P O E T S W H O S L E E P
______________________
drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold
Monday, October 5, 2020
Sunday, October 4, 2020
NEW! LOUISE LANDES LEVI ~
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A long poem sequence by Louise from Kyoto, Japan
Foldout booklet in Japanese papers
New!
Fall 2020
LONGHOUSE
$12
order through Paypal & use our email
address ~
poetry@sover.net
Free shipping
in USA
Longhouse, Box 2454, West Brattleboro, VT 05303
Saturday, October 3, 2020
RE-READING ALFRED HAYES ~
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Of the three titles in the
New York Review of Books stable
by Alfred Hayes, and I recommend them all,
this is my favorite book, book cover design and
it remains one of the novel examples of male deception.
You read it like you are being chased, and maybe you are.
Even the book typography is graceful and at ease,
which isn't always the case with NYRB titles.
I picked this book up for a re-read sometime over
the summer and it was a one-day full pleasure read.
[ BA ]
Friday, October 2, 2020
RE-READING JIM THOMPSON ~
If you have only one Jim Thompson
book to read ~ this might be the one.
Published the year I was born and today
barked out in multiple editions, the book
has never gone away, become dated, or
softened. Made into at least
two films, with various other adaptations
and still nothing comes close to what
you're going to go through reading the book.
Thompson aligns with David Goodis and
Chester Himes as my top three in the
era that swept in after the king, Raymond Chandler.
[ BA ]
Thursday, October 1, 2020
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.
[ BA ]
Grasshopper, good singer!
Take care of my tomb
when I die
Janine loved this poem by Issa
translated by Nanao Sakaki
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photographs: bob arnold
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
RE-READING CHICAMAW & FRIENDS ~
Bowie tapped the Gulf of Mexico.
"You ever seen the ocean, Keechie?"
She shook her head.
"Me neither. I'm almost thirty years old and you know I
never have seen the ocean. Can you beat that?
Say, how would you like to live on the ocean?"
"Sounds pretty good to me."
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I’ve been down in your territory the last few days re-reading West Texas and Oklahoma district books: The Killer Inside Me with relentless Jim Thompson, and now Edward Anderson, harsh right-winger from Oklahoma and his Thieves Like Us. Anderson sold the book to Hollywood for the film They Live By Night and got himself $500 for it, his second book, thoroughly grubby rich armed robbery stuff, but nothing seemed to help his career because of himself. Dead in his early 60s. By the energy in each Thompson novel you’d think he was made from electricity or kerosene and should be alive to this day. I never read a bad or weak book by him. I may go back and re-read a bunch of other books since I have them all, plus a biography I always liked that I keep on display out in The Studio part of the bookshop that no one ever buys. We may be talking about a world gone by. Usually the one I liked best.
[ BA ~ to ~ J.D. ]
Cathy O' Donnell & Farley Granger in the film
'They Live By Night'
directed by Nicholas Ray
1948
~ If you want film noir at one of its best,
start here.
'They Live By Night'
directed by Nicholas Ray
1948
~ If you want film noir at one of its best,
start here.
Monday, September 28, 2020
POETS WHO SLEEP #18 ~
P O E T S W H O S L E E P
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drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold
Sunday, September 27, 2020
RE-READING PHILIP WHALEN ~
Further Notice
I can't live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me
The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won't go away
I shall be myself —
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo
Like Yellowstone National Park.
22:ix:56
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Philip Whalen
The Collected Poems
edited by Michael Rothenberg
Wesleyan University Press, 2007
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For nearly any other collected poems
one can almost assume cracking the book open
to the middle will well provide the reader
with some of the best poetry by the poet.
Not so Philip Whalen.
For the last 50 years I guided my Whalen trajectory
through my favorite book of his, On Bear's Head,
a book devised and brought into existence through the
tough work of James Koller, Bill Brown and Don Carpenter
after a little fight with the co-publisher Harcourt & Brace.
Coyote Books was the rightful instigator, as usual.
Whalen was hot from the start — say after he gets through
his apprenticeship in the 40s— from the 50s onward
he is sailing, and Michael Rothenberg's perfect book
for Whalen: cover jacket design and hundreds of poems
(what more do you need?) plus Whalen's drawings and
doodles and general Philip-energy, it's all here in the Wesleyan
edition and I've come during a virus pandemic and read it all (ALL)
now a second time. Reading Philip Whalen is like bicycling up
a hill while eating an ice-cream cone, and maybe it's a hot day
but it doesn't have to be. Energies transfix. You know you've
got a poet when everyone says he or she is reading him and
no one knows who you're talking about.
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Friday, September 25, 2020
RE-READING RONALD JOHNSON ~
from ~
The Book of the Green Man
Of the seasons,
seamless, a garland.
Solstice
to equinox —
days,
The length of
breath,
a sequential foliage
firmly planted in
our veins,
we stand in our rayed form:
blue-eyed,
a chicory,
Sponsa Solis —
& upon the sun appears
a face
also with rays
in descent
trough an undulant
blue.
_____________________
Ronald Johnson
The Book of the Green Man
Norton, 1967
There is something beguiling and transfixed,
at least it happens to me, when I re-approach
Johnson's early books published exquisitely
by Norton.
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