WITH ME ~

Listening right now

STRAIGHT AHEAD
Oliver Nelson, alto/tenor sax, clarinet
Eric Dolphy, alto sax, bass clarinet, flute
Richard Wyands, piano
George Duvivier, bass
Roy Haynes, drums
On LP: Prestige

EARTH ~

Robert Francis


Born in Upland, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1901

Robert Francis moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1926

after graduating from Harvard. His first book of poems

Stand Here With Me appeared in 1936.

By 1940 he began building

his home Fort Juniper on the outskirts of town, which since

the poet's passing in 1987 has become a legendary spot

and home or studio for many other poets.

Collected Poems 1936-1976 makes a fine companion.

The poem below is drawn from that collection.

I have worked with this poem with every age group,

including with strangers when reading out on the street.

It chimes.


~

SILENT POEM


backroad----leafmold---- stonewall---- chipmunk
underbrush---- grapevine---- woodchuck---- shadblow



woodsmoke---- cowbarn ----honeysuckle---- woodpile
sawhorse---- bucksaw---- outhouse---- wellsweep



backdoor ----flagstone----bulkhead---- buttermilk
candlestick---- ragrug---- firedog---- brownbread



hilltop ----outcrop---- cowbell---- buttercup
whetstone---- thunderstorm---- pitchfork----steeplebush



gristmill---- millstone ----cornmeal ----waterwheel
watercress---- buckwheat---- firefly---- jewelweed



gravestone---- groundpine ----windbreak---- bedrock
weathercock ----snowfall---- starlight---- cockrow

I-VERMONT ~

WITH ME ~

What I'm listening to right now :

my listening:
song: "Chairman Mao" by Charlie Haden
"Old and New Dreams"
on LP: Black Saint/Italy

TREASURE ~

Chris Strachwitz ~ Arhoolie Records

I've made note to Chris Strachwitz in other Birdhouse posts. One of the rarest of marvels who won't be quite recognized for the general public to jump on board — just that: rootsy, folk splendid, bluesy, down-home, ethnic, tribal, bountiful, everlasting — too good to be true.

Please read more :
see the slide show
great music

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/arts/music/28arhoolie.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=strachwitz&st=cse&scp=1

SMALL ~

Windigo

I draw from rain, impetus;

from wind, if it be chill

or great enough, anger;

from snow, anxiety or,

if it be deep enough,

fear; from sun, what else?

solace, through glass,

however cold: solace.

Guy Birchard

I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L[eonard] to come &

mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking

suddenly "This is Earth life." I seemed to see how earthy

it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare;

as if a moon-visitor saw me.

Virginia Woolf (from her diary)

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. MONTAIGNE

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Small? A young couple in love in their NYC nest. Less than 400 sq. ft. to be exact. Two rooms. They both have work and keep well. She is lively (as we can see), he is a carpenter and finds his wood and material right off the streets.

Together they decorate and show heart in tough times.

Please read the New York Times article below and be sure to walk through the nest and garden via the slide show.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/realestate/28habi.html?_r=1&hp

"Windigo" is from the stunning Further than the Blood by Guy Birchard

(Pressed Wafer, 9 Columbus Sq., Boston, MA. 02116)

photos © bob arnold

"purple japanese iris" poem by bob arnold

sidewalk art by jacqueline laufman

"sawbuck"

"new breadboard"

I recently worked with many feet of yellow pine stair tread.

When the job was done I was left with one foot — a butt end —

nowhere to go with it except make a breadboard for Sweetheart.

~

SPY vs. SPY ~

John le Carré

Please link and listen in:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/25/british_novelist_john_le_carr_on

WALKABOUT ~

drawings © bob arnold

I LET MYSELF... ~

Rosie Thomas

Hailing from Michigan like her friend Sufjan Stevens, Rosie Thomas has five albums to her name, including one on her own label Sing-Along-Records. She has performed with others (Velour 100 being one), as a duet, and a solo artist. Under the name Sheila Saputo she also side lines as a stand-up comedian, and when not there, or on the folk stage, as an actress
(Calvin Marshall).

photo: starringcapa.com

EARTH ~

Norman Schaefer

On the Summit of Cathedral Peak, 1999

EDIZA LAKE


I have wandered
far and wide
in the Sierra Nevada
but nothing like
the autumn wind tonight.

