PHANTOMS ~

Bureau of Investigative Journalism


http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/04/02/americas-new-data-centre-makes-uk-surveillance-plans-seem-petty/

2 April 2012

America’s New Data Center Makes UK Surveillance Plans Seem Petty
Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors in Utah
by Alice Ross

In the small town of Bluffdale in the Utah desert, the US government is halfway to completing a gargantuan complex designed to store and trawl through billions of phone calls, emails, and other global communications. As the UK government reveals its own plans to carry out mass surveillance, a lengthy piece in May’s Wired ( http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/05/features/the-black-box?page=all) reveals the full extent of the US’s ambitions to capture and spy on almost everything that is said online or on the phone.

The Utah Data Center is the new hub in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) network of surveillance centers: a sprawling $2bn (£1.25bn) complex that takes the US one step closer to ‘total information awareness’.

The center is so big it’s hard to get your head around the figures quoted in the article. Ten thousand builders are working on it. It will use an estimated $40m of electricity every year, according to one estimate. Much of this will be spent powering four 2,300 sq m halls filled with servers capable of storing a truly enormous amount of data – Wired mentions Pentagon ambitions to store yottabytes of data (septillion bytes of data).

The center will ‘intercept, decipher, analyze and store vast amounts of the world’s communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign and domestic networks,’ Wired reporter James Bamford says. Even the most apparently insignificant scraps of data will be captured and stored – in case they later become important: ‘private emails, mobile phone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails – travel itineraries, purchases and other digital “pocket litter”‘, Bamford adds.

But the Utah Data Center has another, more secret purpose: cracking cryptoanalysis to allow the US security agencies to read foreign diplomatic and military communications, as well as confidential financial or personal messages, scouring the ‘deep web’ of password-protected and otherwise encrypted information.

The Bluffdale project is the next step in the rapid escalation of the NSA’s surveillance powers, and will cement its position as the ‘largest, most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created’, as Bamford points out.

And as with the UK government’s plans to monitor email and other communications, announced this weekend, much of the Utah Data Center’s phenomenal surveillance capability is directed at US citizens. The US government has installed monitoring rooms in the facilities of US telecommunications companies, Wired reports, enabling it to monitor emails and phone calls with ease – the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ program that caused outcry when it surfaced.

Former NSA official William Binney explains to Wired how the NSA’s ‘warrantless wiretapping’ domestic surveillance program may have been larger than ever reported at the time: he helped design the systems, and explains that the US had a choice over where it placed the surveillance equipment.

By installing it at the landing points where internet cables enter the country, the NSA could have limited interception to foreign communications only. That wasn’t what the US decided to do: instead, it built intercept stations within the US, allowing it to access the bulk of domestic traffic too. Binney says the program could tap 1.5 billion calls a day.

And that’s what the government is capable of before the Utah Data Center comes online: the massive codebreaking power and storage that the Bluffdale project adds will take the NSA’s surveillance capability to staggering new levels.

As Bamford points out, although this level of surveillance is often justified as being essential for fighting counterterrorism, the NSA was unaware of both the ‘underpants bomber’ in 2009 and the Times Square bomber in 2010. In both those cases, incompetence on the would-be attackers’ parts, rather than the sophisticated surveillance network, prevented serious attacks.

Bamford, who is also the author of a book on the NSA, lays out a shadowy, complex world in impressively clear and detailed terms. Even the complex, techy aspects of the project are digestible – although this sheer accessibility makes it hard to stave off the feeling of powerlessness and paranoia that shadowy forces could, if they chose, learn so much about your life.

He uses the Utah Data Center as a route into explaining the vast intelligence infrastructure that allows the NSA to monitor everything from walkie-talkie messages in foreign countries to private government communications of both allied and enemy nations. Bamford also outlines the supercomputers being built by the NSA to boost its codebreaking powers.

It certainly doesn’t make for soothing reading – but it’s the kind of investigation Wired can do better than anybody else, and it’s a useful reminder that even before the UK government rolls out its latest surveillance program, we are all being watched already.

