ANNOUNCING ~ JIM CARROLL








by

TOM CLARK

"A poet departs, too soon, and there is a void that will not be filled. From somewhere deep and old the tears well up in the dark night.

When I met Jim in 1967 he was seventeen. He had been leading a triple life: high school All-American basketball star, heroin addict/ street hustler, poet."

The above is from Tom Clark's wee memoir of Jim Carroll, as submitted by the author, newly published from Longhouse for the Spring Equinox 2010. With photographs by Bill Berkson, Mary K. Greer, and Beatrice Murch.


In glossy photographic wraps, hand sewn in four colors. Ready to be slipped into your back pocket, or anyone's.


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email: poetry@sover.net
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Please visit Longhouse for this & other publications

Tom Clark was born in Chicago 1941. Man of letters in poetry, prose, biography and the fine art of proper blogging, Beyond the Pale.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, he then attended Cambridge University and University of Essex before returning to the United States in 1967. A long time resident of the American west, he makes his home with Angelica in Berkeley, California. This is Tom's second Longhouse publication along with Single - Longhouse, 2009.

photo courtesy: Mary K. Greer

BOOKS & KEROSENE


So many good books come my way – by mail, by other hands, by used shops, by rummage, by friends, by trade. Can't beat a book, people.

So while the snow took out our power one more time last week, and that makes it 5 days out of 7 with no power, books got read, when we weren't working at throwing the snow out of the way.

Sweetheart was out in the studio where more books are housed finding things and heard something behind her where she kept the glass door open, and there were two horses wanting to come inside! We've had bear, moose, bobcat, the sly fox in the dooryard, and now two wandering horses lost awhile in the snowstorm. They mangled all the fine lace work of snow paths I had just finished shoveling but so what, horses in the yard are a nice surprise. They must have been extra dainty to get in and around the narrow gauge pathwork along the woodshed. Somehow they did it.

Knowing horses, Sweetheart led the them back out onto the road and down river a ways until they got their bearings. . .we sort of think we know where they came from.






KENNETH KOCH


Thanks to his poem about a garbage can
lid being smashed into a likeness of King
George the Third's face, my sixteen year old
son is now writing poetry. This activity has
recently led him into drinking alcohol and
experimenting with drugs, which makes
it difficult for me to say, but I'll say it
anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch,
for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.

Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
(Shearsman Books / www. shearsman.com)

Two books of poetry that excite me — and I'm the kind of guy who gets excited by a good working chain saw, new spring birds, and catching a whiff of my true love's dress flying out the back door — so. It's to Kent Johnson and Ange Mlinko. If I recall, Kent had a thing there for one of Ange Mlinko's books, so I thought to read the two poets together. It hummed along.

I like Kent Johnson's writing & self, because he is full of beans. Every generation has to have a tireless and bold bean counter, and Kent Johnson is the one. When spoken of to Walt Whitman, Walt said: "'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes' and Kent Johnson is my son." When brought up with Virgil, the V. Man said, "'Be favorable to bold beginnings' and my son is Kent Johnson." Taking off his wide brim hat Goethe sighed then grinned and said "'All my works are fragments of a long confession' and I know my son is Kent Johnson."

The blue book pictured above is the water the horse was led to.

STET STET STET


Where the curve of the road rhymes with the reservoir's
and cleared of the leafy veils that for six months
obscured it,
the landscape's wet chestnut
in the gray descended cloud
intones You're lucky to live in a watershed
so no vast tracts of tacky drywall
turn the land into peremptory enclosures.
You've bought in.
The venial sin:
being exceptional.
Reading Holderlin.
And the natural hallucinogen of joy
helium-cum-oxygen
leaving wordy outputs
hanging on piney tenterhooks
while all the wild protected liminal woods
contrive a blind.

~ Ange Mlinko, Shoulder Season
(Coffee House / www.coffeehousepress.org)








Kevin O'Hara, A Lucky Irish Lad
(Forge)

I prefer the author's first book, and it is a classic all its own, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims — where Kevin O'Hara and his donkey companion travel 1800 miles around Ireland on-foot. This new book is a sequel of the Irish quest, but this time it's where the author was raised in the hills of western Massachusetts in the 50s-60s, and of course the stories and family characters abound.



















WAITING FOR THE FAT LADY TO SING

----It was the longest opera ever written. By the time the fat
lady sang most of the audience had died in their seats still holding
their programs, the theater full of flies and microbes.

