RE-READING LYNETTE ROBERTS ~

 

Brazilian Blue

If I could create one tree

And hang it in the sky

And spray it with the living

Gold of the sun, and hold

The natural pattern of its growth,

I would ay that I had done

More than enough.

But observe where the sun

Has set against the black

Edge of the leaves,

How other leaves seem

To drift from one

Branch to another, or

Were they bird against

Tis darkwinged Brazilian sky!

Wings that edge the

Sao Paolo woods.

This flitting by,

This sudden appearance,

And inconsequence of time,

Is the moment I would

Hold before you;

Tomorrow evening it will

Have gone.

______________________

Collected Poems

Lynette Roberts

edited by Patrick McGuinness

Carcanet, 2005

________________________________________

The editor of this fascinating volume says it best:

"The Argentine-born Welsh writer Lynette Roberts

published two books of poems as dramatic, varied,

dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any

experimental poetry in the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot

her friend and editor at Faber,  praised her work, complimenting

it by that most Eliotic of criteria: that it communicated

before it made sense." Robert Graves was also a close reader.

Wyndham Lewis drew her portrait, and Dylan Thomas was

best man at her wedding. And you have probably never heard

of her. No help from Lynette Roberts herself — in her later life

Roberts had a mental breakdown and stopped publishing; in fact

she refused to have her two books of poetry re-published when

interest arrived. Thus her work was largely forgotten and she died

a relatively unknown writer in 1995. (4 July 1909-26 September 1995).

It's her diaries I wish to find next.

[ BA ]

LORRAINE O'GRADY ~

 

L O R R A I N E      O' G R A D Y

“Art Is . . . (Girl Pointing),” 1983/2009.

 Lorraine O’Grady has been shaping her art on a different model.Credit...

Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Alexander Gray Associates

RE-READING ANN QUIN ~

 

A N N   Q U I N

SALLY GROSSMAN ~

 

S A L L Y      G R O S S M A N

the album cover of album covers

photograph:

Daniel Kramer

RE-READING ROSEMARY TONKS ~

 

R O S E M A R Y    T O N K S

Addiction to an Old Mattress

No, this is not my life, thank God ...

... worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;

Obsessed first by one person, and then

(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;

These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,

They belong to the people in the streets, the others

Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.

Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!

Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.

Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd

That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas

That float themselves about from place to place, and then

Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.

Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones. 

Meanwhile ... I live on ... powerful, disobedient,

Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,

With these people ... who are going to obsess me,

Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable

For this is not my life 

But theirs, that I am living.

And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.

__________________________

Rosemary Tonks

Bedouin of the London Evening:

Collected Poems & Selected Prose

(Bloodaxe Books, 2014)  

© Estate of Rosemary Tonks 2014, 2016.

POETS WHO SLEEP #42 ~

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

ARTHUR GUNTER ~

 

VINCENT TRIPI ~

 

With her pan

     the old prospector

          points upward

                              — for Laura Bell

______________________

Vincent Tripi

the day i find

poems from a desert hermitage

1725 Marion Avenue, Apt 12-I.

Novato, CA. 

_________________________

according to his inscription, Vincent

sent me a gift of this fine book of short

poems when he was living in Novato, CA.,

and come to think of it Sweetheart and I

passed through there some years earlier —

I believe Vincent even tried to look us up

in Vermont when he was living just down

river from us but I guess he got lost, as

others have, long before GPS took the fun

out of everything — Vincent passed away

last Fall and I'm thinking about him now

[ BA ]

ANNISTEEN ALLEN ~

 

THURSTON HARRIS ~

 

LANDSCAPE IS MY MISTRESS ~

R E A D     M E !

POETS WHO SLEEP #41 ~

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

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! JOHN McPHEE ~

 

John McPhee poses for a portrait in his office at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Bryan Anselm—Redux for TIME 

H A P P Y      B I R T H D A Y

J O H N     M C P H E E

March 8, 1931

ANCIENT BASEBALL ~

 

The lively spirit and busy fingers of

Alfred Jarry and Rube Goldberg live-on

to this day out of the Catskills of New York

and its very own Mikhail Horowitz via

Ancient Baseball, where Mikhail has long worked

his workshop of collages. No easy-street photoshoppy

stuff here. Each collage from baseball land, includng

"Babe (Ruth) in the Manger" were done with old-school

finesse — hand wrought cut & paste w/scissors,

straight-edge razors please, and whiff the

room with paper cement.

Ah, it does make a style and grace.

[ BA ]

_________

__________

Alte Books

30 Old Whitfield Road

Accord, New York

12404

RE-READING ASHA BANDELE ~

 

absence in the palms of my hands

                                                                    for audre lorde

i will eat the last signs of my weakness

remove the scars of childhood wars

i made you this promise as

humble as mary washing the feet of her savior

it was an unsteady may afternoon &

we were standing in the doorway of the home you had adopted

you let me there with

your head raised and still dreadlocked walking

toward the beginnings of your death

i didn't say i'd never take the chemo you told me

& though i know we must have spoken after this day

these are the last words i ever remember hearing from

you

audre

i learned to face the complexity of living watching you

face the complexity of dying

                never do it on your knees never do it with your back turned

                never do it with your eyes

low

i learned dialectics watching you at war

a defiant soldier for peace against the serenade of violence

inside & outside

your body                      a mighty oak refusing

to be scorched in silence

these days

in the face of necessity battles i know i must

never forget the warnings of my woman's flesh

nor lose the terror that keeps me brave*

but this morning your memory informs my tears

thick & isolated

unable to rest

it has been two years now but

death does not know time and

your absence aches in the palms of my hands

but i am also angry

i curse the disease because cancer is not natural

nor the act of an unforgiving God

crossing the world we once shared

i see

poison passed off as food   water   air   as

good earth upon which we may live or clear out

the next rainforest to make room for a grinning clown

& hamburger stand

the   whole   world

is being nourished on big macs & radon

staring westward at hollywood for daily salvation

& we do not understand our 5 year olds

when their eyes melt

& they do not scream only

shrug

in the solitude of my writing i place

your poetry around me like a makeshift altar

& pray my generation of poet-historians

will abandon any urge toward the mirage of relevance created 'cause

WE BLEW UP THE SPOT YO!

in the urgent hour of now

we need stories beyond shock value whose

focus is transformation

or at least the prayer that

we will write no words we will not want spoken out of

the mouths of our children

that we will owe nothing we cannot repay.*

*from "Solstice" by Audre Lorde (in Black Unicorn)

__________________________________

absence in the palms of my hands

asha bandele

Harlem River Press, 1996