GEOFF MULDAUR

the rooster chews tobacco

There are many voices out there I love to listen to, but I'm stopped dead with Billie Holiday, Skip James and Geoff Muldaur. Muldaur has a warble that would fit into my woodlot on an April morning, things just breaking from winter to spring. Is that a bird or peepers, I'd wonder? Then rising out of the great nowhere would come fiddles, washboards, by-crikky string instruments and there was some of the Muldaur sound...born of blues, folk and maybe best known via the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Since the early 60s, Muldaur with varied friends, family, associates of all kinds has been playing a strong lineage of very great music: clean, sassy, dance-to-it, toe-tap-to-it, get-lost-in-it music. It's one of those beautiful things, and going at its own speed and understanding, so it falls many times under the radar of how to get successful in crass America. Much of the best in this country has been swept under the rug or out the door, so peek under your rugs everyone. Take a look around the dooryard.

With a cover art by Ed Ruscha, announcing modernity, and an inside sounding about as old but fresh as anything possibly could get, these are the Texas Sheiks. Drawing from traditional tunes and a few choice blues masterpieces. Including Muldaur, guest player Kweskin and a sterling bunch of musicians ranging from all around the Woodstock, Austin, Berkeley folk scene. This one has it. "Blues in the Bottle" is 100 years old running on the youngest legs you've ever seen.

The Texas Sheiks

On a personal note, I met Geoff Muldaur in a girls school gymnasium where I was awaiting a friend about to graduate out of high school. Muldaur was waiting like I was for the same person, in this case, his daughter Clare. He hadn't been seen in some years on the music scene and was just about ready to break back in with a new solo recording Secret Handshake. A singular masterpiece. His daughter had walked into my classroom at age 15 and said she didn't write poetry but she wrote songs. Looking at her I knew those songs were poetry so I said, bring to class those songs and bring your guitar. Really? she piped up. Really, I said. She played in my classrooms the next three years, or until I got fired, or did I walk-away in time? I'd already been there twenty years, coming in two months of the year every winter to make a very important extra payroll to see my family ways through. Worked with hundreds of joyful wonder students. It was a drive down from the back woods and I didn't even drive. Many good people gave me rides, when I wasn't driving an old clunker illegally, and I never missed a class, not one, in twenty years. Talk about folk, while listening to the blues.

Clare Muldaur

http://www.claremuldaur.com/

geoff muldaur photo: http://www.xyz.net/~seldarts/2005_FolkFestivalFavorites/Geoff_Muldaur.jpg
the texas sheiks photo: www.nflyagency.com/artistpages/sub_MULDAUR.htm

clare muldaur photo: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1225/1361276366_540298c3e7.jpg

CE ROSENOW










With a lovely cover by Morris Graves ('Shore Birds') and a slender grace delivery page by page, Ce Rosenow quietly comes by for a visit from the Pacific Northwest.









longing for something

an unknown seabird

soars out of sight



~




unemployed —

salt water stings

my sunburn



~



harbor dusk —

sound of the boats

shifting in their berths



~



dying fire . . .

I sit quietly

with my ghosts





~




Pacific by Ce Rosenow, 2009
Mountain Gate Press
2105 Glencoe Road
Hillsboro, OR.97124

BETTYE LAVETTE

Deep soul collectors love this Detroit raised gem.

photo: www.nippertown.com/2009/12/30/nippertowns-top..

ED MARKOWSKI

A CHINESE BOX

If you would like to purchase the booklet please link here.

please click onto poems to enlarge

Ed Markowski is a maestro of the short and long poem — better known as the bunt and the home run. His many-storied life has taken him from the trades of auto-worker, construction, and since 1980 working with chronically mentally ill adults, for the last twelve years in an inpatient setting for a Michigan hospital. His work has been published plenty from Don Wentworth and Norbert Blei outposts, solid homes. Philip Rowland's Noon as well. He's packing one heck of a book to be published.


