THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSITY ~

Roberto Bolano

Ernesto Cardenal and I


I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered

to my face

and then I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching

from the opposite direction

and by way of greeting I said:

Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven

that is communism,

is there a place for homosexuals?

Yes, he said.

And for impenitent masturbators?

For sex slaves?

For sex fools?

For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed

with enemas,

for those who can't take it anymore, those who really truly

can't take it anymore?

And Cardenal said yes.

And I rasied my eyes

and the clouds looked like

the pale pink smiles of cats

and the trees cross-stitched on the hill

(the hill we've got to climb)

shook their branches.

Savage trees, as if saying

some day, sooner rather than later, you'll have to come

into my rubbery arms, into my scraggly arms,

into my cold arms. A botanical frigidity

that'll stand your hair on end.




_______________________

Roberto Bolano
The Unknown University
translated by Laura Healy
New Directions, 2013

Ernesto Cardenal

LADY LAMB THE BEEKEEPER ~

Discography

_____________________

    2007: The Tingly Circus
    2008: Someday We Will Levitate
    2008: Samples for Handsome Animals
    2009: The World Tour EP
    2010: Mammoth Swoon
    2012: head is swimming (bedroom recordings)
    2012: Fall 2012 Tour
    2013: Ripely Pine

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper
(Brunswick, Maine ~ now Brooklyn, NY)

AT HOME WITH KESEY ~

WOODSHED ~

In the wood nest

Vermont

photo © bob arnold

POSTCARD 16 ~

Robert Johnson's grave marker, Mt. Zion Baptist Church
Morgan City, Mississippi
photograph Tom Rankin, 1993

http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/biography

WHAT ALL BOOK LOVERS KNOW ~

“Text is now a verb,” E.L. Doctrow said. “More radically, a search engine is not an engine. A platform is not a platform. A bookmark is not a bookmark because an e-book is not a book.”

“Reading a book is the essence of interactivity,” he added, “bringing sentences to life in the mind.” 

IPPEKIRO ~

Kamiuma 
(February 1942 ~ March 1944)





Forsythia blooming

sun shining

the mind of the ancient







Things are refreshingly cool

a chicken

and his face









A cicada hole

around there

the fragrant color of earth








So full of

white clouds

I catch a grasshopper









I have potatoes to eat

I see a bamboo grove

from where I sit








I long for my home

my home

ice on a harvested field









It's May

the sun and a grove of young pines

are leaning









It's midwinter

there are many mountains

there is one lake









A summer-like mind

this placid water

reminds me of my home country









Living in a field

I bury the fire

deep in a brazier









I talk with a child

who hasn't caught

a single cicada yet








Pee-cho pee-cho

sings a bird

blue mountain comes near










        . . . . remembering Basho


A vast grassland

Basho comes all alone

after a wintry blast 









I look upon the surface

of one stone

spring light in a bamboo grove











By the fireside tonight

I think of ocean tide ebbing

on a moonlit night











Burning the fallen leaves

I feel infinitude

behind me










A rooster and I

walk

over the frozen earth











I shall respond

to the mountain form shone

by the winter sun












My ears being frost-bitten

the sky is vast

these days













Being with the bare trees

I sleep at night

facing this direction

Ippekiro Nakatsuka (1887 ~ 1946)
____________________________

from Cape Jasmine and Pomegranates
(the free-meter haiku of Ippekiro)
translated by Soichi Furuta
Mushinsha / Grossman 1974



http://www.big.or.jp/~loupe/links/ehisto/eippekiro.shtml

ARK ~

~

A Note on the Text 

This edition is based on the complete ARK published by Living Batch Press in 1996. The text has been checked for accuracy against typescripts and previous publications of the poem. Some corrections have been made accordingly, with several missing lines restored. 

Previous editions of the poem vary the leading to reflect single-and double-spacing in Johnson's typescript. However, for greater legibility, this edition adopts a basic leading that is uniform.

Peter O'Leary
editor of ARK

Ronald Johnson
ARK
Flood Editions, 2013

WENDY CROSS ~

If you're close to Northampton, Massachusetts — or know someone in the region — encourage them to spend some time at A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery — big glassed main street nest where you can easily walk in off the sidewalk and stroll the Wendy Cross world


http://www.apearts.org/exhibits--events.html

THE WISHING BONE CYCLE ~

 

artist : kari percival

from Far North Beast Ghosts the Clearing

The truth is
I have mud on my hands
from digging roots

The truth is
I brought them to you

It is the truth
I worked to get them
and complained
while digging them up

The truth is
once I got back here
and saw your face
it didn't matter,

that work







Little snail
curled up

leaving a snail shape
in the blanket

when I lift you






If I popped out of the snow
with ten crows
tied to the top
of my head

you still would not wake

deepest sleeping one
I've ever seen






I'm no owl
don't you believe it

Just because my big
feather face
is so round
when you wake,
don't believe
I'll fly away
in the morning?







