VALERIE JUNE ~

http://valeriejune.com/

XUE DI ~

ECHO LAKE




   Grant me a favor. Give me to understand your mysterious lake.

   Let my white feathers, like eyes shedding expressions, float in your tranquility. The banked rushes,

row after row, are bent like ideograms. The long cries of geese drown out a secret. Tell me, isn't

that secret as chimerical as the sun-chiseled mountains? As enduring?

   I beg you to grant me a favor.

   Crossing the fields, I walk right into you, my worn feet tramping over your secret as if it were dew

in the grass.

   When I enter the lake, its tinted water swallows my skin inch by inch, and a strange and distant

memory comes back to me: my mother massaging my entire body. But her hands now lie at the

bottom of the lake. Motionless there. I walk into you as the sound of music, my most sacred

coronation, your tinted water swallowing my skin inch by inch. I'm in such a tranquil , such a lovely

dreamland, that even when I knock against the sickliest body, I am unable to wake with a start, I stay

asleep in the catapult.

   My lips will never recount anything. The world will not pour in or out of them. They sink into the

water and kiss the fish in the weeds. Like time, they take on a cold and lasting silence.

   Mysterious lake, let me enter you naked. Let my feeble song fall into your grasses like a length of

yellow ribbon. After you grant me this favor, I will enter the mystery. Break away. All the

misunderstood, let me distance myself from them. Distance, what a pretty hoax. I have lived a brief 

time and in a frenzy.  I loved poetry with my life. Was that not enough?




_____________________

Xue Di
translated by Hil Anderson & Forrest Gander
ACROSS BORDERS
GREEN INTEGER 2013

"In China, to be a poet is dangerous.

To be a poet means to be honest,

tell people your true feelings.

When the political situation is rough,

writers will be the first group to be oppressed."

Xue Di

NAJWAN DARWISH ~

Nothing More to Lose

___________________________________

Lay your head on my chest and listen

to the layers of ruins

behind the madrasah of Saladin

hear the houses sliced open

in the village of Lifta

hear the wrecked mill, the lessons and reading

on the mosque's ground floor

hear the balcony lights

go out for the very last time

on the heights of Wadi Salib

hear the crowds drag their feet

and hear them returning

hear the bodies as they're thrown, listen

to their breathing on the bed

of the Sea of Galilee

listen like a fish

in a lake guarded by an angel

hear the tales of the villages, embroidered

like kaffiyehs in the poems

hear the singers growing old

hear their ageless voices

hear the women of Nazareth

as they cross the meadow

hear the camel driver

who never stops tormenting me

Hear it

and let us, together, remember

then let us, together, forget

all that we have heard

Lay your head on my chest:

I'm listening to the dirt

I'm listening to the grass

as it splits through my skin. . .

We lost our heads in love

and have nothing more to lose

Najwan Darwish

NOTHING MORE TO LOSE

translated from the Arabic by Kareem Abu-Zeid

New York Review Books, 2014

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/najwan-darwish/

REAL LIFE ~

Just a note to the recent passing of so many fine poets — like Philip Levine — who I made an immediate Birdhouse memorial page to by selecting one of his poems from his Wesleyan title Not This Pig (1968). A book I pretty much marked up from here to Tuesday with favorite lines and favorite poems way back when in 1968, then I went on to buy and read every one of his books for almost the next half century. He had a wonderful run and the poems stayed true blue, often politically charged and even romantic.

However, Philip Levine wasn't a "working class poet," nor working class as often comes along with any word about him. He held a brief youthful stint at lousy paying jobs, including in an automotive plant, like dozens and dozens of American poets before and after him have done. Like Levine, almost all of that drudgery and work was over with by the time these poets hit age 30, when you're supposed to wise up, or not be trusted. Take your pick. Levine decided, and he did it very well, to mine the memory of that brief automotive time and give us many fine poems right from the guts and grease of that hardware and life. But he did this while going for his college degrees and his long standing job as a professor. He certainly should be honored there. He wasn't a working class worker.

To me a working class worker is one who has earned a paycheck from working class work, a mainstay of the earnings. This puts almost all the renowned poets out of the ranking.  That working class paycheck also keeps the recipient in that ranking in almost all social order, meaning diminished. There is no tenure, no pension plan, no golden parachute, no big paycheck awards. Really, there's nothing, they're working until they can almost not work any longer. Far past any retirement age. If they had a state job, they may be in better shape but by then most minds have also been state-shaped. Not a versatile shape.

The self-employed worker is working often pay-check-to-pay- check. If they don't work, they don't eat. If they don't work, they don't buy shoes for their kids. If they don't work, they could freeze to death. Some have pride and would never take a welfare check or any welfare, they're workers. There's deep honor in knowing how to work with one's hands and build things, make things run, make things hold water, make things glow.

