Cowboy Jack Clement April 5, 1931 ~ August 8, 2013
One colossal loss to music, planet earth, stars above, and all things that are miserable about living put into many terrific and often joyous songs. This man did it. One more of the ones we have lost from the original American frontier.
“I’ve got a bunch of people who say I’m a genius,” Mr. Clement, known to
everyone in Nashville and beyond as Cowboy Jack, once said. “That don’t
make me a genius. But you’ve got to be pretty smart to get all them
people to say that on cue.”
Be the first kid on your block to get yourself a copy of this classic in modern poetry.
You may have been the first kid on your block to have the original editions forty or so years ago, and lucky you if you still own either the cloth or softcover copies.
This is the new, refurbished edition with all three volumes included and key appreciations added.
Price and shipment from the U.K., is entirely fair.
This 16-year-old male polar bear died of starvation resulting from the
lack of ice on which to hunt seals. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Global
Warming Images
Don't take my word for it — I grew up on Neil Young, Art Pepper and Woody Guthrie — and although Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace may not be quite the masterpiece (when he finally finishes writing his memoirs: he seems to be threatening many books) as these two other guys' classic autobiographies, it's as fine-feathered as Dylan's Chronicles volume one, and almost Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire. Almost. Helm's is trimmer, leaner, spookier, biting. Neil Young is a horse that runs to greet you at the fence.
If you told me he dictated the 500 page book as he tooled around in one of his Cadillacs, I'd say, "Makes sense." The book reads that way. If you grew up in the 60s and aren't bitter (not many left) and are interested in the 60s (some youngsters are), you might not be able to put the book down. I only do because eventually I have to get some sleep. And do some work.
Yes, Neil Young is wealthy, lives on a ranch he's owned since the early 70s on the Pacific coast, has been married three times and seems quite content with his third wife Pegi. One can feel this throughout the book and when watching them on stage performing. Young also bows with grace to his two previous wives, even some of his girlfriends, adores his children, has come to love many of his old musician friends as he's faced his own mortality, and no matter the riches and fame and drugs and serious medical seizures that have plagued him throughout his career (starting when he was cutting "After the Gold Rush" — at least — did any of us know? No.) his childhood, parents, siblings and extended family out of Canada are as close to him now as they have ever been. I believe it's the wide berth of Canada in the center of all his best songs, edged with an American dream broken, glued back, and broken again.
He broke a toe, and seems to be in Hawaii recuperating, songless, and trying to etch out this memoir. Much of the text reads as remembrance and likewise Live! talking-right-at-us from across the room, or in the driver's seat, out of the corner of the mouth, long sideburns. Young's a train lover, big cars and vintage trucks connoisseur, admitted materialistic fella, family man, and storyteller spinning out tales, vignettes, appraisals, strong opinions about the music industry (more power to him), and portraits. Some guys get all the breaks. More power to him. Power given to us.
The ultimate rich hippie, but with hard work, and dreams. Plus the many songs that penetrate. . .let's not forget. Long may he (we) run.
__________________________________
Waging Heavy Peace Neil Young Penguin/Plume/Blue Rider, 2012
Our good friend Josh Burkett is heading over to the United Kingdom to play some shows and is asking anyone to lend a hand in support to the Josh-cause.