There's things I do
There's things I do

in happiness
of your arrival

Today I was out
stooping my shoulders
in the lily-pad water
with moose

O-HA!

so happy
it was all I could think
to do






Crow
sit down
shut up

can't you see
who's sleeping?

It's her
just born and not ready
to hear your crow noises yet

Sit down
shut up






I can't travel
away from you

rolling pine cone

Each time I go to leave
my shoes hide
in your dreams






All the warm nights
sleep in moonlight

keep letting it
go into you

do this
all your life

do this
you will shine outward
in old age

the moon will think
you are
the moon






Wild turkeys
dance
on a mound of earth

and the moles
under them
say
"We know the earth
is loud
with turkeys again"

But you,
not-yet-born,
when I tap my fingers
on the mound over you

do you know who dances?






Old turtle
walked this far
to see

Who-woke-up-here

I'll pick you up
to see

Well,
here she is

wrinkled as you are

_____________________

The Wishing Bone Cycle

gathered & translated by Howard Norman

Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians

Ross-Erikson 1976

One time
all the noises met.
All the noises in the world
met in one place
and I was there
because they met in my house.
My wife said, "Who sent them?"
I said, "Fox or Rabbit,
yes one of those two.
They're both out for tricking me back today.
Both of them
are mad at me.
Rabbit is mad because I pulled
his brother's ear
and held him up that way.
Then I ate him.
And Fox is mad because he wanted
to do those things first."

"Yes, then it had to be one of them,"
my wife said.

So, all the noises
were there.
These things happen.
Falling-tree noises were there.
Falling-rock noise was there.
Otter-mud- sliding noises was there.
All those noises, and more,
in my house.

"How long do you expect to stay?"
my wife asked them. "We need some sleep!"

They all answered at once!

That's why now my wife and I
sometimes can't hear well.
I should have wished them all away
first thing.

DORIS LESSING FOREVER ~

Doris Lessing
( b. October 22, 1919, Kermanshah, Iran ~ November 17, 2013, London )

Doris Lessing spoke with reporters from her front porch in London after she won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

photo : Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"Her themes have been universal and international. They ranged from the problems of post-colonial Africa to the politics of nuclear power, the emergence of a new woman's voice and the spiritual dimensions of 20th-century civilisation. Few writers have as broad a range of subject and sympathy.

She is one of those rare writers whose work crosses frontiers, and her impressively large output constitutes a chronicle of our time. She has enlarged the territory both of the novel and of our consciousness."

~ Michael Holroyd

Lessing's biographer and executor



http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing-death-margaret-atwood-tribute

Novels

    The Grass is Singing (1950) (filmed as Killing Heat (1981))
    Retreat to Innocence (1956)
    The Golden Notebook (1962)
    Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
    The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
    Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
    The Diary of a Good Neighbour (as Jane Somers, 1983)
    If the Old Could... (as Jane Somers, 1984)
    The Good Terrorist (1985)
    The Fifth Child (1988)
    Love, Again (1996)
    Mara and Dann (1999)
    Ben, in the World (2000) – sequel to The Fifth Child
    The Sweetest Dream (2001)
    The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) –     sequel to Mara and Dann
    The Cleft (2007)
    Alfred and Emily (2008)

The Children of Violence series

    Martha Quest (1952)
    A Proper Marriage (1954)
    A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
    Landlocked (1965)
    The Four-Gated City (1969)

The Canopus in Argos: Archives series

    Shikasta (1979)
    The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
    The Sirian Experiments (1980)
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)
    The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)


Opera libretti

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (music by Philip Glass, 1986)
    The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (music by Philip Glass, 1997)


Comics

    Playing the Game (graphic novel illustrated by Charlie Adlard, 1995)


Drama

    Each His Own Wilderness (three plays, 1959)
    Play with a Tiger (1962)


Poetry

    Fourteen Poems (1959)
    The Wolf People – INPOPA Anthology 2002 (poems by Lessing, Robert Twigger and T.H. Benson, 2002)

   
Short story collections

    Five Short Novels (1953)
    The Habit of Loving (1957)
    A Man and Two Women (1963)
    African Stories (1964)
    Winter in July (1966)
    The Black Madonna (1966)
    The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972)
    This Was the Old Chief's Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1 (1973)
    The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2 (1973)
    To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, Vol. 1 (1978)
    The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, Vol. 2 (1978)
    Through the Tunnel (1990)
    London Observed: Stories and Sketches (1992)
    The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992)
    Spies I Have Known (1995)
    The Pit (1996)
    The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (2003) (filmed as Two Mothers)


Cat Tales

    Particularly Cats (stories and nonfiction, 1967)
    Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor (stories and nonfiction, 1993)
    The Old Age of El Magnifico (stories and nonfiction, 2000)
    On Cats (2002) – omnibus edition containing the above three books


Autobiography and memoirs

    Going Home (memoir, 1957)
    African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (memoir, 1992)
    Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994)
    Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 to 1962 (1997)