----Some began to think that perhaps the opera was a bit long,
that maybe the fat lady should start singing a little earlier so
the audience might have time to write their wills, and to say
goodbye to friends and family.

----But others felt, what better way to die than waiting for the
fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's
real, not the fat lady, not even death. . .

~ Russell Edson, See Jack
(University of Pittsburgh Press / www.upress.pitt.edu)


I'm not sure what one does about Russell Edson, so I keep on reading him. Have for a long time. I saw him read at a small venue over the last 10 years and he was unlike anything to be heard from. Almost a carnival act — that unpredictable and unexplained. Ideal for poetry. He also paints and has been married a long time to Frances Edson, and I once found a charming and unique book of her writing and have never seen anything of hers since. I'm pretty sure this is all mysteriously for the good.




I can't even begin to extract from Heimrad Backer, concrete poet and visual wonder, who was part of the Austrian avant-garde after a youthful experience with Hitler Youth before joining the Nazi party at eighteen.

As the record shows — and transcript is one — "the Holocaust was not unspeakable, but was eminently describable and a described act spoken by thousands of people concerned with the precision and even beauty of their language." Backer's documents, poems, lists, found-poems are drawn from the Nazi's paperwork, victims letters, medical and train charts and schedules from the records of Auschwitz.

Heimrad Backer, transcript
(Dalkey Archive / www.dalkeyarchive.com)





A sound and modest collection of essays by Ilan Stavans making the range from literary, historical, cultural and autobiographical, leaning with a sure eye to his own Latin American background and giving forth on Neruda, Marias, renegade Bolano, Cisneros and mixing in Sebald, Kapuscinski, Edmund Wilson, with personal venues on keeping a notebook, teaching Spanish and more. He's wise and unflappable enough for the publisher to have given him a large type font and less words per page and a fatter book and thus a more readable book, but alas the publisher did not.

Ilan Stavans, A Critic's Journey
(University of Michigan Press)





This book is as large and glorious as it looks. Actually a national treasure. America is still capable, much of it hidden in them thar hills. Hills you may live in and are possibly unaware of what lives with you. Musicians, potters, weavers, fiddlers, hand craftsman, blacksmiths — the timeless stuff. Gorgeous large black and white portraits of each visitor, and that's what this book becomes, a visit. Followed by a later section in the book with easy to follow layout detailing who is behind each of the photographs by interviews, talks, or portrayals. There are eighty visits and Tim Barnwell has spent thirty year's setting it all into play. In a beautifully sewn cloth edition with an accompanying CD. You'll be in the southern Appalachian region, and you may want to stay.



Tim Barnwell, Hands in Harmony
(Norton)




How do I best show to you Louise Landes Levi's latest book of poems and travel journey, which includes photographs from Margarita Island? I'll just snap two photographs of the books sitting beside me.




Very beautiful and clean black and white edition with the one exquisite color photograph like a birthday sweet on the back cover. Do read that poem if you can. All of Louise's poetry is of devotion. There is a glossary offered to guide the guideful through an exotic landscape political, philosophical, religious and planetary. With Louise the raga goes on.

Louise Landes Levi, The Book L
(Cool Grove Press, 512 Argyle Rd., Brooklyn, NY 11218)












Speaking of a national treasure — Walker Evans! Every new book about him or of his work continues to spellbound.

With no dustjacket and instead steering by the possible vogue way of publishing for the future: decorative cloth boards with no fuss or muss. It suits this old fashioned subject of American folklore: the picture postcard.

This treasure trove (over 400 pages, often two postcards per page) is drawn from the Walker Evans Archive which includes as one would imagine in a master photographer's booty: thousands and thousands of black and white negatives and color transparencies, never mind correspondence, diaries, writings, proof sheets, and 9,000 picture postcards of which Jeff L Rosenheim has beautifully signified, along with excerpts from Evans thoughts on the subject and one WE lecture from Yale (1964). But mainly it's for the postcard, vintage-eyed Evans style, and it's a feast.

