AFTER THE FALL ~

ANECDOTAGE ~

B R O A D S T O N E    B O O K S

http://broadstonebooks.com/Jonathan_Greene_Page.html

 

MAURICE SCULLY ~

Baint an Fheir


Poem: Plod. Poem: What's left of your bones.

There, see. Poem: 'Blunder follows blunder'

he wrote, (tapping the floor) beginning again to

take note, and grow up. Little incidents connect

to make a afbric where air meets in its heat cold

too to the lip tangible in its flow, woven through,

walled in. The verb: gathering. The verb: locate.

The verb: stop. Acumen, praise. White is the colour

of your true love's hair — Wood Angelica, Butterbur,

Purple Loosestrife — now. Yes. The verb: to see.

                 The verb: to know. This then.

                                      So. 

__________________________ 

Maurice Scully
Several Dances
Shearsman, UK, 2014

 


Even Maurice admits it's been years & years and it has been years & years since we have been in touch, but poet's have a secret weapon, are you listening? they have books no one wants to read that they can send as gifts, and they do, and we who receive many of these books must be thankful. Often they will be the best books you will read all year, and the worst. Be thankful. Someone is sharing. Sharing has disappeared if you haven't noticed. Sharing now means something on computer stupidity and that's not what I mean by sharing. Maurice has sent his most recent book from Shearsman, that fine fiddle of a press in the U.K. Maurice won't believe me, you won't believe me, but I had been recently wanting to read something new by Maurice. No doubt he read my mind. I opened his new book that he sent as a gift and came upon an opening word by Frank Samperi who really never did anything wrong with a poem. No failures.

Sunlight is

on things.

MULTITUDINOUS HEART ~

C A R L O S    D R U M M O N D    D E    A N D R A D E

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/books/review-multitudinous-heart-newly-translated-poetry-by-carlos-drummond-de-andrade.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Books&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&configSection=article&isLoggedIn=false&pgtype=article

M U L T I T U D I N O U S    H E A R T

It happened in Rio.

I was walking on the Avenida close to midnight.

Breasts were bouncing amid lights flashing countless stars.

The promise of the sea

and the jangle of streetcars

tempered the heat

that wafted in the wind

and the wind came from Minas Gerais.

My paralytic dreams the ennui of living

(life for me is the wish to die)

reduced me to a human barrel-organ remotely

in the shopping arcade of the Hotel Avenida sultry sultry

and since I knew no one, just the soft wind from Minas,

and didn't feel like drinking, I said: Let's end this.

But an excitement throbbed in the city its long buildings

cars with tops down zooming toward the sea

the sensuously roving heat

a thousand gifts of life for indifferent people,

and my heart beat violently, my useless eyes cried.

The sea was beating in my chest, no longer against the wharf.

The street ended, where did the trees go? the city is me

the city is me

I am the city

my love.

—————————————

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

MULTITUDINOUS HEART

Selected Poems

bilingual edition

translated by Richard Zenith 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015 

SPIKE DRIVER BLUES ~

http://www.mississippijohnhurtfoundation.org/?gclid=CIicqpzV-McCFYORHwodigEHmg

THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIENDS ~

Bill Kasper, known as the Birdman, digging through the piles of his eclectic inventory at Rainbow Music on First Avenue in the East Village in New York City   
 Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/nyregion/east-villages-birdman-abandoning-his-nest-of-cds-and-cassettes.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

nytimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/business/media/a-vinyl-lp-frenzy-brings-record-pressing-machines-back-to-life.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

JOHN WIENERS ~

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

THE OPEN PRAIRIE ~

MALAQUE ~

EDWARD THOMAS ~

E D W A R D    T H O M A S

Adlestrop

 
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

( Penguin Books )

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-thomas

KAFKA — THE BLUE OCTAVO NOTEBOOKS ~

Edited by Max Brod
Translated by Ernst Kaiser, Eithne Wilkins
Exact Change
Franz Kafka

(3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)

"The voices of the world becoming quieter and fewer."

young Franz Kafka

Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off your shoes,

yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling

garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your

nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that

hides beneath that, and then the core and the core and the core, then the

remainder and then the residue and then even the glimmer of the undying

fire. Only the fire itself us absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself

be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other.

 

FK,  Prague

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

Franz Kafka with his fiancee Felice Bauer 1917

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/different-kafka/

DEREK MAHON ~

Gipsies




for Nina Hutchinson


Once there was house and home

And books against the cold.

