LET IT BE ~

LONGHOUSE BIBLIOGRAPHY TO DATE ~

The Complete Longhouse Bibliography
1971~2020
updated links
(more to come)



Longhouse Bibliography 1971-1989

Longhouse Bibliography 1990-2006

Longhouse Bibliography 2007

Longhouse Bibliography Photo Album 1974 - 2009

Longhouse Bibliography 2008

Longhouse Bibliography 2009

Longhouse Bibliography 2010

Longhouse Bibliography 2011

Longhouse Bibliography 2012

Longhouse Bibliography 2013-2015

Longhouse Bibliography 2015-2019

Longhouse Bibliography 2019-2020

—————————————

cedar star built by bob arnold

onto the longhouse woodshed

2016

BACKROAD CHALKIE ~

Backroad Chalkie

Finn Wilcox

THREAD ~

Monadnock

At night we would light two lamps

Where I would watch you undo

Every button of that blue checkered dress

The rest of you in boots

Blonde hair loose

Wet a little from rainwater

That morning we climbed

From a roadside clearing

Alone on the mountain

Shared bread and honey

Followed the trail down

Of ice and small birds

Wait

All evening

A swallow has

Swept the grassy

Farmyard for one

Shedded goose

Feather to stitch

Into her nest —

It is easy enough

For me to pick

Up — but I watch

Instead, until

She has it

Thread

Take a blanket of red wool

Fold it into a cushion square

Beside flames of the wood fire

Where lamplight of the room

Falls the best, and right there

In the heat, away from winter

With your loom of sanded birch

I’ll watch you weave the moon

Stars, river and mountains

From a trail we’re on of thread

What She Wears

Where I am

The day is so utterly beautiful

All wind and sunshine

A dress could be sewn from it

And what do you know, I’m alone

But not for long

————————————

BOB ARNOLD

I'm In Love With You

Who Is In Love With Me

Longhouse 2012

WILLIAM BENTON ~

Camera Obscura



A tiny catchlight of saliva
shows as she opens her mouth.

In the moment of recognition

details of the glitzy room
slip from focus: she stares

out of the shadow of her hat —
a wide-brimmed, red, feathery affair —

aware of what is rehearsed
in the encounter, undaunted,

prepared for that alone.






Winter Nights        
                  
                   For Sangmi



Too bad the waste
of these winter nights

can't be saved up, placed
inside the folds

of a counterpane —
a half-remembered thing,

kept in the linen closet —
cut perfectly to fit

by the knife of spring.






Backlit



A species of
survival
assembles its
colored wings.

Something something
in the lanced air.

The unforeseen branch
syntax flutter
of what wasn't
and then is.

They use it
like a meaning:
it means
they are alive.






Necessary Sorrows


Lorenzo died today. Or yesterday.
The obit was forwarded to me. Out
of the water small waves tent into
peaks of undulant light. All
you can see in Algeria is the green
immediacy, the mule and the wagon,
the war. Affection is a wandering
soul. A girl ends up being tall and
intelligent, with memories. If you
talk to yourself, don't forget her.



