Louisville, Kentucky August 5, 1934 ~ August 31, 2026 Port Royal, Kentucky
Monday, August 31, 2026
HANSHAN ~
from Cold Mountain Zen
Father and mother having left me much to inherit,
I'm not envious of others' paddies and fields.
My wife handles her loom, clicking, clucking,
my child, playing by herself, mouth babbling, babbling.
She claps her hands, making blossoms dance,
chin in hands, she listens to birds singing.
Who will come by and admire all this?
Just a woodcutter stops by for awhile.
Since birth, for thirty years,
I've walked tens of thousands of li.
Along the rivers blue grass proliferated,
as I entered the borders scarlet dust rose.
I kneaded elixir vainly to seek immortality,
I read books to comment on history.
Having returned to Cold Mountain now,
I lie by a stream and wash my ears.
As I climb the path to Cold Mountain,
the route to Cold Mountain does not end.
The valley is long with piles of stones,
the streams smothered with grass.
The moss is smooth, not because of rain,
the pines sough, not by borrowing winds.
Who would go beyond the world
and sit with me amid white clouds?
I lie beneath heavy layers of rocks;
steamy clouds do not fade during the day.
My room is murky and dark,
but my mind rejects uproar and clatter.
My dreams go to wander in golden palaces,
my soul returns by crossing the stone bridge.
I've thrown away whatever disturbs me,
even the gourd clanking in the trees.
My house sits under green boulders;
the garden is wild but I do not cut grass.
New wisterias hang down, entwiningly;
old stones stand, rising steeply, sharply.
Monkeys pick mountain berries;
in the pond a white heron mouths fish.
The transcendental book, in two volumes,
I read under a tree, mumbling.
_C O L D M O U N T A I N Z E N_________________________________
Hanshan
translated by Hiroaki Sato
New Directions 2026
I've waited all my life for Hiroaki Sato to bring us Hanshan —
it was only a matter of time. Excellent footnotes accompany these
poems, so I encourage every reader to find this essential book, a
beauty, and read all the poems, all the footnotes, all the essays,
all the all. I just wanted to type out a few poems to share on a late
summer season evening.
Sunday, August 30, 2026
MONK ALIVE IN ZURICH 1964 ~
Thelonious Monk Quartet Zurich, Switzerland 02/26/1964 Charlie Rouse (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Edward "Butch" Warren (b) Ben Riley (d)
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Friday, August 28, 2026
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
Thursday, August 27, 2026
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
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
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.”
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Monday, August 24, 2026
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
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Saturday, August 22, 2026
EL CORNO EMPLUMADO RIDES AGAIN ~
Letters That Breathe Fire: El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn by 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
Friday, August 21, 2026
IAN FRAZIER ~
always fine writing by this author —
the plus is the time he gave to
Montana's Kim Williams
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY TONIGHT ~
This is not from Monterey Pop Festival — it is pre-Monterey.
Instead we have an eternal clip from
KTVU News, San Francisco,
early 1967.
NEW! ANDREW SCHELLING at LONGHOUSE ~
NEW!
ANDREW SCHELLING at LONGHOUSE ~
ANDREW SCHELLING
Wielding the Sanskrit Ice Axe
~
L O N G H O U S E
2026
$12
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Vermont
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Tuesday, August 18, 2026
MITSKI TONIGHT ~
All songs and vocals are by Mitski. The album was produced and engineered by Patrick Hyland and mastered by Bob Weston, with assistance on drums and logistics from Kris Bulakowski.
Monday, August 17, 2026
DONOVAN TONIGHT ~
The Mountain · Donovan Slow Down World ℗ Donovan Discs LTD Released on: 1976-05-01 Producer: Donovan P. Leitch Composer: Derroll Adams Lyricist: Donovan
LINDA GREGG ~
We Manage Most When We Manage Small
What things are steadfast? Not the birds,
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against the hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safely in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
Marriage and Midsummer's Night
It has been a long time now
since I stood in our dark room looking
across the court at my husband in her apartment.
Watched them make love.
She was perhaps more beautiful
from where I stood than to him.
I can say it now: she was like a vase
lit the way milky glass is lighted.
He looked more beautiful there
than I remember him the times
he entered my bed with the light behind.
It has been ten years since I sat
at the open window, my legs over the edge
and the knife close like a discarded idea.
Looked up at the Danish night,
that pale, pale sky where the birds that fly
at dawn flew on those days all night long,
black with the light behind. They were caught
by their instincts, unable to end their flight.
Staying After
I grew up with horses and poems
when that was the time for that.
Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky
in the Fillmore West when
everybody was dancing. I sat
in the balcony with my legs
pushed through the railing,
watching Janis Joplin sing.
Women have houses now, and children.
I live alone in a kind of luxury.
I wake when I feel like it,
read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.
At night I watch the apartments
whose windows are still lit
after midnight. I fell in love.
I believed people. And even now
I love the yellow light shining
down on the dirty brick wall.
Grinding the Lens
I am pulling myself together.
Don't want to go on a trip.
I have painted the living room white
and taken out most of my things.
The room has never been so empty.
Just now a banging thunder
and suddenly falling rain.
I leave the typewriter and run
outside in my nightgown and take
the cotton blanket off the line.
It is summer and I am in the middle
of my life. Alone and happy.
______________________________
Linda Gregg
Poetry, April 2026
photo: 1981
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Saturday, August 15, 2026
L' Afrique Danse No. 1 TONIGHT ~
The First Of The African Labels "L' Afrique Danse" Compilations. Made Up Of 6 Previously Released 7" Singles By OK Jazz And Conga Succes With Various People Taking A Leading Role With Them.
Friday, August 14, 2026
Thursday, August 13, 2026
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