EARTH ~

Robert Sund

FEBRUARY 27, 1978


After staying up late
at Lyle's
--------rice & spinach
----sourdough
hot coffee
stories strung together
----in the night,
I went home to
light a fire in my stove.



A long time since I was here.
I open the door —
moonlight on the floor
-----like a silver plate at a feast!
I strike a match
light the lamp,
and look around.
My house looks at me
-----surprised.
My bed,
my table and chair,
the stove,
the cedar walls.
Everything looks
---------surprised and
-----speechless at me.

[ please click image to enlarge ]

JANUARY 1, 1984



It snowed last
-----night while everyone slept.
In the clear sky and sunlight
ten miles away
---------the foothills take
-----one white step
-------------into the mountains.

There is only a handful of this edition printed (I believe 350 books) so row swiftly to catch your copy. Sund's "journals" were complete and exquisite poems, and this collection, netted by two of his friends, the poets Tim McNulty and Glenn Hughes, shows the same polish and gleam of Sund's earlier and seminal collection of poems Ish River. Not to be without.

http://www.pleasureboatstudio.com/


see also:
http://www.robertsundpoetshouse.org/bio.cfm

Photograph of Robert Sund courtesy of Mary Randlett

EARTH ~
( Danny Lyon )

[ please tap each image to enlarge ]

dedicated to Kim Dorman

more danny lyon:
http://dektol.wordpress.com/

LUNAR ~

From Longhouse
9:35 PM
river, peepers, blackness
about to dissolve into moonwash
by midnight
Moon at perigee — closest to the earth — and full moon

~the night before, Venus
'northernmost for many centuries'





once in vermont films
film © bob arnold

SINGING ~

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~
( tsunami )

"About 95% will probably never come ashore and is destined for that massive swirl of floating plastic known as the north Pacific garbage patch."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/01/tsunami-japan-debris-us-canada

EARTH ~

Bald Eagle

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/us/a-repository-for-eagles-finds-itself-in-demand.html?hp





nytimes

EARTH ~
( Anna Schuleit )

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/flowers-in-the-hospital/






photo : anna schuleit / nytimes

EARTH ~

XI CHUAN

Somebody



spring stays inside the hat
autumn stays inside the blouse
morning stays on the treetops
evening stays in the shithole


the barren mountain stays on the barren mountain
jadeite water stays in the teapot
the mansion stays on the map
the poor stay in the gutter


three pounds of ink stay in the intestines
fifty grams of sweat stay in the bloodstream
spit stays outside the stone
foul language stays on ivory


red stays on a red face
white stays on a white face
fragrant and sweet stay on lips
salty and spicy stay on chopsticks


scorn stays west of the left ventricle
remorse stays east of the pubis
desire stays in front of the dick
exhaustion stays on the eyelid


sickness stays in the palm of the quack
heartache stays on the shoulders of foxes
life-snatching lightning stays on top of the head
a pair of worn-out shoes stays on the roof


soap stays at the edge of the sky
dogshit stays in the flowers
ghosts stay on the bench
shadows stay beside the wineglass


emptiness stays in the mirror
wind stays on the flame
The Compendium of Classical Prose stays under the menu
the Emperor stays on TV


stammering and sputtering stay in the spittoon
being of two minds stays on the chessboard
chivalry and gallantry stay in the dust
all's well that ends well stays on the pillow






What the Tang Did Not Have



All products of modernity aside, the Tang didn't have, well, let's count:
in the Tang there wasn't this, in the Tang there wasn't that, uh, in the
Tang there weren't any Thinkers! In the Tang there were emperors
and beautiful ladies and palaces and armies and officials, there were
astrologers and the moon and the clouds and poets and minstrels and
dancers, there were drunkards and hookers and revolts and stray dogs
and wilderness and ice storms, there were the poor and the illiterate
and national exams and nepotism. . . but in the Tang there were no
Thinkers. How could that be? With no Thinkers, there could be jade
and gold splendors: without Thinkers, everyone was worry-free, espe-
cially the Emperor. Free to play. In the Tang they played up the great
Tang, poets played up their great poems (only after the middle of the
dynasty did poets start to furrow their brows). In the Tang there were so
many poets, it was as if before the Tang there hadn't been any! Not that
in the Tang they thought that poets could take the place of Thinkers,
only there really weren't any Thinkers in the Tang. For anyone now
who dreams of taking us back, let me just warm you: prepare your
thoughts — either give us a second Tang dynasty without any Thinkers,
or give us something that isn't the Tang.



