EARTH ~
(The Oak)

the mighty acorn

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/nyregion/boom-and-bust-in-acorns-will-affect-many-creatures-including-humans.html?hpw





ny times

EARTH ~

Oak Around

sculpture & photo © bob arnold

this is an oak firewood cairn (a cord) I built on Thanksgiving Day and will burn in two years (allowing oak to season). As I hauled the firewood out of the woods and built the sculpture, from afar I saw two passersby over three hours hiking the muddy road, and we waved.

EARTH ~

Lenny Bruce being hauled off the stage like a criminal he refused to be

MY SWEETIE SAYS . . .


whenever
I play


Lenny Bruce


she
hears


Judy Garland

some great moments in television:

Rin Tin Tin
Lenny Bruce
Steve Allen Show
Jack Kerouac on Steve Allen
Paladin
Dylan on Johnny Cash
Ed Sullivan with The Beatles and The Stones
Hendrix on Dick Cavett
Zappa on Joey Bishop
(going by memory, it'd cheating otherwise)
(more to come)

EYES WIDE OPEN ~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2011/dec/02/julian-assange-iphone-blackberry-gmail-surveillance-screwed-video





the guardian u.k.

TED ~

And if he sings

-------------------with care,

he sings

------------------a new song

made of old

---------------flints struck.

New fires/

--------------------/flames.

O.K. He sings his source.

The photograph above is Ted Enslin a year ago right in his natural habitat: the Maine seacoast.

I'll miss Ted for sure. Next to no one like him the last 50 years in US poetry, maybe the last 100 years. He stayed independent to the shivering end.

Thanks again to Whit Griffin who took some of the finest photographs of Ted in his last decade.

The poem of Ted's is from an appreciation piece I wrote about him tucked inside his Little Wandering Flake of Snow, published by Alec Finlay as a Morning Star Folio 1/4, Edinburgh ~ Scotland.

photo © whit griffin

DECEMBER 1st ~

Kokomo the Cutie Pie checks out a December 1st

photo © bob arnold

READER ~

a little blurry of the images but hopefully you get the gist of beautiful books!

film © bob arnold

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~

ARAM SAROYAN
COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS
Ugly Duckling Presse
www.uglyducklingpresse.org

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~








BIRDHILL



a bird

a hill

it's fair



road

curves

under



a wood

slow

through







~





make

matter

wave






~







here

where



all

is



tiny

pieces






~






corn

no not corn

run on ahead



& wonder

could it be

barley






~






on the bypass



kestrel hovers

over grass



& drops

as I drive past






~






SHANAGOLDEN



it's a real place

it is

we went there






~






sweet

this song

is not



meaning

my sons

asleep



listen

to catch

a breath






~






or other

words

are lost






~BILLY MILLS
from Lares / Manes
(collected poems)
Shearsman Books
www.shearsman.com

fixing books this morning in the bedroom I found Billy's lovely book of poems, thinking I had misplaced and all the while it'd been right near my head! selected a few as I read / typed with one finger, other hand holding the book open. went out and took a photograph before breakfast, about to rain. well recall the many letters and poems from Billy (and Catherine) once upon a time from Barcelona and Ireland.

KEEP COUNTING ~

Inner City Media

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Dakotas —
stitched earth
planted



The train traveled that night
through upper North Dakota, parallel to the
border of Canada and through some of the coldest
areas in all America. Towns like Minot and Rugby,
and Rugby just happens to be the geographical center
of North America but we are not awake for it. I
remember how we hurled through this part of the
country long ago from the other direction and we saw
it all in the daylight of morning and part of the
afternoon. Back then the train had a "dome car"
which was a coach with a second level where people
could sit and look out, and if I'm not mistaken all the
sides and roof were rounded in glass. At least I have
this memory of sitting up there late one night
watching the stars peeking in and out as the train
smoked through tall forests of the Cascades. The day
we traveled through North Dakota in the dome car,
Susan and I might have sat up there all day, or we
might have divided our time between there and a
Dutch doorway where we would linger to enjoy the breeze.
But I do remember sitting up in the dome car while a young
Amish couple, sweet and trim in suspenders and short hair,
a full skirt for the young lady, made out passionately.
It was a wonderful way to go, as pronghorn antelope
startled on the prairie at the chase of the train.