Other non-fiction

    In Pursuit of the English (1960)
    Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (essays, 1987)
    The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987)
    A Small Personal Voice (essays, 1994)
    Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994)
    Putting the Questions Differently (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1996)
    Time Bites (essays, 2004)
    On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (Nobel Lecture, 2007, published 2008)

DALE PENDELL ~

http://www.northatlanticbooks.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781556438950

http://telegraph-books.net/mondayarchive/audio/100714-pendell.mp3
( be patient loading on )




The Great Bay
chronicles of the collapse
Dale Pendell
North Atlantic Books 2010

SATURDAY NIGHT ~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_U.S._Bonds

POSTCARD 15 ~

Gina K & Ari Versluis / M.A.R.S. observation
Barbie Collectors Club Benelux

PAL GOOSE ~

Pal Goose

On that sunny day
I opened your pen door
And let you out —
You loved the sun
Sun on snow
Making tracks to the pond —
Because it got too busy
But I have no excuse how
I forgot to close your
Pen door and left home

Sometime in the evening
Faraway, thoughts to you and
The open door but I would get back
The moon was out, and you
Loved the moon —
The raccoon was out, and he
Hunts by the moon —
The next morning you were
Found dead with eyes open
Suddenly flat and huge on the snow

Too big for raccoon to even bother with
Whose blood-tracks tricky designed away
And then as if he noticed how obvious
Seemed to wash his murderous paws
Off in the snow and vanished

You were our third gander
In twenty years, flocks of
Geese once upon a time mixed
With ducks and chickens and when
Our rooster died you were the new
Rooster for the chickens —
It looked funny, it looked
Practical, you fit

I miss you now when I split
Wood and wait to hear your call
Loud and sudden and part of me

 

____________________________

Bob Arnold

from Once In Vermont

Gnomon Books, 1999

AUTUMNAL ~

DENISE LEVERTOV ~

I imagine someone will find something to pester about with this massive and holy beauty of a book, but I can't be bothered. Like I say, it's a beauty. The poet is long gone but certainly not to the memory of many of us who grew up with her books, issued one after another from New Directions (the faithful), and many of us knew Denise Levertov as friend, teacher, fellow contributor, activist, neighbor. We could even stretch it and say to many poets now in their late 50s to early 70s, who may recall a time when Levertov was a sort of earth mother poet to them, or sister. The poem below will just begin to show (but amply) her ability as mesmerizing storyteller — this poet who began to write her poems at age 5. And this poem has deep ingredients of Richard Jefferies roaming the same countryside, even the skilled wandering discipline of Williams (his longer poems; he will become a confidant and friend), Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, perhaps the balancing scales of Virginia Woolf. But it's all wickedly private/public Denise Levertov. As Eavan Boland makes note in her excellent introduction to this tome — you can sense the power of the poet right from the first line.

There's a lot going on here with this book. First, it's gorgeous coming into your hands, and almost heartbreaking to see such a devoted publisher as New Directions sticking to their guns with one of their poets . . . a woman poet, who never get enough big book attention. If they wanted to make a lasting monument, they have. It's over 1,000 pages true. Precious little waste, if any. The founder of New Directions, James Laughlin, is all throughout the book with his earnest for Levertov to be in his stable, after west-coast-both-feet-on-the-ground-genius Kenneth Rexroth introduced Levertov's poems to his poet/publisher friend. It was a good time for things to take off, and it did.

Later years brought this forever independent (Levertov) from no set school or sect, but her own, to Stanford, other parts west coast, and Seattle. Eavan Boland divides her time at Stanford and Dublin; scholars, other poets, students and a readership just carried on a momentum. Something the two editors of this book, and publisher, have handled well. The poet's individual books unfold in chronological order, along with extensive annotations and notes by Levertov herself on many of the books, when not poems. First lines are properly indicated as an index. It'll all come in time though, because you'll be holding the book in your two hands for awhile and not even wanting to open its leaves for a few moments. There's an absorbing ritual — a nearly forced will — that asks you to slow down, take a moment, and breathe in the apple you're about to bite. 

~ BA

________________

 A Map of the Western Part of the Country of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers   

and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,   

and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a   

stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,

I am Essex-born:

Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,

the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,

Roding held my head above water when I thought it was   

drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees

stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,   

the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.

Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,

Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots

sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,

Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,

in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,

through its trees the ghost of a great house. In

Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the   

light of flaring sundown, seven kings

in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings

the place of law

where my birth and marriage are recorded

and the death of my father. Woodford Wells

where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white   

statue forlorn in its garden)

saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,

(forgotten? and further away

the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once   

but many times?).

All the Ivans dreaming of their villages

all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,

picking up fragments of New World slowly,

not knowing how to put them together nor how to join   

image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map

made long before I was born shows ancient

rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire

for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages   

indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country   

remembers the first river, the first

field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,   

that new smell, and remembers

the walls of the garden, the first light.

_______________________________

Denise Levertov

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov

edited and annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey

New Directions 2013

 http://ndbooks.com/book/the-collected-poems

BRUCE DERN ~ Americana

http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60297478