POETS WHO SLEEP #42 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

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                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

ARTHUR GUNTER ~

 

VINCENT TRIPI ~

 

With her pan

     the old prospector

          points upward

                              — for Laura Bell

______________________

Vincent Tripi

the day i find

poems from a desert hermitage

1725 Marion Avenue, Apt 12-I.

Novato, CA. 

_________________________

according to his inscription, Vincent

sent me a gift of this fine book of short

poems when he was living in Novato, CA.,

and come to think of it Sweetheart and I

passed through there some years earlier —

I believe Vincent even tried to look us up

in Vermont when he was living just down

river from us but I guess he got lost, as

others have, long before GPS took the fun

out of everything — Vincent passed away

last Fall and I'm thinking about him now

[ BA ]

ANNISTEEN ALLEN ~

 

THURSTON HARRIS ~

 

LANDSCAPE IS MY MISTRESS ~

R E A D     M E !

POETS WHO SLEEP #41 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

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                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

 

The complete series to date ~ please link here

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! JOHN McPHEE ~

 

John McPhee poses for a portrait in his office at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Bryan Anselm—Redux for TIME 

H A P P Y      B I R T H D A Y

J O H N     M C P H E E

March 8, 1931

ANCIENT BASEBALL ~

 

The lively spirit and busy fingers of

Alfred Jarry and Rube Goldberg live-on

to this day out of the Catskills of New York

and its very own Mikhail Horowitz via

Ancient Baseball, where Mikhail has long worked

his workshop of collages. No easy-street photoshoppy

stuff here. Each collage from baseball land, includng

"Babe (Ruth) in the Manger" were done with old-school

finesse — hand wrought cut & paste w/scissors,

straight-edge razors please, and whiff the

room with paper cement.

Ah, it does make a style and grace.

[ BA ]

_________

__________

Alte Books

30 Old Whitfield Road

Accord, New York

12404

RE-READING ASHA BANDELE ~

 

absence in the palms of my hands

                                                                    for audre lorde

i will eat the last signs of my weakness

remove the scars of childhood wars

i made you this promise as

humble as mary washing the feet of her savior

it was an unsteady may afternoon &

we were standing in the doorway of the home you had adopted

you let me there with

your head raised and still dreadlocked walking

toward the beginnings of your death

i didn't say i'd never take the chemo you told me

& though i know we must have spoken after this day

these are the last words i ever remember hearing from

you

audre

i learned to face the complexity of living watching you

face the complexity of dying

                never do it on your knees never do it with your back turned

                never do it with your eyes

low

i learned dialectics watching you at war

a defiant soldier for peace against the serenade of violence

inside & outside

your body                      a mighty oak refusing

to be scorched in silence

these days

in the face of necessity battles i know i must

never forget the warnings of my woman's flesh

nor lose the terror that keeps me brave*

but this morning your memory informs my tears

thick & isolated

unable to rest

it has been two years now but

death does not know time and

your absence aches in the palms of my hands

but i am also angry

i curse the disease because cancer is not natural

nor the act of an unforgiving God

crossing the world we once shared

i see

poison passed off as food   water   air   as

good earth upon which we may live or clear out

the next rainforest to make room for a grinning clown

& hamburger stand

the   whole   world

is being nourished on big macs & radon

staring westward at hollywood for daily salvation

& we do not understand our 5 year olds

when their eyes melt

& they do not scream only

shrug

in the solitude of my writing i place

your poetry around me like a makeshift altar

& pray my generation of poet-historians

will abandon any urge toward the mirage of relevance created 'cause

WE BLEW UP THE SPOT YO!

in the urgent hour of now

we need stories beyond shock value whose

focus is transformation

or at least the prayer that

we will write no words we will not want spoken out of

the mouths of our children

that we will owe nothing we cannot repay.*

*from "Solstice" by Audre Lorde (in Black Unicorn)

__________________________________

absence in the palms of my hands

asha bandele

Harlem River Press, 1996

RE-READING FERRUCCIO BRUGNARO ~

 

We Don't Want Bosses, Period

We don't want bosses of any kind,

                                 period.

They've already splashed around

                       in our blood,

already feasted plenty

                              on our lives.

Stop asking us so many questions.

Look at our injuries

             the damage done to peasants

                                    and miners.

We've gotta yank this plant out of the world

                           once and for always.

Don't ask anything else of us. We've really

                                  made up our guts.

We don't want bosses

because they're

                           the same as ever;

because they want the land

                    all for themselves,

because they never stop

                   robbing, trampling

and killing, killing

day and night under every kind of sky.