___________________





XI CHUAN
translated by Lucas Klein
from Notes on the Mosquito
selected poems
(New Directions 2012)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! ~

Pete Seeger

Please repeat after me:

"Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger!"

Can be said in a whisper, too ~

When someone reaches 93

as Pete Seeger has today

& for everything he's given to the world

It's a gift to give back thanks

a synopsis from the folks at Wikipedia:

Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer and an iconic figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival.^[1] A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.^[2] Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.

As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964, and The Seekers in 1966. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS "American Masters" episode Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Seeger states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".

LOVE ALCHEMY ~
( May Day after )

Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel's Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel is now out from North Atlantic Books, who have already shown their magnificent gift at releasing large, exquisite collections by Kenneth Irby, Gerrit Lansing, now Kandel, and in the works other poets in the San Francisco sphere.


Born in New York City in 1932, she passed away in San Francisco in 2009. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Timothy Leary and others, Kandel was a participant at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book, her then notoriously banned short book of what she would call "holy erotica". It was her 35th birthday that day, and Michael McClure remembers, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her."


On May 10th in San Francisco, old friends, new friends, strangers and a family tribe will be singing to her again. If you're closeby, comeby ~

photo : isaac hernandez

PROFIT ~
( Mayish Day )

Stephen King

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/30/stephen-king-tax-me-for-f-s-sake.html





I don't read much Stephen King — one or two, wait three! of the earliest books (Carrie, Cujo, Christine) but last year I read a short story of his aloud to Susan while the clothes were being washed in town. I see him as a real American kid. There's that comfort of being raised where he could develop a mischief (which I also had and I believe you had) and he refuses to grow up in all the right places. In other words, he's dangerous, the way Mark Twain liked them. He's also a good example of being rich and what one can do with the service to one's country. I love it he owns two radio stations and he lets them PLAY in Bangor Maine.

[letter to J.D. from Bob 2 May 2012]

EARTH ~
( May Day )

"EUDORA, Kan. — The sight is a familiar one along the dusty back roads of the Great Plains: an old roofless silo left to the elements along with decaying barns, chicken coops and stone homesteads.

Abandoned rural silos catch seeds and then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds as they grow tall inside. A tree grows from within an old silo in Cleveland, Mo.

This is the landscape of rural abandonment that defines a region that has struggled with generations of exodus.

But increasingly there are unexpected signs of rebirth. Many of these decrepit silos, once used to store feed for livestock, now just hollow columns of cinder blocks, have through happenstance transformed into unlikely nurseries for trees."

Read More

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/us/amid-rural-decay-trees-take-root-in-silos.html?_r=1