photo courtesy: Jeff Herron

ARCHIVE









TO EERO


who made things possible

who I met as we hiked in his flooded crops

the river that thoreau & his brother rowed

beyond the trees

we were going to read in a greenhouse

with plastic covering

natural lighting

even a microphone

just friends showing up

on such a rotten weather day

friends showing up








photo © susan arnold

IRIS DEMENT

Arkansas native, raised in California and steeped in country & gospel measures Iris Dement won't be forgotten in the film Songcatcher. This song fest is just about right for the middle of the work-week.

photo:http://www.irisdement.com/i/gallery/id-10.jpg

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE






Baudelaire was perhaps the first performance artist in history. At least he was one of the first to live out his aesthetics, to make his home decor, his clothes, even his way of moving, consistent with his poetry. As the portrait photographer Nadar recalled, "Monsieur Baudelaire was gloved in pink and proceeded in his walk by little jerks, like a wooden marionette, seeming to choose each place where he would step, as if walking between eggs." He was the great apostle of dandyism, and he thought nothing of spending so much of his fortune on curious medieval furniture, Rhine wine, emerald-coloured goblets, loose robes and rich foods that when he died in 1867 he still owed money to shopkeepers for these extravagances of his early twenties. In his letters to friends from this period, Baudelaire frequently talks about the purchase of a Japanese print, a writing desk, a drawing or bits of bric-a-brac long before such bizarre objects bought randomly were a la mode. As he wrote, his ideal was "the man who was rich, idle, even blase, who has no other occupation than to run on the path towards happiness; the man brought up in luxury..."


Although Baudelaire later suffered - in his dispute over the control of his fortune with his stepfather, General Aupick, in his amorous disappointments with women, in his battles with censors over his collection of poems, The Flowers of Evil, and in his struggle with syphilis - nevertheless in his years at the Hotel de Lauzun (which was known as the Hotel Pimodan in his day after a more recent owner), the poet was entire happy. His mistress, an actress named Jeanne Duval, who was one-quarter black, was living just a few blocks away. Jeanne was one the whom Baudelaire addressed in his poetry as a strange deity brown as night ("bizarre deite brune comme les nuits"). Her rooms were on the rue de la Femmes-sans-Tete ("the Headless Woman" now the rue Les Reg Rattier); the street was named after a sign in front of an inn that showed a woman without a head and the slogan "everything is good", meaning that all was well when one dealt with a headless woman. Baudelaire was writing some of the most important poems in these years, 1843 and 1844 - according to some experts, the majority of the poems that would eventually appear in Les Fleurs du Mal.


But by September 1844 the party was over. The poet's mother, dismayed that her son had spent 44,500 gold francs in two years, had the rest of his fortune placed in the hands of a guardian who would dole it out in minuscule monthly sums. Nine months later the humiliated poet attempted suicide by knifing himself (he wrote that suicide is the "only sacrament in the religion of dandyism"), but he failed to do himself in and was nursed back to health by Jeanne Duval. After that he limped home to his mother and lived with her. His glorious years on the Ile St. Louis were over.

— Edmund White, The Flaneur (a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris) Bloomsbury 2001

photo: www.gonsalves.org/.../charliesoon.htm

JOHN FRUSCIANTE

It was his birthday a few days ago ~ a vintage guitar and analog player

photo: http://rvibe-live.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/l_dc2be89f805341b2b881bbe02d1e7c83.jpg

ONCE IN VERMONT 1

GRAM PARSONS

(1946 ~ 1973)



Often in the chapel where I go ~ lots of snow, lots of trees ~ this song plays

photo: http://30daysout.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/gram_parsons.jpg

SUGARING TIME







A week ago now since the big storm had one more day of fight in it and took out the power for another day or so. Today is a March day. February goodbye. Sky blue. Clear as bell. A chilled breeze. And 40 degrees. Mud everywhere. The 40 inches of snow now down to three feet and piles of it on one side of the road with weeping pastures and fields and side boards gushing sudden water from the Great Mother earth that gets to the river by first running through the road. The road you're on. Miles like this.


We were out with chain saw, 3-foot bow saw and loppers taking care of all the white pine damage from the snow storms, and it's extensive. Much we will pile to compost back into the earth. Some we will cut down fine and lay into our driveway and build an old system corduroy road to get the vehicles over the mud. The poor man's fill.


