EARTH ~

Traffic jam in rusty nails

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY



I have been talking into the ear of a donkey.

I have so much to say! And the donkey can't wait

To feel my breath stirring the immense oats

Of his ears. "What has happened to the spring,"

I cry, "and our legs that were so joyful

In the bobblings of April?" "Oh, never mind

About all that," the donkey

Says, "Just take hold of my mane, so you

Can lift your lips closer to my hairy ears."



ROBERT BLY
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey
(Norton 2011)

everyone wants his, her, its ears rubbed or whispered into ~ here's a photograph I took one spring in new mexico

photo © bob arnold

New!
from Longhouse
December 2011
&
Forthcoming 2012

Reader

******* The Longhouse "Special Special" is back for another Perfect-for-the-Holiday Purchase from now until the New Year's ~

Send $50 and we will send to you 8 publications
of our choosing from the Longhouse treasure chest...

One-of-a-kind
Booklets, cards, broadsides for framing, books !

And on top of that we'll pay for shipping, too!

International orders the only exception so please inquire our Bookshop.

With this, you can gift yourself, or better:
have the bundle shipped to someone else.

Just tell us where to send the gift and we will.

Don't even ask what publications will be sent, that's half the fun.
We're capable of fitting in some real surprises and sizes.

You may pay by credit card, personal check, money order,
or use the easy Paypal link below.

Got a great friend you want to make even greater —
here's your chance.

Mom, Dad, brother, sister, kids, neighbor : "hate poetry"
— try this gift on them.

While supplies last!

Send info, pay us, we'll take care of the rest.

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________

Ordering questions ? For credit card payments or international orders, please write our Bookshop

Our mailing address : Longhouse, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303

Many thanks for all your support this year

____________________

~ NEW BOOKLETS AVAILABLE NOW ~

Ray Gonzalez ~ The Mud Angels, Mesilla, New Mexico

A chapbook depth new collection of poems by Ray Gonzalez, mapping deep into poetries and the southwest. Signed copy available upon request. Unsigned $8.95 + $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________


Ken Letko ~ Forgotten Inventors

Good thought and play at work here in this clutch of new poems by Ken Letko. Signed copy available upon request. Unsigned $8.95 + $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________

Joseph Massey ~ Another Rehearsal for Morning



The Block (Between Seasons)


No change beyond air
smelling faintly of old piss.
A neon liquor store sign
strains to break the overcast—
how November moves.
Stunted palm tree’s
stunted shadow sutures
curb to street, street to
curb—to lawn glazed
white with television. I
walk, watch day dissolve
as if on waking’s edge;
those impossible lines
consciousness repels.

Joe Massey's third booklet from Longhouse, and it's double the size! In lovely Himalayan wraps with band. Signed copy available upon request. Unsigned $10+ $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________



Mark Terrill ~ Up All Night

Enough poems to fill a book! in this fold-out bus ticket. New from our American friend long living abroad in Europe. With one of Mark's drawings from his private notebook. A signed copy available upon request. Unsigned $8.95 + $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________

J. D. Whitney ~ Other Cousins

More poems of the Cousins! A fine companion piece with the earlier Longhouse booklet Cousins in colorful cardstock with wrap around band. Signed edition available upon request. Unsigned $8.95 + $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________

Bob Arnold ~ Forever








IN GLADE


I cut the smaller

trees to make the

bigger trees bigger

yet and wait for the

sunshine to pay it

all a visit

20 new poems by Bob in this handmade pocket-size companion with Himalayan wraps. One of only 50. $20 + $2 s/h

Use Paypal? Purchase now for domestic orders —

____________________

~ Looking for MORE Longhouse publications? Please visit here : A Longhouse Catalog

____________________



Forthcoming in 2012

Helen Nearing ~ Our Backwoods Neighbor — Jarvis Green





________________________________________________________________________________

Your magic key into the Longhouse Bookshop Catalog is here for our complete and current listings as of today.

