd puke."

Sweetheart’s now looking at my guidance about hiring or not hiring this small Irish hard drinking fellow.

Q & A



Got any snakes in the house?

Nope. Just in the firewood.

Garter?

Yup. Maybe a half dozen in this stack of wood.

How about brown recluse?

Not here.

I got stung in the lower leg, almost killed me.

Where?

Around here, even though they say the spider isn’t around here. He found me. I was 11 days in the hospital. An Oriental doctor is the one who saved me and neither of us could speak the same language. A hole the size of a half dollar in my leg. And the stink, whew! I guess it was my rotting flesh. For awhile there I was on drugs where I was seeing rats in the kitchen. I know they weren’t there but I saw them.



Bob Arnold gets many poems with people messin’ with his head.

HEADING OUT

photo © bob arnold

JULY IN THE SUN




We pick blueberries this way —

I wear jeans and t-shirt

you wear a pretty dress



the rest is easy

SUGAR CONE




She’s in a small building
ready to serve us ice-cream cones

but before she does that she’s on the
phone and

when she hangs up she tells us she has
just become a grandmother! and then

she asks us what we’d like today and
we tell her what we’d like today is to say

she doesn’t at all look old enough
to be a grandmother




Bob Arnold has just about heard enough about himself and would rather be in love.

RAIN, OWLS, DRUNKS

Yesterday we took a hike in the rain. Me in yellow slicker coat, Sweetheart under an umbrella. The rain coming down hard. Hard enough to keep a barred owl still on a low beech tree branch, 6 feet off the ground, just blending in with the soaking rain. Only because I stopped and tapped Sweetheart to see the owl did it get bothered and set off across the road right in front of us. That great round head. A young woman was once very close to buying our cabin in the woods and we were settling the deal when a barred owl called as evening was coming on. It was summer chilling to hear the calls over and over. But this frightened the woman, who said she studied Shaman rites, not to buy the cabin.

Whatever

After the owl we came upon two fishermen returning to their pickup truck. Both drunk. One was loud and the other was goofy and a little sweet, so they balanced one another out. As we passed with a friendly wave, the loud one glared at us and blurted, "ANY fish in this RIVER?" as if we owned the river and his poor return was our fault.

Heavy rain, spooky owls, and drunks.

Bob Arnold has lived on the Green River almost 40 years and to the dismay of everyone when they ask if he fishes in the river and he says, “no”. He bathes in it.

YESTERDAY IN VERMONT photo © susan arnold











EXTRA INNINGS




It thundered and roared five inches of rain last night

Right onto and off the big steel roof

Visitors about to leave took a look outdoors and back-tracked inside

We talked one or two more rounds

Said goodbye one more time

Had all that extra living

Because of the rain




Bob Arnold says this poem has less to do with baseball and everything to do with affection.

A DREAM WITH MY FRIEND JEWELL ON THE SUBJECT OF LIFE & FAME

I know I told you long ago, but when I was 10-12 years old my father was giving serious consideration on moving the family to Phoenix. For a building contractor he heard it was a hot spot. We’d be loading up the wagon in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and somehow making it to the southwest. It seemed impossible, it was impossible. I can easily imagine us though meeting, as if in a dream, in some bookshop a few years later in downtown Phoenix where you were busy growing up as a boy.

[ A bookshop corner, given light by only a shabby window.]

"Excuse me, do you like Oppen?"
"Huh? George Oppen? Yes. Yes I do!"
"Me too." Some silence, because we are 16.
"Do you like William Carlos Williams?"
"Absolutely."
The rest was easy.

Of course I'm giving ourselves pointers for knowing Oppen's work at 16, when I didn't, but I know we were both reading Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth and Kerouac. Certainly Creeley, Levertov, Olson, Duncan, Reznikoff and Snyder. Though we’d be equally as excited when falling into the hands of Spicer, Eigner, Zukofsky, Corman, Niedecker, O’Hara, Baraka, Corso, Whalen — the gods of poetry list is very very long — and we haven’t even dipped a toe into Europe or parted Asia’s curtain. South America was where Rockefeller's son was eaten by cannibals, or so we thought, but it was really New Guinea. Head-hunters. Africa was Tarzan. Period.

