LOOK WHO HAS COME FOR A VISIT. . .

THE PLEASURE OF

FRIENDSHIP

The pleasures of friendship are exquisite.

How pleasant to go to a friend on a visit!

I go to my friend, we walk on the grass,

And the hours and minutes like moments pass.

Stevie Smith

MY HEART WAS FULL

My heart was full of softening showers,

I used to swing like this for hours,

I did not care for war or death,

I was glad to draw my breath.

WE REAL COOL

(The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.)

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks

LOVE POEM

---It's so nice

to wake up in the morning

---all alone

and not have to tell somebody

---you love them

when you don't love them

---any more.

Richard Brautigan

I'm no fan of the set-up, the pre-arranged, the presentation, though I have arranged this morning these treats out on the porch sun steps, and they all came to me over the last few months. Just found.

The Stevie Smith is a real treat of actually being available; the Gwendolyn Brooks for all time; and the Brautigan so reasonably priced and just hanging out. I like how he is handing us the phone. A time and place.

Make sure you have your reading glasses and magnifying glass handy to read the Brautigan CD booklet notes: Michael McClure and Bruce Conner are here reading or contributing in some fashion, along with other friends and visitors. The Stevie Smith has a whalloping 50 poems starting with "My Cats". The Gwendolyn Brooks is one hour long, and gives us longer poems "The Lovers of the Poor" and "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" along with her other great stuff.

If I was asked to bring in recordings of modern poets to folks wanting to hear a poem, I'd bring in these three. There would be no question-mark faces. Everyone would recognize something of their own lives here. I'm pretty sure they'd ask for more.

EARTH ~

DEBORAH DIGGES

write a book a year



Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling,

really, scared as I was and torn and sore.

I say what other women could have managed it?

My life before then

picking flowers against my destiny

what glance, what meeting,

who was watching, what we don't know we know,

the hour we chose and we are chosen.

And suddenly the dead my mission,

the dark my mission.

He'd find me pounding out the hours.

Spring is for women, spring clawing at our hearts.

We are pulled forward by our hair

to be anointed in the barren garden.

I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,

my face before the fire,

or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way

to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.



The Wind Blows Through My Heart (Knopf)

(1950-2009)

EARTH ~

NEW BOOKS ARE ALL THE TIME ARRIVING

I just stood a small bunch up on the porch stairs, and since we are outdoors and working in the weather, do squint close to see with me:

STARLINGS

The starlings are singing!
You could call it singing.
At any rate, they are starlings.



SHORT POEMS

My muse plays tennis
and has a body like a Greek god.
My muse wears glasses
and looks swell in them.
I could go on like this forever.



James Schuyler, Other Flowers (Farrar)

Verses from a HYAKUIN RENGA




A whole year's passed —

he fetches down the elk skull,

aspen leaves shaking

Andrew Schelling,

One Phase of the Hunt

1 or 100

countryvalley@mac.com http://web.mac.com / countryvalley

Julie Johnstone's ever quiet and elegant publications from Essence Press.

David Miller's

"Untitled (Visual Sonnet)"
Ink on paper
1 or 250.

www.essencepress.co.uk.

IN A DOORWAY

How far a page stretches in autumn-
Treetops, hills, sky.

I hold what unfolds: leaves'
Cascading violins, some implications

Of arrival that contaminate the day.
Wind proposes another dance:

Siestas, melancholic afternoons,
Patterns contained within the steps

My feet make pausing as the evening
Star bares her breast and sky diminishes.

Robin Magowan, Internal Weather, photographs by Juliet Mattila

Pasdeloup Press, Ontario Canada

LATER ON OUR WEDDING NIGHT, TWO SILENCES IN THE HOUSE


Like a Shaker bowl
the house contains the silence
of belief, and
like a Navajo basket
containing none of our business
it is keeping quiet,
deathly still, in fact,
about God's plans.



Mark Jackley,

Lank, Beak & Bumpy

Iota Press www.iotapress.com

Here is a sure, durable unsentimental chorus of poems to love & landscape — or as Steve Lewandowski likes to describe his hills around the Finger Lakes district of western New York State there are / hills upon hills walking / the day away in the woods — and he may as well be describing himself. Take this book by the hand.

Stephen Lewandowski,

O Lucky One

FootHills Publishing
www.foothillspublishing.com

EARTH ~

ROBERT CREELEY

I was very moved when Whit Griffin sent this to me a few weeks ago from his iPhone. He's done this in the past while traveling through the south, or while up in New England. The shots are forever immediate and fresh. No fanfare. He puts me where he is.
And we wish RC a very Happy Birthday today.






photos: courtesy of Whit Griffin

GOODBYE

HANK JONES, AGE 91

photo: washingtondcjazznetwork.ning.com/profiles/blo...

EARTH ~

THE LUMBERMAN, AND HIS TEENAGE SON

Once upon a time my father stayed home sick from work. This happened maybe twice in my lifetime as a youngster living in the same house with my parents. My mother, maybe, sick one day in my Life as a Youngster.

My father called me into the bedroom, there he was propped up on pillows.

"Bobby, I need something to read. What do you have in your room?"

Like I was some gunsmith. ‘I need a gun, not just any gun Bobby, you'll know what to do.’

I'd nod and bring him a well oiled Smith & Wesson. He'd nod, then he'd ask me to leave the room. Was this sick man going to take his life? Shoot the tv that was playing I Love Lucy? Or just spend the day fondling the gun?

But he didn't ask me for a gun. He asked me for a book, any old book. I nodded. Rushed out of the room and went for the book I had just finished, without ever, and I mean ever and never, breaking the spine.

