From Woodburners 2007: FRIEND-O / LOOKING AT NOVEMBER / Harvest / ~ GOT YOUR WOOD UP? ~ AUTUMN 07/ DOG DAYS 2007 / SUMMER HOURS / NOH APRIL / MUD-TIME / YOU MOVE LIKE YOU ARE ALL OVER ALIVE
Origin,
Sixth Series, The complete issues now available on CD, edited
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Magazine Interview with Bob by Gerald Hausman
Origin, Sixth Series CD now available
Longhouse's
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1971-2006 !
complete with
editor Bob Arnold's annotations and a galaxy of press title images.
Please visit! A 'continuing chalkboard' : Bibliography
Part One 1971 - 1989 and Bibliography
Part Two 1990 - 2006
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WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : FRIEND-O
remembering Landis Everson
Fred McDarrrah
Bill Griffiths
Evel Knievel
He who serves all, best serves himself - Jack London You can paint a picture with dung, or with a pipe, just so long as it is a picture.
- Apollinaire
Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
-Ray Bradbury
there is a new humanism afoot that will one day touch the world to its
core. tractional poetry is only one of the means by which to reach out
and touch the other. the other is emerging as the necessary prerequisite
for dialogues with the self that clarify the soul & heart and open the ability
to love. I place myself there, with them, whoever they are, wherever
they are, who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem by
as many exits and entrances as are possible.
- bpNichol from "Statement" Toronto, November 1966I love pinball - there should be pinball in every movie.
- Richard Linklater from the commentary "Dazed and Confused" (Criterion)
George W. Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the treatment of detainees. Most egregious, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. He seeks to do the same in Iran.
This President is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression". And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for this crime, if we do not actively defy this government, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
-Chris Hedges, from "Hands off Iran" The Nation Dec 10, 07
WOLVES ARE STANDING IN YOUR DREAM
Out in the rain, out in the snow
They come with the spring night's winds
that breathe on the window
in the dawn
They come with the migrating birds
hatch when love's struggle
has taken place, give birth
through their mouths
They embrace your naked body
living shadows of frost-Hanne Bramness, Salt on the eye, selected poems (Shearsman Books /www.shearsman.com)
EZRA POUND'S PROPOSITION
Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"
Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.- Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco)
Don't expect any fireworks here, This is a
paragraph about uprooting ornamentation
in the way of perceiving the world, an argument for
moving prose privileging a shifting position on the
surface of the earth. It takes as its percussive beat
the presence of a mocking bird unimpeachably
outside my bedroom window. Nature's encroach-
ment springs its central aphorism. I find myself at
an impasse, get around it by installing a clump of
chrysanthemums in the center of the room I've yet
to delineate. A wall's a wall. One looks both ways
from a window. There's no social power in the ter-
minal cluster that ends a flower.-Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial)
ATLANTIS - A LOST SONNET
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city-arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals-had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city-
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.- Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence (Norton)
The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid
this is the true eventual story of billy the kid. it is not the story as
he told it for he did not tell it to me. he told it to others who wrote
it down, but not correctly. there is no true eventual story but this
one. had he told it to me i would have written a different one. i
could not write the true one had he told it to me.this is the true eventual story of the place in which billy died.
dead, he let others write his story, the untrue one. this is the true
story of billy & the town in which he died & why he was called
a kid and why he died. eventually all other stories will appear
untrue beside this one.- bpNichol, The Alphabet Game (Coach House/www.chbooks.com)
edited by Darren Wershler-Henry & Lori Emerson. Twenty years since his young passing, British Columbia born Barrie Phillip Nichol has never been more relevent and his own poet, with imaginative editing (including traces from The Martyrology) highlighting the likewise poesy and visuals.
We had a big party
for our 20th wedding anniversary.
Someone said, "Tell us
your secret.'
I did.
Everyone left and the marriage
was over.- Dan Nielsen, The Once Over (The Chuckwagon, 146 College Hwy #18, Southampton, Ma. 01073 / casey.st@comcast.net)
Peter Money and his small crew are going great guns and doing fine work from Harbor Mountain Press (www.harbormountainpress.com) Brownsville , VT. 05037: a new selection of titles has just arrived Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Blues; Jan Clausen, If You Like Difficulty; William Cirocco, Aerolith; Peter Money, Che, an autoseriograph novella; and David Miller, In the Shop of Nothing where we show one of the many poems from the book below. Miller excels at both poetry and prose; this is a new and selected poems done very trimly and fine:
The black oval surface framed in gilt,
from which I expected my image to return
during a city walk, unaccompanied by flowers,
fails. Catalogue the things evoking love
and evoking desire - the same equal things:
garden in night, pathway, train-station, shops
and cafes; the story binds them disparate.
We fail each other over and again
as if tumbling down a hillside, giggling,
screaming. Each lives to bear difference
which is endurance, on these streets
or in ghostly dream; equally: the face
fails to appear.- David Miller, In the Shop of Nothing
Three-cheers for the second-chance, the reprint, the used, the here again. White Pine Press has long been active at bringing back out of print books and recovering old classics, as below with one of Sonia Sanchez's finest books:
POEM NO. 12
when i am woman, then i shall be wife of your eyes
when i am woman, then i shall receive the sun
when i am woman, then i shall be shy with pain
when i am woman, then shall my laughter stop the wind
when i am woman, then i shall swallow the earth
when i am woman, then i shall give birth to myself
when i am woman, ay-y-y, ay-y-y, ay-y-y,
when i am woman. . .- Sonia Sanchez, Homegirls and Handgrenades (White Pine Press www.whitepine.org)
Ben Ratliff is white, New York Times, and he wasn't even born when John Coltrane was jet-propulsion and that's all the more remarkable that he even took this mythic heights on and at least gives the reader a school yard stick measuring of some jazz essence, common-sense and a try at improvisational theory and swing. It isn't the best book on Coltrane (C.O. Simpkins book, I agree, probably holds that title) or even jazz, but I like his heart:
Indirectly, by example, Coltrane encouraged musicians to practice and study rudiments and scales and harmonic theory. He played the blues in unusual keys for the sheer challenge of it. He worked on himself until he became a great technical achievement, the complete jazz musician. Even more indirectly, he encouraged other musicians, in jazz and outside jazz, to transcend their hang-ups and preconceptions and to play a pure intuitive expression, as opposed to learned figures. He helped people freak out; he gave them extramusical ideas.- Ben Ratliff, Coltrane, the story of a sound (Farrar)
(DVDs & Films) :1924, the year of Kafka's death, saw four short surrealist films released quivering on the silver screen: Rene Clair's Entr'acte; La Coquille et le Clergyman by Germain Dulac; Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique and Duchamp's Anemic Cinema can be found now on Anthology of Surreal Cinema, Vol. 1. 65 minutes of silent black and white starring some of the names above, along with friends that show up like Erik Satie and Man Ray.
One of the wildest samurai films and not crazed with cult antics: Sword of the Beast (1965). Mifune shows up in a small role, though a significant scene, of chopping up to size marauders who dare tangle with him in a quiet evening snowfall. The conditions are mesmerizing. The final showdown goes from A to Z outlandish. It all takes place inside a traditional home with paper walls - one warrior with a sword against a myriad of crazed ones, sharpened by evil, so he's wonderfully doomed.
During all of November Turner Classic Movie channel gave us each night a visiting guest who showcased their favorite films for our viewing pleasure. Each night introduced by the gentlemanly host Robert Osborne. Each night more of the same, classic after classic, seen a million times and ways...until, until...James Ellroy showed up to present his jazzed bebop 1950s on location California cheeseball/film noir specialties: Stakeout on Dope Street, Murder By Contract (with dark Vince Edwards), The Lineup (a Don Siegel forgotten) and lastly, and the best, Richard Fleischer's Armored Car Robbery. Great stuff, rarely seen on tape or dvd. And if you wish to enjoy yourself further, seek out any film noir now on dvd with a extra extra bonus commentary of having the team of James Ellroy and Eddie Muller doing a slippery autopsy. But imagine, for the last night of the Turner month long guest appearances - for whom they might have chosen to help host the clincher - they fizzle fart with ex-con businessman Martha Stewart. It might have sailed if she had chosen Caged Heat.
