Sunday early morning with a new snowfall
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Saturday, January 18, 2014
JAKE BUGG ~
Great name. And British (Nottingham).
Already looks young for the rest of his life at nineteen.
Opened last year for the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, maybe you remember.
He does look here like a very young Keith Richards.
He does look here like a very young Keith Richards.
Two albums now under his wing.
I've drawn 10 songs here mainly from his first album Jake Bugg, recorded when he was 17.
It doesn't hurt him a bit you can hear Hank Williams in the closing song.
Friday, January 17, 2014
LESTER YOUNG ~
_____________________
Lester Young
interviewed by Francois Postif
The Cool School
writing from America's hip underground
edited by Glenn O' Brien
Library of America
2013
Labels:
Francois Postif,
Lester Young,
Music Box,
The Cool School
Thursday, January 16, 2014
E.E. CUMMINGS 2 ~
I wasn't planning on another round of Cummings, but then a good friend in England, a poet, had seen I was reading through the new and hefty Complete Poems of Cummings, which by the way I don't own but borrow from an out of state library, three cheers for every librarian that is alive! and my friend wondered if this poem he remembers as a young man was in the book — Yes, it is — and since he doesn't have a copy, and I do, I can type it out just for him which is also just for you.
LVII
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
from W [ ViVa ]
________________
E.E. Cummings
Complete Poems 1904-1962
Revised, corrected, and expanded edition
edited by George James Firmage
Liveright 2013
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
BALTHUS ~
Vanished Splendors
(chapter 28)
Drawing is a great school of truth and exactingness. It brings us closer to nature's most secret geometry, which painting doesn't always allow us to do, since more imagination, stage direction, and spectacle go into it. By contrast, drawing necessitates abstraction in some way, since it is about going beyond facial and bodily appearance and reaching their light.
It's a more austere and, perhaps, more mystical project. It entails reaching the flame of an incandescent blaze. With just a few lines the fire, despite its transience, may be stolen, captured, and grasped in its glimpsed-at splendor. I was able to do this in my portrait of poor Artaud doodled on a cafe table. By this I mean that the painter must have a spiritual approach, because fire is spirit and he himself is life. The painter's gaze contains spirituality, and his ability to attain it captures his model's essential nature, and deepest, most unsettling structure. Then a crossing occurs, a clairvoyance that Arthur Rimbaud wrote about.
Today, when my vision prevents me from drawing, I still have the blessing of painting. I see colors. This is a mysterious fact that Setsuko finds difficult to understand, although she witnesses it daily. I know when she gives me the wrong color, as a kind of transfiguration takes place, an alchemical process, and I know when a little bit more Rosso Pezzari or Egyptian blue is needed; I cannot see anymore, yet I see color combinations on a canvas.
A miracle.
____________________
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski)
Vanishing Splendors
Ecco, 2001
translated from the French by
Benjamin Ivry
Monday, January 13, 2014
E.E. CUMMINGS ~
45
i love you much (most beautiful darling)
more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky
—sunlight and singing welcome your coming
although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess
(except my life)the true time of year—
and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each
nearerness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love
from 95 Poems
____________________
E.E. Cummings
Complete Poems
1904-1962
revised, corrected, and expanded edition
edited by George James Firmage
Liveright, 2013

Sunday, January 12, 2014
VIRGINIA RODRIGUES ~
Saturday, January 11, 2014
JEFFERY BEAM READS BOB ARNOLD ~
Hello! A rare posting by Susan on an ice cold day and a sunny walk along our river, to return home and receive a cue from Bob's friend John Phillips in England — take a look at this! Forget the deep freeze, and feeding the wood fires — I'd rather share Jeffery Beam's loving generous essay at Oyster Boy Review 21, now gathered here below for you. While Bob's books may be found on Amazon, they are available locally here at Longhouse Publishers & Booksellers. With much appreciative thanks to Jeffery ~
Susan
Plain-Spoken Love Books by Bob Arnold Jeffery Beam
