EARTH ~

image: Bob & Susan Arnold Longhouse

EARTH ~

idea: Bob & Greg when reading on the streets for Katrina; next for Gulf miseries
graphic design: Greg Joly at Bull Thistle Press

THINK BACK, PILGRIM VI

.

60°38′59″N 153°48′38″W.

dick proenneke

Richard Louis "Dick" Proenneke was a very handy Iowa boy born in 1916 and gone after a fascinating life in 2003.

His place on earth can be visited today in Twin Lakes, Alaska, a rugged and isolated spot where he 'retired' at age 51 after decades working as a mechanic, salmon fisherman and other duties. He stuck to this spot for 30 years. To see the location on the map:
60°38′59″N 153°48′38″W.

With a keen intelligence and sure with his hands, plus owning a rock bottom
work ethic all made Proenneke a crackerjack mechanic, carpenter and jack-of-all-trades = homesteader complete.

Sam Keith wrote an excellent portrait about Dick Proenneke in his book One Man's Wilderness. I'm showing a clip from the film Alone in the Wilderness below.

After working like a mighty mouse all his life (and enjoying it!) the good man passed away from a stroke at age 86. He had only recently moved out of the sticks and to California to be with family.

DICK PROENNEKE, ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS

MORPHINE

Cambridge, Massachusetts based rock group lasted ten years (1989-1999) or until frontman Mark Sandman on his two-string bass guitar, died of a heart attack while performing on stage in Italy. Way too young ~ still missed. His former band members have stayed loyal to the group's roots & music.

photo: www.sugarzine.com/site_04.06/music.html

EARTH ~







TOUGH



Leaf hangs


To one beat-up


Sawmill log






from, Once In Vermont (1999)

photo © bob arnold

. . . MORE VISITORS!

AFTERWORD



Pleasure is but a can

Of earth, and the soul

No more than

A great bladder.



A can of Jesus is our god,

A can of Jesus and/or rats;

The rats are weeping;

Jesus is the earth;



The earth is your brother.

Here are your good habits.

Say it

In a voice so loud,



So loud that Jesus can hear it,

So loud that I can no longer hear it.

That voice! You sounded

Just like my brother.


— Aaron Kunin

The Sore Throat & Other Poems




THOSE SHIPFITTERS WHO DREAM



in perfect ships, hulls mad

with longing jut into blue or mist, depends.

On what you've lost. You think you can't bear it,

each clown uncovers himself in smiles the wider

the sadder. A girl's pulse a bracelt loosening her wrist.

A cup of coffee anywhere in the world on a warm porch,

or maybe yours is different. Your scars. I know that

after the burns small petals as a rose & pink

like I was then. Some evening comfort.

A river reaches up & tangles.

In Minneapolis the bridges like clamps

over the city's open heart stopped for winter.

In Dallas, the heat. You don't want to know Fort Wayne.

Can't know New Orleans. This same friend who saw you fall into love

sees you fall out. Sees you cheat. First thing in the morning

sinks his hands into dough, the baker. Discards the blood

in a long plastic tube, the nurse. Straps on a bomb.

The terrorist is lying, too. The friend who says

nothing is worth this. Everything is.


— Josie Sigler

Living Must Bury




THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT



You can picture a trillion go go fields.

On each inch grid a different swab of culture.

Just add light add heat just add water.

But cannot guess what each swab will yield.

When & in which place the plot will rupture.

A conscious bloom that when peeled.

Out will shiver out & search out borders for fire.

Bloom picture the dumb son circle. Vulture your.

Bald skull skin burns slither to the dirt go shield.

It go dig deep go go where you've already keeled.

[Still shoveling asleep in the finally night] over.

And over it pierced your first & over dream it sealed.

Your eyes open & in them it pitched in them a pasture.


— Ben Doller

Dead Ahead



All available 2010 from ~

FENCE
Science Library 320
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY. 1222
fence @albany.edu
www.fenceportal.org

or from our bookshop at Longhouse ~

or your from own friendly neighboring independent bookshop you are keeping alive.