Here are the dates so far scheduled for Josh. If you're close by, you might well want to scuttle down or around or in for a show or two. Josh is the author of a Longhouse booklet published last year showcasing some of his travel journals on the road from another concert tour. See here:
Aug 13th CAFE OTO, LONDON(w/Jon Collin & Eric Arn) 14th KRAAK, MANCHESTER(w/Jon Collin & more) 15th V TONGUE, GLASGOW(w/Jon Collin) 17-18th WOOLF FEST, WILTSHIRE(w/Alisa Sufit & more) 19th ULTRA E Space ANTWERP(w/Byron Coley & Head Of Wantastiquet) 20th GOLD POODLE HAMBURG(w/Ron Schneiderman & Head Of Wantastiquet) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ JB: " better exemplifies the original free-folk impulse than any of his more celebrated contemporaries. And while he may not be doing four page fashion spreads in 'underground' style bibles, he remains *a* keeper of the flame"- David Keenan Wire Magazine/Volcanic Tongue . Thou never playing a show in the UK before, Burkett has been making solo lps in the states for 20+ years. He has also played in the following groups/collectives: Vermonster, Tower Recordings, Shrinnirs, Parrotprobe, Borb, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Wormdoom, & Tarp... & has played solo sets on bills with folks like: Charalambides, Jack Rose, Chris Thompson, Ed Askew, Michael Chapman, Cherry Blossoms, Steve Gunn, John Fahey, Corsano/Flaherty, Daniel Higgs, Red Favourite, Sun City Girls, Ralph White, Michael Hurley, Son Of Earth, Bobb Trimble, Fursaxa, Thurston Moore, Circle, George Stavis, Michael Yonkers, Dredd Foole & more. "Joshua Burkett is one of the rock’s of the New England rock underground. He got his start in the Bimbo Shrineheads at just 16 years old, playing bass and saxophone. Burkett later played sax and served as cover artist for Vermonster, Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar’s outlet before Major Stars. Beginning in the mid 1990s, he released solo material on his own Feather One’s Nest label, including the masterpiece Gold Cosmos, which featured both Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and Pat Gubler of P.G. Six. Spirit of Orr Records recently reissued Owls Leaves Rustling, Burkett’s 1995 solo debut, along with testimonies from Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano and Wolf Eyes’ John Olson." - Dusted Magazine
It is written on the walls of the mountain though I have not seen it: I Love You Fernando. Everytime a departure, another eye not seen again, to make it easier; But it must come from inside this knowledge that I will live though you are not with me, here where I can see you. Riding this broken road away, more alone than even the beginning, when you were Gone. Suddenly, & I clung to you, sending messages direct to your heart where we are one & you must receive these goodmornings to the clouds this oneminded unrelenting reach to you love & you only leaned over abysses Holding onto pain : Let time not change me! hanging into death — til now I have let flow a flicker in the sea & it rushed forth giving, so great is the need in the heart for healing Love the prominence love the perfect measure we, just two frail receptacles & love the transforming splendor.
So this departure also how can I tell you good-bye? Having loved another eye & leaving behind this also, I am most alone.
Why is it I travel this road, this stark of sky & a musician walks to work his hands perhaps in his pockets music animates his step, gauging his life, & go down over snows to a train I don't care about?
Still alive, & yet to learn, or I would not be here penetrating pain itself to find you, uncover what must be true that you are not here and I must know who is half my life & deep as the blood runs in me.
What length of days before I lay down & the sorrow is turned upon itself, that its depth be the source of joy and I rise, unsevered?
french alps / 1-66.
Janine's passionate poem to her husband, the painter Fernando Vega, who would die suddenly in Spain in 1965, was written when she was twenty-four years old and published in her first book, from City Lights: Poems to Fernando (1968).
At that time, a book of poems issued by a woman from the legendary Beat household was uncommon. This untitled poem has been extracted from Janine's personal copy of the book, with her corrections and additions. See pages 22-23 for the poem — the two lines under the line "& it rushed forth giving" had been added in pen by Janine.
Please retool your own worn and much-loved copy of the book.
I Saw My Father I was walking with my father through a palm grove, I was light like a feather, my father was light, he was a cloud and in the cotton of the cloud I shut (just as in the dream) my father's eyes. London, 7-2-2002
Cloves Where is the scent of cloves coming from? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it's wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it's watered at night. Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves, she stitches together my clouds and then scatters them together in a sky like a sheet as she clasps me. Layla feels that my fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is here. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves. London, 12-20-2002
Evening By the Lake Yesterday by the lake the rain was warm, soft, like your skin after a dip in the sea. I thought of you a bit and swore right away: I have to catch the evening train! But I'm lazy, as you know, so I forgot about the train — thought of you a lot, and brought my face closer to the surface of the water, to watch how the sky's waters go home, how this evening is born.
_________________________ translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon and Peter Money Graywolf Press 2012 Nostalgia, My Enemy Saadi Youssef
Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 near Basra, Iraq. He has published more than thirty books, and is considered one of the living masters of Arabic poetry. He lives in London, England.
