JOHN WIENERS ~

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THE OPEN PRAIRIE ~

MALAQUE ~

EDWARD THOMAS ~

E D W A R D    T H O M A S

Adlestrop

 
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

( Penguin Books )

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-thomas

KAFKA — THE BLUE OCTAVO NOTEBOOKS ~

Edited by Max Brod
Translated by Ernst Kaiser, Eithne Wilkins
Exact Change
Franz Kafka

(3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)

"The voices of the world becoming quieter and fewer."

young Franz Kafka

Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off your shoes,

yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling

garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your

nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that

hides beneath that, and then the core and the core and the core, then the

remainder and then the residue and then even the glimmer of the undying

fire. Only the fire itself us absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself

be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other.

 

FK,  Prague

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

Franz Kafka with his fiancee Felice Bauer 1917

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/different-kafka/

DEREK MAHON ~

Gipsies




for Nina Hutchinson


Once there was house and home

And books against the cold.

We are all gipsies now —

Pea-pickers, pickpockets,

Haters, procrastinators,

Wanderers in the salt dunes,

Tellers of strange fortunes,

Bathers in cold waters —

Sleeping, like John Clare,

With our feet to the pole star.






Canadian Pacific



From famine, pestilence and persecution

Those gaunt forefathers shipped abroad to find

Rough stone of heaven beyond the western ocean,

And staked their claim and pinned their faith.

Tonight their children whistle through the dark,

Frost chokes the windows. They will not have heard

The wild geese flying south over the lakes

While the lakes harden beyond grief and anger —

The eyes fanatical, rigid the soft necks,

The great wings sighting with a nameless hunger.







Recalling Aran



A dream of limestone in sea-light

Where gulls have placed their perfect prints.

Reflection in that final sky

Shames vision into simple sight —

Into pure sense, experience.

Four thousand miles away tonight,

Conceived beyond such innocence,

I clutch the memory still, and I

Have measured everything with it since.



———————————————

Derek Mahon
Night-Crossing
Oxford University Press 1968

The Paris Review: The Art of Poetry ~
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/732/the-art-of-poetry-no-82-derek-mahon

RALPH PEER ~

( Chicago Review Press, 2014 )

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/wayfaring-strangers-and-ralph-peer-and-the-making-of-popular-roots-music.html

MARIE LUIS KASCHNITZ ~

M A R I E   L U I S E   K A S C H N I T Z

Hiroshima

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Has taken vows, rings the bells in the cloister.

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Jumped into a noose and hanged himself.

The man who dropped death on Hiroshima

Has gone insane, fights apparitions

Made out of dust that come for him,

Hundreds of thousands every night.

None of all this is true.

Just the other day I saw him

In his front yard in the suburbs.

The hedges were low and the rosebushes dainty.

It takes time to raise an oblivious forest

For someone to hide in. Plain to see

The new, naked house, the young wife

Beside him in her flowered dress

The little girl holding her hand

The boy who was sitting across his back

Cracking a whip over his head.

He himself was easy to recognize

On all fours on his lawn, his face

A grimace of laughter, because the photographer stood

Outside the hedge, the eye of the world.

By Writing

By writing I wanted

To save my soul.

I tried to make poems

It did not work.

I tried to tell stories

It did not work.

You cannot write

To save your soul.

Given up, it drifts and does the singing. 

The White Ships

In our mathematical world

Who can still remember

Anything that decays

And anything that takes root?

White whitest white

Sooner or later we too

Will get our coats of oil-base paint

Then we'll stop getting older

We'll eat blancmange

The clocks will stay white

Except that the night

Drums up hordes of unknown stars. 

My Ground

I have staked out my ground

With frozen fishes

My path to freedom

Is marked by rustling corn husks

I raise ice ferns

On my windowpane

I breathe a circular hole

For my visitors

They see my eyes

My lashes waving

In vain

Around midnight the slalom of ghosts

Sweeps through the corn. 

