LYGIA CLARK ~

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1462

 

Lygia Clark ~

 The Abandonment of Art (MOMA)

1948-1988

http://overthekneeproject.com/2014/04/25/lygia-clark-the-abandonment-of-art-1948-1988/

GADGETS ~

Gadget Dance 1936
photograph Unidentified

AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM ~

The Letters of Thomas Merton and
Victor & Carolyn Hammer
edited by F. Douglas Scutchfield
and Paul Evans Holbrook Jr.
Kentucky 2014

http://uknow.uky.edu/content/celebration-art-literature-and-religion-thomas-merton-and-victor-and-carolyn-hammer

http://merton.org/Research/Correspondence/y1.aspx?id=841

MORRIS GRAVES ~

Morris Graves, 1949

with his dog Edith Sitwell ("Sit well")

photograph: Mary Randlett

A handwritten letter to his brother Wallace Graves,
from Eureka, California, June 8, 1965:


"Walden Pond received. I'd read a few pages when I remembered that Margaret Callahan had sent me a copy when I first lived at The Rock. I was only able to read a few pages of it and laid it aside. There is something about wisdom that has never engaged me. Folly is funnier — and vice more fun. An awful confession to finally have to make.

I will read on in Walden though this time — but so far page after page of bon mots (though in marvelous English) gets me to saying, "Oh, blow it out your ass!" and I lay the book down and reach for another box of Cracker Jacks (they each have a prize in them, you know)."

LANGSTON HUGHES & THE GANG ~

WENDELL BERRY ~

Wendell Berry  & John Haines
Portland Oregon 1982
photography by William Stafford

"What excites us is some sort of technological revolution: the

fossil fuel revolution, the automotive revolution, the assembly

line revolution, the antibiotic revolution, the sexual revolu-

tion, the computer revolution, the "green revolution," the

genomic revolution, and so on. But these revolutions — all

with something to sell that people or their government

"must" buy — are mere episodes of the one truly revolution-

ary revolution perhaps in the history of the human race: the

Industrial Revolution, which has proceeded from the begin-

ning with only two purposes: to replace human workers with

machines, and to market its products, regardless of their use-

fulness or their effects, at the highest possible profit — and so

to concentrate wealth into ever fewer hands."

Wendell Berry

page 10

Our Only World

ten essays

Counterpint

2015

 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/mr-wendell-berry-of-kentucky-berrys.html

 

 

RIMBAUD ~

Arthur Rimbaud

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/travel/where-rimbaud-found-peace-in-ethiopia.html?hpw&rref=travel&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

REVIVAL ~

Burt Bacharach

INTERPRETATION ~

NEW! LORINE NIEDECKER ~

A Cooking Book

  Lorine Niedecker

Longhouse 2015

72 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 6.25 inches

ISBN 978-1-929048-29-8 

This booklet was sent as a Christmas Gift from

Lorine Niedecker to Maude Hartel in December 1964.

It was in Gail Roub's possession as of August 1991.

In 1992 Lorine Niedecker's then Literary Executor Cid Corman

passed the manuscript over to Longhouse who published

A Cooking Book for the Winter Solstice of that same year.

For Winter Solstice 2014 Longhouse refurbished & reprinted

A Cooking Book in a brand new edition with the original edition

now out of print. These poems were not included in the

Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works (University of California)

 edited by Jenny Penberthy.

Longhouse is more than happy to keep this little gem available for

new & old readers.

_____________________

$15

U.S. addresses ~ order here through Paypal
shipping is free

International shipping: $10

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/2015/01/new-cid-corman-of-volume-4-5.html

BY HAND ~

'Oenone', Alfred Lord Tennyson, Seven Poems and Two Translations, Doves Press 1902.

The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad

 and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery

http://gizmodo.com/the-gorgeous-typeface-that-drove-men-mad-and-sparked-a-1686081182


http://www.artsandcraftsmuseum.org.uk/Arts_and_Crafts_Movement/Emery_Walker_Library/The_Private_Press_Movement/Doves_Press.aspx


