New from Woodburners December 17, 2006 ~ OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

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Earlier 2006 Woodburners Little Leaves, King Harvest / Patricia Smith / HIS MUSIC BENT, JAMES L. WEIL (1929 — 2006) / !MPEACH / JF I R E W O R K S / A Barn, Some Books, The Birds / June Coda / June Bug Rattle Screen / Called Back / Remembering Hui-Ming Wang / A Gary Snyder Visit / Remembering Ian Hamilton Finlay / April Showers / Dennis Weaver / Woodburners Celerates A Few Recent Films & March In Like A Lion / Together Forever / Farewells / Valentine / What You Will Not Hear / Winter News

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

! We celebrate in solidarity the street cry hurrah for the end of Pinochet !

So many fine and wholesome and good to share things in the mail recently, or off the street, or given. The eternal given. The more I look at this degenerate government, leadership, and role playing of the greater artist - I'd rather fly away. I once met a phantom up in the dark November backwoods of Vermont, near ski country, where deaths are becoming a usual thing. Another shot dead on a back road just the other day. Along a river washing cold mountain water from some unknown place, from a drop. But once upon a time out in the woods looking for someone, I came upon this phantom. And this hooded smelly one, varmint sprayed, peered out of his cave clothing when I queried and spoke back with simple truths: "Nope" and "Yup". Then he flew down through the trees, blackened as they were in the heavy rain, and was gone. Not bad for a guy I later found out was well over 70 years old.

Anne Waldman has a new and pretty interesting book out, and it's all Anne. High spirit and gifting photographs of old gone pals and poets and retaining the whole: Outrider (La Alameda), poems, essays and interviews you won't get out of the poetry community without knowing sometime in your life. May as well begin. And how did this poem epitomize what I've termed the "Outrider" tradition since 1974 when Allen Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University? The Outrider holds a premise of imaginative consciousness. The Outrider rides the edge - parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream, whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of "negative capability", but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the Outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual "insider". The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.

After the above, the poet I would then go to seek immediately and immerse, and there is the book coming forth to follow, Joanne Kyger, About Now. I haven't held the book yet, but at 800 pages, and Collected, and that means at least 40 years of poetry and living, and I have certainly read all the separate books over those 40 years...there will be meaning. Find and read, give away as gift, counsel all booksellers, teachers and readers. Copy a poem from the book and pin up on a tree, post, laundromat wall where all best readers still congregate.

Fresh in, I have to reach for the morning mail: Banana Baby, Louise Landes Levi (Supernova info@supernovaedizioni.it) in Italian & English. Louise, vagabond poet/minstrel/seeker in full glory expressionist as painting and words long poem song. From America to Europe and a world called home this poet opens the greatest of hearts vulnerable street fighter and humbled visitor all at one embrace. Stylist par excellence. I dream I exist.

Ah, shoulda and coulda been better Chicago Review/Kenneth Rexroth/sixtieth anniversary issue : meant as a celebration of the celebratory one - anarchist/Chicago/San Francisco/Beat/wunderkind literary man, and it all somehow comes up tired. The best of the gathering is the springfed clutch of Rexroth's correspondence with Zukofsky, Yvor Winters, Jonathan Williams and others. All pertinent and so enriched, as always. The rest of the bunch is satisfactory enough, or else just sapped by the customary inclusion and certainly none lacking with sincerity. Jack Spicer is primo Spicer announcing Rexroth's "death" decades before it happened. Robert Bly comes in with a little more of his tweaked magic in essay form. But where's the ground breakers, where's the physical and unified literary and political dangerous mind, where's the beef? A dead man, buried in Santa Barbara, with an eye to see the Pacific (I went to Rexroth's grave once, the Pacific can be seen if you stand on tip-toes) is the life of the party here! Where is the lust of the young poets and thinkers? Jeezus, Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow are just about tapped out dancing across the stage in a one-two Rexrothian shuffle. I'm sick of listening and watching these two beat an old drum with bleeding fingers for their own pal. Didn't anyone else love this guy? Isn't there anyone out there 25 years old with a hardon for something other than themselves? The cover to the issue is pretty ugly even though the poet drew it of himself. Rexroth couldn't have been more wrong about Gertrude Stein (and time has proven him wrong) but it is about the one and only time he was so flat wrong since almost everything else he wrote and said and spoke and scripted into poetry and translation could be massaged or taken apart and used elsewhere and serviced. Listen to him for a moment here. It's raw and sensational and garnished with a disappearing expertise, as shared with Jonathan Williams by letter in 1951: Like a pianist or violinist - you can't be an artist without long hours of constant practice. This is the training - then you've got to get out & put it to use. Work as a gandy dancer or harvest hand or longshoreman - go to sea - get locked up often - jive your affairs with waitresses and cannery girls & whores - work for a bookie - etc. etc. See it all, get your nose in the sweaty armpits of real people. And keep away from dilettantes - potters, weavers, and [ ] dancers. I don't wish you any hard luck, but Danbury will do you a lot more good than Black Mountain - if you throw your lot in with the cons and avoid the martyred do-gooders.
Almost all poets today were kids who couldn't climb trees, swim, or wrassle and were afraid of rough games - so they read Edgar Rice Burroughs, played with themselves, and eventually took to Art. They are poets because they are incompetents. Nobody gives a damn about poetry except a few other malformed freaks like themselves who know less than they do - so they can get away with anything & anything at all. Read Glass Hill, Inferno, Golden Goose, etc, etc. It's not a question. Anybody could do it. Almost anybody could do it better. If you could run a lathe, rope a cow, dig a ditch, fix a car, or fuck a woman, you could do better than anybody in the little poetry magazines after about two hours coaching.

Rough stuff. And amen. I read this aloud to my wife Susan who studied with Kenneth Rexroth in Santa Barbara 1969 and she nodded her head with glee. She also said the don of 'poetry & song' (the name of his class) seemed a bit smug and self-contained when seen walking the campus all alone. Drab, baggy clothing. And a face of radiance. It's not an easy chore gathering these special issues of kings, and the Chicago Review has recently gone wonderfully overboard with galas for Louise Zukofsky, Edward Dorn and now Rexroth. Long ago I would have thought one to Lorine Niedecker would have been absolute - even before Zukofsky - but let's wait and watch, there's always hope a new day may be dawning.

For a new journal exciting each issue, colossal to hold and just begin to wade into, packed with surprise and even much of the same gimmie (same poets all the time all issues everywhere else, blah blah blah) but done with a splendor all its own and with massive appetite for showcasing past/present poets: in this issue it's Dallas Wiebe's "The Kansas Poems" just for starters. Man, I do love their gusto! Edited by Deb Klowden & Ben Lerner - NO: a journal of the arts (www.nojournal.com)

Meanwhile, don't be silly, it's now on the bookshelves staring out at us with the best poetic glare ever: The Complete Poetry, Cesar Vallejo (U/Cal Press) edited & translated by Clayton Eshleman and decades of work and persistence and belief to see this come, and be made from the hands who know quite exactly how to design a book per poet. See their press work on Olson, Creeley, Berrigan, Niedecker collections just for starters. Like naming a sail boat or a race horse, this press stamps a quality from head to toe. The photograph of Vallejo is magnificent. Just look at the size of the tiny book he holds in his hungry hands. Remove the book jacket and it's night time, death time, solace. Whether they are the best translations the poet ever wrote no longer matters. These are the poems at the present moment, in quantity, in flush, maximus and finally. Spend all your rent and own it for the rest of your life. And female is the soul of the absent-she / And female is my own soul.

While reading Vallejo/Eshleman think a moment of Virginia Woolf. Sure, it's possible. Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. What Mary Ann Caws will sum up so elegantly in her equally elegant and delicate book on translation (perfect to go head to head with the Vallejo, so own both) Surprised In Translation (Chicago) Caw's has this to offer about Woolf : It is clear right here, in this moment, that delight is associated with thought, and with the lack of knowledge. We think about, we delight in thinking about, that which we do not yet know, like this wood and this tree. Thought radiates out from the center, not in a straight line: this is modernism, the nonlinear. See what grows and permits growth, and what does not.

