Liner Notes – Bill Dahl
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Saturday, October 4, 2025
CISCO HOUSTON TONIGHT ~
Pie in the Sky by Cisco Houston was written by Fillmore Bennett, Joe Hill and Joseph Webster and was first recorded and released by Charlie Craver in 1930
Friday, October 3, 2025
AN INDIGENOUS PRESENT ~
Plains Cree and member of the Siksika Nation
- Dream Catcher – 2015
- Archival pigment print on watercolour paper
- 81.3 x 167.6 cm
Dream Catcher is part of the larger body of work I produced titled Wanderings (2015); the themes within these images are those related to wandering, exploring the unknown and considering the limitation and possibilities of the self. A red thread or colour red follows me throughout the images, illustrating this indivisible connection to home or the past, which informs me of who I am and possibly who I may become. This constant reminder of the inescapable factors that make us who we are – our past, our circumstance or our genes – can sometimes anchor us to a contrasting certainty. Tethered as we may be to the past and all that makes us who we are, I still seek a world of boundless possibilities of who I may become. I’ve created dream-like images with imaginary creatures to act as my guides to enable the viewer to get lost within their own thoughts and return to their child-like nature, to be free from restrictions and to be the person we dream to be.
In 2022, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson made her public debut with “Counterculture," a series of 12 cast concrete structures in Williamstown, Mass.Commissioned by Art & the Landscape, a program of The Trustees, Massachusetts. Courtesy of the artist, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo by Stephanie Zollshan.
AN INDIGENOUS PRESENT (Big NDN Press/DelMonico Books
Thursday, October 2, 2025
RAFAEL ALBERTI ~
The Angel of Sand
Seriously, in your eyes the sea was two children spying on me,
afraid of knots and harsh words.
Two children of the night, terrible, expelled from heaven,
whose childhood was a robbery of ships and a crime of suns and moons.
Sleep now. Close your eyes.
I saw that the true sea was a boy who jumped naked,
inviting me to a plate of stars and a bed of algae.
Yes, yes! My life would be, already was, a detached coast.
But you, waking, drowned me in your eyes.
Living Snow
Without lying, tell me what lie of snow walked mute through my dream!
Voiceless snow, with blue eyes perhaps, slow and with hair.
When did the snow, looking distracted, push coils of fire?
It walked mute, whitewashing the unanswered questions,
the forgotten and crossed out sepulchers, to launch new memories.
Giving to ashes, already airborne, the shape of boneless light.
_________________________________
Rafael Alberti
Concerning the Angels
translated from the Spanish by John Murillo
Four Way Books, 2025
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
NEW! ELECTRIC BOAT by PAUL McDONOUGH ~
Paul McDonough
Electric Boat, A Collection of Atomic Shipyard Poems
Longhouse
2026
available now
New, perfect bound, 142 pages
Poetry & Photographs
$24
$6 shipping to US addresses
by Paypal or check
Please use our email address of longhousepoetry@gmail.com
LONGHOUSE
P.O. Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont
05303
~
"The poems have the sea edge to them, the rime, the flotsam, the hurt of working in the open, the science of something ever larger than us. It isn’t simply the poems a poet wants to make, but that is essential, and more the overall aura. It is the aura missing from most poets and music today. They don’t live in their work, and your book has it, along with some fright to what you are living with."
"The photos, by the way, are essential to the text to swim the mind and eye, and it does."
— Bob Arnold
~
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
BOBBY CAIN ~
Mr. Cain, center, leading his fellow Black students to the entrance of Clinton High School, the formerly all-white school they were integrating, in the fall 1956.Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress
1939 ~ 2025, Tennessee
Monday, September 29, 2025
LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA ~
Variations on a Last Chance
The fence does not hold.
The wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread.
The snipers run out of bullets.
The desert, as it always has, of its volition, blooms.
The snipers are distracted, sexting their girlfriends.
The snipers' eyes are blinded by smoke from our burning tires.
The snipers wonder if they will ever see the end of us.
The fence does not hold.
The snipers take a lunch break.
The bullets melt in their chambers.
The bullets disintegrate when they reach the word PRESS on Yasser's vest.
The news finally breaks the stillness around us.
The bullets will themselves away from the boy's skull.
The boy's sandals sprout wings and he hovers above the bullets' path.
The snipers lose interest in shooting at medics evacuating the wounded.
The snipers make eye contact with one of us and see.
There are enough saline bags at the hospital.
The snipers shoot and miss and miss and miss.
We outrun the snipers.
We bury the dead at the fence, let their roses reach the other side of home.
_________________________
LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA
Something About Living
University of Akron Press, 2024
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Friday, September 26, 2025
CESAR VALLEJO ~
CESAR VALLEJO (Peru: 1892- Paris- 1938)
Translations by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi
THE NINE MONSTERS
So, unfortunately
pain grows in the world at all times,
it grows at thirty minutes per second, step by step,
and the nature of pain is twice the pain,
and the condition of martyrdom, carnivorous, ravenous,
is twice the pain
and the task of the purest herb, twice
the pain
and the goodness of being, our double pain.
Never, human men,
was there so much pain in the heart, in the lapel, in the wallet,
in the glass, in the butchery, in the arithmetic!
Never so much painful affection,
never did distance attack so close,
never did the fire
play better its role of dead coldness!
Never, sir minister of health, was health
so fatal
nor the headache extract so much forehead from the forehead!
And the furniture had in its drawer, pain,
and the heart, in its drawer, pain,
and the lizard, in its drawer, pain.
Misfortune grows, brother men,
faster than machines, at the rate of ten machines; it grows
with Rousseau’s cattle, with our beards;
evil flourishes for inexplicable reasons
and is a flood with liquids of its own,
with clay of its own, with a solid cloud of its own!
Suffering inverts positions, gives a function
in which the aqueous humour is vertical
to the pavement,
the eye is seen, and this ear heard,
and this ear tolls nine bells at the hour
of lightning, and nine guffaws
at the hour of wheat, and nine female sounds
at the hour of crying, and nine chants
at the hour of hunger and nine thunders
and nine lashes, less a scream.
Pain snatches us, brother men,
from behind, in profile,
drives us mad in the cinemas,
nails us to the gramophones
and unnails us on our beds, falls perpendicularly
on our tickets, on our letters;
and it’s very severe to suffer, one can pray . . .
And because
of pain, some
are born, others grow, others die,
and others are born but don’t die, others
without having been born, die, and others
are neither born nor die (these are the majority).
And also because
of suffering, I am sad
to my head, and sadder still to my ankle,
seeing the bread crucified, the turnip
bloodied,
crying, the onion,
the cereal, generally just fl our,
the salt turned to dust, the water fleeing,
the wine an ecce-homo,
the snow so pale, the sun so ardent!
Human brothers, how can I not
tell you that I cannot bear,
cannot bear do with so much drawer,
so much minute, so much
lizard and so much
inversion, so much distance and so much thirst for thirst!
Sir minister of health, what’s to be done?
Oh, unfortunately, human men,
there is much, brothers, so much to be done!
____________________
Also see:
The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems
Cesar Vallejo
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
New Directions, 2025
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