POETS WHO SLEEP #15 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                                     drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

all drawings

copyright

Bob Arnold


The complete series to date ~ please link here

SONGS OF THE LITTLE HUT ~

Songs of the Little Hut
               ____________________


The sky god rains

but my hut is well thatch'd

draft free, simple

I concentrate my mind —

Rain, sky god

           rain

                                                 — Godhika





Who dwells in the little hut?

A solitary hermit

He's shed desire

He keeps a sharp mind

Oh his little hut was not

built in vain


                                                 — Kutiviharin





You have your old cottage

Now you want a new one

but friend don't you realize

a new cottage is just

             further trouble


                                                   — Kutiviharin





Irrigators channel the creeks

Fletchers straighten the

arrow shaft

Carpenters bend a plank to their will

Men of character

            give shape to the self


                                                      — Kula





The seeing one sees both

the one who sees

and the one who doesn't

The one who doesn't see

sees neither


                                                     — Vappa





My little hut pleases me

I have no need for women

Let them take their

fine clothes and trouble

            somewhere else


                                                     — Ramaniyakutika





Addictions he shook off

food, clothes, house, medicine, no longer needed

His birthplace is emptiness

He leaves tracks

like a bird

through the sky


                                                         — Vijaya





We dwell alone in the forest

old trees the woodcutter rejected

People look at me

like hell-bound creatures at someone

             going to heaven


                                                              — Vijjiputta 




______________________________________________

Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha


Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha
translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman
Shambhala 2020




just be honest — wouldn't you have loved to have written these poems!

RE-READING PATRICIA HIGHSMITH ~

In July I went back to re-read Highsmith's

The Blunderer (1954) — not an entirely

successful novel by the crime master

but mostly a thrilling read for 3/4s

of the book. A slight muddle

sets in where you can sense the author

has lost her story, whereas she doesn't

in her first novel Strangers on a Train.

Compared to say, Sue Grafton, Highsmith is

Shakespeare, and anything by her, including her short

stories, are well worth frightening yourself.

[ BA ]

P A T R I C I A      H I G H S M I T H

RE-READING LETTERS TO JANE ~

Ausable Press

2004

______________________________

Another one of those unique books

and entirely given and gifted by Carruth,

easily one of my favorite of all his titles

and the one that reveals the poet in his

kindness and love for a much younger

and dying poet Jane Kenyon.

Hayden could be a tiring crank but

there was charm and almost always

thoughtfulness to his every move and

this slim book brings it all forth.

[ BA ]

RE-READING SOLEDAD BROTHER ~~

R E A D     M E

This classic has never gone away,
and won't.

VISITING JANINE ~

 

The other day we went down to the Catskills to take care of Janine Pommy Vega’s grave site. Ten years ago already we chose the red Vermont granite for her stone, and I asked that “Poet” be all there was on the stone other than her name and date. She looks awful alone there, friends.  Susan noticed that, a woman to woman eye thing. I then took Susan to Philip Guston’s grave, Musa beside him. Now the PC crowd have canceled his very large and important exhibit of art work spanning a life time because it will include his dizzy Klansmen. Wait until 2024 the artsy legislatures command. To see one of those paintings, and I have in backwater Hanover, NH, is something to behold. In the cemetery all is equal so very early in the morning in the rain.

UPDATE: GUSTON

photographs: bob arnold 

RE-READING PAUL GOODMAN ~

Proverbs of a Small Farm




If the raccoon gnaws ten percent of the corn,

don't set a trap, plant another row.



If spinach goes to seed too soon,

try it twice, then plant chard.



Don't fight the cabbage worms

if store-bought is good and cheap.



Do very little "on principle".

life is hard enough as it is.



Honor the weeds that love your land

and call them flowers, they seed themselves.



When phoebes nest in the barn, you have no choice

but to leave the big door open also to thieves.



Many things will grow in the North Country

that they don't grow,

but then it's hard to give away your surplus

that they won't eat.



Nature is profligate, usury is natural,

but you must not pocket the increase.



One spring when the snow melts, my asparagus

will finally be big enough for someone else to eat.






