POETS WHO SLEEP #47 ~

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

LARRY EIGNER ~

"Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation" 

B  A  S  I   L         B  U  N  T  I  N  G

I enjoy any book by or about

L A R R Y      E I G N E R

including by academics going on & on

in the long run it seems where

the outsiders —

and Eigner was one,

like Philip Whalen —

will be rescued and petted

by the academic Red Cross

but perhaps keep in mind

what John Berryman

once wrote to Ezra Pound 

then residing in St. Elizabeth's Hospital

far from the academy,

"Thirty years ago the

("intellectual") public knew nothing,

at present it is only too damned

apparently familiar with every-

thing — among others, with all

of you. . . There is a whole school

of now-academic criticism

to be broken down also (Ransom,

Winters Tate Blackmur Warren), which I

am convinced is stifling talent."

John Berryman 1947

________________

New Mexico, 2020

"Let the incidents and images take care of themselves"

B  A  S  I   L         B  U  N  T  I  N  G

WILLIAM SAROYAN & VERONICA LAKE ~

 

ON THE GREAT

DICK CAVETT SHOW

ROBBIE BASHO ~

 

W A T C H

_____________________

Voice of the Eagle

The Enigma of Robbie Basho

a film by

Liam Barker

EMILY! EMILY! EMILY!

 

 

 M O R E

POETS WHO SLEEP #46 ~

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

RAMSEY CLARK ~

R A M S E Y      C L A R K

FRANK STOKES ~

• 
  
• 
  
• 
   
• 

OTIS GIBBS ~

 

RE-READING MIRON BIALOSZEWSKI ~

     

A Ballad of Going Down To The Store



First I went down to the street

by means of the stairs,

just imagine it,

by means of the stairs.



Then people known to people unknown

passed me by and I passed them by.

Regret

that you did not see

how people walk,

regret!



I entered a complete store:

lamps of glass were glowing.

I saw somebody — he sat down —

and what did I hear? what did I hear?

rustling of bags and human talk.



And indeed,

indeed,

I returned.





____________________
translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

POETS WHO SLEEP #45 ~

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

CONSTANCE DEMBY ~

 

CONSTANCE   DEMBY

1939 ~ 2021

ENCOUNTERS w/ RICHARD K. NELSON (RADIO) ~

 

L I S T E N

(Liz McKenzie photo/KCAW)

JANINE POMMY VEGA ~ POEMS TO FERNANDO ~

 

Janine Pommy Vega (1942-2010) was born February 5 in Jersey City and grew up in Union City, N.J., the middle sibling of three. She graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1960 and had already become intimate with major players in the Beat Generation. Gregory Corso became her liaison to life-long-friends Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who became her lover. She remembers as a teenager meeting Jack Kerouac asleep under a table. Her life as a poet, teacher and traveler was forever a spiritual quest for transcendence which originally took her on the road at age sixteen to New York’s Lower East Side, later a marriage and early widowhood to the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega, who died of a heroin overdose in Ibiza, Spain in 1965. Her first book of poems Poems to Fernando was one of the earliest Pocket Poets (#22) by a woman author published by City Lights Books in 1968. Her posthumous book Janina would document this restless time period for the poet between Europe, the Middle East and America. By the early 1970s Janine would spend two years as a hermit on the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Her prose book Tracking the Serpent has been described as a feminist “On the Road” journeying with the poet on her visits in the 1980s to matriarchal worship sites in Ireland, England, France, Nepal and the Amazon. She trained herself to become a skilled hiker throughout the Catskill Mountains which was her primary dwelling for the last forty years of her life. A devoted teacher and activist for the rights of prisoners and children, Janine made her name and legend in the New York prisons and school system. The last ten years of her life were tough, a struggle with many medical maladies, but the poet persisted, reading her poetry to the public, often with music, wherever invited. Janine Pommy Vega died of a heart attack at her home in Willow, New York on December 23, 2010.

                                                                                                    

                                                                                — Bob Arnold

_________________________________

Janine Pommy Vega

Poems to Fernando

Longhouse, 2021

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