ALVIN FEINMAN ~

Pilgrim Heights


Something, something, the heart here
Misses, something it knows it needs
Unable to bless — the wind passes;
A swifter shadow sweeps the reeds,
The heart a colder contrast brushes.

So this fool, face-forward, belly
Pressed among the rushes, plays out
His pulse to the dune's long slant
Down from blue to bluer element,
The bold encompassing drink of air

And namelessness, a length compound
Of want and oneness the shore's mumbling
Distantly tells — something a wing's
Dry pivot stresses, carved
Through barrens of stillness and glare:

The naked close of light in light,
Light's spare embrace of blade and tremor
Stealing the generous eye's plunder
Like a breathing banished from the lung's
Fever, lost in parenthetic air.

Raiding these nude recesses, the hawk
Resumes his yielding balance, his shadow
Swims the field, the sands beyond,
The narrow edges fed out to light,
To the sea's eternal licking monochrome.

The foolish hip, the elbow bruise
Upright from the dampening mat,
The twisted grasses turn, nuthatch,
Light-headed blood renews its stammer —
Apart, below, the dazed eye catches

A darkened figure abruptly measured
Where folding beakers lay their whites;
The heart from its height starts downward,
Swum in that perfect pleasure
It knows it needs, unable to bless.


_______________

Alvin Feinman
The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman
Corrupted into Song
Princeton 2016

Harold Bloom gives us a forward to this posthumous collection

and having had enough of Harold Bloom for now I skipped the introduction, took to James Geary's fine portrait of the poet, who is as inventive yet as sullen as he appears here in this poem, nicely working the language over the landscape, and returning after reading the book seeing that Bloom also merits this as one of Feinman's finest. He lived a long life and wrote sparingly and kept long to his teaching duties at Bennington College.

SEE ~ ALVIN FEINMAN

ONCE UPON A TIME NOW IN AMERICA ~

President Obama may escape by the skin of his teeth, having Hillary the professional liar and Trump the professional lunatic left in the wake. We get to hand over the Grand Tetons, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra, the Everglades, the Smokeys, the Long Trail, the Golden Gate Bridge, the northern Cascades, the wind-swept Plains, the mighty Mississippi, to them.

[ BA ]

BILLIE HOLIDAY ~

JAMES BROWN ~

Spiegel & Grau (Random House)

2016

Pulling the curtain back on James Brown

with respect

A GREAT DAY OF READING ~

Alec  Finlay at Langais in North Uist

Here is a link of poetry

and thought from around the world

a great day of reading for you

not to go wrong ~

https://otatablog.wordpress.com

Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape.

CamusNotebooks: 1942-1951

Justin O’Brien, Trans

ONCE IN VERMONT ~

Sun Up

I get up with

The birds who

Get up with me

Show Me

I don’t walk this

Early morning, frost

On the mowing, but you do —

And when you return

I’m sitting by the

Cookstove warm as you bend

To shiver my neck a kiss —

Show me what I missed

Bow

Please don’t take it

For granted this first

Light on the hillside

Bare crop ledges and

A little fresh snow —

Some mornings there I

Would warm myself before

Cutting wood, listen to

Bluejays cry someone was

About and they wanted

You to know the someone

Was you standing in the

Woods warming freely and

It could go on forever

Egg

Morning light of falling snow

We went outside and did our work

Shoveled out dog huts

Opened a trail to the chicken shed

Busted ice from water buckets

I was sweeping off long metal sheets

Over the woodpile when you said

— see how this feels — and in your

Gloved hand you held the flesh of

A warm egg to my icy cheek

__________________________________________

This collection was published in 1999 by Gnomon in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Jonathan Greene and Dobree Adams are the brains behind Pa. Both of these

stalwarts worked through many of my previous books, chapbooks, booklets and

came up with a sizable collection that was guided into place with cover commentary by

Hayden Carruth, Janine Pommy Vega, Cid Corman, and Ian Hamilton Finlay 

and I love them all. The front cover photograph is of our garden in Vermont

 and the stone hut I built for our son Carson on the year of his birth.
I will be showcasing all the book over the many weeks (Mondays) ahead.

