POETS WHO SLEEP #31 ~

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

TONY RICE ~

 

1951 ~ 2020

RE-READING 'MY HEART IS LIKE AN OPEN JELLY JAR' ~

 

Ronald,

I have been reading My Heart Is Like An Open Jelly Jar 

all the while. It’s the last thing I read before falling off to sleep each night. 

My previous late night book for a week was Rockwell Kent’s WILDERNESS, 

my favorite of all his books. Christmas time in Alaska. 1920. 

The first dare of the poet is setting up each poem in a form syntax that most will either balk at — perhaps the serious reader — and it may attract the playful but as with everything you do in writing, it is both playful and deadly serious, even though as with the best of the ancient poets, your subjects are mainly frivolous. Your poems aren’t written, they’re told. I taste them. And I can think of no modern poet in America who does this with such aplomb and delight. You not only write excellent poems, you do so daring the reader to be as attentive as you are to a lover shaving her armpits, or leaves gathering like battleships, walks out to nowhere, the light and the shade, the petals that drop in the quiet of a dark room. Dearly masterful. You have to believe me. 

Not only are your poems structured into shapes, but I detected not one line was manipulated from its meaning to make each shape. Marvelously the poem shape and the poem strength and meaning align one to the other, it’s craftsmanship. Apollinaire could do this, Louise Landes Levi does this, precious few, and those that attempt it are usually disguising that little is behind the playful structure. We get acorns, bombs, missiles, leaves and poems that flow as song with you.

 Bravo maestro. You’re a poet who has seen life and death. You can’t help yourself but wake up and write, walk outdoors and write. And you’re a poet I would want to meet.

[ BA ]

Yggdrasil Press

2020

BEVERLY GUITAR WATKINS (78 YEARS YOUNG) ~

 

BARRY LOPEZ ~

 

B A R R Y     L O P E Z

January 6, 1945, New York ~  Dec 25, 2020, Oregon 

HOWLIN' ~

 

Amongst

OLD TIME SHUFFLE ~

 

SHAMAN DRUMMER ~

 

HAVING EMERGED OUT OF OBLIVION ~

ISN'T THIS THE YEAR, OF ANY YEARS,

the past 70 years, to be reading and viewing

again, the life and dream paintings of

Hieronymus Bosch?

Yes? 

Yes.

Haven't you felt like someone,

maybe an evil monkey,

has been sticking a sharp stick up your ass. . .

or else a reptile is wrapped with a very long

tail around your neck, and it isn't

with comfort. . .you're a pushing-self

inside a large wheel perforated with nails. . .

later, two creeps that look like lizards in steel

helmets are holding you upside down,

bare-assed, on the edge of some funnel. . . 

or is that you with a spike

driven clean through your head?

Closeby, there's a guy walking, barely,

with his head locked in a saucer — 

anyway,

you're always naked, filthy, and a

 mysterious woman wearing a veil

is riding behind you on a platypus.

Of course she is.

A farrier is shoeing both a naked woman

and a naked man with the farrier's

open fire pit flaring and mighty

off the fuel of a torched corpse. . .

GO complain! 

there's an entire

village of people swimming ahead

of you and most are drowning in the

swamp, or is it the waste of centuries?

The color of the pond or lake or river or ocean

doesn't look good —

Virus

 Pandemic

 — we've been

here before,

except we haven't.

The bonfires ahead?

Set by the grinning imbecile in charge.

MERRY

CHRISTMAS!

santa drawn by bob 12/24/20

HB Complete Works by Stefan Fischer (Taschen)

Andre Breton gives us the title

[ BA ]

JOHN WRIGHT TRIO ~

 

JIMMY YANCEY ~

 

I'VE MADE UP MY MIND TO GIVE MYSELF TO YOU ~

 

The ultimate old fella's love song

JACKSON C. FRANK ~

No one is getting weary of this song

RE-READING A PATTERN LANGUAGE ~

 

The bible —

one of my all-time favorite books —

although written in the 1970s by some

smart cookies at the University of California/Berkeley

and structured chapter by chapter, or "patterns"

as a network, I highly recommend becoming comfortable

with this book in your own setting, as I did as a builder,

landscaper, husband and writer playing with the book

not as any guide or answer, but more as inspiration and

focus point, since the book is timeless and can be read

wherever your day or life takes you.

Need to build a house? It's here.

Need to find a secret place? Found.

Sacred places? Got it.

A place to wait. They know.

It's an endless pathway.

I've been re-reading the book for

the past 40 years.

[BA]

Oxford 1977

TRANSISTOR RADIO ~

It's 1963.

Your transistor radio is on.

It's always on.

The batteries never ran out!

On the beach, on your bike, in your back pocket

of the bluejeans. Radio.

As someone asked innocently enough,

"Where'd this music go?"

[BA]

POETS WHO SLEEP #30 ~

 

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

APPLE ~

 

RE-READING WOODY GUTHRIE ~

 

The three great scramble-bound books

in American literature —

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory

Jack Kerouac's On the Road

add to your Guthrie reading list

this treasury of the songwriter's

art work, many seen here for

the first time, and extracted from

the homemade books and notebooks

Guthrie made and shared with

family & friends.

Be a friend.

[BA]

                                                                       Rizzoli, 2007

 

RE-READING FRANZ MARC ~

Of all the marvelous books on Franz Marc's paintings

this smaller book is one of my favorites and the

author Peter-Klaus Schuster does such a wonderful job

his name deserves to be on the cover! at the very least 

on the spine. Here is Schuster's thinking, "A painter

meets a woman poet whose personality differs from his own

almost to the point of contradiction, and yet he calls her "sister"

—that in a nutshell, is the story of the friendship between Franz Marc and

Else Lasker-Schuler." More on Else Lasker-Schuler in the future Birdhouse.

In this book we are offered a little over a year's correspondence from Marc to

Lasker-Schuler, known here as "Prince Jussuf", all through

a series of Marc's watercolors, from very late 1912 to the

spring of 1914. The heartbreak is that Marc was inducted into

WW I in 1914 and would be killed in the siege of

Verdun on March 4, 1916. A further darkness is that

these postcards were almost lost to the Nazis in 1939

as part of their campaign against "degenerate art." 

Quick hands by a married couple, Sofie and Emanuel Fohn,

saved the Marc postcards with an exchange of works by

 German Romantic artists for the expressionist artist's

exquisite postcards. 

This book holds the story.

[ BA ]

 

ETTA JAMES ~

 

The year Carson was born (1985)

we took him to hear Etta James

outdoors, Max Roach was there

as well. For the last twenty years

Carson has worked in a record store

that he manages with his own flair,

and he's played the drums for

thirty years.

It only makes sense that

Chuck Berry shows up after,

and with, Etta James on this

video — or he has while

I was watching.

[ BA ]