CHURCH ~

ALL POETS ~

MUHAMMAD  ALI  & THE  BEATLES

ISHMAEL REED ON MUHAMMAD ALI


JOYCE CAROL OATES ON MUHAMMAD ALI

IF DOGS RUN FREE ~

TWO HOURS WITH NINA SIMONE ~

ROUNDUP ~

and here's another version, and my favorite, of Susan's favorite

and soon your favorite. . .

MORE ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK ~

A L E J A N D R A     P I Z A R N I K

THE SILENT SKY-BLUE WOMAM
AT THE EDGE OF THE SWAMP
For Enrique Pichon Riviere


    They closed the face that was identical to the highest dream of an
imperial childhood, and spooked birds in a frantic rush of black feathers made a perfect terror of the landscape. I am your silence, your tragedy, your watcher. Though I'm only night, though every night of my life is yours.




UNFINISHED WRECKAGE


    This untimely tempest, these rails on the girls of my eyes, this little
love story closing like a fan that would open to reveal a hallucinated
beauty, the most naked woman of the forest in the musical silence of
an embrace.




DENSITY


    I was the source of discord, the owner of dissonance, the girl of the harsh counterpoint. I would open and close with such pure animal
rhythm.




IN THE OPEN DARKNESS


    If the smallest death demands a song, then I should sing to those
who used to be lilacs, who, for the sake of accompanying me in my
black light, silenced their fires when a shadow shaped by my cries
took refuge among their shadows.




THE DARK ONE


    And why did she speak as if silence were a great wall and words
were the colors destined to cover it? And who was it who claimed to
feed on music and wasn't able to cry?




GHOSTLY MEMORIAL


    Night blindly mine. I dream of a body as transparent as a tree made of glass.

    Horror of searching for your eyes in the space that is full of the
screams of this poem.




SCENE


    Noise of someone going up the stairs. The woman of torments, the one who returns from nature, goes up the stairs, from which a trail of blood is flowing. The flower of distance is burning black birds in the hair of the solitary woman. We have to rescue not the flower, but the words.




AT NIGHT


    Night falls, and the dolls project marvelous images in color. Each
image is linked to another by a small cord. I listen, one by one, and
very distinctly, to noises and sounds.

translated by Yvette Siegert

Extracting the Stone of Madness

poems 1962-1972

New Directions, 2016


ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK (1936-1972) was born in Argentina to Russian Jewish immigrants and was educated in both Spanish and Yiddish. She published her first three books of poetry while studying at the University of Bueno Aires and then spent several years in Paris as a writer, critic, and translator. In addition to poetry, Pizarnik also wrote experimental works of theater and prose. She died of a deliberate drug overdose at the age of thirty-six.

VICTOR VICTORY ! ~

V I C T O R     J A R A

Chilean ex-lieutenant faces US trial in murder of singer and activist Víctor Jara

PIONEER ~

N A N E T T E     R A I N O N E

P I O N E E R

DOWNTOWN BLUES ~

MALCOLM LOWRY ~

M A L C O L M     L O W R Y

Nocturne

This evening Venus sings alone

And homeward feathers stir like silk

Like the dress of a multitudinous ghost

The pinons tear through a sky like milk.

Seagulls all soon to be turned to stone

That seeking I lose beyond the trail

In the woods that I and my ignorance own

Where together we walk on our hands and knees

Together go walking beneath the pale

Of a beautiful evening loved the most

And yet this evening is my jail

And policemen glisten in the trees.

Happiness

Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,

A wild sky full of stars at rising

And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,

Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,

Trees with branches rooted in air —

Sitting in the sun at noon with furiously

Smoking shadow of the shack chimney —

Eagles drive downward in one,

Terns blow backward,

A new kind of tobacco at eleven,

And my love returning on the four o'clock bus

— My God, why have you given this to us?

No Company But Fear

How did all this begin and why am I here

at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint,

papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza,

two slimed spittons, no company but fear:

fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint

of birds and buses flying to far places,

of girls skipping with the wind in their faces,

but no company, no company but fear,

fear of the blowing fountain: and all flowers

that know the sun are my enemies,

these, dead, hours?

____________________________


MALCOLM LOWRY
The Voyage That Never Ends
fictions  poems  fragments  letters
New York Review of Books, 2007 

 



 Malcolm Lowry's mysterious demise

THE CRYBABY ~

FARMER'S WIFE ~

Farmer's Wife

Four dozen eggs under her arm,

That’s how she greeted us.

We weren’t coming for eggs

But for a currant bush

Waiting in the dooryard

Wrapped tight in burlap.

I lifted it into the back

Of the truck since that’s

What I was hired to do,

Waited in the early sun

Leaning against the tailgate

While the two old ladies talked.

And with the eggs still under

Her arm she also turned to speak

With me, eyes dazzled like light

In water, checkered blue flannel

Shirt, out-worn by all of her

Sons and now on her back; torn

At the elbows, but warm.

