NOWHERE ~

NOWHERE

Strange to see—
 
A sofa abandoned
 
In the woods



Off a dirt road
 
By the river we hike
 
No one around for miles

 

We turn the sofa back
 
Onto its legs, sit down
 
Call the dog up with us


_________________

© Bob Arnold


from the forthcoming ~
The Woodcutter Talks

 

GERALD HAUSMAN ~

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

____________________________________

$18
Shipping $3.95 ~ U.S. orders with Paypal

Buy now through easy-to-use Paypal, US Orders, $21.95

International orders ~ complete $38 with Paypal payment

all orders may be made by Paypal or check

mail order here:
 

LONGHOUSE
 PO Box 2454
 West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303

____________________

GERALD HAUSMAN

Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers. — Jack Spicer


Okay, now that we have the game field established, start pitching, that means you dear reader. Long green grass stretches before you.

You hold in your hands the ultimate catcher’s mitt of poetry, written over six decades of the poet’s life — imagine six decades. As the editor, I one day asked the poet, as if I was coming by for a cup of sugar, “Say, why not send to me all of your poems written and published over all of your life.” Like I was asking for nothing at all. Well I was asking for nothing at all since the best of poetry is spun out of thin air. The best poetry reads like an umbrella being put up in the rain. What a terrific function! What a way to stay dry! What a balance of dryness and wetness. What aptitude! Let’s go for a walk.

The poet wasted no time, and I knew he was a poet because his lover for life, Lorry, helped him get together all the poems in their sun-baked island home in Florida and in a matter of only a day or so I had all the poems before me, in my catcher’s mitt. Or I was going to make a pretty perfect catcher’s mitt. It would be poems that were lived and made in different locations like Florida, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, New Jersey, New Mexico, California, the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, along a horse trail, swimming in the bowl of a lake, holding a daughter’s hand, listening awhile and awhile longer.  Gerald Hausman could have been famous, and in fact he is famous because he lived the life he dreamed of with one woman, his children, little bits of money and lots of beans and good chili, with an insurmountable energy for storytelling and writing children’s books, and publishing other people’s books, and traveling the simpler paths, where you never run into funny fame and fashion. You make poems like a baker makes good bread. Everybody eats.

You may even forget you are a poet, until another poet tells you —
 you are.

Well over forty years ago I first found the first published books of Gerald Hausman, like folded up into birch bark they were, and they were poems of the time that could be written on the softest subjects and with the most delicate care. There was such hope. It would be the easiest thing to share if only you could find a pitcher and a catcher — and if you did, and they were good at what they did —  the rest would fall into place. People would come, a crowd would gather and watch, cheer, and they’d play into the night. 

Bob Arnold

OTHER NEW TITLES FROM 

LONGHOUSE

Paypal or check, $2 shipping,  please inquire 

email "poetry@sover.net"

_________________________

Bob Arnold's first 

children's book

"R a i n   B e a r"

~ $12.95

LORINE NIEDECKER

  

A Cooking Book 

~ $15

CARSON ARNOLD
If I Blinked Through
These Windows

Collected Music Writings     
a big soaking book of youth     

 ~ $20

 




J.D. WHITNEY
Sweeping The Broom Shorter

Selected Poems    

~ $15

two different covers ~ take your pick!

BOB ARNOLD & JASON CLARK

 Sapline     
maple sugaring in Vermont    

~ $12

 

ROBIN MAGOWAN

The Garden of Amazement 

Scattered Gems After Sâeb 

~ $15

 

 

MALCOLM RITCHIE
Small Lines On The Great Earth

poems from Scotland    

~ $15

BOB ARNOLD
My Sweetest Friend  

poems from brother to sister     

~ $15













DUDLEY LAUFMAN
The Islandian 

Poems & Fables
journey to another land  

 ~ $12

CID CORMAN
of 
Volumes 4 & 5

edited by Bob Arnold 
 848 pages perfect bound

~ $50
 plus $7 priority mail

BOB ARNOLD   
Go West

c'mon! travel westward by train 
in a full book of photographs
& poems


 ~ $15

OPENINGS 
by JAMES KOLLER

selected poems 1959 ~ 1985 
edited by Bob Arnold 


~ $12.95

BOB ARNOLD  
Start With The Tree

150 photographs by Susan Arnold
a lifetime of building & marriage      


 ~ $20

FORTHCOMING   NEW   BOOKS   BY   BOB ARNOLD   &   KENT JOHNSON

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

APPLE TREE ~

The winter was long, deep, cold, and the apple tree in our backyard
says, "Do it again!"

© photo Bob Arnold

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