SATURDAY NIGHT ~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_U.S._Bonds

POSTCARD 15 ~

Gina K & Ari Versluis / M.A.R.S. observation
Barbie Collectors Club Benelux

PAL GOOSE ~

Pal Goose

On that sunny day
I opened your pen door
And let you out —
You loved the sun
Sun on snow
Making tracks to the pond —
Because it got too busy
But I have no excuse how
I forgot to close your
Pen door and left home

Sometime in the evening
Faraway, thoughts to you and
The open door but I would get back
The moon was out, and you
Loved the moon —
The raccoon was out, and he
Hunts by the moon —
The next morning you were
Found dead with eyes open
Suddenly flat and huge on the snow

Too big for raccoon to even bother with
Whose blood-tracks tricky designed away
And then as if he noticed how obvious
Seemed to wash his murderous paws
Off in the snow and vanished

You were our third gander
In twenty years, flocks of
Geese once upon a time mixed
With ducks and chickens and when
Our rooster died you were the new
Rooster for the chickens —
It looked funny, it looked
Practical, you fit

I miss you now when I split
Wood and wait to hear your call
Loud and sudden and part of me

 

____________________________

Bob Arnold

from Once In Vermont

Gnomon Books, 1999

AUTUMNAL ~

DENISE LEVERTOV ~

I imagine someone will find something to pester about with this massive and holy beauty of a book, but I can't be bothered. Like I say, it's a beauty. The poet is long gone but certainly not to the memory of many of us who grew up with her books, issued one after another from New Directions (the faithful), and many of us knew Denise Levertov as friend, teacher, fellow contributor, activist, neighbor. We could even stretch it and say to many poets now in their late 50s to early 70s, who may recall a time when Levertov was a sort of earth mother poet to them, or sister. The poem below will just begin to show (but amply) her ability as mesmerizing storyteller — this poet who began to write her poems at age 5. And this poem has deep ingredients of Richard Jefferies roaming the same countryside, even the skilled wandering discipline of Williams (his longer poems; he will become a confidant and friend), Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, perhaps the balancing scales of Virginia Woolf. But it's all wickedly private/public Denise Levertov. As Eavan Boland makes note in her excellent introduction to this tome — you can sense the power of the poet right from the first line.

There's a lot going on here with this book. First, it's gorgeous coming into your hands, and almost heartbreaking to see such a devoted publisher as New Directions sticking to their guns with one of their poets . . . a woman poet, who never get enough big book attention. If they wanted to make a lasting monument, they have. It's over 1,000 pages true. Precious little waste, if any. The founder of New Directions, James Laughlin, is all throughout the book with his earnest for Levertov to be in his stable, after west-coast-both-feet-on-the-ground-genius Kenneth Rexroth introduced Levertov's poems to his poet/publisher friend. It was a good time for things to take off, and it did.

Later years brought this forever independent (Levertov) from no set school or sect, but her own, to Stanford, other parts west coast, and Seattle. Eavan Boland divides her time at Stanford and Dublin; scholars, other poets, students and a readership just carried on a momentum. Something the two editors of this book, and publisher, have handled well. The poet's individual books unfold in chronological order, along with extensive annotations and notes by Levertov herself on many of the books, when not poems. First lines are properly indicated as an index. It'll all come in time though, because you'll be holding the book in your two hands for awhile and not even wanting to open its leaves for a few moments. There's an absorbing ritual — a nearly forced will — that asks you to slow down, take a moment, and breathe in the apple you're about to bite. 

~ BA

________________

 A Map of the Western Part of the Country of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers   

and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,   

and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a   

stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,

I am Essex-born:

Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,

the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,

Roding held my head above water when I thought it was   

drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees

stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,   

the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.

Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,

Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots

sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,

Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,

in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,

through its trees the ghost of a great house. In

Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the   

light of flaring sundown, seven kings

in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings

the place of law

where my birth and marriage are recorded

and the death of my father. Woodford Wells

where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white   

statue forlorn in its garden)

saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,

(forgotten? and further away

the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once   

but many times?).

