Now come hear these rough rhymes sing
Like sunlight on the ridgelines of far mountain ranges,
Range upon range of recognition in the dawn.
This book documents the settling of the Borderlands.
It is a weaving of humor and tears,
Of men and women grounded in the earth,
The livelihoods and folk knowledges,
The wisdoms fast disappearing,
The horses, the cowboys, the beautiful lands.
It is heard across these howling distances,
Of faraway mountain ranges,
Voices echoing across cedar breaks, arroyos, and mesas.
As far as the eye can see, the distances cling to each spoken word
As each word clings to the distances and tries to take them in.
But if you listen, you can still hear them
When you read these words slowly by the fire
And your voice becomes the people,
The lions, the wildlife, and the land.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
THE CLARITY OF ANY SADNESS ~
The Clarity of Any Sadness
After sustaining any infraction, find a way to direct it toward
dissolve.
The Sutras are full of such advice.
Try this : place two words, equidistant, against the friction of your
speak, against the stricture of stick and stone.
See how your own insides thrive on the plants that lush outside
you.
Get on your knees while kissing your knees.
This is an esoteric teaching I am not at liberty to clarify.
Then separate the string bean part of your heart from the tough
potato skin.
Boil the butter and pour it, clear, through gauze into any jar of your
choosing.
This is not a recipe for sadness. The elephant is already in the
broom.
I have been using the tail of its massive silk self to clear the way.
______________________________
G E O R G E K A L A M A R A S
The Hermit's Way of Being Human
CW Books
P.O. Box 541105
Cincinnati, Ohio 45254-1106
www.readcwbooks.com
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
DRUM ~
D R U M M O N D H A D L E Y
from Book One:
Cowboys and Horses
Preamble
___________________
Drummond Hadley
from Voice of the Borderlands
Rio Nuevo Publishers
Tucson, 2005
from Voice of the Borderlands
Rio Nuevo Publishers
Tucson, 2005
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Monday, November 30, 2015
WRECKING THE WORLD ~
G A R Y S N Y D E R
DILLINGHAM, ALASKA,
THE WILLOW TREE BAR
Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air
all across the globe,
low-ceilinged bars, we hear the same new songs
All the new songs.
In the working bars of the world.
After you done drive Cat. After the truck
went home.
Caribou slip,
front legs folded first
under the warm oil pipeline
set four feet off the ground —
On the wood floor, glass in hand,
laugh and cuss with
somebody else's wife.
Texans. Hawaiians, Eskimos,
Filipinos, Workers, always
on the edge of a brawl —
In the bars of the world.
Hearing those same new songs
in Abadan,
Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks,
White or brown,
Drinking it down,
the pain
of the work
of wrecking the world.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––
G A R Y S N Y D E R
Born in San Francisco in 1930 and after travels, work and life
around the world, Snyder to this day lives a few hours drive
east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Thursday, November 26, 2015
NEW! JANINE POMMY VEGA ~
New and available now from Longhouse ~
Janine Pommy Vega
Janina
Visions, Tales & Lovesongs
288 pages
Janina
Visions, Tales & Lovesongs
288 pages
perfect bound
packed with poems and photographs
Janine's full course album of photographs, travel journals, poems, facsimile notebooks of poems, childhood photographs, and family, Beat family, plus her unfinished
memoir of Jerusalem.
____________________________________
$50
Shipping $5 ~ U.S. orders with Paypal
Buy now through easy-to-use Paypal, US Orders (total $55)
Please use our email address of
longhousepoetry@gmail.com
or we can invoice you, with thanks
all orders may be made by Paypal or check
mail order here:
LONGHOUSE
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont
05303
_________________________________
LONGHOUSE
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont
05303
_________________________________
"Generally speaking, of the so-called ‘Beat Generation’, it is the names and creativity of its male protagonists that are most familiar to us, and whose lives and works have been extensively documented, lionised, and mythologised. But there were also, among this company of free-thinkers-and-livers, women too. Lovers, wives and partners, surrogate mothers, and sisters, some of whom tried to keep hearth and home in some kind of order midst the turbulence of the wake created by the trajectories of the lives of those they loved.