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

photo © bob arnold

CATHOLIC WORKER ~

Rita Corbin

Over many decades the art work of Rita Corbin always drew my eye, whether in The Catholic Worker publications, or other venues. Her woodcuts were stunning pieces — bold and enduring impressions with elegant movement. Some years running we would order RC's holiday cards with many of the woodcuts or other designs, and always very reasonably charged and packed as if personally to us. One woodcut of a woodcutter working in snow caught my fancy and instead of calling Rita Corbin in Putney, Vermont where she was then living, Sweetheart went on a drive to meet and visit with Rita to ask permission to use her woodcut on one of my books. She took five year old Carson with her so it was some time ago. Rita was living in a trailer with cats and children and the visit all fell together nicely, Sweetheart came home with Rita's woodcut in hand. It was reproduced on the book below and published by Mad River Press. We will all miss her.

cover art by Rita Corbin



Rita Corbin, Catholic Worker artist, dies at 81

Artist Rita Corbin, whose tender line drawings graced the pages of Catholic Worker journals for decades, died Nov. 17 from injuries suffered in a car crash. She was 81.

Corbin decided early in life to become an artist, choosing to major in art while attending Cathedral High School in New York City.

"The school was keen on turning out secretaries," she said, "but I refused to learn to type. I knew I didn't want to go into business on pure instinct, I guess. I needed a major and art appealed to me the most."

For Corbin, the artistic endeavor could not be separated from one's political and religious consciousness. She considered the work of the artist to be "a real struggle to bring some kind of form and feeling out of the materials one uses and the society one lives in."

Corbin's society included the natural world as well as the poor. Both were frequent subjects of her illustrations. Her etchings and pen and ink drawings of trees, flowers and birds have been described as lyrical celebrations of nature. Her figurative work has been likened to that of German painter, printer and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz.

Unassuming in demeanor, Corbin was a prolific artist. Over the course of her life, she produced a voluminous and expansive body of work that explored a variety of styles and subject matter. Much of this art was created while Corbin was living in pacifist collectives and raising children. She donated a lot of her work and later said, "In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have given away so much to people who could pay for it. It's not fair to other artists for me to work entirely for free."

Her artwork enjoyed wide-ranging publication. Corbin's images appeared in Commonweal, Harvard Theological Review, several pacifist magazines and numerous Catholic and liturgical publications. She illustrated books, including Thomas Merton's Ishi Means Man, painted a mural in Chicago and annually produced Christmas cards and a calendar.

But Corbin is best known for her countless contributions to The Catholic Worker newspaper first published in New York in 1933. She, along with liturgical artist Ade Bethune and illustrator Fritz Eichenberg, formed what one editor of The Catholic Worker referred to as the "Holy Trinity" of artists whose work shaped the look and feel of the newspaper during its formative years.

Her now-famous etching contrasting the Works of War with the Works of Mercy was emblematic of the Catholic Worker movement's commitment to Christian pacifism and solidarity with the poor. It has been reproduced in Catholic Worker journals all over the country.

Editors described her as a most agreeable and responsive artist, able to produce images in a timely manner.

"If we said we needed something for the newspaper, Rita would do it. She understood the importance of the work," said Patrick Jordan, a former editor of The Catholic Worker and now managing editor of Commonweal.

Rita Corbin's famous depiction of the works of mercy, seen in Catholic Worker communities across the country.Jordan said Corbin "had a way of picturing the poor that was obvious it wasn't from afar. ... There was one picture she drew of a woman at the [Catholic Worker] soup kitchen standing beside a dining room table where someone had scrawled, 'Joy, Joy, Joy.' Rita caught that detail. For a journal that didn't use photographs, she conveyed a great deal with a certain clarity that worked very well for a newspaper."

Writer and publisher Robert Ellsberg, who edited The Catholic Worker in the late 1970s, praised Corbin's regard for the natural world.

"A lot of the famous Catholic Worker artists like Bethune and Eichenberg brought a heavy, narrative approach to the paper," he said. "Rita always brought a more celebratory and decorative approach that came out of the [Catholic Worker] farming communities. Her images from nature reflected as much of a concrete dimension of the Catholic Worker movement as those depicting the Houses of Hospitality."

Indeed, Corbin said she considered some of her best art to be her drawings of nature and the poor, "those on the fringes of society, the same kinds of people Christ came to heal and teach."

Born May 21, 1930, in Indianapolis, Corbin was the youngest daughter of Carmen and Hubert Ham. The family was very poor and traveled throughout the country while Hubert Ham, an organist, played for magic shows.

After graduating from Cathedral High School, Corbin remained in New York to pursue training in art. She was awarded a scholarship to Franklin School of Professional Art, a three-year advertising school, then later studied with Hans Hoffman, a master of abstract expressionism. She also took classes at the Arts Student League of New York City.

But Corbin said much of her artistic education came from wandering through New York's galleries and parks, simply observing.

Upon graduating from advertising school, Corbin was offered a job at an agency, which she declined. When later asked if she regretted refusing a potentially lucrative career, Corbin said, "What I do is kind of commercial, but I have control. I consider myself an artist illustrator, not a fine artist, not a commercial artist."