My father once remarked, as if he was beside himself, that when he looked at my paperback books, a full library and every one in alphabetic order, he was thunderstruck how not one book had a crease in the spine.

"How do you read these books Bobby and not crack a spine?" I showed him my careful technique of reading books as if peering into a small and fascinating room. He predicted I would be blind by age 20. He was wrong, but he was still my father, who I believed knew more than any other man when I was 15. At 16 I had a different opinion.

When I came back from my room, with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in my hand, I spent the rest of the day enjoying hearing my father, once an infantryman in WW2, laughing out loud all through the day as he read the book. He never got out of the bed. He never stopped reading the book. And it seemed he never stopped laughing. Yes, one of the joys of my childhood was that day.

Bob Arnold says, share your books with your parents

photos from the Arnold Lumber family circa 1900, Berkshire County, Massachusetts:

John Arnold scaling timber on Mount Greylock: note the tie, suspenders and top hat for quite the dapper woodsman.

Happy family, in the sunshine, standing & seated on a stickered lumber pile in Vermont.

photos © courtesy bob arnold ( Arnold Lumber )

EARTH ~

treehouse

photo © bob arnold

THINK BACK, PILGRIM V

KENNETH REXROTH

EARTH ~

B-E-F-O-R-E-- C-H-A-I-N-S-A-W-S

DARIUS (Dee) KINSEY

(1869-1945)

Darius Kinsey operated throughout logging camps and locomotive yards in western Washington State from 1890-1940. His outstanding portraits of the logging life were done in high timber, poor lighting and often rain slop. He was a trouper.

His wife Tabitha (Tib) Pritts developed the negatives from Kinsey's often precarious field work and made prints, many large format portraits, which were sold by the hundreds to loggers back in their camps.

It took falling from a stump at an elder age in 1940, resulting in broken ribs, to end the photographer's tramps.

The Whatcom Museum of History and Art holds a major collection of Darius Kinsey's work.

stump house

EARTH ~

UNCLE EARL

Together for a decade, Uncle Earl is an all-women's band that put its name together by being fans of Earl Scruggs, Steve Earle and Uncle Tupelo. How names are made. And they play as lively and as well as their heroes. Original members of the band come and go, but KC Groves has stayed at the helm since 1999. Their own fans are called "g'Earlfriends", and I'm one.

photo: www.jambase.com/Articles/11885/Joshua-Tree-Ro...

EARTH ~

GUSTAV HOLST

(1874-1934)

"The Planets"

suite for large orchestra, op. 32

seven movements, composed 1914-1916

since its premiere the suite has endured

Sweetheart listens to it some mornings, pre-dawn on Dutch radio

for the Earth series: it's "Jupiter", the bringer of Jolity

tempted by "Saturn", the composer's favorite

the concept is astrological

image: www.movie-erudition.com/holst/
photo: www.gramophone.net/ ComposerOfTheWeek/View/230

EARTH ~

OTIS SPANN

One of my favorite bluesman out of postwar Chicago, voice and player. Maybe his early years in Chicago finding work and gigging and making his day wages as a plasterer put that hoarse voice sometimes into play. He only lived forty years, a real shame (1930-1970), gone to liver cancer. But during the best of those years he was the anchor on piano in Muddy Waters band, starting in 1952 and ending in 1968 when he had a few years left to try to strike out on his own.

His father was a piano player. His mother played guitar with Memphis Minnie, no less! When he had a day off from the very popular Waters band, he did session work for Howlin Wolf, Bo Diddley and many others. If only I could have drummed up his rendition of "Tin Pan Alley". It's almost the heart and soul biography of all the deepest swamp of music making. This one below will have mercy.

EARTH ~

THE DOORS
1965-1971 (54 months)
1971-1973 (w/o Jim Morrison)
Jim Morrisson was gone at age 27,
as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin,
Kurt Cobain, Alan Wilson, and Morrisson's
girlfriend, Pamela Courson. RIP.
Likewise Mikhail Lermontov
who didn't sell 75 million albums worldwide.

photo: Joel Brodsky

EARTH ~

TINY TIM

He could have been Darry Dover or Judas K. Foxglove, Larry Love, maybe Vernon Castle? but Herbert B. Khaury in 1962 chose or was labeled "Tiny Tim" for a stage name when he was booked with his ukulele at a club popular for its midget acts.

A devoted musicologist of vintage tunes, he knew them all, was known long ago to play them on the street corners in Boston. And on any size stage from around the world...Isle of Wright, Las Vegas, any cellar.

Born of a Lebanese father and Polish Jewish mother, the self-made Tiny Tim would die a devoted Catholic in 1996 of a heart attack (b. 1932).

He married three times and without a doubt his first wife "Miss Vicki" will be best remembered, having had their wedding ceremony performed on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. I watched it along with millions of teenagers. Everyone but the two of them thought it wouldn't last, and it didn't.

The musician known for his high voice will sing here without the high voice, straight and clear, and grabbing by the short hairs, fearlessly, one of the anthems from the grand Rock pantheon.

The man left behind one daughter, Tulip Victoria.

Photo: ukulelereview.com/.../

EARTH ~








BEEN GONNA



To Everett everything

He had meant to do was

Termed “been gonna” —

So when you view his

Unfinished farm built on top

Of old farms of the

Past, including the burned

Down house his was above,

And the barn once torched,

Never mind the wrecked cars

Over the river bank and

Sculptures of rusted farm

Machinery pulled into one

Corner of the pasture, and

The sugar house built on a

Slipping log sill, and the

Barbed wire fence line

Fallen in the brook, you’re

Looking at a lot of been gonna.






from Where Rivers Meet, Bob Arnold
photo © bob arnold