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
(Steidl, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

photo © bob arnold

FURRY LEWIS

Here's who we need to take us into March — Furry Lewis, born in Greenwood, MS., and raised in Memphis where he worked as a street sweeper for the city until he retired at age 73. There are two headstones at Furry Lewis's grave in South Memphis and that's something he didn't know about when he passed away at age 88. The second headstone was purchased by his fans.

photo: http://img98.imageshack.us/i/lewis2camasz8.jpg/

LOS LOBOS




One way to start the week — the wolves from East L.A.

photo: http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o70/hiddentrackscott/loslobos%20resize/loslobosIMG_1709455x303.jpg

MARIA DE BARROS









The great Maria de Barros brings us through a week of over three feet of wet snow. Listen.

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucecmoore/54155716/

THINK BACK, PILGRIM IV

robert pete williams

[please click onto any for a viewing]

BLACK ORPHEUS




NINA SIMONE





ROSCOE HOLCOMB AND MIKE SEEGER





BILLIE HOLIDAY





TOMAS TRANSTROMER





ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS

SNOW SCRAP



Right after supper while doing the dishes, we both saw the one lamp on by the sink make its tell~tale flicker, and within a minute all the power was gone.


If you only visited us in the summer when the gardens are full and the flower beds fuzzy, you'd never believe your eyes of winter hereabouts.


The woods surround and they bend and creak and bust up and otherwise expand with a deep wet sticking fast snow. One neighbor has already escaped to a warmer climate for a week. In fact, it's about our only neighbor. Stand outside in the dark, look around and know the hollow.


The river muffled under snow. The pathways we shoveled before dark are full of snow again. The Mother's in control.


I take up a book to read and I'll read it all before midnight, cover to cover, by two kerosene lamps. Almost anything to read is comforting in this darkness with small lamps burning. The author is having his first child all the while with two women lovers in his life. Decisions decisions. Suicide is in his family or fatal addictions, and all of this gets batted around. It isn't Chekhov or even Philip Roth, and it reads more like the actor Mark Ruffalo is playing the writer.


The writer does have allegiance to the down-trodden, and I'm attracted to his writing for this; and when his daughter is born and he has a photograph with her in his arms, he is "smiling so broadly that he barely recognizes himself." I'm sure many fathers recognize this, I know I do.


In kerosene lamplight I forgive everything. When the power returns I always hear it burble first in the refrigerator motor, and when the lights are back on, I put the ordinary book down. And yet it is powerfully ordinary. Another new life has changed for the better an old life. I'll read past midnight.

THE SNOW YOU MELT FOR WATER TO BATHE
FLUSHES THE TOILET


I put on that photograph above of the cherub in the snow path just past midnight Tuesday when I set the book down, and then the power went out for what seemed like forever. Flat out. No burble in any fridge, no warning sign, just crash out. Like a big tree went boom. We got four hours sleep and then snowshovels weren't out of our hands for the next three days. A real STINKER of a snowfall, too — last count, during the three days now becoming four: over two feet of snow. Maybe 30 inches. Did I say snow? Cement is more like it, the true wet stuff. The first morning we were out shoveling the-stupidest-idea-you-ever-had-Bob earthen driveway of 200 feet, white pines and birches around us were snapping and cracking under the weight of the snow. We already saw we lost our favorite small crab apple tree, far older than we are, by the studio door. I built that studio by the tree's shade. Piled my lumber under the tree, where we ate our lunches. Get over it Mr. Romantic. Head down, shovel.


At last count we've watched one plow worker go down the road now three times with three different tractors, nothing is cutting it moving this stuff with a machine. Even the town road plow, when it finally gets down to this river valley (the last served road in town), looks beaten in this stuff. We jumped onto the first 16 inches of snow at the crack of dawn and working with a shovel and no plow in this snowfall is like a woman watching her grandchild in the park, you really watch. A half hour is all the difference in the world between shoveling snow or shoveling mortar out of a wheelbarrow and paying for it dearly. All the roofs I'll have to clear can't be helped. At least the roofs I put on after age 50 are steel and at a 45-50 % angle, purposely so. I watch those roofs clear on their own with a certain pride.


Then there's the one roof on the back of the house I built after age 50, but still a romantic, and I just had to have the eyebrow windows in the low end walls which raised the angle on the roof and gave me this winter nightmare. Pretty in the summer. The thing I swear at the most in the winter. A football field of steel just waiting for me. I still climb up on it like a monkey and sometimes need a full day to clear off properly...because you see, there is another main house roof above it that Einstein also reroofed in steel. But with a steep enough pitch thinking that pitch muster might help push the lower snow field off. And sometimes it does. After over two feet of snow came a steady day of rain and the gods were on our side — it let slip most of that bad roof headache of snow. It would come in stages. One stage was well after dark. We heard one whoosh, the kitten and me. I went out the back door where most of the snow landed (Einstein again), and the kitten followed with me and we had a look. I looked at the happy but deadly wet snow pile, the kitten looked at me.