# # #

thanks to Geoffrey Gardner
photo © bob arnold

HISTORICAL FIGURES ~

GEORGE WASHINGTON
IN VERMONT
APRIL 2, 2012

photo & construct © bob arnold

HOMEMADE POEMS ~

LORINE NIEDECKER

"In 1963, Lorine Niedecker married Al Millen, a house painter. The marriage surprised several of her friends, but it gave Niedecker steady companionship from day to day and allowed her to leave her cleaning job at the hospital and devote herself more fully to writing. In October of 1964, having no book prospects on the horizon for the poems she'd written during the first year of her marriage, Niedecker took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems inscribed into the pages of a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she had covered in wrapping paper. She carefully handwrote the small poems in blue-inked cursive, placing each one on its own unnumbered sheet of paper. She then sent the book, with the wry title Homemade Poems and her name inscribed on the cover, to her friend (Cid) Corman, who was living in Japan at the time. A few months later, she constructed two more renditions of the book, which she sent to poet Louis Zukofsky in New York and Jonathan Williams, founder of the seminal Jargon Press. The titles of these latter two books were transformed from Homemade Poems to Handmade Poems.


By turns, the small poems in this three-edition self-publication move through a sprawling array of modes. Niedecker makes room here for — to name only the several categories that spring to mind — deft, vivid details from daily life; excerpts of intimate colloquial speech; sober evocations of global violence; abstracted sound-mosaics; spare "portraits" of historical figures; and found poems pulled from friends' letters (Ian Hamilton Finlay and Louis Zukofsky, "LZ")."


. . .


"My zeal for textual knowledge in this case drove me to seek out Homemade Poems in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, where the book is held as part of Cid Corman's papers. Encountering the book that day — spending time reading its poems in just the form Niedecker had so deliberately inscribed and arranged then — immediately stirred in me a conviction that the textural production itself, in some form or version, deserved a much wider readership, a life outside of the archive."


. . .


"As editor for this project, my central objective has been to create an accurate, commensurate reading edition of Homemade Poems that allows the work to be experienced roughly as Niedecker first gave to it. However well poetry is designed and printed, anthologies of all kinds necessarily have a way of superseding or drowning out the sort of reading experience described above. The very job of any massive, unified anthology is to subsume the smaller, heterogeneous works that are fed into it. In a case like Homemade Poems, this effect is even more pronounced: its singular materiality and text-deployment set it utterly apart from any sort of printed, standardized, mass-produced version."

sharing excerpts from the editor John Harkey's "Usable Dimensions: An Afterword", a pamphlet insert to Homemade Poems.

Some time soon Homemade Poems will be available from
"The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative"
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10016-4309.



And from us here at Longhouse


Longhouse has also published: Lorine Niedecker, A Cooking Book
another of Lorine Niedecker's rare handmade books
coordinated and prepared by Cid Corman & Bob Arnold ~

link to our Lorine Niedecker publications here

film © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

KURT VONNEGUT

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

(Source: Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via Everything was Vonnegut.)

~

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html?kilgore





BOOK AND RECORD BURNING, MONTICELLO, MINNESOTA
1982

EARTH ~

And now what will become of us, without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of a solution.
C.P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians

We were young when we rode out on the long journey;
Now it seems those grandchildren of ours are riding horses.
We were few when we rode forth on that hard journey;
Now we're called a Great Caravan that left tracks in its wastelands.
The tracks remain out in the wastes, in the valleys and mountain passes, and
There are very many heroes left graveless in the desert.
Do not say graveless: In the tamarisk-reddened wilderness, at
Dawn, in the spring, our graves are covered with rose-blossoms.
Our tracks remain, our dreams remain, everything remains, far away, yet
Even if the wind blows, or the sands shift, they will never be covered, our tracks.
And the caravan will never stop along the way, though our horses are very thin;
One way or another these tracks will be found someday, by our grandchildren;

Or, our great-grandchildren.
~Abdurehim Otkur, Tracks

LIFE IS GOOD ~

Two new books I (and others) have waited decades for.

Waited even before they were written ~ that good!

You'd rather read, than sleep, with either of these books ~ that good!

You're happy to have one lamp, or sunshine by a window with these books.

Ideal for train rides, long long train rides. I've done them. Both books will take you across.

Both writers died too young. Damn!

Both books were published by The Library of America. I like that place. Now.

UPS delivered my books ~ never left the woods!

UPS are corporate devils and deliver books and other things = you weigh the scales.

There is absolutely next to nothing on television but the TCM channel, even poor IFC has commercials. So what is your excuse? Two books. Two fisted hams. Two guns. Twin peaks. Double barrel. Curl up and read.

Do men curl up and read? Women couldn't look better than curled up with a book.

Done scribbling ~ I'm reading.

[ BA ]

I remember wondering why, if Jesus could cure sick people, why He didn't cure all sick people.


I remember when twins dressed alike.


I remember when girls wore cardigan sweaters backwards.


I remember being shown to my seat with a flashlight.