It would have changed things for us both as poets; maybe we'd both work for my father and become builders. You thought of law school and your father, but you were being rebellious. The building trade fit right into our dreams of being independent of the Man. After all, it was the Sixties! We thought we would set off and start a commune up near Oracle.

We'd build all the buildings for everyone and everyone would come, including Ed Abbey who didn't like us one little bit and our hammering ways, but he liked all the silver girls who liked rugged poets with tools in their fists and Bonnard paintings on their walls.

Abbey would become most difficult and we'd end up in one of his essays on self-serving-commune-builder-poets-good-for-nothings. People would read this in the thousands and soon print a broadside manifesto out of it. It was posted on all college campuses. At public readings it was Abbey's highest request to read. He did so with glee, each time describing us worse and worse, until we couldn't even recognize the "Scabby white rich boys from Phoenix who I bet get weekly checks from their daddies. And their poetry sucks."

In fact we were once in the back row at one of these readings in Tucson, and we looked at one another getting angrier with each other by the second because it might be true. Abbey said so! The crowd was cheering. What a mess.

Bob Arnold often climbed Mt. Greylock with local cub and boy scout troops as a boy. Once he persuaded a few to leave the pack with him and venture into other parts & trails of the mountain. This caused panic with the troop leaders. One representative came to Bob’s house to speak to his parents. His older sister posed as a ‘parent’ and listened diligently to the scolding about Bob and saved him from further scolding by his parents. Nothing like teamwork.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED THE OTHER DAY

It’s late morning when I see the Fed Ex white pickup truck go down the dirt road, slow up, look in, see under the tall tamarack tree my chalkboard quote with Jimmy Hoffa, and he probably thinks about that a moment. Keeps going. Comes back, slows down again, I wait for him to sum up the right place. We don't use a road # on the house because we like being in the woods, hidden, not some suburbia. So we help people when they are looking for us. He gets out of the truck. "Who you lookin' for?" Looks down at his clipboard, "Susan Arnold?" He appears hopeful. "You found her." He snaps up, "Terrific!" On his shoulder he brings my Mexican tiles. I know they're the tiles. We've been waiting weeks and they never returned our query for a tracking number. Asked 3 times. No answer 3 times. Let's hope they were busy buffing our ceramic tiles instead, down there in old dusty Mexico.

Sets it down. I sign. I then say, "I'm not Susan Arnold, but you've brought me work to do." He looks at me, "I hope that's okay?" I smile, "Couldn't be better." Another "Terrific" from him. Off he goes, happy, did his job. Then he abruptly stops and turns and asks, "Last name?" like he's just recalled his business code of ethics. I say, "Arnold". He's happy again and strides off. I almost said, "Bond. James Bond."

Ah, the box looks like shit. Are the tiles all busted inside? $80 down the drain?

I open the box. Still no breakfast in me and past noon. Inside each tile, 100 of them, are protected in a beautiful styro-wrapping. Couldn't look nicer. I unwrap one bunch and unfold 8 tiles, all shiny and no cracks. Let's hope the bottom of the box looks just the same. I want to save the way it looks for Sweetheart to have a look when she gets home from town so I won't dig deeper. Whoever in Mexico wrapped it up, did as well as I do in Vermont with every book order out of our bookshop. And occasionally I ship out orders in an old lousy box, too.

In his senior year of high school Bob Arnold was thoroughly flunking Algebra II and Chemistry and if memory serves French II. But he won the English Dept. award for excellence. Still, no college wanted him and he didn’t want them. Off to the woods, youngman.

TEXTING

I was in bed at 1 o'clock last night with an Isaac Babel short story when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came a sound through the trees that didn't sound like a rare vehicle on the dirt road passing at such an hour, but maybe it was, and then a burst of rain released with complete abandon. I loved it. No matter what is in the way, the rain seemed to say, is now getting wet. Down came the torrent, and it lasted only one minute. Like a spigot was turned on and off. I only realized then I had lifted my eyes off Babel's words on the page and was listening eyeless to nothing but the rain. When it stopped, I continued with Babel.

Bob Arnold is the oldest son of four children born and raised in a borough at the foot of Mt. Greylock.