The photograph above is some time ago. The baby in my lap has grown into a musician. The massive maple tree we are tapping for sap and boiling down in the kitchen has toppled over. We still have the sugar pails, spouts, too. The swing seat I turned into a bench seat set onto an old tree stump. The chain for the swing is awaiting the next swing which may be awaiting the next baby. But don't look at us.


All that snow around us has melted twenty-five times since.

photo © susan arnold

SIDNEY BECHET






One of the first great soloists in jazz - born in New Orleans and gone by age 62
The French Existentialists called Bechet "le dieu"
Over here you pronounce him as "buh-shay"

photo: http://themusicsover.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/sbechet.jpg

ROLL ON BUDDY

The town snow plow is pushing itself by. Way out here in the woods. The driver is an old friend of mine, Ajax Bond. I can’t remember how he got the name Ajax and I’ve never asked him. He has for the last few years lifted his plow blade when he gets close to our driveway and this saves us hours each week from hand shoveling wicked snow, mostso the stuff that turns to cement after a rainstorm...which happened yesterday after a foot of snow. What was fluffy now got serious. Luckily we old timers from the land of the Never-Never (quit) got onto the jump-pile right early and shoveled everything while it was still fluffy-duffy. After a full day of snow-shoveling and sweating through work clothes one begins to write in rhyme and silly double word tones. I will quit that now.


Ajax lifts the blade, I believe, because thirty years ago on a job we both happened to be at (a house I was building down river from here) I pretty much saved him when he spilled his bulldozer over a cliff edge and was lodged next to a giant red oak stump. Luckily it was a new stump since the land had been logged only a few years earlier. But Ajax couldn't move off his seat, frozen with dread.


No one was there while it was happening. I had hiked back up the road to have lunch with Sweetheart at the appropriate hour of 1 o’clock, so we could catch All My Children, the soap opera. It’s too nutty to explain. We were hooked on it for a few years, after we finally got a 11” tv, black and white, from Sears. Then our son was born and we just all kept on watching it as a little family. Marshmallow in the brains for serious book readers. Our son recalls some of the characters to this day. This is quite a revelation.


So while I am home with Sweetheart and Erica Kane, poor Ajax has eaten early lunch at noon and was back at work and proceeded to take the spill. He still takes chances...I watched as he left our chat at the snow road side yesterday and how his huge plow dump truck not yet filled with sand went shimmying away on the ice forming under the snow with the rain falling. Sweetheart and I both hat and hair drenched.


Thirty years ago I arrive back at the job and there's young Ajax paralyzed and waiting for god knows what. Must of been me? I ran up to his predicament and asked him for his hand which he gave to me and I pulled him off his seat and the throbbing dozer, confused itself by what all the stick-in-the-mud fuss was all about. I never gave it a thought until all these years later when I see him lift the plow blade. Ah, that must be the ticket.

Bob Arnold says : tv, bulldozers, books, snow-plows, snow-shovels = all tools and it all depends on how you use them



photo "newfoundland" © bob arnold

GEORGE HARRISON

The gentleman of rock 'n' roll













photo:http://www.celebrityrockstarguitars.com/rock/harrison_files/George001.jpg

ANNOUNCING ~ JIM CARROLL








by

TOM CLARK

"A poet departs, too soon, and there is a void that will not be filled. From somewhere deep and old the tears well up in the dark night.

When I met Jim in 1967 he was seventeen. He had been leading a triple life: high school All-American basketball star, heroin addict/ street hustler, poet."

The above is from Tom Clark's wee memoir of Jim Carroll, as submitted by the author, newly published from Longhouse for the Spring Equinox 2010. With photographs by Bill Berkson, Mary K. Greer, and Beatrice Murch.


In glossy photographic wraps, hand sewn in four colors. Ready to be slipped into your back pocket, or anyone's.