THINKING ABOUT THE MOON
As a child I thought the moon
existed only at night:
there it was
in the dark sky.
When I saw it in the daytime
I knew it was the moon
but it wasn't the real one.
It was that other one.
The real moon had moonlight,
silver and blue
And the full moon was so big
it seemed close, but
to what? (I didn't know
I was on Earth).- Ron Padgett, How to be Perfect (Coffee House)
~such a beauty, head to toe, stem to stern poem. The ease of spacious line quality and balance, the visual event of it all, the comfort of the language washing right up upon the childhood closing; and to think written by an elderly fellow thinking back, thinking ahead.
MY BROTHER'S TALE
My brother knows everything that happens in the country because
he has an outdoor job that begins at dawn. He says the meth
houses are the ones that have the lights on all night because any-
thing you start on meth you keep doing for days until you crash,
whether it's sex or cleaning. One guy took his tv apart and could
never put it back together. Some people get "meth-bugs," which
is when the chemicals in the meth start to seep out of the skin,
making the meth-head scratch and claw open her or his skin. He
even knew a guy who froze his balls off. The guy went out with
some friends to steal anhydrous ammonia, a frozen gas the local
farmers use for fertilizer and a major ingredient in meth. It's so
malleable you can put it into any kind of container, so he put some
into a paper cup, sat it between his legs, and drove off. The anhy-
drous ammonia spilled onto his balls and froze them off, and his
friends kicked him out of the truck as they drove by the emer-
gency room.
I did not find many ghost tales, but I did find crystal meth
labs growing in the cornfields. Also, I found that some mem-
bers of the county road crew were swingers. I heard of one farmer
who wife-swaps.
- Brenda Coultas, The Marvelous Bones of Time (Coffee House Press)
:no one poem can quite captivate the range and inventions of this Marvelous marvel of a book ~ roaming with an exquisite prose & poem hand and reach, from a midwestern childhood dreamscape bridging Civil War era, folktales, street wisdom, to an overall Supernatural all its own. Not the usual 'clever,' better: well crafted.
Kirpal Gordon: Eros in Sanskrit, lyrics & meditations 2007-1977( Leaping Dog Press/ www.leapingdogpress.com); (CD): Speak-Spake-Spoke, Kirpal Gordon with the Claire Daly Band (LDP Media): the first is book form, the second on CD, either way Kirpal Gordon is flying as sound on the page, or tunes in jazz and poem off the disc. Be smart and go for both. As I state in full on a cover blurb for the book : "Kirpal Gordon is the Huck Finn of New York City. The kid with the goods, he'll show you how stories are really made and how each one will remind you of some place where you have been, or wish to be. Language driven writing that makes music of those molecules, and for once and for all, has you dancing in an empty, quiet room with a book in your hand. The one you're holding." I meant it, still do.
I LOOK TO YOU
99 / Whenever a man
leaves me
my beauty increases- Maram Al-Massri, A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor (Coffee House)
Spanning four decades of poetry, song, street protest & performance, soon to be throttled between the pages of 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border, Juan Felipe Herrera (City Lights) from migrant upraising straight up into a professor standing at U/Cal, Riverside, Herrera makes the Chicano wild call.
CHICANO LITERATURE 100
First of all, you are not going to find this stuff at the mall, in one of - Juan Felipe Herrera
those flashy pendejada shops. Maybe you'll have to quiet yourself
down, listen to yourself, try pintura for a few days, maybe weeks, take
rainy walks, make small mirrors, rake the front yards, listen to the
rake speak, do a mandado for your abuelita if she still lives (do it w/o
berrinches), dig up black dirt on the trail in the forest, carry twisted
wood and leave it at the edge of the road with good words between
you and a squirrel behind the trees, go back and find the seed-voices,
the ones that raised you, the letters that arrived with your red-green
spirit, the ancient songs way deep inside.
NO: a journal of the arts issue 6, 2007 ed: Deb Klowden & Ben Lerner: I've yet to see a sorry assed issue. Every one comes thick and juicy, almost a fresh paint smell to its ink while the contents is rich with poetry, prose, installments, art, eclectic visuals, whether "New works from Japan" or a whole pasture of text devoted to Guy Debord. Poetry/writings from John Ashbery, Joan Retallack, Evan S. Connell (going strong), Arthur Sze and many more. The bosses move around but this is the current address: 260 19th St., Santa Monica, CA. 90402. I once time did my laundry in Santa Monica, right next to an ice-cream parlor. (www.nojournal.com)
FRIEND-O: after decades of filmwork, two directing teams are currently stalking area cinemas with two films straight out of the deep bloody shade of the Vietnam War. It's taken this long to get off the combat field, and to see how it all, eventually, comes back home. The Coen (Ethan & Joel) brothers No Country for Old Men has a world of the old wild-west turned upside down since Vietnam, brought home with drugs, busted soldiers and the American dream turned to sour cream. All the major characters in the film were soldiers for their country in one war or another - Josh Brolin's character having done two tours in Vietnam still carries his hunting rifle slung down at hip level steady, like a soldier, when coming upon one more spooky spot. He and headhunter Woody Harrelson bond momentarily on a Vietnam recognition, ditto the border guard prick who softens on a mutual Vietnam hi-sign with Brolin. Who, by the way, is drop-dead perfect in this role, and as a crummy cop in American Gangster. Wait until you get a load of Javier Bardem, in a role that may finally break him open with American audiences, even if it is as the scariest boogieman to hit the silver screen, maybe ever. In the Coens devilish hands he gets to walk away at the end of the film. There are no happy endings after Vietnam.
As for the many Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes probably untouchable I'm Not There, I can't fathom what all the squawk is about with how this concocted line-up of Dylans is presented. It's beautifully choreographed by Haynes with exquisite detail, broad and minute. Top to bottom. An interpreted marvel of identities instead of one more cookie-cutter biopic. If you grew up with every new Dylan song over 40 years, the film's already embedded in you. Come to the film, relax, and let it open you up. Cate Blanchett is a charm as Dylan during the unraveling "Don't Look Back" era. They get the all important hair right, and the stab of Dylan's incessant cigarette. Lay off Richard Gere - he rolls dusty and sure into Billy the Kid role 1, 2, 3. Hell, everybody's great; you're so swept away by the story, and for anyone raised in 60s-lore the whole film is a bedtime story told by mom. I have to say the young black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) stole my heart visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital as "Woody Guthrie", with Dylan himself singing "Blind Willie McTell" in the background. Ritchie Havens has new teeth since Woodstock '69 and is given a survivalist position in the film as himself. You honestly can't take your eyes at any time off the screen. Watch Cate B. as Dylan and those actors playing the Fab Four (The Beatles) roll in the grass like kittens! Back when musicians let their hair down, back when there was grass. Nobody but nobody caught, not even for an instant, the flash of gorgeous smile the real Bob Dylan sometimes offers. It once glowed from his face up into his burning hair. That's what we call real life, and why we must rebuild it.
A PROGRAM NOTE: my true love and I went to see No Country for Old Men first, and I realized it took that to parch the book out of me. And while the film is exhilarating, nothing will equal the book, one of Cormac McCarthy's pulpiest novels, at least since his Appalachian period (see Child of God). It may have taken a director like Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials ...) along with a touch of Anthony Mann, teamed with the Coens, to tap this yarn quite right. We then came back a week later, rounding up a day organized to justify gas prices, since these outings take the farmers far afield into the college towns just to find such films: so that makes a big mail day posting for the bookshop, then a few groceries, do some wash, then go to a double feature between two towns (I'm Not There at 10am., No Country for Old Men by afternoon) paying matinee prices (rising); afterwards visit a few good bookstores, Christmas lights in the trees stroll, have a Mexican meal out. Drive home, roads dwindling as we get closer.
