FLOAT ~

John Levy's new book of poems and meditations
in response to the drawings of Donald Cole
Afterword (shown below) by Alan Chong Lau

_______________________
Dovadola Press, Tucson and ArtXchange Gallery, Seattle
2016

John Levy poet and Don Cole artist presenting their book Float among what sails & spirals from rick skillman on Vimeo.

HOA NGUYEN ~

Mekong I

River as sift

and sorter

Raw fruits and sell the wares

"Floating market"

Stone    pebble    sand

The silt and new islands

There were 9 months

9 dragons       but they change

as the letter is a triangle

She could be seen as

swan or generalized white

bird      Goddess that ate the earth

How to strand       become

mangroves    stranded

and braid your oiled hair

Vivid swoops that coil

a mouth and canal steered

Row from here to there

Birthday Poem

Illuminated behind a skin

a grey       the sky with fat

fast slants of snow

First Horse poet    This is a birthday

poem    squeaky underfoot

the snow and Jeannine's cookies

I drive husbands and fathers

to early deaths    Push the knife

into the cake to cut it

Me the supposed bringer of ruin

(money)    Covered in fondant and

violet flowers

It's my birthday    My eyes are older

Leave

Mouth       A pictured lip  

in a kiss      What it leaves

out

           Cloaking your mouth

with your hands to say

no more breathing you in

Gather the firm clever thing

from the moment looking away

and the weather quiet

with the turning book

Bark of the trees

you love     then leave

Redbud

Live Oak

Hackberry

_____________________

H O A     N G U Y E N

Violent Energy Ingots
Wave Books 2016

BALLADS, BLUES & BEY ~

IF I HAD WINGS ~

COYOTE AMERICA ~

C O Y O T E      A M E R I C A
D A N      F L O R E S
A Natural & Supernatural History
Basic Books, 2016




A Talk with Dan Flores







Usually I would show the book dust jacket but the drawing of a coyote image
on the dust jacket looks more like a malamute dog than a coyote.
The above photograph sharpens things considerably.
Historically and scientifically this book is quite sound.
Otherwise, troubadours and scoundrels take note —
the author seems quite evasive at sinking into the backcountry
legends of Jaime de Angulo, James Koller's Coyote's Journal,
even Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey.
For instance, DeAngulo is summed up in two short paragraphs,
whereas the cartoon character Wile E. (coyote) is given
a full six pages. We loved the Chuck Jones marvel as children
but grew up to know the lamp light and literature of de Angulo's
Indian Tales (1953) which the author first read live on KPFA radio in 1949 
prior to its book publication, plus the two volume Old Time Stories (1976). 
Indians in Overalls covers de Angulo's first linguistic trip in 1921 
to the Achumawi (Pit River Tribe of northeastern California).
Find these texts and find a coyote who wrote.

Jaime de Angulo with Achumawi 
medicine man Old Blind Hall

JEANNETTE RANKIN ~

In 1917, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress. PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN / GETTY

Jeannette Rankin

(The New Yorker)

THROUGH A SUMMER WINDOW ~

THIS PLACE IN EVERY LIFE ~

Purple Japanese Iris

Where you stand

They just about

Touch your lips

This Place In Every Life

                               

for John Levy

A span of 20 feet —

Someone, but no

One’s around, once

Laid down these log

Poles and nailed the

Planks for what I balance

On and cross, and then

Turn and once again

Walk over, because I

Like the feeling, a

Mountain creek beneath

And leaves floating,

The range of light —

Now back across slowly

The last time

Finally into my direction

Been Gonna

To Everett everything

He had meant to do was

Termed “been gonna” —

So when you view his

Unfinished farm built on top

Of old farms of the

Past, including the burned

Down house his was above,

And the barn once torched,

Never mind the wrecked cars

Over the river bank and

Sculptures of rusted farm

Machinery pulled into one

Corner of the pasture, and

The sugarhouse built on a

Slipping log sill, and the

Barbed wire fence line

Fallen in the brook, you’re

Looking at a lot of been gonna.

_______________________


Bob Arnold
Where Rivers Meet

IANNIS XENAKIS ~

JOHN CAGE ~

J O H N     C A G E

L E T T E R S

thank you Laura Kuhn

Wesleyan Press

— however, one quibble

for a book glowing all-around

why in the world choose

a somewhat weary and tolerating-this-moment

photograph of John Cage

for the dust jacket front cover

when he was, of all sixties icons,

black mountain alumni

the one with the most beatific

and graceful smile;

couldn't the book designers find a photograph

available and affordable

where the beaming one

was beaming?

Otherwise, the letters provide
a whole life to behold

YOU'RE LOOKIN' AT COUNTRY ~

WOODY GUTHRIE ~

All You Fascists I’m gonna tell you fascists You may be surprised The people in this world Are getting organized You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose Race hatred cannot stop us This one thing we know Your poll tax and Jim Crow And greed has got to go You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose. All of you fascists bound to lose: I said, all of you fascists bound to lose: Yes sir, all of you fascists bound to lose: You’re bound to lose! You fascists: Bound to lose! People of every color Marching side to side Marching ‘cross these fields Where a million fascists dies You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose! I’m going into this battle And take my union gun We’ll end this world of slavery Before this battle’s won You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose! © Copyright 2000 by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.

BENJAMIN FONDANE ~

B E N J A M I N     F O N D A N E

Poet and Shadow



XI


to P.L. Flouquet


I've walked behind someone — and it was not Him.
That was no real street,
a street right away leading to another street
and that one in its turn
to another wider street, and then another, even wider —
and suddenly the dancing lights gushed in all directions . . .

