New to Woodburners We Recommend : May 8, 2008 Hayden Carruth one burner hot plate   From Woodburners 2008: If Obama's odyssey shows us anything as a country,... AFTER AN IMBECILE, YES, GIVE US THE 'ELITIST' Four Strong Winds SPRING COMING 2008 WINTER 08 THE DONE DEAL DONE

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND ~ HAYDEN ASKED, 'WHAT WAS THAT BIRD THAT USED TO FLY UP YOUR RIVER AND MADE THAT CALL?' SUSAN WITH A FEVER & LIGHT-HEADED COULDN'T QUITE RECALL. I CAME OVER AND WHISPERED, 'THE KINGFISHER.' HAYDEN NODDED, 'YES, YES, THE KINGFISHER' ~ ~                                                                                                                                                                                                                      giving a loose to my soul                                                                                                     RF   We saw Hayden Carruth yesterday at Marlboro College - probably the sorriest human animal I've seen in quite awhile. But don't get yourself too upset - it's one naturalist looking upon another naturalist. Wheelchair, tubes to his nose, oxygen gasps to get him to speak, his eyes all cockeyed from lord knows what. He throws his head back slowly to look at me with one eye that bobbles for clarity as if an old pirate, then he bellows, "That you, Bob?" What hair is left, down to his shoulders. He forgets a name told to him after a few seconds. Otherwise, his long term memory rivals an elephant. Or a carving into a beech tree. He confuses a roving reminiscence of one writer friend with the next ( Raymond Carver slipping into Edward Hoagland ) showing he has passionate memories that flood his senses and nerves. 87 years long. He told Susan she has "always been a gem". When I put down my copy of Hayden's book For You to sign (he signs nearly blind, almost like swinging a small sword; I have to fingertip point where to attach the pen) he stops a moment and asks, "Did I write a book called For You?" If he wasn't such a survivalist it would be sad, tragic, but here he has come all this way to prove the gods wrong. Just applaud him one more time. He received three deserving standing ovations at this round assembly of over 75 people. Some were old acquaintances we knew from up north - folks Hayden had once introduced us to. Others were readers, neighbors or academics from this college, and it was that world Carruth knew after he left Vermont almost 30 years ago. He's reading his poetry off a book that is projected onto a screen in large point type. He has a helper sitting beside him maneuvering the book so it can all project onto the small screen so he can read. Being Hayden - both crusty and curious - he stops a moment and asks the helper beside him what his name is. The man answers. Hayden reads another poem. He asks the kind man again what his name is. Robert Frost would have never been able to do this so blind, so he stopped, or read and rowed from his heart. Hayden is revealing his work, himself, the very instant. Most humans aren't ready ever for the latter, but it is the crux of many of the ancient Chinese poems Hayden loves. He steered close to the very instant as a poet, but he always practiced it as a man. He worked hard in his fragile health a few years ago to read in manuscript my book on tools and offered a lengthy and pithy commentary, along with lavishing praise and harsh criticism I took in stride while polishing up the book to get it ready for publication. What I wasn't comfortable with was his sometime resentment of others' lives - the fact I had a son who worked with me at hand labor and a woman who loved me and we made a family that worked out in the wood. All the things Hayden wanted for himself in Vermont. A man of disappointments and some bitterness and he shared that bitterness onto me in strange ways. I saw it in the blink of an eye when I met his wife, finally, the one he married some years ago who is now Susan's age. His second wife Rose Marie was at the reading too, shy and hard working, Polish and the poet's wife out in the wilderness who raised a son with Hayden and did all the dirty laundry. She came to visit us when they were breaking up long ago. She cut my hair. Slept in our cabin as our guest. She recalled it all like a far off fantasy land when she was describing it to us yesterday during the reading. Imagine. She wasn't even sure if she was invited to the reception after the reading. And I already knew by the look from a certain someone that Susan and I weren't invited at all. The literary mafioso had made their decision. Ah, once upon a time we had good visits and overnight sleep-overs from Hayden. He slept on the floor of my library and read Bakunin to get himself to sleep. He once returned from France with his manuscript fresh on white pages of his next book The Sleeping Beauty and asked us if he could read the whole thing to us by lamp light