Tuesday, September 1, 2020

VISITING JANINE ~

 




The other day we went down to the Catskills to take care of Janine Pommy Vega’s grave site. Ten years ago already we chose the red Vermont granite for her stone, and I asked that “Poet” be all there was on the stone other than her name and date. She looks awful alone there, friends.  Susan noticed that, a woman to woman eye thing. I then took Susan to Philip Guston’s grave, Musa beside him. Now the PC crowd have canceled his very large and important exhibit of art work spanning a life time because it will include his dizzy Klansmen. Wait until 2024 the artsy legislatures command. To see one of those paintings, and I have in backwater Hanover, NH, is something to behold. In the cemetery all is equal so very early in the morning in the rain.



UPDATE: GUSTON


photographs: bob arnold 




RE-READING PAUL GOODMAN ~









Proverbs of a Small Farm




If the raccoon gnaws ten percent of the corn,

don't set a trap, plant another row.



If spinach goes to seed too soon,

try it twice, then plant chard.



Don't fight the cabbage worms

if store-bought is good and cheap.



Do very little "on principle".

life is hard enough as it is.



Honor the weeds that love your land

and call them flowers, they seed themselves.



When phoebes nest in the barn, you have no choice

but to leave the big door open also to thieves.



Many things will grow in the North Country

that they don't grow,

but then it's hard to give away your surplus

that they won't eat.



Nature is profligate, usury is natural,

but you must not pocket the increase.



One spring when the snow melts, my asparagus

will finally be big enough for someone else to eat.






________________________
Paul Goodman
Collected Poems
Random House, 1974


edited by Taylor Stoehr with a birds-eye view of Paul Goodman
from his good friend George Dennison who well understood the
ways & means of poets, anarchists, educators and philosophers
of all stripes, which Goodman certainly was.