Everything is just right

On this hill farm and I’ve only

Been here 5 minutes. Crows flap

West to east from the wood’s edge

Long over the flat face of pasture.

A manure spreader is backed up

To the kitchen door stacked neat

With stovewood, the lawn is mowed,

And we’ve caught this farmer’s wife

In between the chicken coop and

The house; white hair combed back

With ruddy hands that pick eggs

Each morning, and when she talks

She mentions all of her family.



__________________

Bob Arnold
Where Rivers Meet
Mad River Press

KABIR ~

god my darling
do me a favor and kill my mother-in-law
Janabai (13th century).
trans. Arun Kolatkar



Chewing slowly,

Only after I'd eaten

My grandmother,

Mother,

Son-in-law,

Two brothers-in-law,

And father-in-law

(His big family included)

In that order,

And had for desert

The town's inhabitants,



Did I find, says Kabir,

The beloved that I've become

One with.




____________________________________
K A B I R
Songs of Kabir
translated Arvind Krishna Mehrotra 
New York Review of Books

TOM PACHECO AT THE COLONY, WOODSTOCK, NY ~

RALPH J. GLEASON ~

R A L P H    J.    G L E A S O N

Music in the air

The selected writings of Ralph J. Gleason

edited by Toby Gleason

Yale University Press 2016

Ralph Gleason was more than likely the first music critic I ever read back 50 years ago 

and his selected writings hold true to this day — from Jazz to Rock with much less

the authority on display of many current music critics and more an ease

and conversation and friendship with the music and musicians.

Few can take you by the hand from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong

to Bebop and John Coltrane as Gleason will, or right into

the home of the Jefferson Airplane and the California

music scene of the 1960s. He was instrumental at organizing

 one of Bob Dylan's finest press conferences as well

at being one of the founders of the Monterey Pop Festival

and the starting pistol to the original Rolling Stone magazine.
Plus he wrote about the souls of Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae
with more soul than anyone.
Icing on the cake — he quoted in 1966 the hip poet Philip Whalen —
everything was usable to Gleason if it had the wonder.

All the while well past the age of 30 back then and younger than yesterday.

He was gone, already, by 1975.

No one like him before or since.

This collection gathered up by his son Toby

will show you why.

RARE RECORDING ~

EDGE OF IRONY ~

Marjorie Perloff ~ Edge of Irony

Think Kafka, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth et al 

O F E L I A     Z E P E D A

Just Like Home

The young woman buys

a piece of fresh fry bread from

the Indian Parent Association's booth.

"Oh, just like home," she says.

"Do you have any salt?"

I pour a small amount in her palm.

She sprinkles it on her bread.

She takes a bite, "Mmm, just like home."

She seems unaware she has her eyes closed

as she eats and talks.

The delicate bite of freshly cooked bread

takes her back.

She stands on a street in downtown Tucson

and thinks of women so familiar to her,

her mother, her sisters cooking outside.

In the distance the sound of someone

chopping wood, a barking dog.

Pinon smoke is so real for her right now,

her hair might smell of it if she moved

and the breeze caught her just right.



 Birth Witness



My mother gave birth to me  in an old wooden row house
in the cotton fields.
She remembers it was windy.
Around one in the afternoon.
The tin roof rattled, a piece uplifted
from the wooden frame, quivered and flapped
as she gave birth.
She knew it was March.
A windy afternoon in the cotton fields of Arizona.

She also used to say I was baptized standing up.
"It doesn't count," the woman behind the glass window tells me,
"if you were not baptized the same year you were born,
the baptismal certificate cannot be used to verify your birth."

"You need affidavits," she said.
"Your older siblings, you have some don't you?
They have to be old enough to have a memory
of your birth.
Can they vouch for you?
Who was there to witness my birth?
Who was there with my mother?
Was it my big sister?
Would my mother have let a teenager watch her giving birth?
Was it my father?
I can imagine my father assisting her with her babies.

My aunts?
Who was there when I breathed my first breath?
Took in those dry particles from the cotton fields.
Who knew then that I would need witnesses of my birth?
The stars were there in the sky.
The wind was there.
The sun was there.
The pollen of spring was floating and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not know of affidavits, they simply know.
"You need records," she said.
"Are there doctor's receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family Bible, you know,
where births were recorded?
Were there letters?
Announcements of your birth?

I don't bother to explain my parents are illiterate in their English language.
What I really want to tell her is they speak a language much too civil for writing.
It is a language careful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth.
It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain.
It is useful for speeches and incantations
that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.
It is a language too civil for writing.
It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.
This is what I really want to tell her.
But I don't.
Instead I take the forms she hands me.
I begin to account for myself.


______________________

Ofelia Zepeda
WHERE CLOUDS ARE FORMED
The University of Arizona Press 2008