The full dustjacket to
American Smoke
Iain Sinclair
Faber & Faber
US edition: 2014
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
SPRING LETTER ~
Dear S ~,
Do have S send me her new book of poems, if you can both afford such a gesture, and I'll be sure to send you something new in return. The rites of a real Spring. Excited to learn of this for S. Readings off the island. If you and I ever get to have the chance to do a public reading I hope we can read on a pathway on the island, and whoever shows up by luck, happenstance, or plan, this will be who we read to. The years I read on the street raising money for Hurricane Katrina relief, and inviting Greg Joly to join (about the only one who would steer with my all outdoor, anonymous scheme) was exactly this way. Most who walked by thought we must be "religious." We answered, "Well, a religion of a sort."
You may not be inhabiting the new place but by all photographs you are making it your own. Slow and steady and sure work. It will be left for someone after you are done with it. Can a building have a finer life? Who knows where this fine door you are pressing together in cuts and strong angles will finally end up. In Vermont? Nantucket? Paris? Doors get around. I used one once in a pinch for a snow plow.
The past two weeks we have watched all our snow go into the ground and go away in the river. The river has been running like an emerald we haven't seen for years.
I've been every day with renovation work on the faraway cottage. I'm not sure I even had that built yet when you both visited? Built in 2000. Then the studio in 2002. The renovations in the cottage are all bookshop related since the whole building has been taken up with the book trade. Same with the studio; in fact, same with the house. So I've been building floor to ceiling bookcases and circling the room with these all downstairs. Not a space left free from bookcase — around all the windows, and there are many windows I put in since there is no electricity. Over and around the dutch door I built once upon a time. It's a spooky place to be in at the dead of winter, early morning, snowshoeing up there to retrieve books with a flashlight. It was organic and flavored by luck before we finally gave up with the stacks and mounds and table top piles of books and decided: enough! build those bookcases before the books take over. They had "take-over" written all over the dustjackets.
Since sugaring was very poor, mud season was very light, at least on our road. That's the usual m.o. While other dirt roads have been closed. A very cold March. The frost eased out of the ground gradually but the days weren't warm and nights cold for the sap to flow. It stayed only cold, often bitter. During that time an artist I have yet to meet in northern Vermont sent me a sheaf of his sugar bush drawings and wondered if I had any poems to go with them? I didn't, but I had a bad case of the flu, down for the count for a few days and over that time I wrote the poems and made the book for him and me. Never did that before! Couldn't again! Coming out May Day. One way or another we'll get a sugaring year out of 2014.
It was 75 degrees yesterday, sleeves rolled up. Today they say we may see snowflurries. Check that — a snowfall.
all's well, Bob
photo © bob arnold
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
JESSE WINCHESTER ~
Jesse Winchester
(b. May 17, 1944 Bossier City, LA ~ 2014)
We woke up before dawn Saturday morning to the news of this great loss to the music world, and the world in general, whether it knows yet or not.
I had just posted a Birdhouse piece to Charis Weston and couldn't ruffle yet its feathers. JW knew all about waiting.
Go find his records — they look so good in full LP mode. Especially his first recording simply titled Jesse Winchester, produced by Robbie Robertson, issued out of Woodstock, New York by Albert Grossman's Bearsville label, Todd Rundgren as recording engineer. Winchester was then on the run, from the draft, the Vietnam War, the law, and the album cover showed forth in full glory, from front to back cover, in the same wilderness era wanted poster style. Not bad for a native southern boy whose father was in the Army Air Corps stationed in Louisiana at the time of Winchester's birth. The draft dodger and recent Williams College graduate settled in Montreal, became a Canadian citizen in 1973, and played his first U.S. concert in a decade after President Jimmy Carter issued an amnesty for draft evaders in 1977.
Which doesn't mean Winchester's career went soaring. Anything but.
More albums had by then been issued, all gems, and most are still found to this day in dollar bins if you can find a record store in your town.
We found Jesse Winchester one night, about fifteen years ago, in a small club in Massachusetts. Same club where we found Townes Van Zandt, Spider John Koerner, David Ray, Ramblin Jack Elliott; yes! it was some club. Side street, squeeze in, the stage the size of a card table, the music all terrific, the audience all swaying in the same clover. We brought our young son Carson to all of these concerts, by then an already devoted music loving cub reporter (Sweetheart was pregnant with Carson for the Townes concert, so yes he was there) and he met Jesse who was kind of snarly and kind of shy. It probably made sense from the territory where he had been. The man would fight two different bouts of cancer, and be taken by the second strike.
