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WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND BY THE DAY BY THE DAY BY THE DAY

-- in memory of Richard Pryor & Eugene McCarthy --

 

No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. -Zora Neale Hurston

 

We (Susan and I) have decided it's just too much to generate a Woodburners fire and prepare 500 or so emails and trough these out to everyone. Better to slip it onto the webpage for Longhouse and let it just be found. Starting after the New Year we will begin this trait. Please plug into our webpage when you can for cornucopia books, films, music, rural news. I've been writing these a long time, and first started back in the dark ages of mimeograph: churning out an issue and snuck into the pages of a Longhouse journal of poetry, back then titled: Our Poets Workshop, Workshop, Scout, Poets Who Sleep! and none of it had anything to do with a "workshop" as it came to be known as an art form with academia. Hardly. This was 'in a cabin in the woods, a littler-old-man by the window stood' - the "rabbit" was poetry. The "workshop" was a hut hung with tools, wood shavings on the floor, icy to the touch by winter, the smell of mown grass by summer. Sharp blades, blunt tools, grime on the bench. A good place for poetry. These days, after the latest Woodburners, comes a little email shot in the arm from Hayden about what he liked. Just when I needed one. My thanks HC. We are now in a world over-taxed and gushy lopsided wagon collapsing with too many emails, too much electronics, too much scheduling, too much of everything. It was heaven when the Woodburners was on paper, mimeographed, and folks responded with postage stamp contributions for mailing, letters always, books in exchange. We're all dying now, the whole amazing living and system of publishing and communicating. None of us can keep up. We're sound-bites. The other day, in a college town, Susan and I watched four skimpy furred and bundled women students walking toward us, each with a cellphone locked to their heads: yacking away to someone else and not talking to one another! We were momentarily stopped in a dark pool of ennui. And we all make decisions: mine is to stay away from blogs (I only skim Ron Silliman's with a maple sugarer's ladle) and except for personal correspondence where we all save on postal costs, and running the bookshop (we'd be dead in the water attempting to run counter to the fold, since we did already for years), I am nothing with this new age technology. My days remain still down the center of a trail. Anyone who writes me regular mail and dares to send a book, letter, any shred of literature or semblance of handmade, gets the same in return. The kindness of strangers is literally now our family.

All week, with big snow finally fallen, quieting other quarters, putting a narrow shoveled path between our back door and the truck parked 200 feet away and close to the road,
under stalwart hemlocks, often loaded up with fresh snow - that forest green and white dapple sway wide of the landscape as far as the eye can see. And in the truck driving to town and when I've been the passenger at times, I've been reading aloud to Susan. It was crime writer marvels for awhile, but even Chandler got too wordy for us and so many films have driven ahead of the original text. So we see Bogey and Bacall in shimmering black & white and become almost impatient with the original text. The eyes have a gift all their own for visuals! Instead we went to James M. Cain for a spell and gobbled up The Postman Always Rings Twice. An ideal winner heard aloud. Later, to Grace Paley, but we found her earliest stories now hopelessly dated with domestic travails between women and men. Her ethnic neighborhood cityscape yarns often much finer. Her style not at all changed with its sure wit & wisdom. However, the reading broke down midway through The Little Disturbances of Man so I limped off and reread the rest of the book silently but not before taking down Thurber and many of his Fables and reading those aloud to Susan. Knitting needles in her hands. On the same couch. Three feet from the woodstove. After supper. The only place really warm in all of the house; unspinning Thurber antics about hens that fly on a duck's back and bears that don't get it.

Reading from my library shelf off the many volumes of The Library of America series. I once saw a whole set of these in a small housed and community funded library on Martha's Vineyard. Modest place, put together with yarn from small town, though someone must have donated this wealthy purchase of everything deeply good American. Since we were on a roll with the Thurber, I next pulled down Flannery O'Connor and read her story - second night by the fire husband and wife - "Everything That Rises Must Converge". I last read O'Connor, complete, when I was a teenager...now returning to her southern theme of Rosa Parks era characters on buses. Whites & Blacks. As often the case with southern literature: it's mother & son tall drinks, with a twist. Happy enough with one O'Connor (she has that power to satisfy with less is more) I then read from Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, just picking at it and never remembering just how powerful Walker Evan's introduction to the book (and Agee) is. Another book I read that flipped my life upside down and around at age 17. Now I find Agee's opening pages faltering, self-conscious, he knows he's in the hands of a masterpiece-to-be. I'm content for now just keeping with the photographer-splendor of Evans written piece; his own homage to the whole big picture. Susan is sleepy by fire, warmth, hearing tales, and just as I'm digging back to read all of Frost's Home Burial, which reads robust-made but stilted in these times. Who can any longer see the lantern lamp throwing up as much shadow as light on the old New England narrow staircase between characters: the home cemetery framed all in one small window, what depth of loss burrowed into the whole of a home? I need to fly around like a young barn swift to "Out, Out", woodpile's rot, birches lean, the simplicity of a poem about a handmade door frame - built to last longer than the carpenter who plumbed it and his later generations. In reading Frost one can almost pinpoint just where one of his children went mad, where a wife was lost, and success finally reigned.

It was with Zora Neale Hurston, Susan spoke up. In the truck coming home from town. I'm riding shotgun with a poor flashlight in hand reading from Hurston's The Library of America volume, where the editorial committee saw it sensible and knowing just to use the last name like a brand on an animal for the dust jacket and spine: "Hurston". There was only one. All the books in the library series are stamped this way. I see they have just issued "Roth" (but I might argue wanting "Henry" more than "Philip"). Rumbling on snow plowed roads, which means snow skimmed over potholes, we'd been going along on the earlier ride to town from Hurston and her Jamaica travels Tell My Horse (her titles are often terrific: spanning literary with lingo, routed landscape and life). It was daylight then and we're into "the Rooster's nest" of Jamaica, British West Indies, between one errand and picking up five gallons of kerosene for Susan's portable heater to warm up her legs where she works in a cubby hole on the second floor of a farmhouse built in 1790. Renovated by us both over four decades now and climbing. Rebuilding never ends. The Episcopal minister friend who sold us the place has just passed away down in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm still living up to what he gave to us, since that is good for you. Hurston does this on every line of her memoirs and folklore text. Not only is her work not dated, it's futuristic, never-ending, open minded despite her jabs with opinions; you know she is just sassing half the time and trying to figure it out for herself. A reader has to love this about a writer with these abilities - Twain had it, too, so did Stein; all those Thurber Fables are about: can I pull this off with a malarky "moral" at the end? The morals all read like Rodney Dangerfield punch lines...the band does a sour note by horn, the drummer slaps the hi-hat.

It's in the telling of the tales and to hear them aloud is magic; even better in a truck with dim flashlight, between errands for kerosene where I see my old friend Keith just kicked off our road by a new band of yuppies who don't like his junkyard. He really had no idea how to run anything close to a business as a junkyard has now become - or should, to stay alive in a community of very fussy taxpayers - who, naturally enough, need not one lousy old bolt or floppy distributor cap or rear fender off this junkyard of wares because they all drive super-duper brand new vehicles. We're driving a 1989 Toyota pickup truck wired together by chewing gum and old steel roofing parts (my specialty) and Keith would have probably gunned on heated bar and chain oil under the chassis for us if he were still around. The junkyard looks like a film set for some rural George Romero underground classic. The 16 inches of snow that fell a day ago helps a little at hiding steel and iron chunks and all I can think about is how much good is being wasted at the powers of recycle, renewal, keeping a country boy in some business, since there is nothing quite like driving your old clunker into a yard and having two or three grease monkey wunderkinds descend on it like nothing in the whole wide world is impossible. "We'll have it up and running soon", goes their simple minded steeped in blood and muscle refrain. This is what we have thrown away?! I worked in that junkyard decades pulling old parts and having royal rootin-tootin arguments and laughs with the feisty owner some years younger than me. And when I needed some help to build a stone wall in the village for a customer of mine, it was Keith I could tap to show up to lend a hand. You've no idea, ever, what you will be given in return if you make good with one native son, and even better if his or her whole family jumps on board. Be ready for home cooking, even if it is out of a ratty Cheetos bag.

As a country we haven't a clue how we are losing the very ingredient and heart string that has pulled us this far. The cities are already DMZs. Little oasis of urban renewal and boardwalks appease the money tourists, but country friends one day in Detroit, around Wayne University, saw their van hustled up and vandalized in a war zone all its own. They drove home nonstop in 18 hours with a busted window passenger side, happy to have their home and some trees to surround them. Those trees were planted - whether by bird, wind or hand, and nurtured, logged off, regrown, kept for company amongst an earlier generation that liked their trees; and as we rid the old guard and generations to come, we take the whole cream out of the milk, the baker out of the chef, throw the handsaw out of the toolbox at working with and maintaining a rural essence. Wendell Berry has that gorgeous poem I've enjoyed reading aloud on the sidewalk for these readings for New Orleans Musicians, called "Creation Myth"...where one brother listens to another brother returning home, wayward, bumbling his way through the woods and knowing full well, humorously, from his porch stance just where the brother is heading...until he remembers the deep quarry on the land and where his brother would be killed in a fall. The sound of the brother's boot steps tramping, the porch brother coming out to breathe in the summer night, the wayward brother going lost. Until the porch brother bellows out his brother's name and sets his direction right. I read it, with my reading companion Greg listening, on the street and at the point of the brother's name being shouted out, it roils up against a dozen buildings and a corner bank and almost everyone on the sidewalk turns to look. A surprise to us the first time this happened. But it's the brother's name - one word sounding, one word presence, one word care - turned this wayward brother around, away from the quarry, and back on course. That's rural, as much as inner city, and without it, we're lost.

So what was it by Hurston that Susan wanted to know about? She had much liked the nutty professor of Thurber's yarns, and the historical perspective of the West Indies through Hurston storytelling mind, but it held not a candle to her dog-eared and almost forgotten "Negro Mythical Places" where one can learn just where Big John De Conqueror ended up. All of these tales and dreamtime and real places from rural Florida folks this very persistent writer gleaned up. You look at the cover photograph of Hurston and she has that keenly knowing and steady but horribly vulnerable look on her face that Dinah Washington often had. And their singing was remarkably akin - pushing against the odds, of time, fame/no fame, going after the moxie. The essence. Not always ending up right side up. I believe that's the reader's job to pull right. Hurston's mythical tales will interest anyone in imagined zones: from Calvino, Borges, you name it. You'll know it when you are there. It's something to kick up the dust of these wondrous tales with a flashlight in a truck cab read aloud and as-one with a loved one asking, "where is Diddy-Wah-Diddy?" The answer: "way off somewhere".

Way off somewhere is where Jamaica Kincaid can be found in her latest book Among Flowers (National Geographic) this Vermont gardener-writer, seen here trekking through the Himalayas with botanist friends, gathering plants and seeds either by notebook jottings or literally into packets to be transplanted elsewhere. Ever cautious of marauding Maoist guerrillas and leeches (both share equal time with this writer's candid onslaught). There is a fleeting strength of storytelling, much as with Hurston, in this travelogue...where the reader is allowed plenty of daydreaming off the text as the writer is employing the same...so just as you think you've lost your place, Kincaid has remained diligent in her tracks. Not much is amassed here. It's core driven, height of the Earth's universe, amongst sherpas and you're as teeny-weeny with her. Kincaid is circling circling circling in one place like a cat into her nest.