http://www.typespec.co.uk/doves-type/

PHILIP LAMANTIA ~

photo ~ Harry Redl

Philip Lamantia

I Touch You

I touch you with my eyes when you lie under spiders of silk

I touch you with my one hundred headed giraffes too secret to be seen

the rods & cones the morning covets awaken you

with my touch of tobacco eyes

and you rise from the snail's bed of tubular hair

I touch you with the breath of jet planes

and they are gone elsewhere to touch you too

I won't have you touched by sordid saints

I touch you with the hour that drips scent

snared from the chain of immaculate lice

who avenge themselves forever on the holy of holies

I touch you with the wind heaving the breasts of the morning

I touch you in the overcrowds

and they vanish

replaced by all the women who resemble you

and I touch them with the eyes of the sun

Annihilation of priests

I touch you on the threshold of the totem

carbon salt on the breath of the world

I touch you with my intricate rose superior to the fog

I touch you with heart strings of the veiled mountain

whose magnetic moment is the sight of us making love

I rend your skirt by the wind stolen from ancient castles

your legs secrete the essence of wheat

and your ankles brush the wing of crow

Your lips touch alchemic gold torn from the femur bone of poetry

whispering through archives of your smile

that beguiles the oracle who has a headache to change his legends

I touch your earlobe with the fatal elegance of the peacock lip

your convulsions gallop my heart of the rose hermetic and flushed by goats sighting prey

I touch your nipples

that touch heaven that is all of you touching me

the temple of your hips

the morning glory of your sex

the miracle of bedsheets and the sacrament of sweat

Rhythms of your thighs are the music of the spheres

You are more beautiful than the black buttocks of dawn

and all light has been given to veil you from the murderers of love

I touch your presence undressing the furniture

whose cries fill the distance between us

and you shall hear

when I touch you with telepathic tendrils

for then I'll come into you the light of the walking dream

-   -   -

You wait you wail

Across the silences

That are a struggle in the world

Obstacles said to be conjunctions of Saturn and the Moon

Objects — telephones — are taboo

Taboo the sky curled into leaden pillars

Taboo the river of racing horses

The sun spits on my fingers

Your little finger completes a sentence

Solitude is a flame of sleep

Jungles fold me in passionate bird omens

Where are you

The page is turning against me like a wave of horses

I'm unsteady on this continent

That throws its chains around all of us

As if we weren't here

Orbiting like apples through galaxies of desire

Your countenance in the clock I map

And your hands brushing the hair invisible

Step by step we come closer

To the Thunderbird's retreat

And beauty cries from a lacerated heart

 

________________

Philip Lamantia

The Collected Poems of Philp Lamantia

edited by Garret Caples

Andrew Koron

Nancy Joyce Peters

(University of California Press 2013) 

http://boppin.com/redl/index.shtml

WEATHER REPORT ~

WEATHER REPORT



It’s late


I’ve been shoveling snow


the woods are dark deep done


and so what if I’m


done shoveling for the night


the snow is still falling


it's been falling for months


it will fall while we sleep


snow doesn’t sleep


it’s here and then it's gone


it isn't worried about your hardship


it will melt in good time


you will forget


about it all


by spring and


spring isn’t in a hurry either


you’re out of luck

_____________

Bob Arnold

White-breasted Nuthatch

THE MAN WHO NEVER ~

GUEVARA ~

Che Guevara
 1963
Photograph by Rene Burri
Swiss Foundation Photography Collection

MALCOLM X ~

Malcolm X assassination: 50 years on,

 mystery still clouds details of the case

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation

VALERIE JUNE ~

http://valeriejune.com/

XUE DI ~

ECHO LAKE




   Grant me a favor. Give me to understand your mysterious lake.

   Let my white feathers, like eyes shedding expressions, float in your tranquility. The banked rushes,

row after row, are bent like ideograms. The long cries of geese drown out a secret. Tell me, isn't

that secret as chimerical as the sun-chiseled mountains? As enduring?

   I beg you to grant me a favor.

   Crossing the fields, I walk right into you, my worn feet tramping over your secret as if it were dew

in the grass.

   When I enter the lake, its tinted water swallows my skin inch by inch, and a strange and distant

memory comes back to me: my mother massaging my entire body. But her hands now lie at the

bottom of the lake. Motionless there. I walk into you as the sound of music, my most sacred

coronation, your tinted water swallowing my skin inch by inch. I'm in such a tranquil , such a lovely

dreamland, that even when I knock against the sickliest body, I am unable to wake with a start, I stay

asleep in the catapult.

   My lips will never recount anything. The world will not pour in or out of them. They sink into the

water and kiss the fish in the weeds. Like time, they take on a cold and lasting silence.

   Mysterious lake, let me enter you naked. Let my feeble song fall into your grasses like a length of

yellow ribbon. After you grant me this favor, I will enter the mystery. Break away. All the

misunderstood, let me distance myself from them. Distance, what a pretty hoax. I have lived a brief 

time and in a frenzy.  I loved poetry with my life. Was that not enough?




_____________________

Xue Di
translated by Hil Anderson & Forrest Gander
ACROSS BORDERS
GREEN INTEGER 2013

"In China, to be a poet is dangerous.

