POETS WHO SLEEP #32~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

RE-READING PIG EARTH ~

 

In a large library of all important books

Pig Earth remains my personal favorite of 

John Berger's gifts to the world —

this is Berger's first novel (with poems)

in his trilogy from the French peasant

countryside Into Their Labours,

also including Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag.

Also of note from the Berger countryside are

two books: A Fortunate Man: the story of a country doctor 

(with photographs by John Mohr)

and, Another Way of Telling.

This just begins to touch stone in a very long 

career for a novelist, critic and essayist

who began his life as a painter

in London, born November 5, 1926.

Gone to us January 2, 2017 in France.

[ BA ]

WOODCHOPPER'S BALL ~

 

LONGHOUSE AT 50 YEARS OLD (TODAY) ~

 

50 Years

                                                               for Olga Cabral and Ann Perkoff

Here we are now 50 years old at Longhouse. Someone asked me

recently, "you must have been very young when you started?"

I was, but also draft age. I had been drafted into the Army in 1971, 

resisted that war, as I already had years before, but it becomes a whole 

other animal when they come for you. So my draft board put me

 in Vermont as a C.O., but I was coming anyway, being a kid 

raised in the neighboring Berkshire hills.

All it took was a mimeograph machine, as some of the finest small press

publications of the 1960s had already taught me but it would be many years

before I ever saw a copy, being a country boy. My roots were in the woods

and I would go (by correspondence) to many poets around the United States,

 who lived a similar discipline and almost all were friendly. Nothing's 100%.

The first press I had was called "One Night Books" (1971) and I handmade two

 anthologies from that imprint — both titled "Remember the Time in the Tent"

 and a sheaf of small booklets 

of my own work. A friend at the time even cut out a woodblock 

I still have with the press name on it.

Soon I was working from "Our Poets Workshop" because I was leading a once

a week poetry gathering at a local unaccredited college fitted smally

with misfits and marvels and each week I brought poets work

 in for everyone to read and the first poet was Cid Corman.

By 1974 Cid and I were in direct contact from Kyoto to Vermont

and that relationship would go strong until Cid's passing in 2004.

By 1974 I was moving "Our Poets Workshop" to simply "Workshop"

and rolling out issue after issue, all on mimeograph and everything

was sent away free. Robert Bly wrote me back to say, "Put a price on it, even a dollar."

Noel Young from Santa Barbara cried, "Staple the sheets!"

 Poets sent me their work, their postage stamps

and if they had any money, they were generous. How does one

keep things going at such an adventure stuck out in the woods

without a vehicle, without a driver's license, without private income?

I arrived to this location along a wood's river with a backpack on my back

and a minister friend who read Thomas Merton as I had, deeply, and he

told me he had just bought an old hunter's cabin ten miles out of town

in the woods — no heat, no running water, no plumbing at all, no nothing —

but it had a roof and 16 bunk beds and if I was willing to take on

renovating that cabin, and his own house on the land, plus his long roadside

of stone walls, I could have the place for free. I had never touched stone walls

in my life. I had worked all my teenage years as an apprentice carpenter 

for a long standing lumber family, but doing what you're told and knowing

what to do when you're not being told are two different worlds.

I began my carpentry tearing out all those sixteen bunk beds 

and the lumber would have to become

my firewood for the start of a long winter. In the spring I would begin rebuilding

stone walls and fifty years later I haven't stopped. I took to those walls and

many soon took to me and began to hire me to repair and build and

also lay up stone walls. When a farmer hires you to build his stone walls

you've sort of passed whatever test is out there. 

It's now 1976 and I'm changing

all the press name to "Longhouse." I'm working as a builder, I'm publishing poets

regularly in all handmade journals, booklets, postcards, broadsides, sheafs, 

and my first book of poems has been out two years. A lovely young

woman has also been with me those same two years after my first two 

years alone and living and working as a hermit. I'd seen her in passing

 after my long hikes or hitchhikes into town, but she's the one who

 bicycled out those ten miles to find me, to see me, to land me. 

Susan.

Now there's a Longhouse to become something — love, very hard

work, writing, publishing, corresponding by mail (which was everything),

friendships, co-building workers, the river, the woods, and never stop at

least every week or every month, every season, right up to present time

publishing someone, and giving it away free.

The church where I worked as sexton had a mimeograph machine.

The law office where Susan worked had a photocopy machine.

Say no more.

 

Libraries pay. Collectors pay.

Readers on the search pay, and eventually (by then, 40 years) we would direct the

Longhouse into publishing full size books, establish a bookshop, and for the 

last ten years I have whittled down all my building and stone work away

from customers for pay, allowed the bookshop to work for us, and put

all my building trade into cottages and huts built on our property. At last

count there are nine. Ten may be enough. 

During the pandemic of 2020

more and more passers-by could be seen on our back road on bicycles, on-foot

slowing down in vehicle after vehicle and if they could catch us out there

at work they'd shout up, "I love your place" and we'd wave back, and some

would walk up and politely ask, "what is this (pointing to the forest buildings) all about? 

 Were they for rent? Was it a writer's colony? Was this an institution?" 

All logical questions. I guess it could be called a sort of institution:

 the Longhouse-been-here-a-long-time-and-ain't-going-away-institute. 

It doesn't cost a thing. Just a certain love.

[ BA ]

(it's an even longer story — a son was born, there are

granddaughters — but for another time)

Links to the Longhouse Bibliography

photograph above by bob arnold:

after all our woodsheds are filled to the brim

finding the very back door to the kitchen

fits in as an ideal woodshed all its own.

Close by, handy.

December 25, 2020

REMEMBERING JEAN VALENTINE ~

 

J E A N     V A L E N T I N E

1934 ~ 2020

IKE & TINA TURNER ~

 

SPADE COOLEY ~

 

AND SNOW ( RUSSELL EDSON ) ~

Silent in the woods where snow is falling

Silent in their hoods where snow is falling

Snow-things

Tree-brown

And lovely snow

White and falling

Under the needled wing snow is falling

Fluffy white oh fluffy flight

In and out the wind night

Came snow and they

And the trees and the rocks

And the houses and the lights

Came snow and they

Through the woods

And light

And through the woods

And red children faces

And winter apples

And light and night.

and snow

________________

Ceremonies in Bachelor Space

Russell Edson

Tough Poets Press

Who in the hell is Tough Poets Press?

Who knows. I saw a listing for the book

and liked that it was Edson, one of his books 

I didn't know, hadn't read, and the title and the

book design had Edson written all over it, and now

I see it was Edson's first book, published by

Black Mountain College, of all places, in 1951.

For some reason, and again holding to the Edson

aura, the contents of the book are in public domain

due to non-renewal of its original copyright, and so

the sharp-eyes in Arlington, Massachusetts at Tough

Poets Press, with the help of many (they list all the names)

on 49 Churchill Avenue, came through and published this book.

I'm very glad  they did. I have a sneaky feeling Tough Poets is

onto a very good thing, re-issuing the likes of Kirby Doyle, Gil

Orlovitz, Gregory Corso, Marvin Cohen, Johnny Stanton,

Donald Newlove — what could go wrong!  — Seymour Krim,

Dan Propper and Jack Micheline should be in the wings.

It seems the Edson is print-on-demand, so come one and

come all. NOTHING by Edson should be passed up.

I saw him read once in a cellar environment with

cellar people as his audience and it was beloved.

[ BA ]

RE-READING ROBERT CREELEY (THIRTY THINGS) ~

 

Laughing

Who enters this

kingdom. And

the people

formed in rock.

The Temper

The temper is fragile

as apparently it wants to be,

wind on the ocean, trees

moving in wind and rain.

No

No farther out

than in —

no nearer here

than there.

Here

Here is

where there

is.

Xmas Poem: Bolinas

All around

the snow

don't fall.

Come Christmas

we'll get high

and go find it.

Xmas

It commonly sings,

this Christmas.

But

      for Stan's birthday

if we go back to where

we never were we'll

be there [REPEAT] But

A

head of

the outside

inside.

A Loop

No

one

thing

anyone does

Still

Still the same

day?

Tomorrow.

One Day

One day after another —

perfect.

They all fit.

__________________________

Robert Creeley

Thirty Things

Black Sparrow

1974

one more of those tiny books I love

LINDA GREGG ~

 

Linda Gregg in her element, in a nicely pressed top

Glistening

_______________

As I pull the bucket from the crude well,

the water changes from dark to a light

more silver than the sun. When I pour it

over my body that is standing in the dust

by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily

in the sunlight with an earnestness like

the spirit close up. The water magnifies

the sun all along the length of it.

Love is not less because of the spirit.

Delight does not make the heart childish.

We thought the blood thinned, our weight

lessened, that our substance was reduced

by simple happiness. The oleander is thick

with leaves and flowers because of spilled

water. Let the spirit marry the heart.

When I return naked to the stone porch,

there is no one to see me glistening.

But I look at the almond tree with its husks

cracking open in the heat. I look down

the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating

faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there

a long time with the sun and the quiet,

the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

To Be Here

_____________

The February road to the river is mud

and dirty snow, tire tracks and corncobs

uncovered by the mildness. I think I am

living alone and that I am not afraid.

Love is those birds working hard at flying

over the mountain going somewhere else.

Fidelity is always about what we have

already lived. I am happy, kicking snow.

The trees are the ones to honor. The trees

and the broken corn. And the clear sky

that looks like rain is falling through it.

Not a pretty spring, but the real thing.

The old weeds and the old vegetables.

Winter's graceful severity melting away.

I don't think the dead will speak.

I think they are happy just to be here.

If they did, I imagine them saying

birds flying, twigs, water reflecting.

There is only this. Dead weeds waiting

uncovered to the quiet soft day.

Kept Burning and Distant

______________

You return when you feel like it,

like rain. And like rain you are tender,

with the rain's inept tenderness.

A passion so general I could be anywhere.

You carry me out into the wet air.

You lay me down on the leaves

and the strong thing is not the sex

but waking up alone under the trees after.

_____________________

Linda Gregg

Sacraments of Desire

Graywolf Press

1991

Sweetheart and I once upon a time

had an evening meal with Linda Gregg

and she asked me if she could sign a copy

of her book I had with me — and now that

she is gone, I am happy she did, adding a bit of

decorative scroll to her inscription which seemed

to be part of our all together get together. In another

twist of fate, she could have been one of the Beats,

but her beautiful working mind was always in the clouds.

[ BA ]

POETS WHO SLEEP #31 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here