We've worked 18 hour days the last three days by doing it in shifts — two hours hard work w/shovels or chain saw, then one hour siesta. Siesta meaning melt snow on the woodstove since the power is out and there's no running water, or lights, or small bathroom. Just trim the kerosene wicks and fill the lamps, don't even change out of the pants wet to waist until noontime. Dry those by the fire to change back into at 4 when you go out for the next two hours of work before dark. At dark, read. By woodfire light, by candlelight, by kerosene, and when finally blind, by large flashlight. Read and try to relax even though it's snowing heavily again, or is that rain? If you hear a whoosh off the back roof , it must be rain.


By the next morning I'm roof raking the old duck shed and the smaller woodshed. The big woodshed is clear with its steel. Since the house is 1790 and built like a barn, I roof rake up to the main cross beam running the width of the house eight feet up from the edge of the lower roof line. Now the heavy roof of snow is safe. It's probably safe anyway but I'm in work habit. Come inside for that work siesta and read another tanka by Bill Knott (that he kindly sent to me c/o his Lulu packs), read aloud a poem by Sandburg painting on a high-rise in Chicago ("People Who Must"), eat a pretzel, drink from the jug of water, kiss your co-worker to both stay happy. Always kiss your co-worker.


Nothing is working but the shovels and the kerosene lamps. No one's around to help. Mail isn't delivered. Newspaper's a no-show. E-mails are a million miles away. Snow is the news, deep & serious. Large tree branches are down everywhere, mother nature's war zone. When the phone miraculously wants to work we call someone somewhere and it could be India who tells us 3000 are w/o power. In ten hours that number is down to 35. By dark it's down to seven and I have a sneaky feeling those seven are homes within one to two miles of us. As the rain increases with that snow load in the trees, by morning the number of homes lost to no power is back up to the thousands.


We go through three work gloves a day. Dry them in cycles under the woodstove.


I'll tell you now that by tomorrow and we're in a momentary lull, the chattering goldfinches will be back in their sudden appearance/disappearance act.


But for now take the chain saw w/ snow to the waist and cut out trees, branches and brush snowblown down and ruined. Watch the candles melt down between dark and midnight. Nothing's going to change for awhile. We've already moved all the food perishables outdoors in sacks or into snowbanks as temporary refrigeration. Seven red squirrels found the food, seven squirrels were shot. It's the law of the jungle. I thought we already had an agreement they feed off the birdfeeders and we all subsist? Winter after winter. When we brought outdoors what we eat and they went for that, well...


This is the late winter snow report. What's ahead? Six weeks of mud. Stay where you are.

photos © susan & bob arnold

FORECAST




What has happened —

for days and days all we have heard about

is the great snowstorm heading our way



best stock up, best finish up last minute things

best wait and ponder and worry about

this approaching snow



whatever happened to awakening to snow falling

in the far north woods

where you live

photo © bob arnold

I watched the weather last night and looked at the map — heavy snow in parts of Texas. . .


all for Kim




Santa Fe has received the foot of snow we are about to receive. Or two feet. You never know here. An extra inch in Texas is a foot. Here a foot is foot. We will be with snow shovels in hand up to Friday.


As I finished up the snow news in the southwest, another friend buzzed in a letter and said what snow was now in outer Detroit, coming heavy. That was most likely the snow we are now feeling slowly but surely. Nothing like snow that visits and visits us all! Take it that way, give it to someone else.


We won't be like the kitten in the living room watching all the world of snow just come down, come down. And then he'll only live 12-15 years at the outset. Our dogs made it about the same length of time. Our geese only lived 10 years, ducks a little under that, chickens barely live. The ladybug now on my arm, maybe one season. This thought is about to end.


I sometimes like to go out in the new snow falling and bring in heavy armloads of oak and beech stovewood in my slippers. I look down at my feet and say to myself you're in your slippers.



