SWITCHBOARD GIRL ~ Lorine Niedecker

Lorine and Henry Niedecker

SWITCHBOARD GIRL

I divined this comedy, Dante, before I went in. But I had to have a job. "Like one who has imperfect vision, we the things which are remote from us." O brother, we saw tho the eyes were shot. We had light if not love. We had business.

Nystagmus ("The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling"), the searching movement, combined with 80% vision. You'll have to use a magnifying glass, we can't give you glasses to reach print. Good-bye to proof reading. Good-bye to a living. No! That low, rangy, glass-walled office and plant in the Frank Lloyd Wright setting, clean-mowed acres, tulips, petunias, evergreens—I would apply there. Not literature but light fixtures and pressure cookers. Out of daylight into Wade Light.

I was the September dandelion—forty, female—seeking a place among the young fluorescent petunias. I keep cropping up in the world's backyards while here in America, on all sides they shear civilization back to the seventeen-year-old girl, not yet young shall we say.

I entered the window-walled office of personnel. Or was it a corner of a little theatre? What would the director be like? A properly placed man may expand his influence over the whole of your sight. We met ideally, as strangers do, without prejudice, without violence . . . courteous before the guessed-at depth. All art between us. Will he help me? He is not usual. He moves as in a dance to be considerate. As if to speak, against the room's outdoor backdrop, of Renoir? Of Einstein? Is he the master economist with a sense of the relative value of things? The artist with a sense of needing fewer things? The political observer with a knowledge of electronics? What does he know really, sweetly, by touch?

He said, "You read."

Beethoven: "It is impossible to say to people, "I am deaf." But I said it: I have an eye handicap.

"I wonder if you should . . . we have a switchboard opening. You might try it."

I went in. Lights, polished glass, blond satin finished desks, glossy haired and bald-headed efficiency. Shine. Lamps to be produced. Lamps to be sold. The antique sweatshop base with a new shine. You'll never have to polish this brass, a lacquering process, won't tarnish. This is the lust that will never rust.

The shade by the door, the grey parchment face, cracked in a half smile. Shall I appear alive or let myself be carried along? I suppose man is, the most sensitive physical part of him, an electrical apparatus, switches, wires, etc. . . .How much do I give to Wade lamps? It takes 1028 human bodies to build a star. Purely business.

The girl at the switchboard shouted, "Come in—if you can—it's my birthday, you know. Once a year and at Christmas this happens—nylons, table lamps, candy, help yourself. The bosses, the old honeypots, must like me a little bit, anyhow. Sit down. Let me tell you what goes. They're all good enough guys, family men, church, golf, they're after the business, they'll lay on you, of course."

You see in a place of this kind, she said, the switchboard girl is one of their outlets. They do a great deal of their sweating thru you. You'll make the contact and in haste, also they relax thru you. You're a part of it when their bags are full and you jazz 'em when they're down.

"Get me the Howard Hotel, a single."

"Good, I like to sleep close."

That was Mendau, the burnt-out fuse in the beautiful suit who still thinks he's got something to sell.

"Give me Philadelphia." Give me Europe. I'm waiting, operator, for the Paris pick-up. I'm on wartime Montparnasse, gas mask, phosphorescent heels, illuminated brooch. "What's that?" What does it look like? There they call it what it is.

The Japs: We had neither hens nor eggs. We went requisitioning. A miserable village. On the way back we began to look for Chinese girls.

They don't make 'em as sensitive as geiger counters.

"Goddamit what the hell happened to that call to Lethal Steel? Sleeping at the switchboard?"

"I reported to you, sir, that Dan Blaine will talk."

"Christ if you can't get anybody but Dead-End Daniel—"

"What was the name they wanted?" Somebody by the name of Christ.

Please pass the blood. Human materiel is obsolescing.

As for the work itself, she plays an intricate chess. You gamble with the red and the white and the green, without benefit of spa.

I lost. "No natural aptitude."

Dante? Yes, go ahead.