I remember changing my name to Bo Jainard for about one week.


from "I Remember" by Joe Brainard






The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,
(beautifully) edited by Ron Padgett

David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s,
edited by Robert Polito

(The Library of America 2012)








It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The jury decided he was guilty. The judge handed him a life sentence and he was taken to San Quentin.

~ David Goodis
from Dark Passage





It really is beautiful, Vermont. Makes so much sense to live
here. (If only life made so much sense.) But it doesn't.

~ Joe Brainard
from "Wednesday, July 7th, 1971
(A Greyhound Bus Trip)"



Joe Brainard, like Lorine Niedecker, is brilliant on first blush, and Emily Dickinson, beyond brilliant. Frank O' Hara. There's an honesty and vulnerably very few could live with themselves by. Nothing fragile about it at all, just asking to bottle sunrise. Can't do. One won't find this sort of writing anywhere else in the world: it comes from the underpinnings of an Empire. Where 'little people' speak remarkably.

I read Joe B. until late into the night on his one man show bus trips from NYC to Vermont where he was lover with Kenward Elmslie and spent the summers here in the state. Elmslie is a grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, and a somewhat intriguing poet, dramatist and publisher. Joe was a gay wunderkind Huck Finn, gifting his art work to all poets and their publications, and forever wondering alive (scribbler into notebooks) what made himself tick. An incredible presence in this book.

Goodis could become the greatest of them all crime writers — such a depressing and low life. Breakdowns, living back and forth with his parents, failed relationships, some Hollywood time and money and minor fame, the French grabbing after him (Truffaut) and of course the early demise. Very few photographs of him, or 12 variations on the one. His main prose characters (male) are rinsed out and hung out to dry. This one volume from The Library of America will be an instant classic.

[BA]



book photos © bob arnold
bottom photo: Joe Brainard's studio

EARTH ~

THE CREEPY CRAWL



There's a stink in the old farmhouse
Maybe a dead squirrel or rat or could it be a cat?


We've a hot water kettle on the woodstove
With apples and cinnamon


Nutmeg
Be patient with it


It takes a long time for a life to disappear

"steady chipmunk"

photo © bob arnold

FEAST OF SNAKES ~

Harry Crews
June 7, 1935 ~ March 28, 2012










http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1231


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/books/harry-crews-writer-of-dark-fiction-is-dead-at-76.html

EARTH ~

Salvatore Quasimodo

(1901-1968)

MARCH WIND (AFTER QUASIMODO)



I will know nothing of my life but its mysteries,
the dead cycles of the breath and sap.


I shall not know whom I loved, or love
now that in the random winds of March


I am nothing but my limbs. I fall
into myself, and the years numbered in me.


The thin blossom is already streaming from my boughs.
I watch the pure calm of its only flight.


trans. Don Paterson

POET ~

Adrienne Rich

(May 16, 1929 ~ March 27, 2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?hp

Nonfiction books

• Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton. 1976. ISBN 978-0-393-31284-3.
• On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, 1979
• Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985, 1986 (Includes the noted essay: "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence")
• What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993
• Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations. W.W. Norton. 2001. ISBN 978-0-393-05045-5.
• Poetry and Commitment: An Essay, 2007
• A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997–2008, 2009
• 
  

Poetry collections

• A Change of World. Yale University Press. 1951.
• The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems. Harper. 1955.
• Snapshots of a daughter-in-law: poems, 1954-1962. Harper & Row. 1963.
• Necessities of life: poems, 1962-1965. W.W. Norton. 1966.
• Selected Poems. Chatto & Hogarth P Windus. 1967.
• Leaflets. W.W. Norton. 1969. ISBN 978-0-03-930419-5.
• The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. Norton. 1971.
• Diving into the Wreck. W.W. Norton. 1973. ISBN 978-0-393-31163-1.
• Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. Norton. 1975. ISBN 978-0-393-04392-1.
• Twenty-one Love Poems. Effie's Press. 1976.
• The Dream of a Common Language. Norton. 1978. ISBN 978-0-393-04502-4.
• A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far: Poems 1978-1981. W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated. 1982. ISBN 978-0-393-31037-5. (reprint 1993)
• Sources. Heyeck Press. 1983.
• The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated. 1984. ISBN 978-0-393-31075-7.
• Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems. Norton. 1986. ISBN 978-0-393-02318-3.
• Time’s Power: Poems, 1985-1988. Norton. 1989. ISBN 978-0-393-02677-1.
• An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. Norton. 1991. ISBN 978-0-393-03069-3.
• Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970. W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated. 1993. ISBN 978-0-393-31385-7.
• Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995. W.W. Norton. 1995. ISBN 978-0-393-03868-2.
• Selected poems, 1950-1995. Salmon Pub.. 1996. ISBN 978-1-897648-78-0.
• Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998. Norton. 1999. ISBN 978-0-393-04682-3.
• Fox: Poems 1998-2000. W W Norton & Co Inc. 2001. ISBN 978-0-393-32377-1. (reprint 2003)
• The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000-2004. W. W. Norton & Co.. 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-32755-7.
• Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006. 2007. ISBN 978-0-393-06565-7.
• Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010. 2010. ISBN 0-393-07967-8.