in our leaf size cabin in the wood. He would have tried to steal any sleeping beauty in a heartbeat during his cavalier girlfriend time between marriages, but I knew wise and stylish ones that already knew a poetry of love and loyalty. At the Marlboro reading we brought fifteen books by Hayden for him to sign. It certainly seemed excessive, but we could have brought thirty, and when he used to visit us he always looked forward to sign whatever we had on hand. I chatted with him before his reading and asked if he was up to signing a pile afterwards. "No problem, I brought my special pen," lifting it with a little smile like a wet dipstick for me to see. Ever the elegant ruffian. So while he signed the books, animated between joyful and grumpy, we visited like always and pretty much said goodbye.   Bob Arnold 5 May 08   ~ WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND one burner hot plate ~   Often situations evolve and move into position or even into a corner and reveal a truth. Like ooze leveling. This has now happened with the Clintons. But they won't alter their break neck personal indecency for anything, short of something better and better coming their way. Between the white house Punk and the Clintons we get the very worse nightmare of sixties spoiled brats rolled into one doobie. Lucky us. If Hillarious sees nothing better than her own image and career going forward, then she will plow forward, reckless all the way. B. Clinton has already shown he is of the same cloth. He fed right into the right wings hands back in the 90s; and learning from their mistakes, his wife now works like the right wing adopting all their tricks and zeal for private justice, and will burn on the civil war road to hell just like General Sherman, clunky wagon wheels and all. It means nothing to them that it is destroying their party since this party has since parted down the middle against them in their actions from the 90s. Kennedy, Kerry, Dodd, Richardson, McGovern, soon Gore etc. all the pillars of the righteous liberal party want them gone and kid Obama put into gear since he has a ton of work to do to bring back a bipartisan Democratic party, which he had in-tow back with Iowa, and has since lost to the Clinton rat pack medicine show. It's amazing how racism shows itself right and left of the center aisle. Of course, the Clintons could also try being team players and begin working for Obama, while easing their way away the next few weeks of campaigning, and coalescing their supporters with Obama and possibly saving some of the planet. Just a thought. And what is it about West Virginia that the Clinton machine seems to have it all sewn up for this Tuesday? Is it really a state of elderly women voters who believe a nasty woman 'fighter' is the way to run the world? Or more of those ornery white-folk who believe 'Obama is a Muslim'? I took a slow train ride once through Harper's Ferry (John Brown rise up) and I know it's in West Virginia...where the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers abide. While this is going on, groundhog McCain is shifting into those centrist liberal camps and meeting with black and Hispanic communities, while advocating for right wing Supreme Court judges...so by the summer he should have a ragbag battalion that is everything from soup to nuts: right wing to liberal and thus sponsoring a sort of koolaid Obama mixture, with a sprig of Clinton and patched together maverick McCain all the way. He's running from the WMD Punk, too. The audience has become quite agile and agreeable with this folksy liar and his promises, allowing trouble for honest Barack....who is exhausted, anyway, from tangling in the pucker brush for months with the viperous Clintons. It's time for the super delegates to get up off their partisan fat asses and screw this notion that there is a choice between a "woman and an African American" and realize there is no such choice: it's a snake and a snake handler. Behead the snake, toss it, and grab the snake handler and move him into nomination: there's more snakes ahead. Bob Arnold 7 days into May 08     WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND ~ If Obama's odyssey shows us anything as a country, we are as racist as ever. Imagine a white politician having to put up with this scrutiny on such a ridiculous and shallow subject as having an odd bed fellow who just so happens to be a father figure and a pastor. He has basically leftist ideas which are his, and that's about it. Sorry he happens to be loud, and oh yes, happens to be black. McCain's pal, Rev. Hagee happens to like the idea that Katrina ruined New Orleans and hopefully killed off some wicked homosexuals, but he's okay. And yes, he's white. If anyone wants an outrage, the outrage is watching the liberal Clinton machine going merrily along with McCain on a war & gas economy, pandering all the way as a two-some, which they are. White as ever and ready to go against each other as the two corporate heavies in the Presidential election for the Fall. There is no choice, there is only the corporate sponsored election. So have a great time! It's repulsive. There should be fighting in the streets, and a few buildings burned down. Oh yeah, no one wants to waste the gas.   ~   The more intricate our society gets, the more semi-legal ways to steal. -Travis McGee   Dear Kim, Very good news Jeff's college gang of theater artists (which they are) got the recognition they deserved with the Brecht play. No big award individually to Jeff...just remind him how almost every enduring theme in the theater is about the secret of life which is simply about endurance. So while recognition individually often kicks in an important first-step, it more than often kills the ability to learn the quiet suffering of creating. The individual, it must be understood, gathers oneself alone, then spreads it into a fraternity. It is a rare event in any part of life when this can be shown and revered. Every school I ever visited to work in for a day or a few months all paved the way for the 'independent mind', but it was hell to pay if one truly practiced this. Same with poets sifted down to even the lowly small press - the majority just want to be bigger and richer and more known and then top heavy and of course eventually fixed and empty. This is all happening right now with Barack Obama. We're watching how a good man is, indeed, hard to find. We cut them down. There is something about how Greatness is no longer allowed...whether the people themselves have been diminished by time, technology and greed, and so will not tolerate falling in behind an idealist who has the ability to make thought into action...a very scary prospect for those stuck, blindly and in a routine, with the every day mechanics of keeping a capitalist country afloat. That means 90% are rowers down in the ash pit of the galley, while 10% roam the deck in the wild blue horizon breeze. That is America. Obama came out and off of the Slaveship (see Amiri Baraka's play) and dared to work his way to the top of that deck. This is why he wasn't "black enough" for blacks at the start. And the white educated ones picked him up on the deck, knowing fully how he got there, his trousers were torn to shreds, his frame was thin from no food or drink, but he blinked and smiled and spoke from an elegance of learning. We in our position of knowing recognized something from our own lives and moreso our readings, which lifts into dreams. But now another has got himself up from the slaveship and he's making trouble for the Obama man. A Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Just like a literary act: the black cat that follows every good story, film, play and novel...the threatening article. Melville is filled with this, Hawthorne, the menacing and swirling windy foreboding leaves of a long Robert Frost tale. Trouble. In literature there is time for the creator to move the lines and the history and the theme to gel into a moral. In real life it is much more difficult, if not impossible in the realm of sound bites and the opposite of a literary stroll through a field. This is haiku without the penetration. Many Americans look for any excuse not to learn and not to make things difficult, something Obama has been stating in the very first of his campaign speeches a year ago: it's going to take work ahead, personal sacrifice and hard knocks to get where he plans to go. "Are you with me?" he'd always sweet-shouted at the closing of his talks. He's been there and done it. We're just foolish enough not to recognize this as we insist on experience that comes as canned laughter and easy gimmicks of worshipping a "hero". Americans madly wish to remain in their routine. One more reason why we're failing in this transition time between handmade and technology - at just how to maintain one (handmade: conversation, rigor, dirt under the fingernails) as the new world we have also made through evolution and despite ourselves, swarms in. We can't have any development if one doesn't work with the other. In the better world: a mind is developed and open and allowing to see what Rev. Wright preaches is often the truth, and Obama is the transfer (new world) to put some of it into practice. The good Rev. has clearly shown he has all the ability to rouse up a telling speech, and zero ability to circle the differing forces into a unity. And unity is biblical, no matter how you cut it. I hate to think it, see it, watch it happen, and it is, right before our eyes - the cutting down of a dream. Indiana is an old Klan state, and the misery lingers there. For years on end we have convinced ourselves that because thousands of African-Americans have even made it up the splintered-to-golden corporate ladder, racism must be gone. It's not only not gone, it's double-fold with a huge culture of blacks hating whitey like we've never known, and despite a vast majority of whitey not deserving of this, and vice-versa for the black world, it's been brothed. Rev. Wright wants us to know this in his performance part Rap Brown meets Sam Cooke (trouble enough) and in his hysterical ego fitting down into the tv screen and palm size Blackberry, never mind a YouTube; he's only got 15 minutes to get his 15 minutes and didn't he just go ahead and slit a friend's throat to get there. In great literature we are now stuck in those muddling lines of many pages between the opening chapters of lust and advance, with the closing pages of culmination and possible harmony. History will have a word for us.   