The Sunny Top of California

Dew gathers on the meadow grasses.
Deneb takes its place in the center of the sky.
Step by step around Rockslide Lake,
keeping my eyes on the radiant moon,
I call out the names of old Chinese poets,
who instruct me by saying nothing.
All my life I’ve loved high lonesome places.
Odors of moss and bark
and cones and twigs and snowmelt mud,
I feel like I’ve been coming to the Sierra
for a thousand years.
A human life is no more than a flicker of lightning,
but to die on a glacier
my bones would be pure forever.
Watching the moon begin its slow descent,
my mind quiets down
until there’s scarcely a ripple.
In the morning I’ll look for a campsite
somewhere green and steep and wild
where a wolverine might feel safe.
I talk brave,
but all I want is an autumn alone
with books and tea
and Bugler cigarettes rolled-your-own,
to be deeply enjoyed without hurry
on the sunny top of California.

YOSEMITE VALLEY

This one

dogwood in blossom

is all the spring I need.

CLEAR AUTUMN MORNING

Orion stalks the Pleiades.

Paper ~thin, a silver crescent begins to rise.

Dawn light fills Evolution Basin.

On the southern slopes of Mt. Huxley

folds and wrinkles come into focus.

Cold air drains from Muir Pass.

Frost sparkles on the grasses

white as the Milky Way.

One star by day, thousands at night,

I'm never so alive as here.

I lift a cup of tea to the alpenglow

and clear autumn morning,

alone, happy,

thirty miles from a road.

---

Norman Schaefer
The Sunny Top of California

La Alameda Press
9636 Guadalupe Trail NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87114

author's photo: dan pattitucci

EARTH ~

SWEET LAND

Another one of those films Hollywood shuns. It made only (only) a million at the box office. Which would be fine to most of us, but it's way below minimum-wage for Hollywood or anything else in the media. The director worked years at getting it onto the screen. Someone else complained about the chronology of the film (not liking) and I thought, hmm, that's just what I love about the film. It's flashbacks and foreshadows and lighting. Excellent actors. It isn't powerful. I believe I have become quite tired of the powerful.

We watched it by woodfire light, one simple candle and two crate tables pushed together for a Thanksgiving little feast.

EARTH ~

coda: I've got lots of smart friends; some can even spell better than little ol' me.

At least two times I have posted this Beckett quote, and each time "charitable" has been wrong.

I worked with a plumber this morning and hunkered down into his work, back to me, I heard him mumble to himself, but loud enough for the world, "dummy". About himself. A little mistake he had made. Like the one I've been making.

I even have a kind neighbor who tried to correct my ways to get the word, finally, right. "Dummy".

When a moment might be warm again (ha!), I will remount the Beckett and snap another photograph and finally have the words of Molloy right as rain.

By the way, it should be "defence". Too.

For the moment the above has all the feeling, though wrong. I'll be changing it.

And then it will be right.

EARTH ~

Skellig-Michael-/ Ireland

Skelligs

Gulag camp / Russia

Ostrog Monastery, Montenegro

Phuktal Monastery / Zanskar India

Sumela / Turkey

St. George's / West Bank

Popa Taungkalat / Myanmar

Meteora / Greece

Phugtal Gompa / Himalayas

Xuankong Monastery / China

Taktsang Monastery / Himalayas

Tiger's Nest / Bhutan

Each site! but this last one, indeed, takes my breath away

TRANS ~

Tomas Transtromer


Tomas Transtromer was born in Stockholm (1931) and published his first book of poems in his early twenties — nothing has slowed his poetry down since, not even a crushing stroke in 1990 which bothers his speech, but not his writing, or piano playing, alebit one handed. Long a practicing psychologist (since the early 60s), before the stroke he worked in juvenile prisons, with drug addicts and the disabled. I've chosen the poems below from The Sorrow Gondola, the first collection of poetry the poet completed after 1990.

April and Silence



Spring lies deserted.

The velvet-dark ditch

crawls by my side

without reflections.



All that shines

are yellow flowers.



I'm carried in my shadow

like a violin

in its black case.



The only thing I want to say

gleans out of reach

like the silver

in a pawnshop.






A Page from the Nightbook



One night in May I stepped ashore

through a cool moonlight

where the grass and flowers were gray

but smelled green.



I drifted the slope

in the colorblind night

while white stones

signaled to the moon.



In a period

a few minutes long

and fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me

beyond the lead-shimmering water

lay the other shore

and those who ruled.



People with a future

instead of faces.







Night Journey



There's a swarming beneath us. The trains are running.

Hotel Astoria shivers

a glass of water near the bed

shines in the tunnels.



He dreamt he was a prisoner in Svallard.

The planet rotated and rumbled.

Glittering eyes walked over the fields of ice.

The beauty of miracles existed.







