SAM HAMILL FROM THE CHINESE ~

Crossing the Yellow River




A little boat on the great river 

whose waves reach the end of the sky —



suddenly a great city, ten thousand

houses dividing sky from wave.



Between the towns there are

hemp and mulberry trees in the wilds.



Look back on the old country:

wide waters; clouds; and raising mist.



________________________



Wang Wei
translated by Sam Hamill 
Tiger Bark Press
2013

ELIZABETH BISHOP (Meets Colm Tóibín) ~

Princeton University Press 2015

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/eavan-boland-reviews-on-elizabeth-bishop-by-colm-t%C3%B3ib%C3%ADn-1.2146004

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCfT7ccPAP4

THE GREAT JUDITH MALINA ~

Judith Malina

 Ms. Malina was born in Kiel

 a port city in northern Germany

 June 4, 1926 ~ April 10, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/theater/judith-malina-founder-of-the-living-theater-dies-at-88.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

http://www.livingtheatre.org/

BLACK MIRROR (WHITE BEAR) ~

Who are you?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/button-pusher

THIS PLACE IN EVERY LIFE ~

THIS PLACE IN EVERY LIFE


 


A span of 20 feet —
 
Someone, but no
 
One’s around, once
 
Laid down these log
 
Poles and nailed the
 
Planks for what I balance
 
On and cross, and then
 
Turn and once again
 
Walk over, because I
 
Like the feeling, the
 
Mountain creek beneath
 
And leaves floating
 
The range of light
 
Now back across slowly
 
The last time
 
Finally into my direction

                                             

                                                                    for John Levy



___________________

© Bob Arnold



from Habitat
Pentagram, 1979



 

 

VALLEJO / MALANGA ~

Some Days A Fruitful, Cautious Longing
Comes Over Me



Some days a fruitful, cautious longing comes over me,
to love and kiss affection on both cheeks,
and from afar there comes to me,
demonstrative, a wish, a different wish of loving, strong,
the one who hates me, the one who tears up his role, the little boy,
the one who weeps for one who has been weeping,
king of wine, slave of water
the one who hides in his own wrath
the one who sweats, the one who passes by, the one who
shakes himself within my soul.
The pleasure to arrange a braid of hair
of one who walks to me, the soldier's hair;
one's light, the great; one's greatness to the boy.
I want to iron a handkerchief at one
for the one who cannot weep
and, when I'm sad or when good fortune pains me,
to patch up geniuses and children.

I want to help the good man be a little bad
and have an urge to sit
on the right of the left-handed, answer the dumb,
trying to be useful in what
I can, wanting very much
to wash the cripple's foot,
and help my one-eyed neighbor sleep.

Oh, this love of mine, this world-wide love,
interhuman, parochial, fulfilled!
It comes just right,
from the foundations, from the public groin,
and coming from afar it makes one want to kiss
the singer's scarf,
to kiss the one who suffers, in this roasting-pan,
the dumb, in his deaf cranial murmur, dauntless;
the one who gives me what I had forgotten in my breast,
on his Dante, on his Chaplin, on his shoulders.

To sum up, I should like,
when I am on the famous verge of violence,
or when my heart is brave, I should like
to help the one who smiles to laugh,
place a little bird square on the scruff of a villain's neck,
nurse the sick by provoking them,
buy to kill from the killer — a dreadful thing —
and be at peace within myself
in everything.


6 November 1937
César Vallejo



______________________

translated from the Spanish by Gerard Malanga


MALANGA CHASES VALLEJO
Selected Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Three Rooms Press
www.threeroomspress.com

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Back in 1975 or so I edited and published a small booklet of Gerard's which I'm sure was one of these poems from this fine collection. As Aram Saroyan writes, "This in turn gives the young poet —in his twenties when he did this work—the courage of his convictions, the essential room to breathe."

BILLIE HOLIDAY by JOHN SZWED ~

 

Viking 2015

"When John Hammond first heard the Count Basie band, it was a revelation.