_______________ 

MARIE LUISE KASCHNITZ

translated by Lisel Mueller

Princeton University Press 1980

 

WRITING ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE ~

L A W R E N C E    F E R L I N G H E T T I

( Liveright 2015 )


http://blog.sfgate.com/bookmarks/2014/03/17/ferlinghetti-to-publish-his-travel-journals/

50 years of being there

CAMILO JOSE CELA ~

C A M I L O   J O S E   C E L A

The Paris Review Interview

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1396/the-art-of-fiction-no-145-camilo-jos-cela

 

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS ~

Home Is Where the Heart Is




They came from a long way off, very old friends, at least the

man was. Another new wife we got to know and like. There was

wine. There was summer evening, a song sparrow serenaded

around a dessert of sliced fresh fruit and blueberry bread. We

started on the dirty dishes but left them in hot suds, there was

too much to show in the short time they were here. We traveled

around the old colonial home patched together with no money

and stories instead. They became lost in the small rooms, the

sloped ship-like floors, dim lighting. We laughed and visited in a

living room laid out for no company. It was obvious to see we

stretched out on the sofa two feet from the wood fire and

napped like kittens together through the winter. How could

anyone visit with that? When we made up their bed, crisp sheets

and pillow cases, they said they would sleep in their truck.



__________________ 

  © Bob Arnold

STEVEN MILLHAUSER~

Steven Millhauser

Voices in the Night

Knopf 2015 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/10/a-voice-in-the-night 

drawing David Levine

HAN SHAN ~

http://www.shambhala.com/cold-mountain-3748.html

Shambhala Publications

translated by J.P Seaton

XCIV

It's been a long time since I passed through this place.

Today, I'm here again, after seventy years.

Of those who wandered by back then,

most lie among the grave mounds.

Me, my head is long since white,

but I still hold on

to my little slice of cloudy mountain.

I have a message for those who'll come after:

You have to read

the words of the ancients.

 

JEAN VALENTINE ~

 J E A N    V A L E N T I N E

Photo courtesy of Schlesinger Library

Great-grandmother,


be with us

as if in the one same day & night

we all gave birth

in the one same safe-house, warm,

and then we rest together,

sleep, and nurse,

dreamily talk to our babies, warm

in a safe room        all of us

carried in the close black sky.



—————————— 

Jean Valentine
Shirt in Heaven
Copper Canyon Press 2015

RENE DAUMAL ~

Rene Daumal

VAIN PRAYER TO THE ELEMENTS

     Dust, dust of the oceans, first handkerchief above the wave, call
to the free cloud. . .
     The cloud suddenly falls as a block of stone.
     Dust, rock dust, into this rock. I will plant my freedom, into this
rock now scattered to the wind.
     The burning sand eats our foreheads, simoon of flames.
     Smoke, smoke from the burning of bodies, smoke full of illu-
sions, in you I will plant my fancy.
     Smoke returns to the ocean, flask of dirty water where a hunch-
back Venus scoffs at hope through her satisfied teeth.



_______________________

Rene Daumal
Le Contre-Ciel
The Overlook Press 1990
translated from the French by Kelton W. Knight

"Rene Daumal was born in 1908 in Boulzicourt, a small town near

the Ardenne mountains. He would die in Paris just thirty-six years

later. Most of the intervening years were spent questioning the implications

of that birth and impending death and the authenticity of the

man they represented."

J U L I O C O R T A Z A R ~

J U L I O   C O R T A Z A R

T H E   P A R I S    R E V I E W   I N T E R V I E W

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2955/the-art-of-fiction-no-83-julio-cortazar

BUKOWSKI ON WRITING ~

C H A R L E S    B U K O W S K I

[ Charles Bukowski to Ron Silliman March 1967 ]

       [ . . . ] I have read the critics — Winters, Eliot, Tate, so forth,

the New Criticism, The New New Criticism, the demands of Shap-

iro, the whole Kenyon crowd, the Sewanee crowd, I used half a life-

time reading the critics, and while I found the content pretensive

I found the style somehow pleasurable, and now it's nice of you

to tell me that the best of them are trying to get "human dignity,

self respect, the kind of pride you find in a wild, free stallion" back

into verse. that sounds as phoney as a horse's rubber asshole to me

but if that is your insight and/or your outlook, it's yours, and fine.

       IF ALL ELSE IS UGLY, IS DEADLY, THEN ISN'T IT OUR

DUTY TO BE BEAUTIFUL?" you scream at me in large caps. Ron-

ald, "duty" is a dirty word, and "beautiful" is a put down word. you

want to knock somebody off his dusty little legs — just demand that

he be "beautiful."

( Ecco 2015 )

16 August 1920

Happy Birthday Charles Bukowski