K E N K E S E Y
Happy July 4th!
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Friday, July 3, 2015
Thursday, July 2, 2015
ALICE & GERRY SPEAK ~
ISLAND DREAMS
Hi Gerry and Lorry.
I just finished reading Island Dreams, all in one sitting. If I were a poet
like you, I could say all I want to say about the book in ten words. Being more
limited, it would take me 100 times that. It is a book of love on many levels.
Bob and Susan did a wonderful job in editing it and designing it. I like the
page-size and square format because there is a lot of white space for the poems
to breathe. The lack of illustrations in the main part of the book contributes
to that open space also. It says, these poems can sit by themselves, they need
no other support, and that space invites the reader to sit with each individual
poem as long as she wants, not rushing, crowding. Reading the poems was, as I
expected, a chance to visit some old friends and times, but meet a lot of new
ones also. There is a smoothness to the way Bob chose to group them. And the
poems themselves, the work, are just lovely. It is like you have a vision into a
crack in the world and you show us what you see, you give us light and wisdom
and touch our hearts, all with so few words. What a journey. I was happy to see
that you and Lorry ended up back at the reunion, slightly greyer in the hair,
but no less loving or loved. Congratulations. I hope you are as proud of the
book as we are of you.
Much love,
Alice
Alice Winston Carney, author of A Cowgirl in Search of a Horse: A Memoir
Alice Winston Carney, author of A Cowgirl in Search of a Horse: A Memoir
It's such a great pleasure to wait and to have a book in mind that
waits with you. In this case many years went into Island Dreams,
actually about 50. That seems astounding to me, but yet this is my 70th
year on earth. Our friend Alice W. Carney, a really fine writer in her
own right (write), has said as much as I could say about this book of
ours. One of the poems in the book dates back to 1963 and describes a
hitchhiking trip from Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Quebec City
where we -- two friends and myself -- sang for our supper and rode a few
hundred feet on a freight train and spent a night in a Montreal jail
for vagrancy.
The poem "Quebec City" won a poetry prize and earned me (at age 19) a
payment of $50.00 thus proving that a poet could make his way in the
world, with his thumb out and his wallet handy. I was to learn as I went
on down the road and Island Dreams tells the tale of living on island
after island until the islands weren't islands any more -- they were
just isolated pieces of earth, or sand, where we pitched our tent of
love and went on from there. When I say "our" I am speaking of Lorry and
Gerry, and later on, Mariah and Hannah, our daughters.
Jack Kerouac called his days with thumb out, "A billowy trip in the
world." I have always thought that's what it is to be alive ... to
breathe deeply and look out of unjaded eyes at all that is around you.
And that's what poetry is, a little eye-prayer to all the things a baby
sees. My deepest thanks go to Bob and Susan Arnold, editors and
designers at Longhouse Publishers and Booksellers. It was Bob's idea to
have me reach back all the way to the beginning, thumb out, and
expectant that a ride would come. And it's been quite a ride.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
NEST ~
Nest
Fallen nest
Under big maple tree
Made of vine / branch / hay
Filled in for eggs
With soft white hairs
That keep our malamute
Warm through winter
Which I brushed out of him
And threw away
Weeks ago
________________________
Longhouse 2015
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
TOVE JANSSON ~
http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/tove-jansson/
New York Review of Books
translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
New York Review of Books
translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
Monday, June 29, 2015
R.S. THOMAS ~
R S Thomas and Mildred Eldridge at Tallarn Vicarage 1940
That Day
Stopped the car, asked a man the way
To some place; he rested on it
Smiling, an impression of charm
As of ripe fields; talking to us
He held a reflection of the sky
In his brushed eyes. We lost interest
In the way, seeing him old
And content, feeling the sun's warmth
In his voice, watching the swallows
Above him — thirty years back
To this summer. Knowing him gone,
We wander the same flower-bordered road,
Seeing the harvest ripped from the land,
Deafened by the planes' orchestra;
Unable to direct the lost travellers
Or convince them this is a good place to be.