I can't imagine viewing I'm Not There in a more ideal spot: the struggling Pleasant Street Theater of Northampton, Mass. Is it true they've changed their name to The Todd Haynes Theater? If this keeps them alive and thriving, terrific. The theater is dug-in-the-wall-small, the screen is tiny by today's standards (the Haynes film edges fell off the screen) but the place dims a luxurious inky black at showtime. Some films, like this one, or Dead Man (once upon a time I took our son out of school at age 12 to go see this film here, dripping cave conditions, neither of us have forgotten it) seem like private screenings. Precious few theaters host you like Pleasant Street: 10 in the morning quiet, a cunning ticket taker, with a co-worker setting out, like crystal glassware, generous portions of popcorn, and it's all free! So is the tea, so is the coffee. The magic carpet ride has only just begun: big posters flop the walls of stunning films to come; there's an etched into the wall Stanley Kubrick quote about cinema humbling any possible pretense, and at least for the Todd Haynes film we have a guest appearance of some guy with a mandolin down in the front swaying away with serenading Dylan songs as our entertainment before the film begins. I had gone out for a walk prior to showtime around town, but when I returned Susan said he just showed up and started to play. Quite quite riddle-like. We saw he packed up his instrument at the darkening hour and watched the film with all of us. Laughing, crying, abiding.
MUSIC TO MY EARS:
Michael Hurley, Ancestral Swamp; John Lurie, Fishing With John; Brian Eno, Luciano Pavarotti et al, Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1; Sonic Youth, Carrie Rodriguez et al, Like A Hurricane: a tribute to Neil Young, Martin Jack and Werewolf Sequence, Ice Thorn (that's Martin J. Rosenblum); The Turfan Ensemble, Morton Feldman First Recordings: 1950s; Cassandra Wilson, Sings Standards; Olivia Harrison, Eric Clapton et al., Concert for George; Yungchen Lhamo, Tibet, Tibet; and while out on road trips to various towns we've been catching (the higher up we go out of the valley)one or maybe two college radio stations from Amherst, Ma. Not the NPR drone, but filigree of everything from bootleg Hendrix to-this-minute punk, gliding and rotten.
- Bob Arnold
2 December 2007
WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND: LOOKING AT NOVEMBER Another one of those true stories from poetry land
Poet: I started writing very early, as a child. But I wrote terrible poetry, just terrible.
Youngster: (hand raised from the audience) I was wondering - you say you wrote "terrible poetry" when you were young - well, what is a "terrible" poem?
a murmur rises like a hive has been touched amongst an audience of 200 youngsters strong.
Poet: (leaning forward from the podium) What, dear?
Youngster: You said when you were young you wrote "terrible poetry." Can you describe what makes a "terrible" poem?
Poet: That's right, terrible poetry. But, you see, I was young.
Youngster: Well, I'm young and I write poetry and I don't think it's "terrible".
a united cheer goes up throughout the school hall!
Another one of those true stories from poetry land.
I was visiting The Putney School in Vermont one early morning, a ghost fog seemed to be nowhere that morning except on this rural campus, tucked up in the trees, up past the school's large flower garden. Late September still unseasonably warm so the zinnias remained hardy, but the grass around the floral showcase was too tall and ragged. The poet would read to all the school a little after 9 a.m. - they say an ungodly hour for most poets, but I always found it a perfect time to sing like a bird.
The students would arrive at this gathering hall very comfortable in their back-to-the-land gear, some of the girls in tall soft boots and jeans. The guys with shirts out, hair rubbery, long or lank. There were many worn smooth pine benches these puritans had to sit on, for quite a long time, as the poet would read and talk and read and field questions for almost two hours. Not a coat or tie in the place. No serious hard-bitten adult, even the poet was in violet color.
She loved her Mandelstam and Blake, likened herself to, but knew she "was nothing like Elizabeth Bishop" (although she was = the intelligence and care of the poetic line), tried to read into a PA system that was Vermont's best, so it hooted, boomed and squealed. This startled the poet who had been living some weeks at an artists' colony where she circled her room peering into books, getting lost in a dark dictionary, "erasing my words". She would be perfect in a nutshell of college students hanging onto her every cautious notion, and speaking of composing a poetry that "surprises" her. This morning's high school group is quite the opposite, they like to know what makes a clock tick. They wake up most mornings without a sound in their heads, a field catching sunlight. Maybe the clear bark of a crow flying over with them to the dining hall for breakfast. The gravel under foot rattles. A poet's coming at 9 o'cock...what's that all about?
The poet would find out the hard way what-that-was-all-about speaking like a professional poet and not a human being, not a friend, not a regular. Poets floating on their cloud of knowing, that awful gnawing knowing. So as I sat there in the back thinking I knew quite a bit, too, I was wondrously slapped awake the same time the poet was, on her stage (unfortunate for her!), as she drew in questions and attempted to make sense back to the greatest bullshit detectors in all the world. In years and years of questions I've never heard a better one asked, and in the right company, and every ounce of it genuine. Nothing harsh about it. I knew the poet was stunned and the rest of the reading would never shake out right, and it didn't. The question was as remarkable as "why do you love me?" In fact, it was, "why don't you love me?"
- Bob Arnold
Remembering R.B. Kitaj, Jon Anderson & Deborah Kerr
Poetry, first of all, was and still must be a musical form. It is speech musicked. It, to be most powerful, must reach to where speech begins, as sound, and bring the sound into full focus as highly rhythmic communication. High speech. - Amiri Baraka
Gentleness had come a great distance to be there - Henri Cole a boot full of brain kicked out in the rain? - Paul Celan "Now listen! I'm no fool," (Gertrude) Stein once said in reply to a student's question about her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," "I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a...is a...is a...' Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years."
- Janet Malcolm from "Two Lives" (and then again there are Hazrat Inayat Khan's lectures from the 1920s collected in "The Mysticism of Sound and Music" which may have influenced Stein, never mind John Coltrane, where the Sufi master wrote: "If you repeat: flower, flower, flower, your mind will be much more impressed than if you only think of the flower.")
What is becomes what was. But the 'isness' remains in the memory and turns to something more stark, more identifiable not of memory but of a stark reality as if what is remembered turns in the earth slowly into a form true and real - Harriet Zinnes
I ask myself, whether,among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is a single one who is ashamed of himself. - Elias Canetti
SYCAMORES
I came from a place with a hole in it,
my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.
And after I emerged, all dripping wet,
heavy drops came out of my eyes, touching its face.
I kissed its mouth; I bit it with my gums.
I lay on it like a snail on a cup,
my body, whatever its nature was,
revealed to me by its body. I did not know
I was powerless before a strange force.
I did not know life cheats us. All I know,
nestling my head in its soft throat pouch,
was a hard, gemlike feeling burning through me,
like limbs of burning sycamores, touching
across some new barrier of touchability.
- Henri Cole, Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar)
For those that wondered just how it was before Writing Workshops -
I went into the hospital in 1946, with advanced tuberculosis, and altogether I spent three and a half years in the hospital. By the time I got out, I had had 10 ribs removed, one lung collapsed, a piece of the other one removed, and there were some severe complications from an experimental drug that was used to keep me alive. During these years I was given up for dead several times. One doctor told me that I could not live, I just didn't have enough lung capacity, and I should just go home and sit quietly and I would soon be dead. Now, I am blessed with a rotten attitude, and my response to statements of this nature is: Fuck you, no one tells me what to do.
Anyway, I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life. This did not make me a writer, but provided the incentive to discover that I am a writer.