A.G. SULZBERGER

nytimes

EARTH ~

JAAN KAPLINSKI

ALL IN ONE

one in all

mind in body

the strange in the ordinary

the ordinary in the strange

a swarm of bees

in an old chest

in the loft

of an abandoned

farmhouse








MAY YOU BE

the mild soft

summer night

of my non-existent

childhood

covering me

with its huge

voiceless wings








EVERY UNDERSTANDING

comes in due time

your rough little cheeks

first snow

always

to someone

for the first

for someone

for the last

time








IF I MUST BE

at all then let

me be a tiny

fleeting

transparent

almost bodiless

mindless

nothing through

which can flow

the infinite

light of being

of becoming

Amitabha









INFINITE LIGHT

of the night where

the flowing world

becomes fleetingly transparent

and on my right

your breathing



we have been

so thirsty

so silent

we two together

on the seashore sometimes

in Saaremaa








THE WHITE VASE

on the white piano

glowing

through the blue

stream of dusk

that carries

me with

myself

with this house

this room

this you



I am ready

to go

to flow

it is good

like remembering

that I

have stored the matches

and firewood

for winter








A PURE AND BURNING

thirst for you

the greatest

deepest longing

gives your hand

into mine

between your two phrases

between two glances

the wind

rustles over the forest








LITTLE BY LITTLE

OUR DIRTY RIVER

flows itself clean

little by little

perhaps we too



manage

to take each other

by hand

back to the endless

purity of

this world

understanding

we have never

really left it








TODAY

forever

let me look

with your

gentle glance

through myself

through the twilight

that floods

our room

our world








JAAN KAPLINSKI
THE SAME SEA IN US ALL
Breitenbush Books, 1985

Translated from the Estonian
by the author and Sam Hamill

EARTH ~

Pretty Boy Floyd




Born in Georgia, raised in Oklahoma, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd robbed banks. His range through the 1930s was in the Midwest and south central states. Following the death of John Dillinger in July 1934, "Pretty Boy" (he hated his nickname) was named Public Enemy Number 1.


In October Floyd's life would end when he was killed in an Ohio apple orchard by the police; the FBI were also in on the chase, led by the legendary lawman Melvin Purvis. The outlaw was 30 years old. A fellow Oklahoman, Woody Guthrie, wrote a terrific song to Floyd, and another northern midwestern boy is singing it here.

MINDFUL ~

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

A rare chance to hear Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore reading (and accompanying himself on zither) from his classic collection of shamanic poetry ‘Dawn Visions’, originally published by City Lights back in 1964, when the author was in his early twenties. The poems were written during explorations of mind and space in Mexico and California. As Moore describes it, a period of “immersion on the ocean of poetic inspiration, my near drowning in a sudden flood of imagery and pushing further and further, almost under water in it, surfacing to sing.” From a similar well sprung The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, which Moore founded in 1966, blending Zen Buddhism, music and dance of eastern folk theatre and Antonin Artaud into higher dimensions, performing their plays at night, in an amphitheater in North Berkeley, by torchlight.
In 1970 he renounced written poetry and became a sufi, traveling widely in Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria. Moore broke his silence in the early eighties and has since published numerous spiritually informed books

City Lights Books

http://soundcloud.com/sloowtapes

http://sloowtapes.blogspot.com/

EARTH ~

back road chalkie
photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Wendell Berry

I've watched Wendell Berry's NEH speech (linked below, go for it). He's not a great speaker, too dry, a bit feeble (don't blame him, it's hard work having a conscience), lacking a humor that is important to start into and thread a long speech, though a few in the audience admit to their opening moments of nervous laughter.


Of course the speech has a great theme: affection, and written well by the farmer/poet who has shown the same in many of his best poems.


I note almost all the past NEH speakers are from safe ground: no Gary Snyder, no Noam Chomsky, no Susan Sontag, no Studs Terkel, no Amiri Baraka. We continue to die a slow death.


I have to say a color guard at the start of the program, and two holding rifles (loaded?), doesn't make me feel comfortable for anyone in the audience. Its choreography looked clumsy indoors, even a parody. Recent blitzed minds holding US service rifles and what they have done with them is inches from one day one of these militants turning it on the audience. Or the speaker.


The aura of the pre-speech felt like faded glory. A much younger writer should have been chosen to read the Berry poem ( we are talking here of sustainability, right? ). I know they have young and authentic Kentucky poets and writers all over the blue grass state. Our moderator had to make sure the speech afterwards was thoroughly rinsed with bleach by saying it didn't reflect the opinions of the US government (to say the least!). Somehow it is lost on those in power that a poet, teacher, farmer, neighbor, essayist like Berry — who has made a lifetime of books (and readers) to fill whole shelves and with the potential of being stocked in every library around the world — is the voice of the citizen, and so the greater voice of any government.