___________________ There's nothing imagined about Bob Arnold, and yet his whole life has been the product of imagination, and imaging a life that is as forceful as a wood chop, as clear as a woodpecker's call, as circular and varied as tree rings, as fragrant as a strip of cedar wood. Arnold's a master stonemason; a builder in the old ways of form, function, and perfect fit; a friend to chainsaws, pick-up trucks, stonecutter's tools, rivers, and grosbeaks; a lover of women (one woman in particular for over forty years); and a man's man—meaning the kind of man that knows himself and who you are (male and female or whatever new way you define yourself) and welcomes whatever that is with equanimity and generosity round the campfire. But Arnold's also one of the finest poets writing in America, one of the cleanest and purist, and without self-aggrandizement. Although he's been published by some of the finest small presses around, and at this point in his life is probably well known in the poetry world beyond his close cadre of admirers, he still keeps himself whole and wholesome in his country Vermont retreat, with wife and soul-mate Susan. You won't find him bandied about by the academic world or the slick world of poetry celebrity, and he still publishes many of his books himself, but Arnold is the real thing. The thing that lasts. That sticks. That will be as solid a long time after the celebrity poets have slipped into storage stacks. Arnold, too, has earned a deep appreciation from many poets and writers, including myself, for his Longhouse poetry publishing projects and his blog postings about poetry, literature, art, culture, and politics. His poetry reflects the kind of respect for the language, and for the world and the people and things in it, that's quite rare. It's a poetry laid down with as fine a mind and hand as the walls he builds—responding always to the lay of the land. Simple and spare when required. More discursive and filled with storytelling verve and kick when necessary. Always, however, ringing in the mind with spiritual light, the sound of a thing well-said and carefully thought-out, both visceral and enlightened, tender and spot-on, good-humored, patient, loyal, and resolute. There's a charismatic human spirit behind this work, that appeals because its charm is sincere and without airs. Each poem is a hot cup of tea on a below freezing morning, or a tumbler of cool spring water when the heat's got at you. I've never met Arnold, although I will name him as a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration for close to a decade now. So, you can take my words with a grain of salt if you want, but seek out two interviews in Jacket magazine, follow his care-taking of the estates of Cid Corman and Lorine Niedecker, and read the work. You can't disagree. The latter two of these books are part of a trilogy. Bob's words (I'll call him Bob now that I've revealed myself as one of his devotees): "The trilogy is called Woodlanders. The first two books are Yokel and I'm in Love with You Who Is in Love with Me. I'm the idiot, certainly not you, having to tell you these titles but I have to get in the groove. The third book, forthcoming, is titled The Woodcutter Talks. The trilogy covers poems and life over 40 years in the same place in Vermont, home, marriage, building work, stonework, woods river, and that psych-folk son." The Woodcutter Talks, the third book, is just out. Get it. There's no preferred order. Like the tree-rings, their order is circular. A handful of poems in the small chapbook Gentleman reappear in I'm in Love for it was published as a tribute (as many of Bob's books are) to Susan. It's a lovely thing to hold, and would make a sweet gift book to a beloved, or to a nature enthusiast. For some reason the poems herein remind me of James Laughlin's poems. I think it's the off-hand charm, the small ironies and little twists of thought and language that take the reader to a place not only pleasantly in the Now but also so richly sensual. "To have every bird in the woods / Finally sing and I am known to it / Is all the morning I ask // To see the flower garden / Move as a dress on your body / Is all the day I wish // To have the stars rise from the river / And you think of me not as crazy / Has to be the night ahead." ("To Have") There's a relaxed sexiness to these poems—I'm In Love bursts with it. Bob's love for the earth is just as vibrant and coyly robust as it is for Susan: "Early in the day / Building a house / Far from any town / With no other sound / But the river and the / Rhythm of nails pounding— / And once between raps of / The hammer I heard nearby / A woodpecker answer." ("Answer") That woodpecker sound is as naked and attractive and absorbed into the poet as Susan's body under her dress. I think of these poems as if Jean Follain might have written such if his world had not been one of such a magnitude of loss. I wrote Bob upon receiving and reading Yokel. "Dear Bob. Just a note to say how much I've enjoyed reading Yokel. The people are all drawn with such a clear plain love—a plain-spoken love drawing them