GENERAL ORDER NO. 9 ~

Robert E. Lee

Confederate General Robert E. Lee issued his Farewell Address, also known as General Order No. 9 to his Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865, the day after he surrendered the army to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Lee's surrender was instrumental in bringing about the end of the American Civil War.

Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, 10th April 1865.

General Order
No. 9

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.
I need not tell the survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them.
But feeling that valour and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I have determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.
By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a merciful God will extend to you his blessing and protection.
With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

— R. E. Lee, General, General Order No. 9

http://www.generalordersno9.com/

http://www.filmthreat.com/interviews/39660/

DESCENT ~

John Haines
Descent
CavanKerry Press
Fort Lee, New Jersey

After the book dealers scarfed a book sale, pushed into their boogie corners with their stashes, counting and mounting their hardware, the scanner-monkeys with their hand scanners and adding up the treasures, I found this book left behind on one of the tables. It was inscribed to Scott Walker, John Haines publisher once upon a time at Graywolf Press. It was then fully signed by the author on the full title page. It was a fine and dandy presentation copy.  We were all in a high vaulted gymnasium on a Friday morning, plastic sheeting covering the hardwood floor. I had read everything by Haines, or so I thought. Somehow I had missed this book from late in the poet's life. Essays. Some reviews. A few endearing memoirs.

 It was a lucky day.

[ BA ]

 

POSTCARD 41 ~

"Lunch Break"

Basil Rathborne, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre,

Vincent Price,

Hollywood 1962

photograph by Allan Grant

GERARD BELLAART ~

once in vermont films © bob arnold

ANDREW SCHELLING ~

For the Birdhouse dozen readers or so — and you know who you are — let's not beat around the bush: this is the book you want to read, want to own and want to do what I am doing: promote it. The essays are mainly western USA based, with one long adventurous foray away from the west and into Sweden and the Nobel Prize for the author's father, and the author is family oriented in just the right way for the essay — of the father — to be the last word. There are other fathers, wisdom fathers, in this fine shaped book from deep forest seekers and inhabitants, to Jaime de Angulo, east India mystics, poets and similar seekers, other poets, and even a time out to discuss awhile baseball. Babe Ruth was a poet, and if you don't think so, then his name was poetry. 
Please read the back cover blurbs shown above, they mean well.

MICHAEL HETTICH ~

The Measured Breathing



And so I understand, at least for a moment,
how something and nothing can sometimes be reversed,
as I understand nothing: The black in a crow's wing
works like my deepest sleep when I wake
beyond mere self, that black like the waves
lifting their shoulders in a sudden swell of memory
or just a sudden swell. If everything we needed
were real, those delicate yellow-bellied birds
might fly through this thicket without brushing anything
and I might come home to a house full of absence
and meet all the people I've loved, sitting there
in the bodies they had then, but stuffed now with straw,
propped up and grinning. As my body too
is stuffed with dry grass, which pokes through my clothes.
I was hungry and you fed me — just enough to survive
until I was only what I am now, disappeared
into the music behind all this sound,
as the trees are connected to the trees of their past
through roots and branches and leaves — without thinking
anything we'd ever recognize as thinking,
anything we'd recognize: a place beyond this air.

Michael Hettich

Systems of Vanishing

University of Tampa Press

2014

for more Michael Hettich at Longhouse

please go here ~

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search/label/Michael%20Hettich

DRAGONFLY ~

Back Road Chalkies

photo © bob arnold

PATRIZIA CAVALLI ~

Two hours ago I fell in love

and trembled, one tremble still,

and haven't a clue whom I should tell.

(translated by Mark Strand)







Don't count on my imagination, no,

don't count on that, I won't preserve you,

won't put you on the shelf till winter,

I'll open you now and swallow you whole. 

(trans. Geoffrey Brock)








Just hearing a verb

that sounds true to me

I feel my blood spurting

towards salvation. Like coming home

and finding the merciful fresh sheet.

(trans. David Shapro & Gini Alhadeff)







Oh really, she's with somebody?

So she's with somebody.

Is she really with somebody?

I guess she's with somebody.

So she is actually with somebody?

Well then, she is, she's with somebody,

so you're saying she's with somebody?

Okay, then, she's with somebody.

(trans. Mark Strand & Gini Alhadeff)







Here I am, I do my bit,

though I don't know what that may be.

If I did I could at least let go of it

and free of it be free of being me.