THINK BACK, PILGRIM V

KONONO No 1




KONONO No 1, or: L'orchestre folklorique T.P. Konono No 1 de Mingiedi
come from the Congo with three electric likembe players, many vocalists, dancers, percussion and sound makers fashioned from found objects and out of junkyards (check out the cymbals the drummer uses). A small basket of lively recordings have appeared since the late 80s, at least one waiting 10 years before it saw the light of day. Now nothing stops this force of nature at play.

EARTH ~

The glimmer of gold


Nobody reads poetry anymore

so who the hell are you

I see bent over this book?

I first discovered this book ten years ago when it was published in its haunting version by Faber. A collection culled from twenty of the poet's books. Ristovic wrote, at times, as if from the Medieval Ages and made his bread & butter as a school teacher. Serbian, he passed away in 1994 so he never saw what good craft and spookiness the poet and translator Charles Simic put into his first time showing in the United States. I don't keep this book in my library. I keep it handy — for years in the bedroom, in a narrow book case between two windows I built, with its one small lamp.




Small lamp



Small lamp,

light up my face

from time to time.

Don't pretend

you don't see me.



I'm here

wherever that is,

still

doubled over

my worries.





from Skin and bones


The priest and the mourners

are climbing a hill,

the dead man lies smiling

in the coffin of yellow wood.



The red-faced priest reads

from a black prayer-book

while stealing peeks

at the young woman next to him.



His prayer has brought

tears to her eyes,

she imagines his hand

between her breasts.



Even the deceased

has propped himself on an elbow.

The spring rain

beats on his chest and face



as he listens closely

to what the priest is saying.

Finally, he shrugs his shoulders

and lies back down.




Tree


How antiquated a tree is! How old-timey,

its inclination to rustle in the evening

while I walk home from the library with books under my arms.

Its branches sway the way the wind wants them to

and its beauty lies in what a man or child

bears in his heart as he runs under it.

Perhaps only Plato expected to find wisdom

in such constant motion. First one, and then another

branch, fails to inscribe a circle,

merely arousing in us certain associations

at which we arrive by swapping our experience

of the real for our experience of the imaginary.

And how old-fashioned I am, who loves to dawdle

under a tree and seek in its appearance

some symbol of mortality and eternal life.




Happiness



The mouse is golden

and so are the turtle and the spider,

and even the centipede,

and the pebble with which you try

to get rid of it

without leaving your bench,

from which one can view many other

things and golden beings.





Gingerbread Heart


Make me a long coat of heavy cloth, tailor,

the kind that won't fray,

and of a dark color,

so no one will notice the cigarette ashes.



Make the dark trousers of the same material,

to last as long as I want them to,

wearing them to visit many cities, villages,

and other out-of-the-way places.



Make me a dark vest, O tailor,

in which to sit at a banquet table

with a rich man's rose in the buttonhole,

surrounded by happy faces.



Make me a dark jacket, tailor, with wide, deep pockets

to clench my fists in, while watching the one

they're dragging from my table into the bushes,

which after a few moments begin to shake.



translated by Charles Simic

SIMON VINKENOOG

poems: 1950-2006


Translations by Gerard Bellaart, Frederique Berringer
Louise Landes Levi & Hans Plomp

AFTERWORD BY LOUISE LANDES LEVI

~

If you would like to purchase the new booklet, please link here


For the complete Longhouse titles we offer, please link here

Be careful when you take on the map and begin to work with poets and translators in Amsterdam, France, New York City and then Venezuela who love the work of a poet gone to them and all of us. This is the first booklet pocket size English translations of Simon Vinkenoog's selected poems, ranging from his early years to the grand beatific end. In 2004 he was chosen as the Poet Laureate of the Netherlands, something all his readers and followers already embraced. He passed away in 2009.