There are poets in America to this day who are working class. They work long hours and in deep shade of recognition. They naturally don't fit into the puzzle of poetry schools and poetry circles, they're working, they're getting by, they probably can't always afford to buy your poetry book but they'll check it out of the library. They have such real gem experiences and may not have the finesse or workshop models to make a poem swing into the New Yorker each week, but man their experiences are real stuff magic.

[ BA ]

LYNNE TILLMAN ~

"At the beginning, when I started to show my writing to people, to give readings from it, I had no audience. No one has an audience at the start, because no one is waiting. Certainly not for your work. To think that would be delusional. There was no audience for my writing. To the extent that I have one now, it is because, over time, say, 25 years of my writing’s being published, people called readers have come upon a story or novel or essay of mine and thought, I’d like to read more. This amazing relationship — a reader finding a writer whom he or she would like to read — begins accidentally and might become a habit or practice. If I think about readers who look forward to my next novel, I feel inspired to finish it. Those readers are important to me, though I don’t write for them. I certainly don’t want to disappoint them with a poor book or story; but I don’t write for them. I’m encouraged by the thought of them. In a real sense, readers are more important than writers. There are too many of us anyway, and too many write books that are nothing more than words used poorly in sentences that don’t signify in novels or stories that are primarily thoughtless. But readers — all readers should exist!"

LYNNE TILLMAN 

What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

Red Lemonade, 2014

www.redlemona.de

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-lynne-tillman

CHARLES BUKOWSKI ~

A RIOT IN THE STREETS



it's a good day, a good time, anybody can

blow a hole through you at any minute.



they are shooting from the rooftops now

and the night sky is smoking,

red.



what more could you want?

you can watch it on your tv or you

can look outside, it's the same

thing.



they are letting it all out again.

airing it out.

it's healthy.



the cops are hiding.

nobody is bored tonight.

the safest people are already in jail.



everybody feels curiously alive,

at last. 



it's party time!



this city is the whole world

and it's running right at you.



it's a good day, a good time!



hell is coming out to play



with you.









9 BAD BOYS



Celine will bat

lead off,

Shostakovich is in the

second

spot,

Dostoevsky should hit

3rd,

Beethoven will definitely bat

clean-up,

Jeffers is in the 5th

spot,

Dreiser can hit

6th

and batting 7th

let's have

Boccaccio

and 8th the

catcher:

Hemingway.



the pitcher?

hell, give me the

fucking

ball.





BARFLY



Jane, who has been dead for 31 years,

never could have

imagined that I would write a screenplay of our drinking

days together

and

that it would be made into a movie

and

that a beautiful movie star would play her

part.



I can hear Jane now: "A beautiful movie star? oh,

for Christ sake!"



Jane, that's show biz, sp go back to sleep, dear, because

no matter how hard they tried they

just couldn't find anybody exactly like

you.



and neither can

I.







SILLY DAMNED THING ANYHOW



we tried to hide it in the house so that the
neighbors wouldn't see.
it was difficult, sometimes we both had to
be gone at once and when we returned
there would be excreta and urine all
about.
it wouldn't toilet train
but it had the bluest eyes you ever
saw
and it ate everything we did
and we often watched tv together.

one evening we came home and it was
gone.
there was blood on the floor,
there was a trail of blood.
I followed it outside and into the garden
and there in the brush it was,
mutilated.
there was a sign hung about its severed
throat:
"we don't want things like this in our
neighborhood."

I walked to the garage for the shovel.
I told my wife, "don't come out here."
then I walked back with the shovel and
began digging.
I sensed
the faces watching me from behind
drawn blinds.
they had their neighborhood back,
a nice quiet neighborhood with green
lawns, palm trees, circular driveways, children,
churches, a supermarket, etc.

I dug into the earth. 


___________________________

CHARLES BUKOWSKI
NEW POEMS BOOK 3
edited by John Martin
Virgin Books, 2004

PHILIP LEVINE ~

Philip Levine

(January 10, 1928 – February 14, 2015)

COMING HOMEWARD FROM TOLEDO




We stopped at a beer garden,

drank, and watched the usual farmers

watching us, and gave a dull

country laborer a lift

in the wrong direction. He

giggled by the roadside where

we left him, pissing in snow

and waving, forty frozen

miles from home.



                            When the engine

failed, we stood in a circle

of our breathing listening for

the sounds of snow.



                             Later

just before the dawn of the

second day of a new year

already old, we found her

under white heaps, another

city in another time,

and fell asleep, and wakened

alone and disappointed

in a glass house under a

bare wood roof.    



                               I called out for

you, my brothers and friends, and

someone's children came, someone's

wife — puzzled helpful faces —

saying "father" and "husband."