This is an author / title search form via ABE Books.

We have over 17,500 unique titles available for sale.

Use the ABE guide to find the author or title, then contact either one of us.

You may buy directly from our Bookshop email or through ABE. Thank you!


________________________________________________________________________________

"reader" photo © bob arnold
all other photographs courtesy of the authors

EARTH ~

Greg Brown









photo: greg wood

OCCUPY ~

DESMOND TUTU SUPPORTS OCCUPY PROTESTORS TO CAMP AT TRINITY CHURCH

South African archbishop enters row over Wall Street church's refusal to allow a winter encampment on its property

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/16/desmond-tutu-occupy-movement-trinity-church

www.guardian.co.uk

EARTH ~

Georg Trakl (1910)

NIGHT SURRENDER


Monk-girl, close me in your dark;

O you mountains, cool and blue!

Downward bleeds the darkened dew;

In starlight the cross looms stark.



Crimson broke both mouth and lies

In the ruined chambers' cold;

Laughter comes with games of gold,

And the bells' last echo dies.



Mooncloud! wild fruits at night's seam

From the tree fall in the gloom;

And all space becomes a tomb,

The seething of the earth a dream.



GEORG TRAKL
from Song of the West
translated by Robert Firmage
(North Point 1988)

The dark and spooky Austrian poet worked as a pharmacist while deep into drug addiction, depression and a royal unraveling. One of his closest friends was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who provided the poet with an anonymous stipend, quite sizable, to assist with his day by day. Nothing helped. The poet was gone to a cocaine overdose at age 27 in the early stages of the first World War. His books of poems feel remarkable in the hands.

photo : literaturnische.de

EARTH ~

~ Book lovers everywhere tip their hats ~

George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died at age 98.
(December 14, 2011)


Please read Eddie Woods glory road tribute to George Whitman here:
http://www.parisiana.com/node/125




photo: ny times

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

A sign in Amtrak
city station —
REPORT ANY SUSPICIOUS
LOOKING PEOPLE
I look around
we look at ourselves

It is so, we all die. Each and every one of us; no matter the car of wild kids swerving us on a curve heading north from El Paso on Route 10, and by the looks of it they might be headed into something bad earlier than they should; or the old guy peddling fruit and vegetables from the rear of his pickup truck parked alongside the road. He'll die too and I wish he wouldn't. I hope that little boy who sat between me and the taxi driver — who at one point while driving put an arm around the boy and hugged him — I hope that little boy lives longer than me, just as I hope my own son thrives and his mother with him. I can see Susan and Carson living a very long time as mother and son. I'd like to be with them, and if it can be forever, I'll take that too.

This is how you come to feel when you read these wonderful household poems by Bobby Byrd. It's the living and the dying and the inbetween. You read a poem, then look up and realize — my god, I want to read it again — or at least say it out loud to someone, tell others about it. Bobby's poems bring people together and everything looks easier than it is. How fortunate to be able to live a life like this, a life that is ready for any death and a life that would have friends say, "Yeah, Bobby, he lived a good one." Behind it all, the poet puts on an accomplished act of fakes and feints and laughing through the pain; one just doesn't gain the hospitality Bobby gathers in his poems without the struggle, and for that I consider him one of the best poets in El Paso, even though I know he would stand up at least a dozen other poets from the city and describe how he learned from them.

We're driving out of the city in less than one hour after we arrive passing up the opportunity to visit Bobby and his wife Lee, and maybe it is because we don't want to ruin a good thing, but don't ask me what that means.

We go on to pass Keith and Heloise Wilson just north of here in Las Cruces — close friends with Bobby and all of these good folks friends with some of our friends. Because Drummond Hadley was on the phone with a mutual friend who said we were about to leave on a train in the early morning, Drummond called our house from his ranch in one of the corner pockets of Arizona. He'd heard we were coming his way and he would be delighted to have us visit, he even knew the train passed as close as Lordsburg, New Mexico.

