THIS MOMENT AT LONGHOUSE (NEW TITLES) ~

~

WHEN I WAS A POET IN CHINA ~ Norman Schaefer

Norman Schaefer

When I Was A Poet In China

Norman Schaefer’s long experience as a wilderness trekker in the Sierras and his admiration for ancient Chinese poets, exemplified by the ethereal presence of Li Po, informs this etude on the sights and sounds of West Coast ecology. When I Was A Poet In China is elegant yet accessible, with a deep respect for the sagacity of an ageless sensibility still relevant today. Centuries and cultures are bridged in this masterful dialogue reflecting on art, literature, and the vagaries of existence under the willows on the banks of Putah Creek.

P A T   N O L A N

Longhouse

2026

available now

New, perfect bound, 100 pages

Prose

$16.95

   $5 shipping

 NEW! ANDREW SCHELLING at LONGHOUSE ~

ANDREW SCHELLING

Wielding the Sanskrit Ice Axe 

L O N G H O U S E

 2026

$12 

   (postpaid)

New! Margaret Randall at Longhouse

Margaret Randall

Book Burning Here and Now

L O N G H O U S E

 2026

$12 

   (postpaid)

New! Jonathan Greene at Longhouse

Jonathan Greene

Thoughts to Survive Hard Times

~

L O N G H O U S E

 2026

$12 

   (postpaid)

BOB ARNOLD'S "SWWIMMER” ~

"Artists feed each other: John Cheever fed one of the best. Bob Arnold was inspired by the John Cheever’s short story.“The Swimmer” to write a fact based novel SWWIMMER (the double “W” is intentional) that honored Cheever’s achievement. In doing so, Arnold created a rare work of art: a stunning trade book that is also an artist-book, an example of masterful writing, exquisite design, and a story that takes the particulars of personal family relationships and makes them universal as they develop the themes of love, loss, abandonment, the striving to return to inner peace by finding a way outward, “swimming” into the world’s confusions and mysteries." — JOE NAPORA

A personal letter from Margaret Randall:

Dear Bob:

As it turns out, I read Swwimmer in one sitting last night. I'd intended only to glance over the book but it hooked me. I like the writing a lot. It seems a departure from your writing style in other books and particularly suited to telling this subtly complex story which--am I wrong?--seems to be modeled after your own son and his life. A very moving story. And the shape and heft of the book works well. I have been working on an essay about how these maga AI companies are buying up, scanning, and then destroying books... by the tens of millions. Part of what I am trying to transmit is the importance of the book as form as well as content. Swwimmer confirms this. And Schelling's translations from the Sanskrit, following the story of that first Everest climb and the lost codex that recorded the legend of the mountain's spirit were also fascinating. A rare jewel.

Thanks again.

Love, Margaret 

 Bob Arnold

SWWIMMER

Longhouse

a new edition, 2026

available now

New, perfect bound, 170 pages

Prose

$20

    $5 shipping

_________

Listen up!

Every book or title here are human-authored and human-designed. People made them. No part of this work may be used to train AI technologies, to develop machine learning or large language models, or for similar purposes without the clear written permission of the publisher.

Thank you! from Bob & Susan at Longhouse

Established in 1971

LONGHOUSE

P.O. Box 2454

West Brattleboro

Vermont

05303

   all photos & buildings by

   Bob & Susan Arnold

ARTHUR SZE ~

 

Into the Hush

1

A magpie feather gleams in the grass;

today you are not having open-heart surgery,

nor are you strapped to a hospital bed,

inhaling oxygen; you do not mix cement

and sand in a wheelbarrow, nor did you sleep

the night in a field off an interstate highway.

This morning you live in a sparrow's warble,

in pale green leaves trembling in sunshine.

You catch the curling wave of the day

where peas flower on a trellis, where apricot

blossoms tinge the tips of a hundred-year-old tree.

Weeding in the garden, you get stronger

as you dig; you become well, island, field;

out of nowhere, a rough-legged hawk

glides downward with outstretched wings;

aspen leaves flutter without wind.  When you've

worked this long, your art is no longer art

but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.

_________________________________

Arthur Sze

Into the Hush

Copper Canyon Press

2025

WENDELL BERRY ~

 

W E N D E L L   B E R R Y

Louisville, Kentucky August 5, 1934  ~  August 31, 2026 Port Royal, Kentucky

HANSHAN ~

 

from Cold Mountain Zen

Father and mother having left me much to inherit,

I'm not envious of others' paddies and fields.

My wife handles her loom, clicking, clucking,

my child, playing by herself, mouth babbling, babbling.

She claps her hands, making blossoms dance,

chin in hands, she listens to birds singing.

Who will come by and admire all this?

Just a woodcutter stops by for awhile.

Since birth, for thirty years,

I've walked tens of thousands of li.

Along the rivers blue grass proliferated,

as I entered the borders scarlet dust rose.

I kneaded elixir vainly to seek immortality,

I read books to comment on history.

Having returned to Cold Mountain now,

I lie by a stream and wash my ears.