        END

__________________

from ND 13
New Directions in Prose & Poetry
edited by James Laughlin
1951

Lorine Niedecker

http://www.lorineniedecker.org/


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lorine-niedecker

SUNDAY DAWN ~

Mavis Staples

SPACE CLOTHES ~

Wooden Shjips

(pronounced "Ships" ~ San Francisco)

Erik "Ripley" Johnson
Dusty Jermier
Nash Whalen
Omar Ahsanuddin

selections compiled by bob arnold from the albums below

ALBUMS

____________

    (2007) Wooden Shjips (Holy Mountain)
    (2008) Vol. 1 (compilation of hard-to-find singles) (Holy Mountain)
    (2009) Dos (Holy Mountain)
    (2010) Vol. 2 (compilation of hard-to-find singles) (Holy Mountain)
    (2011) West (Thrill Jockey)
    (2013) Back to Land (Thrill Jockey)

ANNOUNCING BOB ARNOLD'S "STONE HUT" ~

Stone Hut is the revised and much expanded edition of Bob Arnold’s book On Stone — with twelve additional chapters added since the first book was published in 1988, including commentary about her reading of On Stone by homesteader Helen Nearing. The original photographs are here, now in color, plus a virtual photo album of job sites and stone structures built by Bob Arnold over forty years. It also remains a family book, with the birth of a granddaughter, furthering the telling.

Stone Hut

NEW & EXPANDED  25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Doubled in size from its original edition published by Origin Press in 1988

Expanded chapters on stone work by Bob Arnold

With its original introduction by Cid Corman

160 photographs all in color

Limited to 100 copies in this first edition


$25
plus $3.95 s/h to U.S. addresses
  

Order now with Paypal, US orders postpaid & International (with shipping)

Choose US order or International order

US Orders, $18.95 USD    International postpaid, via air $39.95 USD

 


Longhouse Publishers & Booksellers
PO Box 2454
 West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303

POSTCARD 18 ~

"Silver Stairs is the name of a fairytale falls which graces
the mountainside with liquid lace between Essex and Summit
on Montana U.S. 2 just south of Glacier National Park.
The "stairs" are tiers of black granite, and the water
tumbling down them is a springtime phenomenon, a
highwater treat for early season visitors."
photograph by Gene Bachteler

DEER SEASON ~

Deer Season




If I am a deer
No one will find me


I’m gone —


There are still places
No one man has been
 

I would turn the color of oak leaves
When I move into sunlight I am sunlight

 
As always I will hear the voices of
Hunters breaking through the woodlot

 
They sound lost
Look disfigured

 
I can standstill for as long as 
It takes for them to walk by

 
I’m invisible —

 
The deepness 
Of lakes




____________________

Bob Arnold

photo : peter miller

CHIMES ~

Bob stenciling stone sun room floor

November 2013

  thanksgiving

 photo © susan arnold

ADELE ~

Having a father that ditched her mother, and Adele at age 2 (b. 1988), in U.K., much like Quentin Tarantino's beginnings (and neither have forgiven their fathers) there are millions of girls and young women and fellows who strut around with the songs, conduct, and images of these two jungling and comforting their minds. Adele has terrific range, self-taught by studying from The Spice Girls and Pink to Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, she is also a graduate, as was Amy Winehouse, from The BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology. This multi-platnium singer owns her place. Wait until her auto-didactic self discovers Nina Simone and Patsy Cline.







selections compiled by bob arnold from the albums below




ALBUMS

____________


 19 (2008)
 21 (2011)

KRISTA FEAKES ~

artist : Caleb Feakes

To Where I Walk

Memory, alone, warming
your shirt, white wind
through like pine, old snow
falling through split rails.





No Stoplights in This County

I grew up in a creaking house,
knew roads by their river names,

winter camped on the Cranberry
and the Little Flagg, they all led to Lake,

and married a man with a .45
and a trunk

full of rods.  Driftwood up from snow
lit itself.  The night wind held

to let ash rise straight from the heat
of wet popple sticks,

set space to see
the canine stomp,

wolves between trees
in an arc for us.

I'm nodding rod.

He's pacing the .45,

says it might be better
to take the frozen bay next turn.

This year I augured a place for him,
set him down

in these ashes.
Kneeling, and snow falling

as iced-over lilacs.

Though not the one I fished from.





Port Wing, Lake Superior

Wood floret, sour oak, turn of the screw set
in heart downed for board foot,
bar oil thinning

in blue smoke, our arms crossing our faces
from each air further into the lungs
as chain slips then slows into the lemon grain.

