NEW! ROBIN MAGOWAN ~

 

New, perfect bound, 60 pages of poems

$16 

BOB ARNOLD'S ~ WHILE ALIVE ~

Secret Love

Tucked inside the large

wheel well of the old fire

truck is the robin's nest

Painting

She is walking

in a soft blue dress

through splashed summer

grass and I can watch

her from faraway come closer

a bell-shaped bag with our breakfast

swings lightly in her hand and

I still can't believe that I

have known her forever

and may meet her again

_____________________________________________

New, perfect bound, 115 pages of poems

with an introduction by Margaret Randall

Limited:

$20

plus $5 shipping

by Paypal or check

_______________________________

LONGHOUSE

P.O. Box 2454

West Brattleboro

Vermont

05303

FEW WORDS, MANY BOOKS, UNWAVERING LOVE ~

BOB ARNOLD'S

"FEW WORDS, MANY BOOKS, UNWAVERING LOVE"

Book Review: Cup, Faraway Like the Deer's Eye, and Darling Companion by Bob Arnold

by Svetlana Litvinchuk

October 4, 2024

Bob Arnold is one of those rare visionary poets whose work stands the test of time, bypassing trends to arrive at something foundational. With his impeccable vision, he makes it his mission to get us to slow down and see what matters in this brief life. Even from a moving train speeding from Chicago out west and back again, which is the setting for his collection, Darling Companion, he reminds us to take time to notice, to “find sunlight to sit in,” and to ponder things like, “Nebraska. When will they have time to chop all this corn” or the reasons why “as we cross America/ look up every main street— nobody.”

Arnold doesn’t use a lot of words yet manages to say so much. One remarkable quality of his writing is that there is almost no sense of the poet himself in his aphorism-like poems. His scenes are always grounded in a strong sense of place but his mastery is in showing while making the narrator invisible, managing to melt into the scenery with jewels like, 

“in a new land

otherwise taken for granted— 

the evening breeze

touching every leaf.”

 

 

This is a gift he bestows upon the reader— he offers pure glimpses and unmarred observations of landscapes and of Americana, urging us to pay attention, or in his own words, to “buy so many postcards— as if you’ll never return.” By stitching together tiny vignettes, Arnold paints a larger picture of rural life that seems to expand throughout his work. With precision and economy of words, he whittles poems down to attain the minimalist aesthetic that befits an ascetic. Take the poem, “Mountain” for instance, which with four simple words creates a story of a mountain greeting the day:

“Mount Blanca

Sunrise

Stone”

 

His work relies on recurring themes, and we get the sense that he writes poems the same way he builds cabins, constructing images piece by piece until they are large enough so the reader can walk around inside and look around. Much as in architecture, the materials are basic and uniform, the words are simple building blocks. But the artistry is in their configuration; the grandness is in the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. 

Always present in his work is his obvious fondness for his partner, Susan, his cup of his love overflowing for her at every opportunity. In his book Cup, we get a deep yet brief and intimate glimpse of their decades-long love affair taking place in their small cabin where he chops wood, washes her hair by the fire, gazes at the way it falls in front of her face, and takes the time to admire her long cotton skirts as he melts snow into water, and we are endeared by the flour on her lips in her otherwise clean kitchen after she finishes baking and watches the river freezing, then thawing, then flooding the bridge into town. He shows us that we are ultimately defined by who we love and how we love them, by what we do and why we do it. 

In Arnold’s work, Susan is not a figure left to our imaginations shrouded in mystery, as her photographs liberally grace the pages of his other books. In Far Away Like a Deer’s Eye, we get a deep look into his entire life through stories that span his childhood all the way into the present where we find him today, well into his 70’s, complete with color photos of the poet and his muse growing older together and as in love as ever. Through this glimpse of their shared lives we are warmed by the fire of the unfolding tale of the tender tale of their marriage and family.

Bob Arnold is a poet with a strong back and an open heart, but his words are not those of a romantic. He is never effusive or overly sentimental. His poems are bare as a no-frills cabin life in the woods of Vermont. Still, they are gentle, precise, and devoted, a hallmark of a carpenter who has been softened by years of reverence for the forest. His cool, even tone gives rise to a deep well of emotion as he tells us about “places[s] of many trees, grasses, and children playing and we could have broke down weeping to see the earth this way.” Over the decades, Arnold has honed the skill of helping us access a passion for the natural world and the interconnectedness of human relationships, showing us what a true humanitarian, environmentalist, and craftsman aspires to, leading us to beauty both very near and the very far with lines like, 

“same stars as home

except these nearly

touch the ground”

 

 and

“not electric lines anymore

across New Mexico plains—

strings of sunlight”

 

 Despite his brevity, his attention to detail and simultaneous hawk’s eye for the big picture is a gift. Zooming in and out, he says much in what he leaves unsaid, painting millennia-long stories of fields with “trees far off/ never climbed by a child/ only crows.”