I SAW THE FLOWERS SHIVERING

I saw the flowers shivering
yes actually shivering
in the sunshine

they know something
we don’t quite know yet
about changes to come

summer to autumn
and it’s in people too
and even the windchimes




Bob Arnold believes a poem a day, at least, keeps the doctor away

BACK ROAD CHALKIE FOR THE AUTUMNAL

photo © longhouse

photo © bob arnold

LONGHOUSE ON TOUR

GOODBYE MARY (1936-2009)

A GREAT GRAB~BAG OF
HEAVEN & EARTH LOVERS





LXIII

My home's a hole,
and a hole's where nothing is.
Pure, clean, emptiness, to venerate. . .
A blazing flower of brightness, sun oh sun . . .
Food? Wild plants will make this meager body maigre feast,
and a cotton robe's enough to robe illusion . . .
Bring all your thousands of Sages, all sorts, here to meet me,
what's left of me, and the Heavenly Buddha!

Han Shan
COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS
EDITED & TRANSLATED BY J.P. SEATON
Shambhala

Nothing in the world is finer than more Han Shan, and mostso from the nimble strong-ankled mind of J.P. Seaton. Included in this capsule of heaven are the likes of Han Shan, side-kick Shih Te, and much lesser known devil may-care Wang Fan-chih. Those familiar with Longhouse publications have seen this crew at work, via Seaton's care, for some years now.







Neil Young
FORK IN THE ROAD
Reprise CD


The Canadian folk rocker's finest fest in years. Back to a grinding
guitar used as chain saw and lyrics that take on Empirical rogues.
He may be a millionaire, but he shares his wealth.

There's a bailout coming but it's not for me
It's for all those creeps watching tickers on tv

PLANTING MELONS

When I follow my nature I'm rash
too careless to earn a living
this year I tried planting melons
in a garden that was mostly weeds
the plants all shared the rain and dew
but mine ended up in the shade
and once spring work got busy
the time for hoeing was past
the farmers laughed at my useless efforts
from dawn to dusk resulting in nothing
clearly this isn't my kind of work
I'll stick with ancient texts instead

Wei Ying-wu
IN SUCH HARD TIMES
TRANSLATED BY RED PINE
Copper Canyon Press


One more outstanding tome to pass down generations. Like J.P. Seaton's Han Shan above, Porter's scholarship and trail wise ways offers a steady hand at the poems and enriched commentary throughout. Drop out of college for awhile, find the good books!






www.movingmtn.com
guest editor: Clemens Starck

From the heart of the Pacific Northwest & ranging a bit down into the Sierra for some of the poets & writers & carpenters & gardeners & fishermen & woods workers & plain fine storytellers that bursts this issue. Seekers please take note.


WOMEN

I'm doing dishes.
It's summer.
My wife and my mother
are outside
sitting by the fire
laughing so hard
I have to set the pans
aside
and watch.

It's important to
pay attention to joy.
To love that is serious.

Now they are showing
each other earrings,
mom's silver bracelet,
Pat's jade teardrops
looped around her neck.
The night sky
bringing its own
slow jewelry to bear.

It hasn't always been like this.
I wasn't an easy son.

To those who say
redemption
dwells only in the house
of the Lord,
I say:
you haven't met these women.

FINN WILCOX



Are we finally tired of all the documentary films showing pursuists climbing Everest at $40,000 per person and at last count leaving 200 dead bodies up on the mountain? Despite the surf music they often use in these films, everybody doesn't come home. Try the much quieter and brotherly film Blindsight (2006) directed by Lucy Walker. Six blind Tibetan toughies (children) take off on a trek with adult guides to scale 23,000 foot Lkakpa Ri, a northern neighbor of Everest. They share the same Advanced Base Camp. Keep an eye and ear on Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber to reach the summit of Everest — he provides just the care as a guide throughout this beauty.







Rebecca Solnit
A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL
THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMUNITIES THAT ARISE IN DISASTER
Viking

Yes! my very thought: the rebellion will come against Kindle and all the toys. The human psyche and frame can take just so much of watching itself dissolve into a micro-bite. It will want itself back. And the young people will rebel against the notion of no books, no vinyl records, no real paintings, no touch. Humans aren't stupid. Individually many are. But this act will come from a unity of spirit and an overview of how the landscape is looking depleted of life. I'm finishing Rebecca Solnit's new book on disasters (like 9/11, like Katrina, earthquakes etc) and the overpowering courage and community that evolves from the survivors. Written during the author's own struggle with an illness, with a pinpointed survey on the media, Hollywood, varied authorities & vigilanties who often think they rule the roost. Here's a cry out to the passionate ones.

