A Longhouse Birdhouse

Saturday, May 28, 2016

TOM PACHECO AT THE COLONY, WOODSTOCK, NY ~

RALPH J. GLEASON ~

R A L P H J. G L E A S O N

Music in the air

The selected writings of Ralph J. Gleason

edited by Toby Gleason

Yale University Press 2016

Ralph Gleason was more than likely the first music critic I ever read back 50 years ago

and his selected writings hold true to this day — from Jazz to Rock with much less

the authority on display of many current music critics and more an ease

and conversation and friendship with the music and musicians.

Few can take you by the hand from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong

to Bebop and John Coltrane as Gleason will, or right into

the home of the Jefferson Airplane and the California

music scene of the 1960s. He was instrumental at organizing

one of Bob Dylan's finest press conferences as well

at being one of the founders of the Monterey Pop Festival

and the starting pistol to the original Rolling Stone magazine.
Plus he wrote about the souls of Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae
with more soul than anyone.
Icing on the cake — he quoted in 1966 the hip poet Philip Whalen —
everything was usable to Gleason if it had the wonder.

All the while well past the age of 30 back then and younger than yesterday.

He was gone, already, by 1975.

No one like him before or since.

This collection gathered up by his son Toby

will show you why.

Friday, May 27, 2016

RARE RECORDING ~

Thursday, May 26, 2016

EDGE OF IRONY ~

Marjorie Perloff ~ Edge of Irony

Think Kafka, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth et al

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

O F E L I A Z E P E D A

Just Like Home

The young woman buys

a piece of fresh fry bread from

the Indian Parent Association's booth.

"Oh, just like home," she says.

"Do you have any salt?"

I pour a small amount in her palm.

She sprinkles it on her bread.

She takes a bite, "Mmm, just like home."

She seems unaware she has her eyes closed

as she eats and talks.

The delicate bite of freshly cooked bread

takes her back.

She stands on a street in downtown Tucson

and thinks of women so familiar to her,

her mother, her sisters cooking outside.

In the distance the sound of someone

chopping wood, a barking dog.

Pinon smoke is so real for her right now,

her hair might smell of it if she moved

and the breeze caught her just right.

Birth Witness

My mother gave birth to me in an old wooden row house
in the cotton fields.
She remembers it was windy.
Around one in the afternoon.
The tin roof rattled, a piece uplifted
from the wooden frame, quivered and flapped
as she gave birth.
She knew it was March.
A windy afternoon in the cotton fields of Arizona.

She also used to say I was baptized standing up.
"It doesn't count," the woman behind the glass window tells me,
"if you were not baptized the same year you were born,
the baptismal certificate cannot be used to verify your birth."

"You need affidavits," she said.
"Your older siblings, you have some don't you?
They have to be old enough to have a memory
of your birth.
Can they vouch for you?
Who was there to witness my birth?
Who was there with my mother?
Was it my big sister?
Would my mother have let a teenager watch her giving birth?
Was it my father?
I can imagine my father assisting her with her babies.

My aunts?
Who was there when I breathed my first breath?
Took in those dry particles from the cotton fields.
Who knew then that I would need witnesses of my birth?
The stars were there in the sky.
The wind was there.
The sun was there.
The pollen of spring was floating and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not know of affidavits, they simply know.
"You need records," she said.
"Are there doctor's receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family Bible, you know,
where births were recorded?
Were there letters?
Announcements of your birth?

I don't bother to explain my parents are illiterate in their English language.
What I really want to tell her is they speak a language much too civil for writing.
It is a language careful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth.
It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain.
It is useful for speeches and incantations
that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.
It is a language too civil for writing.
It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.
This is what I really want to tell her.
But I don't.
Instead I take the forms she hands me.
I begin to account for myself.

______________________

Ofelia Zepeda
WHERE CLOUDS ARE FORMED
The University of Arizona Press 2008

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

CATO ~

B U R T K W O U K IS G O N E

HOAGY LANDS ~

Monday, May 23, 2016

WOODCUTTER, Part 3 ~

"Hands"

photo ~ bob arnold

may 2016

Many Times

There is the absolute way

Of doing it, and we have done it

Many times and again —

How I will come to you

How you will meet me

The early morning sun

Perfect on the bed, and

Stripes in the Mexican blanket

Like blood, the sea, yellow iris petals —

And it is a silly lovers ritual of ours,

I hug you and you hug me and step onto

My boots, and I walk you and me around the

Sunlit room, the sway of patchouli in your hair,

And your face smooth against my lips

Like the inside of your hands

The Skin of Her Neck

Tonight, because her hand is in pain, the small finger

Swollen, yes, I’ll stir the

Batter, although she is better

And first taught me how

Something is done right.

And I came from behind

And smelled the skin of

Her neck, the long blonde

Hairs alive and the blouse

White and rough, tucked into

A thin summer skirt.

Winter, near Christmas,

3 feet of snow and her

Body moves across the

Cabin room with summer,

A clay bowl with

Colored stripes in her

Arms, the fresh heat

Of the flat iron stove.