All the while writing I've been listening, repeatedly - many times rising out of my seat and crossing the room to turn over the lp - side one to side two and back to side one, still one of my best "finds" from any dollar record bin: Get Right With the Swan Silvertones. I was turned on to these guys long ago in an interview I read with Al Kooper (another American genuine), same way Jimi Hendrix, by interview, first turned me to The Band's, Music From Big Pink in 1968. The power of the word. The power of big name telling secrets. And The Band's debut remains one of my favorite holiday/religious albums - to kingdom come - every imaginable music sphere on this disc: classical, blues, jazz, vaudeville, opera, bluegrass, folk, rock 'n roll, minstrel around tears of rage. In the meantime, goose bumps up and down my arm now a million times over with the Swan Silvertones, riding high from 1956-64, oriented somewhere between the coal fields of Kentucky to West Virginia (where angel falsetto Claude Jeter worked) and if Neocons and some Red State/Blue State phony Christian values have turned you away from peace in the valley - allow Jeter and his streamline gris of gospel-meets doo-wop like you've never heard it, clasp you in "Mary Don't You Weep". One song worth a thousand points of light.

The other day something new was playing on the speakers and my California gal came into the room and asked with the sweetest slur,"What's. This?" It was none other than Jimmie Dale Gilmore's brand new Come On Back. And when I informed my in-house critic that they were thirteen beautifully drawn old tunes Gilmore gathered up to remember as his dead father's favorite songs: "Saginaw, Michigan" to "Train of Love" she felt a little terrible and listened closer. Jimmie Dale Gilmore is "Smokey" from the film The Big Lebowski for those that haven't yet a mental picture. His voice continues to kill anything out of modern razzle-frazzle Nashville, and this would be an ideal gift for any codger - young or old - you may have dragging tail around the house. Pick me up on your way down

Baby Beat Generation, translated w/introduction by Mathias de Breyne (La Main Courante) : the second San Francisco Renaissance, tagged roughly from the latter 60s through the 70s and it's anyones own list who was involved with this disperse group of self proclaimed "Beats", "Baby Beats" and the whole wild tribe. It did exist. With the big-hearted assistance of Thomas Rain Crowe (who was there and participated, laying in a fine introduction for the book and showing up in many of the photographs) the better portion of the Baby Beats herein have been pulled from Beatitude magazine, founded by one of the royal real McCoys of the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Coro era, Bob Kaufman. I've never been fond of the "Baby Beat" label, supposedly a choice of two words taken from the drunken speech of one Richard Brautigan in Spec's Bar one night in San Francisco It's like calling someone a "Baby Be Bopper" - you're either "Beat", or you ain't. The proof's in the poetry and there is plenty of it quite good herein by whole displays of Beat forefathers (and mothers): Ferlinghetti, Di Prima, Micheline, Meltzer, Hirschman, Valaoritis, Snyder and more. An interesting selection...then to the Baby Beats themselves: Crowe, Ken Wainio, Neeli Cherkovski, David Moe, Janice Blue, Kaye McDonough amongst others, plus "peripheral poets" who I would have liked reading larger portions of - mostso Andy Clausen, Max Schwartz, Sharon Doubiago, Andrei Codrescu, Cole Swensen, Dale Pendell etc. No one is ever happy with these anthologies because of who is missed and left out. Forever Donald Allen's The New American Poetry anthology will haunt the ages for how to grab an era by the scruff of the neck and bottle it (almost). Baby Beat Generation is one of the best thus far: splendid looking, well built, fine utility attachments and biographies of everyone, bilingual (French-English) with a young French translator ready to rumble. Plus a CD included from Marin County's Sleeping Lady Cafe circa 1976 and its gala reading "Benefit for Irish Prisoners in British Jails". An excellent array of readers. It isn't easy to tame a beast; this collection makes a grand selection and just lets it roar.

Not To Miss: Hudson River Art, summer 2005 (241 Warren St, Hudson, NY 12534) - exceptional magazine for the cost $5.95: surveying art galleries and artists up the waterway and small towns of the Hudson River area of New York. Interview with photographs and poems by Gerard Malanga, a Mary Woronov feature, music 'soundings' with Gabor Csalog, reflections from the artist Charles Frazier, plenty of exquisite illustrations; John Ashbery and other poets dot the landscape. It all hangs well.

You might have thought the coffee table venue for the book Farm Aid, a song for America (Rodale) with its foreword by Willie Nelson is something not worth fighting for, or reading, but it is. Begun by Willie Nelson, after an idea by Bob Dylan, Farm Aid concerts have now reached its 20th anniversary of raising music and cash for the plight of the American family farm. As Nelson states it in good earth parlance:"We're fighting for the small family farmer, which means that we're fighting for every living American". He's been helped by the greater music community, which splashes throughout this anthology, mixed with a wholesome collection of writings from Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie to Wendell Berry, Howard Zinn, Gene Logsdon and many excellent chapters on grass roots community work and the consequences of industrial agriculture. It's a serious labor of love that balances nicely. Even Iggy Pop played a show.

I can't get free of, and don't wish to, the image of two riders on one horse woven into a rug texture and floating under and down the clear pool Iranian brook of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film Gabbeh (1996). The title is from the hand of sheepherding nomadic tribes of Iranian weavers, mostly women. "Gabbeh" is also the lead character in the film: a dazzling young woman kept from marrying her suitor on horseback by a rifle touting father. Age old tale. Minced with an appreciation of landscape-as-art becomes art like you've rarely seen except in the hands of masters of outdoor cinema. That doesn't include computer nerd geniuses. This is pure catch the wind quality, stilled a moment and birdlike, let go. do what you want with me / but don't break my heart

Another one not to miss, and make sure you watch the director's commentary along with the film, because he enhances the film double-fold, and one could almost argue that Pedro Almodovar is one of the few now working in cinema on the grand scale who can both exquisite a film, and mine commentary into the whole, as well as Fellini did in his time. The dicey Bad Education is no easy animal to tame: timing scaled to a literary sharpness, meeting up with transvestites, priests in frock (and out), the naughty tale of young love and predatory sex as blackmail. The sweetened advantage of a DVD is having a special feature of the director Almodovar there to hold your hand.

Only 150 made and I hold one. Sent by Ted who claims this is about all she wrote in his long life of about 100 books of mostly poetry (but try to find his excellent prose from a few Conjunction journals long ago where Ted revealed a beautiful story or two, as if a dream. Influenced from years reading Marquez, Fuentes and knowing his own duende) One Day And How It Was,Theodore Enslin (Granite Press 2005) is issued from made-by-hand John and Jasna Phillips of Cornwall, UK: 27 Treverbyn Road, St. Ives, and it is literally Ted's size of it, one day spread. There is a magic in this world and I / have dared to try to find it... Indeed.

 

© 16 December 2005 Bob Arnold

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND MAKES A PITCH

I have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry. I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. A poetry of loam, where water can sing. A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat -Pablo Neruda

There are many publisher's travel and journey book series on-going, and I have reviewed a handful of these in the last few Woodburners. One of the better drawn is the Jamaica Kincaid book from the National Geographic series, which also boasts a W. S. Merwin title I also liked quite a bit. I've yet to read the others, though I see William Least Heat-Moon is writing a book on Western Ireland. This attracts my attention and also drives me crazy: why is it this series - along with the Crown Journey Series (Frank Conroy, Ishmael Reed, Michael Cunningham all have fine books therein) - are ever eliciting known and well established writers into its fold? Where are the editors today that should be digging up great little books by great unknowns? Is it just a plain and simple marketing investment? Are we left now with a world of publishing where editors from publishing houses grab well fed hired-guns who make pretty packages to sell, and around and around we go? What happened to finding a no-name and believing in the work? Instead we are fish in a tank: writers made to make books and an audience spoon-fed on these writers ad nauseam - book after book and New Yorker magazine issue after issue, the same stable of purebreds. If I see one more stale and half-baked poem in this magazine - well, I'll quit. Oh, wait a moment, I have. After reading it for 40 years. One recent marvel is Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri (New York Review Books) a sojourn of poems, as pilgrimage, to the poet's native state of Maharashtra (India) sweet as grapes / are the stone of jejuri. While I advocate the Jamaica Kincaid book (a New Yorker staple herself), I can't help but wonder just what wonder would have been made if Janine Pommy Vega had written her Himalayan tale and had it published by a large publisher. And Jonathan Williams shelling us walking tours from old England's trails, Thomas A. Clark all-Scotland, Tim McNulty and moments in the rising mists of the Olympic Peninsula. How about James Koller telling tales of a full Europa travel from a very small backpack spanning the last 20 years? Joe Napora speaking of Indian Mound dwellings of the midwest, Drummond Hadley riding the Mexicana range on horseback, Bobby Byrd on the air-up-there between El Paso to Juarez; how the rain's been falling four decades in Bill Deemer's Oregon? Just imagine what Cid Corman could have given us after a half-century expatriate in Kyoto - or Jonathan Greene visiting Cid and then Basho's shrine - a story or two, I bet, there! Lax of Greek isle, Jack Gilbert Greece-to-Northampton as subsistence living. Ted Kooser on the Plains, John Martone in quiet neighborhood garden, Ted Enslin as backwaters music. How about Louise Landes Levi's travels between translations Daumal, Michaux etc., and going into their lands. Cralan Kelder's homeland floating sails from California, Africa, England, Amsterdam...or Alec Finlay doing the same as body and poetry...David Giannini's travels via his Dust collection circling the globe with contributions rung in and each place could have a written text of where-from. Shouldn't Jim Harrison seal Michigan as his own after Hemingway? Can't Lawrence Ferlinghetti tell us the best about San Francisco? Isn't it time Thurston Moore put the candles on the cake and be given the publisher to experience Punk and Beyond. Charles Plymell remains one of the last and best Beat nobles: it's better we pay him now to write a masterpiece about the open road. Let Ed Sanders show his mastery of where one goes between music, art and history: there has to be a trail there, no? Patti Smith might lend a hand. Diane Di Prima on the whole of Mother Nature? You betcha! We missed Fielding Dawson and his chance, so how about Kirpal Gordon or Gerard Malanga explaining what a New Yorker is, in the best Whitman sense. Mikhail Horowitz on baseball! Now! Hayden Carruth on longevity of spirit spanned jazz to poetry to cowshed blues? Ginsberg gone, Creeley slipped through our fingers, how about Anne Waldman on globe-trotting poetry wares? If Anne can't get to it, then I'd ask Marie Harris. You never heard of Marie? Exactly my point! It's a blessing. Eshleman in French caves, Coolidge on drumming and language essence, Dale Smith and Hoa pinpoint Austin once and for all - with Kim Dorman's help, his head ever left back in India...where Andrew Schelling, Andy Clausen and a potato bag of others are ready to go. We need real writers who know off-the-map to take the reader off the careful and situated page. I've sketched out a bird's eye view.