I've been playing his music all through the past weekend. Here's a clutch of songs, amongst an easy two dozen, I always liked.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
CHARIS WESTON ~
Edward Weston, Portrait of Charis Wilson
Gelatin silver print
Edward
Weston Archive. Collection Center for Creative Photography
©1981 Center
for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
A west coast love story, done bohemian style, done in the era of Robinson Jeffers and done in his same town of Carmel, California. 48 year old photographer Edward Weston met his muse and future bride Charis Wilson, age 20, and were, as they both said, instantaneously drawn to one another. They met in 1934, began to live together along that wondrous seacoast habitat, finally to marry in 1939 and were separated in 1945. Divorced 1946. And during those eleven years they sure did some things.
For one thing young Charis kept taking her clothes off, always a sunbather, freely, and Weston started to take photographs, 100s and 100s and many became legendary. There are an equal amount of fully clothed portraits of Charis as well. What Weston was capturing, and Charis was giving, was a freedom, a body light, a daring rarely seen.
A natural born storyteller (all part of the freedom) Charis Wilson Weston then wrote the grant application that earned for Weston a Guggenheim Fellowship — the first photographer to ever receive one — a $2,000 stipened that would take them 16,697 miles around western states in 187 days, and Charis did most of the driving, and would write the pioneer-keen-eyed text for their combined masterpiece from their journeys California and the West, published in 1940. The couple are still very much in love. It shows throughout the book. During this time Charis wrote the articles for photography magazines that were always credited to Weston.
You go girl.
When it all ended, native San Franciscan Charis Wilson already had a new husband planned. They were married immediately after her divorce. Two daughters were raised — one was later murdered in Scotland and the other remained close to her mother until Charis Wilson's passing in Santa Cruz, California at age 95 in 2009.
[ BA ]
A west coast love story, done bohemian style, done in the era of Robinson Jeffers and done in his same town of Carmel, California. 48 year old photographer Edward Weston met his muse and future bride Charis Wilson, age 20, and were, as they both said, instantaneously drawn to one another. They met in 1934, began to live together along that wondrous seacoast habitat, finally to marry in 1939 and were separated in 1945. Divorced 1946. And during those eleven years they sure did some things.
For one thing young Charis kept taking her clothes off, always a sunbather, freely, and Weston started to take photographs, 100s and 100s and many became legendary. There are an equal amount of fully clothed portraits of Charis as well. What Weston was capturing, and Charis was giving, was a freedom, a body light, a daring rarely seen.
A natural born storyteller (all part of the freedom) Charis Wilson Weston then wrote the grant application that earned for Weston a Guggenheim Fellowship — the first photographer to ever receive one — a $2,000 stipened that would take them 16,697 miles around western states in 187 days, and Charis did most of the driving, and would write the pioneer-keen-eyed text for their combined masterpiece from their journeys California and the West, published in 1940. The couple are still very much in love. It shows throughout the book. During this time Charis wrote the articles for photography magazines that were always credited to Weston.
You go girl.
When it all ended, native San Franciscan Charis Wilson already had a new husband planned. They were married immediately after her divorce. Two daughters were raised — one was later murdered in Scotland and the other remained close to her mother until Charis Wilson's passing in Santa Cruz, California at age 95 in 2009.
[ BA ]
once in vermont films © bob arnold
Friday, April 11, 2014
WILL PETERSEN ~
Will Petersen was such a good man — one could sense this not even knowing Will personally via his sweeping and full-hearted letters. A close friend during the "Japan years" with Cid Corman and Gary Snyder and others. That era of American poets & artists in Japan after WW2, either as students of zen, or living and working there, or visiting, awaits in the wings for some scholar to take up and showcase an historical record, with photographs, book length. It'll be a rich telling.
In the meantime, when in Illinois over the five weeks of Will's tribute, why not stop in and be nourished. Will and Cynthia's Plucked Chicken was unlike any other small press journal — most definitely inspired by Corman's Origin in all the right ways (poets published etc) but also with the flair and freewheelin' of the artist's own brush. It's said so often but still not enough:
they don't make 'em like this any more.
[ BA ]
Thursday, April 10, 2014
E-SPORTS ~
WELCOME TO YOUR SCREEN MIND
roll over george orwell
roll over ray bradbury
roll over bookstores
roll over conversation
roll over
BURLS ~
REDWOOD TREES HAVE SURVIVED LIGHTNING, FIRE, HIGH WINDS AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS
BUT NOT MAN ~
BUT NOT MAN ~
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
CARSON ARNOLD'S NEW BOOK ~
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE!
click onto image to enlarge
________________________________________________________________
Carson Arnold comes from a place where poetry is dignity and where nature
defines all. As any teenager will attest, you either scowl or smile away the
purity of realism, and in Carson’s case he expressed this dynamic in a
dialogue with music, primarily rock n roll and all its offspring. Owing to
nada, but going for the gold, and dreaming towards radical awareness.
And the kid done grown up.