While each short poem has its own legs to stand on, with a singular pearl of wisdom to share, woven together into a collection the poems create an inspiring landscape. Through repetition of the images of things that surround him, like trees, snow, the wood stove, and the bowls in their kitchen, the reader can cobble together a broader panorama of the world and the few things in it that matter. Arnold makes connections in quiet, pensive, and humorous ways with observations like:

“$35 night

in Kayenta—

motel hot

water is cold

cold is scalding

drain is slow”

 

Wholly Zen with an untiring admiration for nature, his ability to notice and to help us see is unfaltering. His books are candid, the poems brief, yet in a series of vignettes strung together he opens our field of vision to an unfolding landscape that leads us up the mountain of the Self, placing a picture window in front of us and sitting us by the wood stove. As we gaze, he tells us stories, quietly gathers kindling, and builds a fire to keep us warm as we look out onto the world, remembering that our Earth is merely a “rock rising to light.” All that matters, his poems tell us, is to take a few deep breaths and to practice seeing the fleeting nature of life on our own, to find the beauty in it—the magic, the love. 

Svetlana Litvinchuk holds a double degree in Foreign Language and Literature and International Studies from University of New Mexico. She is the author of a debut poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Sky Island Journal, Plant-Human Quarterly, ONE ART, Willows Wept, Union Spring Review, New Verse News, Merion West, Propagate: Fruits from the Garden Anyhology, Black Coffee Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter in Cape Girardeau, MO. She is passionate about nature, the Earth, and sustainable agriculture. She is a reviews editor with ONLY POEMS. 

JANINE POMMY VEGA ~ POEMS TO FERNANDO ~

 

Janine Pommy Vega (1942-2010) was born February 5 in Jersey City and grew up in Union City, N.J., the middle sibling of three. She graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1960 and had already become intimate with major players in the Beat Generation. Gregory Corso became her liaison to life-long-friends Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who became her lover. She remembers as a teenager meeting Jack Kerouac asleep under a table. Her life as a poet, teacher and traveler was forever a spiritual quest for transcendence which originally took her on the road at age sixteen to New York’s Lower East Side, later a marriage and early widowhood to the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega, who died of a heroin overdose in Ibiza, Spain in 1965. Her first book of poems Poems to Fernando was one of the earliest Pocket Poets (#22) by a woman author published by City Lights Books in 1968. Her posthumous book Janina would document this restless time period for the poet between Europe, the Middle East and America. By the early 1970s Janine would spend two years as a hermit on the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Her prose book Tracking the Serpent has been described as a feminist “On the Road” journeying with the poet on her visits in the 1980s to matriarchal worship sites in Ireland, England, France, Nepal and the Amazon. She trained herself to become a skilled hiker throughout the Catskill Mountains which was her primary dwelling for the last forty years of her life. A devoted teacher and activist for the rights of prisoners and children, Janine made her name and legend in the New York prisons and school system. The last ten years of her life were tough, a struggle with many medical maladies, but the poet persisted, reading her poetry to the public, often with music, wherever invited. Janine Pommy Vega died of a heart attack at her home in Willow, New York on December 23, 2010.

                                                                                                    

                                                                                — Bob Arnold

_________________________________

Janine Pommy Vega

Poems to Fernando

Longhouse, 2021

__________________

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HEAVEN LAKE ( 32 ) ~

photo ~ Jerome Delay

Sick Days

Middle of winter

I knock a bug to the carpet —

what is a bug doing here at

my lamp this time of year?

for the longest time

I have been watching it slow-

ly upright itself on the

heavy weave of carpet as

if it were me —

I can’t stop watching

A Moment In The West

Fairly pretty

In a pale violet

Long skirt, white

Blouse, black hair

Sells me one very blue

Iris from a thick

Bunch in a plastic

Pail, wraps it with paper

And blue string

Then smiles at

Susan who I

Hand it to —

Who takes me

Out and shows

Me more of

Santa Barbara

Our Life

You

&

me

&

then

some

You

The woodpile I stacked in the woods

Is precisely as I left it one month ago

Where I dropped the cherry tree

Bucked it up, split it, stacked it

It was left to the sun, rain, gloom

Harmless showers, longer nights

And if I’m a nice guy

I’ll cover the woodpile

Before it snows

It’s all up to me

___________________

Bob Arnold

Heaven Lake

Longhouse 2018

HEAVEN LAKE (29) ~

Departures

I brought a big sack of laundry

to the laundromat to wash

in fact I brought two

on a cold winter slush ground day

and I was the only one in there

reading my book of a Slovene poet

when two other guys showed up

one with his smart phone entertainment

the other with a nifty jazz player hat

me with my book on a bench

two dryers tumbling

one with a jumbled sound

which turned out to have a

rhythm all its own when it

finally stopped, clothes almost dry

(they are never completely dry)

the fellow with the jazzy hat said

without turning around, "Just when

I was getting used to the rhythm of

that sound" and I replied, “And isn’t it

Just like rhythm, once it’s noticed

it’s gone."

It Happens

Getting older —

The dark woods

Look darker

Authority

Some mouse has woven

a paper nest in my stored

away mud boots all winter

It’s now sloppy spring

and I’m needing

my boots

who am

I to wreck

a warm home?

Flying

I tell him I have never flown in a plane

He looks at me quietly for a moment

Then repeats what he can’t believe he has heard —

You have never flown in a plane. . .

Others have reacted the same way over the years

I look at their expressions, their whole faces

Faces that are full of disbelief and somehow larger

So that I feel like I am flying over mountains

Notes

Every night, late,

I have written a note I leave

for the woman I love

over 40 years this way

Somewhere there is a drawer

or drawers of these notes

she saved everything

which tells you everything

If one day you come upon these notes

remember when I tell you

we were in love

as you feel only the paper

___________________________

Bob Arnold

Heaven Lake

Longhouse 2018