"Albert Camus was born in Mondovi in 1913 to a mother of Spanish origins who was both deaf and illiterate. His father died in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was barely a year old. Young Camus grew up in a three-room apartment in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers with his domineering grandmother, his silent mother, who supported the family by cleaning houses, his brother Lucien, and his uncle Etienne, a barrel maker. A grade school teacher, Louis Germain, recognized his talent and saw him through to the lycee, and after completing his under-graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Algiers, with a thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine, he turned to theater, to journalism, and to the literary career that led him to Paris, the anti-Nazi resistance, and the many books we know, until his life was cut short by a car accident in 1960, when he was forty-six years old. Long after Camus left Algeria, his writing remained imbued with his intense love of Algerian landscapes — the mountainous Kabylia, the Roman ruins of coastal Tipasa, the shining port of Algiers, and the modest blue balcony of his mother's apartment on the rue de Lyon. Those places were his wellspring."
(where we picked enough for the week — winter's crop is already stored away — and had enough saved from the picking to have a picnic supper in one corner of the orchard with food we brought with us, finding two cinder blocks discarded in the tall mowing grass and sat there and the rain had stopped in time to pick but the leaves were all wet. And later we visited Eleanor, in the village, and talked of time's past, which is timeless.)
A poem (or more) will be offered by the hour or with the day and at the very least once a week. So stay on your webbed toes. The aim is to share good hearty-to-eat poetry. This is a birdhouse size file from the larger Longhouse which has been publishing from backwoods Vermont since 1971 books, hundreds of foldout booklets, postcards, sheafs, CD, landscape art, street readings, web publication, and notes left for the milkman. Established by Bob & Susan Arnold for your pleasure. The poems, essays, films & photographs on this site are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without the author's go-ahead.
New from Bob Arnold ~ "Faraway Like The Deer's Eye" ~ Bob Arnold Faraway Like the Deer’s Eye — A Saga — FOUR BOOKS IN ONE VOLUME ~ A Poet’s Memoir // 50 Years of Longhouse & Poets // A Builder’s Life, with photo assembly // The Selected Poems of Bob Arnold // An afterword by Andrew Schelling
Longhouse Bibliography Quick Link —
Link to the Birdhouse Bibliography
Visit the Longhouse Bibliography (a press edited by Bob Arnold) ~
"Poets Who Sleep" by Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2019. 500 portraits by Bob Arnold of poets worldwide & others. Please link on image for ordering information.
Link to a Preview of Poets Who Sleep
Shared at "Dispatches from the Poetry Wars"
Heaven Lake by Bob Arnold
Available from Longhouse. Please link on the image for ordering information.
The Woodcutter Talks by Bob Arnold
Available from Longhouse. Please link on the image for ordering information. Drawing from years of poetry and also new poems, The Woodcutter Talks is Bob Arnold at his finest branching love poems with back country work poems and settlement with community, family and individual portraits. The extensive collection also showcases vintage photographs from woodcutters and woodchoppers and big-saw-pullers of old. Sweat runs down the cheeks of the mere literary and they adore one another.
Stone Hut by Bob Arnold
"Once again, my friends, this is your best book! Exquisite in design, fat enough to be a feast, pretty enough to just wade around in, but deep enough to dive into and stay with, all I can say is WOW, you guys really did it – it’s the first of its kind, a scrapbook novel that is also a how-to and a mystery -- how did he do it, and how does he make rocks balance like Thor? — Gerald Hausman" ~
Museum, An Unlikely Meditation, written by the poet Bob Arnold, is as much an unlikely novel. Visit this page for details.
Cid Corman's Of, Volumes 4 & 5 from Longhouse.
ANNOUNCING. The final volumes to Corman's opus in one book ~ of, volumes 4 & by Cid Corman. 1500 poems, 850 pages edited by Bob Arnold, now available in a limited edition from Longhouse, 2015. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information ~
'Fully a book ~
An interview with Bob Arnold on Cid Corman’s ‘of’
Janina by Janine Pommy Vega
New and available now from Longhouse ~ Janine Pommy Vega Janina Visions, Tales & Lovesongs 288 pages perfect bound packed with poems and photographs. Janine's full course album of photographs, travel journals, poems, facsimile notebooks of poems, childhood photographs, and family, Beat family, plus her unfinished memoir of Jerusalem.