----------

TUBA

The dance of differing
orthographies is all
but forgotten now.
Her stomach spoke
an ancient fish language
of the Cui ui ticutta.
His stomach chattered
ancient squirrel words
of the Koop ticutta.
Now their grown kids eat
tuba once in a red moon
and talk only by e-mail.
He dares not boss her around
anymore-Lord, if he did, she
might inhale Jim Beam and
race to the Indian cemetery
and piss on the grave
he so foolishly keeps
crawling out of.

-Adrian C. Louis
Logorrhea (Triquarterly. 2006)

------------

I have always enjoyed coming upon an essay or even letter from E.L. Doctorow in an issue of "The Nation". In a slim book collection of essays - not as exciting. Creationists, selected essays 1993-2006 (Random House) does have some sharp thinking about Mark Twain and Melville composing Moby-Dick, and even more on Harpo Marx and Albert Einstein, and an exceptional last chapter on "The Bomb". If Doctorow has anything, and he has much, it's his one or two line skill at distilling a whole chapter. Plus his fine eye character to Americana, now a very old and fussy word. Civilization is buying and selling people, and working them to death. Civilization is a vicious, confidence game played on a field of provincial ignorance.

I about died (in love) when I saw how fine this book looked - a royal original jim dandy of a book with gatefold covers and a photograph of the author James Laughlin as done up like a snapshot on the cover. Inside The Way It Wasn't (New Directions 2006), the author's quasi-autobiography since he was still penning all about his life when he passed away at 83. So this is the decorative and colorful files from the work in progress, and being mostly about others from a man who cared a great deal about others. It makes a very attractive story - from ancestors to Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky - with the author's alter ego Hiram Handspring, and Handspring's - well, blond pussy glossy - smack in the middle of the book. Long before Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes gave being an American a very bad name, we had the likes of Emerson, Twain, Stein, Ives, Miller, Robeson, Partch, Fuller, Patchen, Cage, X, Dorothy Day, Merton, Kerouac, Pynchon, Dylan, and rich guys like steel mill heir James Laughlin, who made books for ever single poet I've ever met to have in their libraries. And he wrote some great poems himself. A chip off the old Huck Finn.

Speaking of Huck Finn, Neal Cassady, the fast life of a Beat hero, David Sandison and Graham Vickers (Chicago) has the very best photograph of the mysterious LuAnne Henderson in it - probably shot by Cassady. It also may be the best portrait yet of the angel-headed hipster since it pays proper attention to Carolyn Cassady's side of the story, and less on rumor and grandstanding. But I'm taking my time reading and so are the writers etching this story. With few than 100 pages left it is only 1951, Cassady is 25 years old, been married three times and has two kids and Jack Kerouac and he have already lived on the road. In fact Kerouac has just finished writing his masterpiece that year in a three week pill-popped marathon. It will be six more long years before Cassady is even a blip on the screen for the rest of the world to know of his whereabouts in the published On the Road, as Dean Moriarty. There is only so much that can be retouched about a legend.

Quite suddenly everything is coming up comic books, comic artists, major collections (like S. Clay Wilson, don't go without it) and one of the finest has to be In the Studio, visits with contemporary cartoonists (Yale) - brilliantly focused and designed, with length interviews with the likes of these characters - Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Jaime Hernandez, Gary Panter, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware...how can it go wrong? It don't.

Now for some common sense, for a closer, from the late David Schubert - 1941, his introduction to Five Young American Poets (New Directions):

A SHORT ESSAY ON POETRY

A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human sense, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of the vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gayety by contrast with the burden it carries - for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry's career, perhaps new awarenesses are discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.

Music on while I wrote: Eric Anderson "The Street Was Always There", Wes Montgomery "Smokin' at the Half Note" (with some of the finest Wynton Kelly), Tengir-Too "Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan", Michael Cooney, "Singer of Old Songs" ....various Dylan bootlegs, Billie Holiday on the hallway turntable, The Beatles "Love" (George Martin's orgy), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution "Whale and Porpoise Voices","Baila! a Latin Dance Party", Jeff Beck, "You Had It Coming", Ann-Margret "Let Me Entertain You", Bo Carter "Bo Carter's Advice"

- Bob Arnold

17 Dec 06

 

CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS!

 

At the foot of a hill where children are playing
a dainty stream babbles
It does not realize that very soon
it will be the sea

- Ko Un

 

FULL MOON OVER FALLUJA

Well, now we know they are lighting up the night sky with white phosphorus,
better able to see midnight skin melting into bone. What country is it
that would send such harsh chemical fire into a neighborhood?
In occupied territories of Palestine, a father has donated organs of his son,
murdered by Israeli army, to a congregation of six, both Jewish and
Muslim. If this doesn't shame the violent of all nations into melting
their weapons, what will? Tonight, let children of earth sleep in peace
under a full moon, let skin remain the body's best organic protection,
let bones stay cool and covered--in a thousand years there will be
plenty of time for our skulls to rest in warm earth & give thanks.

- Eliot Katz (When the Skyline Crumbles, poems for the Bush years / Cosmological Knot Press: ekatz57@earthlink.net )

Eliot Katz is a poet and activist and such a warm-hearted soul as he so clearly comes across in each one of his books. A poet who can function most anywhere: urban blight, needs of the homeless and community action, at the barricade long against injustices, out in the Canadian Rockies with the love of his life. What in the world's not to like! The above poem comes from one of Eliot's latest chapbooks rummied with power. This book and his Unlocking the Exits (Coffee House) is a must for any poetry library. I mean must, folks.

Like a bird on a wire: say three birds on a wire one may have if looking for a fine evening at home with an old film, don't hesitate with Michelangelo Antonioni's (bird one), mid70s film The Passenger (bird two) or with Jack Nicholson (bird three) starring and offering commentary throughout the film in present day cracking elder voice and conversational ease, sincere 'Jack' personal reflection and dramatic science.

Here's a new book legacy in the making: I recently caught up with Cormac McCarthy by scooping out of a book sale drips and drabs his novel No Country for Old Men (Knopf). The book sat for a few weeks staring at me each time I walked through a particular room at home. I left it that way as a reminder to read. I'd gone through my grassfire phase of reading all McCarthy's books in one fell swoop and probably needed a few years respite, and so sold more of him from our bookshop than I was reading. The flaring red dust jacket of the novel was beckoning. In the early Fall I picked up the novel for a long distance drive with Susan and figured to begin reading the book aloud, and lo and behold, ran 150 pages quickly into the book, aloud no less, and soon we we're deep into guys with guns in the southwest gamed with deadly drugs. It got to be too much male bang-bang for Susan, so later that day I curled up in my slippers and read the rest of the book long into the night; only to receive an email from Texas friend and poet Kim Dorman that he was just starting McCarthy's newest novel The Road, with its particularly stark dark cover and he couldn't put the blooming thing down. How heavenly to think I could now go from modern Texas town shootouts (cheap motels get zonked) in one McCarthy novel, to The Road where a father & young son & pistol traipse the post-paradise earth in ashen misery with everything vanquished and people eating people. I could hardly wait. I said so to Dale Smith who was just writing to me from his Austin school headquarters where Charles Whitman, famed sniper, smacked bullet chips into the limestone building where Dale was writing from. Dale and Kim are friends in town but I don't think Dale knew yet Kim had flashed through The Road, but he was on his way within seconds to get his own copy after I spilled my guts; and by email #2 within a day he was chompin' at the McCarthy bit, a writer who has situated quite a few of his recent novels in the no man's land of the greater southwest with no borders. A buzzard doesn't fly in proportion to borders. Tommy Lee Jones shot his film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in this same Cormac McCarthy terra incognito. You think you know where you are -but, man there is a lot of space. In McCarthy, dialogue isn't enhanced by punctuation, rather by the reader's immersed involvement. "An American Beckett here", as John Martone just wrote to me a second ago; midwestern John also disappearing into McCarthy. Beckett meets Bradbury, it had to happen. You're with McCarthy, or your not. There is an evolution of knowing exactly how the novel is working that occurs alive in your hands. The book literally becomes threatening. I'm looking across the room at my copy of The Road waiting for me. It is.The starving father and son, the cache of canned fruit they have just discovered in one more abandoned home cellar.Two pages earlier the duo fell upon another cellar writhing with naked human beings lodged by cannibal survivalists stalking what is left of the planet Earth. Depending on your age, you side with the father or son or both in your interpretation. The power of the book is what is missing, which is almost everything you are familiar with...except your soul and defenses. I've another writer friend, David Giannini, living up east where I am who has been reading the book in deep drunk droughts as he picks the book up in expertise reading habits from various bookshop locations. There has to be a buzzard ability to read a buzzard. Shoot one down, cut it open, unbelievably, it also has a heart. Susan's staying clear of me when I'm holding The Road in my paws.