THE MUSIC PLAYING: rainfall, spring at least   Bob Arnold 30 April 08   WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND: AFTER AN IMBECILE, YES, GIVE US THE 'ELITIST' remembering Aimé Césaire Jimmy Giuffre ~ The poet Tom Clark needs your help. He is stranded with no salary and no medical insurance to cover costs due to a recent stroke. He also needs funds for medications to aid in the recovery of his wife, Angelica Clark, from surgery on her hip. -Dale Smith please go to Dale's blog for more information: ~ One of the exhibits at the Umm al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam's periodic sops to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist - indeed an "infidel," according to bin Laden. Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful "Texanization" of the Republican Party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions? (2003, The Guardian ) from Martin Amis, The Second Plane, September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf): jeweled essays over the last half dozen years or so on all things Islamic fundamentalism and other friends.   GOING UP: Eleven billion elevator trips are made each year in New York. Otis Elevator estimates that it transports the equivalent of the world's population every five days. from The New Yorker April 21, 08   HE SAID, YEAH, SORRY ABOUT THE LICENSE PLATES; I KNOW THAT'S ROUGH FOR VERMONT BUT I'M FROM NEW YORK AND I HATE JERSEY, TOO. To think of the costs! The gasoline getting from one place to the next; one state to the next; one dream to the next. First leaving for the north, and then deciding - and what was it the slant of the sunlight? the veer of the road? the wave of the treeline up ahead? - to go instead south and toward the sea. Where three days later, after three days of sea shore, we would leave at 6 AM after hiking the beach, stretching for a 500 mile drive through all sorts of sea coast lowlands, old factory cities where the church steeples stick up in the grungy neighborhoods; neighborhoods of once upon a time glass milk bottles and lots of kids, mother aprons and lunch pails, soot, and brick, and about the only place we'll see old cars on the whole trip. The cost! everyone drives a super mobile, we even rent one for three days and leave our clunker back in the rental enterprise garage stall. "The vandals hit us but we got it all on camera. Don't worry, your old car will be safe." It's been 30 years since we've been in Rhode Island and the stonework is still there that everlasts between Tiverton to Newport. You don't have to squint or even close your eyes to imagine the once farmland where these stone walls first occurred and why they occurred. The newer stonework is just for show, and there is plenty of it. It's almost ridiculous now with so much stone and a suburbia and shop-schlock burbing its way in. Eventually Newport is just one grand manse and nothing much to stop for. A slice of pizza goes for $16 along the legendary Cliffwalk but we're eating fog and joggers and listening to surf crash below on these headlands. The cost! We're doing our best in a little Korean buggy that hugs the road and takes the whale of the semis roar as we tool all the way down on one tank and will do the same back. In one cavalier town, bunched with seaport homes and gardens and way too early midweek for tourists but a pestering is always there, out of the town library we come with two canvas satchels of books. We have a library card for almost all this region. We've carefully packed and mailed back our books from the wood's home to the sea, and there is something romantic and sensible about that. And other than an initial subscription fee there is no cost! Imagine in this day and age of paying through the nose for gas, shoe leather, a biscuit, a water bottle, to be able to amble out onto the sidewalk loaded down with great and goodness books. Heavy art cloth editions, fresh minted paperbacks, poetry galore and if one has the time, one can sit just about anywhere, benches everywhere, trees with no leaf shade yet but expansive hardwood trees, and the afternoon is there to open like a book. ~   FIREFLY UNDER THE TONGUE I love you from the sharp tang of fermentation; in the blissful pulp. