A Longhouse Birdhouse

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

JOHN BRADLEY ~

Placing A Mask Of My Face Over My Face

I aspire only to silence. I could not let you know

this I was told, and yet here I am releasing sounds

once stored miles below your shoe. Rules make me

want to run to a glass room, vomit a broom, and blind

each wall with dank river mud. I could say you will

stab my every exhalation and it will not harm me.

You will charm me and make me kinder and smarter,

lilting the tilt of the planet. I can't quite see the trace

of your face, yet I'm told it resembles a baggie of frozen

starlight, a shot glass of lung water, a vial of sea salt

vapor. I aspire only to invisibility, the skin around the rain

droplet on the back of your hand. I don't know you,

or I know you but don't yet belong to you, the slight

scar on your throat. I feel stronger, the rules flimsier,

after I've found in the corner, under the carpet, a slim

black turd. Perhaps you wish to smack me, so I'll glow

about the head. I'm never certain when you're in

the garage, engine running, what you grasp of desire.

That crescent moon only seen through the bottom

of a rusted bucket. Thus I leave you, listing with silence,

aspiring only to what shall be spilled.

______________

John Bradley
Spontaneous Mummification
winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2019
SurVision Books
2020

Monday, March 9, 2020

YOKEL ( 22 ) ~

Stonemason Credo

Between talking to myself

While walking around

Choosing the right stone

And talking to myself while

Laying the stone as to what

Works right and doesn’t

I have enough company by

Myself not to have you who

Asks kindly if you may help

Back Road Archaeology

Every morning Native ate pancakes —

I would walk the mile north to his farm

To catch a ride with him to work,

Sat while he ate, looked out the

Thick plastic of his kitchen windows,

At the third chair — a plate of pancakes

For his son still in bed, 5:30 a.m.

On the way out the door, pulling

His heavy coat off a nail, Native

Tossed the paper plate onto a year’s

Worth of paper plates on the back porch,

Each licked clean by his dogs

Next month, in April, after half the

Junk has blown away from the farm

He will load what is left into a manure spreader,

Haul it down pasture to the old

Stone foundation where his parents

Once lived, throw it all in

An Old Timer

selling his tools on the lawn —

what pains him the most is

seeing them laid out that way

doing nothing

Chimney Fire

Climbing the roof

With a bucket of sand

Stars above bigger than ever

Gone

Some say they’ve moved out.

Gone. None of their kids are

Seen up at the school bus stop,

& I haven’t seen the VW without

Plates on the road, nor Native’s truck.

Gone. Born here, still young, married

& with the two kids, but now gone.

He was working in a garage outside

Of town until he got fired. They

Said he was doing well for himself,

Then he started to drink with the

Boys after work, got home past

Midnight — his wife stopped waiting up —

For months she would borrow a neighbor’s

Phone to call him, whisper pleas.

But now they’re gone. No kids at

The bus stop. Their dogs still prowl

& beg in the village, pick fights, bite.

One of them ate a turkey right off the

Back porch of a bountiful Thanksgiving

Day feast, months ago, before Native’s job

At the garage, before he came home

Drunk or stoned, before they were gone.

It’s still talked about.

I drove by their trailer today.

Place looked dead.

The door stoop was gone.

_____________

Bob Arnold

Yokel

Longhouse

2011

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

LONGHOUSE BIBLIOGRAPHY 2019-2020

T H E L O N G H O U S E

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

2019 ~ 2020

2019 ~

2019. Bob Arnold. Woodlanders. Longhouse 2019

Susan has broken her left ankle, surgery tomorrow, it’s late February 2020 and time to write up a few things for the bibliography heading us to almost 50 years of Longhouse. Woodlanders is a sequence of short poems that makes one long poem and I’m quite happy to have it looked over and cared for by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s back cover quote.

2019. Reza Saberi and Robin Magowan, edited and translations. A Rose Garden of Persian Poetry from the 10th Century to the Present. Longhouse 2019.

We have now published quite a few of Robin Magowan’s translation titles and this book, a team effort for Robin, is the largest and most expansive of all the books. Time to delve deeply into the 10th century and come forward.

2019. Guy Birchard. Ishmael. Longhouse 2019. Postcard.

How it often happens, a friend, a poet, someone sends me something in the mail that hits me squarely between the eyes and I simply want to publish it at that moment, and often do. Guy’s poem here is no exception and I designed it into a postcard for easy handling and postage. Give the postal carrier, always, something good to read.

2019. Bobby Byrd. What’s It Like Not Being Here? Longhouse 2019.

Like Guy, Bobby’s poem came through the mail from Bobby as a poem to share. I wanted to then share it, so printed it up as a longer postcard poem complete with a background relief photograph of the Organ Mountains and other ranges close to Bobby. Ted Enslin used to write me, splendidly, of his winters away from Maine spent in the Organ Mountains.

2019. Gary Hotham. 23. Longhouse 2019

It wasn’t that long ago but I already forget if Gary sent me poems or I asked him for poems, I believe the latter now that it’s upon me, and Gary complied. He sent a few more than 23 but that’s the number of poems I came up with after my reading and I said to Gary, “Why not call the gathering “23”? Gary agreed. Susan and I made the 23 poems into a foldout booklet with a wrap around band.