Corbin first visited the New York Catholic Worker on New Year's Day in 1950. Like many before her, she was immediately recruited to help in the kitchen. She made friends with the Catholic Workers and kept coming back to their home on the Lower East Side to attend Friday night meetings, bake bread, serve soup, support a strike or demonstrate against the city's civil defense drills.

"The Catholic Worker was my school, my education," she once said.

The Catholic Worker first published Corbin's art in 1954. Two years later she married Marty Corbin, a Catholic intellectual. For 10 years, the couple lived in Glen Gardner, N.J., in an intentional community founded by pacifist Dave Dellinger.

As artist and writer, the Corbins contributed to Liberation, a radical, pacifist monthly. Conditions in Glen Gardner were very tough. The Corbins lived in an un-insulated chicken coop. Their firstborn, a son, died in infancy, the first of many losses in Corbin's life. Three daughters were also born in Glen Gardner.

In the mid-'60s, the family moved to the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli, N.Y. Marty Corbin edited The Catholic Worker. A son and another daughter were born.

After spending 10 years at Tivoli, the Corbins relocated to Montreal, where Marty taught English at a local college. Rita separated from her husband four years later, and with her children, moved back to the United States. She lived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., then Weston, Vt., where she became art director of Growth Associates publishers, then Worcester, Mass., where she studied printmaking with artist activist Tom Lewis.

At the time of her death, Corbin was living in Brattleboro, Vt., near her five children and grandchildren.

Once asked what advice she would give to young artists, Corbin said, "Keep working at it. It doesn't come easy. It's very fulfilling. A lot of young people think in terms of jobs and not vocations. It's very schizophrenic."

~ Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

for National Catholic Reporter

Rita Corbin poses for a photo in 2008 at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass. (Photo courtesy of Bob Fitch)

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a longtime NCR contributor. She writes from Worcester, Mass., where she lives and works at the Ss. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker.

http://ncronline.org/news/people/rita-corbin-catholic-worker-artist-dies-81

TED ~

". . .the late Intermezzi of Brahms (Opus 116-118) are magnificent. I have said to all of my close friends that when I leave, instead of the conventional remembrances I would hope that they might listen to Opus 118, #2."

~ THEODORE ENSLIN

Johannes Brahms

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111126/OBITS02/111260312

in memory of Theodore Enslin
posted in spirit by
Bob, Susan Arnold & Whit Griffin

photo © whit griffin

OCCUPY ~

Many of us sent books to the Occupy Wall Street library and watched them being destroyed, fascist style, by the New York City police when they moved into break up camp (Zurcotti Park) with orders from the mayor. Those that don't care that much, if at all, for books, chucked them into the trash. Books have always been a direct threat to some (a pity: there is a book for every one) or a gift from the gods. It's tragic how a book can be treated in angry hands. Please read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/nov/23/occupy-wall-street-peoples-library





To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

NEWSPAPERMAN ~

Tom Wicker was a great newspaperman. As a young man he was the lone New York Times reporter riding in the motorcade through downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963 when President John Kennedy was assassinated. 48 years later, to the exact same day (Nov. 22, 2011), Tom Wicker passed away in Rochester, Vermont at age 85.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/tom-wicker-journalist-and-author-dies-at-85.html?hp




ny times

EARTH ~

Jim Harrison

NIGHT CREATURES


"The horses run around, their feet

are on the ground." In my headlights

there are nine running down the highway,

clack-clacking in the night, swerving

and drifting, some floating down the ditch,

two grays, the rest colorless in the dark.

What can I do for them? Nothing, night

is swallowing all of us, the fences

on each side have us trapped,

the fences tight to the ditches. Suddenly they turn.

I stop. They come back toward me,

my window open to the glorious smell of horses.

I'm asking the gods to see them home.



JIM HARRISON
Songs of Unreason
(Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

parismatch.com

EARTH ~

RUTH STONE
June 8, 1915 ~ November 19, 2011

when I met ruth stone some years ago she signed a book of hers to me ~ "love, Ruth Stone".
enough said.

THANKSGIVING ~

EMI Records workers hand packing vinyl records in 1965
Look at those smiles!

"To take upon us the mystery of things: this is my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously" — King Lear

I walked into a used music store yesterday and Sticky Fingers was rolling, on this song below. Is it me, the album, or both of us, at just how over powering it all still sounded? Maybe moreso in these times — the world economics unraveling, with global warming mishap ~ perhaps, and closer to home: a government that is pretty much kaput. Was this album a foreshadow for things to come, or a contributor? Did this album really make out-of-their-minds-Americans? Does it really take Kafka and George Orwell to forecast that nothing works if you don't work? Truly work. You know, doing many things you don't wish to do, but they have to be done: help your neighbor, pickup after yourself, address others with respect and concern, balance differences so a partial harmony may materialize. Does anyone really think an album that flows as spooky and as long as the river Nile wasn't made with struggle between many skilled musicians, engineers, producers at catching the times in its teeth? All pure hard work.