- Hubert Selby Jr., "Why I Continue To Write" from The Outlaw Bible of American Essays edited Alan Kaufman (Thunder's Mouth Press)
Two Lives, Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm (Yale): that's Gertrude (Stein) and Alice (Babette Toklas) as if we didn't know, and their forty year marriage. Alice was known as the workhorse for their every needs - in the kitchen, household, secretary - except in the bedroom where Gertrude claimed she was the "best cow giver in all the world". "Cows" in the Stein notebooks are orgasms , which she gifted regularly to Toklas, though, supposedly, never received. This is a fine ramble of a rumpled book, small in hand which the design crew at Yale has made to look antiquated with a fake wear line along the top edge of the dustjacket, well illustrated and paper text clumped and pesky with gossip, rave insights, scholarly maverick wisdom. A bit like ol' Hugh Kenner in knowing the subject cold and instead of releasing a giant tome door-stopper (Kenner did one: The Pound Era: it's never reached the floor in this house), giving a sweet concise portrait. But do be careful with some of the dates and loose strings of research here: on one page Stein is dead on the operating table of stomach cancer (true) on July 27, 1946...on a later page she is writing her will on July 23, 1947. 1946 is the correct date. When a book is this good you bump over the bumps, plus Stein has never been without controversy, even in biographies. As Malcolm asks and pokes at with a short stick throughout the book: "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" You won't like the answer. Nor was Stein ever happy with her under appreciated stake in the literary world. Her masterpiece The Making of Americans remains one of the 20c openly abused products by its host of reviewers - laughing at the idea of even reading such a thing, and proceeding to review the book anyway. Marianne Moore got to about page 50. John Ashbery admits to pretending to have read the book for years, though running out of gas by a seemingly deadend page 30. Now Ashbery has read the book four times "since I had to read every sentence, I think, at least that many times". Malcolm took a different tactic: with a kitchen knife she claims to have cut the big book into six sections, thus making it portable "and (so to speak) readable." Whatever turns your crank. Stein is unavoidable, though many have done just that to her, for the past 100 years. This little book could be your point of entry.
Landscapes of New Mexico, paintings of the land of enchantment, Suzan Campbell & Suzanne Deats (Fresco Fine Art Frescobooks.com) : forget the roundtrip ticket to Albuquerque, here's second best - a broad wing span assembly of painters currently living and painting in New Mexico. A beautiful book. With each artist alphabetically arranged, or if it's companionship you want, they are paired as one, as Alvaro Cardona-Hine and Barbara McCauley are here, and so nicely (I wish there was more McCauley, color and line as Franz Marc). Of course reminders of groundbreakers like O'Keeffe and Hartley from the same soil abound, but the range is wide and wild and gloriously intense whether learning with Teruko Wilde's "paint rain" or the jazz beat foliage of David Foley, to the outback clarity of Wilson Hurley who practices what he preaches "I look, and look, and look". Now come and look. The separate biographical portraits of each artist are excellent, like home cooking.
THINGS THAT ARE FULL OF PLEASURE -
Finally I have a dress that resembles my mother's except for the
buttons. It is a lamby dress: grayish white and furry like wool. A
waist. Three buttons down the front, mine in red, and hers-black
with red in each center. She has tied a red ribbon around my
ponytail also. I love her. I love that we look the same. Am I four?
My grandfather in Wisconsin teaches me how to dog-paddle. The
bottom of the lake is soft.
pine, leaves, rose, hedges, stem
Dad shows me how to wind wire around tiny pine tree branches. It
is five years old but only a few inches tall. We collect new moss to
cover the roots.
The smell of hibiscus. gardenia. I think of my grandmother.
I think of mango trees.
My first husband speaking street Spanish.
My second husband taking my hand and guiding me out of the
rough waves I had gotten myself into. Once on the beach, the hot
air. The hot towel.
My third husband.
Mt daughters, home before midnight and in their beds. They each
come in quietly, and kiss me goodnight. I tell them: sticks feathers
string mud. They understand.
-Kimiko Hahn, The Narrow Road to the Interior (Norton)
One more new poet added to a long and enduring list of Native American poets (and I include some "white" poets on this list) who writes, herself, of Salvadoran Roque Dalton and being mistaken for Puerto Rican. The poems have humor, clicking insight, and move the page (air) with skill -
INDIAN RUINS
"I want to see Indian ruins."
So I drove him
Past HUD houses and boarded trailers,
Beer bottles and blood drops
And a three-year-old girl huffing glue
From a brown paper bag
We came to a place
Where the earth lay torn and scarred,
Littered with shards of pottery
And bits of ancestral bone.
"At last," he exclaimed,
"Real Indian ruins!"
- Sara Littlecrow-Russell, The Secret Powers of Naming (U Arizona Press)
LETTER TO A FRIEND FROM THE ROAD
We've been gone awhile, and despite the fog and near ground smoke in some of the regions, an excellent sojourn. First over to the lower Maine coast and down to Hampton and Rye seeking whatever rambles are possible. We see that part of the coast is truly gone. I doubt we'll ever head back. No need to go into the obvious list of travesty. At least an early day hike on the beach nearby Rachel Carson's estate was worth part of the trip. A day trip. No need to fill the coffers of the local gentry since the gas prices to & fro had to be justified somehow. We were traveling in one of the new cars our Toyota dealership offers at a low rate per day, free mileage, and run we did. Already vast stretches of New Hampshire unrecognizable to someone like me who went to high-school there, ran track in some of the school towns, hitchhiked roads that have been ground up and replaced by pulverizing commuter fast tracts. Head up into the mountains if you even think about wanting to smell the roses. We will.
The next morning we left home to be on Race Point on the tip of Provincetown at 8 AM sharp. A four hour drive. We hiked there, the Meadows (Thoreau & Channing did time there) and later bits of Eastham (Henry Beston's spot); that day Race was the one we preferred. Always a drive within the town right into the bowels of the finest old homes and buildings. Strong as ships. An added treat was a somewhat loose but tribal nod and glance to a wide degree of cross dressers and 'dolls' stalking and long legged panty hosing around Commercial Street. Photographers then stalking them. A very different breed than the summer tourists, and nothing as close to the early spring population we like the best: blinking out of a soggy winter, preparing for the cast over to come. We ate beach bum variety, hiked much and then headed back to Vermont on the highways which have gone berserk around Worcester, Springfield and when north at Manchester. 65 mph is now a random bouncing tide going 90 mph. One guy just had to give the farmers the finger, nearly wiping himself and his lousy SUV out on the guard rails.
A few hours rest and we were gone the third morning for the White Mountains, fog or not. It was as smoky as a stove pipe surfing down through Franconia Notch - both dangerous and exhilarating. Half the Presidentials showed forth when heading up through Pinkham Notch, and once out of the Conway traps (twin mall towns) there is some depth of forest and landscape and open range. Small towns fickle with Christian bookshops and old grubby garages that still work on vehicles. You almost want to stand midstreet an applaud. We were gone the day easily up in those parts. The foliage charged with golden beech, birch and the spread of evergreen. Noxious.
Fourth day had us off early again in the dark morning for a more local adventure: book sale outside Amherst, and then a date with a friend's mother who needed repair work on her house roof. Crawling about up high at noontime with a caulking gun of tar, hammer, knives and new nails...a few hours work as a favor to friends and in exchange Susan and I had 7 hours with them and served both dinner and supper and a old style visit of conversation, laughter and being invited in. Nothing like it. One day we will have you here for a similar visit and we'll stack some firewood together in the sun.
