ILLUMINATIONS ~

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

CITY



I am an ephemeral and not at all dissatisfied citizen of a

metropolis thought to be modern because every known

taste has been avoided in the furnishings and exteriors

of its houses as well as in the plan of the city. Here you

would never point to the traces of any monument to

superstition. Morality and language are reduced to their

most basic expression, indeed! These millions of people

who feel no need to know one another experience such

similar kinds of education, occupation and old age, that

their life-spans must be several times shorter than those

which a mad statistic determines for the peoples of the

continent. Just as, from my window, I see new specters

rolling through the thick and eternal fumes of coal fires,

—our shadow of the woods, our summer's night! —

modern-day Furies, in front of my cottage which is my

country and all my heart since everything here resem-

bles this, —Death without tears, our active daughter and

servant, and a despairing Love, and a pretty Crime

whimpering in the mud of the street.





RUTS


On the right, the summer dawn wakens the leaves and

vapors and sounds of this corner of the park, and the

embankments on the left hold within their purple shad-

ows the thousand rapid ruts of the damp road. Parade of

enchantments. Indeed: parade floats covered with gilded

wooden animals, masts and multicolored canvas back-

drops, drawn by twenty dappled circus horses at full gal-

lop, and children and men on the most amazing beasts;

—twenty vehicles, embossed, flag-draped and decked

with flowers like old-fashioned or fairy-tale coaches,

filled with children costumed for a suburban pastoral. —

Even coffins under their canopy of night brandishing

ebony plumes, fleeing to the sound of huge blue and

black mares' hooves.





WAR


In childhood, certain skies focused my seeing: all char-

acters modulated my features. Phenomena were set in

motion. —Now, the eternal inflection of moments and

the infinity of mathematics chase me across this world

where I undergo every civil success, respected by strange

childhood and abnormally large affections. —I dream of

a War of righteousness or force, whose logic will be quite

unexpected.

---It's as simple as a musical phrase.





DAWN


I embraced the summer dawn.

---Nothing was moving yet on the facades of palaces. The

water was still. Encampments of shadows still lingered

along the road through the woods. I walked, walking liv-

ing and warm breaths, and jewels looked on, and wings

arose noiselessly.

---The first undertaking, in the pathway already filled

with fresh, pale sparkles, was a flower which told me its

name.

---I laughed at the blond wasserfall disheveling itself

through the pines: at its silver summit, I recognized the

goddess.

---Then I lifted the veils one by one. In the pathway, ges-

ticulating. On the plain, where I denounced her to the

cock. In the great city she fled among the steeples and

domes, and running like a beggar along the marble

quays, I chased her.

---Father up the road, near a laurel grove, I wrapped

her in the veils I had collected, and I felt, a little, her

immense body. Dawn and the child fell to the bottom of

the wood.

---When I awoke it was noon.






from ILLUMINATIONS
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
JOHN ASHBERY (trans.)
Norton 2011

top photo: Étienne Carjat

Rimbaud (1854-1891) was known by one as a "disreputable, mean, ruthless, perverse, hateful wretch. He was also one of the greatest poets who ever lived." Ever restless, he managed to travel three continents before succumbing to cancer at age 37. Supposedly his poetry and creative life was all together done with by age 21. We say it has an eternal flame.

Rimbaud self-portrait near the end of his life

EARTH ~

You know that song Johnny Cash always sang so well about "I've been everywhere, man..." Well, that's how we feel after myriad miles on the road in less than a week. We got punchy with some great road limericks and sayings we invented as happenings occurred. The cheapest gas we could find was dead center in northern New England in a college town $3.73.9 a gallon. Still highway robbery, and that last digit has become the tell-tale con. There was a fellow in a mom & pop backwater business selling it for a little bit more down the road from there. Door wide open, three huge stray mutts lounging on the plank floor, everybody in the family working the place, barely hanging on, still happy to chat. Make conversation. Bless them, really.

We had our bicycles and bicycled everywhere we could, no matter the hour or the rain or not. 6:30 this morning in Manchester Center, Vermont. We've been surveying old graveyards too since we are designing the tombstone for a close friend. Last evening down in the Berkshires we cleaned up the graves for some of the family; then bicycled the spooky lanes.

Bicycled in the northern White Mountains — way back in searching out two waterfalls. Saw long distance runners training barefoot. Gazed up higher, snow still deep in the ravines. Lots of beer now being brewed by all sorts of folks in a wide radius of the Whites. Drive into any small town and one can point easily to the Haves and the Have-Nots. Houses all trim and kept like nobody's business by the old timers, whether they have money or not. They just do it. Otherwise, the wealthy or well-to-do are doing just fine, and then there are way too many old homes broken and sunken and terribly lost. Ravaged is the better word.