— Thurston Moore
__________________________________________________________________
Carson Arnold comes from a place where poetry is dignity and where nature
defines all. As any teenager will attest, you either scowl or smile away the
purity of realism, and in Carson’s case he expressed this dynamic in a
dialogue with music, primarily rock n roll and all its offspring. Owing to
nada, but going for the gold, and dreaming towards radical awareness.
And the kid done grown up.
— Thurston Moore
__________________________________________________________________
Carson Arnold
If I Blinked Through These Windows
Music Essays & Interviews
Longhouse 2014
456 pages
$18
$3.95 shipping (USA)
International orders please inquire
ORDER NOW!
By credit card, check
or
with easy to use Paypal ~
By credit card, check
or
with easy to use Paypal ~
For International orders, please inquire as to shipping
Email : poetry@sover.net
AFTERWORD TO THE BOOK_______________________________
Most of the essays and interviews on Track and H(ear) can be found at the website: www.LonghousePoetry/hear.html
There were a few longer interviews with the musicians Dredd Foole and Peter Siegel — too long to manage in print — that are not in this collection but can be found at the same website.
The postcard series LISTEN! is shown here in facsimile copies, but there are real copies, in limited edition, available from Longhouse.
This book publication was made by Bob Arnold, with great help from Susan Arnold, the mother of the lode. One day, Bob said, he walked into Carson's music store and saw a young man busy at work helping customers with their requests and keeping good cheer with his fellow employees. It was the ultimate tribal experience of record stores around the world. The groove. You know one when you're in one.
He also saw that this young man had gone through some struggles. That this treasure chest of writing had been done, and while some from his website readers had sent back hurrahs and salutations (music energy is beautiful) there was something missing in his hands, and it may be this book.
So over one of the coldest and snowiest winters in the backwoods, or anywhere else, for years — two~hands set to work to compile a book and have this ready for Carson’s 29th birthday in June. Same birth date as Che Guevara's; same day as Flag Day — just to show you how much of a Gemini this young fellow is.
Age 29.
Not yet 30.
You can still trust him.
— Levi RoseThere were a few longer interviews with the musicians Dredd Foole and Peter Siegel — too long to manage in print — that are not in this collection but can be found at the same website.
The postcard series LISTEN! is shown here in facsimile copies, but there are real copies, in limited edition, available from Longhouse.
This book publication was made by Bob Arnold, with great help from Susan Arnold, the mother of the lode. One day, Bob said, he walked into Carson's music store and saw a young man busy at work helping customers with their requests and keeping good cheer with his fellow employees. It was the ultimate tribal experience of record stores around the world. The groove. You know one when you're in one.
He also saw that this young man had gone through some struggles. That this treasure chest of writing had been done, and while some from his website readers had sent back hurrahs and salutations (music energy is beautiful) there was something missing in his hands, and it may be this book.
So over one of the coldest and snowiest winters in the backwoods, or anywhere else, for years — two~hands set to work to compile a book and have this ready for Carson’s 29th birthday in June. Same birth date as Che Guevara's; same day as Flag Day — just to show you how much of a Gemini this young fellow is.
Age 29.
Not yet 30.
You can still trust him.
photos © susan arnold
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Monday, April 7, 2014
KEM NUNN ~
I don't know. . .Thomas Perry can be quite good when it comes to the crime thriller, not always even, but good enough. He usually starts off with a bang, pads the middle, and when he's the best, creeps with you on all fours to the finish line. The Butcher's Boy certainly. Fidelity is pretty well twisted on tight, as is Pursuit, and the recent The Boyfriend isn't bad, except the boyfriend himself isn't all that memorable. Perry's had better women assassins.
Enough on Perry. It's Kem Nunn I'm here for. His books are three Perry's-in-one for dynamo, and unlike Perry, Nunn isn't writing a cookbook method mystery. He's writing powerful, well-built novels, often starring a surfing culture, or bikers, or outcasts of some model and misshape, or a Native American tribe; and for what Raymond Chandler did for his time in Los Angeles, I believe Nunn is doing it now in present California, all with a certain knowing click and hipness that Chandler owned in his era.
Nunn's first book, the best novel ever written about surfing, Tapping the Source, should be showcased here with The Dogs of Winter. Again, surfers, but this time not in southern California as with Tapping, but in the outback of northern California. It turns out a dangerous corner of the woods.
Chance is brand new. With characters clumsy and tattered and even boring in some ways which in the hands of Nunn he can handle with his eyes closed. You can almost feel him enjoying playing with this role as a writer making something grand out of nothing. Barely a surf in this book, but surf is there, because we're all the time in San Francisco. I couldn't put the book down, but I did, because I wanted the pleasure of fine writing over a few days.
