THOMAS A CLARK, THREADBARE ~

 

the shape changer

                ______________________________

once I was a deer

stepping under trees

my form always broken

by lights and shadows

then I was a wildcat

leaping up and away

from the traces of my own

rigour and ferocity

in a fold of hills

nodding with flowers

I took on many

shapes and colours

seldom was I present

to myself in a form

half as alluring

as what I might become

again I was a goldcrest

a bright fragment of song

moving through the forest

leading farther in

at times defeated

reduced to stone

I lay disregarded

concealed in the open

then I was a juniper

turning to take the slope

pausing and bracing myself

above a sheer drop

and once I was a dragonfly

for an afternoon

little more than a notion

of the stillness and the green

_______________________

The Threadbare Coat

Selected Poems

Carcanet, UK, 2020

we celebrate our wedding anniversary

today with a dear poetry friend

LARRY EIGNER ~

 

_______________________

microphones

on top of the world

heads spin

empty

______________________

Waters /

Places /

A Time

edited by Robert Grenier

Black Sparrow Press

1983

photo ~ Ann Charters

JOHN COLTRANE "SPIRITUAL" TONIGHT ~

 

Concord Music Group reissues remastered and expanded edition of John Coltrane’s Afro Blue Impressions Two-CD set commemorates both the 40th anniversary of Pablo Records and the 50th anniversary of the recordings Concord Music Group will reissue a remastered and expanded edition of John Coltrane’s Afro Blue Impressions album (international release dates vary). Enhanced by 24-bit remastering by Joe Tarantino, three bonus tracks, and new liner notes, the new reissue celebrates the 40th anniversary of Pablo Records, the jazz label founded by Norman Granz in 1973. Afro Blue Impressions represents an anniversary within an anniversary. By the time Norman Granz launched Pablo in 1973, he’d already stockpiled several years worth of previously-recorded tour performances in his vaults, including these sets from Stockholm and Berlin in late 1963 (October and November, respectively). This new two-disc reissue of the classic Coltrane Pablo album — originally released as a double LP in 1977 — arrives just a few weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of the original concerts. Coltrane fronts a stellar quartet on both European dates that includes McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. In addition to the nine tracks that appeared in the original Afro Blue Impressions double album, the reissue also includes three bonus tracks from the Stockholm date: “Naima,” “I Want To Talk About You,” and “My Favorite Things.” “When you compare and contrast the performance of a composition that was released on the original album to a different performance of the same composition from among the bonus tracks,” says Afro Blue Impressions reissue producer Nick Phillips, “it perfectly illustrates just how restlessly creative Coltrane and his band were. Each song was a springboard for unpredictable improvisation and boundless creativity.” “These tracks brim with the wonder and the power of discovery,” says Neil Tesser, author of the new liner notes accompanying the reissue. “At this juncture, the Coltrane Quartet existed in a state analogous to quantum mechanics . . . Each new performance yielded new insights. As the musicians gathered this data and sifted through it, they would arrive at the polished theories underlying the eventual masterworks to come, such as the album Crescent and the monumental suite A Love Supreme — achievements that would then launch a new age of chaotic discovery, on such albums as Om, Sun Ship, and Meditations. How much those recordings will resonate on their 50th anniversaries will likely engender some controversy; Coltrane didn’t live long enough to complete the journey that began with them, and the jury remains out, even decades later, regarding the impact of that work. But history long ago weighed the import of his work in 1963, when his music stretched and struggled its way toward becoming Coltrane’s iconic stylistic statement.”

AMIRI BARAKA ~

 

   Lunch Poems series

    Amiri Baraka

GREAT MUSIC TALK TONIGHT ~

 

Joe Boyd

   Buddy Miller

TRACY K. SMITH SAYS FEAR LESS ~

 

R E A D   M E

    Norton, 2025

URSULA K. Le GUIN ~

 

Some of the Philosophers

can't use it

can't count it

so refuse it, this —

the inexhaustible, bountiful,

elusive

spring of the absurd,

brooding over the dark abyss

wing,

the word.

Self

You cannot measure the circumference

but there are centerpoints:

stones, and a woman washing at a ford,

the water runs red-brown from what she washes.