I'm about to post a little poster of the new book I'm reading on the Harvard squad of psychedelic rompers Leary, Ram Dass, Weil and one not so well known, but the true prophet of that age, Huston Smith. I've grown weary of my younger self who was partly fueled and brought this far on the Beats, acid freaks and black revolutionaries. Old self never forgets how he got here. Respect bows in all 4 directions. Then cuts out the chaff.


There's new stuff all the time to help us along.


In the music dept. at your job take a listen, when the guards allow you to, to the new Chris Smither's CD. It's thin and in cardboard, just out. From the first note in, you're in good hands. From a guy who never had to try to make black singer blues. It's hard enough being white. It's hard enough being.




Last night lounging on the sofa bed spread open on the lv room floor we watched Julie & Julia, the silly latest from Nora Ephron, and since it made us feel like two girls, we enjoyed it through & through. Cutie-Pie loved the bed. He'd never seen it before! We have to remember to pull it out more often.


In another hour I'll be out of slippers and in boots.


Sweetheart asked, "You sure you want to reveal all this about slippers?"


I smiled and said, "You bet."

top photo © bob arnold

THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB
(Harper One 2010)







starring the well known Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Andrew Weil, and a much lesser known and quieter Huston Smith. . .

. . . who the author Don Lattin describes exactly this way halfway through his survey of a mind expanded time.


"The conference at the University of California offices in San Francisco went on as scheduled. But even before Huston [Smith] delivered his paper, [Paul] Lee could see that the distinguished philosophy professor was getting tired of the circus surrounding the early years of the psychedelic scene. What had been going on back east was bad enough. But this West Coast scene was out of control. These were bacchanalian rites, and they were going down on an unprecedented scale. It was downright Dionysian.

Huston no longer wanted to be associated with the social movement that was coalescing around Leary and Alpert and Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. Smith looked at all the sexuality immortality inspired by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the psychedelic religion and was reminded of what Friedrich Nietzsche said about Christ's disciples — how they "should look more redeemed". To Huston's mind, steeped in the history of religious movements. Leary and Alpert's actions smacked of antinomianism, the Christian heresy that asserts that true believers are exempt from moral and civil laws because they're already saved.

"Huston was a moralist", Paul Lee would later explain. "He thought this antinomian trend was something to criticize. We said, "Oh, man. Come on, Huston. Lighten up. Just because you were born in China to Methodist missionaries." But he thought that because he was identified with all this, he had to critically comment on it. He did, and he was right. A lot of lives were damaged. Huston sounded the sour note at the conference, but in retrospect, I think that was important. But at the time, everybody just sniffed at him."


It's telling.

Huston Smith was a tolerant teacher and guide toward varied cultural beliefs and religions. He was instrumental in introducing the Dalai Lama to the West.

www.flickr.com

WOODSHED COLLAGE

collage & photo © bob arnold

TAOIST




we're

light



as

fear

photo © bob arnold

WHAT THE WRITER INSTRUCTOR ME TOLD ME



To be a success, me boy

you have to write the stuff

the people want



what do they want?

what do they want?!

they want the stuff that



makes them feel miserable

to make some sense and it only

makes sense if you're miserable, too



so stop with the love poems

even though every one secretly

loves love poems

A PRIVATE LITTLE POEM
FOR ED MARKOWSKI



vincent t. lives maybe 12 miles from me

we've never met



no man is

an island



wanna bet?

Let us return to old times, and that will be progress
— Igor Stravinsky


THE ONE OR TWO THINGS. . .







The one or two things I have been thinking about lately —

what happened to all the poets I was reading in the 60s-70s? Did they all just one day blow away? I have a library in the thousands of such books and I hate to tell you we have a bookshop with much of the same; and on top of that, I have close friends who care for me and Sweetheart, who wonder how we are possibly making a living? Like always, scratching away. Working all the time on a magnanimous load of wasted time. That’s dreamers for you. And even more, we publish all the time poets who don’t sell but write wonderful work. Ain’t life grand? I mean it is.