I'm not content at listening to a mob being pissed off. I've been listening to that for six decades. It's nowhere. Pick up the ax, build your home.



Is it really going to come to a vast and powerful minority of 1% that is going to control by police state (watch Occupy videos for prime example, or in Cairo, Greece, China, Tibet, Africa, Syria et al) how we ride our wobbly (think bicycle) but beautiful country down the road? Really? This one-percent is mighty mighty because they thoroughly believe in what they own: money, land, companies, people. What do you believe? They love to keep us drugged on commodity and fear. I'm not about to buy outrageous Rolling Stone tickets when I can walk into a music store and find this song-blast coming my way c/o of a free-thinker youngster behind the counter nodding to the music and to me with a grin. This is what free is all about. Zero cost. Float awhile while you rest. I think we can be hard workers and love and be insurmountable. I really do. And brush aside a one-percent. It means showing the cops (who are now robbers) and the armies (mercenaries) they're bought and working for a no end. Their families, too. Everyone is as frightened as you are. Throw out the dead flowers; plant, grow, cut some new.



By the way, we came home and played Sticky Fingers. Loud. It's even better curling through the house with all the lights out. Be brave.

EMI Records

sticky fingers, 1971

OCCUPY ~

Read about Pepper Spray from Scientific American:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/21/about-pepper-spray/







MORE!


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/too-much-violence-and-pepper-spray-at-the-ows-protests/248761/

TED ~

THEODORE ENSLIN
1925-2011








a partial list of Ted's books:

• The Work Proposed (1958)
• The Place Where I Am Standing: Poems (1964)
• This Do (1966)
• To Come, To Have Become: Poems 1961-66 (1966)
• New Sharon's Prospect & Journals (1966/1967)
• The Four Temperaments (1966)
• Characters in Certain Places (1967)
• The Diabelli Variations, and Other Poems (1967)
• Agreement and Back: Sequences (1969)
• Forms 1-5 (1970-1974)
• Views 1-7 Berkeley, CA: Maya (1970
• The Country of Our Consciousness (1971)
• Etudes (1972)
• Sitio (1973)
• The Swamp Fox (1973)
• Views (1973)
• With Light Reflected: Poems 1970-1972 (1973)
• The Mornings (1974)
• Fever Poems (1974)
• Of East Dennis: The Highlands in Sorrow (exact year not known: 197-?)
• Mahler (1975)
• Ländler (1975)
• The Median Flow: Poems 1943-1973 (1975)
• Synthesis 1-24 (1975)
• The July Book (1976)
• The Further Regions (1976)
• Carmina (1976)
• Papers (1976)
• Assensions (1977)
• Ranger CXXII & CXXVIII (1977)
• Circles (1977)
• Concentrations (1977)
• Ranger (2 vols. 1978 corrected edition 1980)
• Tailings (1978)
• Occurrence: An Issue of Theodore Enslin (1978)
• 16 Blossoms in February (1978)
• May Fault (1979)
• Opus 31, no. 3 (1979)
• 2 Plus 12 (1979)
• The Fifth Direction (1980)
• The Flare of Beginning Is in November (1980)
• Star Anise (1980)
• Two Geese: Two Poems (1980)
• Madrigal (ca. 1980)
• In Duo Concertante (1981)
• Axes 52 (1981)
• Markings (1981)
• Processionals (1981)
• September’s Bonfire (1981)
• “F. P.” (1982)
• Meditations on Varied Grounds (1982)
• A Man in Stir (1983)
• Gray Days (1984)
• Songs w/out Words (1984)
• The Weather Within (1985)
• For Mr. Walters: Master Mechanic (1985)
• The Path Between (1986)
• The Waking of the Eye (1986)
• Case Book (1987)
• Six Pavannes (1987)
• Love and Science (1990)
• Little Wandering Flake of Snow (1991)
• Mad Songs (1995)
• Conversations (1998)
• Sequentiae (1999)
• Then and Now: Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (1999)
• In Tandem (2003)
• Nine (2004)
• I, Benjamin (2010)
  

the saddest news just now in via phone call from richard levasseur, one of Ted's closest friends, and mine. Few words but that the good man was gone last night (Sunday-Monday) in his sleep. Ted and I read our poems in public together as a twosome a few times, maybe the most memorable for me was at Melville's home Arrowhead in the Berkshires. Goodbye musician~poet of the seascoast & hills.


Photo courtesy Whit Griffin
Photo courtesy of Alison Enslin