You never answered, never

heard, under the frozen stars

of that old year where the snow

creaked in great mounds and the air

bronzed from the slag heaps twenty

miles south of Ecorse, for you were

happy, tired, and never going home.



 _____________________

Philip Levine
Not This Pig
Wesleyan University Press 1968

PALS ~

Andy Warhol and Parker Tyler
Photograph by Gerard Malanga
New York City, 1969
The Bellevue Press

DOC POMUS ~

https://rockhall.com/inductees/doc-pomus/bio/

WILLIAM EGGLESTON ~

Steidl, 2014

http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/04/01/10-lessons-william-eggleston-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/

DAVID CARR'S LAST VENUE ~

David Carr

September 8, 1956 – February 12, 2015

http://new.livestream.com/nytimes/events/3800646/videos/76929642

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/business/media/david-carr-media-equation-columnist-for-the-times-is-dead-at-58.html

TRIGGER ~

Roy Rogers' famous horse "Trigger"
A permanent resident of the Roy Rogers
and Dale Evans Museum

One can play "Happy Trails"
recording on the postcard
on any nonautomatic return
phonograph player at 33-1/3 rpm

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ ~

A long time ago, way back, there were beings

Who formed a circle to keep the wolves

At bay and stay warm; they were bound to vanish

They were a lot like us.

We're here, our last words are fading,

The sea has gone

For one last time lovers are embracing,

The land is naked.

Above our bodies sound waves rise

And fall and move

Around the world,

Our hearts are nearly cold

Death must surely come, deep and gentle;

Soon, human beings will run off from this world.

The dominion of machines will then be complete

And pure information will triumph and fill

The empty carcass of the absent divine;

And this noise will rule until the end of time.






The Long Road To Clifden 



West of Clifden, headland, 

Where the sky changes to water

Where water changes to memory

At the edge of a new world



Along the hills of Clifden

The green hills of Clifden,

I shall lay down my pain.



For us to live with death

Death must change to light

Light change to water

And water change to memory.



To the west, all of humanity

Gathers on the road to Clifden

On the long road to Clifden

Humans lay down their pain

Between the waves and the light.

___________________________________

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ 

The Art of Struggle

translated by Delphine Grass & Timothy Mathews

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq

SILVINA OCAMPO ~

Fragrance

I who live close by

bear witness that at certain hours

of the night or day

it floods the areas of the square where it lives

and enters the windows of neighboring houses;

it's more important than the corporeal

beauty of the trees because even the blind can see it

through the illusion of perfume,

as through music.

Often, at any hour,

I tried like a sleuth to find where that heavenly

fragrance came from and I reached the conclusion

that it's simply like the soul

lodging nowhere and all about.

~





Love



I would like to be your favorite pillow

where you rest your ears at night

to be your secret and the fence

around your sleep; asleep or awake



to be your door, your light when you go away,

someone who does not try to be loved.

To escape the anxiety in my complaints,

and manage at times to be what I am; nothing,



never to be afraid of losing you

through fickleness and unfaithfulness,

nor pointlessly grant to you



the tedious, vulgar faithfulness

of those abandoned who prefer

to die instead of suffer, and do not die.

__________________________

Silvina Ocampo

translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss

New York Review Books, 2015

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/silvina-ocampo/

SIT DOWN ~

B E C K

_____________________________________________________________________________

The born loud and now rich Kanye West picked on Beck last night at The Grammys, grumbling about how Beck, of all people, isn't worthy of the album of the year award. He may as well have picked on George Martin of The Beatles. This is what I mean by loud. His mother or father never got across "think" then "speak."

______________________________________________________________________________

STEVE ~

Steve Sanfield & Doc Dachtler

I just learned of an old friend's passing. This is what I get for living so tucked away in the snow. 

News comes from a snail mail letter from another old friend in Colorado telling me about Steve's passing in the Sierra of California. And I'm not sure how long my letter sat in the post office box but I opened it tonight sitting by the wood stove on a small bench in barely any light and when I came to that part of the letter about Steve I moved into the light and read the paragraph again to make sure I was hearing things right.  That's right, hearing things right.

Above is a photograph of two long-time Longhouse poets I always liked to publish and be in touch with. You can see they were pals.

 Steve Sanfield was one of the founders of the American Storytelling Renaissance, becoming the first storyteller-in-residence in the United States in 1977. He is also the founder of the Sierra Storytelling Festival. Steve had over thirty published books under his belt — poetry and prose, but really it was all poetry.

We both lived as long as we lived in our respective spots on earth — 45 years in our spots — which I believe was part of why we contacted one another in the first place. Brotherly Place. Steve's spot on earth was the San Juan Ridge at his home on Montezuma Hill.

_____________________

BOB DYLAN WOODSTOCK ~

Bob Dylan
photograph by Elliott Landy