_________________________

translated by Jack Hirschman from the Italian

Ferruccio Brugnaro

FIST OF SUN

Curbstone Press, 1998

Ferruccio Brugnaro worked for 30 years —

most of his adult life — in an industrial park of

chemical factories in the Porto Marghera district of Venice.

Well known as a worker-poet he shared his poems for years,

printed in mimeo format, to workers at the factory and in many

schools he visited. Poet & translator Jack Hirschman chose for this

collection from three previous books by Brugnaro: We Must Want To,

 The Silence Doesn't Rule and The Clear Stars of These Nights.

Born in Mestre Italy in 1936, Ferruccio Brugnaro has retired from

the factory shift and now devotes his full-time to writing.

[ BA ]

BUNNY WAILER ~

 

B U N N Y     W A I L E R

1947 ~ 2021

POETS WHO SLEEP #40 ~

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

JANE MEAD ~

 

Seventy Feet From 

The Magnolia Blossom

there is an ant.

He is carrying

a heavy load —

We should help him.

______________________

Jane Mead (1958~-2019)

The Usable Field

Alice James Books

2008

SKIP JAMES ~

 

TOMMY JOHNSON ~

 

RE-READING LOCAL LIVES (MILLEN BRAND) ~

Misplaced Kansas

In nineteen forty-nine,

when the Walter Shuhler farm

was about fixed up as a dairy,

a cyclone came up Butter Valley,

Sunday evening, "a little before nine —

twenty minutes to nine," the sky darkened.

"We were in the barn. Didn't hurry.

We had this and that to do,

but as we came to the house,

we saw it was very black,

and I noticed a flickering, I said to Florence,

'It's a cyclone over the hill there.'

I recognized it from Kansas,

we ran then. I wanted to pull the electric switch

in the cellar. I told the family,

'Keep away from the window.'

Lucky they were all inside.

When I pulled the switch, it was pitch dark.

I could see flashes. I could see rafters fly over

I didn't know they were from my own house.

There was a kind of deep roaring hum

that the wind and pressure make.

Everything was rocking and shaking,

whatever could shake. It was over

in about fifteen seconds.

We were the worse hit in the valley.

The house roof was off altogether,

and the chimneys. Most of the windows frames

were pushed right in. Outside,

everything was mashed up. The silos down.

All the big trees were over, flattened.

You can still see the stumps.

It came from the south

and was only a few hundred feet wide.

We were hit right in the middle.

If it wasn't for the house that split it,

it would have taken the barn. As it was,

when the house split it,

one part went down this way

and took the roof off a small pig stable.

The other part went that way

and took a chicken house, everything —

took it all away. The chickens

were scattered on the hill and next day

came walking back. I heard a few

were down in Clayton close to that

manufacturing place down there.

The barn wasn't hit

but on the barn side near the house

about fifteen feet of boards

broke where the house roof blew against it

and pushed the frame about two inches.

But just so the barn stayed. Lucky

the cattle were in the barn, it didn't hurt them.

I had started to make a hen house

out of a temporary croncrib.

I had two two-by-fours

nailed with eightpenny nails,

and the wind tore one of them to pieces

and din't touch the other.

Still it wasn't as bad as a fire.

But it was bad enough.

The trees that were over broke fences.

We were most of the night clearing the lane.

The next day,

shingles, tin, and nails lying all over

in the meadow and the fields.

If the cows eat wire or nails,

it will kill them, so we carefully

cleaned off the meadow first — that was still

where we mainly fed the cows —

and let the cows out. We put

a canvas over the house roof

and four days later, by Thursday,

we had the roof back on.

It was a cyclone, all right. Strange,

there never was one before

and never was one before

and never has been one since.

I've seen it in Kansas, a cloud

let down a wind funnel that would shoot along

faster than you could run

and everything it touched was gone.

But who'd think

that Kansas would chase you here?"

__________________________

Millen Brand

Local Lives

Poems of the Pennsyvania Dutch

Potter, 1975

__________________

a gem of a book, published when Millen Brand was nearly 70 years old, having written the collection over some thirty-five years. Brand  is Pennsylvania German on his mother's side and lived for many years on Crow Hill near Bally amongst the farmers, tradesmen, factory workers, women and children and fellow storytellers. There is no book of poems like this one. The poems John Berger drew out of rural France in Pig Earth is akin, as is Drum Hadley's Borderland, and I'll be drawing from both those books over the next few weeks.

[ BA ]