Huh? - while hanging a glass door I was listening to school marm Bob Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour" and I believe he just said that blues singer Etta James was the daughter of Minnesota Fats! Did I hear that right? I was running a drill at the moment, but I grew up on both these two, and even if it isn't true I'm believing in it from now on. A long time ago I read Fats' book on shooting pool the same week as Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (a title that only gets finer). I also want to imagine Dylan is steering this whole radio program by himself - between tunes deep in vinyl record piles, thick-thumbed books, research volumes he is mumbling through and ready to spin us another nugget tidbit of music history. I know he has an armory of researchers at the helm, but he's chattering away with tap-dancing confidence.

While I was writing about Dylan's show, I was already thinking of what I might say about the late Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, a poet I almost forgot about from the early 70s until his translator and caregiver Mark Terrill sent me his excellent slim volume of Brinkmann poems Like A Pilot, selected poems 1963-1970 (SRLR Press, PO Box 19228, Austin, TX 78760-9228). There is no easy example to place before you of a Brinkmann poem. The whole guy is a high wire act, and the poems mingle like the Milky Way. He's right up there with Roland Barthes, Randall Jarrell and Frank O'Hara - meaning, all unfortunate victims of being run down dead by vehicles - and come to think of it, he joins their mind pantheon as well. A poet from near Brinkmann's same Europe and certainly ice skater's verve and swirl, would be Cralan Kelder. Both poets with such a tease at language and living. I'll try to put them both in a pullman coach for you here, though I already know it's impossible since they insist at spreading like scattershot. Brinkmann you can find via this exceptional book of poems. Cralan is newly wed and a sweet guy, already published by Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts at Coracle, and Longhouse, so expect years ahead of more fine books. Plus John Martone and I are nitching-in Cralan for the forthcoming and very last blast of Origin. More on that in 2007. I imagine crooked mouth Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino from the film Sea of Love as the cinematic equivalents to many of Brinkmann's poems -

NOT HERE It was a room which she slowly filled or it was a movement that she made or just that she was there and stayed. Considering the time of day the opportunity was to his advantage. The time she stayed and still more. The movement, the confusion. How together they saw through the confusion. They almost could have said we're happy. -Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (trans. Mark Terrill)

CALL FROM TOKYO attic room lying on a small bed in southern Holland end of "summer" it's August, and she said "no deal this year" as far as I can tell. All "summer" clouds rolling in like free samples of a new drink. window open listen to rain. pretend we're camping. girl calls on telephone. somebody in Tokyo loves me. I love somebody in Tokyo. maybe that's the whole poem. she's leaving Tokyo soon in an hour or two, but I'll still love her. - Cralan Kelder from Cralan Kelder. night falls and is slow to get up. Longhouse, 2005.

 

~

 

We didn't head into much of the annual Brattleboro Literary Festival this year, held the last five years around Columbus Day. It had more to do with the weather being just too woodcutting perfect, which is what we were doing, or even for eating picked apples out in the sun. And we did that too. In fact, the festival has gone from its first year apple- tasty to almost a bowl of waxed fruits. Not all of this can be blamed on the dedicated organizers who are, after all, working on volunteer time and genuine interest, along with the usual slumming with a most general MFA pursuit. For the most part, the writers drawn are academic, institutional, or rolling in the big time...and the audience these days hankers for that. Don't blame it on the organizers who are simply feeding the people crackers they want. Post a list of classic "Nobodys" to read in any festival and no one's coming. But man, have those been the best readings in my experience! I've got an imaginary public readers list 100-strong that no one's attending. Believe-you-me. I can't imagine anyone tolerating an unknown writer presenting the same drivel I heard a famed one reading at the festival - after she forewarned us she does not like to read her own work (which she was about to do) and usually only reads for money - but she was making an exception for us. Famous names have got us all stuck. And this in the same festival that over the years has had Ruth Stone in blinding antics with clarified sincerity, Saul Bellow in sit-down conversational tone like Augie March had just hit town, and William Gass sweeping the rafters of a church in storytelling heaven. It can happen. This year it was Martin Espada, stalwart, sweaty, and sleeves rolled up putting the make on the poems of Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca and even tenderhearted gone broken Miguel Hernandez with such an Orson Wellian ceremony, and switch-hitting between Spanish and English and never losing the luster betwixt translation. Masterful. Companionable. There was a sweetness in his body language and words. For these four dead freedom fighters, one should give thanks to Espada. And for dropping in, like a snowflake, a poem by Genevieve Taggard; who, whether Espada knows it or not (he made no mention), once lived around these Brattleboro hills.

Such exquisite color left in the Vermont back hills and we've been hiking and working in them every day. Midway through October and at 1000 feet the fern beds remain buoyant and happy green along the trail, under the yellow birch, dodging the frost that wiped out their kin lower down beside the river with us. We've been cutting wood, splitting up two to three truck loads a day and stacking the beech, ash, red oak and sugar maple into cord-size cairns since I'm away from stone work; so I may as well stack the wood to season as if stone. Solid mounds. Stay in practice. We stapled the "Bernie for US Senate" onto one of the cairns facing down the hill to the road. That's Bernie Sanders: Independent, the first live body I've ever endorsed for a government seat, even though I think he'd do more good as our governor - where he'd have better earth to hoe in. And my how the smallest maple leaves have fallen off those destitute trees that were stripped by caterpillars of first growth foliage in May, and returned by late July with at least a second leafing. These leaves the size of a baby's hand, candy orange and red, dreamy to come across brightening up through the trail. Overnight it could snow, smack a deadly frost, so don't blink.

 

"You get outta the fuckin car -
No! you get outta the fuckin car
No! you get outta the fuckin car.
No! you get outta the fuckin car.
No! you get outta the fuckin car..."

{more choice moments from today's American cinema 101 - just punch into any film channel available and be sure to have brain-dead script masterpieces starring The Rock, Snoop Dogg and of course Bruce Willis. I reach, instead, for my copy of Kiss Me Deadly}

 

Sean Casey at The Chuckwagon (valleyarts.blogspot.com / casey.st@comcast.net) continues to whack out of the park great little publications, stapled and simple as pie. Dave Newman's Midnight is the latest treat of poetry from the work place, complete with a young junkie ("Don") as your job supervisor. All I can say is I'm glad both my grandmothers have passed on to a better world. In the meantime we have worksite poets creamed in irony like Dave Newman, sharing why little works right anymore when you go to buy a fuel cap at your local hardware store (if you even have a hardware store in town. Home Depot is not a hardware store). The whole of this poetry collection can be read in ten minutes of a long poem salvo, plus it's got heart and edge -

Don hadn't had a driver's license
since his first bust at sixteen.
He lost his license, then got
busted driving drunk
down a one way street,
so they doubled his license
suspension, and so on, forever.

I said, "How do you get to work?"

He said, "I drive."

- Dave Newman

 

Such a lovely book of poems - and his first, at age 80, after running with the ever famous Berkeley Renaissance dogs in the 40s - Duncan, Spicer, Blaser - and publishing sporadic gems from 1955-60, he let it all go elsewhere for the next 43 years. A gush returned from 2003-05 making the gist of Everything Preserved, Landis Everson (Graywolf). I'd pick any poem in the book as an excellent example of steering right. That's a sharp 100 pages with no mistakes. The first poem to turn my head -

FAMINE

In the middle of the night at least twenty deer
Came out upon my pillow to graze.
Gazing down at me with sad, round eyes,
Their pointed hooves quilting my pillow.

And I thrashed gently in sleeplessness,
Moving not to disturb them, wondering
At the famine this year that forces so many
To roam to poor, unfamiliar pastures.

The moon through the window throws cold light
Upon their curved backs, making a forest
Of crossed antler shadows on sheets
That until now have been flawless and starved.