- Bob Arnold is the author of American Train Letters (train traveling through USA/Canada) Coyote Books-SUNY/Buffalo

! FLASH ! :  Legendary troubadour Bob Dylan will start a new career as a radio DJ when he launches a new weekly music show on XM Satellite Radio next March. Pinch yourself.

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND TRY OUT A HOLIDAY SEASON & NOT
TO MISS : NEW ARRIVAL BOOKS ! FOR SALE IN OUR CLOSING PAGES

in memory: Link Wray

 

 

let us
find out a few things
by watching

- Besmilr Brigham

 

I find it broadly interesting that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, natives in at least four parts of the world kicked out their white invaders in a final surge of native powers. All had intense dancing as a means of preparation; all felt that if they danced fervently enough they would become invulnerable to bullets. (This belief still surfaces occasionally.) The four groups were:

The Boxers in China.
The Mahdists in the Sudan.
The Zulus in South Africa.
The Sioux and other tribes in North America.

The Boxers were convinced of their invulnerability as they marched on the trapped legations; the Zulus believed it as they prepared their triumphant ambush at Islandwanda; the Mahdists believed it is as they faced Kitchener's guns at Omdurman; and the Sioux believed in it in South Dakota-some wore Ghost Shirts that were to keep the bullets from finding them.
-Larry McMurtry

 

Fair Greetings to Morgan Gibson and his many years duty and now celebration to Kenneth Rexroth's centenary (1905-2005)  http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rexroth/rex-cont.htm        

Here are books, films, music, the last few weeks in hand, I couldn't get enough of. And some others that didn't do all that much: a book on poetry by Camille Paglia (okay); Joan Didion's latest - about the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne - captivating, but somehow too inspected; Maureen Dowd's herky-jerky book asking: 'Are Men Necessary?' What a question! Of course they aren't. And I would like to read the Doris Kearnes Goodwin biography of Lincoln if anyone would like to gift it to me for the holidays. I'll take the Ted Berrigan Collected Poems as a substitute: beggars can't be choosy. (Please, I'm only joking...or, is he?)

Also included: please check out the list for Longhouse New Arrivals at the end of the Woodburner's - let the curtains part for a delicious table setting of gift choices of poetry and other books! Someone's got to compete with Barnes & Noble, Borders, box bookstores. It goes without saying to support your local independent bookstore, poets, on-line independents, and all street corner sellers of rare goods. 

Just to let you know the reading series for relief funding for New Orleans musicians continues with no let up - we haven't missed a week on the street since Katrina raged through the Gulf region and have been sending our quarters and dollars down to Preservation Hall as they gather up in the old violin case stayed open on the sidewalk. Other poets and musicians have mentioned wanting to come and join in. Be my guest. Just let me know, and we will arrange a time. With snow now on the ground, we're playing footsie with what best weather comes each week. Hope to see you there.

Patriot Readings: please go to:   Vegetarians Between Meals: This War Cannot Be Stopped By a Loyal Opposition by Jeremy Scahill / Published on Friday, November 18, 2005 by www.CommonDreams.org

What's Love Got To Do With It? (everything)
Highly recommend on DVD - Films -

~ The Brown Bunny, written, directed, acted in, devised, amplified, courageously brought to a finish line by Vincent Gallo. The film Entertainment Weekly wrote "...no one in America will ever see one frame of this film..." hunt it up and prove the mass market, once again, wrong. With Cheryl Tiegs as lonely park bench "Lilly" and Chloe Sevigny showing some guts as "Daisy". Gallo goes by "Bud". It's a cross-country in a one man van heartbreak from New Hampshire to Los Angeles.

~5 x 2 (French) one more itsy-bitsy masterpiece by Ozon showing the dissolve of a marriage, and because it's French, it's done backwards in time. Ending with a sunset.

~ Bad Timing (1980), the Nicolas Roeg masterpiece of editing splicing montage brilliance appearing when Quentin Tarantino was but a babe and no doubt influenced. Most of the male roles are twerps so the screen gets eaten up like July cotton candy by one Theresa Russell, new to cinema and thankfully not a Julia Roberts. Twenty five years later and the film still roars. Nicely framed in Criterion's library along with the other Roeg gem: The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976):  how an Alien becomes a Human Being, or is it vice-versa? : Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry: when cinema was pithy, Swiftian space-traveling. Taken from the 1961 novel by the late and not to be forgotten Walter Tevis, whose literary works worked splendidly with imagined worlds. Of the 2 dvds The Man.. is by far the greater package from the Roeg oeuvre, with 2 discs, packed as letterbox version of the film, interviews with everyone, including Tevis (only audio), plus theatrical trailers from around the globe. A mind spinner.

~ Nanook of the North, shot in the early twenties by film pioneer Robert Flaherty with a lot of help from his friends, like Inuit hunter Nanook, who would die of starvation two years after the film was made. Upper Hudson Bay region, Nanook, family, sled-dogs, the barrens. Everyone suffered getting this classic finally into the can. 2005 update: "Nanook of the North" soundtrack by Starbird, issued from Becky & Carson Arnold and a musical adaptation of the original film. Either one is one-hour each of emptiness finding sound. Starbird's ambient breath of spacing and time stopped/accelerating at once, makes gorgeous connections. In line with Eno & Cage.

~ Man of Aran, Flaherty ten years later, now off the western coast of Ireland when land was stone, moss and precious few tourists. The ancient world was still forming. Flaherty has searched and cajoled and made his ideal family of islanders - woman, man and boy along the sea, upon the sea, and in the rock. It's breathtaking. Many faceted features beyond the original film showing the island in present time, interviews with some participants from long ago, plus an excellent interview with the filmmaker's wife, Frances Flaherty, in 1971 from their home in Dummerston, Vt. A heady time of antinuclear power resistance watching Yankee Power Plant being constructed in her near backyard, feisty core opposition, and how a woman who traveled with her filmmaker husband to every quixotic outpost during filming, and now in her late 80s, still believed in taking a stand.

~ Landscape in the Mist (1988, Greece) declared a "masterpiece" by some, and in the finest tradition of Tarkovsky, a small boy and his older sister find their way on a long bleak trail to Germany in search of their missing father. It's the kindness of strangers (all male, like father-figure figurines) and the wretchedness of another met along the way that fill this road movie, sparked with the children's revelations and determination to believe. In many ways akin with the brother & sister searching in Agee's The Night of the Hunter. There is a small boat journey to the other side, as well. And a Tarkovsky lone tree in a field to hug. Quite bleak, but the children, like children everywhere, are glow bugs in the dark.

Ciao! Manhattan (1972) the disintegration of Warhol Factory girl, and model for Life and Vogue, Edie Sedgwick - not to be missed but probably best watched these days with the "Car Talk" tempo of commentary by filmmakers John Palmer and David Weisman, exclaiming their surprise that they are still alive, considering their drug choked star would be dead, shortly after the film's release, at age 28. There are two films here: the often gorgeous black and white film first shot in 1967 at the first Be-In in Central Park, Max's Kansas City and other city parts (Edie slim, tall legged, before her silicone breast implants), and then picked up three years later after a breakdown of the drugged star and probably some of the film crew. Three years later isn't pretty - now in color, with a larger budget to mess with and the only redeeming interest is the black and white footage spliced into the glamour color whacked-out world of poor Edie. She's half naked most of the time and living in an emptied California estate swimming pool. Famous posters of old friends surround her living space, losers keep her company. You wait for the flashback black and white '67 uninhibited scenes to pull you through. Not as coherent as Jean Stein's book Edie, but it's an action film.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004): one that can withstand more than one viewing, and one of the few films these days that matches the integrity and storytelling strength of the book its drawn from - in this case, Ernesto Che Guevara's youthful diaries on a journey from Argentina with his pal Alberto Granado northward: Chile, Peru, the jungle and mountain life that will quickly revolutionize the soul of young Che. If one can tolerate the bestial Neocons the last 5 years; two hours is a snap in a lover's arms like Che's, watching his story unwind. Director Walter Salles hits all his marks, with a stellar film and portraits from Latin America to close out and enrich the last note before closing credits. Applause.

Finally, after all the cult & classic films, a simple American yarn set in San Fernando Valley interweaving the lives of six women exceptionally cast: Glenn Close, Cameron Diaz, Calista Flockhart, Amy Brenneman, Holly Hunter and Kathy Baker: Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her  (2000) is probably fast asleep on some video store shelf just waiting for you to find it. As I did. Be a 'romantic' (so unpopular these days) it's better than grumpy - put a tear in your eye.

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The Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg (Yale): music, records and culture from Aristotle to Zappa. Everything it says it is and thensome; a testament and worship with storytelling spunk on the history and travails of the phonograph. If you still own a collection of old records, and, are still buying them, add this book without a moments hesitation to your collection. First published in 1987 and now reissued with a broken heart in the advent of digital technology, file trading etc., it's a wonder of down to earth writing, subject matter, dirty in the vinyl like you've lucked into some guy's private workroom of old turntables, well filed phonographs, drawers and drawers of parts & accessories and a head full of stories - like Stockhausen's belief on listening to electronic music at home as, "the inner eye opens to visions in time and space which overstep what the laws of the physical world around us permit; spatial perspective and the logic of cause and effect in temporal events are both suspended." Go there. It's good for you.

Wisely pulling from a rich aquifer of Appalachia & more: Jonathan Greene, Thomas Rain Crowe, Joe Napora, Sebastian Matthews and many others, Asheville Poetry Review #15 is a very sharp looking and balanced issue boasting a quartet of special features: "A Short Memoir of a Friendship, Cid Corman (1924-2004)" by Greene, "A Last Interview with Philip Lamantia" by Crowe, Andre Breton's "The Manifesto of Surrealism" (should be reread from time to time to stay honest), and a farewell for Robert Creeley by Jeff Davis. Gunned with well chopped poetry and book reviews in there as mixed nuts rather than the typical swamp of reviews at the tail end of a journal. This bird flies. (ashevillereview.com)

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander (The Library of America): from a series of horribly designed little books on the shelf that haven't quite busted out yet, and may not, but it is a good day to have Gwendolyn Brooks. One of the very few Pulitzer Prize winning poets - if not the only one - who went from a comfortable mainstream perch with Harper & Row and recognition with the big time outlets, into the bowels of Black Power (1967 is the dividing line for Brooks) and published from then on only with black presses like Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, later to Third World Press and the poet's own The David Company. Allegiance is this poet's middle name, and there hasn't been a poem she wrote that hasn't proven that true. Now if this "American Poets Project" can get on the stick and add Zukofsky, Niedecker, Baraka, Stein we might have something here. America has always been rich with the work - deep, fluffy, in layers, shelves and shelves and rooms full of fine sandwich eating poetry, and at the same time silly (and harmful) with partisan. marketing blinders. It keeps us digging, way past the usual reviews and even what can be found in the funneled-for-market bookstores. Think of Brooks as a grand example of how it can be done. We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike...