2019. Louise Landes Levi. The Madness of Kazuko Shirashi, The Poet's Domain. Longhouse 2019.

Louise has forever been a friend of Longhouse. She writes here as she spans the globe as the itinerant self she is, either playing as a musician or reading as poet she is a one-woman band. Lately she has taken up brief residencies in Japan, mostly in Tokyo but her heart is in Kyoto and I still await poems from Kyoto that I can consider for a booklet. This booklet is all Tokyo, with a homage to Japan’s own wonder Kazuko Shirashi. Louise knows how to treat this.

2019. Gerry Loose. In Which. Longhouse 2019.

Gerry is one of my favorite poets of the wild, particularly all that land of the old Great Britain, Scotland, and elsewhere pathways, even to Vietnam. His sentences land with care, keen observation and a manual laborer’s touch for how to make something work. Work well. This one does. A larger postcard sending through the mail.

2019. Joseph Massey. Backroad Scroll. Longhouse 2019.

Joe was visiting family in his native Delaware and wrote saying he had some new work he was immediately fond of and because we have published a finger food amount of small booklets by Joe, would we care to see these new poems for a possible booklet. We would. Joe sent them and we did them up in a foldout booklet that works with the pace of a fine long walk.

2019. J. D. Whitney. My. Longhouse 2019

J.D. and I have been writing one another, each day, without fail, for years. Sometimes a poem gets tucked into a letter, all emails, and this poem I just couldn’t help myself and wanted to publish it that same night. It spills down the page not as a spill but as water stone to stone to stone, or bird to bird calling. Here is a poet and a poem who knows what he is hearing, listening for and giving to us. Lucky us. Designed into one very long slip.

2020 ~

2020. Bob Arnold. non(e). Longhouse 2020.

I woke up one morning of the full moon and had all these lines wanting to be said and maybe even put onto paper and I had a letter owed to my friend Peter Garland in Maine, so Peter got all those words coming as a Sam Fuller horse stampede, that cinematic in my mind, which then became a document or long poem of how to love our country, keep our country, be our country. It worked best to share the document as one of our bus-tickets, folded into quarters and tucked into regular mail letters. Not as many but some still get them.

2020. Bob Arnold. How Wars Begin. Longhouse 2020

This poem, from an older book but pertinent for these times, I thought should be seen again in a postcard design with an old woodcut fabric to go along with the poem and the sharing. People have some weird idea all rural people are conservative and voters for dizzy autocrats. They may be sometimes dizzy, often conservative, even weird, but the real quality of rural people is seeing the forest for the trees.

2020. Cid Corman. The aim is a poetry. Longhouse 2020.

Here is Cid Corman, photo as a young man, looking backwards and forging ahead. Good ol’ Cid. I have a prose piece on one of Cid’s favorite subjects: poetry, the original one page manuscript, with brief corrections and date when written as the inside of the bus-ticket, ideal to frame, and it is likewise decorated with many poems from Cid’s seldom seen last book of poems of, the many hundreds of poems from volumes 4 and 5. I’m giving you a good dozen.

2020. António Osório. Translated from the Portuguese by Susan Margaret Brown and Patricio Ferrari. THE AFFECTIONATE ROOT. Selection from António Osório

I believe Patricio Ferrari came our way via Louise Landes Levi and Patricio (from Argentina) stayed spry and lively all through our correspondence setting up some plan to showcase the debut in America of António Osório’s poems. No doubt Patricio welcomed one of our foldout booklets but I saw far too many gems in this manuscript to curtail the amount of richness that would be snugged up into a booklet. A bus ticket was the way to go — tall and airy and very light to send the poems around the world considering the tax that now comes with overseas mailing. We send this one out as a letter from home.

2020. Norman Schaefer. Bear Lessons. Longhouse 2020.

All true. And Norman is the modest and sharp-eyed trailblazer to write the real bear story, without the usual hyperbole that comes with bear and fish yarns. You read the little book and look around to see if you are safe, and if you are, you’re glad.

2020. Andrew Schelling. After The Cricket. Longhouse 2020.

Decades now Andrew and I have traded what we call pony express correspondence, actual letters off an old keyboard and sent on paper and gotten there by all sorts of US postage stamps showing Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, old trains, birds of prey, Henry David Thoreau. Remember postage stamps when we were kids. They’ve gotten much better. Letters are great to write and receive. Sometimes Andrew sends poems with the letters, or one poem taste and I ask for more and more then come and I see a foldout booklet evolving and that’s how this one happened. A beautiful title.

2020. John Phillips. Hourglass Longhouse 2020.

I’ve been publishing John Phillips for almost twenty-five years. He came to me out of the blue from his native Cornwall, or he may have already been living in his favored other native habitat of Slovenia where his wife Jasna is from. They live there now, maybe settled for good? Many fine poems are being written by John and every so often I get the feel for another booklet of poems, big enough to be a small book of poems, always complete and nourishing from John, and this is one more. Turn the hourglass over.

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M O R E T O C O M E

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