Hung-maple under ship bell wick
minnowing the light to fish sheller sulk,
trees tied under the height

of cap gill bower, four arms pushing north at the trunk
leaning south from the light row.  Straight
cut and a bevel follow,

blade slowed the day to all night,
to all mayflies
flawing the light

to all night in the black lines of the butterfly
on late Archean stones, to sacrifice, to husk
of the dead notch, to edge

of the blocked clouds
leaving the forest,
to heeled blade bound inside the trees toward otherwise,

to our four arms covered in a graceful silt,
to a beam we've based to till the sky into a kettle
of hepatica, opening to us sending up the red oak,
   
baby is a kicking in the bark, my body hulling out
in trees downing to a calyx at the root,
chain set to loosing wood stars from the lowest circling walls,

to take them home to Port Wing,
where May waves carried yellow tinder
from our clothes.  Lake, you let him hold me there

and this baby in my body grown, you bend us three
into a treble hook, caught in the white and tressing grass
and rising into clouds.






The Barrens

Apple tree, May, my son, a monarch wing-torn
color in the river, a robin under the feeder

is your soul again.  Hay clung to your lace
from the ploughman's thrash, it holds a straw

marked and burned to time the living.
The rubble stack rusts letters
from a cast iron door

as the barrens force the owl sounds
into clearings.

Apple tree, May, my son, a monarch wing-torn
color in the river.

A robin under the feeder is your soul again.

Stars like black shapes

of a song you hum,

nearby, a doe arcs her fawn.






North of 29

A little ditch vased now, bergamot,
gayfeather, with a few from the bed,
quick lift and a look under

the boat tarp, home and washing out
our shirts with the sleeves still up,
children on the floor

seeing how far a coin can roll.
Someone at the door?
Spiders backing further

into soffit,
red pine rising out the eaves
to point toward

water falling off.
Strangers on our porch
waiting it out.

You're telling a story
of your mother
and the long green path

she made on Madeline each year,
taking low-ground berries from the bay.

They talk of moving here someday.





Pestle

Ran the groundstone
blade, trimmed

the cylinder star-tip

from the stick. 
Said the weight
is best measured

by the thin slice.
Nutmeg,
fennel,
too much garlic,
find another butcher.

A book with the matter
unbound,

splayed like a 52 against
the table.  Said the old

man,
made it from

spices,
scent-measured handfuls

from bare silver cans.

Now running along
the outer rings of an old tin,

rubbed sage burred upward
to the hollow,

how much, Father,
do I lift?






Kakagon

As I low down across the schist
and iron ore caught in potential quarry
saw a spirit in a cut of water flowing out

from stones I didn't know, its breath
coming from the rock
through bluejoint fish and watershed
from a mineral trench water-scratched
like a running face I didn't know.

It perched upon an oystered stick,
a birch and visible weapon bent
by shovel hound, attendant to subaltern work,
balanced on that tree, saying,

So... do you think
I'm a good one or a bad one?
From above that cliff or below?

And low I dreamed
that if I slept
within an unmade pit of metallic height
uprising against a drilling heat,
I'd rest my head onto the marsh,

and the rice would flame like prayer wicks,
and all the mineral
that makes this spirit small,
less than a watered pulpwood lace
of child's scissor snow.

I'd walk the bottom of the mine,
still trapped beneath
Penokee quake, mumbling
like an idling stall,

How deep will you go to find me?





Child

To where I walk now you are
holding a stone

beneath the surface of the water
the row moving over it

and under it, the light
your mirrors and ceilings

not divided by so many shadows.
I wanted the water to answer me.

I took its handfuls of sand
from under its waves

to hold something.
What moved in the masts living
is still alive,

seeds passed through the water

are still alive.
That baby out of me
is still, in the tide, they say

heavenward,
a lake suddenly lupine,

gone through a water,

the weight of a child
moved
from one bed
to another.






To Siskiwit

Snow fluted along a County C,
like everywhere I went was with me,

the sky a sound missed in a see,
I tried to look into a snow

lost quickly to my heat.
Where fishline burned into a knot

to place a heart to snow collecting,
I stand you, sand on basalt,

water sticks, white clingstone drops
into the lake whitecapping

from cresting boughs
over brownstone cliffs, a quiet

snow strung branch harp falling
into a fragile water lift.

Snow is here like someone,
like someone turned each shape of it.






Midge Tempi

Love, but never beyond revision,
the sun need only save the phenomenal,
spinning the cloudless flakes    
like dust through the salt-made light

rosined by a church window
where you think of gnats slightly touching water
under the leaves are seeming to repeat themselves
among the cloudless snow

like once
a love sagacious,
atomically scattered, or else kept
silent, a harmed air sent rising in the cold clear is

stopped.  We wake, to a shared haze
we wake.  Your body wakes elsewhere,
wakes by conditions counterfactual,
sends in each our bodies a slow white limb

of clouds, to a world were it other,
a place you or slightly
kept where two wings are or were
hovering the pond,

this world will end when snowballs reach the sun.