Redtail

By the river I found her —

Long and short feathers matted by weeks of rain,

A soft spotted down on her chest,

The whole body twisted in the crotch of an ironwood

This hawk hung and not a right way to die.

Nudged out with my axe handle it fell with no life,

Eyes gone and the rotting smell of blood and grease.

I cut the claws for the first time, others I’ve left —

One talon broken off and the muscular flex of skin

No different than a man’s, except for the ruggedness,

The pale yellow of it, but a companion to my own.

And the tail feathers — still a beautiful tan — pinned

Open for flight on rough pine boards inside our cabin,

I only buried some of her.

The Woodcutter Talks

I’ve got to go pretty soon

So I’ll take my boots off

And shake out the snow,

Sit close to the fire you

Have built, then left for me.

I’m in no hurry until the sun comes up.

My snowshoes need new leather straps

But for now they’ll have to do,

Carry me to the woods where I work

Thinning out the half bowl of a hillside —

That’s what it looks like — and sometimes

I rest and watch it for what it is, with my

Wet gloves off, the clearness above me.

_____________________________

Bob Arnold
WHERE RIVERS MEET

Sunday, May 22, 2016

FINALLY, ED ABBEY'S DREAM ~

The Glen Canyon Dam

UNPLUGGING THE COLORADO RIVER

ny times

BOBBY CHARLES ~

Saturday, May 21, 2016

THE REAL THING ~

Remembering John Herald

The World of John Herald

SMALL TOWN TALK ~

DaCapo Press, 2016

Along with Joe Boyd's White Bicycles

Hoskyns Small Town Talk

is one of the few enthralling books

on the subject of 60s popular music
from a small town like no other

and its cast of characters.

Hoskyns hits his stride from one

legendary pivot to the other: Albert Grossman,

Bob Dylan, The Band, Janis Joplin, various music

studios, producers, hometown local folkies

at the time Maria Muldaur, Jim Rooney, John Herald,

the drifters in and out like Jesse Winchester, Karen Dalton and Paul Butterfield

plus the diehard comments when needed by Ed Sanders.

You want a book that comes in and takes off its coat,

kicks off its boots, rolls up its sleeves and knows how to visit.

Here's the book.

BARNEY HOSKYNS SMALL TOWN TALK

Friday, May 20, 2016

JORGE CARRERA ANDRADE ~

JORGE CARRERA ANDRADE

Imprisoned beneath the leaf

an anemone watches

the world's sadness pass

Y A H A

The cicada.

Nothing in its song reveals

that tomorrow it must die.

B A S H O

Closed house:

Around the paper lantern

the bats dance.

R A N S E T S U

Beneath the vast snowfall

many hidden seeds

wait for spring.

I N E M S O

In this everything ends:

The skeleton of a fan

when the autumn wind blows.

O T S U Y U

The dead leaf

landing caresses

the stone tomb.

R A N S E T S U

Wild goose, wild goose

how old were you

when you first cut loose?

I S S A

Spring dies

and filled with tears

are the eyes of fish.

B A S H O

_________________________________

translated from the Spanish by Andrade
then from the Spanish by Joshua Beckman
and Alejandro de Acosta

WAVE BOOKS Micrograms 2011

Thursday, May 19, 2016

IN A STATION (1968) ~

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

KATHERINE DUNN~

remembering

K A T H E R I N E D U N N

(the young writer, then 24 years of age)

1945 ~ 2016

Katherine Dunn NY Times obituary

ON GROWING OLD IN SAN FRANCISCO ~

On Growing Old in San Francisco

Two girls barefoot walking in the rain

Both girls lovely, one of them is sane

Hurting me softly

Hurting me though

Two girls barefoot walking in the snow

Walking in the white snow

Walking in the black

Two girls barefoot never coming back

_____________________
J A C K G I L B E R T

Views of Jeopardy
Yale Series of Younger Poets, volume 58
with a foreword by Dudley Fitts
Yale University Press, 1962

Long before Jack Gilbert was anywhere near old — President Jack Kennedy was still alive, Martin Luther King was alive, Malcolm X was here, The Beatles and Stones had yet to land in the USA,

so far a monkey had been shot into space, but Jack Kerouac had begun his decline, and Jack Gilbert wrote this poem. I heard him read the poem when it was both raining and snowing outdoors, early April, and now Jack Gilbert was very old, taking the stage, and this was one of the first poems he brought forth, maybe it was the first poem of the evening; by the way he presented the poem, with the smallest commanding voice, I recall nothing afterwards. It was as if an old man, very old man, had never forgotten these girls, that weather, those times, that sighting, and the very place, and we were nowhere near San Francisco. And yet with his declining powers, we were. The whole room. He looked up and paused after reading this short poem as if to see if people were really paying attention and did they hear what he had just read? It was from his very first book of poems. The best poets remember every poem they wrote.

JACK GILBERT'S PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW