ELIZABETH WILLIS ~

Elizabeth Willis

photo by Juliette Valery

Elegy

The day I drove

in a driving rain

from realism to impressionism

a moving hillside fooled the town

What does it take

to make a happy ant?

a dropped lozenge

on the damp step

bumping into a friend

in the daily grind

avoiding death

Still you slip away

in a desert hospital

and cannot see to see

Hawthorne's hand

against your hair

the stumbling blue

of windowed air

Autographeme

A thought on the lip

of little sand island

An easy messenger

who forgot where to go

I came to laugh

in a dirty garden

A thwarted paulselessness

considering pearls

I was fluent in salamander

Everything wrote itself onto skin

with a tangled blowing

An opal eye looking down

on an errant package

A sky wrung of tint

What is the meaning

of this minor error?

The reflecting pool

no one could read

A beach fire snagged me

with its bright emergent eye

My colony sought revolt

in every yard

The present was a relic

of a past I was older than

Taking its language, I became an abridgement

of whatever I contained

A social imperative of silky fears

I wanted air

I wanted the balloon

Darkness flaked down like bottle glass

invented by a poor oily sea

A house made of soup

Others formed an invisible order

felt in every part

The male of the species was

louder than the female

Females made the mush

a sound of offstage sweeping

Boys played a game of torment

and sleepy forgiveness

while girls read their books on the rocks

containers of a solar plot

Little bird, fox on a string

A caravan of foreign number

staging death

So?

A smudge against the smallest dress

buried creature, of sly erasures

in the storied night, long e

cricketing awake, asleep

IV ( a few stones for Lorine Niedecker)

This I is an idyll

I captured the first day

the office between

the leaf and the external

Landlord I said again

you can't move a river really

yet with no apparent music

my face would pass

________________________________

Elizabeth Willis

Alive

New and Selected Poems

New York Review of Books 2015

SALLY MANN ~

Little Brown, 2015

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=405937803&m=406231585

 

EDNA O'BRIEN ~

Edna O'Brien Paris Review Interview

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2978/the-art-of-fiction-no-82-edna-obrien

JOANNE KYGER ~

Joanne Kyger & Arthur Okamura

POST EXTINCTION

                     How could you forget me so quickly —

But the way you are reached, touched, awakened

             by the world continues

                                           the same way you yourself

                          pass along a freely given

              lineage of  existence

                         Each one, every thing, perfect  "as is"

                Like the moon

            going down

        never really leaves the sky

                                             So "existence" never quits,

                                  never began,     never ended

                      You see in the moment

                                                 So sorry it will never be

               like this again —

      But when has the present ever been singular?

Everything with a language of distinction

                                      with sorrow, with melancholy

                              with sweet appreciation

                    of an extinguished future

        when water becomes

  a state of being

                                                                                  September 2014

________________

Joanne Kyger

On Time

City Lights 2015

JOSEPH MITCHELL ~

Random House, 2015

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/66086-what-exactly-was-joseph-mitchell-doing-all-those-years-at-the-new-yorker.html

 

 

RAYMOND CHANDLER (1949) ~

Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
13 May 1949.




"I don't know what's happening to the writing racket in this country.

I get an offer of $1200 a year for the use of my name on the title of

a new mystery magazine. Raymond Chandler's Mystery Magazine. I

have nothing to do with the magazine, no control over the contents

and no contact whatever with the editorial policy. It does seem

to me that a line has to be drawn, and I am even willing to argue

that you can rule out ethics and you would still, if you had any

vision, have to draw that line as a matter of policy. But such is the

brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can

feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck."



___________________


The Raymond Chandler Papers
Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959
Edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000

"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, 

and America has never looked the same to us since." 

 — Paul Auster

AN OLD TIMER~

AN OLD TIMER

 


Selling his tools on the lawn —
 
What pains him the most is

 

Seeing them laid out that way
 
Doing nothing


 _____________


© Bob Arnold


from the forthcoming ~
The Woodcutter Talks

ROBERT SUND ~

R O B E R T    S U N D

photograph Mary Randlett,
1967

    

Centuries Go By 

In the world of men
 

centuries go by leaving
 

little trace.

 

A blossom in men is
 

like a cathedral,
 

seldom built.

 

It must be that in schools
 

when the blackboard is being erased,
 

under the sweeping hand,
    

     some words
    

     disappear forever.

Shi Shi Beach 1991

Ink Bottle


 
1

 
Somewhere

inside this ink bottle

there is a starry sky!


 
2


Don't keep the lid on

your ink bottle

too long.
Seattle, late 1960s






Summer Solstice


 
It's been a busy day.

First,

one hummingbird, then

another!


For Allen Engle






Ten By Twelve


My shack is ten by twelve.

    Two bottles of saké

    under the bed.

    Hot soup on the stove,

    and bread in the oven.


My auto harp tuned up and ready.


When friends come rowing up,

how big this shack will get!