LEE MORGAN ~

Blue Note: 1963

HORACE SILVER ~

Blue Note, 1956

BAD GIRL ~

THELONIOUS MONK IN JAPAN 1963 ~

MARY RUEFLE ~

Wave Books, 2016

A tidy and fascinating collection of tales, or call them prose, poems, prose poems

it won't matter, all is good.

I just don't have the time at the moment (I'm framing a building) to type

out the two longer pieces that thrill me here —

"Pause" and then a long piece about shrunken heads.

Pause is menopause.

It's never been survived in better hands.
Here is a link to the piece first published in Granta:
https://granta.com/pause/

GOOD NIGHT BROTHER ~

Brother

Empty yourself in the foamflower, 

calla, the crushed chicory.

Greenflies nest in the blasted

bird, some blue-wing roadside

rots in the scrub beardtongue,

the hot air upon us to bear as is.

Some lay on warm ryegrass in

the last residue of cloud.

The geese go on being geese

silken in slashes of weather

whether we hammer them

to our wooden homes or not.

Tell us how this ends. In the throat,

the cloves, or in the dove coming

out of herself in the wayside seeds?

I Struggle With Your Breath

I see it only when horses are

in motion, the blur canter

and lupine, muscle and prairie rock,

running the weeds in a condition of

quiet that is thunder tender

on dirt and thistle, on the bird-weeks

of April like a rain-born weeping

for the lost and cooling places I

roam just before moon.

Christ, the lambs are yellow

and the goats are rag paper. When I

watched you breathe on the virgin teen,

herons tried to feed their way

back to someone's normal soul.

And No Thief Approacheth And No Moth Corrupteth

The earth is through the lamb-farm

where sun bloods the apples,

where ticks in silence rest in the soak of backwater.

In the dream of your execution, I do

my violence with a green handkerchief,

bird shit on lavender, and the moon rises bald

and clean into the ditch. I hear the mental process

of silos simmer and the Pentecostal winds.

This house marked with snowberries and dust.

The great price of bringing forth wheat.

Thou Art Lightning And Love

To the feast of errors

I give larch

that never bloom,

silk fishes of milkweed,

confusion of the divided seasons,

thorns in a pale nest blown

into pinecones.

Out of haying comes

the living light

as thistles, all who hate

you joined to you,

walking upright with

the strength of clean pine.

________________________

KIMBERLY BURWICK

Good Night Brother

Burnside Review Books, 2014

 

ATTICA ~

Pantheon 2016

Long before "9-11" this was an earlier 9-11, the Attica Prison Uprising in upstate New York told with the clear-eyed scope of a storyteller's eye by historian Heather Ann Thompson — and this may be the strong thread of the book, amongst the revealing horrors long hidden — is Thompson's straight-edge sturdy report.

Don't delay.

In Attica they killed black, brown and white all the same, even the guards, officials, anyone in the way. The State Police had issued shotguns and very few had ever used a shotgun in riot formation. Buckshot did the most damage. Plus toxic gas and powder dropped from a helicopter Vietnam style. It was the year of post Cambodia, Laos, Parrot’s Beak, the war coming to a halt and the US losing. They’re still angry. Still losing. Americans have the lousiest teacher in world history next to various other fascists. In all our cities, their governments, now in small towns' corrosive politics and, I know, ingrained in rural routes.

Democracy Now! (watch)

Tom Robbins on Attica


The New York Times Book Review

ADRIENNE RICH ~

What Kind of Times are These


There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled,
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

(1991)


_____________________________

ADRIENNE RICH
Collected Poems
1950-2012
Norton, 2016

In 1951 Adrienne Rich published A Change of World and came right out of the poetry tree completely formed —

and remarkably she continued to form and re-form and grow for the next half-century. 

One of the major American poets of

the 20th and 21st centuries.

[ BA ]

THE CUCKOO SHE'S A FINE BIRD ~

Not a mountain fiddle

but a sawing violin

not a real cuckoo bird

but a cuckoo clock

all from this canny

Virginia singer

(Document 1926-1929)