~
I sit down and read and quite often when I finish I walk over and sit again and write just what I think what I just read just like I'm doing now. As Louis Simpson once wrote: "Poets don't have to think - but there poems should." If you don't know Louis Simpson's own work, you might take a look, both poetry & prose. A sensible man. Little read these days. I found this quote while reading before breakfast Joseph Stroud's new and utterly gorgeous book handmade by Jerry Reddan at Tangram Ukiyu-e, Snapshots of the floating world (Tangram). Many these days have tried this sort of old floating world form, bowing to the ancients like Tu Fu and buddy Li Po, and Stroud hits a homerun. How good? Well imagine you are walking through the room and the radio is on and by some stroke of magic there is still a dj out there not working a gimmick or a Clear Channel program and something juicy like Bo Diddley ripples out and around the room. That good. Bo Diddley actually shows up in Stroud's book, a small gem like poem with Ginsberg & Whitman in a top down Thunderbird and who else but Bo Diddley on the radio taking them further down the road. At 86 cents a barrel for oil, the world burning from the ozone layer down into the center of the planet, what else can you hang onto? Your sweetheart, a tree, and poetry. It'll never fail if poetry continues writing as well as Joseph Stroud and the book is finger mortised by Jerry Reddan. Tangram books are issued out of Berkeley in very low editions and immaculate stitching and papers used. I handle my copies like love letters, but then I'm a romantic. Here's one of the poem's from Ukiyo-e, Snapshots of the floating world just to show you how good good can be -
LAZARUS IN VARANASI
From a pyre on the burning ghat
a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.
As if remembering something important.
As if to look around one more time.
As if he has something at last to say.
As if there might be a way out of this.
(what the heck, one more)
THE POEM
Old and weathered, like leather
out in the rain all winter, smelling
of wood smoke, bleached silver
by the days, almost ready to go
back into earth, a husk, almost
empty, filled, almost, with light.
- Joseph Stroud
BOOKS READ WHILE WATCHING THE WORLD SERIES (such as it was) ~ the first night it rained, and Boston was hitting well. There is an awful lot of spitting - even the plate umpire spits into his palm to get a grip on the ball - and all the corporate commercials in a string, and the usual pitchers pawing on the mound, the stalls, the organized feints and stare downs....so there's a lot of time to read. I went through some recent enough art books wide on my lap as company with the games. If you've been waiting for the ultimate Saul Steinberg retrospective, here it is: Joel Smith, Saul Steinberg, Illuminations (Yale) with a personal tip of the cap from Charles Simic as introduction and an excellent commentary into this troubled artist's life. One of the bellowing ironies of life ~ those that make us laugh, cause a smile, stop us endeared ~ have been living through a private hell. Beautifully laid out paintings and illustrations, with thumbnail descriptions, glossary, notes and chronology with photographs. A decade before R. Crumb looked like R. Crumb, Saul Steinberg had that look, including the hat. // Know that Thailand (old Siam) is unique in Southeast Asian history having never been conquered or colonized by the Europeans. When visiting (I don't know) its architecture (armchair traveler) one senses immediately the country's isolation and unique powers of holding no resentment against the usual white race plunderers. One look at their glitter embroidered temples and big hat majestic roofs, those deepened temples, and this was a civilization just too busy at work. Architecture of Thailand, Nithi Sthapitanonda & Brian Mertens (Thames & Hudson) is a golden guide to traditional and contemporary forms. One more bible for ethnic building and ways. I got lost in this one. // I Looked up by the 5th inning (come on! the score was 10-1). A fairly fine synopsis of African American art from the Colonial period to present time: African American Art, the Long Struggle, Crystal A. Britton (New Line) introducing many more women artists as Pat Ward Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Clarissa Sligh, Alma W. Thomas rarely given the coverage, and a concise historical background. One place to get a toe-hold and ask for much more. // Maxine Kumin, Still to Mow (Norton) and by what I've read here in New England of this New England poet as a New England team takes game one of the World Series, I tend to agree with the title. There's some heartwood here, terrorism, end of the world lingerings, musical sluicing...I was okay where it took me. Here's how the book opens, a clincher premiere:
MULCHING
Me in my bugproof netted headpiece kneeling
to spread sodden newspapers between broccolis,
corn sprouts, cabbages and four kinds of beans,
prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation,
AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami,
front-page photographs of lines of people
with everything they own heaped on their heads,
the rich assortment of birds trilling on all
sides of my forest garden, the exhortations
of commencement speakers at local colleges,
the first torture revelations under my palms
and I a helpless citizen of a country
I used to love, who as a child wept when
the brisk police band bugled Hats off! The flag
is passing by, now that every wanton deed
in this stack of newsprint is heartbreak
my blackened fingers can only root in dirt,
turning up industrious earthworms, bits
of unreclaimed eggshell, wanting to ask
the earth to take my unquiet spirit,
bury it deep, make compost of it.
- Maxine Kumin, Still to Mow
- I've liked this poem each time I've returned to it. It turned my head in a bookshop while leafing, then again in another bookshop, and finally in a library copy. The "honor" word choice could be applied to the poet's way of handling all his work, translations and teaching over many years.
HIDE-AND-SEEK, 1933
Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up
on the game before it was done
and forgot I was still hiding.
I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose.
-Galway Kinnell , from The Best American Poetry 2007, ed. Heather McHugh (Scribner)
To some he is over-hyped, while to others he's essential, and to even some he is a combination of the two. In fact one may have produced the other. Needless to say, it is impossible to comprehend the sixties, or even America without a touch of Andy Warhol. Don't deny yourself, sit with this heavy tome Andy Warhol Portraits (Phaidon) in your lap and wave through 300 portraits made from the 1960s up to the artists death in 1987. His trademark Marilyn Monroe I believe has been replaced over time by the equally breathless and color-toned Blondie (singer, not the comic). His "Unidentified Woman" (1985) looks twenty years ahead of its time by reminding one of the unidentified woman of now: Laura Bush. No matter what one thinks of Warhol's art, his was a cosmic capital eye.
He came from a village in the Chuvash Republic many hundreds of miles east of Moscow and his poetry sparkles with its own effervescence of little lyrical books within one book, constantly surprising and inventing, beginning as if mid-sentence or song as if his poetry body and mind never stopped, it was life: Gennady Aygi, Field-Russia (New Directions). All poets are "nature poets" if they are anything. The poems in this book (gathered up after the poet's death) are a bit more cryptic than other Aygi, but one wants it all. Here's a sample ~
WALKING TOWARD A BIRCH-TREE
IN A FIELD
it was
a - a
no more: it was
gleaming from within
(making clear the limits)
in soundless prayer
with movement - just barely
that heaven
too
should be
a
- Gennady Aygi, Field-Russia (New Directions)
Happily, very happily, I have more in hand from White Pine Press (www.whitepine.org) of their Companions for the Journey series of compact books and oh what a beauty to behold, finally, a full volume of Haiku Master Buson, trans by Yuki Sawa & Edith Marcombie Shiffert. Nicely annotated, bilingual and clean as a whistle. Take a look ~
Springtime rain!
Almost dark, and yet
today still lingers.
~
Treading on the dishes,
rats make a noise
of coldness!
~
A tethered horse
and snow on both of
the stirrups!
There are a few boners, like this one made famous and much finer by others:
The light of a candle
is transferred to another candle -
spring twilight.-that terrible clumsy pitiful word "transferred" removes all human grace. But then again the best of haiku collections are spiced with a few mangy uglies, poems just too stupid to survive in their translation and they always get the last laugh. Nobody has the foggiest idea about haiku - it's one of the most revered and also emulated to smithereens. Pure Coyote.
Even more so
because of being alone
the moon is a friend.
- Yosa Buson
(DVD) Stone Reader, Mike Moskowitz, director: already a few years old but dealing with an age old subject of one's favorite book, in this case the very little known The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman. A book I happened to have read at its showing and simply because of the bright review of the book by John Seeyle, yet one more forgotten master storyteller in the league of Americana. This is a readers delight of a film, watching the director take on the hunt to locate the elusive one-book-wonder Mossman, who went on to years of drifting, and then solid years as a welder instead of writing book two. Involving visits with Seeyle, Leslie Fielder, Frank Conroy and others show up along the way sharing their insights about great books the director bundles up and takes along with him on his field trip of discoveries. Nothing like a reader grabbing down favorite books from his shelves and packing a box for show-in-tell. Kingpin editor Robert Gottlieb even sits down for a chat. Indeed, only Jospeh Heller is missing. Moskowitz finds his man, so a second viewing, with commentary, is worth buddying up.