FAITS DIVERS


------------------Je est un autre — Arthur Rimbaud


I am a stranger to my own blood
my heart beats on other doors,
I recognize the colors of gods frothing
but it is I that makes me shiver


I am broken by my own eyes
and the stones
which like budding flowers
slowly grow from my entrails


I drowned in this quicksand song
from which a thousand dead implore:


— in this bare landscape called life
time sung to death drifts asunder —
ripples of past without present
words sounds murmurings


1949/1950

translated by Gerard Bellaart, Frederique Berringer

THINK BACK, PILGRIM V

AGNES MARTIN

EARTH ~

Please click onto this excellent article from the UK.

Now: who goes to prison?

photo: picsdigger.com/keyword/la%20riot/
photo: www.diatribalist.com/archives/2008/7/1/weepin...
image: www.anunews.net/blog/?cat=3
photo: watergatesummer.blogspot.com/2010/04/mining-d...
photo: earthfirst.com/.../

GOODBYE ~

DENNIS HOPPER
1936-2010

He was born in Dodge City, a fighting town, that's what should be remembered about Dennis Hopper. While still a youngster and still in Kansas, he studied art with Thomas Hart Benton.

He died in Venice, California, where he long made a reputation for himself as one of the genuine American hipsters. A legendary photographer to many. An actor in a ton of crummy films and a handful of reputable ones where without his presence, no film. Or at least not the little bit of cinema masterpiece that came with it. He just showed up in the oddest places with the oddest decisions and there is something memorable about that savvy lust and defeat.

Supposedly John Wayne chased him with a loaded rifle on the set for True Grit. Probably deserved it.

He starred in two James Dean films, and that's one shy of how many films James Dean ever starred in.

For fun, check his early acting out in the small film called Night Tide (1961). I've never forgotten it.

He probably was an asshole. I've been called one. So have you.

There's no one to replace him. Just look around.

photo: www.horror-movies.ca/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=24080
photo: slamxhype.com/.../

EARTH ~

SKIP JAMES

When we had a dog and played Skip James, the dog ran upstairs!

Now we have a cat, and the cat listens.








photo: www.last.fm/music/Skip+James/+images/156959

TOUCH ~

Please direct thoughts to Peter Orlovsky, who we've just heard isn't doing at all well

photo: piemonte.indymedia.org/article/3104

EARTH ~

Hi all, in case you were wondering ~ we've been without power or phone for the last three days. It's the flipside of what I consider "bliss". Having the Internet and the Birdhouse and our bookshop wired is one fabulous. Being knocked out cold and back with the river and the grasses and woods and loves is quite the other. Handle both as bliss.

On Wednesday night I was out after dark recording barred owls squawking and raising all kinds of ruckus across river. Pitch black but for the stars. I looked up and said to Kokomo: "It looks like no storms or that rain they were all predicting. Sleep well."

In two hours everything turned upside down with a tornado wind, hail, a blast and sound animals know about — they hide, or some come to your lap and jump into it, looking up into your face with a What's happening? gaze. Heck if I know.

We watched the light show and watched the modern world cave-in and slept under pelting rain on the roof and a breeze like a tropical islandia visiting through the windows.

The next morning leaves from miles off seemed to be in the yard. No trees down by some miracle. This wouldn't be the case getting out of here and to a job site only a half hour away. That would take three hours to get to...after one detour after another on all the back roads. Even Brattleboro was in a pickle, no power and so no gas pumps working. We had 1/5 a tank. Suddenly seeing all stores and businesses black, people outdoors talking, traffic slowed down in an immediate emergency crawl. It had an old feel to it. A workable ease.

We tried a few of the back roads we knew to get us closer to the job, no luck. Maple limb busted down hanging wires, another maple all down across the road. Like a behemoth. We needed gas and headed south to the next town. The kid came out shaking his head, arms in the air, no gas! Keep going south, to a bigger town, they had gas, now we're an hour away from the job and in another state. Wizzle our way back home taking the smallest roads, along the brooks, chancing no trees would be down.

