LARRY EIGNER CHALKIE ~

Back Road Chalkie
L A R R Y   E I G N E R

photo: bob arnold
april 2015

FRANCIS PONGE ~

translated by Lee Fahnestock

"Born in 1899, Francis Ponge studied both law and philosophy before taking up a variety of editorial and teaching jobs. Le parti pris des choses, published by Gallimard in 1942, caught the attention of writers and artists. Wide recognition came in the sixties when Gallimard published several large collections of his poetry and essays. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects with playful neologisms and his own phenome- nological ballet. He described his poetry as "a description-definition-literary artwork" that avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry. He died in 1989. Lee Fahnestock is a translator and critic. Long an admirer of Ponge, she has published translations of Vegetation, The Nature of Things, and The Making of Pre. Her translation, with Norman MacAfee, of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and her translations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s letters to Simone de Beauvoir have been widely celebrated."

SPRING LETTER ~

SPRING LETTER FROM HOME


                                                                  for Sam


Sweetheart and I are both down with very bad colds, or maybe it's the flu? It’s been years since we’ve experienced this sort of wrangle, and after a tough winter. Not fair! Have to laugh.

I can hear the goldfinch calling out in the rain as I type. Most of the snow is gone except for the snow that always lasts until May 1st at the back door. A big pile there. I checked yesterday.

I tore down the old duck shed/tool shed I built 35 years ago of salvaged lumber — pine boards and even the oak floor joists I yanked out of this main house when I renovated in 1977. The joists were heavy gang plank mothers, worked perfectly in the old shed for the roof. Lasted. This time around I slid them out and bucked them up for firewood and now they heat the very room where I once pulled them from. You can go home again.

I salvaged 3/4 of the old lumber and have now built a tool room extension to the studio building. It sort of looks like Thoreau’s hut with his woodshed addition. It will take the mowers (which you don’t like) and all other tools for landscape work. I got it framed up, raftered, purlined, and sheathed over the weekend. Just to put on the white cedar wall shingles and evergreen steel roof. Let all future snowfalls slide off.

I’ll also put a blue steel roof on the stone hut in May. It will turn 30, with Carson.



© Bob Arnold
Spring 2015

 

DRUM ~

DRUM



 
Early morning climb to the roof
 
Cold dew on pebbled tar, taste of
 
The galvanized nails in your mouth
 
Work — nail shingle to shingle tight —
 
Each hammer pound echoes another
 
Pound in the hills, enough to wonder
 
Where it ends and who hears it then


 ____________________


© Bob Arnold 

from Where Rivers Meet
Mad River Press 1990 

 

ANYWHERE YOU LOOK ~

Anywhere You Look




in the corner of a high rain gutter

under the roof tiles

new grasses' delicate seed heads



what war, they say




_________________________

Jane Hirshfield
THE BEAUTY

Knopf 2015

JOAN COLOM ~ THE STREET ~

Joan Colom

I Work the Street

photographs 1957-2010

Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalunya

2014

Joan Colom at work

http://emirco.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-joan-colom.html

ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS ~

Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner 

& the American West

http://www.davidgessner.com/

EDUARDO GALEANO ~

Eduardo Hughes Galeano, writer

3 September 1940 ~ 13 April 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/15/eduardo-galeano

CHARLES SIMIC, THE LUNATIC ~

THE HORSE



I awoke in the middle of the night to find

A horse standing quietly over my bed.

My friend, I'm so glad you're here, I said,

It's snowing and you must've been cold

And lonely in your stable down the road

With the farmer and his wife both dead.



I'll throw a blanket over you and check

If there is a lump of sugar in the kitchen,

Like the one I saw a man in a top hat

Slip to a mare in a circus, but I fear you might

Be gone when I get back, so I better stay

And keep you company here in the dark.



__________________



CHARLES SIMIC
The Lunatic
Ecco, 2015

"All writers have some secret about the way they work. Mine is that I write in bed."
CHARLES SIMIC

SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY ~

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/autobiography-of-a-corpse/

SAM HAMILL FROM THE CHINESE ~

Crossing the Yellow River




A little boat on the great river 

whose waves reach the end of the sky —



suddenly a great city, ten thousand

houses dividing sky from wave.



Between the towns there are

hemp and mulberry trees in the wilds.



Look back on the old country:

wide waters; clouds; and raising mist.