WAIT

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent hell’s noise

in your nostrils crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why

on earth

they never told you

EARTH ~

Do you know we still have our Christmas tree up? It's the one we moved outdoors after the Christmas and New Year holiday. Balsam. Cut on our land. It has barely lost any needles. Stood in a cask of water that became ice that became water (last week when it reached 80 degrees) and is now blowing down in the returned late March winds no matter how many times we pick it up to stand again. Live this long as a cut tree, defying death and persevering with small Christmas lights on you, and yes we begin to treat you as if you are a small, green figure of a person. We pick you up every time you fall.


Same as these hemlock 4 x 4 timbers. Found when we returned last Saturday after a day of errands in a few towns. Came up the bumpity-bump-bump road south along the river, mud rutted, mud flattened, not so bad at all as decades of other times this road this time of year was always mud hellish. Came up the dirt hill drive to home and there in the dooryard, as if waiting (they are) the half dozen hemlock timbers. Blonde and very heavy. They "smell" to anyone who doesn't know lumber, fresh cut. The timbers were a tree just a few hours earlier. A tree I cut down and set to the side of the road after Hurricane Irene. A friend with a tractor and willpower was all up for my offer when I said,


"How about you take the logs and saw them out at your place? We'll split the lumber 50-50." Big shouldered he nodded with a smile and we both liked that idea. Mountains move when more than two smile and like an idea. Tractor away up the road last Fall the friend went. I knew I wouldn't see him or the timbers until spring. So he was right on time.


But still, seeing the timbers stacked so nicely and never called for, was a nice surprise.

photo © bob arnold

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

photo © bob arnold



__________________________________

Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

Works

[edit] Fiction

• Tatlin!: Six Stories (Scribner's, 1974) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories (University of Chicago Press, 1979) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• Eclogues: Eight Stories (North Point Press, 1981) (two stories illustrated by Roy Behrens)
• Trois Caprices (The Pace Trust, 1981) (three stories later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• The Bowmen of Shu (The Grenfell Press, 1984) (limited ed., collected in Apples and Pears)
• Apples and Pears and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1984) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• The Bicycle Rider (Red Ozier Press, 1985) (limited ed., later collected—in a different version—in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• Jonah: A Story (Nadja Press, 1986) (limited ed., later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories (North Point Press, 1987)
• The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers (North Point Press, 1990)
• The Lark (Dim Gray Bar Press, 1993) (limited ed., illustrated by Davenport)
• A Table of Green Fields: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1993)
• The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1996)
• Twelve Stories (Counterpoint, 1997) (selections from Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers)
• The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003) (contains seven essays [three previously uncollected] along with nineteen stories [two previously uncollected] and one play)
• Wo es war, soll ich werden: The Restored Original Text (Finial Press, 2004) (limited ed.) [1]

[edit] Translations

• Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (University of California Press, 1964)
• Sappho: Songs and Fragments (University of Michigan Press, 1965)
• Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979)
• The Mimes of Herondas (Grey Fox Press, 1981)
• Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians (The Pace Trust, 1983) (from Boris de Rachewiltz's Massime degli antichi egiziani, 1954)
• Anakreon (The University of Alabama/ Parallel Editions, 1991)
• Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets (University of California Press, 1980) (adds Alkman to Carmina Archilochi and Sappho: Songs and Fragments)
• The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus (Counterpoint, 1996) (with Benjamin Urrutia)
• 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995) (revises and collects the texts—but none of Davenport's drawings—from Carmina Archilochi, Sappho: Songs and Fragments, Herakleitos and Diogenes, The Mimes of Herondas, Anakreon, and Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman)

[edit] Poetry

• Cydonia Florentia (The Lowell-Adams House Printers/Laurence Scott, 1966)
• Flowers and Leaves: Poema vel Sonata, Carmina Autumni Primaeque Veris Transformationem (Nantahala Foundation/Jonathan Williams, 1966; Bamberger Books, 1991) (illustrated by Davenport)
• The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (Jordan Davies, 1982)
• Goldfinch Thistle Star (Red Ozier Press, 1983) (illustrated by Lachlan Stewart)
• Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations, 1950–1980 (North Point Press, 1986) (includes most of Flowers and Leaves, along with translations of six of the "7 Greeks" and of Rainer Maria Rilke and Harold Schimmel)