Hadley, Wilson and Byrd are three champs of Southwest poetry (for lack of a better term) since the 1950s and not one of them was born there (except Keith) and I have a hunch that makes all the difference: for whatever reasons they arrived, fell in love with a place and stayed. In Hadley's case as a poet, he has almost disappeared there; it's just that serious.

It certainly seems like we are the fools, preoccupied, selfish, that we leave behind Bobby in Texas and slip past Keith in Las Cruces which is so easy to locate on this highway, and never make it as far as Lordsburg with a junction route that allows you to drop gradually into Arizona. Even Ted Enslin, a friend to all three of these poets and not too concerned about these visits we miss — like me he knows it will happen — but by letter Ted wishes we had taken the little highway from El Paso that wanders to Las Cruces through old towns Berino, Vado, Mesquite — "And you would have been in the shadows of the Organ Mountains the whole way."

I know, I know, we can't please everyone but we already have plans to return and find Ted's highway, and I hope we can do it by not being noticed as we did two days later on this trip to La Luz, New Mexico. A tip from a New York Times travel section noted this small town — close enough to the sensation of White Sands, as an authentic old-style New Mexican hideaway, and after driving in for a moment and leaving, I wish everyone would leave La Luz alone, just leave it be. The Times readers arrive with bed and breakfast trappings and the need for an immediate fix from an urban rapidity; in other words — they want everything. La Luz is so close to Alamagordo that it doesn't seem possible there could be a feeling of relief as you sink into the shade of cottonwoods floating over the town's narrow roads. We stayed one hour eating oranges and pretzels in the parking lot behind a church with a freshly painted, or refurbished, mural.

There were many such excursions and wrong-that-became-right turns and pleasant discoveries all through the New Mexico we visited. A little like Vermont, with the best swimming holes and trails and sloped pastures no one has written about, and we found a few. Or else we appeared at some places during a day that completely won us over and these places didn't even have a name.

Americans seem to have an agenda where one visits a location that everyone else has been to so you have something to talk about to someone when you return. Yosemite experience to Yosemite experience, Grand Canyon to Grand Canyon, Big Sur drive to Big Sur drive just won't compete with watching falling leaves settle into a mountain stream in Arizona. I figured out after a few trips to the Southwest and a few more to go, the reason we haven't visited with any of these poets we do love and admire, is that we are coming to terms and introducing ourselves to the land, which is in the best way, getting to know the people, whom the best poets know.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

All wars, whether just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.


~Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, 1919

photo "tick~tock" © bob arnold

LOVELY ~

Bill Tapia

This obituary from the New York Times by Douglas Martin about Bill Tapia was just too irresistible not to share!

Bill Tapia, Virtuoso Ukulele Player, Dies at 103

In 2001 Bill Tapia took one of his guitars to a Southern California music shop to get it fixed. A woman was buying a ukulele, and Mr. Tapia asked to see it. He began playing it, masterfully, with a distinctive jazz inflection.

“Hey, who are you?” the store’s owner asked.

If Mr. Tapia could have seen the future, he might have answered, “Duke of Uke,” the title of an album he recorded in 2005 at the age of 97. But at the time, he knew only that he was sad that his daughter and wife had recently died in quick succession, and that playing the ukulele felt good.

Mr. Tapia, who died on Dec. 2 at the age of 103, first played the instrument as an 8-year-old street musician, then went on to become one of Hawaii’s premier young ukulele players in the 1920s and ’30s. But after World War II he switched to the guitar to get jobs playing jazz, his favorite kind of music, gave away his ukuleles and for a half-century had almost nothing to do with the instrument that had defined his youth and middle age.

Then something astonishing happened: Mr. Tapia was “discovered” as a ukulele virtuoso at a time when the instrument was having a resurgence of popularity. He became a ukulele star, twice making the Top 10 on the jazz charts, wowing concertgoers by playing the ukulele behind his head à la Jimi Hendrix, and making three albums — one of which honored his 100th birthday. He was elected to the Ukulele Hall of Fame.