Silence



Walk by, they are buried. . .

A cloud floats over the sun's disc.



Starvation is a tall building

moving in the night



in the bedroom an elevator's dark shaft

opens toward the interior.



Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.

Walk by, they are buried. . .



The silverware survives in large schools

at the depths where the Atlantic is black.







Midwinter



Ablue light

radiates from my clothing.

Midwinter.

Clattering tambourines of ice.

I close my eyes.

There is a silent world

there is a crack

where the dead

are smuggled across the border.




Tomas Transtromer
The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer)
translated by Michael McGriff & Mikaela Grassl

FERLINGHETTI ~

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

One of the last men standing ~ and it is well worth reading the verve of a wise poet, painter, technician (of the sacred) storyteller, activist and world traveler.


Please click on here:

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/2132/ferlinghetti_11_1_10/

A WAY OUT ~

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT


Born in 1924 in Lwow Poland, where he was forced to leave as a student when the Soviet Red Army invaded in 1944, for Krakow, where he studied economics, and then another move to Sopot where his parents resided and he began work at the Polish National Bank, all the while continuing his Law studies, poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert dropped into a bookshop when he was twenty-four and wrote his first of many essays. While reading the essay I thought it was as fresh as a daisy and may have been one of his concluding remarks, often repeated by many others to this minute, on the demise of poetry. Zbigniew Herbert passed away in 1999.


~

The bookseller on whose counter I put down two slim volumes I'd found on a high shelf, looked at me in disbelief.

"Poetry," he muttered, "but almost nobody buys that these days. It's commercial waste paper."

That last phrase, though softened by the adjective "commercial," grated on my ear for a long time. On the way home I wondered, mournfully: are we really seeing the demise of poetry? Is this oldest of literary genres departing to the cemetery of exhausted forms? Forms too diminutive for the coming content? Does emotion lie under the threshold of sensitivity in a person of our atomic age?

In spite of everything, poetry exists. There are poets who write poems, publish defenseless little books, literary journals print experts' polemics, critics are led by the nose. Only the whole movement is suspended in air, because a poet's word never becomes a household word. Contemporary poetry is ridiculed by the average reader, and school has done an expert job of making the classics repugnant. The number of people who read poetry is minuscule — it's an inarguable fact.

Let's try to find the causes of this state of affairs, let's try to find a way out.

( from "Poetry In A Vacuum?" 1948)


coda:

A. But language is a common medium of communication for all people.

B. That's exactly where the problem lies. Language is an impure instrument of expression. Tortured on a daily basis, made banal, subjected to base treatment. So the dream of poets is to reach the virgin meaning of words, to give things their proper names, as Norwid says, "Let words mean only what they mean and not against whom they are used." That's a quote from another great poet. For me the dialogue with objects was such an attempt to reach the pure source of speech. It was also a rebellion against liars and swindlers."

(from "Conversation on Writing Poetry" 1973)






The Collected Prose, Zbigniew Herbert
1948-1998
Ecco

FAREWELL ~

While working at setting down tile today, I heard the news Norris Church Mailer had passed away. She was an author, mother, former model, and Norman Mailer's last wife. She was only 61. A few years ago, one very early spring, Sweetheart and I jumped into the truck and took a drive down to Cape Cod and went to where we always go, Provincetown. It was still very sleepy in tourist town and the weather was wet and ragged when we arrived. As she does, Sweetheart went to read the community bulletin board at the Grand Union to see what was going on. Dark was coming on. We hadn't eaten. She saw that Norris Church Mailer was reading that evening in the town library. I said, "Let's go."

Nice big white library at the center of town, run and used by all sorts of book lovers. We know the place and went through a side door and could hear the reading had already begun.

Norris Church Mailer was what she might term a southern belle — attractive, great eyes and lots of spunk. She was reading to maybe 30 local folks in a parlor setting, circled with books and the walls decorated nicely in wood craftsmanship. Norman Mailer was in the front row, now nearing the end of his life, sitting with crutches that would help move him like a human crab when it was time to leave. We snuck some chocolate chip cookies early from the reception table and called that supper (life on the road) and went in to enjoy the reading.

Norris Church Mailer once said she reached to read People Magazine before The New York Review of Books. Yes, she was enjoying herself at this reading. So were we. We were but strangers, but I got the feeling everyone seemed to know and like the author when she was done.
She knew she would never write War & Peace. Or The Naked and the Dead.
She had something else to offer.

It was southern hospitality. It gets me every time.

I was playing this piece of music when I heard of her passing.

Photo courtesy the LA Times