————————

WILLIAM BENTON
Backlit
Pressed Wafer, 2017

SANDY BULL ~

R E A D      M E

GWENDOLYN BROOKS ~

Beacon Press 2017

LISTEN ~

THE LOUNGE LIZARDS ~

PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE ~

R E A D     M E

KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS ~

R E A D      M E

it's never too late to read a good book

one in here has an excellent eye to bob dylan

THE SKIN OF HER NECK ~

Many Times

There is the absolute way

Of doing it, and we have done it

Many times and again —

How I will come to you

How you will meet me

The early morning sun

Perfect on the bed, and

Stripes in the Mexican blanket

Like blood, the sea, yellow iris petals —

And it is a silly lovers ritual of ours

I hug you and you hug me and step onto

My boots, and I walk you and me around the

Sunlit room, the sway of patchouli in your hair

And your face smooth against my lips

Like the inside of your hands

Day And Night

How often have we

Stepped together into water —

You left your clothes on the rocks

And shivered your way to me

Said it was freezing as I thought

Of the mountain stream filling this

Clear basin of evening light, and how

Swallows showed us the angles of the sky

Far above barbed wire and pasture heat

Which we came down from after work

Smelling lilac in the breeze —

And it was the long blonde hair you shook

Out of a blue bandana and later braided

That had me remember the day and night

The Skin Of Her Neck

Tonight, because her hand

Is in pain, the small finger

Swollen, yes, I’ll stir the

Batter, although she is better

And first taught me how

Something is done right

And I came from behind

And smelled the skin of

Her neck, the long blonde

Hairs alive and the blouse

White and rough, tucked into

A thin summer skirt —

Winter, near Christmas

3 feet of snow and her

Body moves across the

Cabin room with summer

A clay bowl with

Colored stripes in her

Arms, the fresh heat

Of the flat iron stove

Lamp

After supper

No longer summer

A windy night ahead

We sit in the kitchen

One lamp

Read before the fire

Nothing else in our lives

Boots drying

Rain on the windows

————————————

BOB ARNOLD

I'm In Love With You

Who Is In Love With Me

Longhouse 2012

bell hooks ~

"Silence is present everywhere under patriarchy, though it requires

different silences from men than from women. You can imagine

the policing of gender as the creation of reciprocal silences, and

you can begin to recognize male silence as a tradeoff for power and

membership. No one ever put it better than bell hooks, who said:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not

violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males

that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill

off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not suc-

cessful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on part-

icular  men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

That is, patriarchy requires that men silence themselves first (and

perhaps it's worth noting again that, though patriarchy is a system

that privileges men and masculinity, many women are complicit in it,

some men rebel against it, and some people are undoing the rules of

gender that props it up). This means learning not only to be silent to

others but also to themselves, about aspects of their inner life and self.

Reading hook's passage, I was chilled, as though I suddenly

understood that this is the plot of a horror movie or a zombie

movie. The deadened seek out the living to exterminate feeling,

either by making their targets join them in numbness or by intim-

idating or assaulting them into silence. In the landscape of silence,

the three realms might be silence imposed from within; silence

imposed from without; and silence that exists around what has not

yet been named, reorganized, described, or admitted. But they are

not distinct; they feed each other; and what is unsayable becomes

unknowable and vice versa, until something breaks."

— Rebecca Solnit

(Happy Birthday bell hooks, 25 September 1952)

GUY DAVENPORT ~

GUY DAVENPORT

 PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

PETER COLE ~

The Prayer Book




For years I've wanted to write a prayer book.

Why? Because I've learned

that the solid hangs upon nothingness.

Because I've found that the sentence is a kind of petition.

And because I've found that in all that I've said

in all that I've said I've said only thank you.

So, little by little,

                       in fact I've written that book

and today it weighs some two hundred pounds

and soon it will celebrate its fiftieth birthday

and yesterday I bought it shoes.


Aharon Shabtai (translated by Peter Cole)







Kharja / Closure






 "Oh, I'll

love you alright;

         so

   long as you

manage to bend



   both of my

anklets

back to the

   thin silver

earrings you gave me."


(Anonymous, Mozarabic, 12th century
 translate by Peter Cole)








Palestine: A Sestina


Hackles are raised at the mere mention of Palestine,
let alone  The Question of — who owns the pain?
Often it seems the real victims here are the hills —
those pulsing ridges, whose folds are tender fuzz of green
kill with softness. On earth, it's true, we're only guests,
but people live in places, and stake out claims to land.

From Moab Moses saw, long ago — a land
far off, and once I stood there facing Palestine
with Hassan, whose family lives in Amman. (We were his guests
at the Wahdat refugee camp.) Wonder shot with pain
came into his eyes as he gazed across the green
valley between Nebo and Lydda beyond the hills.

Help would come, says the Psalmist, from one of those hills,
though scholars still don't know for certain whether the land
in question was Zion, or the high places of Baal. The green
olives ripened, and ripen, either way in Palestine,
and the memory of groves cut down rings on pain
for those whose people worked them, for themselves or guests.

"I have been made a stranger in my home by guests,"
says Job, in Hebrew that evolved along these hills,
though he himself was foreign to them. His famous pain
is also that of those who call the Promised Land
home in  another tongue. Could what was pledged be Palestine?
Is Scripture's fence intended to guard this mountain's green?

Many have roamed its slopes and fields, dressed in green
fatigues, unable to fathom what they mean, as guests.
And armies patrol still, throughout Palestine,
as ministers mandate women and men to carve up its hills
to keep them from ever again becoming enemy land.
The search, meanwhile, goes on—for a balm to end the pain,

though it seems only to widen the rippling circles of pain,
as though the land itself became the ripples, and its green
a kind of sigh. So spring comes round again to the land,
as echoes cry: "It's mine!" —and the planes will bring in guests,
so long as water and longing run through these hills,
which some (and coins) call Israel, and others Palestine.

The pundits' talk of Palestine doesn't account for the pain—
or the bone-white hills, breaking the heart as they go green
before the souls of guests-on-earth who've known this land.



————————————
Peter Cole
Hymns & Qualms
new & selected poems & translations
Farrar, 2017

LARRY EIGNER ~

R E A D      M O R E

The University of Alabama Press 

2017

———————————————

NICOLAS GUILLEN ~

Nicolas Guillén, Cuban Poet

 (1902-1989)

R E A D !