Walking Woman with the Tambourine is the final book of poems by Janine Pommy Vega.
"Walking Woman with the Tambourine is the final book of poems by Janine Pommy Vega. The author completed the manuscript and left it as she wished with her executor Bob Arnold … New and available now from Longhouse ~ Poetry. 144 pages. Perfect bound softcover. Please link on the image for ordering information
New! James Koller : Selected Poems 2003-2004-2005
James Koller — Selected Poems 2003-2004-2005 Longhouse 2016, 72 pages, perfect bound. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information PLUS more from Longhouse
OPENINGS by JAMES KOLLER
Selected poems 1959 ~ 1985 edited by Bob Arnold. New and available now from Longhouse ~ 72 pages . Perfect bound softcover. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information PLUS more from Longhouse
Lorine Niedecker's A Cooking Book
A Cooking Book Lorine Niedecker Longhouse 2015 72 pages, perfect bound. Please link on the image to purchase this new title from Longhouse.
Kent Johnson's "I Once Met"
Available once again now in 2022! $25 plus shippingVisit the Birdhouse for Kent's book information :
JD Whitney's Selected Poems
J.D. Whitney ~Sweeping the Broom Shorter Selected Poems 1964-2014 from ~ Longhouse 2014. 192 pages. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information PLUS more from Longhouse
New! from Longhouse ~ Island Dreams by Gerald Hausman Please link for details & Paypal payment
ISLAND DREAMS by GERALD HAUSMAN Selected Poems 1968 ~ 2015 chosen & edited by Bob Arnold New and available now from Longhouse ~ 160 pages Perfect bound softcover. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information PLUS more from Longhouse
John Bradley's "And Thereby Everything"
L O N G H O U S E is very proud to announce a new book by John Bradley in their on going series of S C O U T book publications — other titles from the series have been by Kent Johnson, Janine Pommy Vega, James Koller, Bob Arnold and Lorine Niedecker with more in the works. An opening salvo at the front of the book by Patrick Lawler should provide ample cover for what the reader should come to expect. And Thereby Everything John Bradley Longhouse 2015 First edition only issued in softcover 208 pages, perfect bound illustrated throughout by Bob Arnold with 150 photographs
Dudley Laufman : Bull & More Bull
Visit this page for information on this new Longhouse by Dudley Kaufman (2016)
Dudley Laufman's Islandian Poems
The Islandian Poems & Fables Dudley Laufman Longhouse 2015. 72 pages, perfect bound. Please link on the image to purchase this new title from Longhouse.
Duo by Bob Arnold — New from Longhouse Please link to A Longhouse Birdhouse for more information
DUO Bird Poems by BOB ARNOLD. New and available now from Longhouse ~ 92 pages. Perfect bound softcover. Please link on the cover image for details & Paypal payment information PLUS more from Longhouse
Start With The Tree by Bob Arnold
New in 2015. Building a marriage, building a family, building a small barn out in the woodlands together as a family, as a marriage, and seeing the roof go on. Over 150 color photographs
Beautiful Days by Bob Arnold
Beautiful Days ~ new poems of living and working in the Vermont woodlands and to Hurricane Irene
Yokel by Bob Arnold
[from "Yokel, A Long Green Mountain Poem" by Bob Arnold] ~ that and more at Bob Arnold webpage of books & poems: Please link on this image for more
Go West by Bob Arnold
Filled with poems and travel photography — shares one cross-country trip the couple took in the mid-1980s to California from Vermont.
"I'm In Love With You Who Is In Love With Me" by Bob Arnold
from Bob Arnold's new book "I'm In Love With You Who Is In Love With Me" ~~~~~~~40 years of love poems
"Rain Bear" by Bob Arnold
Bob Arnold's first children's book "Rain Bear" New and available now from Longhouse ~ 50 pages. Perfect bound softcover with photographs ~ & drawings by Jason Clark
"Heretic" by John Phillips from Longhouse
New from Longhouse ~ John Phillips "Heretic". Poems with collages by the author. Click on the image for more ~
Kim Dorman — "Owner"
"Owner" by Kim Dorman. Including photographs by Kim Dorman. Selected and edited by Bob Arnold. New and available now from Longhouse 2016 ~ 80 pages. Perfect bound softcover