The Basie players were very different from Eastern jazz bands. Much of

their music was based on the blues, and they had a remarkable

singer in Jimmy Rushing, though Hammond thought the

vocals were secondary to the remarkable dance music they brought

with them from the Midwest. Their rhythm section had a lighter,

more even, and propulsion feel that was the envy of every band

that heard them (Benny Goodman, especially, favored the wing

they generated); the ensemble was strong and brassy;

they had the ability to create spontaneous arrangements based

on collective experience; and their use of riffs and call-and-response

was state of the art. It was music of urban sophistication that

still retained a feel for the blues."

John Szwed, Billie Holiday

The Musician and the Myth

ELFRIEDE JELINEK ~

FOUND OBJECT

THE PRESENT MOMENT ~

long ago Gary Snyder

The Earth's Wild Places

Your eyes, your mouth and hands,

the public highways.

Hands, like truck stops,

semis rumbling in the corners.

Eyes like the bank clerk's window

foreign exchange.

I love all the parts of your body

friends hug your suburbs

farmlands are given a nod

but I know the path

to your wilderness.

It's not that I like it best,

but we're almost always

alone there,

and it's scary but also calm.

_________________________

Gary Snyder

"This poem was lost for some years and then turned up again.

I don't remember any publishing history for it other than as a

fugitive broadside maybe in the seventies." GS

The Present Moment

Gary Snyder

Counterpoint 2015

psst — who in the world set "Gary Snyder" on the cover off-center?!

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400573636/at-84-poet-gary-snyder-lives-in-this-present-moment

BLAISE CENDRARS ~

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4388/the-art-of-fiction-no-38-blaise-cendrars

SPRING JUKE ~

music compiled by bob arnold
april 2015

FIRST SNOW AS I SPLIT WOOD ~

FIRST SNOW AS I SPLIT WOOD


 


Thin snow falling into
 
Valley fog, quiets everything,
 
No bird call, nothing flying —
 
The splitting wedge and hammer
 
Echo over the pasture
 
While the flakes open bigger
 
For no reason other than snow
 
And I straighten my sweaty back
 
And watch this world, lend a tongue
 
And taste it melt


_____________


© Bob Arnold 

from Where Rivers Meet
Mad River Press 1990 

RAVENS IN THE STORM ~

As a young father of three Carl Oglesby once worked for a defence contractor — the 60s being the 60s — he was soon president of the SDS — Students for a Democratic Society. Almost a half century before our present time opening doors with Cuba, Oglesby was instrumental at building a bridge to the revolutionary state. He could be seen as untrustworthy by his more radical colleagues, called in to be a witness at the Trial for the Chicago 8, to this day he is remembered as giving some of the finest speeches on-foot to the tribe, the movement, the grass roots. This memoir reflects that talent; it's upbeat, and his memory for the time is elegant and sure. He passed away in 2011 somewhat forgotten. The lone rider, Oglesby did for his era as a writer what Clancy Sigal did for his.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Dixler-t.html

WHILE YOU SLEPT ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/opinion/our-land-up-for-grabs.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

LAURA MARLING : SHORT MOVIE ~

MARCEL DUCHAMP ~

AKA Marcel Duchamp

edited Anne Collins Goodyear

James McManus

(Smithsonian 2014)

http://www.understandingduchamp.com/

TOMAS TRANSTROMER ~

Tomas Tranströmer

1931-2015

http://tomastranstromer.net/

After a Death

Once there was a shock

that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.

It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.

It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun

through brush where a few leaves hang on.

They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.

Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat

but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

The samurai looks insignificant

beside his armor of black dragon scales.

TOMAS TRANSTROMER

translated by Robert Bly

WANG AN-SHIH ~

(1021–1086)

Autumn Night



I doze, a guest among topsy-turvy books,
then sit amid insect song. Isolate silence,

remnant lamp casting halos of darkness,
heavy dew settling across cold branches:

it's joy absolute to gaze out all idleness,
or even more, to sit deep ch'an stillness,

and it's beyond insight. I clamp my nose,
and chant in a long-ago sage's lost voice.