The bicycle can get in and out where any other vehicle, or even on-foot, can't quite maintain the same slip-easy arrival and departure. The only way to do these towns is by the back ways, side streets, alleys, cemeteries, back lots connecting debris, pathways, shortcuts, and hidden passages. Overhear worlds and clatter from the Chinese restaurant rear open door. Two mops out there, a ratty chair where someone takes a cigarette break.

A black and white yard cat attentive for us in fixed sit position as we approach on bicycles...he's heard and is waiting for us long before we spotted him.

A coyote crosses the interstate highway rain in four or five loped gallops. Something very serious about that tail. The expression on the face. Reckless speed at 80 mph by many and nobody came close to the wild animal sleek.

Cornfields under water. Burlington flooded. A stranger notices our out-of-state plates on a rental and even though we're from the same state warns us, "Don't go there."

We did drop in to see an old poet friend, and it's been years. I saw him sitting in his favorite living room easy chair by the window of the farmhouse where I last left him and tapped at the window. He looked up and gave a small hand wave and with great difficulty hobbled to the door. What a trouper some of these old gentlemen are! After the door opened I asked if he knew who I was. He said he didn't know. When I told him his whole body relaxed as he said my name aloud and smiled and opened both his hands to gesture me inside.

You're home.

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

WALKING DOWN TO GET WATER



She'll return through the pasture

I'll find her shoulders






Bob Arnold
from The Cold Spring Journal No. 1
edited by Pamela Beach Plymell
Joshua Norton
Charles Plymell
September 1974

chimera : sharon arnold


A summer poem I saw happen one summer and many other summers, same shoulders.

EARTH ~

Alden Van Buskirk

Muted Terror



I am dreaming.

It is pleasant to dream.

I dream cars churning

corners below this porch.

They are not circus wagons

or signboards boiled

open by the sun. Dreaming

they appear as colored sores

issuing from the stop sign.

They are not water, though sun

dances on their glass backs.

Nor can I ascertain their depths

for their reflection breaks from

the limits of chrome.

To dream the motors? It is not

possible except as the sun and the

weeds pry their hoods off in future junkyards.


A blue one displays its thousand broken suns

swinely, dark head in; the window severs blacknecks,

it soars drunken above

the others, a bleeding fire.

This is a car not a bird.

It terrifies beautifully.





from Lami
The Auerhahn Society, 1965

FOR A VERY LONG TIME I HAVE BEEN DRAWN TO THE ABOVE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE POET, MAYBE THE ONLY ONE THERE IS, TIPPED IN BY A LOYAL HAND ONCE UPON A TIME INTO THE POET'S ONLY BOOK. THERE IS SOMETHING NOW AND FOREVER IN THESE POEMS AND FOR YOU IF YOU CAN FIND THIS BOOK. THE POET DIED IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES IN 1961.

EARTH ~

FORUGH FARROKHZAD

(1935-1967)

Another Birth



My whole being is a dark chant
which will carry you
perpetuating you
to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming
in this chant I sighed you sighed
in this chant
I grafted you to the tree to the water to the fire.

Life is perhaps
a long street through which a woman holding
a basket passes every day.

Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
life is perhaps a child returning home from school.

Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
who takes off his hat to another passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning.

Life is perhaps that enclosed moment
when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes
and it is in the feeling
which I will put into the Moon's impression
and the Night's perception.

In a room as big as loneliness
my heart
which is as big as love
looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness
at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase
at the sapling you planted in our garden
and the song of canaries
which sing to the size of a window.

Ah
this is my lot
this is my lot
my lot is
a sky which is taken away at the drop of a curtain
my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs
a regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia
my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories
and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me
I love
your hands.

I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow I know I know I know
and swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

I shall wear
a pair of twin cherries as ear-rings
and I shall put dahlia petals on my finger-nails
there is an alley
where the boys who were in love with me
still loiter with the same unkempt hair
thin necks and bony legs
and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
who was blown away by the wind one night.

There is an alley
which my heart has stolen
from the streets of my childhood.

The journey of a form along the line of time
inseminating the line of time with the form
a form conscious of an image
coming back from a feast in a mirror.

And it is in this way
that someone dies
and someone lives on.

No fisherman shall ever find a pearl in a small brook
which empties into a pool.