The mouths of caves. The mouths of bells.

The sky in winter under snowclouds

to northward, green of jade.

No star is farther from it than the glint

of mica in a pebble in the hand,

or nearer. Distance is my god.

Slick Rock Creek, September

My skin

touches the wind

A lacewing fly touches my hand

I speak too slow     

                            for her to understand

Rock's warm under my hand.

It speaks too slow

                            for me to understand

I drink sunlit water.

Flight 1067 to L.A.

Snowy sierra sawteeth

lift to leftward

as I drink white wine staidly

above the Great Valley in the belly

of a silvery psuedocetacean

sailing the airsea to a palmy city.

I am my ancestors' sci-fi.

Waking in April

Drifting on the birdsong river

between no light and light

and the sleep of  man and a cat,

I wear the soft old shirt

my mother made me seventy years ago,

nightshirt, dayshirt,

winter coat, wedding gown.

I wonder, as it wears away to rags

and gauze, will there be a mirror

to see the naked soul in,

or only an unraveling of shadow

as the day widens

and things grow clearer.

______________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Larger Reality

Winter Texts, 2025

VASHTI BUNYAN TONIGHT ~

 

JOHN DARNIELLE'S SONGS ~

R E A D   M E 

MCD/FARRAR

2025

EL CORNO EMPLUMADO RIDES AGAIN ~

 

Letters That Breathe Fire: El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn by Margaret Randall

MISCELLANEOUS

Author:  Margaret Randall

BUY NOW...→

New Village Press. 2026. 384 pages.

Despite my immersion first in the poetry of the San Francisco renaissance and later of the avant-garde scene in New York, I was woefully ignorant as a young poet of writers outside the confines of the United States and Europe. I was far from alone in having no conception of the rich cultural and political tradition of those countries closest to me in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is, until I opened the pages of El Corno Emplumado.

In Letters That Breathe Fire, Margaret Randall’s selection of correspondence from El Corno Emplumado mirrors the dynamism and passion of young writers and activists around the world creating and struggling in the midst of the turbulent 1960s. El Corno Emplumado, partly printed bilingually in Spanish and English, was originally created by co-founders and editors Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón to act as a conduit through which information could flow freely between writers and artists hitherto separated by the boundaries of countries and language. Starting with its second issue, El Corno created a special section that in its almost eight years of publication from 1962 to its final issue in 1969 would publish over two hundred letters culled from the thousands they received.

Selections from every letter published in the thirty-one issues that comprised the run of El Corno are included in this collection. Browsing its pages, one encounters Ernesto Cardenal’s excitement that poets are creating a “real Pan American Union . . . Poets of various languages but all writing in a common language like Pentecost.”

Denise Levertov, in a lengthy letter, challenges her dear friend poet Ted Enslin’s declaration that politics “has absolutely no place in poetry or art of any kind, no didactic cant has.” Levertov champions the validity of art as protest, emphasizing that “the poet has no exclusive area of concern, and that poets or nonpoets, we are ‘members, one of another’; and that there is no danger, no shame, and no hope in which we are not all involved.” Then there is Thomas Merton celebrating that for the poet “there is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom. . . . Come, Dervishes: here is the water of life. Dance in it.”

There are also letters by Julio Cortázar, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Bly, Cecilia Vicuña, John Sinclair, Raquel Jodorowsky, and even by an anonymous political prisoner and an angry British subject. Documents of length and substance, these are an example of the diversity and heft of the hundreds of letters in the collection.

El Corno issues are presented in chronological order. At the beginning of each section, Randall contextualizes the historical aspect of that particular issue by locating it in a political and cultural context and by adding extensive informational footnotes about the letter writers where needed. There is also an ample index at the end of the book.

The correspondence in El Corno is the best kind of history, written from the pens of the individuals who lived and witnessed it, as relevant today as it was more than five decades ago. Letters That Breathe Fire is not only an invaluable resource, it is compelling reading. This is a book to be kept close at hand, to find inspiration from, to actively engage with, because it comes directly from the lived experiences of individuals who, communicating with one another across borders and boundaries, strove to make sense out of the world they inhabited, of the art they were in the process of creating.

Susan Sherman
New York City