[edit] Fugitive pieces

Davenport wrote introductions or contributions to many books:

• Jack Sharpless's Presences of Mind
• Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies
• Will McBride's Coming of Age
• Paul Cadmus's The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989)
• Charles Burchfield's Charles Burchfield's Seasons
• Simon Dinnerstein's Paintings and Drawings
• Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, and God
• Jonathan Williams's Palpable Elysium, Ear in Bartram's Tree, Elite/Elate Poems, and tribute to Edward Dahlberg
• Lenard D. Moore's Forever Home
• Paul Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume 1
• Jonathan Greene's tribute to Jonathan Williams, JW/50
• Daniel Haberman's Lug of Days to Come
• Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
• James Laughlin's Man in the Wall
• Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote
• Ralph Eugene Meatyard's Father Louie and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
• Aperture's monographs on Eudora Welty's and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs
• The University of Virginia's small monograph on Lafcadio Hearn, The Art of Lafcadio Hearn (1983)
• Charles L. Rubin's collection Junk Food (1980)
• Elizabeth Turner Hutton's Americans in Paris (1921–31): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, and Alexander Calder
• Riva Castleman's Art of the Forties
• Ronald Johnson's Ark: The Foundations and Valley of Many-Colored Grasses
• O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings and Selected Stories (which he also edited)
• Davenport's own selection of Louis Agassiz's scientific writings, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz.

Some of these pieces were included in Davenport's collections of essays.

[edit] Commentary and essays

• The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press, 1963)
• Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Iliad (Educational Research Associates, 1967)
• Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Odyssey (Educational Research Associates, 1967)
• The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. (North Point Press, 1981)
• Cities on Hills: A Study of I – XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos (UMI Research, 1983)
• Charles Burchfield's Seasons (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994)
• The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (Rizzoli, 1989)
• Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays (North Point Press, 1987)
• A Balthus Notebook (The Ecco Press, 1989)
• The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Counterpoint, 1996)
• Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Counterpoint, 1998)

[edit] Paintings and drawings

• A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport, with an essay by Erik Anderson Reece (New Directions, 1996)
• 50 Drawings (Dim Gray Bar Press, 1996) (limited ed.) Introduction by Davenport gives an account of the role drawing and painting played in his life.
• Joan Crane's Davenport bibliography (see below) includes a 25-page insert of reproductions that suggest the range of his drawing styles.
• Two books by Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters and The Stoic Comedians, include Davenport's crosshatched crow quill and ink work, ten full-page drawings in each.

[edit] Letters

• A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964–1968, ed. Thomas Meyer (Green Shade, 2004). Selected correspondence with Jonathan Williams
• Fragments from a Correspondence, ed. Nicholas Kilmer (ARION, Winter 2006, 89–129)
• Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, ed. W. C. Bamberger (W. W. Norton, 2007)

via wikipedia

A POEM BEFORE
(Bedtime) ~

I'm off to the river on a horse,
who'll halt a little when I think a little.

SANDRO PENNA
(Perugia 1906- Rome 1977)
trans. Blake Robinson



"maple grain"
photo © susan arnold

EARTH ~

The Uros people live in small floating islands in the bay of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in south-eastern Peru. The 60 islands are home to about 1,000 people and are made out of the reeds that grow in abundance in the shallow waters

photo : mattia cabitza
the guardian (u.k.)

































The Uros are a pre-Incan people who live on forty-two self-fashioned floating islands in Lake Titicaca Puno, Peru and Bolivia. They form three main groups: Uru-Chipayas, Uru-Muratos and the Uru-Iruitos. The latter are still located on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca and Desaguadero River.

The Uros use bundles of dried totora reeds to make reed boats (balsas mats), and to make the islands themselves.[1]

The Uros islands at 3810 meters above sea level are just five kilometers west from Puno port.[2] Around 2,000 descendants of the Uros were counted in the 1997 census,[3] although only a few hundred still live on and maintain the islands; most have moved to the mainland. The Uros also bury their dead on the mainland in special cemeteries.

The Uros do not reject modern technology: some boats have motors, some houses have solar panels to run appliances such as televisions, and the main island is home to an Uros-run FM radio station, which plays music for several hours a day.

Early schooling is done on several islands, including a traditional school and a school run by a Christian church. Older children and university students attend school on the mainland, often in nearby Puno.

from Wikipedia