Limited availability
$15

plus $3.95 shipping


order now through Paypal for free U.S. Shipping

international orders please inquire

Available from-
Longhouse, Publishers
1604 River Road
Guilford, Vermont 05301
802-254-4242

email: poetry@sover.net
[credit card, paypal or check]

Please visit Longhouse for this & other publications

Tom Clark was born in Chicago 1941. Man of letters in poetry, prose, biography and the fine art of proper blogging, Beyond the Pale.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, he then attended Cambridge University and University of Essex before returning to the United States in 1967. A long time resident of the American west, he makes his home with Angelica in Berkeley, California. This is Tom's second Longhouse publication along with Single - Longhouse, 2009.

photo courtesy: Mary K. Greer

BOOKS & KEROSENE


So many good books come my way – by mail, by other hands, by used shops, by rummage, by friends, by trade. Can't beat a book, people.

So while the snow took out our power one more time last week, and that makes it 5 days out of 7 with no power, books got read, when we weren't working at throwing the snow out of the way.

Sweetheart was out in the studio where more books are housed finding things and heard something behind her where she kept the glass door open, and there were two horses wanting to come inside! We've had bear, moose, bobcat, the sly fox in the dooryard, and now two wandering horses lost awhile in the snowstorm. They mangled all the fine lace work of snow paths I had just finished shoveling but so what, horses in the yard are a nice surprise. They must have been extra dainty to get in and around the narrow gauge pathwork along the woodshed. Somehow they did it.

Knowing horses, Sweetheart led the them back out onto the road and down river a ways until they got their bearings. . .we sort of think we know where they came from.






KENNETH KOCH


Thanks to his poem about a garbage can
lid being smashed into a likeness of King
George the Third's face, my sixteen year old
son is now writing poetry. This activity has
recently led him into drinking alcohol and
experimenting with drugs, which makes
it difficult for me to say, but I'll say it
anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch,
for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.

Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
(Shearsman Books / www. shearsman.com)

Two books of poetry that excite me — and I'm the kind of guy who gets excited by a good working chain saw, new spring birds, and catching a whiff of my true love's dress flying out the back door — so. It's to Kent Johnson and Ange Mlinko. If I recall, Kent had a thing there for one of Ange Mlinko's books, so I thought to read the two poets together. It hummed along.

I like Kent Johnson's writing & self, because he is full of beans. Every generation has to have a tireless and bold bean counter, and Kent Johnson is the one. When spoken of to Walt Whitman, Walt said: "'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes' and Kent Johnson is my son." When brought up with Virgil, the V. Man said, "'Be favorable to bold beginnings' and my son is Kent Johnson." Taking off his wide brim hat Goethe sighed then grinned and said "'All my works are fragments of a long confession' and I know my son is Kent Johnson."

The blue book pictured above is the water the horse was led to.

STET STET STET


Where the curve of the road rhymes with the reservoir's
and cleared of the leafy veils that for six months
obscured it,
the landscape's wet chestnut
in the gray descended cloud
intones You're lucky to live in a watershed
so no vast tracts of tacky drywall
turn the land into peremptory enclosures.
You've bought in.
The venial sin:
being exceptional.
Reading Holderlin.
And the natural hallucinogen of joy
helium-cum-oxygen
leaving wordy outputs
hanging on piney tenterhooks
while all the wild protected liminal woods
contrive a blind.

~ Ange Mlinko, Shoulder Season
(Coffee House / www.coffeehousepress.org)








Kevin O'Hara, A Lucky Irish Lad
(Forge)

I prefer the author's first book, and it is a classic all its own, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims — where Kevin O'Hara and his donkey companion travel 1800 miles around Ireland on-foot. This new book is a sequel of the Irish quest, but this time it's where the author was raised in the hills of western Massachusetts in the 50s-60s, and of course the stories and family characters abound.



















WAITING FOR THE FAT LADY TO SING

----It was the longest opera ever written. By the time the fat
lady sang most of the audience had died in their seats still holding
their programs, the theater full of flies and microbes.

----Some began to think that perhaps the opera was a bit long,
that maybe the fat lady should start singing a little earlier so
the audience might have time to write their wills, and to say
goodbye to friends and family.

----But others felt, what better way to die than waiting for the
fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's
real, not the fat lady, not even death. . .

