BOB ARNOLD'S ~ THE WOODCUTTER TALKS ~

Drawing from years of poetry and also new poems, The Woodcutter Talks is Bob Arnold at his finest

branching love poems with back country work poems and settlement with community, family and 

individual portraits. The extensive collection also showcases vintage photographs from woodcutters

and woodchoppers and big-saw-pullers of old. Sweat runs down the cheeks of the mere literary and

they adore one another.

First edition
Longhouse 2015
only issued in softcover
234 pages perfect bound
w/ photographs

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L O N G H O U S E
 PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303

NICK CAVE ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/i-am-the-real-nick-cave.html

JOY HARJO ~

 J  O  Y     H  A  R  J  O

For Calling the Spirit Back
from Wandering the Earth
in Its Human Feet



Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth
gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars' ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents' desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time, who will be
there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there
without time.

Let the earth stabilize post colonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don't worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders,
your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of you
ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our
direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take
many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or
ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and
creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way
through the dark.



_____________________

J O Y   H A R J O
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
Norton, 2015

DAVID BROMBERG ~

 

 http://www.davidbromberg.net/

WOMEN OF THE BEATS ~

Janine Pommy Vega

 Joanne Kyger

 Hettie Jones

 Anne Waldman

 Denise Levertov

 Diane di Prima

 Lenore Kandel

 Mary Norbert Korte

 ruth weiss

 Elise Cowan

https://www.bartlebyeditores.es/ficha_obra.php?id_obra=204&genero=poesia

REAL LIFE ROCKS ~

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300196641

GETTING ACQUAINTED ~

GETTING ACQUAINTED


 
We knew no one
 
Driving into a
 
Small town

 

Then we saw a sign
 
“It’s a Boy!”
 
And we knew someone


_______________________________________


 © Bob Arnold

 

AWAY ON THE MOUNTAIN ~

 

YVES BONNEFOY PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW ~

Y V E S   B O N N E F O Y

The Paris Review Interview

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1790/the-art-of-poetry-no-69-yves-bonnefoy

 

THE ANCHOR'S LONG CHAIN ~

Seagull Books 2015

Yves Bonnefoy

 

The Anchor’s Long Chain (Ales Stenar)

translated by Beverley Bie Brahic 

 
I

They say
Boats appear in the sky
And from some of them
The anchor’s long chain may rattle down,
Down towards our furtive land.
The anchor bobs over our fields and trees
Seeking a place to moor,
But soon a wish from above yanks it free; 
The ship of elsewhere has no use for here,
Its horizon lies in another dream.

It may however come to pass
That the anchor is heavy, unusually so,
And rakes the ground, rumpling the trees.
Someone saw it snag a church door,
Catch the arch where our hope fades,
And a sailor had to shinny down
The taut, jerking chain,
And free his heaven from our night.

SHARDS ~

http://www.ndbooks.com/book/shards-fragments-of-verses/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/04/lawrence-ferlinghetti-interview-poets

EDITH PIAF ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/movies/08vie.html

BERLIN STORIES ~

New York Review of Books, 2012

http://www.nyrb.com/products/berlin-stories?variant=1094929313

FRANK O'HARA ~

Y E T   A N O T H E R   F A N





It's a great shame

Madame Mallarme

that to sad us your

hands seem swans

on tortoises drifting

elegant in the sea



While birds whine

at the sun we lay

our aching eyes in

your lap and an iron

balustrade holds

firm round our heart



Gently white planes

rove the horizon

as your wings beat

to earth and trample

our freckles into

coral and grass


 _________________

F R A N K   O' H A R A 


 

SWEDISH PURSE ~

SLY ~

SLY

 

By truck we were
 
Heading home the same
 
Time we saw fox heading
 
Home by the side of the road
 
Muddy legs like quick
 
Moving boots he made
 
His way and I swear
 
We looked at him
 
And he looked at us
 
And the Earth was whole


_____________________ 

© Bob Arnold
The Woodcutter Talks
LONGHOUSE 2015

YESTERDAY AND TODAY ~

T H O M A S    P Y N C H O N

( 1966 )

ny times

THE HARROW & THE HARVEST ~

A LOVING GESTURE ~

Dear K —

This old nondrinker notices just how much drinking is in your letter from this gala event you attended. How our society depends on the drink to grease the gears, to get us through. To get everyone involved through. It’s the non-drinker, trust me, they have no idea what to do with.