To be a poet means to be honest,

tell people your true feelings.

When the political situation is rough,

writers will be the first group to be oppressed."

Xue Di

NAJWAN DARWISH ~

Nothing More to Lose

___________________________________

Lay your head on my chest and listen

to the layers of ruins

behind the madrasah of Saladin

hear the houses sliced open

in the village of Lifta

hear the wrecked mill, the lessons and reading

on the mosque's ground floor

hear the balcony lights

go out for the very last time

on the heights of Wadi Salib

hear the crowds drag their feet

and hear them returning

hear the bodies as they're thrown, listen

to their breathing on the bed

of the Sea of Galilee

listen like a fish

in a lake guarded by an angel

hear the tales of the villages, embroidered

like kaffiyehs in the poems

hear the singers growing old

hear their ageless voices

hear the women of Nazareth

as they cross the meadow

hear the camel driver

who never stops tormenting me

Hear it

and let us, together, remember

then let us, together, forget

all that we have heard

Lay your head on my chest:

I'm listening to the dirt

I'm listening to the grass

as it splits through my skin. . .

We lost our heads in love

and have nothing more to lose

Najwan Darwish

NOTHING MORE TO LOSE

translated from the Arabic by Kareem Abu-Zeid

New York Review Books, 2014

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/najwan-darwish/

REAL LIFE ~

Just a note to the recent passing of so many fine poets — like Philip Levine — who I made an immediate Birdhouse memorial page to by selecting one of his poems from his Wesleyan title Not This Pig (1968). A book I pretty much marked up from here to Tuesday with favorite lines and favorite poems way back when in 1968, then I went on to buy and read every one of his books for almost the next half century. He had a wonderful run and the poems stayed true blue, often politically charged and even romantic.

However, Philip Levine wasn't a "working class poet," nor working class as often comes along with any word about him. He held a brief youthful stint at lousy paying jobs, including in an automotive plant, like dozens and dozens of American poets before and after him have done. Like Levine, almost all of that drudgery and work was over with by the time these poets hit age 30, when you're supposed to wise up, or not be trusted. Take your pick. Levine decided, and he did it very well, to mine the memory of that brief automotive time and give us many fine poems right from the guts and grease of that hardware and life. But he did this while going for his college degrees and his long standing job as a professor. He certainly should be honored there. He wasn't a working class worker.

To me a working class worker is one who has earned a paycheck from working class work, a mainstay of the earnings. This puts almost all the renowned poets out of the ranking.  That working class paycheck also keeps the recipient in that ranking in almost all social order, meaning diminished. There is no tenure, no pension plan, no golden parachute, no big paycheck awards. Really, there's nothing, they're working until they can almost not work any longer. Far past any retirement age. If they had a state job, they may be in better shape but by then most minds have also been state-shaped. Not a versatile shape.

The self-employed worker is working often pay-check-to-pay- check. If they don't work, they don't eat. If they don't work, they don't buy shoes for their kids. If they don't work, they could freeze to death. Some have pride and would never take a welfare check or any welfare, they're workers. There's deep honor in knowing how to work with one's hands and build things, make things run, make things hold water, make things glow.

There are poets in America to this day who are working class. They work long hours and in deep shade of recognition. They naturally don't fit into the puzzle of poetry schools and poetry circles, they're working, they're getting by, they probably can't always afford to buy your poetry book but they'll check it out of the library. They have such real gem experiences and may not have the finesse or workshop models to make a poem swing into the New Yorker each week, but man their experiences are real stuff magic.

[ BA ]

LYNNE TILLMAN ~

"At the beginning, when I started to show my writing to people, to give readings from it, I had no audience. No one has an audience at the start, because no one is waiting. Certainly not for your work. To think that would be delusional. There was no audience for my writing. To the extent that I have one now, it is because, over time, say, 25 years of my writing’s being published, people called readers have come upon a story or novel or essay of mine and thought, I’d like to read more. This amazing relationship — a reader finding a writer whom he or she would like to read — begins accidentally and might become a habit or practice. If I think about readers who look forward to my next novel, I feel inspired to finish it. Those readers are important to me, though I don’t write for them. I certainly don’t want to disappoint them with a poor book or story; but I don’t write for them. I’m encouraged by the thought of them. In a real sense, readers are more important than writers. There are too many of us anyway, and too many write books that are nothing more than words used poorly in sentences that don’t signify in novels or stories that are primarily thoughtless. But readers — all readers should exist!"

LYNNE TILLMAN 

What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

Red Lemonade, 2014

www.redlemona.de

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-lynne-tillman