Speaking of which, what is all this noise between a Garrison Keillor and August Kleinzahler scuffle: "one is better than the other!" Since when? Never mind bad mouthing Keillor, or even Ted Kooser's poetry. Like: down-home cooking doesn't taste mighty fine all of a sudden? It all seems to have stemmed from Garrison Keillor's anthology (another ugly looking duckling by design) Good Poems (Viking ) getting published with its sort of working-joe appeal and poetry - meaning: if it can be read by regular'folks, it must not be poetry. Please, smug comments like that, please pipe down. Kleinzahler - an excellent poet, isn't in the anthology, but, what do you know, I am. Some have asked me how I happened into such an anthology and I haven't a clue. I was solicited by a crew of hard working Keillorites with my poem in their hands: asked for permission, paid pretty well and the poem appeared in the anthology and was spoken by Keillor on radio. End of story. The anthology has since been seen in every Barnes & Noble in the USA and all bookstores with a halfway decent poetry rack. Chalk one up for poetry! because it puts poetry where it should be in the first place: bookstores, chains if we wish them to take over the planet, grocery stores, hardware stores, health food stores, music stores, let it rip. Keillor had his own plan and the type of poetry he likes to make up a collection. His prerogative. It serves a purpose. Should Kleinzahler have been part of it?: certainly, with a bunch of many others if we want to think of an impossible book impossible to market in this bizness poetry land we now live in. Where poets muscle against one another instead of working with one another. Dream-team is having August Kleinzahler side by side with Ted Kooser and Clark Coolidge heralding with Jean Valentine and get yourself an editor that isn't a scaredy cat at finding wholesome poems with that 'inner ear' (and eye) that Stockhausen spoke of above with listening to music. To have a great poetry we need not only great audiences but poets who will shut their mouths complaining and bickering and dividing into schools, camps, fisheries and get back to work writing "Good Poems" - the stuff you want to share, and hand down, like any good tool. It doesn't matter if its brain surgeon Language Poets, to the guy who changes your snow tires poet. It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.

August Kleinzahler has written such a fine-tooled memoir I've reviewed early in these pages, so has Ted Kooser, and now Stanley Kunitz has The Wild Braid (Norton) a poet reflects on a century in his seaside garden, which seems conceived and edited by Genine Lentine and made into an attractive garden book album of sorts, with photographs and poems by Kunitz. But the sparkle of the book is the poet's reflection on plants, gardening and care because all of it is an easy switch hitter's stance on the subject of poetry. Weather, location (Provincetown, Ma), seasonal duties, garden paths, yard trees, ocean breeze, transplanting and recycle, all part of the poet's own technique in the subject and composition of his poems. Like a garden, some of the poems have become weary, old, a few hackneyed lines, but there is an overall decency in Kunitz throughout his life of writing that remained emboldened after all those many years. Dip in and out of this little fancy coffee table sleeper if there ever was one, though I believe it will grab you in first, and humble you quick.

Stone By Design, Lew French (Gibbs Smith), photographs by Alison Shaw: one more coffee table splendor but it's still tough and dirty work by those who lay the rock...in this case, for mainly the wealthy on Martha's Vineyard, and barely an old rambling stone structure and farmland pose despite minute patches of this still remain like hen's teeth on the very wealthy isle. For seeing how the upper crust live and keep a workingman and his crew solvent, enjoy. But it is mainly blockbuster stonework to Wow! the wowers. The author maintains a sensible working text in his self-taught (the best are: makes for raucous invention) range of working with stone, tools, inspirations, techniques and the all important motivation. There are many examples from cutesy to outstanding fireplace setups. May be best to first leaf in a bookstore to see if too-pretty is your sort of thing, but one to add to any stone-cult library.

Oh What A Slaughter, Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster) for some time now Larry McMurtry has been writing small books on big subjects from the American West. Not his best selling fiction, but his somewhat forgotten and expertly dished nonfiction. This thin volume, with of course Custer on the cover surrounded by serious Plains Indians ready to chop him down to size, deals with massacres in the Indian Nations 1845-1890. This would be settlers being killed by Indians, US calvary killing same Indians and Mormons killing settlers for still one of the most controversial massacres in US history, at Mountain Meadows in 1857. Being a native of the west, McMurtry brings along his evocative personal history and deft strokes to sum up the untold dead in less than 200 pages of straight talk. He's an author who has always allowed those that were there to have the last word: "Near the end of his life the tenacious Sioux chief Red Cloud remarked that while the whites had made his people many promises, more than he could remember, they had only kept one: "They said they would take our land and they took it." The bloody work that taking it required is the subject of this book." It still is.

Autobiographical Moment #333: while a passenger with Susan in the truck the past few days I have been reading aloud all of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, ever a killer. The book is finer than any film version, and besides, neither film had quite the right actors for the roles. My picks for the eternal roles in my head are fleshed out, dynamically, and with a bit greater grifter expertise, by Jean Peters (Cora) and Dan Duryea (Frank). Peter Jackson's computers-can-make-anything crew should get right on it.

The Wave in the Mind, Ursula K. Le Guin (Shambhala) daughter to Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, the latter who founded the Department of Anthropology at the University of California/Berkeley in 1901, whereas Theodora went on to write a biography of "Ishi", a 'wild' Indian, last of the Yana tribe, who suddenly appeared out of supposed hiding in 1911 in northern California with a language none of the local Indians had ever heard. In a state, where years earlier, Indians were massacred like flies, since gold was in them thar hills. "His story is, I think, essential reading to anyone who thinks they know, or wants to learn, how the West was won, and who Americans are." This excerpt is from but one essay called "Indian Uncles" (Ishi passed away thirteen years before Le Guin was born) that reveals the brilliant concentration and ease at once in this writer, who pans fearlessly and with almost humorous abandon over a spectrum of talks and essays on most everything: from women's shoes to Tolkien to the merits /or not, of writing workshops. There is something really clicking in this writer's head - lots of thrust and trust - where she has a craftsman sureness that is remarkably attractive. Prose and poetry-all art, music, dance-rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, or rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a little while.

Just in, and I mean just in: I turned off the screen writing the Le Guin review and opened the morning mail: Here from Twelve Bells Press run by Chris Morton at 3 Bathurst Row, Coates, Gloucestershire, UK GL76NW: is The Boreal Poetry Garden, Marlene Creates (Dwelling no. 7) which "commemorates certain fleeting moments of my interaction with the land where I live (Newfoundland). The brief texts reflect some of the site's particular geophysical and climatic characteristics, its plant life, wildlife and social history, and my experiences here. For me, the location of the words in the specific spot to which they refer is fundamental to the radiating energy of their meaning and, of course, their beauty. The place I inhabit is both wondrous and constantly changing, which, I know, entails loss. My cosmology, I suspect, is basically elegiac." I like her already. Mawzy color photographs with brief text and a Rilkean lacing around it all. No price, so write Chris and make contact - Dwelling is an occasional series devoted to an exploration of the notion of dwelling in the work of contemporary artists, writers and researchers in a variety of disciplines, so Morton says, and carries forth to a tee.

Doings, Jackson Mac Low (Granary) assorted performance pieces 1955-2002 and a masterpiece of bookmaking: selecting a skilled doer and innovator, complete with the poet's handwritten, drawn, typographic and musical notatons, along with an accompaniment audio cd, enhanced with both studio and live performances, plus workbook style commentary by the poet guiding personal insight and instructions. Being Mac Low, the instructions are to be followed as much as barked at, forcing newer inventions and the hope for endless renewal. As Steve Clay states in his excellent introduction (yet another plus for the book) "Mac Low stated throughout the making of Doings that he was not particularly interested in creating facsimiles of his original compositions but rather in making a book that would facilitate further performances of the scores by whatever means seemed most efficient. Doings is thus several books at once...perhaps most important, young poets will find a sourcebook for creating and performing new language art - determining for themselves what can be done." One of the essential books for 2005 and the future. Call it a gift. Mac Low is only as "experimental" as the day dawning. Is that wool hat my hat? Is that wool hat...

I just keep looking at it, tempted, swayed away, just too much Bob Dylan all of a sudden with newly released classic songs repackaged for yet another generation, documentary film, even some cd released through Starbucks (a place I've never been in) but soon I will dig in the sandbox of his The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 w/cd (Simon & Schuster) found appropriately enough a few months ago in Woodstock, NY., and I'd be a fool not to plug the very fine and cozy bookshop in town for whenever you get there next: drop into The Golden Notebook on Tinker St., all the locals swear by it and it's in a fighting cause to be there forever as a real bookstore, rickety on the outside and many tiered book treasures inside the belly. I even heard one excited visitor drop in, plunk his bags down and set his hands together in prayer and nearly shout, "Thank god, a real bookstore! Not a chain! I promise to buy something. I will." I believed him without having him also fall down on his knees. The Dylan is like a lunch box serving of everything Bob over his early years, definitely a must sifting through photographs, journeys, tours, playlists, concert ticket stubs, the eternal background. It's in your hands and not a blog or shifting 'pages' on a screen. It's a companion volume to Martin Scorsese's film "No Direction Home" in sturdy illustrated slipcase. Where great guns and ephemera meet up in one book with a blast.

Best Music Writing 2005 (Da Capo): I always read each annual book issued from Da Capo cover to cover. Too bad this year's bread-basket is cut down considerably in size from the earlier years. Our son Carson's essay "Patti Smith: The Art of Trampin'" published from Longhouse, was one of the "other notable essays of 2004". Shouldn't a maverick now sweep up the notables and publish them with glee? If only it took hard labor and not money to get it done. Michael Ventura, Steve Erickson, Gary Giddins, Chuck Klosterman, Monica Kendrick all on that notables list.  Well all right so I'm going steady / It's all right when people say / That those foolish kids can't be ready / For the love that comes their way (Buddy Holly)

Music cds: Liking about everything I've been listening to recently of new kid on the Indie block Devendra Banhart, whether solo or with Jana Hunter - both come with music as if composed and recorded up in a treehouse, as did Kendra Smith years before them and Vashti Bunyan decades before them all. Banhart is a grand mimic of styles and voices, ranging from a street singer to Caetano Veloso and thus has drawn his own mimics. Quite a compliment. With the death this week of Vermonter-Texan Chris Whitley I've been pulling out all his music to pay homage; the least a neighbor could do. You should too. Spangled voice and guitar work matching. I've already mentioned Carson & Becky's Starbird recording of "Nanook of the North". Chip off the old blocks they are giving them away as fast as they can press copies done the old fashioned way: all by hand, in a small apartment with a new kitten named Pearl. Visit Carson at his Turn It Up! music store location in Brattleboro and contribute some bucks for a copy and the cause. Listening to everything by Cabo Verde's Maria de Barros, how she swoons and owns a room!    Cream Royal Albert Hall 2005 which is currently playing in its documentary concert form on PBS stations is a keeper by audio two-pack cd and definitely the dvd of the concert. Clapton is the least interesting, though he pulls off a none too shabby version of "Stormy Monday" but sometimes seems a little lost at finding himself where Jack Bruce's vocals want to take him back to psychedelia heaven. Bruce looks ravaged and is in a perfect place to show time is a killer and how many of the blues songs they rocked in the 60s now make perfect sense in their present condition. "World Gone Wrong" is all-beautiful-Bruce. Somehow Ginger Baker looks fitter and finer 40 years later and his drumming rolls throughout the hall. African band Konono No. l  on crammed discs resounding Congotronics finally getting surfaced after 30 years terrorizing trance method sonic distortion from ensemble instruments jerry-rigged microphones, megaphones, percussion ala old car parts, and electric likembes (thumb pianos). It is its own ghetto-blaster. Finally, out a few years now and circulating used, the boxset of John Coltrane/Live Trane, The European Tours (Pablo): the wellspring only deepens since his death 35 or so years ago and he remains, for me, one of the few players out of the 60s that I can listen to all day alternate takes and repeated performances night after night as he tours through Europe with his crackerjack band - Dolphy, Tyner, Workman, Garrison, Elvin Jones - receiving tremendous support from both audiences and critics than they ever received back in the USA. 7 discs from "My Favorite Things" through "Afro Blue" bliss. Hearing is believing.