________________________
Paul Goodman
Collected Poems
Random House, 1974


edited by Taylor Stoehr with a birds-eye view of Paul Goodman
from his good friend George Dennison who well understood the
ways & means of poets, anarchists, educators and philosophers
of all stripes, which Goodman certainly was. 

LAST CHANCE ~

 

R E A D      M E

Windy Dipa Rhoads

POETS WHO SLEEP #14 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                                       drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

all drawings

copyright

Bob Arnold



The complete series to date ~ please link here

RE-READING TWO GEMS ~

Zbigniew Herbert 1960

 

I read again these two slender books over the 4 of July

fest when we could detect from the woods where

we spent two nights by camp fire preparing delicious

simple meals what sounded like mortar fire from two

outlying towns ten miles away, a strong bright

lamp allowed all the reading we wanted late into

the night after dishes with these two strong minds

on the subjects of books, other writers, travel into

foreign lands, and mosing around art, architecture,

wars and recovery.

[ BA ]

RE-READING A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD ~

John Lehmann, 1951

___________

There are scores of editions of this excellent

autobiographical novel published, though

incomplete (you might not think so) when the

author passed away at thirty-one in 1948.

The above photograph is my book.

Struck down on a bicycle by an automobile 

thirteen years earlier, fracturing his spine,

Welch composed this telling of his life,

accident, healers, and agony of never

surrender in this book for the ages.

RE-READING ANNIE DILLARD ~

Farmer's Daughter



There's always unseasonable weather.

Remember the flood that killed father:

when the water went down, the chickens

lay muddy and drowned. Oh we watch

the weather here on earth; we don't forget

the winter days when girls wear cotton dresses,

the Aprils when the bushes sag with snow.

      We were cutting the apple trees back

      when he said, "Look, it's snowing;"

      but I'd seen a winter of snow

      and knew that more were coming.

Still, what do we know of a season?

Only father could say

when the rain would stop at the mountain

or ruin the hay. I'd try to watch

the hawks or lick a finger,

and the crops were still a failure;

there was frost all over the valley,

south as far as Twin Falls.

      He kissed me when shadows were long

      on the path to the orchard; he promised

      to meet me again when the apples were in;

now when the wind parts the curtains,

now in the city when the cat won't come,

I sleep with only one eye shut,

keeping a weather eye out.






______________________

ANNIE DILLARD
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
University of Missouri Press
1974





Someone ordered this book from us ~
so since I'm the packer of books, I read it
before I packed it. It's how you say goodbye.

RE-READING GEORGE DENNISON ~

A somewhat forgotten and misunderstood book
which can be aligned with Thoreau's Walden
except we are in rural Maine with George Dennison's
personal journals and his playwright ear for neighbor
portraits — landscape & lingo — and while George passed away
far too soon (1987) to put these pages together into what others
have predicted would be a masterpiece, it's all in the eyes of the beholder.
I met George Dennison once upon a time when we hosted a
gala for a fine Vermont poet and George was there and while
everyone took their chosen corners of our house to bed down
for the night, George said he'd be just as happy out in the front

yard, under the starry hemlocks and the August night with

his sleeping bag. In Temple there is short passage
where George describes a home place
and it may as well be George describing himself,
"The house and grounds are so attractive, cheerful and open —
ample, generous, farm and home."
The book and author — unique.

[ BA ]





Steerforth Press
1994


As for those that criticize Temple for being
merely loose pages from a journal by Dennison —
have a look at Shawno



a gem of a book at 86 pages
straight out of the heart of Temple, Maine
in the home built by Finns as George would write
and his lovely companion, a dog, called Shawno.

___________________
Schocken Books, 1984

RE-READING A CORDIALL WATER ~

This is my favorite M.F. K. Fisher

book of many many — and it must

be this edition, partial to the lovely size

and design of North Point Books. 

Jacket design by Wesley B. Tanner.

Writing straight from the wild.

[ BA ]

RE-READING THOMAS BERNHARD ~

Perhaps best read

after reading all of Bernhard

so far translated into English —
written in 1980, a decade
before the author's untimely passing —
Bernhard takes on all the literary prizes,
the farcical pomp and ceremony,
and of course takes all the money and runs.



Knopf 2010