We did get to the job, three hours later and stopping to visit with friends along the way right on the border of Massachusetts. All their many trees up, house okay. We had a glass of lemonade and a cupcake with them...caught up on old times, and then kept going. It wasn't hurting a thing to be house painting from mid-afternoon into the evening and no one home. When they get home they'll find a fully mature sugar maple gone over. Generators are running in many houses as we pass-by. One small house has two huge trees canopied in the worse way right over the roof.

Out in open farmland it was sad to see an old survivor maple tree busted up in many wars and hanging in there well over a century old. But this storm caught it just right. Knocked it over flush at ground level and it sort of keeled on its side like an old timer knocked down in a bustling crowd. No one stopping to help him. He's just frozen that way holding himself from completely falling down by one arm held out. That was this tree. Its human appeal.

the photo of the big-daddy maple tree above is one we lost in a similar windstorm twenty years ago ~ you can see where the tree has already lost a main leader in an earlier battle and some bird or animal once carried one of our sunflower seeds up there and it roosted
this tree went down hard across much ground, and the road, and its top leaves touched the river
we cut it up and used every stick


photo: Susan Arnold

EARTH ~

PORTER WAGONER


With a television series running in the hearts of country music fans for 20 years, nevermind having over 80 hit songs, it was Porter's last album Wagonmaster, released the year of his passing in 2007, that is the one to find. On this one album PW reclaims all sides of the legacy and hardship of his long career. Produced by Marty Stuart, who knows just how to handle and ask the questions of Mr. Grand Ole Opry.

photo: www.americansongwriter.com/.../

OIL!

Please read Bob Hebert of the New York Times filing reports from the Gulf

image: www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/05/us_...

ARCHIVE







" I WISH I STILL HAD THAT SKIRT "



Young girl

12 miles from town

not a mother yet

duck shed half-built

one blouse, man's jeans, laundry line

her eyes say what she thinks

to the one who holds the camera







photo © boyfriend

EARTH ~

SLINKACHU

The publisher ~ BoxTree (Macmillan) understands the street artist Slinkachu ~ he's the one with the smallest cloth bound book in the art section shelves of the bookstore.

So small and compact and delicious, a savvy bookseller would have it propped up on its own as a miniature showcase.

I found my copy under the rubble of larger and beaten up and spine slanted tomes unsure of their size and weight and volume ~ under it all was Little People in the City, the little gemstone of all things Slinkachu. Street name for the Devon, UK., born artist who is becoming known these days from his photographs of his urban creations, which are often here today and gone tomorrow. Imagine the tiny toy soldiers you once played with now delicately placed by the artist on the street, but not as soldiers, just regular pedestrians, looking just like you and me, but placed next to a real live dead bumblebee, or stubbed out cigarette, or on the tossed ring of a beer or soda can, there one of his tiny figures perches looking at the same city park waterway as we do, and maybe completely unnoticed by any one of us. Until kicked, stepped upon, going about its own purpose. As demanding as a haiku.

We even have an exhibitionist, trousers down around his ankles, willy out, a woman reacting with her hands at the side of her head outraged. Two inches tall all of this. On a city street. You just missed it walking by.

The charm of this book is Slinkachu has situated his locations and taken both a life size portrait of where & how, plus a closer detail of the actual event of his little ones, so all is one. Seeing is believing = go to the book. Look around you when next out: a Slinkachu may be around.

There is an index in the book to then show where each piece was located and at what date with additional photographs.

Like everything in this day and age: big stuff is happening, and even the little stuff ~ once washed away with the rain, humility, grace, luck, so-be-it ~ is being captured, documented.

There's humor, irony, affection, loneliness, love, and killers on the loose...just like life size.

Little People in the City by Slinkachu
( BoxTree / Macmillan )

artist's photo: Charlie Hedley

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.