The other thing I’ve been thinking about is what in the world has happened to the world —

meaning, how we operate in it and so with one another. We actually aren’t. I hesitate to knock, even though I have, Twitter users and cellphones and all the junk that now fills our daily lives. Not my life, but lives of people I could be tossing a ball to, or having a conversation with, or waving hello to, or walking into a room where there is one person and only me and that person is having the grandest time yakking into his cellphone. I say leave home and so leave home, leave the stuff at home. Return to the world and be part of it. Carry away from home a book in your pocket, a fiddle on the back seat, guitar, a pair of binoculars, okay take a camera....but Blackberry, Twitter, cellphone, all the gizmos, keep those in their place: for an emergency, for practical use. Get back to talking to one another, walking down the street open for action. Ever think about whistling while you walk?

photo © susan arnold

LUCILLE CLIFTON







It's time to say goodbye to a poet — one I heard read in a small town library 35 years ago and of the many readings I've dropped into and out of, indoors & outdoors, this one was one of the best. A friendly poet, a giving poet, a poet ready for conversation and strangers afterwards. All in a small town that folded up at dark. Poetry, because of Lucille, the only show that day in town.

Move three decades later and here is a poem I liked to read on the street with friends when we were working with villagers to make a little of their money to send down to New Orleans and victims of Katrina. Lucille's poem rang always so true.

MEMPHIS



. . . at the river i stand,
guide my feet, hold my hand

i was raised
on the shore
of lake erie
e is for escape

there are more s'es
in mississippi
than my mother had
sons

this river never knew
the kingdom of dahomey

the first s
begins in slavery
and ends in y
on the bluffs

of memphis
why are you here
the river wonders
northern born

looking across buffalo
you look into canada toronto
is the name of the lights
burning at night

the bottom of memphis
drops into the nightmare
of a little girl's fear
in fifteen minutes

they could be here
i could be there
mississippi
not the river the state

schwerner
and chaney
and goodman

medgar

schwerner
and cheney
and goodman
and medgar

my mother had one son
he died gently near lake erie

some rivers flow back
toward the beginning
i never learned to swim

will i float or drown
in this mississippi
on the mississippi river

what is this southland
what has this to do with egypt
or dahomey
or with me

so many questions
northern born

(1936-2010)

TOUGH GUY








PAST ONE O'CLOCK. . . (1930)


Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.

The milky way streams silver through the night.

I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams

I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

And, as they say, the incident is closed.

Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.

Now you and I are quits. Why bother then

To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.

Behold what quiet settles on the world.

Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.

In hours like this, one rises to address

The ages, history, and all creation.

trans. George Reavey

A brilliantly sized and scoped feeling nonanthology~anthology of writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the unofficial poet laureate of the Russian Revolution, as if official ever meant anything to such a big-hearted river man. Here are short essays, ruminations, art work, daring photographs, plenty of the stalwart poems, and just getting the right breed of translators and thinkers to tinker with this mighty one. Testimonials often like to align Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch as the "most conspicuous inheritors of Mayakovskian energy and style", and somehow leave out the most most conspicuous: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Margaret Randall, Thomas McGrath and Charles Bukowski. Can't you just see Bukowski and Mayakovsky delivering mail together!

from HOW ARE VERSES MADE? (1926)


I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps.

So the rhythm is trimmed and takes shape — and rhythm is the basis for any poetic work, resounding through the whole thing. Gradually, individual words begin to ease themselves free of this dull roar.

Several words just jump away and never come back, others hold on, wriggle and squirm a dozen times, until you can't imagine how any word will ever stay in its place (this sensation, developing with experience, is called talent). . .

Where this basic dull roar of a rhythm comes from is a mystery. In my case it's all kinds of repetitions in my mind of noises, rocking motions, or in fact any phenomena with which I can associate a sound. The sound of the sea, endlessly repeated, can provide my rhythm, or a servant who slams the door every morning, recurring and intertwining with itself, trailing through my consciousness, or even the rotation of the earth, which in my case, as in a shop of visual aids, gives way to and inextricably connects with the whistle of a high wind.

Rhythm is the fundamental force, the fundamental energy of verse. You can't explain it, you can only talk about it as you do about magnetism and electricity. The rhythm can be the same in a lot of poems, even in the whole oeuvre of the poet, and still not make the work monotonous, because a rhythm can be so complex, so intricately shaped, that even several long poems won't exhaust its possibilities. . .

It's a good idea to write a poem about the first of May in November or December, when you feel a desperate need for May.

In order to write about the tenderness of love, take Bus No. 7 from Lubyansky Square to Nogin Square. The appalling jolting will serve to throw into relief for you, better than anything else, the charm of a life transformed. A shake-up is essential, for the purposes of transformation.

trans. G.M. Hyde

NIGHT WRAPS THE SKY, WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT MAYAKOVSKY
(Farrar), edited by MICHAEL ALMEREYDA