Some of the finest comic poetry since Frank O'Hara and whomever else you may like to list. I turned the pages and came to this poem, smiled broadly, read some more, smiled more...went to the beginning and read all the book. Chosen, wisely, by WS Merwin for the Yale Younger Poets Series. There is a poem about Yeats called "Yeast" that is pitch perfect laughter.
TONIGHT
Tonight my girlfriend's brother
is visiting from Japan. We take
him to New York's tallest building -
the moon.
- Loren Goodman, Famous Americans (Yale)
LISTENIN' -
Radiohead In Rainbows (handed to me by Carson straight off-line, down loaded for peanuts, and so readily available to most anyone: this is the future); Iron and Wire The Shepherd's Dog; Bobby Womack The Soul of Bobby Womack: Stop On By; Putumaya Presents Women of Spirit; Mark Knopfler Kill to Get Crimson; Nina Simone Forever Young, Gifted & Black; Abbey Lincoln Devil's Got Your Tongue; Robert Plant/Alison Krause Raising Sand (produced by T Bone Burnett, who has become the John Williams of the
rock/folk/popular sect. Looking at the CD cover Susan thinks Robert Plant washed in from the sea and much younger Alison Krause is there to pick up the saltwater mollusk. Tantalized. They do sound fine together); The Excello Story (Lightnin Slim, Lonesome Sundown, Lazy Lester and a host of blues music phantoms - this sound will put the watery chill in you); Dino Valenti, Dino Valenti :I remember this recording from years ago - one more of the haunted delicious sounds out of the 60s with somewhat simplistic lyrics attached to a overpowering passion unheard of in these now jaded times...so I open the door and let it flow out. Gifted to me since as tape, burned CD etc from friends of all ages from all around the country. Go, Dino, Go, in memory.
I believe the next Woodburners will be after the New Year. I have a "Longhouse Bibliography" to update for all of 2007 with all new entries and descriptions after a very packed year.
~ Bob Arnold
4 Nov 2007
W O O D B U R N E R S W E R E C O M M E N D ~ H A R V E S T remembering ~
John T. Scott, sculptorMarcel Marceau Sri Chinmoy... ...gone at 76, guru to millions, plus John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana, known to only have slept 90 minutes each day - otherwise meditating, teaching, his physical spiritual workouts, and having written 1500 books, 115,000 poems, 20,000 songs, supposedly 200,000 paintings; god bless'd Caw the great Caw - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Book,
beautiful
book,
miniscule forest,
leaf
after leaf,
your paper
smells
of the elements
-Pablo Neruda
Love calls us to the things of this world - Richard Wilbur
nothing more beautiful under the sun
than to be under the sun -Ingebord Bachmann
Poets are persons aware of aloneness and competent to speak in the space of solitude-who, by speaking alone, make possible for themselves and others the being of persons, in which all the value of the human world is found. But never assuredly-never without the saying of it (it does not "go without saying"), which saying is what the poet can do, if he is any good at all
- Allen Grossman
Sunday, July 26 1857
The note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting but almost wiry sound, was the first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. This was the prevailing bird in the northern part of Maine. The forest generally was all alive with them at this season, and they were proportionally numerous and musical about Bangor. They evidently breed in that State. Wilson did not know where they bred, and says, "Their only note is a kind of chip." Though commonly unseen, their simple ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te, so sharp and piercing, was as distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkness of the forest would be to the eye. I thought that they commonly uttered it as they flew. I hear this note for a few days only in the spring, as they go through Concord, and in the fall see them again going southward, but then they are mute. We were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early. What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!
- Henry David Thoreau, The Allegash and East Branch
Bob Arnold & Greg Joly continued their never-ending reading series on the street over September commemorating their two years of reading on the streets since the drowning of New Orleans (Katrina).This time it was merely a 15 minute affair, on the corner, a surprise to both guys meeting by chance in town. Bob was packing some Neruda anyway, and Greg was packing some Martin Espada anyway. This time they read in memory of fellow Vermonter Grace Paley. In December, Bob plans to meet up with friend Louise Landes Levi on the street and welcome her to Brattleboro, slush, snow, rain or shine as they get together a reading and maybe some music.
Why are people destructive and joy-hating? Is it perception of the unimportance of their lives finally penetrating the bark of their complacency and egotism? The slow martyrdom of sexual frustration? The feeling they're objects of use and not of love? The knowledge they're marked out for death, their resentment hardening with their arteries? Whichever is the reason, they can't for long endure the sight of a happy man. You might as wisely light a match in a room filled with cyclopropane as go among them with a pleased expression. Tear it off your face they must, let their fingers be crushed in the attempt. Because many poets have averted their eyes from this radical evil, they strike me as insufferable blabbermouths. They did not retch enough; were too patient, courteous, civilized. A little brutality would have made them almost men. Irving Layton from A Red Carpet For The Sun (Jonathan Williams Publisher, 1958)
WE CANNOT DECIDE
There has never been beauty like yours.
Your face, your eyes, your presence.
We cannot decide which we love most,
your gracefulness or your generosity.
I came with many knots in my heart,
like the magician's rope.
You undid them all at once.
I see now the splendor of the student
and that of the teacher's art.
Love and this body sit inside your presence,
one demolished, the other drunk.
We smile. We weep, tree limbs
turning sere, then light green.
Any power that comes through us is you.
Any wish. What does a rock know of April?
It is better to ask the flowery grass,
the jasmine, and the redbud branch.-Rumi, Bridge to the Soul (HarperOne, 2007): translated by Coleman Barks and one of the many beauties in this collection celebrating Rumi's 800th birthday. And sounding still so young! Barks travels to Iran with Robert Bly in a small and decorative part of this book to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Tehran, where eighty percent of the courses are taught in English. In a city where gasoline costs 15 cents a gallon. This book of ninety new poems, mostly all new to translation. Ah, this country to invade, or to learn from?
Long before Saving Private Ryan, there was Overlord (1975) Stuart Cooper's portrait of D-Day from the unique perspective of a young British soldier on his way to the beach at Normandy, and actual film footage Cooper developed with master skills from cinematographer John Alcott threading miles and miles of European theatre war archive It's estimated the war archive depth, to be seen complete, would take a viewer every day/5 days a week/ 9 years of watching. Slip-edited technique (seamless) with often dream surreal and black & white real war film journalism, stitched into live action. Made by a young director during the ashes of the Vietnam War. There is an eerie shot of Hitler in a plane over viewing a war zone in Poland much like the Punk flying over a sumerged New Orleans and taking a peek. The repeated misery of history.
Other films that may have wasted your time, but they didn't waste mine Perfume; Japanese Story, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont; For Your Consideration; Vision of Light; 11:14 : sensory whole and fine use of CGI, the always excellent Toni Collette, never mind Joan Plowright and a reintroduction of the original Brief Encounter, the gift as only Christopher Guest (listen with commentary - then go to the over-the-top commentary on Talladega Nights), to cinematographer secrets & lies, and great fun with overlapping young lives and crimes in the night. On the other hand there is 3:10 to Yuma (or Dumba) one more shocking reminder how the new westerns ain't like they used to be. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are fine, trapped in a very silly remake. You could care less who dies in this film. You almost want to die. The best shot in 3:10 to Yuma is Crowe studying a book, on horseback and a wily hawk. The film should have ended there, at 5 minutes, and been the shortest talkie western ever made. It was downhill after that, fast. Even the psychotic side-kick is going up against a film legacy from Klaus Kinski to Jack Palance and he doesn't stand a chance. But, as a friend and I both agreed, the air conditioning that day was sure nice.
CITY OF DAVID
Jerusalem is a grave of poets. Name
two who are buried there:
the poet Dennis Silk is buried there.
He lived with a dressmaker's dummy,
in a cave, on the Hill of Evil
Counsel due South of Zion Mount.
