Roberts Blossom at home with his books
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Home-alone-with-his-words-Retired-actor-2622962.php
Saturday, August 3, 2013
ROBERTS BLOSSOM ~
Roberts Blossom at home with his books
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Home-alone-with-his-words-Retired-actor-2622962.php
Friday, August 2, 2013
JANINE POMMY VEGA ~
from Poems To Fernando
It is written on the walls of the mountain
though I have not seen it:
I Love You Fernando.
Everytime a departure, another
eye not seen again, to make it easier;
But it must come from inside
this knowledge that I will live
though you are not with me, here
where I can see you.
Riding this broken road away, more alone
than even the beginning, when you were
Gone. Suddenly, & I clung to you, sending
messages direct to your heart
where we are one
& you must receive
these goodmornings to the clouds
this oneminded unrelenting reach to you
love & you only leaned over abysses
Holding onto pain : Let time not
change me! hanging into death
— til now
I have let flow a flicker in the sea
& it rushed forth giving,
so great is the need in the heart
for healing
Love the prominence
love the perfect measure
we, just two frail receptacles
& love the transforming splendor.
So this departure also
how can I tell you good-bye?
Having loved another eye & leaving behind
this also, I am most alone.
Why is it I travel this road, this stark of sky
& a musician walks to work
his hands perhaps in his pockets
music animates his step, gauging his life,
& go down over snows to a train
I don't care about?
Still alive, & yet to learn, or I would not
be here
penetrating pain itself to find you, uncover
what must be true
that you are not here and I must know
who is half my life & deep
as the blood runs in me.
What length of days before I lay down
& the sorrow is turned upon itself,
that its depth be the source of joy
and I rise, unsevered?
french alps / 1-66.
Janine's passionate poem to her husband, the painter Fernando Vega, who would die suddenly in Spain in 1965, was written when she was twenty-four years old and published in her first book, from City Lights: Poems to Fernando (1968).
At that time, a book of poems issued by a woman from the legendary Beat household was uncommon. This untitled poem has been extracted from Janine's personal copy of the book, with her corrections and additions. See pages 22-23 for the poem — the two lines under the line "& it rushed forth giving" had been added in pen by Janine.
Please retool your own worn and much-loved copy of the book.
Please retool your own worn and much-loved copy of the book.
Janine Pommy Vega © Bob and Susan Arnold
self-portrait drawing of Fernando Vega
photo of Janine Pommy Vega by Kenneth Pate
Thursday, August 1, 2013
SAADI YOUSSEF ~
I Saw My Father
I was walking
with my father
through a palm grove,
I was light
like a feather,
my father was light,
he was a cloud
and in the cotton of the cloud
I shut (just as in the dream)
my father's eyes.
London, 7-2-2002
Cloves
Where is the scent of cloves coming from?
her hair?
armpit?
or her dress
thrown on the Tunisian rug?
From the third step in the house?
Layla
makes everything smell of cloves.
Layla
is the orchard when it's wet.
She is
what the orchard breathes
when it's watered at night.
Layla knows now
that I am drunk with the scent of cloves,
she stitches together my clouds
and then scatters them together
in a sky like a sheet
as she clasps me.
Layla
feels that my fingers are numb,
over the dunes she knows
my pulse is hers,
my water is here.
Layla
leaves me sleeping,
rocking between clouds
and cloves.
London, 12-20-2002
Evening By the Lake
Yesterday
by the lake
the rain was warm,
soft,
like your skin after a dip in the sea.
I thought of you a bit
and swore right away:
I have to catch the evening train!
But I'm lazy,
as you know,
so I forgot about the train —
thought of you a lot,
and brought my face closer
to the surface of the water,
to watch how the sky's waters go home,
how this evening is born.
_________________________
translated from the Arabic
by Sinan Antoon and Peter Money
Graywolf Press 2012
Nostalgia, My Enemy
Saadi Youssef
Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 near Basra, Iraq. He has published more than thirty books, and is considered one of the living masters of Arabic poetry.
He lives in London, England.
He lives in London, England.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
ALBERT CAMUS ~
( ALGERIAN CHRONICLES )
"Albert Camus was born in Mondovi in 1913 to a mother of Spanish origins who was both deaf and illiterate. His father died in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was barely a year old. Young Camus grew up in a three-room apartment in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers with his domineering grandmother, his silent mother, who supported the family by cleaning houses, his brother Lucien, and his uncle Etienne, a barrel maker. A grade school teacher, Louis Germain, recognized his talent and saw him through to the lycee, and after completing his under-graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Algiers, with a thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine, he turned to theater, to journalism, and to the literary career that led him to Paris, the anti-Nazi resistance, and the many books we know, until his life was cut short by a car accident in 1960, when he was forty-six years old. Long after Camus left Algeria, his writing remained imbued with his intense love of Algerian landscapes — the mountainous Kabylia, the Roman ruins of coastal Tipasa, the shining port of Algiers, and the modest blue balcony of his mother's apartment on the rue de Lyon. Those places were his wellspring."
"Albert Camus was born in Mondovi in 1913 to a mother of Spanish origins who was both deaf and illiterate. His father died in the Battle of the Marne when Camus was barely a year old. Young Camus grew up in a three-room apartment in the working-class Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers with his domineering grandmother, his silent mother, who supported the family by cleaning houses, his brother Lucien, and his uncle Etienne, a barrel maker. A grade school teacher, Louis Germain, recognized his talent and saw him through to the lycee, and after completing his under-graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Algiers, with a thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine, he turned to theater, to journalism, and to the literary career that led him to Paris, the anti-Nazi resistance, and the many books we know, until his life was cut short by a car accident in 1960, when he was forty-six years old. Long after Camus left Algeria, his writing remained imbued with his intense love of Algerian landscapes — the mountainous Kabylia, the Roman ruins of coastal Tipasa, the shining port of Algiers, and the modest blue balcony of his mother's apartment on the rue de Lyon. Those places were his wellspring."
~ from the introduction by Alice Kaplan
Albert Camus
Algerian Chronicles
edited with an introduction by Alice Kaplan
translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Belknap / Harvard, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
MARIE THARP ~
In 1959, Marie Tharp and colleague Bruce Heezen completed their first map of the North Atlantic
Marie Tharp, oceanographic cartographer, at the drafting table
Monday, July 29, 2013
LIMELIGHT ~
"Limelight" ( Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom ) 1952
photo : W. Eugene Smith
photo © bob arnold
susan
BLUEBERRIES ~
(see you soon, off to pick)
(where we picked enough for the week — winter's crop is already stored away — and had enough saved from the picking to have a picnic supper in one corner of the orchard with food we brought with us, finding two cinder blocks discarded in the tall mowing grass and sat there and the rain had stopped in time to pick but the leaves were all wet. And later we visited Eleanor, in the village, and talked of time's past, which is timeless.)
(where we picked enough for the week — winter's crop is already stored away — and had enough saved from the picking to have a picnic supper in one corner of the orchard with food we brought with us, finding two cinder blocks discarded in the tall mowing grass and sat there and the rain had stopped in time to pick but the leaves were all wet. And later we visited Eleanor, in the village, and talked of time's past, which is timeless.)
susan
BIRTHDAY CHEERS, SUSAN ~
"Susan - Happy Day of Birth and a beautiful new year for you!"
Cheers, Edie and Kathy
Cheers, Edie and Kathy
chalkie art © Edith Platt
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