 
Somewhere out there someone has a video of you on their cell phone doing “Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools” in a conga line.

 
It’s customary to think we are now all in the chain of fools since we are all drunk. Have to be. Unless we aren’t getting through.

 
My father would be uncomfortable with me, who wasn’t drinking, while he was drinking. Finally when he was loose and relaxed enough, he’d cozy up to Sweetheart and me and take out his forever shirt pocket notebook filled with lumber scribbles and house information, cabinets to order for a kitchen job he recently measured up for a young couple eager for their first home, and he’d write down just what it would cost to get us tickets for an Amtrak train trip since he had been listening to us prattle along about a long cross-country voyage and it sounded like fun. Into the notebook went all the information, which of course looked like nonsense to him when he sobered up. Sweetheart still remembers this sort of sad testimony about the man. Nothing ever came of it, not that we expected any, the guy was just relaxed and feeling happy.

 
A close friend felt more like himself when he finally got me to drink down two bottles of red wine with him the very last time he visited here. He didn't know all I wanted was to see him smile. I must have felt somewhere in the soul this could be a last visit, although I would have never predicted it. My friend, to us, would live many years longer. He brought the two bottles of wine (which he drank the most from), Breyers ice cream, and a jar of unsalted old man peanuts that he seemed to relish. A loving gesture.

 
The stout Jack Daniels bottle sits on our kitchen shelf not quite polished off after a very long winter and chilly spring, along a dreary episode with the flu. Neither of us wanted any of the whiskey. But the bottle label looks dignified like a Harley Davidson emblem. We tried the hot-toddys and got nowhere with them but sipped them down like medicine. Sweetheart only once. Me every night for a week. I’m not sure it cut a lick but I gave it a try for the first time. It all still tastes like gasoline to me, as does wine, very foreign, but nothing matches the stuff I used to swill down when I was with a Chinese foot doctor for a few years and the concoctions he insisted I swallow I’m sure were part bark, roots, dirt, animal droppings, insect wings and bat guano. Pretty pink pig ear grease. The squiggles of homemade calligraphy down into my gut.

 
What will be left of us when the world is pulverized?

 
What I like about this Mexican hole in the wall restaurant where we eat is the owner is a limping long haired native with a wolf grin and wide striped shirt and he moves with the deliberation of a wise animal. And he owns the place and he’s owned the place a long time and he’s made it work. Congratulate the man! He hires women all in Spanish tongue, a bit of Indian shade to each of them, fluent in their tricky language and half may smile at you. Just their pacific faces beat out the entire history of most of the white customers that wait for their take-out orders.  There is little to speak of from this white world except consuming, Facebook, cell-phone, money making, bill paying and a rent to meet. Where’s the beef? Where’s the trail? Where’s the music? It’s MP3 and throw away the vinyl, the field recordings, the personal heavy boxes of records, so many journeys. The real heft that instills a real memory. The stuff that makes you feel hurt in places and so you are alive.

 
I listened to Boz Scaggs during an interview, and there’s the Texan musician looking a bit wasted after decades of road life, making a music out of this young man heart of once upon a time and somewhere in his serious litany of remembrance he suddenly turns me on and I really hear and see and bear down with what he’s trying to get across. It’s almost like he has the partial heart of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers sincerely deep down in his bones. It is true. I can hear the cadence and the calmness of the dust trail and animal ploving and how slow both the Red River and Rio Grande can flow. Only a true Texan. Like you, he says, he was raised in Oklahoma and Texas. I like these guys. Always have. He has a new and very popular album now out. Try to play it at your music store job. Put a Texas blues into the Texas hallways, trap it into the book catacombs, drizzle it down into the store cafe. Sexify the styrofoam.