out. They live on the page and, of course, remind me of many of the kind of folk with which I grew up in North Carolina country. It's the generosity and good humor of your portraits that's so compelling—and the ease with which you evoke your woodland community—and how it holds together even when the facts say it shouldn't. I love too the way you've strung the poems like a necklace of acorns around your life and the energies of Yokel, Sweetheart, Preacher, and Native making the strand. As always there are so many poems I love it would just mean listing the contents. Wisdom and storytelling all combined with your usual energy, grace, tongue-in-cheek, hand-on-hammer, hand-in-pocket, kiss on Susan's lips. I think it one of your major accomplishments." Yokel is a book about being human, how unlike and alike we are, and is built in praise of the colloquial. It's Our Town and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Frost and Whitman and Jonathan Williams' Appalachia, but not. Bob has taken his wide reading from Rimbaud to Asian poetry, from Woody Guthrie to H.D. and understands how the colloquial is the Classic, and the romance of the backwoods a philosophical inquiry into living. It's also about how Bob and Susan have, over their years in Vermont, become native, become local, while keeping their private intelligences to themselves, bringing them out for sharing with the right visitor or neighbor. Bob doesn't leave out the invasion of the modern into his idyllic countryside and a number of poems track the challenges of old colliding with the new. In "Earrings" Yokel who would "plow snow / all his life" recalls "from a heated / Cab tonight / Coffee thermos / Between his legs" seeing a pretty woman on a back road with "Four earrings in / Each ear and her / Friend had one / Stuck through / Her nose." Or as in "Old Town": "When proudly announced at town meeting / Cable was coming to the area / In the front row one old native raised an arm / Asking, Does that mean I have to get a TV?" I look forward to reading The Woodcutter Talks. I know it'll be full of pithy sayings and wise observations brought on my tree and storm and river, nail and roof and board. I'm In Love seems appropriate as middle volume for the trilogy. Susan sandwiched between their lives as neighbors and locals, and Bob's livelihood taking care of their and other's buildings and the landscape that nourishes their rural life. You got a flavor of the poems earlier. Suffice it to say, that if you are loved, or ever have been, or will be, Bob's kind of love is what you are after. Worshipful—but not to detriment, honest, playful, wise, tender, and with just the right amount of rubosto. He's Adam and Romeo, Orpheus and Odysseus, Shah Jahan and Rama. And he can build and fix whatever you want (and welcomes your help as well as a back rub), and is a perfect father too. Dante nor Petrarch loved no more: "They have been together and in love so long now / That when they think of an earlier life apart, it / Isn't possible. Or it seems another life entirely. / After all it was childhood only before they met." ("In the Land of Slush") That's the kind of forthright take-no-prisoners kind of adoration Laughlin writes too. "It was childhood only" a killer line. Everything in Bob's world is touched by Susan's presence—mittens, stray dogs, candy wrappers, and fireflies. It all evokes wonder and delight, and most of all, gratitude in Bob's eyes, manifesting in his words some of the most delightful, endearing, joyful, and spiritual rich love poems ever written. I could go on. Let Bob speak, I hear a voice tell me. It can be a big bad rotten / world out there— / find a leaf / hide under it / float upon it / clothe yourself. ("Make Do") http://www.oysterboyreview.org/issue/21/ Oyster Boy Review Post Office Box 1483 Pacifica, CA 94044 |
Labels:
Bob Arnold,
jeffery Beam,
Oyster Boy Review,
Susan Arnold
Friday, January 10, 2014
TWO STRONG WINDS ~
Amiri Baraka
(October 7, 1934 ~ January 9, 2014)
Carter Camp
(August 18, 1941 ~ December 27, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/us/carter-camp-american-indian-leader-dies-at-72.html?ref=obituaries
(August 18, 1941 ~ December 27, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/us/carter-camp-american-indian-leader-dies-at-72.html?ref=obituaries
At one time in America — certainly from the 60s into the 70s — these two men held the news and our culture by storm. Before the endless era of 24-hour-vacuous, Reality TV, liars to the left of you and liars to the right, and before the general rule of zombie nation — we had activists, poets, musicians, fathers and mothers who put their lives on the line for a greater good. Carter Camp was born in White Eagle, Oklahoma and was an American Indian Movement (AIM) activist from the Ponca tribe. He was one of the organizers of the Wounded Knee standoff.