~

Since postmoderniem reshaped the intellectual landscape, it has been problematic to even use the term human nature, with its implication of a stable and universal human essence. The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures — but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave. The language of therapy speaks almost exclusively of the consequence of disaster as trauma, suggesting a humanity that is unbearably fragile, a self that does not act but is acted upon, the most basic recipe of the victim. Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our own experience. Most people know this other human nature from experience, though almost nothing official or mainstream confirms it. This book is an account of that rising from the ruins that is the ordinary human response to disaster and of what that rising can mean in other arenas — a subject that slips between the languages we have been given to talk about who we are when everything goes wrong.

REBECCA SOLNIT

TEN SEASONS
EXPLORATIONS IN BOTANICS
EDITED BY GERRY LOOSE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORVEN GREGOR
Luath Press www.luath.co.uk



autumn wind
still alive and seeing ourselves
you and me

~ ONITSURA

version by Gerry Loose


TEN SEASONS grew out of Gerry Loose's three
years as Poet in Residence at Glasgow's Botanic
Gardens. This gathering of texts, along with
stunning photographs, shows that poetry,
although presented here on the page, in its
most portable form, exists off the page, on
scraps of material, in stone, even in water. The
book both celebrates a particular residency
and offers a rich resource for the interaction of
botanic gardens and creative language. Plant-
lovers and poetry-lovers will find much to
enjoy in its pages.
~ Scottish Poetry Library

~

And then this beauty just walked in the door today. . .
one large volume collecting twenty of John Martone's
small, beautifully fugitive books of poems. You gotta have it.






John Martone
KSANA
RED MOON PRESS
PO Box 2461
Winchester VA. 22604-1661
www.redmoonpress.com






holding
a stone
moss holds

~


no gloves
no money
these pockets


~


washing
dishes first
then shaving


~

autumn
woods

on my
knees


~


stream
boulder

sheep
color


JOHN MARTONE







THE DEAD WEATHER
HOREHOUND

With an album cover to die-for. No one in this house says "CD cover". Back to the roots ladies & gentlemen. Not all of the album holds, but just unload one-cut "Rocking Horse" (it goes great back-to-back with Beck's "Youthless") with the windows open on the highway late at night and the summer ending — you're ready for winter. With shades of 13th Floor Elevators and produced by johnny-everywhere Jack White (also on drums & vocals), along with Alison Mosshart and other surprise guests.





Philip Whalen
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PHILIP WHALEN
Wesleyan


If you own a poetry library, and don't have this book yet, think Loser. Almost 1000 pages of primo and it's not just the poetry, it's the attitude and perseverance and scope and humor and love and protest of the poet that is essential. And it's probably best not to eat too much all at once, so the book becomes truly a companion for months on end. And before you know it, you can't be without the book. The editor and publisher and layout crew have done a splendid job. As terrific as the poems are, don't forget Whalen's brilliant and tricky mind, so read the prose and all the appendix slots at the back of the book. In fact, maybe read those first, like a trail guide before heading in nibbling raspberries. I've selected one stunning poem that has reverberated in my bloodstream for decades, and then a hot lick example of PW prose.


THE LAUNDRY AREA

Each time I hang up a washboard
The slenderest thread of cold water
Runs down my wrist and into my armpit
Without wetting my clothes.


Tassajara 22:iii:78

If my friends had not helped me, I should have starved or gone, at last, to the nuthouse. They fed and clothed and housed me, arranged poetry readings for me, got my work published and reviewed, made other people buy my books, and now they faithfully write letters to me, which I answer promptly. These experiences made me realize that I didn't need money in order to write: what I needed was love and poetry and pictures and music in order to live. This knowledge not only freed me from a lot of old hangups, it also changed my feeling towards poetry and all the other arts. I saw that poetry didn't belong to me, it wasn't my province; it was older and larger and more powerful than I, and it would exist beyond my life-span.
~ PHILIP WHALEN

Pete Nelson
NEW TREEHOUSES OF THE WORLD
Abrams

I'll ignore just how expensive and ridiculous some of these treehouses are, since many are spectacular, and in the right frame of mind & hand can be built by true builders with used and found material and become genuine arboreal habitats. In my time, I've built a few. And they can't be beat as just the crow's nest to climb into and read all the books mentioned above & below.