All the Ivans dreaming of their villages

all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,

picking up fragments of New World slowly,

not knowing how to put them together nor how to join   

image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map

made long before I was born shows ancient

rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire

for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages   

indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country   

remembers the first river, the first

field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,   

that new smell, and remembers

the walls of the garden, the first light.

_______________________________

Denise Levertov

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov

edited and annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey

New Directions 2013

 http://ndbooks.com/book/the-collected-poems

BRUCE DERN ~ Americana

http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60297478

COLD MOUNTAIN ~

Cold Mountain Poems

twenty-four poems by Han-Shan

translated by Gary Snyder

Counterpoint 2013

HARRY DEAN STANTON ~ Americana

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/harry-dean-stanton-partly-fiction-2013

VIA MEXICO ~

The Mexican tiles, 6 x 6, that went into the stone work of the sun room, now completed, had to come from somewhere. We found a company that ships from Mexico via Texas in the crummiest boxes imaginable, and not one chipped tile inside. Wrapped like Easter eggs.

I've kept the styrofoam to recycle in our wrapping book orders that will go everywhere, and the newspaper in the box from Mexico and bright wrapper I show here.

 © Once In Vermont Films, 2013

 

 

 

POSTCARD 14 ~

"Doorway, P.S. 190, New York City, 1955"
photograph by Sid Kaplan

DOORYARD ~

We had snow this morning. It stuck. I awoke and peeked from the bed through our broad windows and I could see what looked like white blossoms on the trees. I thought, just maybe, I had slept through winter and it was the first of spring and the shad trees were again blooming like they did in our dooryard . . .

. . . melted by noon

photo © susan arnold

6 am

MALCOLM RITCHIE - Two New Booklets from Longhouse

Text & photographs by the author

Each of the two booklets published by Longhouse shown here contain a chapter selected from Malcolm Ritchie's recently completed (unpublished) memoir, The Crows of Gravity.



"A Village at the End of Culture is a cameo from our three-and-a-half year sojourn in the remote farming/fishing village of Sora, on the Japan Sea coast.  It describes our realization that what we were experiencing and witnessing was the last living breath of a profound culture still lived at the cradle of its birth in the cultivation of rice, and under the tutelage of its ancient gods.  The fragile survival of a holistic way of life, somehow still extant, but fast disappearing with the demise of the aged inhabitants of Sora and its neighbouring communities.  A way of living which expresses the true definition of the term ‘culture’ with its roots in the Latin cultura and its meaning of ‘cultivation’ – connection with the natural environment and the seasonal cycles, and its association with cultus, to worship.  The loss of a meaningful life being hastened by the ravening appetites of Western materialism/consumerism and its global markets, which had already transformed mainstream Japanese culture and distorted its traditional cultural mind-set."

Use Paypal to Order Malcolm Ritchie's
 A Village at the End of Culture ~

You choose! Includes S/H

Unsigned to US Addresses $12.00 USD    Unsigned to International $15.00 USD    Signed to US Addresses $15.00 USD    Signed to International $17.00 USD

Text & photographs by the author

"Encounter with the Great Mother recounts my experience with the psychotropic plant ayahuasca, referred to as Mother Ayahuasca by the peoples of the Amazonian rainforest, and worked with as a sacramental medicine in their sacred ceremonies.  It describes my encounter with a profound intelligence which spoke to me both cosmically, and with a deep knowledge, or seeming familiarity with my own individual psyche – the compassionate heart/mind of the planet we are in the habit of calling, while forgetting the truth of, ‘Mother Earth’."

