RE-READING ANONYMOUS (ESKIMO) ~

Magic Words


In the very earliest time,

when both people and animals lived on earth,

a person could become an animal if he wanted to

and an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

and sometimes animals

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen could

              happen —

all you had to do was say it.

Nobody could explain this:

That's the way it was.


translated from the Inuit by Edward Field


__________________________________

WAXAHATCHEE ~

 

RE-READING ALAN LOMAX ~

FARMS GOT SO POOR "IT TOOK TWO ROOSTERS TO CROW ONCE" 

From the song 'My Last Ole Dollar' a classic hard-luck story from North Carolina comes collected by Lee Morris (MS Federal Writers Project):

"Hard luck just runs in my family. I mind the time I couldn't even buy a hen and a chicken. Decided to kill myself. Scared my old pistol wouldn't work, so I bought me a gallon of kerosene, a piece of rope, bottle of rat poison. Rowed down to the lake to where some trees hung way out over the water.

So I stood up and tied the rope round my neck. Bid farewell to this hard old world. Poured kerosene all over myself, et that rat poison and set my clothes afire, figgerin' I'd shoot myself just when I kicked the bat out from under my feet.

But that durn pistol shot the rope in two. I fell in the river and put out the fire on my clothes and got to stranglin' and chokin' that water, and throwed up the poison. Well from that I figgered my luck was changin', so I swum out and put up for the legislature. Durned if I didn't get elected, too!"

(and I believe we saw some of his younger relatives in the U.S. House of Representatives during the impeachment hearings for Donald J. Trump; in fact, I know we did.)

No book I went back to read during the Covid-19 pandemic

treated me better and settled down around my shins finer than

Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America. My copy

is a hardcover still in its decorative dustjacket and the boards

of the book are layered in old moss and smell like I've pulled out

a slate shingle from an old pile instead of a book. Lord knows where

I ever found the book — I first read Folk Song USA (John and Alan Lomax, the power house

father and son team of traveling sleuths and field recorders)

in puffy softcover while in high school and it was just too loaded for bear at the time and age

when listening to Bob Dylan, Richard Farina, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, 

Tom Paxton, Hedy West, Joan Baez who had obviously worked like miners

through this book and the North America bible. 

Since Lomax believed the folk song was aligned with

fantasy and the skill of the unconscious where the American dream and

struggle is truly revealed. In the above players mentioned, Dylan's masterpiece

 "Highway 61" (1965) may be our best example. The maestro has readily

admitted what he pulled out of the guts of this book and the Lomax (and Harry Smith)

jukebox, and we haven't even touched down into the rich gardens this book

gives (there are 300 songs) through original work by the likes of Merle Travis,

Blind Willie Johnson, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, A.L. Lloyd, Jean Ritchie,

Pete Seeger, Jimmy Driftwood, prison camp work songs — long before Howard Zinn, 

this book is the people's history of the United States.

[ BA ]

EARL HOOKER ~

 

RE-READING BUKOWSKI & MARTINELLI ~

Shirley Burns Brennan (you can see and feel the Irish ancestry) kept the last name Martinelli from her brief marriage to the abstract painter Ezio Martinelli. Her life credentials are staggering for someone barely remembered: muse and mistress to Ezra Pound during his residency at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital just begins things. Martinelli is a key figure throughout Anais Nin’s Diaries, and William Gaddis drew his character Esme from Martinelli for his greatest work The Recognitions. She will begin a long correspondence with Charles Bukowski in 1960 which may be one of the best things that ever happened to him, since Martinelli is her own, dedicated and tough. She pushes H.D. at him; he pushes back with Jeffers love. They both meet nicely over Pound. For awhile I found Martinelli’s letters cryptic and taut with hipster talk, but she will grow on you, she’s good for you. Bukowski remains.