 
I have a steel wall to build today. Happy days are here again.

 
all’s well, Bob

BORN WITH THE BLUES ~

MILLIONAIRES ~

MILLIONAIRES





What to say to
 
A Mexican gal
 
Working high off
 
In the mountains
 
With a quick greeting
 
For us to step out
 
Back and see what
 
They do — dyeing
 
Wool over a cast
 
Iron pinyon fire —
 
The dyes stir with
 
Wool skeins in two
 
Deep tubs boiling
 
Out of control as
 
Bare armed she works
 
Ingenious pulleys to
 
Lift out and bleed
 
Magnificent colors,
 
Nothing like we see
 
Anywhere else in old
 
Town until we look up
 
To the sky, and another
 
Worker drapes the dipped
 
Wool over makeshift
 
Drying racks, neither
 
Women bothering much
 
To wear their masks
 
For the wicked vapors,
 
Since out of nowhere
 
In the smolder of heat
 
Poisons and probable
 
Embarrassment she says
 
They are both
 
Going to win the
 
Lottery — fast white
 
Grins — “Yep, going
 
To win big-time
 
A million bucks”


________________ 

 © Bob Arnold

AFTER THE FALL ~

ANECDOTAGE ~

B R O A D S T O N E    B O O K S

http://broadstonebooks.com/Jonathan_Greene_Page.html

 

MAURICE SCULLY ~

Baint an Fheir


Poem: Plod. Poem: What's left of your bones.

There, see. Poem: 'Blunder follows blunder'

he wrote, (tapping the floor) beginning again to

take note, and grow up. Little incidents connect

to make a afbric where air meets in its heat cold

too to the lip tangible in its flow, woven through,

walled in. The verb: gathering. The verb: locate.

The verb: stop. Acumen, praise. White is the colour

of your true love's hair — Wood Angelica, Butterbur,

Purple Loosestrife — now. Yes. The verb: to see.

                 The verb: to know. This then.

                                      So. 

__________________________ 

Maurice Scully
Several Dances
Shearsman, UK, 2014

 


Even Maurice admits it's been years & years and it has been years & years since we have been in touch, but poet's have a secret weapon, are you listening? they have books no one wants to read that they can send as gifts, and they do, and we who receive many of these books must be thankful. Often they will be the best books you will read all year, and the worst. Be thankful. Someone is sharing. Sharing has disappeared if you haven't noticed. Sharing now means something on computer stupidity and that's not what I mean by sharing. Maurice has sent his most recent book from Shearsman, that fine fiddle of a press in the U.K. Maurice won't believe me, you won't believe me, but I had been recently wanting to read something new by Maurice. No doubt he read my mind. I opened his new book that he sent as a gift and came upon an opening word by Frank Samperi who really never did anything wrong with a poem. No failures.

Sunlight is

on things.

MULTITUDINOUS HEART ~

C A R L O S    D R U M M O N D    D E    A N D R A D E

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/books/review-multitudinous-heart-newly-translated-poetry-by-carlos-drummond-de-andrade.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Books&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&configSection=article&isLoggedIn=false&pgtype=article

M U L T I T U D I N O U S    H E A R T

It happened in Rio.

I was walking on the Avenida close to midnight.

Breasts were bouncing amid lights flashing countless stars.

The promise of the sea

and the jangle of streetcars

tempered the heat

that wafted in the wind

and the wind came from Minas Gerais.

My paralytic dreams the ennui of living

(life for me is the wish to die)

reduced me to a human barrel-organ remotely

in the shopping arcade of the Hotel Avenida sultry sultry

and since I knew no one, just the soft wind from Minas,

and didn't feel like drinking, I said: Let's end this.

But an excitement throbbed in the city its long buildings

cars with tops down zooming toward the sea

the sensuously roving heat

a thousand gifts of life for indifferent people,

and my heart beat violently, my useless eyes cried.

The sea was beating in my chest, no longer against the wharf.

The street ended, where did the trees go? the city is me

the city is me

I am the city

my love.

—————————————

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

MULTITUDINOUS HEART

Selected Poems

bilingual edition

translated by Richard Zenith 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015 

SPIKE DRIVER BLUES ~

http://www.mississippijohnhurtfoundation.org/?gclid=CIicqpzV-McCFYORHwodigEHmg

THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIENDS ~

Bill Kasper, known as the Birdman, digging through the piles of his eclectic inventory at Rainbow Music on First Avenue in the East Village in New York City   
 Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/nyregion/east-villages-birdman-abandoning-his-nest-of-cds-and-cassettes.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

nytimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/business/media/a-vinyl-lp-frenzy-brings-record-pressing-machines-back-to-life.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news