Use Paypal to Order Malcolm Ritchie's 
Encounter with the Great Mother ~

You choose! Includes S/H

Unsigned to US Addresses $12.00 USD    Unsigned to International $15.00 USD    Signed to US Addresses $15.00 USD    Signed to International $17.00 USD

MILITARY MIGHT ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/reports-of-military-sexual-assault-rise-sharply.html?hp

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175769/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_silent_soldiers%2C_the_losers_from_our_lost_wars/#more

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/arendt-eichmann-new-truth/ 

SUCCINCT ~

Poems by the ancients, translations, world wide poets, many famous, beautifully stylized and form-fitted to the page
 from WH Auden in modern times to Louis Zukofsky

 plus ~

Gary Hotham, Ce Rosenow, John Phillips, Bill Knott, Ted Kooser, Ann Deagon, Jeffery Beam, John Brandi, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Ciaran Carson,  Jim Clark, Thomas A. Clark, Cid Corman, J.V. Cunningham, Bill Deemer, Claudia Emerson, Robert Francis, Jack Gilbert, Jonathan Greene, Sam Hamill, Stephen Holt, Joseph Hutchison, Thomas Johnson, William Kloefkorn, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Daniel Marion, John Martone, Michael McFee, Thomas McGrath, Paula Meehan, Samuel Menashe, Ruth Moose, John Montague, Robert Morgan, Adam Morton, Lisel Mueller, Les Murray, Mike O' Connor, Alexis Rotella, R.M. Ryan, Steve Sanfield, Norman Schaffer,  Jack Sharpless, Paul Curry Steele, James Still, Joseph Stroud, Richard Taylor, William Thompson, Charles Tomlinson, James L. Weil, Robert West,  Jonathan Williams, Miller Williams, Joe Zaratonello, Isabel Zuber, Fred Chappell, Bob Arnold, William Harmon, Albert Goldbarth, George Garrett, Louis Bourgeois, R.L. Barth, Max Albern.

Since the majority of anthologies are devoted to strictly name poets, or those-in-the-know at the moment, I thought I'd skip the many known poets as I one-finger-type-out each 'other name' poet with my right hand as the left hand holds the book open. There is no table of contents. There is a well thought out balance in the book between renown and elsewhere.

However, if a poem is good, resonates, nourishes, it is all by itself renown.

Succinct

The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems

edited by Jonathan Greene & Robert West

Broadstone Books

418 Ann Street

Frankfort, Kentucky

40601-1929

ANN DEAGON

     ________

I never lust

after a man

as much as

before one.

GARY HOTHAM

     _________

fog.

sitting here

without the mountains

TED KOOSER

     _______

    STARLIGHT

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.

No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

JEWEL ~ STRAIGHT AHEAD ~

SNOW LEOPARDS ~

The male and female cubs, as yet unnamed, were born at NY Central Park Zoo
 this summer to mother Zoe and father Askai.

 Photograph: Julie Larsen Maher/AP

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/05/snow-leopard-cubs-new-york-central-park-zoo

THE COUNSELOR ~

The other day we finally dragged ourselves away from all the construction work, with a rain day helping us along, and saw The Counselor — Cormac McCarthy unwinding more of his southwest devils. Absolutely no one in the theater with us. Matinee. High noon. I believe this is the film McCarthy really wanted instead of No Country For Old Men which probably came across to him as high class entertainment, which it is, and beautifully so. In the new film it's spare, literary, confusing for the general audience that expects everything to be set before them like a calendar — including the hateful time line appearing as a digital readout on the lower part of the screen "Three months later" etc. The Counselor is also nasty, septic, and deadly serious, as Rubén Blades character will remind all gringos. It'd be best to be seen on the wide full screen for the southwest dread and landscape.

 It isn't a happy ending.

POSTCARD 13 ~

"Greetings"
photograph : Ron Sanford

motto

STUMP FACES ~

These faces, slowly gathering, are now on the shelf over the kitchen stove. They've been made as I make a softwood log chair and cut back on the logs. Each butt end becomes "a face" and is collected on the shelf. So far we have from the left clockwise: Layla, her father Carson, one dog representing all our dogs, Bob, Sweetheart and at 9 o'clock Kokomo the cat.

photo © bob arnold

ALLAN BLOCK ~

Allan Block

(1923 ~ 2013)

Musician Rory Block with her father Allan Block, New Hampshire 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/nyregion/allan-block-whose-sandal-shop-was-folk-music-hub-dies-at-90.html?hpw



http://www.ledgertranscript.com/home/9051334-95/music-man-remembered 



http://www.wirz.de/music/blockfrm.htm