_________________________________________

from To Where I Walk
© 2013 Krista Feakes

Longhouse
Publishers & Booksellers
Green River, Vermont

cover art by Caleb Feakes

To Where I Walk

Unsigned $7.95 USD    Signed $12.00 USD

IN BED W/ BOOKER "BUKKA" WHITE ~

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/26/john-fahey-blues-folk-guitar-pioneer

POSTCARD 17 ~

"Sonny Boy" Williamson grave
Tutwiler, Mississippi
photograph by Tom Rankin, 1994

AT HOME WITH HARRISON ~

THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSITY ~

Roberto Bolano

Ernesto Cardenal and I


I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered

to my face

and then I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching

from the opposite direction

and by way of greeting I said:

Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven

that is communism,

is there a place for homosexuals?

Yes, he said.

And for impenitent masturbators?

For sex slaves?

For sex fools?

For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed

with enemas,

for those who can't take it anymore, those who really truly

can't take it anymore?

And Cardenal said yes.

And I rasied my eyes

and the clouds looked like

the pale pink smiles of cats

and the trees cross-stitched on the hill

(the hill we've got to climb)

shook their branches.

Savage trees, as if saying

some day, sooner rather than later, you'll have to come

into my rubbery arms, into my scraggly arms,

into my cold arms. A botanical frigidity

that'll stand your hair on end.




_______________________

Roberto Bolano
The Unknown University
translated by Laura Healy
New Directions, 2013

Ernesto Cardenal

LADY LAMB THE BEEKEEPER ~

Discography

_____________________

    2007: The Tingly Circus
    2008: Someday We Will Levitate
    2008: Samples for Handsome Animals
    2009: The World Tour EP
    2010: Mammoth Swoon
    2012: head is swimming (bedroom recordings)
    2012: Fall 2012 Tour
    2013: Ripely Pine

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper
(Brunswick, Maine ~ now Brooklyn, NY)

AT HOME WITH KESEY ~

WOODSHED ~

In the wood nest

Vermont

photo © bob arnold

POSTCARD 16 ~

Robert Johnson's grave marker, Mt. Zion Baptist Church
Morgan City, Mississippi
photograph Tom Rankin, 1993

http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/biography

WHAT ALL BOOK LOVERS KNOW ~

“Text is now a verb,” E.L. Doctrow said. “More radically, a search engine is not an engine. A platform is not a platform. A bookmark is not a bookmark because an e-book is not a book.”

“Reading a book is the essence of interactivity,” he added, “bringing sentences to life in the mind.” 

IPPEKIRO ~

Kamiuma 
(February 1942 ~ March 1944)





Forsythia blooming

sun shining

the mind of the ancient







Things are refreshingly cool

a chicken

and his face









A cicada hole

around there

the fragrant color of earth








So full of

white clouds

I catch a grasshopper









I have potatoes to eat

I see a bamboo grove

from where I sit








I long for my home

my home

ice on a harvested field









It's May

the sun and a grove of young pines

are leaning









It's midwinter

there are many mountains

there is one lake









A summer-like mind

this placid water

reminds me of my home country









Living in a field

I bury the fire

deep in a brazier









I talk with a child

who hasn't caught

a single cicada yet








Pee-cho pee-cho

sings a bird

blue mountain comes near










        . . . . remembering Basho


A vast grassland

Basho comes all alone

after a wintry blast 









I look upon the surface

of one stone

spring light in a bamboo grove











By the fireside tonight

I think of ocean tide ebbing

on a moonlit night











Burning the fallen leaves

I feel infinitude

behind me










A rooster and I

walk

over the frozen earth











I shall respond

to the mountain form shone

by the winter sun












My ears being frost-bitten

the sky is vast

these days













Being with the bare trees

I sleep at night

facing this direction

Ippekiro Nakatsuka (1887 ~ 1946)
____________________________

from Cape Jasmine and Pomegranates
(the free-meter haiku of Ippekiro)
translated by Soichi Furuta
Mushinsha / Grossman 1974



http://www.big.or.jp/~loupe/links/ehisto/eippekiro.shtml