© 7 December 2005 Bob Arnold

Longhouse New Arrivals

 

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WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : ALL HALLOWS EVE, RECENT BOOKS & MORE

There is another world, but it is inside this one - Paul Eluard

Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals. - Kurt Vonnegut

The maverick Progressive Era writer Mary Austin became convinced that environmental rhythmic patterns are translated into the physiology of people attuned to them. So the prosody of the Gettysburg Address, as she reads it, expresses the rhythms of a man who spent many hours splitting rails. - Forrest Gander

Despite the fact most of us have not gone through a sex change, all of of us are being boiled down to a neutered state - philistines now run our country willy-nilly: after indictments have been handed down onto "Scooter" Libby, his case has now been assigned to U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, nominated by the Punk in 2001. Let the Magic begin!  The petroleum industry, of course long associated with our phony President's family dynasty, is scoring quarterly profits in the billions and still raising prices while we keep madly pumping...the hobgoblin' vice-president's long tongue cronyism to Halliburton, profiting like kings in two lands of devastation man-made by this administration: Iraq, and drowned New Orleans... and now Rumsfeld will cash in on the latest Fear Factor - a possible avian flu outbreak - by his stock holdings at Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent on Tamiflu, an antiviral agent. Rumsfeld before becoming secretary of defense was chairman of Gilead. Local woodchoppers are doing everything in their power to follow suit by jacking the price of a cord of firewood 100% in some cases, and this load of basically a renewable resource and often unseasoned-creosote-gumming wood, could be mixed with most anything, so learn how to measure a true cord of firewood, and what is wood and what isn't, to be fully empowered. Same guy chopping, same truck (soon to be newer), and figuring like everyone else: you screw me / I screw you. So, let's read books ! published by subsidiaries of the oil, airline and other "well-read, enlightened industries", and a few small presses you need not be too interested in because, hey - they won't make you famous. So...do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya? 

BOOKS TO COVET -

* available from Longhouse

Passage, Andy Goldsworthy (Abrams): I wasn't sure what to do about Goldsworthy with all his fancy books. Coffee table culture for coffee table money, until I watched a film on the stone builder and weather trickster deluxe - how he built in all seasons, scrapped up his fingers and hands, monkeyed with balance and didn't seem to mind at all when some of his stone or wood concoctions, many wonderfully constructed, and quickly, would be felled by the evening tide, winds, or just gravity. His stone mind is my own, ever discovery. These days he has jumped into the big arena and large equipment but hasn't lost dickering together a simple twig design in the woods when the notion strikes him. In this film there is a scene with the British Goldsworthy in the USA working beside a team of US stone wall guys on some rural spot, and he doesn't quite fit with his elfin manners and quirks of experiment. You can see the good ol'boy Americans just tolerating the little guy. Just look at what he can do with stone when opening to the glossy title page of this book. If you like your stone, it will stop you cold.

Anarchy, Protest & Rebellion, Fred W. McDarrah (Thunders Mouth): it was Fred McDarrah, the photographer, who single-handedly introduced me to the faces of the Beat Generation as a kid in his musty looking book The Beat Scene - an album of clockwork vintages from all around Greenwich Village in its heyday bohemia Howl, with assorted shots of west coast poets that wandered east for a visit. Some of those exclusive photographs from that era make it into this much larger survey, but it is mainly riveted to the 60s counterculture: almost everyone of the bad guys are here, and all the good guys that McDarrah can call his own. Who else could have caught Tiny Tim, Hugh Romney and Moondog in one photograph quite so right? Someone also worked hard to organize and write up many page short biographies of everyone shown in the book. A fugitive, classy dossier in itself.

Once Upon A Time in the Italian West, Howard Hughes (I.B.Tauris): Eastwood on the front cover, Van Cleef on the back cover, the span ranges from A Fistful of Dollars (1964) to Henry Fonda's last best western My Name is Nobody (1973), plus The Big Silence (1967) isn't missed. Ennio Morricone runs down the center of the book like blood. This is the heart of the heart of the Italian Spaghetti Western galaxy guide. Loaded with photographs and film stills. Go get dirty.

If the next generation of poets midway in their career walks and talks and writes as well as Forrest Gander, there's hope. A Faithful Existence, Forrest Gander (Shoemaker & Hoard): is a very big book at less than 150 pages, and you will want to crawl through it as you suck up smart stuff, southern legacy, poetics via geology, and pristine homages to the likes of Henry Dumas, Besmilr Brigham, George Scarbrough, Araki Yasusada, Vic Chestnutt, and I know Creeley and Oppen and Laura Riding are hiding in there because I've snuck ahead but I don't dare read out of turn. Gander has enough mysterious science about his way of writing that you don't want to veer off course, in case you miss something. I absolutely honor any writer who refrains such quotes as the one above regarding Mary Austin and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and then goes ahead and puts that same rail-splitting grain into his own abilities. Just try this paragraph on for size - it's better than whole books written by poets about themselves - If not a writer, then I would probably be a geologist. I majored in geology, was heading to graduate school in paleontology, and the doe-eyed dark angel touched my shoulder with a finger and the doctor said, third-stage melanoma, let's go. In no time, I'd lost my spleen, a line of lymph nodes, a bear's mouthful of flesh and muscle over my shoulder blade, and a rectangle of skin, about the size of a City Lights paperback, that had been stripped for use as a graft. Lying in the hospital, nothing but words in my head, I began to imagine another way to love the earth, and to find something to stand on. In a time of the poet's cry, "Me Me Me!" and shocking waste, the marvel of this book is just what the author kept out, and then put back in. One of the star throwers.

More downright fine books - each tidy in their own worlds:
The Polysyllabic, Nick Hornby (Believer Press): "a hilarious and true account of one man's struggle with the monthly tide of books he's bought and the books he's meaning to read" promo filler but essentially a true summing up, and proceeds from the book going to a great causes: split between 826NYC, a writing center in Brooklyn for students between the ages of 8 and 18, and Treehouse, a London based charity for children with autism.

Povel, Geraldine Kim (Fence) : all "verse" is "confessional", so a 'confessional verse poetry/novel' is just one more to add to the pile, until we arrive at Kim's total package of best author's photograph in years (take a look), designed whipped and presented by a deservingly hot small press (their author's list is-to-discover - and that's the point of an excellent small press: believe in the unknown - and Kim's fine writing that experiments with full backbone, written in that land before she was lauded. You ain't quite literary fit until you've put this book under your belt. Only if you are searching for a narrative

The Selected Poems of Du Fu, translated by Burton Watson (Columbia): self explanatory greatness. Brook water cold splash to the face. But I still prefer the spelling and look to "Tu Fu" - the contentment of the woodland birds puts me to shame

A Defense of Ardor, Adam Zagajewski (Farrar):  These great scholars, who seem to know everything, who've counted the disks of the vertebrates and the syllables in Archilochus' poems, can't manage to identify whatever it is that catalyzes human minds and creativity. They analyze the outcome, but are blind to its essence; they study the fire but can describe only its ashes. And as we know, Nietzche gleefully calls this principle that the scholars overlook none other than life itself. "Well, what do you know, Ollie."

TEACHING IN THE PRISON

She falls from the cliff leaving her
Three-fingered hand print on the cave
Leaves the future hanging on the wall
Like a scythe in Checotah thrift shop
On lock
She picks up moonlight
Striped light in five directions
Running from the pick-up
With knife in her hand
Jesus
Behind these bars
Even the ghosts turn their backs.
"Come on in Poetry Bitch
What you gonna teach us today?
Push a little harder
This ain't no screen door."

- Terry Hauptman

* from Terry Hauptman, On Hearing Thunder (North Star Press / nspress@cloudnet.com) with an accompaniment CD-Rom and paintings by this poet/artist. Let the above poem speak. Terry Hauptman is grounded, passion hurt and loved, the not-to-be-last of the singers as she shares each song, poem, color of paint - maybe your own. This is a very full book of poems lived & learned.

The two hefty poetry collections of the moment in my sphere (w/June Jordan coming up) are by Ted Berrigan and Drum Hadley.  One is dead with a family heritage coming through for him, the other one is lucky he isn't dead for what he has put himself through. Both lived their own way and the poetry says so. For some reason Olson is hanging around on the Hadley edges, as if one part Drum can't drop it (and shouldn't) after Olson paid the utmost of poetry brotherly nods by taking some of Hadley's poetry and putting it into the geography of Maximus. But I believe other literary types just can't get comfortable until they pigeonhole a poet as hailing from somewhere literary familiar: coming out of the blue, the shadows, the greater territory, just won't do. Early Hadley had the Olson rouge, but everything about Voice of the Boderlands (Rio Nuevo) (foreword by Gary Snyder) is more conjunto/corridos, Tex/Mex rawhide, much more Sandburg folk than any Olson, the stuff Mary Austin would have walked miles and miles to meet. Hadley is another one of the rail-splitters that modern America hasn't got a clue what to do with. At one time he would have been termed bigger than life goodness - like cornfields, desert winds, Will James tales. Astronauts and test pilots used to be made of this Right Stuff - poetry formed off your living straight off the range - maybe 30 years at least in the making, these are poems, tales, hollers, songs, wisecracks, short film escapades, love letters, prayers from someone who is truly gifting us what he could just as well kept to himself. Imagine that. Many years ago Drum Hadley called me from one of the early cellphones a rancher would toss onto the seat of his pickup truck as he drove into the wild blue yonder called his ranch on the New Mexico/Arizona border to tell me how much he liked a book of my poems. He drove to the highest part of his ranch possible to make the call. I was receiving this on a four-party line rural phone myself. It's incredible we even got a word in. What I'm bragging about is Drum's generosity. And it floods this book of charms. When I was the wisp of a broom /Sweeping the herds of cattle /Across the great rangelands

Like Fred McDarrah with his photographer's eye to social commentary, Proof by the photographer Jim Marshall is the cream of the crop of 1960-70s music sphere. It just doesn't get any better, except that it does: instead of just showcasing the hero print from a roll of film, Marshall gathers up over sixty proof sheets and shows them in their entirety on the opposite page from the master. So in essence, the reader is receiving an encyclopedic tour as if Marshall's private work book is open for all to see. Beautifully designed by Chronicle Books at a modest price. The fuck finger-shot of Johnny Cash was Marshall, and no one ever came close to catching Janis Joplin and early Bob Dylan quite like Marshall. Only Billy Bob Thornton's spread seems fixed, fashionable, and a waste of time.