For Erik Ambjor

The Table I Keep This is the table I keep. This is my warm spot in the world. A table to rest my ink bottle on. A table with other tables inside it. The ink wanting to be heard. Ink whose body is a river, whose fullness is to be joined with other waters. The ocean, rolling landward comes home one river at a time, cresting and breaking into song. Each day at my table I hear the heartsong     and the lament, as one by one the rivers come home. April 1991, Taos

http://www.robertsundpoetshouse.org/bio.cfm

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY ~

Dear G —

Happy Mother’s Day! of which is today.

Sweetheart and I worked the yard early then took off for the village on bicycles hoping to catch a friend at home but no such luck. She seems to have a woman staying with her, not wanted, maybe planted by caring family (elsewhere) so she is simply tolerating this treatment, the same way my mother sounded this morning when we finally located her in a new nursing home in Naples, Florida. I said “Florida”, she responded “Williamstown” meaning the “Villa” (as they call it) must remind her of her times in Williamstown, MA. which I would recognize, in my mother’s eyes, which means she’s now wondering why I haven’t visited her yet. This is dementia. A publisher friend just wrote to me, sadly, that Robert Bly is now in that state. The longer we survive.

Glad you got to California; glad someone still gets to California. Sweetheart and I now debate, agreeing fully with one another, California now is not our California, but I bet we’d still have a great time if the season was right and we were right in Big Sur. Alone. With the wilds. It still may happen soon enough. While you were away I had a month of the flu but I didn’t stop and just kept building or tearing down. I removed to the ground, to the last stone, the old duck shed I built 35 years ago, salvaged 75% of the pine lumber that was already used lumber and even slipped out the mighty oak rafters in the shed that I had originally hauled out of our living room and where the bookshop now is many decades ago when I rebuilt the house and ordered hemlock joists to replace these heavy oak originals. In the duck shed the timbers just went to sleep for the last 35 years. They felt just as sound and were just as heavy when I put them in 35 years younger. This time I looked where all the old nails were embedded and chopped the oak up for late spring firewood. Nothing more ideal. The 75% salvaged pine went into a small tool building I built on the back side of the studio and sided as well with white cedar, roofed with green steel, and there you have it. The mowers and bicycles and the snowblower I’ve yet to use are now in there. I did pull awake the snowblower to see how it ran from the woodshed to the studio and I like its power. Except I saw I was moving in 5th gear. I might have tried 1st.

My flu stayed all April and into May with a cough. Then Sweetheart picked it up and it looked like she would toss it off and instead it did a number on her and turned into pneumonia. That’s where the lyme disease havoc on her immune system now comes into light. We got her onto antibiotics quick like and yesterday we climbed Sugarloaf for the first time in a month and she’s about 80% lung power. She had already put in a morning crouched and pecking away at a book sale basement with me so I reminded her of that. The feet and legs get heavy on cement for so long. The bicycle ride this morning was a breeze. But we missed our friend. We did run into a woman who had shared a hospital room with Sweetheart when Sweetheart had the lyme and this woman was in for a mysterious bite (spider). She had forgot what it was she was in for so I reminded her. Younger than us, including her husband, who walks past us without any degree of recognition. The last time we saw him he was giving us the finger from his pickup truck being stuck behind us coming down the steep village hill. And then five years before that he might remember when I came close to side swiping him while he was taking an evening walk north of the village and we were coming home. Sweetheart said, “That was close,” calmly as passenger.  Ah, the neighborhood. A kid in a jalopy just tried that with us on the bicycle ride this morning; he seems to be holding a grudge. You were the last person to visit here. Although Sweetheart has already lost count how many people are stopping at the house, looking, pointing, waving to us, taking photographs etc. all day today. Right now a kid in a coup just stopped, his shirt off, he looks just like Justin Bieber, and he’s taking a cellphone photo of the chalkboard. Up on the board is a quote by former Halifax, Vermont resident Saul Bellow.

Books are still being designed and printed. You’re getting the notices as they clip.

all's well, Bob

OBJECT : PHOTO ~

Object : Photo

Modern Photographs

The Thomas Walther Collection

1909-1949

(MOMA, 2014)

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/the_project.html

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA ~

To My Own Poem




Best case scenario —

you'll be, my poem, read attentively,

discussed, remembered.



Worst comes to worst,

only read.



A third option —

actually written,

but tossed into the trash a moment later.



The fourth and final possibility —

you slip away unwritten,

happily humming something to yourself.


_________________________


Wislawa Szymborska
M A P
Collected and Last Poems
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak
Houghton Mifflin 2015

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA ~

In Praise of My Sister



My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
   Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.



_________________

Wislawa Szymborska
M A P
Collected and Last Poems
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak
Houghton Mifflin 2015

COME TO SPRING ~

COME TO SPRING


 

All day a hard rain
 
And all night
 
Washing away the last
 
Of winter’s snow

 

You get used to the rain
 
So you don’t see the snow go
 
But it goes
 
Into the river

 

Miles and miles
 
Of river melting snow
 
Someone somewhere else
 
Is also writing this poem


_______________


© Bob Arnold 

from Invent A World
Mountains & Rivers Press

 

GO ROUND ~

FLOWN ~

Just to let you know. . .the good pirates at Grooveshark, my music source, and it was lovely while it lasted, have shutdown their site.