Of the writers Wendell Berry bravely learned and quoted from: Wallace Stegner, Wes Jackson, Albert Howard, Aldo Leopold and even E.M. Forster — except in their regional roosts (Leopold/Wisconsin etc) just go try to find these authors' books in your local bookstore. You say you no longer have a local bookstore? Ah, yes, more of the problem.


Wendell Berry is hardly a modern Henry David Thoreau, as he's often described. That distinction might better be served by his friend the late Harlan Hubbard. Get out there and beat the bushes for Hubbard's "Walden" of a sort — his masterpiece volume Payne Hollow.


It's long been known Berry doesn't use a computer. I'm far but a good example for one using modern conveniences — though it could be argued that one, like Berry, who calls himself an environmentalist and is often championed as one — is, in fact, out of touch with the current environment without a computer. Before your backwoods brains boil over, think about it. In this case, a computer as tool. As accessibility. As electronic pathway and still keeping all the trees. As canoe. Some computer users have the agility to glide.


For this speech Thoreau would have definitely shown up open collared, quoted John Brown, Walt Whitman and perhaps passages from the Gita, and told the authorities there would be no speech until they get rid of the armed soldiers who have nothing to arm at such a speech. He would have made some people unhappy. Some of those unhappy would then make their own stormy speeches and articles how Thoreau once almost burned down his town with a got-away grass fire. All true, he was an adventurous young man. Balanced and sustained everything he touched with an exploratory and inventive way. To this day he has no one, like John Muir in the west, who can rival his hardscrabbled and persistent methods. A whole other era, a whole other heaven — a time of foot-to-mind powers. Both fellows were hikers, dreamers, doers, travelers, mystics, working authors, field hands, respectful trespassers.


Wendell Berry is a farmer in the truest sense, with a long family heritage. I can close my eyes and imagine this speech being said on a milking stool, late in the day, dim lights in all the barn windows, and everything in the barn, including the pesky swallows that nest, falling peacefully asleep.

http://www.neh.gov/news/2012-jefferson-lecture-wendell-berry

photo: guy mendes

TOOLS ~

Sunswumthru A Building

building books
by bob arnold


Of all toolboxes yanked from trucks, or automobile trunks, lifted out of back seats, or even carried in as a canvas bag, I never saw a book tucked away in one. A book is about the last thing ever spotted on a job site, and usually it is a tossed away manual for some equipment. But I read books on the job — sandwich in one hand, Basho in the other hand. I would carry my books in my lunch pail. Though because I read, I often earned the nickname “Preacher.”


So it isn’t any accident I still bring books to my building job sites, now thirty-five years at it and going strong. I started out as a boy carpenter working for my family lumber business and those jobs were mostly modern quick-built homes. A dynamo crew could nail up a half-dozen homes over one summer. I soon moved to Vermont and worked with building crews here or there, but really I worked best alone or with one companion helper. There were countless old homes I worked on, repairing stonework to carpentry. One of my strangest jobs was helping an owner build his large house — mostly I was there to show him how to frame and he would carry on when I had to be away — though his one demand for the house was that he wanted no windows, just a front door. Since he lived the greater part of the year at a university job far from his new home, he was wary of vandals and wanted to keep any out by keeping any windows out.That was until I reminded him how vandals could just as easily chain saw an entry into his house to rummage inside, steel door or not. On hearing that, he agreed to put a few windows in. Small ones. Since this friend was a university librarian, we talked books and writers from sun up to sun down on the job and then on the long drives he gave me back to my home.