- Landis Everson

 

     From about the late 1500's to the 18th century, many thousands of European men - and women - converted to Islam. Most of them lived and worked in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Rabat-Sale area of Morocco - the so-called Barbary Coast States. Most of the women became Moslems when they married Moslem men. This much is easy enough to understand, although it would be fascinating if we could trace the lives of some of them in search of some 17th century Isabelle Eberhardt? But what about the men? What caused them to convert?
     Christian Europeans had a special term for these men: Renegadoes, "renegades": apostates, turncoats, traitors. Christians had some reason for these sentiments, since Christian Europe was still at war with Islam. The Crusades had never really ended. The last Moorish kingdom in Spain, Grenada, was added to the Reconquista only in 1492, and the last Moorish uprising in Spain took place in 1610. The Ottoman Empire, vigorous, brilliant, and armed to the teeth (just like its contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobean England), pressed its offensive against Europe on two fronts, by land toward Vienna, and by sea westward through the Mediterranean.

from, Pirate Utopias, Moorish corsairs & European renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia)

- the opening chapter to a fascinating book by a renegade chronicler mining the dark secrets from the 17th c. Pirate Republic of Sale in Morocco to old New York. Small world.

 

R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (Abrams) introduction by Terry Zwigoff. Don't be confused - master artist R. Crumb didn't write the nifty text for each of these portraits of dead greats he's drawn like no one else. I wish he had, since I'm curious. The text portraits are concise literary wonders by Stephen Calt, David Jasen and Richard Nevins, and my hat's off to the three for an evening of reading pleasure. Many of Crumb's full color illustrations have been packaged other ways in the past: box set cards, in pages of "The New Yorker" and elsewhere. Now in one book, under $20, glossy, compiled by Crumb and with a 21 song CD salute hosting Charley Patton to Fats Waller to the Carter Family. One of the books for the Old Ways Good Ways, not to be without.

 

"What's that you say, Pa?"
"Dare's no more Underground!"
"But Pa, dare is-dare is..."
...just take a look at what slipped out of its tyvek envelope this morning from the mail Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal #7 edited by t. moore with a black & white cover photograph of a longhair beaded necklace savant who I swear is the spitten-image of the guy who sold to me Leonard Cohen's LP Songs of Love and Hate way back in 1970 from what used to be our hometown pool hall. Inside the journal spills out all sorts of poetry, song and chants by none other than Ira Cohen, Richard Meltzer, Lee Ranaldo, Byron Coley, Mike Watt and a slaughter of others, including Charles Plymell kicking off his poem "I Got A Call to Make" like this -

Whose got a cell phone
I got a call to make
Hey god I wanna talk to you
leaving us sticking to a piece of space matter
like orphans in eternal fear not knowing why we're here

There's more where that came from www.ecstaticpeace.com

 

If you are one who has ever been on the receiving end of one of Ed Baker's loony moments, take heart, he's a loving man who does good work with calligraphy brush stroke, paintings, howlin' at the moon haiku and comes out of Fort Baker somewhere in the same town John Fahey hailed from: Takoma, Maryland...and in fact Ed just had published his poem to Fahey Along the Sligo (Country Valley Press, 1407 Mission St, unit A, Gardnerville, NV 89410-7221), and as editor and publisher has christened the good ship Dozen (a baker's dozen) issue #1 with featured work by Chuck Sandy & John Vieira, along with a supporting cast of characters which sits mighty pretty from where I'm reading it: Bob Arnold, Ed Baker, Shizumi Corman (a rare sighting of Cid Corman's love of life/wife Shizumi's calligraphy), Ted Enslin, David Giannini, John Levy, John Martone, John Perlman, John Phillips, Jeremy Seligson, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk. each page / a book // every word / more so. Go for it: ed baker@sdf.lonestar.org

Ever seen a moose trained to drag loads with a homemade travois? Go to page 32 of Adolf Hungrywolf, The Tipi : traditional native american shelter (Native Voices /PO Box 99/ Summertown, TN. 38483) and the book is a treasure trove album of historical photographs and text outlining the development and use of tipi life and hunting lodges on the North American continent. Plus pointers on how to build a tipi, painted tipis of the Plains tribes and sweat lodges. The personal accounts of Native peoples are invaluable, and the deep-seated knowledge by Hungrywolf ripples the book with annotations and cause. The Apache have medicine to find a lost horse. The old man who had it died last week. Formerly the Kiowa, too, had this medicine. A small buffalo skin tipi was set up inside of the big tipi. People sat quietly and voices came from inside this small tipi. Four pipes lay on the ground. The medicine man said, "I am calling the old people long since dead." "Ha! Ha! Yes! Yes!" "You smoke!" "What do you want?" "A horse is lost?" "Of what color?" The medicine man tells its color. "Yes, I see it." "Where?" "Over there." "Drive it this way!...So in the morning I find it."

Music that's been playing all along while I've been writing: The Jive Five (doo-wop specialists) ~ The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker ~ Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass Whipped Cream & Other Delights Re-whipped ~ Sunday Nights, the songs of Junior Kimbrough ~ Julian Summerhill, The Hologram Cowboys Lay Down With Their Horses ~ Shirley & Dolly Collins, Anthems in Eden ~ Johnny Cash, Personal File ~ Grateful Dead, Birth of the Dead (my favorite dead time) ~ Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil ~ Bo Diddley, 500 Percent More Man ~ Junior Parker, The ABC Collection ~ Julie Driscoll/Brian Auger & The Trinity, Street Noise ~ Rudolf Serkin, A Life ~ Cisco Houston, Cisco Sings ~ Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica, The Russian Seasons ~ the opening theme music jingle to the film A Life Less Ordinary: it's been stuck the last 30 minutes going round & round while I try to tighten this all up.

— Bob Arnold

15 October 06

 

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : KING HARVEST

I would wish to give you
again
             whatever (everything
I have given you
& not take any of it back

— Hilda Morley

I would sit here given the opportunity
and behold the beauty of that face throughout the day

— Sortere Torregian

 

remembering Glenn Ford & Mazisi Kunene

The most recent news about our public readings on the sidewalk — Greg Joly of Bull Thistle Press has letterpress printed a broadside to commemorate our first anniversary of readings for New Orleans musicians with a two poem display by Bob Arnold & Greg Joly. The broadside is limited to only 50 signed numbers and will be available from Longhouse in October. In the meantime, both poets, with others, will continue their weekly reading stint celebrating poetry, rural living, politics & visitation.

For years now I have been advocating books to read that we often don't even have for sale in our own bookshop — talk about a stupid businessman! But I've always been after spacious reading and the spirit of books more than a quick buck. One guy once said to me, "So how does this Internet thing work: you put books up for sale and then you wait for the money to show up in an envelope slipped under your door?" I stood there for a moment after he left in the luxury of imagining a world working that way. A little of it does. Finally I have begun organizing the Longhouse bibliography of 35 years — books, booklets, anthologies, journals, postcards, slips that show up under the door! and I even got silly enough to think I might annotate everything, so I have. To my mind, it is the ultimate Woodburner from our nest. Things we published — with, of course, some of the background history remaining with the underdog, the singer, the barely housed and the sweetly surprised. We'll release the Longhouse bibliography before snow flies like very proud parents.

 

In the meantime, I've been reading James M. Cain's The Butterfly aloud, such sexual and violent restraint all but vanished in today's world of Super-Size me. For most of the films spun from Cain's novels, the right director was on hand. Take a look at the reissued magic of Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder now on dvd. Unfortunately, The Butterfly hasn't yet had the same care, unless you are a Pia Zadora fan. Good enough for the initial flash. Both Morricone and Orson Welles were somehow involved in that one.

 

A moment ago, our mail carrier Vera was honking her delivery truck out at the roadside having a heavy package for us. This is a country custom and won't be quite killed off until all the country folk are gone. Vera was befuddled and then so was Susan, and I got that way feeling the weight of the package when Susan brought it inside, because Charlie Mehrhoff had sent poems and a book as gifts, and the bottom of the package was built out of a 10 x 12 inch rough white pine board. First time that has ever happened. Country girl Vera said it was the first for her, too. Hey, Charlie, I'm going to carve an apple stem bread board out of it. Give it to a loved one.

 

Here's what I picked up the other day at one of our local libraries. I was working off merely the new arrivals on only two shelves. If you want to read: you can find it. I also went on to more reading at the excellent local bookseller's and I mean excellent — one could bow down at just what excellence is given in these times instead of at the scythe of the corporate conglomerate. Of course if we wanted to stop the madness we could — stop buying at malls and box bookstores, and stop paying for the gas — just walk and bicycle. The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions (Noam Chomsky).

On to the list, go find yourself at your library and be excited:

Leonardo's Notebooks ed. H. Anna Suh. (massive, mesmerizing, manrooted)

Cochise, the life and times of the great Apache chief by Peter Aleshire. (maybe the ultimate leader of a warrior people and arguably the only Native American leader to actually win his war with the United States of America)
Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar by Richard Meier

Native and Naturalized Trees of New England and Adjacent Canada, a field guide by Richard M. DeGraaf and Paul E. Sendak. (did you know: the eastern hemlock may take 250 to 300 years to reach maturity and may live for 800 years or more. I renovated our colonial farmhouse in the 70s all with native hemlock, good for centuries more)

Ag Greadath Bas sa Reilig by Louis de Paor. (bilingual Irish/English: a massive songfest difference)

New History of Japanese Cinema by Isolde Standish. (I was mainly hunting down for b. 1960 film swordsman Miike, he's starting to get into the annals)

The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover.

All the Lavish in Common by Allan Peterson.

Remnants of Hannah by Dara Wier.

Timothy Leary, Robert Greenfield.(kudos to a biographer who reveals in his back pages: "As I was laboring to complete this project, someone told me: Those who love Timothy Leary will hate your book. And those who hated him will never read it." A solid document from the multifeathered sixties. Historians will be tearing their hair out for centuries trying to figure the era out. Best to listen to ones that were there, as this author. Photos, deep notes, index, the works.)

film rack: all that was left before a weekend -
Tommy (still a thrill to watch on mute when Ann-Margaret's on screen)

Ran (no wimpy CGI shots in this one — when a towering castle burns down, it's really burning down. Smoke in the faces of all actors. One of the very last of great filmmaking hours and Kurosawa then in his 70s. It was the first film we took Carson to see, at birth. It was late, he got fussy)

Carnival of Souls (if David Lynch ever thought of a remake, grab Gwyneth Paltrow for the lead. I believe it is imperative the director also play the main ghoul as the original director Herk Harvey did)

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (one should never forget Bette Davis, and for that matter, Joan Crawford....plus the commentary is royal)

By the way, I also pointed to, for Susan's sake, Alice Notley's new book of selected poems Grave of Light. I just finished reading my own copy and at around page 80 I became frisky about the book in Susan's company. She asked, "Would I like it?" I nodded like a fool bear with a mouth dripping of honey. Being both territorial with our books — I treat mine like precious stones. Susan doesn't mind if a book falls from her sleepy head off the chair...she coveted the library copy. Rigged for abuse. The clerk at the front desk on check out, tending to all the above, only had a comment about Alice Notley. "So that's what Alice Notley looks like." Said more to Alice's photograph, than to us.

 

Dylan's, Modern Times is not quite as fine as the other things he has been doing the last handful of years, none of his albums have been. Despite the hype and return to form — did it go somewhere? He's actually been the best on his XM radio show "Deep Tracks" where you can hear the maestro twist out tunes and local history and opinions from his grass roots monarchy. Nothing he has since recorded touches what three meritorious albums he recorded during a mere 14 months, light years ago :Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, so let's not get too silly. But Bob Dylan has never stopped either — he's one of the true masters of physically living and doing and sharing what he picked up as a lad from pure rock and roll: listen to the opening sound on Modern Times and hear a memory of Big Joe Turner storm through and through, and then tolerate and grow enchanted by Dylan's incredibly conservative streak of making yet one more album spanning influences from Harry Smith's seminal folk roots anthology of music to (Vermonter) Rudy Vallee and Tiny Tim. Unlike most of the famous who have stopped learning, this guy can't help himself from learning, and so he teaches and preaches weekly on a radio show everything from Hank Snow and Charlie Poole to ZZ Top and Alice Cooper. Never mind a Gwendolyn Brooks poem I just listened to him recite, on the spot, a moment ago. It's a thrill to imagine what you are able to listen to here: not only chosen music, but chosen by one who has ruled rebel music for the last 40 years. Imagine John Coltrane spinning a jazz channel for you each week, and talking to you like an exotic uncle out of work with plenty of records to bring up from the basement. This is where Dylan excels. Also in his autobiography Chronicles, now remaindered at your local bookseller. And from time to time showing up as a guest performer with nothing to lose, so he let's it all hang out. His individual recent records all have a magic but there's so much hype only a martian or a member of the Taliban has any chance to sit down with it and have the ears to shock. We're all programmed. To get out of the program soup it may be best to return to the performer's children's songs, nearly as good as Woody's, and then try the new records, which are slick, topnotch bands, but like Chuck Berry, Dylan always seems to have the most fun with pickup bands in a basement (say) or happenstance. Dare to hear Modern Times as a passerby in a record store loud speakers and you may run for your life — crooner meets lightning blues — from a guy who was never "sixties", even though he manhandled the decade. He's straight 50s, still standing and performing to this day like others from that lost decade: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Fats Domino, Doc Watson, Guitar Shorty, cats all from the North Country.

 

Since poetry may be read as behavior — the particular behavior of the individual poet, whether a Celan, Ginsberg, Niedecker — with that range of humanness. So, too, a small press or journal has its own making if it is really getting at the jam. This brings to mind Philip Rowland's very fine Noon, a hallmark for the short poem from poets worldwide and bound into exquisite Japanese book-making. For a change one is holding a very pretty edition with poems that pack a wallop and none of the poets are identified until the last page where you may map backwards to discover who you have just read. A nice touch of intimacy meets anonymity by the editor. Four issues have so far been released and a fifth shall come in 2007, we are promised: noonpress@mac.com

 

And in proportion as a man has bestirred himself to become awake to his own locality he will perceive more and more of what is disclosed and find himself in a position to make the necessary translations. The disclosures will then and only then come to him as reality, as joy, as release. -William Carlos Williams

I dunno. The other evening I sat in a packed college auditorium and listened to a MacArthur "genius award" recipient read like a mumbling idiot to us all. I realize this sounds terribly cruel, but the reading was cruel to experience — all that potential and gathering of souls wasted on immaculate immaturity and self-aggrandizement. Not even a wit of classical splendor from a poet now of that age. The greatest applause was given back to the poet after a sudden high drama "fuck", spoken with an abrupt refound clarity. One can sense our audiences at once waiting for some reprieve, some solace, some warmth after decades of thoroughbred liars and cheats and squalor. Instead we're falling right into the rank and file at our jaded best. I remember a poet once, only mere weeks before his death, walk to the edge of the stage after shunning the podium, and with the mic in one hand, and a book in the other, in the poorest light imaginable and with nearly blind eyes, read his poems to us while sitting down on the lip of the stage with his legs dangling as if a scene straight out of "The Little Rascals". With us. I can remember Lucille Clifton one winter evening holding a small library room in the palm of her hand. So much of that delicious thinking and being in the early American modernist poets like Williams is just not there in someone like Charles Bernstein, no matter what pilfer the new academy wants to preach to us. Bernstein in his new and playful Girly Man (Chicago) is groomed for more of this scholarly hijinks, hoax, mimicry and fancy, but there is next to no guts or soul to this charade. (so what / at least there's sound / in the verbs). I've been reading and watching for years now an American poetry slide into the same empirical jockeying and domination quite like the little men running our government for the same amount of years, say 25 miserable ones. Just so much fluff. Skip Bernstein's poems and enjoy his nonfiction prose mind; and for the Williams quote — sail away from America, it's now run by poet professionals anyway — and land in the Palestinian lap of Taha Muhammad Ali. Get a load of this locality for soaring:

THE HEIGHT OF LOVE

What makes me love
being alive
is something I can't quite describe,
can't put into words with my pen
or utter aloud...
I love the world, and dreams
set in that forest of light
on the banks of the mystery
of my shameful ignorance
(concerning
the boat's destination
and the journey's goal)
-that at which
I haven't dared
hint or point...

And even if
the days were emptied
of all that was finer
than the reed-flute's rasp,
of all that is more desirable
than the warmth of the winter's fire,
even if they were emptied
of all that is sweeter
than "How are you?"
wafting up
from a winning smile,
I would go on
preferring life
to a thousand deaths!