~ Russell Edson, See Jack
(University of Pittsburgh Press / www.upress.pitt.edu)


I'm not sure what one does about Russell Edson, so I keep on reading him. Have for a long time. I saw him read at a small venue over the last 10 years and he was unlike anything to be heard from. Almost a carnival act — that unpredictable and unexplained. Ideal for poetry. He also paints and has been married a long time to Frances Edson, and I once found a charming and unique book of her writing and have never seen anything of hers since. I'm pretty sure this is all mysteriously for the good.




I can't even begin to extract from Heimrad Backer, concrete poet and visual wonder, who was part of the Austrian avant-garde after a youthful experience with Hitler Youth before joining the Nazi party at eighteen.

As the record shows — and transcript is one — "the Holocaust was not unspeakable, but was eminently describable and a described act spoken by thousands of people concerned with the precision and even beauty of their language." Backer's documents, poems, lists, found-poems are drawn from the Nazi's paperwork, victims letters, medical and train charts and schedules from the records of Auschwitz.

Heimrad Backer, transcript
(Dalkey Archive / www.dalkeyarchive.com)





A sound and modest collection of essays by Ilan Stavans making the range from literary, historical, cultural and autobiographical, leaning with a sure eye to his own Latin American background and giving forth on Neruda, Marias, renegade Bolano, Cisneros and mixing in Sebald, Kapuscinski, Edmund Wilson, with personal venues on keeping a notebook, teaching Spanish and more. He's wise and unflappable enough for the publisher to have given him a large type font and less words per page and a fatter book and thus a more readable book, but alas the publisher did not.

Ilan Stavans, A Critic's Journey
(University of Michigan Press)





This book is as large and glorious as it looks. Actually a national treasure. America is still capable, much of it hidden in them thar hills. Hills you may live in and are possibly unaware of what lives with you. Musicians, potters, weavers, fiddlers, hand craftsman, blacksmiths — the timeless stuff. Gorgeous large black and white portraits of each visitor, and that's what this book becomes, a visit. Followed by a later section in the book with easy to follow layout detailing who is behind each of the photographs by interviews, talks, or portrayals. There are eighty visits and Tim Barnwell has spent thirty year's setting it all into play. In a beautifully sewn cloth edition with an accompanying CD. You'll be in the southern Appalachian region, and you may want to stay.



Tim Barnwell, Hands in Harmony
(Norton)




How do I best show to you Louise Landes Levi's latest book of poems and travel journey, which includes photographs from Margarita Island? I'll just snap two photographs of the books sitting beside me.




Very beautiful and clean black and white edition with the one exquisite color photograph like a birthday sweet on the back cover. Do read that poem if you can. All of Louise's poetry is of devotion. There is a glossary offered to guide the guideful through an exotic landscape political, philosophical, religious and planetary. With Louise the raga goes on.

Louise Landes Levi, The Book L
(Cool Grove Press, 512 Argyle Rd., Brooklyn, NY 11218)












Speaking of a national treasure — Walker Evans! Every new book about him or of his work continues to spellbound.

With no dustjacket and instead steering by the possible vogue way of publishing for the future: decorative cloth boards with no fuss or muss. It suits this old fashioned subject of American folklore: the picture postcard.

This treasure trove (over 400 pages, often two postcards per page) is drawn from the Walker Evans Archive which includes as one would imagine in a master photographer's booty: thousands and thousands of black and white negatives and color transparencies, never mind correspondence, diaries, writings, proof sheets, and 9,000 picture postcards of which Jeff L Rosenheim has beautifully signified, along with excerpts from Evans thoughts on the subject and one WE lecture from Yale (1964). But mainly it's for the postcard, vintage-eyed Evans style, and it's a feast.

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
(Steidl, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

photo © bob arnold

FURRY LEWIS

Here's who we need to take us into March — Furry Lewis, born in Greenwood, MS., and raised in Memphis where he worked as a street sweeper for the city until he retired at age 73. There are two headstones at Furry Lewis's grave in South Memphis and that's something he didn't know about when he passed away at age 88. The second headstone was purchased by his fans.

photo: http://img98.imageshack.us/i/lewis2camasz8.jpg/

LOS LOBOS




One way to start the week — the wolves from East L.A.

photo: http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o70/hiddentrackscott/loslobos%20resize/loslobosIMG_1709455x303.jpg