We are all gipsies now —

Pea-pickers, pickpockets,

Haters, procrastinators,

Wanderers in the salt dunes,

Tellers of strange fortunes,

Bathers in cold waters —

Sleeping, like John Clare,

With our feet to the pole star.






Canadian Pacific



From famine, pestilence and persecution

Those gaunt forefathers shipped abroad to find

Rough stone of heaven beyond the western ocean,

And staked their claim and pinned their faith.

Tonight their children whistle through the dark,

Frost chokes the windows. They will not have heard

The wild geese flying south over the lakes

While the lakes harden beyond grief and anger —

The eyes fanatical, rigid the soft necks,

The great wings sighting with a nameless hunger.







Recalling Aran



A dream of limestone in sea-light

Where gulls have placed their perfect prints.

Reflection in that final sky

Shames vision into simple sight —

Into pure sense, experience.

Four thousand miles away tonight,

Conceived beyond such innocence,

I clutch the memory still, and I

Have measured everything with it since.



———————————————

Derek Mahon
Night-Crossing
Oxford University Press 1968

The Paris Review: The Art of Poetry ~
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/732/the-art-of-poetry-no-82-derek-mahon

RALPH PEER ~

( Chicago Review Press, 2014 )

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/wayfaring-strangers-and-ralph-peer-and-the-making-of-popular-roots-music.html

MARIE LUIS KASCHNITZ ~

M A R I E   L U I S E   K A S C H N I T Z

Hiroshima

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Has taken vows, rings the bells in the cloister.

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Jumped into a noose and hanged himself.

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Has gone insane, fights apparitions

Made out of dust that come for him,

Hundreds of thousands every night.

None of all this is true.

Just the other day I saw him

In his front yard in the suburbs.

The hedges were low and the rosebushes dainty.

It takes time to raise an oblivious forest

For someone to hide in. Plain to see

The new, naked house, the young wife

Beside him in her flowered dress

The little girl holding her hand

The boy who was sitting across his back

Cracking a whip over his head.

He himself was easy to recognize

On all fours on his lawn, his face

A grimace of laughter, because the photographer stood

Outside the hedge, the eye of the world.

By Writing

By writing I wanted

To save my soul.

I tried to make poems

It did not work.

I tried to tell stories

It did not work.

You cannot write

To save your soul.

Given up, it drifts and does the singing. 

The White Ships

In our mathematical world

Who can still remember

Anything that decays

And anything that takes root?

White whitest white

Sooner or later we too

Will get our coats of oil-base paint

Then we'll stop getting older

We'll eat blancmange

The clocks will stay white

Except that the night

Drums up hordes of unknown stars. 

My Ground

I have staked out my ground

With frozen fishes

My path to freedom

Is marked by rustling corn husks

I raise ice ferns

On my windowpane

I breathe a circular hole

For my visitors

They see my eyes

My lashes waving

In vain

Around midnight the slalom of ghosts

Sweeps through the corn. 

_______________ 

MARIE LUISE KASCHNITZ

translated by Lisel Mueller

Princeton University Press 1980

 

WRITING ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE ~

L A W R E N C E    F E R L I N G H E T T I

( Liveright 2015 )


http://blog.sfgate.com/bookmarks/2014/03/17/ferlinghetti-to-publish-his-travel-journals/

50 years of being there

CAMILO JOSE CELA ~

C A M I L O   J O S E   C E L A

The Paris Review Interview

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1396/the-art-of-fiction-no-145-camilo-jos-cela

 

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS ~

Home Is Where the Heart Is




They came from a long way off, very old friends, at least the

man was. Another new wife we got to know and like. There was

wine. There was summer evening, a song sparrow serenaded

around a dessert of sliced fresh fruit and blueberry bread. We

started on the dirty dishes but left them in hot suds, there was

too much to show in the short time they were here. We traveled

around the old colonial home patched together with no money

and stories instead. They became lost in the small rooms, the

sloped ship-like floors, dim lighting. We laughed and visited in a

living room laid out for no company. It was obvious to see we

stretched out on the sofa two feet from the wood fire and

napped like kittens together through the winter. How could

anyone visit with that? When we made up their bed, crisp sheets

and pillow cases, they said they would sleep in their truck.



__________________ 

  © Bob Arnold