I know a sad little fairy
who lives in an ocean
and ever so softly
plays her heart into a magic flute
a sad little fairy
who dies with one kiss each night
and is reborn with one kiss each dawn.


from Another Birth (1963)




Bathing


I shed my clothes in the lush air
to bathe naked in the spring water,
but the quiet night seduced me
into telling it my gloomy story.

The water's cool shimmering waves
moaned and lustily surrounded me,
urged with soft crystal hands
my body and spirit into themselves.

A far breeze hurried in,
poured a lapful of flowers in my hair,
breathed into my mouth Eurasian mint's
pungent, heart-clinging scent.

Silent and soaring, I closed my eyes,
pressed my body against the soft young rushes,
and like a woman folded into her lover's arms
gave myself to the flowing waters.

Aroused, parched, and fevered, the water's lips
rippled trembling kisses on my thighs,
and we suddenly collapsed, intoxicated, gratified,
both sinners, my body and the spring's soul.




Sin


I have sinned a rapturous sin
in a warm enflamed embrace,
sinned in a pair of vindictive arms,
arms violent and ablaze.

In that quiet vacant dark
I looked into his mystic eyes,
found such longing that my heart
fluttered impatient in my breast.

In that quiet vacant dark
I sat beside him punch-drunk,
his lips released desire on mine,
grief unclenched my crazy heart.

I poured in his ears lyrics of love:
O my life, my love it's you I want.
Life-giving arms, it's you I crave.
Crazed lover, for you I thirst.

Lust enflamed his eyes,
red wine trembled in the cup,
my body, naked and drunk,
quivered softly on his breast.

I have sinned a rapturous sin
beside a body quivering and spent,
I do not know what I did O God,
in that quiet vacant dark.

"For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad's last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems. Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia's Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America's Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions."

from the foreword by Alicia Ostriker
SIN
selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by Sholeh Wolpe
(Arkansas)

Traveling to Tabriz in her native Iran Forugh Farrokhzad made a film, now considered a classic, showcasing Iranians affected by leprosy. The House is Black appeared in 1962. While shooting the film, she became attached to the child of two lepers. She adopted the boy, Hossein Mansouri, and brought him home to live with her in her mother's house.

In the late afternoon on February 13, 1962 Forugh Farrokhzad was killed in an accident while driving her jeep attempting to avoid a school bus. She was 32.

dangerousminds.net

EARTH ~

The best a writer writes is beautiful

Forget the mad and dutiful.


IAN HAMILTON FINLAY























































corbisimages.com : IHF smile
poem
blogs.guardian.co.uk : little sparta
garden ~ little sparta
poem
littlesparta.co.uk : IHF sailboat
'for the temples of the greeks...'
esferapublica.org : little sparta
poem
edinphoto.org.uk : IHF boat

GO TO: http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/

EARTH ~

APPROACH


I’ve only been away one day

But already between the width

Of the stone wall gate

Spans the thinnest first strand of

A spider’s web, floating there

As the river fog this morning

In the valley — well enough to

Stoop beneath it,

Cause no harm.







© Bob Arnold
from Where Rivers Meet
(Mad River Press)


photo & stonework © bob arnold

EARTH ~

POEM: pomegrante / fruit of brides



pomegranate
fruit of brides


melon
fruit of marriages


concentric fruit
hard-soft fruit
fruit of seeding & dying in union


I knew a man whom death was mushing
who liked nothing better than a melon


choosing or eating
he stroked the rumps
sounded them with his finger


melons & melons
were carried in the sun
before his bones turned slush
carried each like a babe
wrapped in papers to keep cool


& ate we ate
salt nubbles
juice on wood
swimming with flies in the stain
casting cool rind to patient dogs


careful
don't drop the baby


the old dog
waddles off
tusks of rind
from his jaw


pomegranate
fruit of brides





PAMELA MILLWARD
from The Route of the Phoebe Snow
(Coyote 1966)

PAMELA MILLWARD WAS FIRST SEEN IN COYOTE'S JOURNAL (SPEAKING FOR MYSELF), AND LATER IN HER NOVEL MOTHER (FOUR SEASONS FOUNDATION).

REASON ~

Lanny Friedlander

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/us/07friedlander.html?ref=obituaries









reason.com

EARTH ~

Mary McCaslin

When I fell in love with you know who, there was no one we played more in our cabin in the woods, besides Townes Van Zandt, than Mary McCaslin. Old record player. Repeatedly. And I believe we wore through both our separate albums of Way Out West and so bought one more out of the dollar bin. And years later when our son Carson was born, we bought him a copy.