As I climb the path to Cold Mountain,

the route to Cold Mountain does not end.

The valley is long with piles of stones,

the streams smothered with grass.

The moss is smooth, not because of rain,

the pines sough, not by borrowing winds.

Who would go beyond the world

and sit with me amid white clouds?

I lie beneath heavy layers of rocks;

steamy clouds do not fade during the day.

My room is murky and dark,

but my mind rejects uproar and clatter.

My dreams go to wander in golden palaces,

my soul returns by crossing the stone bridge.

I've thrown away whatever disturbs me,

even the gourd clanking in the trees.

My house sits under green boulders;

the garden is wild but I do not cut grass.

New wisterias hang down, entwiningly;

old stones stand, rising steeply, sharply.

Monkeys pick mountain berries;

in the pond a white heron mouths fish.

The transcendental book, in two volumes,

I read under a tree, mumbling.

_C O L D  M O U N T A I N  Z E N_________________________________

Hanshan

translated by Hiroaki Sato

New Directions 2026

I've waited all my life for Hiroaki Sato to bring us Hanshan —

it was only a matter of time. Excellent footnotes accompany these

poems, so I encourage every reader to find this essential book, a

beauty, and read all the poems, all the footnotes, all the essays,

all the all. I just wanted to type out a few poems to share on a late

summer season evening.

MONK ALIVE IN ZURICH 1964 ~

 

Thelonious Monk Quartet Zurich, Switzerland 02/26/1964 Charlie Rouse (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Edward "Butch" Warren (b) Ben Riley (d)

PAUL CELAN by ANNA ARNO ~

 

R E A D   M E

    Belknap/Harvard

     2026

THOMAS A CLARK, THREADBARE ~

 

the shape changer

                ______________________________

once I was a deer

stepping under trees

my form always broken

by lights and shadows

then I was a wildcat

leaping up and away

from the traces of my own

rigour and ferocity

in a fold of hills

nodding with flowers

I took on many

shapes and colours

seldom was I present

to myself in a form

half as alluring

as what I might become

again I was a goldcrest

a bright fragment of song

moving through the forest

leading farther in

at times defeated

reduced to stone

I lay disregarded

concealed in the open

then I was a juniper

turning to take the slope

pausing and bracing myself

above a sheer drop

and once I was a dragonfly

for an afternoon

little more than a notion

of the stillness and the green

_______________________

The Threadbare Coat

Selected Poems

Carcanet, UK, 2020

we celebrate our wedding anniversary

today with a dear poetry friend

LARRY EIGNER ~

 

_______________________

microphones

on top of the world

heads spin

empty

______________________

Waters /

Places /

A Time

edited by Robert Grenier

Black Sparrow Press

1983

photo ~ Ann Charters

JOHN COLTRANE "SPIRITUAL" TONIGHT ~

 

Concord Music Group reissues remastered and expanded edition of John Coltrane’s Afro Blue Impressions Two-CD set commemorates both the 40th anniversary of Pablo Records and the 50th anniversary of the recordings Concord Music Group will reissue a remastered and expanded edition of John Coltrane’s Afro Blue Impressions album (international release dates vary). Enhanced by 24-bit remastering by Joe Tarantino, three bonus tracks, and new liner notes, the new reissue celebrates the 40th anniversary of Pablo Records, the jazz label founded by Norman Granz in 1973. Afro Blue Impressions represents an anniversary within an anniversary. By the time Norman Granz launched Pablo in 1973, he’d already stockpiled several years worth of previously-recorded tour performances in his vaults, including these sets from Stockholm and Berlin in late 1963 (October and November, respectively). This new two-disc reissue of the classic Coltrane Pablo album — originally released as a double LP in 1977 — arrives just a few weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of the original concerts. Coltrane fronts a stellar quartet on both European dates that includes McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. In addition to the nine tracks that appeared in the original Afro Blue Impressions double album, the reissue also includes three bonus tracks from the Stockholm date: “Naima,” “I Want To Talk About You,” and “My Favorite Things.” “When you compare and contrast the performance of a composition that was released on the original album to a different performance of the same composition from among the bonus tracks,” says Afro Blue Impressions reissue producer Nick Phillips, “it perfectly illustrates just how restlessly creative Coltrane and his band were. Each song was a springboard for unpredictable improvisation and boundless creativity.” “These tracks brim with the wonder and the power of discovery,” says Neil Tesser, author of the new liner notes accompanying the reissue. “At this juncture, the Coltrane Quartet existed in a state analogous to quantum mechanics . . . Each new performance yielded new insights. As the musicians gathered this data and sifted through it, they would arrive at the polished theories underlying the eventual masterworks to come, such as the album Crescent and the monumental suite A Love Supreme — achievements that would then launch a new age of chaotic discovery, on such albums as Om, Sun Ship, and Meditations. How much those recordings will resonate on their 50th anniversaries will likely engender some controversy; Coltrane didn’t live long enough to complete the journey that began with them, and the jury remains out, even decades later, regarding the impact of that work. But history long ago weighed the import of his work in 1963, when his music stretched and struggled its way toward becoming Coltrane’s iconic stylistic statement.”