I walked on, I feared that it was not Him:
this was no real presence,
a life which right away trails off into another life
and that one in its turn to
an unknown life even more on fire, and then more than on fire —
and suddenly this lurid collapse, Love . . .

He went on advancing — and it was not Him.
I followed him. I was two steps from his shadow.
It was a slow pursuit,
so slow and so far outside of time
that the morning sky suddenly displayed its swamps
and that the roosters were strangled
and exploded into the center of the sun,

a huge real sun which kissed me on the lips.

translated by Leonard Schwartz


______________________

Fondane was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to France in 1923 to pursue his love of
French poetry and culture. In Paris he worked at an insurance company and for
Paramount Pictures while establishing himself as a poet and a leading exponent of
existential philosophy. In 1944, he was deported from France and killed at Auschwitz.


B E N J A M I N     F O N D A N E (1898-1944)
Cinepoems and Others
edited by Leonard Schwartz
New York Review of Books 2016

GOTTFRIED BENN ~

S T I L L     L I F E




When everything lies there in fallen heaps

thoughts, moods, duets

— lies there despoiled

without tinfoil — and the scraped membrane

— all the layers washed away —

of the bloody conjunctiva stares into silence —

what's left?



The sixty-four-thousand-dollar-question! But who in his senses

asks it anymore —

Renaissance reminiscences,

Baroque overlay,

castle museums —

an end to drilling,

but still no groundwater,

the wells dark,

the styles exhausted —

time has acquired a stillness,

the hour breathes

over a wine jug,

it's late, the last blows have been traded,

a clinch and a hang on the ropes

before the bell — I give the world

to anyone who wants it, let them be happy:



the jester's not to turn serious

the drinker's not to wander into the Gobi Desert

even a lady with a lorgnette

entertains aspirations to happiness

well, good luck to her —



the lake rests at ease

rimmed with forget-me-nots,

adders laugh.


                                                             (1949-1955)
—————————————


Gottfried Benn
I M P R O M P T U S
Selected poems and some prose
translated by Michael Hofmann
Farrar 2015





NEVER HEARD OF GOTTFRIED BENN?

STRANGE LOVE ~

WIKIPEDIA:

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Part of the Pacific War, World War II
Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)
Date August 6 and August 9, 1945 Location Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Empire of Japan Result Allied victory
Belligerents
United States Support from:  United Kingdom	Japan
Commanders and leaders
William S. Parsons  Paul W. Tibbets, Jr.  Charles Sweeney  Frederick Ashworth	Shunroku Hata
Units involved
Manhattan District: 50 U.S., 2 British 509th Composite Group: 1,770 U.S.	Second General Army: Hiroshima: 40,000 (5 Anti-aircraft batteries) Nagasaki: 9,000 (4 Anti-aircraft batteries)
Casualties and losses
20 British, Dutch, and US prisoners of war killed	Hiroshima: 20,000+ soldiers killed 70,000–146,000 civilians killed Nagasaki: 39,000–80,000 killed Total: 129,000–246,000+ killed

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JIMMY PAGE AT THE 92Y ~

TREEING THE RACCOON ~

Drum

Early morning climb to the roof

Cold dew on pebbled tar, taste of

Galvanized nails in your mouth

Work — nail shingle to shingle tight —

Each hammer pound echoes another

Pound in the hills, enough to wonder

Where it ends and who hears it then

Charlotte      

Scrag is what they call her

A woman who has been on the river

Longer than anyone of us —

Long white hair braided and pinned up,

Yellow slicker, old pants and a squint.

Once a week she rides down the road

Real slow to the Massachusetts border,

Looks in on everyone’s place,

Then turns around and coming back

Does the same.

Her son doesn’t live out here anymore —

When Clayton did, he lost his wife for it.

Lived with his son and the small farm

For as many years as it takes to get

Sick of it, then moved closer to town

And worked for the state park.

Now his own son is doing the same —

With a wife and a baby and the job

In a wood factory, near Vernon,

Where the power plant burns into the sky.

That leaves Scrag.

I heard that name first from a young hunter

Who would never hunt, half what she has,

And he knows it.

She’s tiny, body gripped like a hickory,

She’ll tend the farm all men have left —

Mend fence and draw water and shovel shit,

Make sure the pigs don’t get loose.

When Clayton comes to sugar at mud-time

She hangs the buckets with him,

Pulls a tractor along the side of the road.

Her hair’s long and white and probably beautiful.

In this raw wind it blows apart like late summer

Milkweed.

Treeing the Raccoon

I’m running and dodging mud holes

And ice, a human wind slamming out of

The woodshed and into the moonlight,

Where we have lain and waited the

Return of the raccoon. I was thinking

Of grabbing a coal shovel, the axe,

Even a stick on my way out the door,

But my voice seemed to do the trick —

Frightening him off tin sheets of

The duck pen and into the darkness of

His mask. I’m crushing through soft snow

And somewhere ahead he’s scurrying it

Seems in a half-circle, until my war cry

Has gripped him claws and bark up a

Tall ash tree between the house and pond —

Maybe 20 feet — until he has regained

Himself in the crotch; where under the

Wizard cap of stars I poke a flashlight

Into the first night of spring, and with

A disgusted look in the eye, he turns his

Ears back and waits a bullet I can’t hear.



_________________________


Bob Arnold
WHERE RIVERS MEET