No man should go on living without the young voice of Mary McCaslin rushing through his veins.


She was completely outside Nashville, recorded in the sticks of Vermont, born in the midwest but with a Pike's Peak knowledge of the old west. More than just the history, places, events and people; she put you there.


Mary McCaslin still tours and plays. Thirty years ago in Seattle walking with a friend on a barren side street we saw a marquee for Mary McCaslin with her then companion Jim Ringer. Their duets rival anyone's.


We never saw them together. We heard Ringer long ago in Vermont, a wee bit inebriated on stage and making fun of his dobro player (who played fine). And then we caught McCaslin years and years later on a wet night in a college town cafe, and miraculously here MM was passing through.


Her first album Way Out West remains eerily stark yet rippling with passions, and absolutely untouched.


Here we share a terrific Marty Robbins song from her album Prairie in the Sky
done all Mary ~

"my love" from the album Prairie in the Sky
philo records

PRICELESS ~

memerial.net/2335-anything-else

GERONIMO ~

democracy now

EARTH ~

Hettie Jones

Hard Drive



Saturday the stuffed bears were up again
over the Major Deegan
dancing in plastic along the bridge rail
under a sky half misty, half blue
and there were white clouds
blowing in from the west


which would have been enough
for one used to pleasure
in small doses


But then later, at sunset
driving north along the Saw Mill
in a high wind, with clouds big and drifting
above the road like animals
proud of their pink underbellies,
in a moment of intense light
I saw an Edward Hopper house,
at once so exquisitely light and dark
that I cried, all the way up Route 22
those uncontrollable tears
"as though the body were crying"


and so young women
here's the dilemma


itself the solution:


I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction





from Drive
(Hanging Loose Press, 1998)

HETTIE JONES HAS BEEN POET, TEACHER (SCHOOLS & PRISONS), EDITOR, PUBLISHER. MOTHER, LOVER LONGER THAN MOST CAN REMEMBER. DRIVE IS HER FIRST FULL COLLECTION OF POEMS AND HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES IS HER MEMOIR. HER MANY BOOKS FOR CHILDREN ARE VERY WELL KNOWN.




photo : nymag.com

EARTH ~

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

As we have seen, Céline favored no class. He felt politicians misused their power, the wealthy exploited the system, intellectuals became lost in obscurantism, the bourgeois sought only to become wealthy. Despite his basic pity for the poor, they did not escape his censure for they were human, that is to say both ignorant and abject. He found the masses to be galley slaves, good for lashings and sweat. We are the minions of good King Wretchedness. "Against the abomination of living in poverty, we must, let's admit it, it's our duty, become drunk with something, wine, the cheap kind, masturbation or movies." At least that would offer a bit of the "delirium of the soul" Céline described in his novels and perhaps felt in his life. Out of all the dreams and miracles we can choose those that best "warm our soul."


Céline felt traditional moral and religious values were suspect; people were misled by prudish, deluded by false promises, invalid hopes and habits. He felt, for instance, as Almeras noted, physical sexuality was not obscene, but the concept of "love foreverness" was both an obscenity and a lie. It was his painfully human task to strip man's mask from his comfortable illusions, to speak out with vigor and clarity. He used one favorite image to describe his role in life, as the lead husky for an Arctic dog sled. Upon his sharpness of eye, his instinct for danger — a snow covered crevice, thin ice, a potential avalanche — rested the safety of all. His baying, loud and prompt, gave the warning note. In similar fashion Céline the writer warned of poverty, impending war, an Apocalypse, not with a murmur or a "by the way" (no equivocal would suffice), but with a howl to shatter the welkin: clear and meaning, heard by all, fulfilling his role as guide and crier.


Céline seemed to enjoy antagonizing his readers. After all, such an attitude aroused the public and sold books. Perhaps that was the price he was willing to pay. But not only did it sell books, it stirred up the country and impelled critics to offer their condemnation or to risk their approval of this rigorously independent writer, this literary anarchist. Many responded, each in his own way. Some found the author boring, obscene, immoral; others found him absorbing, refreshing, honest. To a few critics he was a mixture of all. He was compared to Swift as a parodist, to Zola as an observer, to Artaud, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Kafka, and the surrealists for defining himself through his style, to Pascal for his vision of solitude, to Rabelais for his boisterousness — albeit black rather than jovial. His style was described alternately as a breath of fresh air, a rancid effluvium, a fresco of satire. It was at once mean and gross with flashes of dignity, cynically sincere, a net in which human emotions were caught, an appropriate form with which to discuss the stench of human wretchedness. Impoverished in syntax, it was a rejection of formalism. "Not till Céline arrived," observed Marcel Ayme, "did we notice that French grammar was wearing a high collar, heavily starched." Both Céline's style and his person were " of the people."


For his pessimism, Hayman called him "the black magician of hilarity and rage," and P. H. Simon wrote that Céline would not "sugar-coat the pill." His world lived in abject wretchedness, Fowlie feels Céline was first to announce "the exclusive theme in contemporary literature: the absurdity of human life." Céline's humor reflected its source: Tyczka described his comedy as "a sadistic raillery of ugliness and decay," Tanguy calls him "a wolf of black humor, a catharsis for our time," and Godard sees him as moving from gag to satire to black humor, able to "laugh at the intolerable." In the same vein, Vitoux claims that Céline's words are to the wretchedness he describes as a remedy is to disease. His comedy, though rooted in despair, is irrepressible, outrageous, truculent, brutal, honest and cathartic.


These were the qualities that heavily influenced that course of literature in the twentieth century: despair, absurdity and the need for a new morality. Many writers were directly affected by Céline and acknowledged this indebtedness in their writing. Among them were Sartre, Queneau, Nimier, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs and the Beat Generation. In France a large number of writers tried to imitate Céline's seemingly effortless style in order "to make a buck." As he put it, but discovered the task was next to impossible. A slavish imitation of his style was inevitably superficial, A few such as Renzo Bianchini showed similar passions and moods, but even they fell short of matching his gueule. The power of oral language that was uniquely Céline's.

~ Stanford Luce, from the introduction to Conversations with Professor Y
( Dalkey Archive, 2006 )

EARTH ~

James Laughlin

WHERE IS THE COUNTRY



We were always searching for

That happy country we read about

In books when we were young?

Once we thought we'd found it,

And for a time we visited there,

But then we knew we'd been deceived;

It was not the dreamed-of country.

Or had we just deceived ourselves?

In making the choice of each other

Had we destroyed the happy land?







from Phantoms
(Aperture 1994)

James Laughlin, poet, often blended the spirit of the Latin poets with his own knack for colloquial speech, was the publisher of New Directions books since 1936. A delightful man of letters in his many faceted memoirs ~ often published as essays and autobiography ~ he may be best known outside of publishing for his lyrical and candid love poems.



photo:new directions

EARTH ~

Today, even the very best, are only working for themselves. They pal with those that they recognize in themselves, publish cronies, invite what appeals to themselves. Zero wonder. Zero chance. Zero invention, and it shows everywhere. Obama still shows at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night he can ridicule with decency and include himself in an unflattering portrait. And at the very same hour, know Bin Laden has been targeted and is about to be snuffed out. Navy Seals. Head shot. We live in systematic murder. Ordered by the President of the United States, the guy joking. And a few days before all of this, he was being insulted left and right by high powered clowns with a feeding-frenzy media attention. Racists every one of them; and still the man laughs, orders a killing, orders the burial of the killing in the North Arabian Sea. Yes? No? Maybe? Who cares? In the sphere of the usual day now: jobs, travel, debt, sorrow, loss, indifference; a simple bird call might shatter your spine. No novelist, except maybe Burroughs, had this blueprint down before today with quite the same gristle and devil may care. And brilliant as he was, it's ugly after all. Merely genius darkly philosophizing. Lots and lots and lots of angry men out there. Before any of that, was floral or even ice, morning and night, planetary, and a pair of eyes each day awakening.





barred owl, western USA

MAY DAY ~

"...I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?"

BIX BEIDERBECKE

CHEERS TO MAY DAY FOR EVERYONE!

24 degrees this morning at 6AM., and DSL is down. I see Sweetheart out in red parka with the field and Cutie Pie transfixed, as always, with moving water. We've had moving water everywhere this spring around the world. In many places deeply tragic, even murderous. Here it's snow melt, spring declaring, woodlands running streams. We've been hiking over water and in with water every day on our hikes in the woodlot. For two months in our roads of travel. The cord of cut or split maple I thought we'd have carried down by hand from the woodlot come April Fool's wasn't kidding. We're still bringing it home in canvas sacks on May Day. Good thing too with the weather holding a chilled edge. By noon some days have us in its warm embrace.




photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Others have recorded this song (Tom Russell, Dave Alvin), but for my ear, none better than the late Jim Ringer. He had the voice and the heart and the beat up face to bring it across like no one else. An Arkansas native, raised mainly in the farm valleys of California, a roustabout, Jim Ringer passed away at age 56 on St. Patrick's Day 1992.