“Bill Tapia has been involved with the ukulele, jazz and Hawaiian music perhaps longer than any other living person,” the Hall of Fame said when it inducted him.

His daughter, Cleo, and wife, Barbie, died in 2001. He is survived by grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

William Tapia was born in Honolulu on New Year’s Day 1908. He fell in love with Hawaiian music listening to sugarcane workers play. He bought his first ukulele at 7 for 75 cents from one of the first men to make them commercially. His father abandoned the family the next year, and young Bill dropped out of school to collect tips as a street musician.

At 10 he came up with his own version of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which he played for troops headed for duty in the last months of World War I. At 12 he played vaudeville. At 16 he worked on luxury liners. At 19 he performed at nightclubs and speakeasies in Hollywood and at parties at the home of Charlie Chaplin. At 21 he sat in with Louis Armstrong’s band at a Los Angeles nightclub. By this time he was playing the banjo and guitar, in addition to the ukulele, and was moving between Hawaii and the mainland.

When the Royal Hawaiian Hotel staged its grand opening in 1927, Mr. Tapia played ukulele in the orchestra. He was the only one of the original musicians to return for the hotel’s 75th anniversary — and its 80th. The second two times were better, he said: he got fed.

In 1933, the Royal Hawaiian hired him to drive one of its touring cars — a yellow-and-blue seven-passenger Packard — to ferry the wealthy and famous to scenic spots. He played the ukulele for his passengers and threw in a lesson for anyone interested. His pupils included Jimmy Durante, Shirley Temple and the stars of the Our Gang comedies.

He even claimed to have taught a lick or two to Arthur Godfrey, whose ukulele playing on television sparked the instrument’s popularity in the 1950s.

During World War II, Mr. Tapia organized entertainment for serviceman in Honolulu. After the war, he moved to the San Francisco area and devoted himself to the guitar, and to jazz. The big bands and combos with which he played had no use for ukuleles.

More than 55 years later, Alyssa Archambault was researching the background of her great-great-grandfather, a steel guitar player in Hawaii, and approached Mr. Tapia. She had been a disc jockey and promoter, and was captivated by Mr. Tapia’s music and his story. She got him in touch with professional ukulele players. They thought he had died years ago, but were awed at what they heard.

He released his first album, “Tropical Swing,” in 2004, when he was 96, and “Duke of Uke” the next year, both on the small Moon Room label. A live recording of his 100th-birthday concert at the historic Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif., was released this June.

He played concerts regularly, delighting audiences with songs like “Little Grass Shack.” The most recent was on Feb. 11 — not counting his regular gig at a local senior center, the last of which was only several weeks ago.

Mr. Tapia had a line that never failed to impress audiences: “Here’s a song I performed during World War I.”

~ Douglas Martin (The New York Times)

(Published December 11, 2011)

LOVE ~

Friends ~ and you know who you are ~
we lost Shizumi Corman
on November 30, 2011.


Shizumi is now where she always said she always wanted to be,
with her husband Cid Corman (1924-2004 ).


Kyoto has a dove flying overhead.


I had a thirty year strong relationship and correspondence with Cid, often four letters a week, in the good old days of blue aerogrammes. Who, possibly, has that much to say? But we did. And when Cid was gone, for those few years more, when I wrote to Shizumi, she asked that I continue addressing the letters as I always had "dear Cid & Shizumi". Including having Cid's name on the mailing envelope.


The muse behind 1000 poems.



I leave my

life with you



Make of it

what you can.



~ CC





Shizumi Corman
(Konishi Shizumi)




Baby—we've all jumped

from the pot into the fire.

Ain't we something else?

~ CC

calligraphy © shizumi corman
longhouse publishers & booksellers

photo © susan arnold

EARTH ~

Leonard Cohen

EARTH ~

Hubert Sumlin (1931-2011)

was often heard on his 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop guitar