She bore him children
after her kind. - In any case, whatever
she gave birth to did not live.
Famous Amichai, also a poet,
is buried there. From his apartment on
the eastern slope you can see
a gate of the City, called David's Gate.
In '48, on a beach at Tel Aviv,
the poet Amichai held a dying soldier
in his arms. The soldier whispered-:
"Shelley." And then he died.
Poets built Jerusalem. Therefore,
poets have a duty to destroy
Jerusalem. If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
the world will be better off.
The tree a cat can get up into,
a cat can get down by itself.- Allen Grossman, Descartes' Loneliness (New Directions)
Baseball Haiku, ed. Cor van den Geuvel & Nanae Tamura (Norton): Masaoka Shiki popularized baseball single handedly in Japan during the 1890s while remaining one of the masters of haiku along with Basho, Buson & Issa...the very ones Jack Kerouac was studying, via tutelage of Gary Snyder, while becoming the first baseball haikuist from America...they of the baseball world have apparently claimed him as one of their own. Unlike most of the Beats, JK was a jock. He wrote only one football haiku, the sport he was best known for as an athlete:
Crossing the football field,
coming home from work,
the lonely businessman.
Here's some others from the baseball diamond -
dandelions
the baseball rolled
through them
(Shiki)
~
summer loneliness
dropping the pop-up
i toss to myself
(Ed Markowski)
~
game over
all the empty seats
turn blue
(Alan Pizzarelli)
~
lost in the lights
the high fly ball that
never comes down
(Raffael de Gruttola)
~
summer afternoon
the long fly ball to center field
takes its time
(Cor van den Heuvel)
~
Empty baseball field
- a robin,
Hops along the bench
(Jack Kerouac)
~
my son runs toward
the budding tree -
their first base
(Hoshino Tsunehiko)- yes, indeed, everything is now "to market to market". Haiku/baseball/play ball.
EARTH SERENE
whether we want to live on the 13th floor of a high rise
or want to reside by the sea
we all belong to earth.
for one knee to reach ground took ten years.
both knees took twenty
but loss is not futility.
ground is a source of peace;
earth itself is source of human being.
whether we live in a high rise
or live by the sea
earth is our home.
lest we forget.- Yamao Sansei, Single Bliss (trans. Scott Watson) (countryvalley@mac.com)
:Yamao Sansei (1938-2001), a long time resident of Yakushima region of Japan who for a time was one of the founders of the Buzoku (Tribe) commune with Nanao Sakaki and others. A terrific poet, this fine selection translaed by Watson who lives & works in Japan and printed as a single sheet broadside magnifico by Country Valley Press. (http://web.mac.com/countryvalley)
(Film) Such any easy mark is Julia Taymor's go for broke and to the heart Across the Universe, a thoroughly cosmic and quite adaptable telling of America in the world of the 60s via songs from The Beatles. Just imagine the Yellow Submarine never stopped sailing. Unlike Dylan, The Doors, The Stones, The Beatles songs have been sung aloud from schools, nursing homes , whole neighborhoods, and prisons (even Charles Manson) and through the bands songful characters Jude and Lucy and Maxwell and Prudence, and even Sadie and Jo-Jo, we receive such an attractive bunch that I haven't seen on the silver screen for years. And you definitely need the big screen for this one. Grab your most jaded and corrupted and foul mouthed pal and take them along. This is an intensely human screening, and Bono and Joe Cocker lend a beautiful hand to things. Something this simple and pure doth make the critics quiver.
(DVD) Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Zhang Yimou): of fathers & sons be prepared to weep openly, as the characters in this film do, including Takakura Ken as an aging fisherman on a journey from Japan to rural China wishing to uphold a mission his estranged son had begun and is now too gravely ill to complete. Imagine, a film for the whole family to enjoy. Ages 5 to 500.
THREE SLIM BEAUTIES NOT TO MISS: Cinema Stories, Alexander Kluge (New Directions): German filmmaker Kluge dreams, invents and writes thinking-aloud here with a splendor part memoir, biographical, short essayist and a conviction "that we can share with one another in public something that "moves us inwardly". A man of his word - start here. The ideal book to gift to the ideal rebel: Poetry As Insurgent Art, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions) where the granddad of bebop beat, cool business (City Lights) and knowing the difference between law & order comes forth in a cloth copy $12.95 tagged little wonder, filled to the brim with wisdom and sayings from his ever popular "Poetry Manifestos" of the 70s to something as rolling thunder as this: "If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a "take your seat" practice. Stand up and let them have it" We've all been fingered, never forget it. And Donald Revell does try his darndest in The Art of Attention (Graywolf), these are essays to the poet's eye from a poet's eye. Relaxed and with the reader, moving pleasantly and pleasurably with the help of his text support group ranging from Blake to Whitman, Shelley and Thoreau, Apollinaire, Olson and Ronald Johnson. Amongst the angels finding his way, closing with a sprawling sort of help me Rhonda fiesta on how he suddenly changed his own writing style. Personally I found the new writing style calculated and cold, whereas the earliest poems, before he started thinking too much and just rushed for the pen to sing, the very best.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century ed. Mark Strand (Norton): one of those scary titles. It never works. And Strand early on admits he doesn't know enough about poetry from Africa and Asia, so, why include them. I guess it's too much to sit down and begin to read at such a late and prized age? so I admire the revelation for its candor, but am nevertheless disgusted his editors let him pull it off. Imagine no poetry from where lions and Buddha roam? I actually had to read this declaration twice, then push forward. Strand does grab Akhamatova to Zukofsky; the Vasko Popa shows up just about when you're ready to bail and Gloria Fuertes and Nazim Hikmet sail you up into the center of the book. There is the typical loaded names, deadwood, nothing much surprising, very old bland wine appearance and feel to the selection, and while Milosz by some editorial faux pas gets double billing and it looks corny, Milosz edited his own anthology some years ago just this size that blows this one back into the choir where it belongs. Strand pulled in Lorca and Neruda but of course wouldn't let Vallejo show his face. You see, that's what you get for not going to Africa.
TO MY SOUL
Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?
And you & I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?
And you, a child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,
And what we had
give way like coffee grains
brushed across the paper . . .- Jean Valentine, Little Boat (Wesleyan)
(DVD) Jigoku (Hell): made on a pittance, visually destructive, fascinating, original, unstoppable and in short a wonder, and absolutely hated by some and adored and revered by others. Life isn't perfect, though most of this film swims down in hell. Forget the plot, this one is beyond plot: man leaves the scene of a crime and pays for it within his own mind. Like Ozu, at the opposite end of cinema spectrum (except both masters are possessed) director Nobuo Nakagawa was a hard drinking soul in the real world and did his best living behind the camera. Ozu was also his favorite director. A proven masterpiece, in these eyes, constructed in 1960 and to this day a ground breaker to the mass of buckets of blood and bliss from current Asian cinema. Test your wits. Nakagawa made 97 films, this will be the one remembered. You gave your conscious over to evil
(DVD) Wanderlust: a dreamers compendium of road movies celebrated into a 90 minute documentary here you go! It's just bothered by a silly side show film inserted by the creators of how they could best make their laptop constructed masterpiece, and of course that means to go on the road themselves. Except the road's now about vanished. Thank goodness we had the likes from John Ford (Dennis Hopper's pick for a road film The Grapes of Wrath) to Wim Wenders twin classics Kings of the Road or Paris, Texas (take your pick, but watch both) to be saved on celluloid. Excellent scenes from the field, great and distinguished commentators, turn the key. Press the pedal.
RADIOGENESIS.
poem for the synthesizer & voice
The mind is a car radio. The body is Cocteau's Orpheus.
The sexual attraction is toward the car. The car as Delphic lover.
The love is for the radio, which is the spirit of the lover.
The love-act between radio and Poet is radiogenesis.
God is universal mind. Space-time is thought
The radio is the mind. The mind of the Poet. The fertile egg.