As soon as I finished Chance...I ordered, used, Tijuana Straits. The only book of Nunn's I haven't read and could have when it first appeared, but like I say, I want his books to last. So I've been saving this one. While I wait for the book to show, I reread The Dogs. . .since it's been over ten years since I last read the novel, and I might be a wee bit smarter now having the second reading grabbing me by the arm. Taking me under.
[ BA ]
Enough on Perry. It's Kem Nunn I'm here for. His books are three Perry's-in-one for dynamo, and unlike Perry, Nunn isn't writing a cookbook method mystery. He's writing powerful, well-built novels, often starring a surfing culture, or bikers, or outcasts of some model and misshape, or a Native American tribe; and for what Raymond Chandler did for his time in Los Angeles, I believe Nunn is doing it now in present California, all with a certain knowing click and hipness that Chandler owned in his era.
Nunn's first book, the best novel ever written about surfing, Tapping the Source, should be showcased here with The Dogs of Winter. Again, surfers, but this time not in southern California as with Tapping, but in the outback of northern California. It turns out a dangerous corner of the woods.
Chance is brand new. With characters clumsy and tattered and even boring in some ways which in the hands of Nunn he can handle with his eyes closed. You can almost feel him enjoying playing with this role as a writer making something grand out of nothing. Barely a surf in this book, but surf is there, because we're all the time in San Francisco. I couldn't put the book down, but I did, because I wanted the pleasure of fine writing over a few days.
As soon as I finished Chance...I ordered, used, Tijuana Straits. The only book of Nunn's I haven't read and could have when it first appeared, but like I say, I want his books to last. So I've been saving this one. While I wait for the book to show, I reread The Dogs. . .since it's been over ten years since I last read the novel, and I might be a wee bit smarter now having the second reading grabbing me by the arm. Taking me under.
[ BA ]
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Saturday, April 5, 2014
CROWNED ~
Crowned
A book fell on my head today while building up in the cottage with Sweetheart. All day slugging out new shelving. Sweetheart moving lots of books as well with me over snow. With a sled. Have to be very careful, one tipsy with the sled and many books ruined in the mud and snow-melt puddles. The puddles are now deep. We'll take it if it means the snow is melting. It says it is melting. We say keep up the good work. So back to the book that crowned me. Sure enough, one by Codrescu. One I have been lugging around from building to building waiting for it to sell over 10 years. Never did. I dropped the price down to $3.95 hardcover, brand new. The problem is it crowned me on the head at an inopportune time for me and the book (but not Codrescu, he didn't feel a thing), and on the second floor, with the windows wide open (double window shutter style, lots of wide opening) I took the book in one hand and motion flung it out the window to never never land. Into snow. Near a brook running well, the cover flew off mid-flight. Ah, well. Temper temper. Two hours later we got back to the house and sure enough, there was an order for the book, we sold it. You can bet in the split second before I tossed the book I knew we had another copy, this was a double, so expendable with my wrath. All is well.
Friday, April 4, 2014
CEDAR SIGO ~
click on image once to enlarge
Language Arts
Cedar Sigo
Wave Books, 2014
www.wavepoetry.com
Thursday, April 3, 2014
FRANK SAMPERI ~ TRILOGY ~
Coming very close to mirroring the masterpiece three volumes first published by Mushinsha/Grossman in the early 1970s,
here we have the Trilogy all under one roof, in one volume, from Skysill Press in England. Once again, an American poet has to be taken across the Atlantic only to be brought back home. With three authors writing appreciations of Samperi — Robert Kelly, Peter O'Leary, and Elizabeth Robinson — something new for this new edition.
________________
Frank Samperi
Trilogy
Skysill Press
3 Gervase Gardens
Clifton Village
Nottingham NG11 8LZ
skysillpress.blogspot.com
Then the dwelling of the angel in the road
or rather the odor
sign
of the dwelling
continuing
habituating the man
to the daily
drawing out radiance
preparing
rendering
transparent
the surroundings
the universe
the aureole
receiving
truest
ray
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
POSTCARD 34 ~
On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley arrived at the White House carrying a commemorative world war II colt .45. Being a badge collector he wanted to trade the gun to President Nixon for a narcotics bureau badge. Elvis received the badge and the gun is now on display at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. The irony is too thick & bewildering to measure.
Anyway, no one looks stoned here.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
J.D. WHITNEY'S SELECTED POEMS ~
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE!
J.D. Whitney
Sweeping the Broom Shorter
Selected Poems 1964-2014
Longhouse 2014
192 pages
ORDER NOW!
By credit card, check
or
with easy to use Paypal ~
By credit card, check
or
with easy to use Paypal ~
$15.00
plus $2.00 shipping (USA)
For International orders, please inquire as to shipping
email: poetry@sover.net
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