(trans. Gini Alhadeff)







Lame pigeon. Ridiculous

lame crooked pigeon.

When they have defects animals

suddenly resemble humans.

(trans. Gini Alhadeff)







How sweet it was yesterday imagining I was a tree!

I had almost rooted in one place

and grew in sovereign slowness there.

I took the breeze and the north wind,

caresses, blows — what difference did it make?

I was neither joy nor torment to myself,

I couldn't detach myself from my own center,

no decisions, no movement:

if I moved it was because of the wind.

(trans. Jonathan Galassi)







It's all so simple, yes, it was so simple,

it is so clear I almost can't believe it.

Here's what the body is for: you touch me or you don't touch me,

you hold me or send me away. The rest is for lunatics.

(trans. Gini Alhadeff)

Cavalli was born 1947 in Todi Umbria and resides today in Rome. 
She has published six collections of poems. 


______________________

Patrizia Cavalli
My Poems Won't Change the World
(Farrar 2013)

DAN SNOW ~

Dan Snow is a New England builder of stone walls and stone structures, also well known in the British Isles where he has practiced his trade.

This is the second of his two books on the trade, lush with landscape photographs from job sites, and both books are mandatory reading for the stone crazed one, builder of anything, seeker of the improved spot on earth.

ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION 2014 ~

It wasn't going anywhere until Cat Stevens showed up and sounded like he had never left. The sincerity he spoke of his mother, and then his father, was quite moving in the supposed hotbed of sex drugs and youknowwhat. Then there was too much Springsteen, but a deserving nod to his spirited E Street Band. Finally, we got to a beat-up and perfect tribute to Nirvana, with its rainshadowy songs sung by a crew of women musicians from Joan Jett (right on the money) to a stage flopping Kim Gordon in a great dress & shiny boots, oz-haired Annie Clark, and closing with pink suited New Zealander, Lorde.

 That made me look toward Monday.

annie clark

JIM RINGER ~

Jim Ringer

Go out any where now, I dare you — cityscape, small town, village, pathway, dirt road byway, alley, bike path, motorboat, jet ski, swimming wharf, canoe, park bench, work field, train car, train rail, train yard, foyer, hallway, elevator, stairway, windowsill, schoolyard, parking lot, driveway, grass levee, and you're likely to see, now or one day soon, the people and presence of everything said and sung in this song.

 I can't imagine anyone singing this song as well as Jim Ringer.

Born 29 February 1936, Yell County, Arkansas, USA, d. 17 March 1992, California, USA. In the mid-40s Ringer’s family fled the poverty-wracked Ozarks in hope of a better life elsewhere. After a brief stay in Oklahoma, the family settled in Clovis, California. From his parents, Ringer learned folk songs and traditional music. By this time he could play guitar and he also sang. In his teenage years Ringer drifted, got into trouble with the law, and later married, had two children and then separated from his wife. He played and sang folk and bluegrass, working in bars around Berkeley and Fresno and he also toured for a period with an ad hoc folk band. He then settled into a job at Sweet’s Mill, a folk music camp near Fresno, California, where he was with Kenny Hall And The Sweet’s Mill String Band. This was in the early 70s, which is when he also made his recording debut with both Hall’s band and under his own name. Also at this time, he signed with Philo Records and met singer-guitarist-songwriter Mary McCaslin. From the mid-70s, Ringer and McCaslin worked together, she was also a Philo recording artist, and they married in 1978.

Among songs Ringer composed are ‘Waitin’ For The Hard Times To Go’, which has been recorded by the Nashville Bluegrass Band, ‘Open Door At Home’, ‘Good To Get Home’, ‘Rachel’, ‘Tramps And Hawkers’, the latter recorded by Tom Russell, ‘The Band Of Jesse James’, ‘Dusty Desert Wind’, ‘Tulsa’, ‘Linda’s On Her Own’, ‘Still Got That Look’, ‘Any Old Wind’ and ‘Rank Stranger’. In the early 80s, Ringer switched labels but although his first release for Flying Fish Records gained cult status his career was undergoing a difficult time. So too was his marriage and by the end of the decade he and McCaslin had separated. Ringer’s health was poor and he had a serious problem with alcohol. After the divorce, he returned to Fresno, apparently making no more appearances during the last few years of his life, although he did compose at least one song during this period, ‘If I Don’t Miss You’, which McCaslin would later record.