My enemies' tragedy
however,
owes all to their rush
to rehearse my death —
as a thief is impatient
to get to his specious prayers.
They do not grasp
why
I spend my spirit
like counterfeit coins.
How I could leave
my blood behind?
And decades, decades
of delectation and love —
how could I shed them
for the sake of what I love?

— Taha Muhammad Ali
(So What, Copper Canyon Press 2006)

 

One must sail back to America though, or at least to Paris, where Alice Notley lives, to catch and read one of the finest books of poetry for 2006: Grave of Light (Wesleyan) new & selected poems 1970-2005. Personal preference = I like Notley best around 1977 (though I've never stopped reading her), when she was 30 years ahead of her time with poems that swept the air like this

WHEN I WAS ALIVE

When I was alive
         I wore a thin dress bare
shoulders the heat
         of the white sun

and my black thin
         dress did envelop me
till I was a shell
         gladly and breeze

 

ruffled and filled
         against good legs
the translucent fabric and my
         heart transparent

as I walk toward Marion's
         and Helena's as my
skirt fill empties and fills with
         cooling air

— ah, 'but a passing moment'... you might say. Maybe.
Same year —

AFTER TSANG CHIH

I was brought up in a small town in the Mohave Desert.
The boys wouldn't touch me who was dying to be touched,
               because I was too quote
Smart. Which the truck-drivers didn't think as they
               looked and waved
On their way through town, on the way to my World.

I happen to think Notley's childhood between Bisbee, Az. and Needles, Ca. played a great role (it still does) in her development as a poet — ever exploratory, lyrical, isolated by experiment and fearless with range.

 

From the always intriguing Talisman House comes an anthology of Romanian poetry fetching the last 100 years — from Symbolism to Postmodernism, Born in Utopia, ed. Carmen Firan & Paul Doru Mugur & Ed Foster, with grand mechanics behind the translating machine from Adam J. Sorkin, Andrei Codrescu, Liviu Georgescu and many more. The gist: despite a language and a poetry that suffers from a lack of translators — Codrescu claims two million Romanians were writing poetry (mainly at work) between 1964 and 1989. Dates and activities from a highly mysterious country drifts into tatters because of fascism, World Wars, a fleeing avant-garde in the 30s (for France), to a later day avant-garde, socialism, open travel to the west etc., to these sixty poets packed like sardines and meant for a poetry blast. You'll want it.

 

Tribe Press of Greenfield, Ma., issues handsome booklets. Carol Purington, Following the Stonewall is one of the latest -

A leaf's fall
    my gaze reaches the ground
        before it does

I mean, simply, that all poetry — and all art — is OCCASION. A falling together, a friction, consciousness IN event (beyond mere reflection) from — Surviving: essays by Cid Corman, introduced by Scott Watson (available from Longhouse)

Let's stay with the gorgeous:

FOR A FRIEND

I fell asleep
reading your new book
at ease in the sun
by a mountain stream
listening to the current
as to your words:
the currency of the phrases,
the concurrence of the thought.
It's one of the pleasures
to be able to doze off,
to read your poems,
to hear your voice,
to sleep when tired,
to wake refreshed.

— Gale Turnbull, There Are Words, collected poems (Shearsman Books, www. shearsman.com)

Born in Edinburgh and raised in south England before emigrating to Winnipeg in advance of WW2 , Gael Turnbull, a medical professional, had long been a jumping bean in geographic, poetry and life's pursuits. An elegant independent with poetry that never dimmed over 50 years of practice, and this book is a watershed of showing just so. Gael passed away on his home turf of Scotland.

 

   The principal subject of my poems is qualities indigenous to words themselves; everything else should be shunted aside as something else.
   One motive behind visual enhancements is revealing properties of words previously hidden.
   Learning from visual arts, I want to create after-images that are remembered apart from my name.

— from More Wordworks, Richard Kostelanetz (Talisman)
: meant for viewing and ideal for the futuristic large screen.

 

I think, maybe, Modern Library should have grabbed Pete Hamill's little classic Downtown (Little, Brown) meaning Manhattan. It would have fit just right and in size with those masterpieces they have issued for decades. Hamill talks right from his neighborhood, Irish and saucy, and with all of his newspaperman gusto at relating a history, topical portrait and knowing the criminal element as well as the arts. He's always been a rare breed. I'm not much for New York City, but this book still pulled me up by its bootstraps.

 

Being almost a dead art for the real thing — the majority of the players vanished like pure drinking water — the Blues remains in the oddest quarters: a garage band of misfits grinding a sound and unbeknownst to them getting their ashes hauled; a singer in a park in the evening believing she is alone and wailing her heart out; or a white youngster from Wisconsin born with her nose in a book and later her womanhood in rock and roll who manages to write a pretty devilish biography of the Blues in the form of a glossary — words from: "Alcorub" (something Kitty Dukakis slugged down, look it up) to "Zuzu" (a gingersnap — food, drink, snakes, animals, charms all swarm with sex in the Blues). With ingenious continuity, Debra DeSalvo can ride the reader like a keyboard in her The Language of the Blues (Billboard), wrapping up a dirth of terminology and making a story stick with heroes and villains through and through. She has a conjure hand. The best book on the Blues I have read in quite some time simply for its anecdotal and historical spell.

 

I never saw Frame 1, but Frame 2, ed. Andrew Hughes & Amie Keddy has just arrived in the mail, smelling of kitchen table magic and well heeled with poets Thomas A Clark, Logan Ryan Smith, Jeffery Beam, Sally Ashton, Marjorie Manwaring, Aaron Tieger, Michael Schiavo, Amie Keddy, Whit Griffin, Jess Mynes and some of these poets are mint on the tongue. Go to press4press@hotmail.com for more.

 

The other day we happened to see "The Wave Books poetry bus tour" parked on The Smith College campus, idling its engine and I guess with some poets milling around, but no action! We had read a notice that there were to be readings by poets right off the bus at 6 o'clock in the evening — and to be fair we arrived at 6:30 — and just this engine was idling. I believe this is the same Poetry Bus that has been traveling across from the west in a quasi-Kesey Merry Prankster ceremony of reading in 50 cities in 50 days? And what a great idea! What we were looking at was a bland looking thing for something that is supposedly manned by poets. It looked like it was designed by bankers. Do I have a whole other idea than most do these days about poetry? I dink so. Where are our gypsy caravans? (I missed you Alex, unless you were the fellow in the red bandana?)

 

Imagine for a moment — Thomas Paine and William Blake were pals.
True story.

 

Oh good! a translator with a real axe to grind. Here's the opening of her introduction from The Black Heralds, Cesar Vallejo, translated by Rebecca Seiferle (Copper Canyon) : "I began reading Vallejo in 1970, when I first came across the translations of Robert Bly and James Wright. During that period of his first "discovery" among contemporary North American poets, he became an argument for poetry of the deep image and for a more humanistic engagement...Those early translations drove me to the originals where I have found a very different and unknown poet. Many of the existent translations, many of great merit as poems in English, seemed to originate in the psyche and assumptions of the translating poet. Those poets who have translated Vallejo — most notably, Robert Bly, James Wright, Thomas Merton, and Clayon Eshleman — are poets with often feverish assumptions about poetic practice and its connection to being, who found in Vallejo fertile ground for the cultivation of their own poetic theory and practice; as Eshleman puts it, a way of 'giving birth to myself.' " Seiferle believes Vallejo's work was being "colonized. Caught in the odd double vision of the dominating culture, he is, on the one hand, valued for his wildness and his heart, and, on the other, granted legitimacy only when his work is connected to the European models and influences of the twentieth century." What a grand heads-up way to start a book by wiping the slate clean of the boys club and being as much a rascal as the poet and poetry you advocate. Cesar Vallejo was a young man when he published The Black Heralds (1919) in Peru. In less than five years, now living in Paris, the poet would be eating off the money refunded from collected bottles and cans. One of the master singers of modern democratic vistas, Vallejo was ceremoniously unread during his 46 years on earth — having written five books of poetry and having only two published all before the age of 30. I read no Spanish, so I'm no judge, but I much like what I hand-touch and carry throughout reading this new collection. It just smells right.