Someone at the New York Times should have their mouth washed out with soap at describing Amiri Baraka as "polarizing". Dick Cheney is polarizing, not Baraka. A man who was a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, teacher, lecturer, political activist, community organizer, playwright of note with an Obie Award and other celebrations, ground-cutting musicologist of the full bore jazz era — and young poets take note — with his first wife Hettie Cohen, editor and publisher of the literary magazine, Yugen, which published much of the great work of the Beats. On top of with Diane di Prima establishing a second literary magazine, The Floating Bear. These were magnificent homemade and enduring publications. Not self-published ground meal disappearing acts. A third act for Baraka was founding the small press Totem Press. Black Nationalism publications and anthologies would follow.
If anything, he was unique. Slight of figure. A rightful threat.
I had a friend who brought Baraka into one of the toughest correctional institutions in New York State to read and work poetry with the prisoners. She said he had them all dazzled and committed to song by the end of the visit. No surprise.
~ BA
Someone at the New York Times should have their mouth washed out with soap at describing Amiri Baraka as "polarizing". Dick Cheney is polarizing, not Baraka. A man who was a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, teacher, lecturer, political activist, community organizer, playwright of note with an Obie Award and other celebrations, ground-cutting musicologist of the full bore jazz era — and young poets take note — with his first wife Hettie Cohen, editor and publisher of the literary magazine, Yugen, which published much of the great work of the Beats. On top of with Diane di Prima establishing a second literary magazine, The Floating Bear. These were magnificent homemade and enduring publications. Not self-published ground meal disappearing acts. A third act for Baraka was founding the small press Totem Press. Black Nationalism publications and anthologies would follow.
If anything, he was unique. Slight of figure. A rightful threat.
I had a friend who brought Baraka into one of the toughest correctional institutions in New York State to read and work poetry with the prisoners. She said he had them all dazzled and committed to song by the end of the visit. No surprise.
~ BA
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR ~
Léopold Sédar Senghor
As Federico Garcia Lorca arrived and wrote his master stroke poems to New York City, so did Senghor, translated here by gay activist, professor and author Melvin Dixon
To New York
(for jazz orchestra and trumpet solo)
New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty,
Those huge, long-legged, golden girls.
So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile,
So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets
Raising my owl eyes at the eclipse of the sun.
Your light is sulphurous against the pale towers
Whose heads strike lightning into the sky,
Skyscrapers defying storms with their steel shoulders
And weathered skin of stone.
But two weeks on the naked sidewalks of Manhattan—
At the end of the third week the fever
Overtakes you with a jaguar’s leap
Two weeks without well water or pasture all birds of the air
Fall suddenly dead under the high, sooty terraces.
No laugh from a growing child, his hand in my cool hand.
No mother’s breast, but nylon legs. Legs and breasts
Without smell or sweat. No tender word, and no lips,
Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash
And not one book offering wisdom.
The painter’s palette yields only coral crystals.
Sleepless nights, O nights of Manhattan!
Stirring with delusions while car horns blare the empty hours
And murky streams carry away hygenic loving
Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies.
II
Now is the time of signs and reckoning, New York!
Now is the time of manna and hyssop.
You have only to listen to God’s trombones, to your heart
Beating to the rhythm of blood, your blood.
I saw Harlem teeming with sounds and ritual colors
And outrageous smells—
At teatime in the home of the drugstore-deliveryman
I saw the festival of Night begin at the retreat of day.
And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day.
It is the pure hour when God brings forth
Life immemorial in the streets,
All the amphibious elements shining like suns.
Harlem, Harlem! Now I’ve seen Harlem, Harlem!
A green breeze of corn rising from the pavements
Plowed by the Dan dancers’ bare feet,
Hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts,
Ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks
And mangoes of love rolling from the low houses
To the feet of police horses.
And along sidewalks I saw streams of white rum
And streams of black milk in the blue haze of cigars.
And at night I saw cotton flowers snow down
From the sky and the angels’ wings and sorcerers’ plumes.
Listen, New York! O listen to your bass male voice,
Your vibrant oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears
Falling in great clots of blood,
Listen to the distant beating of your nocturnal heart,
The tom-tom’s rhythm and blood, tom-tom blood and tom-tom.
III
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The reconciliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
(for jazz orchestra and trumpet solo)
New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty,
Those huge, long-legged, golden girls.
So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile,
So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets
Raising my owl eyes at the eclipse of the sun.
Your light is sulphurous against the pale towers
Whose heads strike lightning into the sky,
Skyscrapers defying storms with their steel shoulders
And weathered skin of stone.
But two weeks on the naked sidewalks of Manhattan—
At the end of the third week the fever
Overtakes you with a jaguar’s leap
Two weeks without well water or pasture all birds of the air
Fall suddenly dead under the high, sooty terraces.
No laugh from a growing child, his hand in my cool hand.
No mother’s breast, but nylon legs. Legs and breasts
Without smell or sweat. No tender word, and no lips,
Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash
And not one book offering wisdom.
The painter’s palette yields only coral crystals.
Sleepless nights, O nights of Manhattan!
Stirring with delusions while car horns blare the empty hours
And murky streams carry away hygenic loving
Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies.
II
Now is the time of signs and reckoning, New York!
Now is the time of manna and hyssop.
You have only to listen to God’s trombones, to your heart
Beating to the rhythm of blood, your blood.
I saw Harlem teeming with sounds and ritual colors
And outrageous smells—
At teatime in the home of the drugstore-deliveryman
I saw the festival of Night begin at the retreat of day.
And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day.
It is the pure hour when God brings forth
Life immemorial in the streets,
All the amphibious elements shining like suns.
Harlem, Harlem! Now I’ve seen Harlem, Harlem!
A green breeze of corn rising from the pavements
Plowed by the Dan dancers’ bare feet,
Hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts,
Ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks
And mangoes of love rolling from the low houses
To the feet of police horses.
And along sidewalks I saw streams of white rum
And streams of black milk in the blue haze of cigars.
And at night I saw cotton flowers snow down
From the sky and the angels’ wings and sorcerers’ plumes.
Listen, New York! O listen to your bass male voice,
Your vibrant oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears
Falling in great clots of blood,
Listen to the distant beating of your nocturnal heart,
The tom-tom’s rhythm and blood, tom-tom blood and tom-tom.
III
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The reconciliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
___________________
from The Collected Poems
translated by Melvin Dixon
University of Virginia
Press
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was Senegal’s first democratically elected president from 1960 to 1981. A poet, writer, and statesman Senghor was born near Dakar in the town of Joal to a Fulbe mother and a Serer trader father. He was educated at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer in Paris, where he became friends with Aimé Césaire who he co-founded the Negritude movement, which promotes distinctly African cultural values and aesthetics, in opposition to the influence of French colonialism and European exploitation. After earning his French citizenship, Senghor taught in Tours and Paris. He joined the French army during World War II and spent 18 months in a German prison camp. After serving successive terms representing Senegal in the French National Assembly, Senghor returned to his native land, where he led his nation’s independence movement in 1960.
Residing part-time in France, he wrote poems of resistance in French. His nonfiction work includes numerous volumes on politics, philosophy, sociology, and linguistics.
He passed away at his home in France at the age of 95.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Monday, January 6, 2014
Sunday, January 5, 2014
JO ANN KELLY ~
Jo Ann Kelly's Birthday!
(5 January 1944 — 21 October 1990)
Gone over twenty years ago now and remaining one of the finest bluesmakers there was
KISSING ~
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”
J o h n C h e e v e r
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/opinion/sunday/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-reader.html?hp&rref=opinion
Saturday, January 4, 2014
JOHN CAGE'S ROARATORIO ~
Performers ~
John Cage, Voice
Joe Heaney, Singer
Seamus Ennis, Uillean pipes
Paddy Glackin, Fiddle
Matt Malloy, Flute
Peadher Mercier, Mell Mercier,
to peter garland
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