The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin

BOBBY BYRD ~

You don't go wrong with Bobby Byrd

Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary

Bobby Byrd

Cinco Puntos Press, 2014

701 Texas Avenue

El Paso, Texas

79901




EDITOR


On page 84 of Bobby Byrd's new book of poems

Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary
 
I notice while reading a poem

about George Bush that Bobby

spells the name of Katharine Hepburn

as "Kathyrn Hepburn" —

he does it not once, but twice

I say to myself, "Now what's going on here?"

I'm sure but I google anyway because I can

and sure enough I'm right and Bobby is wrong

but I don't plan to say a word to him

or else he'll think I think his book is wrong

and all this book is is right


[ BA ]

ANIMALS 3 ~

florida panther

LANDSCAPE & LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND ~

Land Lines

 an illustrated journey through the 

landscape and literature of Scotland

photographs by Marius Alexander and Paul Basu

Edinburgh University Press, 2001

OLAV H. HAUGE ~

The Everyday




The great storms

are behind you now.

Back then you never asked

why you were or

where you came from, where you were going,

you were simply a part of the storm,

the fire.

But it's possible to live

in the everyday as well,

the quiet gray day,

to plant potatoes, rake leaves,

or haul brush.

There's so much to think about here in this world,

one life's not enough.

After work you can roast pork

and read Chinese poetry.

Old Laertes cleared brambles

and hoed around his fig trees,

and let the heroes battle it out at Troy.








Erratic Boulder




What an extraordinary place

to settle on,

on a ledge, poised

on the brink.

Don't you value your own success?







Let Me Be Like the Dung Beetle




Sorrow has settled over me

and weighs me down in a warm straw bed.

Let me at least move,

test my strength, lift this slab of sod —

let me be like the dung beetle

in spring when it digs itself out from the dung heap.







Poem




If you can make a poem

a farmer finds useful,

you should be happy.

A blacksmith you can never figure out.

The worst to please is a carpenter.







This Is the Dream




This is the dream we carry through the world

that something fantastic will happen

that it has to happen

that time will open by itself

that doors shall open by themselves

that the heart will find itself open

that mountain springs will jump up

that the dream will open by itself

that we one early morning

will slip into a harbor

that we have never known.

[RB]







Not By Car, Not By Plane 




Not by car,

not by plane —

by neither haysled

nor rickety cart

— or even by Elijah's chariot!

You'll never get farther than Basho.

He got there by foot.







Animal Grave




Just a hollow

in the ground now,

sunk down,

stones have covered it over,

earth and leaves

have filled it

in.

You pause a moment,

it's hardly

worth noticing,

a deer hoof

would barely

trip over it

— not now. 







Mountains Don't Attract Me Anymore




The mountains don't attract me anymore.

I've lived long enough between cold snowfields.

I will find my way in the woods, listen

to fall wind, and stop at the frozen ponds,

engage with streams. Even late in the year

you can find good berries there.

You have to cross mountains if that's not enough.

Peaks stand there, so you know where you are.


[RB] 







How Long Did You Sleep?




Dare you do this —

open your eyes

and look around?

Yes, you're here

here in this world,

you're not dreaming,

it's just as

you see it, things here

are like this.

Like this?

Yes, just like this,

not otherwise.

How long did you sleep?







I Pass the Arctic Circle




A man on the train points out the cairn on the mountain.

We're passing the Arctic Circle, he says.

At first we don't see any difference,

to the north the land looks the same,

but we know where we're headed.

I wouldn't have noticed this little event

if I hadn't, one of these days, passed seventy.





______________________________

 OLAV H. HAUGE
(Norway 1904~1994)

The Dream We Carry

selected and Last Poems
translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin
Copper Canyon Press 2008


All translations above by Robert Hedin except where noted "RB" [Robert Bly]


 

 

NEW ! MALCOLM RITCHIE ~

Malcolm Ritchie

small lines on the great earth


Longhouse 2014

ISBN 978-1-929048-21-2

112 pages

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AH, GOOD OL' VERMONT ~

longhouse : land of poetry

POSTCARD 40 ~

Buffalo Bill Cody

1846-1917

Hunter, scout, Indian fighter, showman; 

Buffalo Bill romanticized the West in his Wild West Show

that toured through Eastern U.S. and Europe. This photo

of the colorful character was taken in

El Paso in 1915 by the Feldman Studio.

SO YOU THINK YOU HAD A BAD DAY ~

JOHN ALL
Mountain climber, scientist



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/24/injured-climber-films-life-or-death-climb-out-of-nepal-crevasse