 

Mike Perry is a born storyteller. And that's not to be confused with a great bullshitter or some yokel who spins barstool yarns. He's a back country town Wisconsin boy with one book under his belt Population: 485 that I found quite by accident one summer popping my head into a far from home library and not being able to put the book down. I had to join the library as a lifetime member, at a cost, to check the book out and then mail it back. I like a good story. In his second book Truck (HarperCollins) Perry realizes he is no fluke as a writer. In fact he's now busy playing writer on the road with speaking engagements and book signings, when not at home tending to his vegetable garden, small town musings, and maybe he's still driving an ambulance that carried the gist of his first book, but I honestly can't remember. Oh yes, the "truck" is an old International pickup he insists on screwing back together and make road worthy with the help of a friend. That's sort of the axis of the book — while losing his hair, falling in love and not sure about all this love stuff are the spokes. Liking Greg Brown's music with his girlfriend, admiring Jim Harrison and really being a deer hunter are also factors. "I am happy to live in a place where I can chuck a washing machine out my back door and no one judges my behavior unusual." Now you're going to read that sentence and think the guy is just squirrely. Not so. Honest conversational storytelling. The last of America is going to be found on the Plains because everyone's ignored it. "Nothing's there", I've heard it said more than once when passing thru. The book is made up of a chapter for each month. Lots happens. There is a wedding at the end.

 

The filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes seemed to have everyone running for their lives, when he wasn't firing them, with his manic devotion to independent filmmaking. All except a genius handful, starting with his wife Gena Rowlands, and other actors like Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel who each shine to this day with that au natural Cassavetes touch. With workmanlike fashion, Marshall Fine's Accidental Genius (Miramax) step by step details how a Hollywood player turned his back and made his own films from his home (or hotel room), managed all the finances and even distribution, while starring in hits like Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen to help front the miracle that Martin Scorsese would later claim inspired him to make movies. Start with his best film, A Woman Under the Influence, and take it from there. This book's a guidepost.

 

Work in Crisis, Sortere Torregian (House Organ, Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Avenue, Lakewood, Ohio 44107) : one of the survivalists in the small press scene at publishing each issue — now at #56 — the cream of the crop. Torregian spans, like an oak tree, some of the greatest poetry inventions from the 60s-to-now. It can happen here.

 

Something to warm your cockles, and just in the morning mail, and far better to warm by than any fossil fuels:  Songs for the Mountaintop (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth / www.kftc.org) CD: ah, the natives who rise up and sing! String bands, fiddle tunes, spirituals , mountaineers and folklorists like Jean Ritchie join this 12 song fest. "Proceeds from the sale of this CD support efforts to end mountaintop removal and valley fills, and to create a better future for coalfield communities and all people. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth is a member-led organization that believes in the power of the citizens, working together, to challenge injustices, right wrongs and improve the quality of life for all Kentuckians. Formed in 1981 and rooted in the coalfields of Eastern kentucky, KFTC has grown to become a statewide social, economic and environmental justice group with more than 3400 members. " Make it 3401 members and climbing.

 

There is some core reading hardwood lumber in Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius (Basic), writings on jazz — beginning with the author's own "Jazz Me Blues" lengthy prologue. Some authors are content to stay in the background blowing on a grass reed held between their thumbs while the circus goes on. Crouch likes to wail in the spirit of Duke Ellington, who openly declared in 1959: "I don't want to feel obliged to play something with the same styling that we became identified with at some specific period...I don't want anyone to challenge my right to sound completely mad, to screech like a wild man, to create the mauve melody of a simpering idiot, or to write a song that praises God. I only want what any other American artist wants — and that is freedom of expression and of communication with our audience." Essential reading here on Charlie Parker, Monk, Miles Davis, Mingus, Coltrane, with a scat singer's ability to pick up around the room many more essays on a range of jazz subjects. A little stuffy at times, but not too bad.

 

Leave it to a woman you fall in love with to change your first name. The unknown Rene Maria Rilke at age 21 met Lou Andreas-Salome, established author and age 36. They became lovers during the autumn months of 1897 in a farming village at the foot of the Alps, and for the next three years were in pretty much one another's company or within their legendary correspondence, now capped inside the covers of Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, The Correspondence (Norton). Rilke had a way of falling in love with women, thus marrying (Clara Westhoff) thus angering Lou, who was already a mood-tude to the mood-king wonder himself. Andreas-Salome was quite adapt at summing up the poet's inability to get a grip on "the conflict between hymnic experience and its expression in creative form." Which of course is what made his books so lush.These letters capsulate a nearly supernatural bond of companionship on a raw nerve rail lasting until the poet's dying day in his early 50s. An indispensable addition alongside all his other books — with the added benefit of two esteem Rilkean scholars and translators Edward Snow and Michael Winkler working over this collection with athletic color commentary and finesse.

 

I may as well lend some titles I'm about to sit down with through an autumn of cutting and splitting up a dooryard of firewood and canning an unstoppable tomato harvest — that's what you get after beating back three nights of frost:

— On Hashish, Walter Benjamin
— Other Planets, Robin Maconie (the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen)
— Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers, Lidija Dimkovska
— Connecting Lines, new poetry from Mexico, ed. Luis Cortes Bargallo, translation editor, Forrest Gander
— The Tipi, Adolf Hungrywolf
— Alaska Native Arts and Crafts, Susan W. Fair

— now at your better bookshops and town libraries. Meant to share. I may get to some in a future Woodburners.

 

The way to say hello or goodbye: Flowers of a Moment, Ko Un (Boa Editions) from one of Korea's favorite poets -

Straighten your clothes!
In a blazing kiln
a pot is being fired

 

Music listened to while writing: the duo albums of Duke Ellington/Johnny Hodges ~ Sun Ra Nothing Is ~ Coltrane Crescent (the dazzling "Lonnie's Lament") ~ The Byrds Never Before (with a sound on this lp 40 years later Devendra Banhart would give his eye teeth for) ~ Buster Benton Is the Feeling ~ Robert Francis reading his poems on Folkways ~ Wanda Jackson's first Capitol lp ~ Don Cherry / Ed Blackwell El Corazón ~Duke Ellington The Blanton-Webster Band ~ Jerry Lee Lewis She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye ~ Otis Spann The Bottom of the Blues ~ Lightnin' Slim Rooster Blues ~ Sonny Terry Sonny Is King ~ Sunnyland Slim Sad and Lonesome ~ Ricky Nelson The Ricky Nelson Singles Album ~ Judy Roderick Woman Blue ~ Erroll Garner Closeup in Swing ~ Gene Vincent Gene Vincent (on the Kama Sutra label) ~ Comets on Fire Avatar ~ Franco el le tout puissant o.k. jazz ~ Sam Rivers Fuxhsia Swing Song ~ the new Los Lobos The Town and the City (even with its old Kerouac title, alas, not quite cutting it).

— Bob Arnold

   1 October 06

P.S. We had hopes of sending this Woodburners out for 1 October, but the night before our server in Bellow Falls, Vermont was an unfortunate neighbor to a restaurant fire in town and was met with a charge of firefighting that filled its adjacent offices and basement with over two feet of water. Right into the brains of the operation. So we have been without website access for a string of days. Bookshop orders have been cherry-picked from other advantages, and personal correspondence has been momentarily lost. As soon as we are back on-the-air, we'll have this Woodburners flying.

In the meantime, 2 October, Susan and I took off that morning with Greg Joly and did a reading tour of 10 Vermont and New Hampshire towns in our pursuit of sharing poetry as a political and social act post-Katrina. We started in Putney reading right outside the Putney General Store - they have an oak bench outside their door under a pottery piece hung on the wall of what must be a hundred glazed faces - and so we gladly read to these faces. Then we came into contact with a harried young mason in jumbled pickup truck, rotten tubs and buckets and caked mortar mix waiting while he was inside the store doing what jobbers do on their way to jobs. We've all been there. He scurried by us on his way back to the work truck and I asked if he could stop a moment (I was going to read my 5 line poem "Self-Employed" about stone work, takes 12 seconds, later timed it) and this blond haired nut in specs turned and snapped, "Don't tell me to stop!" I loved it - put up both my hands as if caught and frightened and resigned all at once and shooed this mad hornet away. What a way to start the day!