Treehouses of the World, Pete Nelson (Abrams) - photography by Radek Kurzaj: for many of these shots the photographer deserves a medal. More than thirty-five treehouses from around the world are documented by the guy that helped build them from his builders nest of Treehouse Workshop in Seattle, Wa. Everything from little mansions a few feet up a stack of trees, to true indigenous woods muse splendors, along with commentary on materials used, new hardware such as the Garnier Limb (the "GL") a turned-steel limb anchor, which has essentially advanced the adventure into trees and what they can hold up immeasurably. These guys are good. But none of them quite reach the heights and magnificence of the Korowai people of New Guinea - building in perfect harmony with their site: tree poles, plant tie wrap and all - but they're getting closer. Full color, splashy, taking you higher.

When next in the mood for a rereading (I do one every few years) go find neighbor to Henry David Thoreau, Michael McCurdy's wood engravings edition of Walden in the 150th anniversary edition published from Shambhala. It's of a higher law and makes for almost a new reading. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.

* For two months now I have been reading a pair of Ed Sanders' poems on the street as I share a sheaf of what I term the Great Americana with the public at large. This is all for reading poetry and writings to earn donations for Katrina relief for New Orleans musicians. And you can't predict a thing. These two poems jumped right up at me as I was reading Stanzas For Social Change (Shivastan). Don't you love a guy who puts his money where his mouth is...these are merry and tough pitted poems exclaiming everything from Blake-light to the great Henry Wallace. The two poems I keep going back to and sharing in the arena of public domain are "The Question of Self Publishing" (something the author knows a thing or three about) and "You have to be Ready for Ridicule" (which goes hand in hand with the other poem). At this point in the sidewalk reading I just about have anyone who can hear and pay attention for a half-minute saying the refrain through the poem You have to be ready for ridicule back to me in follow-the-bouncing-ball agility. Nothing like a poem that makes such goddamn good sense to live high and wide on the street. Keep writing 'em, Ed.

Another rail-splitter, Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (Da Capo) is the book not to miss on music appreciation straight from the soul of blues. Van Ronk died before completing the book, so Elijah Wald comes to the rescue without much of a hitch, and besides, Van Ronk seems to cover ground from his favorite era: 40s-50s bohemia jazz, folk, blues America, before he is gone. There is something akin to Van Ronk's own music finding the book unfinished, open ended, in wonder. They all who became famous (Dylan, Baez) and every other strumming minstrel younger than he, bowed to Van Ronk's dimensions. The author's appreciation for John Hurt, The Rev. Gary Davis, a multitude of early jazz pioneers stuck to a guitar or piano come from the vast depths of a true Brooklyn born autodidact. Hear what will kill him in the timbre of his voice. An excellent companion CD to this book would be...and the tin pan bended, and the story ended (Smithsonian Folkways): live Van Ronk in concert (2001) talking and preaching and fussing aloud with song. Incredibly, and poignantly, he never sounded better.

I realize many, but not all! of us are sick to our stomachs of the misfit and mongrels in the Punk's long term nightmare (one hour was long enough) - and as I wrote to a good friend this morning, I take it personally, big-time, what hell and ruination we've all experienced or fallen to ever since Reagan...so it comes with a good dose of greatness and highly recommended, mostso for teacher's who just need that perfect text for their students: head to, please: Eliot Weinberger's, What Happened Here (New Directions) for a breakdown of history, like the masterminds once drew them up. From Gulf War 1 1991 - through 2004, dissecting the all important theater of 9-11 from Weinberger's vantage point of downtown Manhattan where he lives, and somehow remaining sane as he gulps down and spews out more analysis on cronies and their hideous habits. Since the book was published, we have had hair on fire nickname playthings like "Brownie" and "Scooter" and "Harriet" for further good work from the man who hasn't let his guard down, and one should at least buy and read his book as a way of paying back thanks. Unity. You've already paid enough war tax to kill a country. It's the duty of the patriot to protect his country from the government.--Thomas Paine 'The Rights of Man' c.1792

I am I because my little dog knows me is just one of the crackerjack zest molecules once written or said and certainly lived-by one Gertrude Stein. I know the Language Poets think they are improving on the Stein model, but I just haven't seen the evidence. Everywhere I look and read and blow thick academic dust off of (even if they don't work or are paid by such, they are being heavily endowed from their writing programs and basic allegiances) this Gang comes across dowdy, clams for a laugh, wound barber pole word play. Thank god Ann Lauterbach is among them because she is brainy and exploratory at once, consistently her own pacemaker in poetry for decades and now her first book of essays The Night Sky (Viking) is out, and I probably would have bought the book for Lauterbach alone but there hasn't been a Joe Brainard illustrated book cover done yet that didn't first attract my eye, as Jess Collins used to do. A good deal of this book is fluff and puff and muff but it's good for you. Like most of the Lang Gang, the women are almost always finer then the men, chalk it up maybe to fluidity of mind, colors, landscape encounters and such a dependable facility of memory. From a poet who made her living for years in art galleries (it shows positively) and claims she didn't find her bearings until she began to teach (now at Bard) these are stitched together essays over twenty years, with care. Okay, thanks. It's getting dark, I think I'll go out for a walk now. Blink. Blank.

* John Sinclair's name rings bells for all sorts of folks well over 60 years of age and has always been ringing dem bells for folks in their late teens. He must have something! Associated with all sorts of wild ended parties from The White Panther Party to Detroit's own MC5, and he's kept that weird and wizened look about him, drawing in crowds for his poetry and jazz venues,. And last but not least one must not forget the guy can write about music, and write well. Amiri Baraka does the writing honors for an introduction for Sinclair's Fattening Frogs For Snakes: Delta Sound Suite, and he does it in one of his more tonal oral tributes that really puts some gris on the page. You might expect Sinclair to be as dramatic, but instead he shows up and writes a tour de force giant killer of a long poem on the Delta Blues sound and stroke and folks and history, exclaiming with virtuoso reach his own historical smarts mined in with celebratory lyrics and comments and biographies of all the chief players, who can still be complete unknowns to this day in this country, despite their qualities as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Rice Miller, Muddy, Wolf, Robert Lockwood, Johnny Shines, Robert Palmer and all sorts of bitten terrain and text savvy been-there that I never read anything quite like it before. Not forced, not polished, not crummy, mainly downright sincere. The press: Surregional was in New Orleans, now Slidell, LA. and was smacked around by Katrina but still afloat and constant. Copies can be had soon from Longhouse or through inquiry to Dennis Formento, 1640 Fifth St., Slidell, LA. 70458. The print run is low but the publisher and author deserve a second and third and fourth print run. Designed in black and white with eerie blank promotional copy. None. The Blues always took care of itself.

I picked up a tattered book the other day in town rounds and decided to keep it because of an opening sentence: The Connecticut River begins in the clouds that surround the mountains of Canada and New Hampshire.  I did fall into the clouds with that line. Out of The Complete Boating Guide to the Connecticut River with no specific authorship, more a manual and advertisement brochure once upon a time. The sentence I like will last longer than us and the book, and I've kept the book just for the appeal of this sentence. Someone got it in there. The river was a journey place once upon a time for the likes of John Ledyard, lone sojourner in Jeffersonian stripe (Jefferson lived vicariously through Ledyard before he moved on to the team of madman Louis and frontiersman Clark) who as a dropout from Dartmouth College left the environs not by road or trail but in a canoe he dug out from a tree and then paddled 140 miles south on the river that began in the clouds.

After Kurt Vonnegut gave up the ghost and stopped writing masterful books, as he had his first eight books - a few downright classics - he seemed to stop having an edge seriously as a writer but never lost his best edge as a commentator and all around quixotic prankster. Despite dragging on unfiltered Pall Malls since he was 12 or something, and soon to be age 83, he's always been with us. I love the fact there remains this seasoned author, with a reputable World War Two honor (a soldier and surviving the bombing of Dresden), with a king-size fame registry, who would have the free for all mind and aplomb to write a skinny little book titled A Man Without A Country (Seven Stories). Forget sitting on your laurels, Vonnegut is pissed off, wisecracking, innovative and still teaching us how to write, live and maybe survive. The writing is so simple and easeful and ordinary that you might think you are much more the wiser, and then it hits you Today we have contraptions like nuclear submarines armed with Poseidon missiles that have H-bombs in their warheads. And we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, "Wait till you can see what your computer can become." But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do. Vonnegut has been saying such things for umpteen years now in umpteen college commemorative speeches. Wouldn't it have been great to grab up all his tarter and insight and head off into the big bad world to conquer it from evil? As Vonnegut continues his train of thought, sighing, Progress has beat the heck out of me. Go wonder why a WW2 vet is a man without a country. Not you adults, it's almost too late. But you kids.

Finally a sumptuous summing up of history that roils and boils and tides in on shore not with the scientists, historians, politicians or even the wealthy. But with the poets: from A Little History of the World, E.H. Gombrich (Yale) -
The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem. It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again. And so it was that, barely a hundred years after Charlemagne's death, in times of chaos and misfortune, hordes of mounted warriors from the east invaded yet again, as the Avars and the Huns had before them. Not that there was anything remarkable about that. It was easier, and therefore more tempting, to take the path which led from the Asiatic steppes towards Europe than to launch raids on China. For behind the protection of Shih Huang-ti's great wall, China had now become a powerful and well-organised state, with large and prosperous cities, where life at the imperial court and in the houses of its learned high officials had reached levels of refinement and taste undreamt-of elsewhere.
At the same time as people in Germany were collecting ancient battle songs - only to burn them soon after on the grounds that they were too heathen - and monks in Europe were making timid efforts to turn Bible stories into German rhymes and Latin verse (that is, in about 800), China was home to some of the greatest poets the world has ever known. They wrote on silk, with elegant flourishes of brushes dipped in Indian ink, concise and brief verses which, in the simplest way, express so much that you need only read one once and it is in your head for ever.

And ever.

The day so wind-swept clear that while working outdoors we could hear the Amtrak passing-thru 12 miles away in Brattleboro. All above written in the company of music by Sam Beam /Iron & Wire, then Holcombe Waller, running straight up the tree of Tuli Kupferberg's masterpiece "Tuli & Friends" hearing is believing! followed by gorgeous wondrous Cesaria Evora & Maria de Barros (do you want heaven & earth?) and finally tearing the room to pieces with older Charlie Feathers. Hey now, it could have been Hasil Adkins! Please send any books, music or films to be reviewed within the limits of possibility and no guarantees except lightning strikes twice. For personal, address and website, drop your eyes below.

© 31 October 2005 Bob Arnold

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : FIDDLIN' & POESY

in memory of Shirley Horn

It certainly is a moment to celebrate when poets & fiddlers get together. This happened a week ago when fiddlers Jacqueline and Dudley Laufman drove over from their home in Canterbury, New Hampshire to play their fiddle and barn dance music on the sidewalk in Brattleboro. Dudley is equally known as a poet and so already his interest was perked as to what I've been up to with other poets and musicians ever since the levee broke and flooded most of the city of New Orleans. Darkening the lives of countless musicians and artists from the city. We have been raising money ever since. A wise one broached the subject about how the recent flooding in our New England neighborhood of Alstead, New Hampshire and other parts could use similar donations. Good point. Money should also be raised for that damaged part - many homes and lives have been lost, ruined, at least horribly upset. We may get to that later in the season, but for now it would be something else to see another part of the United States also addressing the plight of Alstead, NH and sending some donations their way. One of the reasons for our sending funds to New Orleans is to get folks out of their own neck of the woods, into other cultures, and toward the goodness of actually being united. I believe it is working, however small it may be. Add a stick.