 Or they have been shutdown by The Man.

It happens, probably should have happened, one of the inevitables, but we did enjoy the free

service and terrific music while it was available.

So here today and gone tomorrow goes all the jukeboxes (Music Box) I prepared for The Birdhouse.

If you listened and enjoyed then the music is in your heads.

Go round.

JAMES KOLLER'S "OPENINGS" ~

OPENINGS by JAMES KOLLER

 selected poems 1959 ~ 1985

edited by Bob Arnold

New and available now from Longhouse ~

72 pages
 Perfect bound softcover

____________________________________

$14.95


Shipping $6 ~ U.S. orders with Paypal

please contact us or use our email address of longhousepoetry@gmail.com

Buy now through easy-to-use Paypal

all orders may be made by Paypal, credit card or check ~
 

mail order here:

LONGHOUSE
 PO Box 2454
 West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303

 
 

                                                 THE RED-TAILED HAWK’S SONG


                                                        I take my time.

                                        I take my time.

                                        I look it all over —

                                        the fencerow, the timber’s edge.

                                        I look it all over

                                        carefully.

© James Koller

___________________________

  JAMES KOLLER was born 30 May 1936 to Elsie Clark and James Koller in Oak Park, Illinois. He has a sister Joan (Perkins). Koller’s father was a union photoengraver for the Chicago Daily News. Once between cross-country trains in Chicago, years later, Susan and I met up with Jim and he took us on a brisk walking-tour of downtown Chicago showing us where his father worked and where Jim once worked as a young house painter and day laborer. In 1948 at the age of twelve Koller took his first trip west with his family into Wyoming, Texas and Missouri where his father had lived for a few years before WWI. His father’s stepfather had lived out his life alone in Missouri. The trip put everlasting pictures into Koller’s head for years to come. He had traveled out to California in 1952 with relatives but in 1956 he took his first trip alone westward and for the next sixty years he traveled extensively throughout the west, crossing the country by car or truck more than anyone could even begin to imagine. He kept moving, and he would do the same twenty years later in Europe. Making friends along the way, and oh so many marriages, loves, children and grandchildren. During the 1956 trip he visited City Lights Bookstore for the first time and the city of San Francisco where he remembers it didn’t then “connect” with him, but it soon would. Over the years he would establish himself with homes and families in Illinois, Washington, California, New Mexico and for the last half of his life in Maine. The sojourns to Europe were also home to Koller. Some of the hallmark stories from Jim would include starting up with Coyote’s Journal in 1964. Editing and publishing the masterpiece On Bear’s Head by Philip Whalen, where he got himself hoodwinked by his co-publisher Harcourt. Meeting Franco Beltrametti’s ship coming to port from Japan in San Francisco, and he would do the same for Philip Whalen when he returned, and a few years later for Gary Snyder’s voyage home, all of this in the late 60s and often helping everyone take their belongings here & there. During his San Francisco time he drove friend Richard Brautigan around because Koller loves to drive and Brautigan doesn’t. Important pals from the time-he-met-them-until-the-day-he-died off his lips would be those already mentioned, plus: Bill Brown, Zoe Brown, Jack Boyce, Joanne Kyger, Peter Coyote, Thomas Thomas, Karl Bruder, Drummond Hadley, Patsy Zoline, Bill Deemer, Michael Fine, Bobby Byrd, Nanao Sakaki, Gary Lawless, Paul Kahn, Stefan Hyner, Giuseppe Moretti, Peter Garland, and shorter stints with poets Lew Welch, Paul Blackburn and Robert Creeley sunk their teeth into him. He had busted marriages and spread out families and every single family member seemed to love him. Including nine grandchildren and a great-grandson. He loved his parents and the family his parents loved. He was last seen in late November leaving family in Illinois, naturally heading west, this time with his oldest son Jedediah. They got themselves in Jim’s  small Ford car over the Mississippi River and into Missouri, home once to his father and other family, and in a Motel 6 in Joplin, room 124, my goodness under the aura of Route 66, in the town where Langston Hughes was born —  poetry & the blues — James Koller was struck down by a massive stroke and would pass some weeks later with his family in his circle. It was 10 December 2014. Some of us have never known the world without James Koller.
                           
© Bob Arnold
Spring 2015

WE SHALL OVERCOME ~

Guy Carawan

 July 27, 1927, Los Angeles ~ May 1, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/us/guy-carawan-dies-at-87-taught-a-generation-to-overcome-in-song.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/local-news/guy-carawan-folk-singer-civil-rights-pioneer-dies-in-new-market_36983659

http://digitalstudio.ucr.edu/studio_projects/carawan/