[ BA ]

Black Sparrow Press

2  0 0  1

POETS WHO SLEEP #27 ~

 

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

DAVE BRUBECK ~

 

REMEMBERING RICHARD NELSON ~

 

R I C H A R D     N E L S O N

ED SANDERS TALKS HARRY SMITH ~

 

Harry Smith's

"Heaven & Earth Magic"

DEBRA WHITE PLUME ~

DEBRA WHITE PLUME

RE-READING IAN HAMILTON FINLAY ~

— Finlay’s work, both as a poet and as a visual artist, is deeply traditional, in that it depends upon elements drawn from the whole history of Western culture; at the same time, it is deeply experimental, in that the deployment of these elements takes place in ways that are new, unexpected, and demanding. The method of reading each poem is not explained in advance by poetic conventions: it has to be intuited from the form presented by each individual poem.

                                                — Stephen Scobie

    

A wonderful glimpse of Finlay's correspondence

with a number of poets, including Robert Creeley,

Gael Turnbull, Ronald Johnson, Louis Zukofsky

and the editor of this volume Thomas A. Clark

on poetry and making. Finlay 1964:

"I am now very interested in the idea of using

poetry in architecture, and have designed poems for

large sheets of glass, and for the outsides of houses. . .though 

none of these projects have yet been realised. I am

sure they will, though, one day. I am also very

interested in toys — not for children, though,

but as pure objects. . .with simple shapes,

in bright colours. I would like to do many things,

when there is the opportunity."

There is a spirit here in Ian that only the birds know.

[ BA ]

WALKIN' DADDY (GREG BROWN) ~

 

RE-READING LUCILLE CLIFTON ~

Memphis




                      . . . at the river i stand,

                      guide my feet, hold my hand

i was raised

on the shore

of lake erie

e is for escape

there are more s'es

in mississippi

than my mother had

sons

this river never knew

the kingdom of dahomey

the first s

begins in slavery

and ends in y

on the bluffs

of memphis

why are you here

the river wonders

northern born

looking across buffalo

you look into canada toronto

is the name of the lights

burning at night

the bottom of memphis

drops into the nightmare

of a little girl's fear

in fifteen minutes

they could be here

i could be there

mississippi

not the river the state

schwerner

and chaney

and goodman

medgar

schwerner

and cheney

and goodman

and medgar

my mother had one son

he died gently near lake erie

some rivers flow back

toward the beginning

i never learned to swim

will i float or drown

in this mississippi

on the mississippi river

what is this southland

what has this to do with egypt

or dahomey

or with me

so many questions

northern born

_________________________________

Was it ten years ago now, or longer?

when Greg Joly and I read on the streets

to earn money for Katrina Relief, and this was

a poem I liked to read, and Greg had poems he

was ready to read and sometimes a brave soul

wandered across the street from the bar, plied

on some juice and he wanted to read, he didn't

care what. We let him. And Jim Koller came down

from Maine and read Ferlinghetti and Louise Landes Levi

stood in the December cold day and read with me and then

we went out with Susan and had hot Korean soup.

Lucille Clifton long ago came to Brattleboro and read

upstairs in the library and she was friendly vicious.

One of the finest readings I ever heard.

[ BA ]

Lucille Clifton

Blessing the Boats

New and Selected Poems

1988-2000

BOA Editions

2000

POETS WHO SLEEP #26 ~

 

P O E T S     W H O     S L E E P

______________________

                                           drawn & scribed by Bob Arnold

The complete series to date ~ please link here

FAREWELL ~

My Mom

Penny Arnold

Belfast, Northern Ireland, 6 January 1928 ~ Naples, Florida, 22 November, 2020   

Susan and I love that photograph of Mom, fully Ireland. There are no stonewalls anywhere in the world like the Irish ones. The Germans and Swiss have their own style, so do the Italians and certainly the Chinese (The Great Wall!) and Vermont has them as well and I’ve built plenty of them. But the Irish wall seems most in play not quite finished, as if the wall builder has gone off for a pint, or a smoke, or is visiting, and the walls wait there, centuries, for a completion and one will never come. Ireland ever growing. Very organic walls.

[ BA ]

On Raglan Road, The Dubliners

(Patrick Kavanagh)