AMIRI BARAKA ~

 

   Lunch Poems series

    Amiri Baraka

GREAT MUSIC TALK TONIGHT ~

 

Joe Boyd

   Buddy Miller

TRACY K. SMITH SAYS FEAR LESS ~

 

R E A D   M E

    Norton, 2025

URSULA K. Le GUIN ~

 

Some of the Philosophers

can't use it

can't count it

so refuse it, this —

the inexhaustible, bountiful,

elusive

spring of the absurd,

brooding over the dark abyss

wing,

the word.

Self

You cannot measure the circumference

but there are centerpoints:

stones, and a woman washing at a ford,

the water runs red-brown from what she washes.

The mouths of caves. The mouths of bells.

The sky in winter under snowclouds

to northward, green of jade.

No star is farther from it than the glint

of mica in a pebble in the hand,

or nearer. Distance is my god.

Slick Rock Creek, September

My skin

touches the wind

A lacewing fly touches my hand

I speak too slow     

                            for her to understand

Rock's warm under my hand.

It speaks too slow

                            for me to understand

I drink sunlit water.

Flight 1067 to L.A.

Snowy sierra sawteeth

lift to leftward

as I drink white wine staidly

above the Great Valley in the belly

of a silvery psuedocetacean

sailing the airsea to a palmy city.

I am my ancestors' sci-fi.

Waking in April

Drifting on the birdsong river

between no light and light

and the sleep of  man and a cat,

I wear the soft old shirt

my mother made me seventy years ago,

nightshirt, dayshirt,

winter coat, wedding gown.

I wonder, as it wears away to rags

and gauze, will there be a mirror

to see the naked soul in,

or only an unraveling of shadow

as the day widens

and things grow clearer.

______________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Larger Reality

Winter Texts, 2025

VASHTI BUNYAN TONIGHT ~

 

JOHN DARNIELLE'S SONGS ~

R E A D   M E 

MCD/FARRAR

2025

EL CORNO EMPLUMADO RIDES AGAIN ~

 

Letters That Breathe Fire: El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn by Margaret Randall

MISCELLANEOUS

Author:  Margaret Randall

BUY NOW...→

New Village Press. 2026. 384 pages.

Despite my immersion first in the poetry of the San Francisco renaissance and later of the avant-garde scene in New York, I was woefully ignorant as a young poet of writers outside the confines of the United States and Europe. I was far from alone in having no conception of the rich cultural and political tradition of those countries closest to me in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is, until I opened the pages of El Corno Emplumado.

In Letters That Breathe Fire, Margaret Randall’s selection of correspondence from El Corno Emplumado mirrors the dynamism and passion of young writers and activists around the world creating and struggling in the midst of the turbulent 1960s. El Corno Emplumado, partly printed bilingually in Spanish and English, was originally created by co-founders and editors Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón to act as a conduit through which information could flow freely between writers and artists hitherto separated by the boundaries of countries and language. Starting with its second issue, El Corno created a special section that in its almost eight years of publication from 1962 to its final issue in 1969 would publish over two hundred letters culled from the thousands they received.

Selections from every letter published in the thirty-one issues that comprised the run of El Corno are included in this collection. Browsing its pages, one encounters Ernesto Cardenal’s excitement that poets are creating a “real Pan American Union . . . Poets of various languages but all writing in a common language like Pentecost.”

Denise Levertov, in a lengthy letter, challenges her dear friend poet Ted Enslin’s declaration that politics “has absolutely no place in poetry or art of any kind, no didactic cant has.” Levertov champions the validity of art as protest, emphasizing that “the poet has no exclusive area of concern, and that poets or nonpoets, we are ‘members, one of another’; and that there is no danger, no shame, and no hope in which we are not all involved.” Then there is Thomas Merton celebrating that for the poet “there is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom. . . . Come, Dervishes: here is the water of life. Dance in it.”

There are also letters by Julio Cortázar, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Bly, Cecilia Vicuña, John Sinclair, Raquel Jodorowsky, and even by an anonymous political prisoner and an angry British subject. Documents of length and substance, these are an example of the diversity and heft of the hundreds of letters in the collection.

El Corno issues are presented in chronological order. At the beginning of each section, Randall contextualizes the historical aspect of that particular issue by locating it in a political and cultural context and by adding extensive informational footnotes about the letter writers where needed. There is also an ample index at the end of the book.

The correspondence in El Corno is the best kind of history, written from the pens of the individuals who lived and witnessed it, as relevant today as it was more than five decades ago. Letters That Breathe Fire is not only an invaluable resource, it is compelling reading. This is a book to be kept close at hand, to find inspiration from, to actively engage with, because it comes directly from the lived experiences of individuals who, communicating with one another across borders and boundaries, strove to make sense out of the world they inhabited, of the art they were in the process of creating.

Susan Sherman
New York City