________________________



Wang Wei
translated by Sam Hamill 
Tiger Bark Press
2013

ELIZABETH BISHOP (Meets Colm Tóibín) ~

Princeton University Press 2015

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/eavan-boland-reviews-on-elizabeth-bishop-by-colm-t%C3%B3ib%C3%ADn-1.2146004

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCfT7ccPAP4

THE GREAT JUDITH MALINA ~

Judith Malina

 Ms. Malina was born in Kiel

 a port city in northern Germany

 June 4, 1926 ~ April 10, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/theater/judith-malina-founder-of-the-living-theater-dies-at-88.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

http://www.livingtheatre.org/

BLACK MIRROR (WHITE BEAR) ~

Who are you?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/button-pusher

THIS PLACE IN EVERY LIFE ~

THIS PLACE IN EVERY LIFE


 


A span of 20 feet —
 
Someone, but no
 
One’s around, once
 
Laid down these log
 
Poles and nailed the
 
Planks for what I balance
 
On and cross, and then
 
Turn and once again
 
Walk over, because I
 
Like the feeling, the
 
Mountain creek beneath
 
And leaves floating
 
The range of light
 
Now back across slowly
 
The last time
 
Finally into my direction

                                             

                                                                    for John Levy



___________________

© Bob Arnold



from Habitat
Pentagram, 1979



 

 

VALLEJO / MALANGA ~

Some Days A Fruitful, Cautious Longing
Comes Over Me



Some days a fruitful, cautious longing comes over me,
to love and kiss affection on both cheeks,
and from afar there comes to me,
demonstrative, a wish, a different wish of loving, strong,
the one who hates me, the one who tears up his role, the little boy,
the one who weeps for one who has been weeping,
king of wine, slave of water
the one who hides in his own wrath
the one who sweats, the one who passes by, the one who
shakes himself within my soul.
The pleasure to arrange a braid of hair
of one who walks to me, the soldier's hair;
one's light, the great; one's greatness to the boy.
I want to iron a handkerchief at one
for the one who cannot weep
and, when I'm sad or when good fortune pains me,
to patch up geniuses and children.

I want to help the good man be a little bad
and have an urge to sit
on the right of the left-handed, answer the dumb,
trying to be useful in what
I can, wanting very much
to wash the cripple's foot,
and help my one-eyed neighbor sleep.

Oh, this love of mine, this world-wide love,
interhuman, parochial, fulfilled!
It comes just right,
from the foundations, from the public groin,
and coming from afar it makes one want to kiss
the singer's scarf,
to kiss the one who suffers, in this roasting-pan,
the dumb, in his deaf cranial murmur, dauntless;
the one who gives me what I had forgotten in my breast,
on his Dante, on his Chaplin, on his shoulders.

To sum up, I should like,
when I am on the famous verge of violence,
or when my heart is brave, I should like
to help the one who smiles to laugh,
place a little bird square on the scruff of a villain's neck,
nurse the sick by provoking them,
buy to kill from the killer — a dreadful thing —
and be at peace within myself
in everything.


6 November 1937
César Vallejo



______________________

translated from the Spanish by Gerard Malanga


MALANGA CHASES VALLEJO
Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Three Rooms Press
www.threeroomspress.com

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Back in 1975 or so I edited and published a small booklet of Gerard's which I'm sure was one of these poems from this fine collection. As Aram Saroyan writes, "This in turn gives the young poet —in his twenties when he did this work—the courage of his convictions, the essential room to breathe."

BILLIE HOLIDAY by JOHN SZWED ~

 

Viking 2015

"When John Hammond first heard the Count Basie band, it was a revelation.

The Basie players were very different from Eastern jazz bands. Much of

their music was based on the blues, and they had a remarkable

singer in Jimmy Rushing, though Hammond thought the

vocals were secondary to the remarkable dance music they brought

with them from the Midwest. Their rhythm section had a lighter,

more even, and propulsion feel that was the envy of every band

that heard them (Benny Goodman, especially, favored the wing

they generated); the ensemble was strong and brassy;

they had the ability to create spontaneous arrangements based

on collective experience; and their use of riffs and call-and-response

was state of the art. It was music of urban sophistication that

still retained a feel for the blues."

John Szwed, Billie Holiday

The Musician and the Myth

ELFRIEDE JELINEK ~

FOUND OBJECT

THE PRESENT MOMENT ~

long ago Gary Snyder

The Earth's Wild Places

Your eyes, your mouth and hands,

the public highways.

Hands, like truck stops,

semis rumbling in the corners.

Eyes like the bank clerk's window

foreign exchange.

I love all the parts of your body

friends hug your suburbs

farmlands are given a nod

but I know the path

to your wilderness.

It's not that I like it best,

but we're almost always

alone there,

and it's scary but also calm.

_________________________

Gary Snyder

"This poem was lost for some years and then turned up again.

I don't remember any publishing history for it other than as a

fugitive broadside maybe in the seventies." GS

The Present Moment

Gary Snyder

Counterpoint 2015

psst — who in the world set "Gary Snyder" on the cover off-center?!

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400573636/at-84-poet-gary-snyder-lives-in-this-present-moment

BLAISE CENDRARS ~

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4388/the-art-of-fiction-no-38-blaise-cendrars