The Poet whose dials are tuned to the right frequencies that
drink in cosmic milk. White knowledge.
Coming from the mind of God as sperm.
The union of sperm and fertile egg
creates the star-burst chemistry of genesis.
Radiogenesis.
The process of translation of these electrical impulses is genetic.
Electro-genetic. And the result is words.
The writing of these words makes the Poem.
Hours, at all hours, spent in the garage.
In the passenger's seat of the car. With the radio on.
Searching the dial for a voice on the other side of static.
For an inspired paradoxical juxtaposition of spoken sounds.
For a metaphor for daily life as light.
Radiogenesis.
Or in attic rooms or dappledganged hotels listening
to the silence between screams for a sign of sanity.
Radiogenesis.
This the Work. This is the stuff of a stuff better than sex.
The whore of Orpheus. The nightmare of Eurydice.
The thing invisible that becomes seen.
The King of the forgotten.
The siren Queen.- Thomas Rain Crowe, Radiogenesis (www.MainStreetRag.com)
:Thomas Rain Crowe makes council circle here with love, surrealism, song and the overall radio heart. Turn it up, since he insists it won't be turned down.
The Colorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms (Chicago): journeys in Outsider Art. Yes, indeed, I like any book that lives up to its title and even subtitle, and of late University of Chicago Press has been issuing well built, eye-catching titles, fine paper and decorative, at affordable prices. Greg Bottoms has made a fascinating scrapple of a book entwining his own badly abused family background within an outer vortex of searching for, and often far afield (I love his heart & soul here), various Outsider artists right in their domain. I don't believe he ever steps foot into a museum even to take a peek. Living is the museum. Shy of any dramatics or illustrations, the humility of the text, cleanly drafted, paints all the pictures for us. Into the after life of Howard Finster, the better known of a crew of survivors still hard at work and living on shoestring made of cat gut: William Thomas Thompson, Myrtice West and Norbert Kox. The greater art is of course the human story told in plain language as if straight off a seed packet asking us to cut a row, plant, water, and make roots. Splendidly adorned with heavy thinkers and likewise psychological theories left hanging as the sunshine is allowed to splash in through the door. This is breezy, thoughtful, come hither writing. I like Greg Bottoms.
(DVD) The U.S. vs. John Lennon : to be more exact - the Nixon regime vs. John Lennon, which included beasts like John Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover. No one that I can remember then was against John Lennon. The Beatles were ever popular and Lennon was one of turbo jets of The Beatles rise to music heaven.This was also back in an era, before flagrant wealth, when celebrities actually put their lives on the line for the cause of world peace. Appearances range widely on the subject of Lennon from G. Gordon Liddy to Bobby Seale. The music is well chosen, the historical clips are smart, and Yoko Ono likes this film.
(DVD) Oasis, d: Lee Chang-dong: remarkable performances by Moon So-ri and Sol Kyung-gu as two societal outcasts (one is off his rocker and recently released from prison, the other a young woman with cerebral palsey) who fulfill one of the most grueling love story's ever set onto film. Chang-dong both wrote and directed this tale and we watch it as if from some secret perspective the director has plinthed for us. The beauty won't be on the screen, but what possibly bubbles up from the depths of the viewer. It may take one or two swipes before you catch onto this one. Unmistakably one of the groundbreaking films from the Korean New Wave, or any wave. It's by itself.
AMBITION
One of the good things about getting older is that no one
asks anymore "What are you going to do when you grow up?
Or later on, "What do you do?" Questions for which
I never had a good answer. Nowadays everyone assumes
I'm retired, and that I have no ambition whatsoever. It
isn't true. It's true that it's too late for me to become an
Olympic champion swimmer or a lumberjack, but my
ambitions are on higher things. I want to be a cloud. I'm
taking some classes and have a really good instructor.
I don't want to be a threatening storm cloud, just one
of those sunny summer clouds. Not that I won't have
a dark side, of course. I'd like to be one of those big
fat cumulus clouds that pass silently overhead on a
beautiful day. A day so fine, in fact, that you might not
even notice me, as I sailed over your town on my way
somewhere else, but you'd feel good about it.- Louis Jenkins, North of the Cities (www.willothewispbooks.com)
O hell, let the poet speak for himself about his own poems. He's so intelligent and giving forth in every one of his poems, often heard on recordings with other musicians. "The 42 poems in this book were culled from a 365-poem opus titled One Year. Each poem in One Year was composed according to the following method: I would take a day-say, January 18-and, shifting through more than 25 years of journals, extract everything that was entered on that date (thoughts, reportage, dreams, conversations, overheard remarks, passages copied from books I was reading, etc.). Then I would isolate clusters of material, combine and recombine them, amplifying and further atomizing the fragments and finally whittling them down to no more than one page of text. So while everything that "happens" in a given poem did indeed transpire on its given date, that date is unmoored in time, representing many years and as many places and circumstances-ergo, the "she" who appears in the first line of a particular poem is not necessarily the same "she" who appears in the next line." Big-size, celebratory cover art reminds me of the very best of the late Wang Hui-ming's woodcuts. Yes! Mikhail Horowitz, Rafting Into the After-Life, (Codhill Press). A beautiful book to behold.
Vali Myers, Gianni Menichetti (The Golda Foundation/goldafoundation.org): often when tramping the mud tract of Maine along the Allagash with companions, Henry David Thoreau would awaken before his companions around a dead campfire and a very still woodlands and think he had to "shout" the woods awake. So he would. Startling everything around him. I can think of Vali Myers as much this way - a core independent, marching to a whole different drummer - born in Australia, raised on the streets of Paris in the 1950s, and nurturing her art work, dancing soul and self for forty years in a wild canyon in Italy she called The Valley. In the back issues of The Paris Review one can find Vali's paintings since George Plimpton recognized her talents early on. What we have here are two men who loved the woman and carried the dream on: Robert Yarra as publisher seeing the book made its way into print, and lushly so - golden covers and photographs, and a seemingly open hand for Gianni Menichetti, a lover of Vali Myers, to share essentially his truths and secrets about those years. It's no formal biography of Myers - more visiting for days on end while Menichetti shares freely, candidly, raw and fully, with no bone to pick. They were lovers for 30 years. I feel this by the last pages. No more let Life divide what Death can join together. (Shelley)
- & thoughts to a fine poet just passed away:
ONLY
In this dark, still room,
which is only a thought,
your star rises again
over calm water,
the air placid in blackness
as it drifts
always farther,
remote and luminous,
no more a face or body,
nor a wing left to shadow me -
only a name, which is mine,
and a receding light
in the room, across the water,
wherever it is I lie down.- Ralph J. Mills, Jr. With No Answer (Juniper Press)
Just home here, from Scotland and Laurie & Thomas A. Clark (Moschatel Press) -
within a withy grove
wait to know your mind
a flurry of feathers
angle shades, slivers
of gold on a green ground
- from, Hazel Wood
~
anyone who is not moved
by the least movement in shadows
who cannot take the evening air
or sit for a while on a stone
among the vagaries of attention
has lost the grace to be alonefrom, In the Black Wood
both poems by Thomas A. Clark
The poetry of Neruda that I love best, that I do reread with an always-renewed pleasure, is the poetry of his ripeness, beginning with the first book Elemental Odeas, published when he was fifty years old, and ending with Full Powers, published when he was fifty-eight, eleven years before his death. These are the poems of a happy man, deeply fulfilled in his sexuality, at home in the world, in love with life and its infinite particular forms, overflowing with the joy of language. They are large hearted, generous poems, resonant with a humor that is rare in modern poetry, in any poetry. The sometimes showy surrealism of the earlier poems has mellowed into a constant, delicious skating on the edge of nonsense.
- Stephen Mitchell, translator: Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon / Pablo Neruda
A modest size collection published by Farrar in almost British Faber & faber typography and jacket decoration, I already liked the looks and feel in hand of Selected Translations by Ted Hughes
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