~



From Italy:






Just read the Shiki that Walter Franceschi shares with us here and your troubles are over poet!

Kindle-Dindle is what I call it, and publishers going out of business, and great bookstores and all the whoa-is-me. Publish yourself and let the chips fall! Blake and Whitman did; Walter now has. It's in the morning mail for 9/11. All the way from Italy. There were many poems that unfold in the manner we publish in booklets regularly from Longhouse, but I'll keep things somewhat private since Walter expected these for our eyes only, but he already knows I can't help myself and will enjoy sharing a few poems with you here.



Walter Franceschi
A FEW MOMENTS
OK Buddha (Italy)






Gerrit Lansing
HEAVENLY TREE, NORTHERN EARTH
North Atlantic Books
www.northatlanticbooks.com

A long time coming these collected poems of Gerrit Lansing and done with precision and grace as the inaugural volume in a new series of cloth editions from North Atlantic Books. If this beauty, designed by Jonathan Greene, is any indication of what's ahead, we will have well chosen and lovely books ahead. A big book by Kenneth Irby is next in line.


OCTOBER SONG


Who is rich in love will lay
An autumn table for his guests
And shape in autumn ornaments
The shapes and omens of his love
So from these purple frets his love
Will take for sure that when they lay
Away all summer ornaments
And evening is the normal guest
He will not be surprised. What guest
Would snub his friendly honest love
That laughs at foolish ornaments
And tumbles them in straw to lay
A guest in ornaments of love?

GERRIT LANSING




Mary Oliver
EVIDENCE
Beacon

In this collection of new poems something has happened with Mary Oliver since the last book. Something important. A loss or a gain or both. She is addressing this theme on almost every page, or wishing to, and May I never not be frisky, / May I never not be risque. Congratulations to a poet who practices what she preaches, or sings.


YELLOW

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.



LI PO AND THE MOON

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:
at night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming
and singing

then drowned as he reached for the moon's reflection.
Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been
as desperate.

Not the moon, though.



SNOWY EGRET

A late summer night and the snowy egret
has come again to the shallows in front of my house

as he has for forty years.
Don't think he is a casual part of my life,

that white stroke in the dark.



WATER

What is the vitality and necessity
of clean water?
Ask the man who is ill, who is lifting
his lips to the cup.


Ask the forest.

MARY OLIVER

and, lastly greatly


edited with commentaries by JEROME ROTHENBERG
TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED
Doubleday/Anchor


Just look at that book cover! I did 40 years ago this year and bought it because I couldn't help myself, after hitchhiking from a college town back home and two very fine bookstores in that town, but neither had a copy of this book. In fact in North Adams, Massachusetts where now Mass MOCA resides, there was no new bookstore in that town in 1969, though somehow a variety store with a rack of newspapers just happened to have this oracle on display. One long look into the book and I was lost forever, or as the wizardly editor described it, appropriately, that where poetry is concerned, "primitive" means complex. I was in my last year of high school and nothing in those 12 years of schooling had remotely come close to touching this.

ORIGINS & NAMINGS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That there are no primitive languages is an axiom of contemporary linguistics where it turns its attention to the remote languages of the world. There are no half-formed languages, no underdeveloped or inferior languages. Everywhere a development has taken place into structures of great complexity. People who have failed to achieve the wheel will not have failed to invent & develop a highly wrought grammar. Hunters & gatherers innocent of all agriculture will have vocabularies that distinguish the things of their world down to the finest details. The language of snow among the Eskimos is awesome. The aspect system of Hopi verbs can, by a flick of the tongue, make the most subtle kinds of distinction between different types of motion.
~JEROME ROTHENBERG

Keep on bloggin'
Til the power goes out
Your battery's dead
Twist and shout


NEIL YOUNG

REMEMBERING JIM CARROLL