I knew fiddlers must be coming to town when last week Susan and I were setting up shop at our spot: old crate, old violin case on top of crate, now old but still attractive poster leaned up to describe who we are and what we are doing. The poster has had many rain days on it, so I framed it onto a pine board which also helps the poster from not blowing over quite as easily. So coming down the street I see two almost Mutt & Jeff wonders: heavyset guy in cowboy hat, white beard, strolling like a bear with a winning smile. Next to him a roasted wisp of a fellow, woolen lumber clothes from the 50s, ragamuffin gray beard possibly aging him ten years and his eyes still blinking getting used to the town life and brighter lighting - woods folks, fiddlin' folks. They drifted up and asked for "Dudley". Said they were old friends. I suggested they settle in beside the parking meter because poetry and music was soon to happen. I spotted tallward Dudley coming down the sidewalk . Greg Joly with him. They had probably met up in the parking garage and this was a first meeting for the two. Both being Scott and Helen Nearing fellows it took only the short walk from the garage to our reading site and they were new friends. Dudley with his fiddle case strapped over his shoulder. In his 70s but still with boyish hair and grin. Younger Jacqueline arriving shortly thereafter with her own fiddle case and beaming smile. I swear country folk are going to save this planet yet! A brisk day and we're all now formed in a tribe ready to work.

Right out of the box I notice a fellow walking toward us, shirt & tie, not looking particularly happy. I throw a rope and ask if he wants to hear some reading. Normally no reason to be this out spoken but the gathering of many workers ready to read and play music causes a storm of improvisation...so I begin to read from Bob Dylan's Chronicles, his passage about New Orleans. My visitor is nodding, he knows the book, has read it in fact. So many of us bond by this realization. Something in the reading, the telling, the unity of spirit, maybe the maple lighting from the nearby tree cast around us convinces the guy to leave a very generous donation. The day has started. Greg, my sometime but stalwart partner from the beginning of this reading series, stands by the violin case and sends me a wide-eyed nod. We're cookin'. Fiddlers are warming up. Soon they will lift the lid off the whole neighborhood and replace log trucks down-gear, traffic busting and general commotion of side street small town America into a sweep of ears, feet and heart. The neighboring bookstore owner leans out the door for a peek. Across the street a mother with two young daughters passing has the two little girls dancing. Add music and there's an immediacy of pleasure. The poets know to run their poems up this spine while the feeling lasts.

When not fiddling, Jacqueline runs off to do an errand. Poems go on, passersby mingle, keep going, at least glance over. Definitely people walk slower to catch a little something of what is being said or played. As I'm finishing up a short poem, Jacqueline is back armed with many sticks of thick chalk. Multicolored. With no hesitation she begins to draw on the sidewalk what she is hearing for poems. As soon as a poem is heard, she writes. Thus: "I think/of a tree/to make/it last" Lorine Niedecker. The line breaks are now oral, reinvented, catch as catch can. There's a brilliance to see the poems go so splendidly from street reading onto sidewalk in-the-moment permanence . Jacqueline doesn't stop there - she florals each poem with accompaniment tree design, laurels...and moves to the next poem as it's heard. One of mine on purple Japanese irises, one of Dudley's on square dancing. People, despite their tastes, are curious, they are now stopping in their tracks realizing they are standing within a poem! They read. Especially the children. Before we know it fiddling, poetry, conversation and thirty feet of sidewalk has been taken over. Dudley has earlier asked if we needed a permit to do these readings. I shake my head, "We've always lived quietly, neighborly with the local businesses. No one seems to mind." We both nod in agreement while surveying the sudden anarchy covering the sidewalk.

Next up is a UPS truck and young driver sliding in to park right at our curb. The driver has unloaded and begins to push his handcart of goodies our way. I look at him and teasingly say, "So, you're going to ride over our newly painted sidewalk?" A smile from him that wins our world immediately, "Yes! I have to!" he cries. These brown uniform workers always on the go. I throw my hand in waving gesture as if an old tale Arabian sheik allowing passage....off he goes. But! he has to return. On the rebound we all stop his cart with a full motion of celebration and say, "Now, it's time for a poem." He smiles, fusses, even shouts, "But, They are watching me. I-know-They- are," he pleads, as he looks to the sky with that possibility of cameras, video, Big Brother dooming his job and life. "But, we are watching you as well", we jest. He acquiesces. Out comes one more of the short poems; no matter, he's in the clutches with us. Right after the poem (15 seconds) he almost jumps and blurts, "Look! See what I mean?" and sure enough, there's his supervisor (even surprises us) leaning against a parking meter and taking mental notes to everything before him. The full form fest of poetry, music and donations. Circus miniature. He isn't a hard ass, is even cordial, smiling, but all business when he gets his minion back up into the box truck. So I follow them in and read a very short poem on the truck steps to the boss and tag him with "Now, you've  been read to." He gets it, the driver is still smiling, but the tension and the authority and who-is-who-here is clearly rippling off the small space. We've all been there.

Soon after, a twelve year old boy, timid, hoarse low voice and clearly curious as to what antics were going on in his town, came poking over and in his curiosity was gifted a poem about "a perfect world". He smiled at the title as if possibly a genie were in some bottle and replied, "Boy, wouldn't that be nice". Yes, you wanted to hug him. So I read the poem, which was about as close as I could get to embracing him, and being a simple poem but loaded with dense parameters, the boy thoughtfully blinked once, twice, then smiled with that sureness of knowing. It restored enough energy and hope in all of us to stay on the sidewalk for maybe the rest of our lives.

How did the day end? With Mount Wantastiquet, towering over the main street buildings, losing more of its sunlight. A chill coming and some fine donations made in the violin case. We headed down to the Korean restaurant and a window table and shared bowls of hot soup. Jacqueline handed over to us the many remaining chalk sticks for another day. And another day after that.

For more on Jacqueline & Dudley Laufman please go to: http://www.laufman.org/

copyright Bob Arnold 24 Oct 2005

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND: SIDEWALK READINGS FOR NEW ORLEANS CONTINUES, RAIN OR SHINE / PLUS KING HARVEST TIME

It's their reality. We just live and die in it - Maureen Dowd on the Bush Administration

Your today is followed by no tomorrow and comes afters no yesterday. Your today is Eternity. - St. Augustine

 

For those keeping score - recently James Koller and I read on Elliot Street in Brattleboro and we were joined by Jim's son Bert on guitar. I liked the way Bert held his guitar as he stood and played, sort of a cotton belt sling wrapped around the hollow body and back to him. It's a lot of gas in a Ford pickup truck coming from and returning to Maine, so Jim and Bert showed some class putting in their time. For some reason only the gods have an answer to, the rain clouds shutup for the two hours while we read and played on the street...I started off with more readings from my Americana series: Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, Gertrude Stein, Ed Sanders, Carl Rakosi, Willa Cather; and then Jim aligned with many pages out of the ever fertile A Coney Island of the Mind, which has to be one of the finest ways to hear Ferlinghetti - by one of his friends. Jim then went to Lorca as I was going to Neruda and Niedecker and I saw he even had a vintage edition of Ezra Pound in his satchel but we started to then read poems of our own. While Jim played on one of his jaw harps (he keeps a ring of them in his coat pocket) some guy crossed the street to be with us on the sidewalk as Koller finished up a tune, Bert strumming along, this guy digging it. When all was done he asked Jim the history of the instrument (good person to ask) and then he waited for my turn since I was next to read. After one poem, our visitor said with complete seriousness, "There isn't any technology at all in your poetry. (pause) You can't live like that, can you?" Almost up there with Creeley's: was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself? Jim and I just smiled at one another. Bert looking like Jesse James.

The next day we read in an art gallery organized at the last minute for a reading - it was an idea burst by the gallery curator Catherine Dianich Gruver. Her gallery has been showcasing all month fine letterpress broadsides by poets Kinnell, Carruth, Kumin, Ed Cain (nice surprise) and many more, and Catherine reveals absolutely nada stuffiness at inviting in two street readers who have also done their share of gallery readings. Come to Brattleboro and find the alley way down a lane toward a view of the Connecticut River, The Hooker-Dunham Theater and Catherine's gallery blocked in with a group of other artists tucked away at various adventures. The elegant printer Dede Cummings works alongside Catherine, and for our little show Dede had made up handsome posters . When I finally got to meet Dede, what did she have to say when we shook hands hello. "Yes, you once rejected one of my poems. (nice smile) But I kept your rejection letter." You never know what to expect in a small town.

Koller and I read for two hours. It's a blur at who really came since we were supposed to be reading to a long lunch hour interest who just might walk in awhile, listen, then mosey on; while Jim and I shared our poems back and forth sounding like a very long back road tour from Vermont to California's old & new dreams. Blame it on the rain.

Now eight days of straight rain, robins in migratory loss for the moment stuck up in our woodlot where I've been laying up stone cairns for over a month, and now a flock of flickers in our rain flooded yard...tomorrow Susan and I push off for Eero Ruuttila's farm and festivities we have been invited over to attend and participate with. I'll be reading with Wayne Atherton either near some bonfire, in a barn, perhaps gathered in a greenhouse? and it all sounds like perfect pitch poetry to me. Come to it, if you can. Each year the farm hosts a public Nesenkeag Farm Day, the 3rd Saturday in October, rain or shine..."organic veggies get sold," so Eero robustly writes to me, "the local bee-keeper sells his honey & a nearby buddy sells his organic meats...I give a farm tour for the local gardeners & farmers who come to see how organic systems work on the farm's  35 leased acres...farm Board members walk kids & their adults on the Nesenkeag Brook interpretive nature trail we have created with a couple of modest grants...there's paints & games for the real little kids & a few musicians play during the afternoon... at day's end I host a poetry reading around a bonfire near our wash area...past years poets have included Gary Lawless, Janine Pommy Vega, Jim Koller, & Simon Pettit." Fine footsteps to walk in. You want poetry out of the ivory towers and the halls of montezuma? Here's your chance. Directions to the farm: Nesenkeag Farm is located in the historic center of Litchfield, NH on the riverside of Route 3-A. Call 603-429-3163.

Next week the poetry will continue on the sidewalk. Fair weather will return. A few maples still have their leaves up. I just may have a few giving me a call how they want to come and join me. Donations being made for the New Orleans musicians fund and certainly at keeping a line of poetry down in front of your path. Happy Trails.

copyright Bob Arnold 14 Oct 2005

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WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND: SIDEWALK READING MAKES A BAKER'S DOZEN

"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – "lagniappe." They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish – – so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city..." from Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

7th October will be our Baker's Dozen moment in the Sidewalk Readings, having stretched the show from western Massachusetts towns back home to Vermont and aligning today when the Brattleboro Literary Festival kicks off, which will entice a few more folks to town. Yesterday we were heckled by a friendly enough kid in big black work boots, who was seething over something about putting a bullet between the eyes of pandas. He seemed to have his reasons. He then asked if we had any poems by Gary Snyder? "No". WS Merwin? "Nope". Then his fat chance wild-card, "How about Lew Welch?" turning to go; but we surprised our visiting crank call when we said, "Sure. We happen to have a poem from Courses in the bag." He was talking to two vintage backwoods types. Then I asked him to take the brick 'stage' and put his money where his mouth was. I was almost proud at how well he quieted down and got the job done, setting the Lew Welch poem out onto the street. When it came time for our reading, naturally enough, he was back with mysterious jabs, hoots, comments. Blithering nonsense. At least he was active.