We sallied a half hour into each town; sometimes treading water in a nobbled and royal old graveyard, even a wide berth grocery parking lot at twilight reading the last session of poems off the roof of the car. We drove from Putney up to Bellow Falls and the scene of our poor rotten luck server Sover.net, smoldering in the center of town, all before noontime. We then crossed over the Connecticut River and up to the posh knoll of Walpole and read awhile outside their post office. We couldn't leave New Hampshire without a deep look into the river ravaged township of Alstead, an area Greg knew as a boy, and so he took us along the roadway showing us just where the houses were washed off the map during the Fall 2005 flood. It started from a blocked road culvert out of town that built up to a 40 foot high wall of water rolling like only a nightmare can past midnight and toward a sleeping villa. Nobody was around when we got out in town, so we read to the river, swirling confused in a year long remorse beneath a battered bridge. Haunting. Under the bridge someone had scrawled, either before or after the flood, in three foot letters "Suck My Balls". And indeed the river had.

Going in any direction from Alstead shows relief, and certainly a mile or two away in Langdon, New Hampshire it's there. A few modest homes and a classic church with graveyard. The graveyard is on a sidehill with wide limbed ancient sugar maples. Most of the stones are very old, cracked, some with elegant weeping willow designs. Often full poems to read aloud right off the stone engravings, and so we did. Part of this became our public reading.

Springfield and Chester had us back in Vermont in no time. A sunny park bench to read from in the former, a gazebo rebuilt nicely with yellow pine purlins and red cedar shingles and smartly sized and placed on the town common. School buses, dump trucks, downshifting and ripping to pieces some parts of our oral poetry. We now consider it an accompaniment.

Grafton is its own pocket paradise. Millionaires live there with some long termed Vermonters and its polished just right. Purty house-styled town library which we all used gladly, and the bathroom, and then ended up at closing time reading on the front porch on a wood wrought bench with the librarian wishing us goodbye as she turned the simple lock on the door and was gone. All to yourself. Free in America.

The sweep drive down from Grafton to Cambridgeport to Saxton's River is sided with rivers, farmland, pastures, dump and prosperous businesses all disfigured as normal things. Nothing glitzy. Still managed by the landscape and four defined seasons, winter being the dominate one. Saxton's River was buttoning up for the day. Only the general store was taking customers and they came as regulars between leaving a job and getting home. We found a picnic table right outside the door, near a gorgeous flock of nastriums still flowering as if a frost was impossible this time of year in Vermont. Chained to the picnic table was a small pooch with a laughable overbite and eyes the size of marbles who nearly jumped into our laps. Its owner must be inside the store. So we read to the dog since no one else was around. When the owner came out with a bag of groceries and a 12 pack of Bud we kept on reading. But I did notice while we read she fed the dog a raw hotdog she bit off in bite size increments. That's what you do for a dog that will walk home with you, and whom you call "Baby Girl".

Day ended in a Hannaford grocer's parking lot. Just where we started 8 hours earlier, 150 miles later, and 10 towns under the belt. The road taken.

— Bob Arnold

       8 October 06

August 31, 2006

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : PATRICIA SMITH

Remembering: Margaret MacArthur & Patricia Goedicke & Syd Barrett & Dika Newlin & Raja Rao & Arthur Lee

 

 

can poetry hurt us?

 

Dear Patricia Smith,

It's been some some some some time since I've read a new book of poems with quite the skill, depth, toughness, beauty and final loving hand as your Teahouse of the Almighty. Hello! (Coffee House / coffeehousepress.org)

I should have known seeing Ed Sanders name on the cover as the judge who selected the book as a winner in the National Poetry Series. I've read a few others in this 2005 winners circle but none delivered quite the loud smack of promise at delivering the goods. Think of the year when Robert Creeley chose Joanne Kyger for this same impact. So much poetry is now caught up in favoritism, professional allegiances, the same sticky school of poetry and poets hugging around the same pissing tree, and precious little reading widely and wildly. Of course Creeley knew Kyger for years in their Bolinas, California digs but it had to do with much more than that: Kyger had been writing in virtual hidden wholesomeness for years and years and was known by chiefly poets only. Creeley in his growing recognition, and likewise courage, plucked a flower: far from the university scene and into a little immediate attention. He couldn't help himself! I think the same is working in the Sanders meets Patricia Smith book wonder.

The first poem in the book killed me, floored me, it's almost better than anything I've read in weeks by itself and of course it helps surround and bring the reader further and further into the book. I wanted to read the poem aloud to my wife Susan afterwards and began but got stuck right where Nicole asks Patricia Smith how she might write a poem to her dead mother, as Smith has done to the memory of her father. These kids she is working with rattled in a school room of losses, early death, parents gone, drug nightmared, often by the most horrible ways. But I was crying inside, tears coming all by themselves to my eyes. Like tears have selves. I told Susan I couldn't go on. "The poem's too long?" she wondered. "No — I'm crying." One of those guys a little shy to admit it, married all these years, and Susan has watched people tear up to my poems, as she has, and the woodsman Bob can usually keep it together. Not this time.

Of all the poets slammin' in Def Poetry Jam and performance poetry and dooking out contestants repeatedly at the National Poetry Slam, Patricia Smith has both the literary chops on the page and the spirited mouth to transcend both. Plain and simple. She's the finest of all those needing to write the street, the classroom horrors and honey (she's haunted by these children as her own), plus her own I'm-a-bad-girl-but-I'm-a-good-girl-I'm-a-mother-I'm-a-grandmother-I'm a-daughter black hearted lineage. She simply loves all she touches and isn't a fool. I hate to quarantine her into the black-woman-writers-only club but why in the world not when it is so remarkably dynamic? Whether Hurston, Sanchez, Cortez, Clifton and certainly Gwendolyn Brooks who Smith in long learned fashion brands deep as a few words at the opening of her book:

If thou be more than hate or atmosphere
Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.
Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

You know why you have to love her and this book? The poet mash potatoes these Gwendolyn lines into every poem. She's not signing the poem until she does. You do weep in these times of cheap thrills and "weee" down the slide of so much poetry trifles and then receive something this brawny, topical, and true.

Coffee House Press has done it again. The book arrived yesterday and I read it twice, as if there were a choice. Fight for that seance of book love! For awhile there I thought Coffee House was drifting into publishing by chic numbers and names, and then comes Patricia Smith, and previously Maureen (language to love) Owen. What do I know, but I might do everything in my power to find the likes of Barbara Moraff and sweetheart a book deal, like you haven't seen in awhile, into the daylight.

Here's the poem to die-for that starts off Teahouse of the Almighty. Of course the cynics — and they abound — will be falling all over their jumper-cables to scoff now that I've set the poem up to snap crackle and pop. Come back to it in the wee hours, when no one is looking, and it's okay to go soft and into your deepest care. No words more need be said but the poet's.

 

 

Patricia Smith

BUILDING NICOLE'S MAMA
for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami

 

I am astonished at their mouthful names -
Lakinishia, Fumilayo, Chevellanie, Delayo -
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery.
I rejoice when they kiss my face, whisper wet
and urgent in my ear, make me their obsession
because I have brought them poetry.

They shout me raw, bruise my wrists with pulling,
and brashly claim me as mama as they
cradle my head in their little laps,
waiting for new words to grow in my mouth.
You.
You.
You.
Angry, jubilant, weeping poets-we are all
saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight,
but you know that, didn't you? Then let us
bless this sixth grade class-40 nappy heads,
40 cracking voices, and all of them
raise their hands when I ask. They have all seen
the Reaper, grim in his heavy robe,
pushing the button for the dead project elevator,
begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,
cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church.

I ask the death question and forty fists
punch the air, me! , me! And O'Neal,
matchstick crack child, and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,
barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet
into his own throat after Mama bended his back
with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow
when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall
of their cluttered one-room apartment,
Donya's cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,
click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger
a barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am shocked
by their losses-and yet when I read a poem
about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffery asks

He is dead yet?

It cannot be comprehended,
my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling
his own breath. And those 40 faces pity me,
knowing that I will soon be as they are,
numb to our bloodied histories,
favoring the Reaper with a thumbs-up and a wink,
hearing the question and shouting me, me,
Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!

Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before
snuggling inside my words to sleep.
I love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole's braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them,
and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?

A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees
and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
Replacing the voice.
Stitching on the lost flesh.

So poets,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind the microphones -
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

And she is waiting.
And she
is
waiting.
And she waits.

 

Put this book into every hand and library.

— Bob Arnold