In the year 2000, I began to build a cottage on our land with my fifteen-year old son, Carson. A two-story, timber-framed, steel roofed and wood side-shingled building, boxed out with many windows since I have been storing salvaged windows from other jobs for years. No better place to draw the daylight and save on wall material.The cottage hunched on a wide stone ledge and was a complete bugger to hand lay dry stone upon and under the building frame, but we did. A month long chore. And during that time Carson and I talked music and books and films and even reminisced about the trips we did together as a family on trains, and we also fought and fussed a little because it was hot work and because we are father and son. Building this cottage together — twelve feet wide by eighteen feet long — would be the first leg of Carson’s home school studies. A program that kept him happily away from the local high school and into percolating sessions of book learning and back work earning, as they once used to say. When Carson asks what books meant the most to me as a builder — including the books I would bring along to jobs as companions — whether they had anything to do with building or not, these are the ones that always spring to mind. A neat dozen. Someday, we will have these books on a shelf in the cottage when we’re done.


1. Working and Thinking on the Waterfront by Eric Hoffer (real worker/real writer)

2. The Long-Legged House by Wendell Berry (real farmer/ real writer)

3. Payne Hollow by Harlan Hubbard (husband & wife homesteading quiet team)

4. The Rock Is My Home by Werner Blaser (my bible for stone work and its environment)

5. Indians in Overalls by Jaime de Angulo (no better writer to start you at dirt level)

6. The Granite Pail by Lorine Niedecker (no better poet for the fine point flowing details)

7. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers ed. by Ann N. Ridgeway (who made his West Coast days around legends & stone)

8. The Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats (this could be inter- changed with Synge’s The Aran Islands: both ultimate, tidy, lunch pail companions)

9. The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton (the other ultimate, tidy, lunch pail companion)

10. Ian Hamilton Finlay by Yves Abreioux (in the evening, after work, to sit and visit with this craftsman’s world)

11. A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al (no better on towns, buildings, construction worldwide)

12. The Folk Songs of North America by Alan Lomax (because there should be a song in your working head)

photos © bob arnold



In all my years since writing this essay and finding more & more books to tuck into the lunchpail, it was the recent one by Malcolm Ritchie that came my way via an island in Scotland that has had me tucking it into my pail all the last week. I'm surveying over a stone outcrop that I plan to start building a small dry stone structure on through spring, summer and fall and this book has been going with me as I carry tools and my lunchpail up to the wooded spot. Chapters short and powerful, vividly setting me immediately in and around the rice fields and thatched homes, with hearth fires of a small village life in Japan. Ideal to perch onto an old stonewall where I am 'stealing' my stone to make a new stone place, where one day someone can arrive and sit inside (large enough for one, or two who are adorable) and read awhile from a born classic like this. The size of the book, by the way, is pitch perfect in one hand, strong bound and cover photograph and logistics just asking to be carried along with you.
A companion.








click onto photographs to enlarge

EARTH ~








R A I N S O N G




Rain all day —
The lilacs bow


~


Rain all day
Heads to ground
Geese graze


~


Rain all day
What is green
Is greener


~


Rain all day
The bucket splashes


~


Rain all day
Tulips fold


~


Rain all day
I run again
Like a kid


~


Rain all day
Rain all night





photo © bob arnold

HELPING HAND ~

Diane di Prima

"Poet Laureate of San Franscisco and feminist revolutionary icon Diane Di Prima has inspired so many of us for over 50 years, whether we know it or not. She was one of the only women of the Beat Generation and was instrumental in shaping the way we view gender based politics. She was homies with Ezra Pound! She has published over 4 dozen books of poetry! She is the mother of 5 children!!

Diane is undergoing a series of painful and difficult surgeries, including having all her teeth removed. Without going into any more details, let's talk about what we can do for a woman who did so much for the advancement of women. If you or someone you know has been inspired by Diane personally or by her large body of work over the last 50 years, please donate anything you can to help her get through this intensely difficult time and the many operations that she is about to go through. Your donation will go towards rehabilitation and medical costs."

READ MORE:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/a-very-personal-message-to-the-poetry-community-on-behalf-of-diane-di-prima/#.T43RIup_3Jk.facebook

http://www.giveforward.com/donationsfordianediprima





photo : bill wilson