Wandering Out With A Full Moon To
Eightfold-Integrity River



Thoughts turned far away from you,
confusion rife, I can't sleep. Finally

I rise, gaze up into bright stars, then
saddle a horse and wander the road

east, thinking rivers and mountains
might ease my worries. I know you

are no dinner. Come: we'll ladle out
clouds together here at their source.











River



When a spirit-spring broke open, it began
swelling and coiling on ahead and through

mountains crowded up, blocking the way.
It keeps flowing right on time to the sea,

harboring bright pearls in mud and sand,
frolicking dragons in cloud-and-rain dark.

Why ask where all its depths came from?
River gods see no further than themselves.









Sent To Assistant Magistrate Guide-Bell



You hurry around your life, and I just idle through mine,
so how could we ever wander up Bell Mountain together?

Outside city gates, I keep a child's routine. But turning to
look back, I see a lifetime of world-dust in a single dream.









Suddenly



Suddenly spring's ending. I close my brush-bramble gate,
green leaves already flooding the city, thick with shadow.

Old-age years are like this. I've lost the urge to see places,
but is there anywhere this spring wind can't go wandering?









Farewell To Candor-Achieve



Traveling north we delight in family,
and drifting south savor friends. How

could we forget each other? We gaze
anywhere into all our kindred depths.









Thoughts Sent On My Way Home From
River-Serene, After Stopping To Gaze At
Samadhi-Forest Monastery



My lame donkey hates the stony road
up there, and I'm done with big climbs.

It seems forever since I saw you, my old
monk friend. Our youth suddenly gone,

I keep following morning clouds away,
then race evening birds back into this

valley of pines all shadowed dark. Here,
I know you in the distances between us.









Gazing North

  

Hair whiter still, I ache to see those long-ago northlands,
but keep to this refuge: goosefoot staff, windblown trees.

Pity the new moon: all that bright beauty, and for whom?
It's dusk. Countless mountains face each other in sorrow.



________________________________

Translated by David Hinton
The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih
(New Directions 2015)

I selected and designed a small foldout booklet
once upon a time of David Hinton's Wang An-Shih
and am delighted to find this full collection
~ not a bum poem in the lot

LITTLE BIG QUOTE ~

"Thanks to the grandiosity and naïveté of W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz — another Jeb foreign policy adviser — U.S. Middle East policy is so muddled that, after occupying and blowing up Iraq, we are working with Shiite Iran to push back Sunni insurgents in Iraq and working with Sunnis and their Saudi Arabian allies in Yemen against a Shiite militia that has Iranian support."

M A U R E E N   D O W D     NEW YORK TIMES   M A R C H 29, 2015

 

 

TEAM WORK ~

TEAM WORK




Each time the delivery trucks

Hit and knock partly over the

 

Stone cairn I built at the top of

Our dirt drive, each time, I re-

 

Build the cairn, stone by stone,

And each time the impatient

 

Drivers hit it and each time I

Rebuild it, until I'm getting good



____________


© Bob Arnold

DON CARPENTER ~

http://www.doncarpenterpage.com/fiction.htm

http://www.doncarpenterpage.com/brautigan.htm

http://www.doncarpenterpage.com/poetry.htm

The Works

_________________

    Hard Rain Falling (1966, novel)

    Blade of Light (1967, novel)

    The Murder of the Frogs and Other Stories (1969, short stories)

    Getting Off (1971, novel)

    Payday (1972, screenplay)

    The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan (1975, novel)

    Charles Bukowski's Post Office (1977, screenplay)

    A Couple of Comedians (1979, novel)

    Snyder, Whalen and Welch, Together (1981, magazine article)

    Turnaround (1981, novel)

    The Class of '49 (1985, novel and three stories)

    The Dispossessed (1986, novel)

    From A Distant Place (1988, novel)

    Fridays at Enrico's (1993–1994, published 2014)

WYOMING ~

Wyoming 1954
photograph by Elliott Erwitt

PAULA FOX ~

Paula Fox Paris Review Interview

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1/the-art-of-fiction-no-181-paula-fox

STEFAN HYNER ~