Among the women who were part of, or
associated with this group of poets, writers, painters, musicians,
street-vagabond-drug addicts, outsiders and hobos, was an angel of the edge. One who put herself out there where many an angel
would have feared to have trod. Her name
was Janine Pommy Vega, who, as a very young woman became close friends with
most of the prominent members of this older generation of ‘Beats’, who bedded
her, initiated her into drugs, and more importantly tutored her in literature
and thought, and a way of life that was a riposte to the stifling and
meaningless materialism of the conventional bourgeois lives they were born
into.
Janine, or Janina in Polish, blossomed
within this creative coterie, into a fine poet, writer, traveller, lover,
sometimes-recluse, and quester for the truth of herself, in the form of love,
both in the human realm among her many male muses, and in her search of the
embrace of the Absolute or Divine. The
insistence of her ‘chosen’ path, that had actually chosen her, was the need for
her to constantly travel to the edge; to put herself at risk; to test every
sinew and thought in her enquiry into her own nature through the art of living
and the craft of poetry. In her pursuit
of this knowledge, she travelled widely, both terrestrially around North and
South America, Europe and Scandinavia, giving readings, writing, teaching,
meditating and generally hanging-out; and into those deep hinterlands within
her own consciousness. All the while an
enquirer, an observer, experiencing both realms with her intellectual,
emotional and spiritual antennae ever-sensitive to the world around her – both
the visible and the invisible. Making
home wherever her path took her, “…for home is a far place, and the place at
hand. I carry them with me, my home and
my wanderings.”
Here in this beautiful book – a tribute to
Janine – designed and produced with the care and attention of ones who were
intimate friends of hers, Bob and Susan Arnold at Longhouse Publishers, we find
writings, papers, notebooks and photographs left after her death. To read the contents and look at the photos,
is like peering onto the desk and into the drawers of Janine’s own workspace. Here is the poet’s temenos, with the evidence of the processes of her thinking,
recalling, creating, adjusting and rewriting.
Occasionally with offcuts of her craft left lying about the place,
marking her path – her heroic journeying towards catching a glimpse; a
reflection; an echo of her true nature.
Love was her vocation, both in her finite
relationships with others, and finally in the infinite embrace of the
Other. Each dwelling within the learned recognition
and acceptance of herself. A beautiful
woman poet who experienced that divine affliction – that ‘fine madness’ – the
temptation to BE. As she herself wrote;
“…the woman Ferocious in her heart for love/And Poet, blessed with the
necessity to go on seeking…”
Malcolm Ritchie
Arran Island, Scotland
author of ~
The Crows of Gravity
( Longhouse 2016 )
( Longhouse 2016 )
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
KEITH WILSON ~
K E I T H W I L S O N
THE POEM POLITIC 10:
A NOTE FOR FUTURE
HISTORIANS
When writing of us, state
as your first premise
THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING
You will never understand us
otherwise, say that we
cherished war
over peace and comfort
over feeding the poor
over our own health
over love, even the act of it
over religion, all of them, except
perhaps certain forms of Buddhism
that we never failed to pass bills of war through our legislatures,
using the pressures of imminent invasion or disaster (potential)
abroad as absolution for not spending moneys on project which
might make us happy or even save us from clear and evident
crises at home
Write of us that we spent millions educating the best of our
youth and then slaughtered them capturing some hill or swamp of
no value and bragged for several months about how well they
died following orders that were admittedly stupid, ill-conceived
Explain how the military virtues, best practiced by robots, are
most valued by us. You will never come to understand us unless
you realize, from the first, that we love killing and kill our own
youth, our own great men FIRST. Enemies can be forgiven,
their broken bodies mourned over, but our own are rarely spoken
of except in political speeches when we "honor" the dead and
encourage the living young to follow their example and be glori-
ously dead also
NOTE: Almost all religious training, in all our countries, dedi-
cates itself to preparing the people for war. Catholic, chaplains
rage against "peaceniks," forgetting Christ's title in the Church is
Prince of Peace; Baptists shout of the ungodly and the necessity
of ritual holy wars while preaching of the Ten Commandments
each Sunday; Mohammedans, Shintoists look forward to days of
bloody retribution while Jews march across the sands of Palestine
deserts, Rabbis urging them on. . . .
THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING
Will expose our children, our homes to murder and devastation
on the chance that we can murder or devastate FIRST and thus
gain honor. No scientist is respected whose inventions help man-
kind, for its own sake, but only when those discoveries also help
to destroy, or to heal soldiers, that they may destroy other men
and living things
Be aware that
Destiny has caught us up, our choices made subtly over the ages
have spun a web about us: it is unlikely we will escape, having
geared everything in our societies toward war and combat. It is
probably too late for us to survive in anything like our present
form.
THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING
If you build us monuments let them all say that, as warning, as a
poison label on a bottle, that you may not ever repeat our follies,
feel our griefs.
___________________
K E I T H W I L S O N
Keith was born in Clovis, New Mexico in 1927 and spent most of his life
in the southwest Rocky Mountains. He began his adult life as a career navy officer
and moved into a world and life of poetry, as a professor at New Mexico State University
and publishing more than twenty volumes of poetry over forty years. The poem above
has been drawn from his masterpiece Graves Registry.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Monday, November 23, 2015
THOMAS MCGRATH ~
L O N G I N G
In these days,
When the winds wear no wedding rings,
Everything seems to be going away:
My sweet son filling his sails at a distant college,
My springtime friends on trail to the ultimate West,
And, even in central summer,
I feel the days shortening,
The stealthy lengthening of the night.
And so, in the imperial extension of the dark,
Against which, all my life, I opposed my body,
I long to pass from this anguish of passings
Into the calm of an indifferent joy . . .
To enter October's frail canoe and drift down
Down with the bright leaves among the raucous wildfowl
On the narrowing autumn rivers where, in those longer nights,
Secretly, in the shallows or on reedy shorelines,
Ice is already forming.
__________________________
T H O M A S M C G R A TH
drawn from William Kitteridge's Western Anthology, a beauty
Thomas McGrath was born in 1916. He was workingclass,
a poet of the Western vernacular and landscape, a college
professor, a novelist, a political activist, an activist. In the last
years of his life he wrote some of his finest poetry ever. In this
present age skittish of socialists, McGrath was a co-founder long ago of the Ramshackle Socialist Victory Party. They sugarcoated nothing.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
RENE CHAR ~
Gala & René Char
(1935)
TO M.H.
11 September, 1966
Back and forth goes Autumn, swifter than the gardener's rake.
Autumn does not overwhelm the heart, which needs the
branch and the branch's shadow.
translated by Mark Hutchinson
Seagull Books, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
SOUTH COAST ~
R O B I N S O N J E F F E R S S T O N E W O R K I N G
T O R H O U S E 1930s
Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind
Unhappy country, what wings you have! Even here,
Nothing important to protect, and ocean-far from the nearest
enemy, what a cloud
Of bombers amazes the coast mountain, what a hornet-swarm
of fighters,
And day and night the guns practicing.
Unhappy, eagle wings and beak, chicken brain.
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible
magnificence of the means,
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and
shabby
Pathos of the result.
__________________
R O B I N S O N J E F F E R S
Although born in Pittsburgh on January 10, 1887, Robinson Jeffers was really born, raised, lived, worked, died and endured on his rocky Pacific coast sanctuary of Carmel, California. You can go there today and still feel his poetry. Go find his books. Yes, make a bookstore order them.
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