___________________
R.S. Thomas
H'm
Macmillan London, 1972
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/r-s-thomas
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Monday, June 22, 2015
SINEAD MORRISSEY ~
Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn't foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we've tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh —
they come back like the tide. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love — their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our lives and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.
This Century, The Next, The Last
My husband requests a sky burial
he wishes to be
as carrion sequestered by leopards
strung up in a desert tree
Back to the familiar corridor he
may choose any opening
but all the rooms contain me
dressed for a wedding
Genetics
My father's in my fingers, but my mother's in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure —
I know my parents made me by my hands.
They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.
With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.
I shape a chapel where the steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father's by my fingers, my mother's by my palms
demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.
So take me with you, take up the skin's demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I'll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
Migraine
And it's happening yet again:
vandals set loose in the tapestry room
with pin-sharp knives. Such lovely scenes
as this day's scrubbed-white clouds
and shock of scarlet blooms
across the wasteground
looking abruptly damaged —
stabbed-through from the back
so that a dozen shining pin-sized
holes appear at random. Then widen.
Soon even the grass has been unpicked,
the gorse hacked open.
I can no longer see your face.
Posed in unravelling sleeves
and disappearing lace,
I have given up all hope for what was whole —
the monkey under the orange tree,
the tatterdemalion nightingale.
Blog
I don't have girlfriends but I do have sex
with a different woman about three times a month.
Sometimes more. Sometimes less. I rarely ask.
They'll stop to talk to me in the supermarket
or on the bus. Off-handedly at first.
They're not made-up or drunk. We don't flirt
or analyse it. There's this tiny electrical thrill
gets passed like an egg-yolk slipping
between the cups of its own split shell.
They take me home. It happens. I leave. Simple.
They don't invite me to dinner or text.
It's easy and clean and consensual.
Then it happens again. Loneliness's overblown —
unless I'm just one of the unnaturally blessed.
My good friend Jack told me to write this down.
______________________
SINEAD MORRISSEY
Parallax
and Selected Poems
Farrar 2015
Born in 1972 in Belfast Northern Ireland, Sinead Morrissey is the
author of five poetry collections. She teaches creative writing at the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
HERMIT'S GUIDE TO HOME ECONOMICS (ROBERT LAX) ~
Robert Lax
Hermit's Guide to Home Economics
New Directions poetry pamphlet #17
edited by Paul Spaeth
New Directions 2015
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
LONG AGO ~
Long Ago
That tiny toy instrument
Shaped like a French horn
Displayed with a dozen others
We both gave it a squeeze —
But for some reason this
One sounded the best
With its familiar sound
More than a horn
And it took your breath away
And close to tears
At how its cry
Was like our geese
On a little farm
From long ago
________________________
© Bob Arnold
from DUO
Longhouse 2015
Longhouse 2015
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
GEORG TRAKL ~
GEORG TRAKL
(1887–1914)
Helian
In the lonely hours of the ghost
There is beauty walking in the sun
Along the yellow walls of the summer.
The footsteps fall quietly in the grass; yet ever sleeps
The son of Pan in the grey marble.
Evenings on the terrace we drank ourselves drunk on brown wine.
The red glow of the peach amid the leaves;
A soft sonata, mirthful laughter.
Beautiful is the stillness of night.
On the dark plain
We meet together with the herdsmen and white stars.
When it becomes autumn
A stark clarity reveals itself in the grove.
We wander calmly along red walls
And our wide eyes follow the flight of birds.
With evening the white water dwindles in the grave urns.
The sky freezes in bare branches.
The peasant brings bread and wine in immaculate hands
And the fruit ripens tranquilly in a sunny room.
O how solemn are the faces of those precious dead.
But it does the soul good by how it does them justice.
________________
GEORG TRAKL
Poems
translated by James Reidel
Seagull Books, 2015
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/georg-trakl
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