With the13th reading under our belts, I would like to thank, so far – Greg Joly for sticking with me. He brought more & more Scott Nearing readings to the curb. Likewise Terry Hauptman and our way of corralling any sort of school child into our circle for poetry. All kids chimed in how they wrote their own poems. There's hope eternal! To my new daughter in law Becky, violin floating with her walk. Susan, ever there at every match. For our neighbors on the street, Brattleboro Books, and their 75,000 used books and how they put up well with customers who would duck off the sidewalk into the store and ask, nodding back toward us, "Were (we) a religious group?" Yes, religiously spiritual!

Thanks to each and every passersby who left us heartfelt donations in the violin case. Every penny went to New Orleans musicians, and more will follow.

I've made invitations to other poets and musicians to come along and work with me, and we'll keep at the readings wherever we can find a patch of sunshine to stand in, come winter. All you can do is invite.

Networking continues with good folks in the devastated Gulf region like Dennis Formento of Slidell, LA (across from New Orleans) and his very fine Surregional Press. Here is his recent contribution to the Scratch My Brain blog which will make connections for any of you to tap into.

"Monday, October 03, 2005

For New Orleans
Regarding "Woodburners We Recommend": Poet Bob Arnold writes, publishes, and distributes books in Guilford, Vermont. He is currently raising money to help displaced New Orleans musicians through street busking: poetry and fiddle, guitar and verse. You get so used to big bureaucratic relief efforts, Red Cross, FEMA, these sometime giants who arrive in your ruined neighborhood, stay a month, and then take off for the next disaster, that you lose sight of what one person can do to assist. A nation of activists is what we need. Yesterday Bob raised $40 on the streets that he's sending on to a musicians' relief effort. Today he sent $100 to a fund established by Preservation Hall. It takes just a little, to mean a lot...

Each one, reach one.

The poem below, by Mikhail Horowitz, was published by Bob Arnold in his Woodburners We Recommend series and is available as a postcard for $5 American money. Bob's "mission statement" for the Woodburners' series follows the poem..." – Please go to http://scratchmybrain.blogspot.com/ for more of this and other postings.

LATE AFTERNOON SIDEWALK READINGS (Elliot Street, Brattleboro, Vt):
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11 October: poets Bob Arnold & James Koller read their poems.
Bert Koller on guitar & music aura

8 October: Bob Arnold reads, Becky Arnold on violin

7 October: poets Bob Arnold & Greg Joly read their poems & other works, 4:30-6 pm

(all above subject to rainouts, or look for them under a nearby overhang!)

all donations to benefit New Orleans Musicians' Hurricane Relief Fund.
online Sidewalk news & updates on readings at: http://www.LonghousePoetry.com/sidewalk.html

 

copyright Bob Arnold 7 Oct 2005

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Great guns! I'm having all sorts of mail coming in after everyone watched the two nights in a row Dylan/Scorsese No Direction Home. And everyone seems to have watched. I was receiving mail after the first night, because people were just itching for the second night to roll around and needed to talk about it. Mail from around America, UK, into Europe. PBS/BBC doing their thing. Sorry about the censoring of language because PBS folks missed Baez roll into a classic and ribald Dylan as mimicked by Baez remembrance jingle. A friend in the Bahamas can't swing a copy of the dvd for maddening shipment reasons, so I offer to find him one, and of course find out everyone has sold out. The fun starts, but I'll locate a copy for him. It honestly feels like the very week Highway 61 came out when I was a kid and everyone owned a copy. If you didn't, I didn't want to know you. There is that incredibly poignant tribal essence and momentum - if but for a moment - between Monday through Tuesday...I'd ask every adult to try to maintain that, retrieve it, we just may be next to nothing without it.

On a second viewing of the film I am just as glued to the scene - part Dylan wonder continuing, mostso the wonder of the era. Our folks had World Wars. We're likewise allowed to be proud, and flaunt our time. You'll be dead soon enough. Besides, we're in a War that just won't end, since Vietnam. Three cheers, in the film, for the editor allowing a segment of Peter LaFarge to remain; and he's in motion. Where else are you going to see Pete Seeger? ...he's a champ, and he's nowhere else on television, radio or magazines. A glimpse, because they're freaks, to: Bremser, Romney, Orlovsky, O'Hara & beatific others etc., but a glimpse has always been enough. There's plenty of books where they come from if you dig and dig and dig. The film's two support columns are: John Cohen on all things traditional folk adventure; and a wizened better-mood- than-last-time Tony Glover, with some of the sweetest insights on Dylan's movements and meanings. Even his tone of voice is perfectly crazed mystical, plus razor sharp. Bob Neuwirth is Dylan's ghost of Christmas past, a key player. I've written about most of the others but you just had to love Izzy Young appearing to be in a lit dungeon, unspecified, with filing cabinets and a robust energy to Villon his way out. Too bad Scorsese made the film since his mood is already fixed, exaggerated, a made up mind from the time. There just has to be another young, wily documentary bestial sort, like the original DA Pennebaker of his time, where someone with money could shove a camera and accessories into these hands and say, "Go shoot. Don't complain. Be invisible." On the other hand, it's remarkable Scorsese is still up for it. His fame got the film placed and planted. Today, famous people don't have to do anything, and they're worshiped as doing something. Very good of the Italian-American director, who readily admits in a later interview: if Dylan hadn't gone electric, he would have never heard of him.

Back at the Ranch -

"one should always go further than one should go" - Cocteau

This is what happened the other day on the sidewalk during readings for raising funds for musicians and Preservation Hall in New Orleans....

...The weather was a delight. I went into Brattleboro and read poetry for 90 minutes on the sidewalk with Becky, my daughter-in-law, she sawing with elegance on her violin (nearing the depth tone of a cello). Susan stayed with us throughout it all. Like new 'parents' to this young woman we can't resist being overwhelmed by her taking on this act, freewheelin', thinking up something to do on the spur of the moment with poetry, and how gorgeous and lifting-high each note floats out over the street. A moment later we find out all the power on this side of town is out. People are on the street, clerks wander from their darkened, worthless stores, in a dead volt instance this corner of town is moving and thinking at foot-speed. It's yummy for a poet.

We attracted all sorts of folks. The energy level was mesmerizing, because there was an old mechanic I once knew, in one of his other lifetimes/my other lifetimes, sitting in a car with his wife right at the curb near me as I read. As we worked out music & poetry, he rolled his window down a crack. I was able to chase by hand gesture his young grandchild out of the vehicle to come hear a poem about deer hunters. As I read, my young participant watched me closely. When I was done I asked what he thought of the poem; tiny, 10 years old. The child pointed to my belt and said I had "something on my pants." I looked down. There was a hornet climbing up. Great kid. Poem was hornet.

Then I saw three teenage guys come around Becky as she played, and one seemed to be teasing on her as she tried to swoon some Gershwin...the kid was mouthing off Beck lyrics. I told him, "nah nah nah, come with me"...as I tugged his sleeve and brought him into the open onto our brick 'stage' of a sort, and said, "Fire away". Good of him: out came the Beck in a steady stream a la Subterranean Homesick Blues. When he was done, I smiled, then said: "Maybe now it's your turn (looking at all three guys) to listen to one from me?" They nodded. I took out the Henri Michaux poem for them by Louise Landes Levi's hand translating. A poem Michaux wrote deep back in the other century, for the masses/for the one, for boys who would die in wars. These three boys listen. Closely. A ton of shattered nerves and attention smattered problems and rotten schools, neighborhoods, families, bodies, down to the molecular infinity of hopelessness, and they're listening. Looking at one another to see if the other one was listening. He was, so they are. It's always how it works.

They dug it.

I went into my books of bear poem, love poem, farm poem: after the third poem, one of the guys asked, "Are these all by the same poet?.. I like them." I nodded. "Yep, they are. By me." Me becomes him because I'm standing right in front of him. We can talk. Touch. Breath/breath again. Sound goofy? Well, for years now I haven't seen anything work better, just worse.

"Really!": they jumped. Then they wanted to buy all my books out of my hands. Kids. No money. All heart. Suddenly they had money. Who was planning on selling books? Not me! A few dollars, each day, in the till has been the m.o. for weeks now. I was left with an old ragged volume of selected poems I made up years ago for a reading session. Becky started playing violin again. It's amazing, like a large bird leaving the ground. Wing span.

Every face looks radiant.

Carson strolls up from his music store and is thrilled at all the street action around us. I went up to the old mechanic's open window, creeping down lower, he's still there, and asked, "Do you want to hear a poem?""Sure", he says. Trying to sit up straighter. A cane at his legs. I read him a poem about the time I built a stone building ("Specifics"). The other guy in the poem is a mutual friend - the mechanic doesn't know this until I get to that part - the beam in his eyes spans centuries when he looks up at me.

Breath.

Today we're setting up our little scene of milk crate, violin case, our miniature classy poster and ready to whirl. An old guy, whiskered and sassy, is standing there and wonders aloud: "Where are the two pretty girls who were with you yesterday?" Ah, showbiz! I have Greg with me today and say to smart-as-a-whip, "Isn't Greg pretty enough for you?" The old one gets right to the point, studying Greg's hair halfway down his back, "Are you a man or a woman?" he quips. Greg tugs on his beard and grins. Then we made nothing after almost two hours of reading poems about local losers like ourselves in the backwoods. Some grandchildren think these same losers are heroes. Trucks, dogs, chain saws, old boots, seasonal clothing. During the last half-hour two 12 year old girls appear like what can only be called magic. One is clasping a paperback copy of In Cold Blood. The other's straight out of great blond tomboy fame. I ask if they'd like to hear some poems. Like my mechanic, they're quick with a "Surrreee!" And they're right there, ready to listen. Some love poems get passed out, since that is actually their request. The woman I wrote them for decades ago, years ago, a moment ago, is standing on the sidewalk watching. Smiling. These little girls like that fact, I can see that....so a certain unannounced gift is exchanged between us all. Sound goofy? Show me something better. A dollar in their hands is $100 in their parents hands, but bless their hearts, they leave us $2 for our time. We say goodbye and close the violin case up. A fellow and his wife walking home from work want to leave $5..."Can we?" he asks. "Sure!" we all chime in, as the bill is slipped under the strap that keeps the case closed.

"Don't shit in camp" - old old saying

We've been angry, we've been bitter, we wise ones who know it all and sit with royal arts to explain it all one more jaded, ugly, senseless, erudite way. As if we're smarter than Emerson. Time's up. We need to hug.

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WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : BOB DYLAN / IF YOU ARE NOW 50 YEARS OR OLDER, YOU WERE THERE

We watched the Dylan / Scorsese dvd last night, No Direction Home, spanning the music of the artist's mercurial wonder years of the 1960s. Of co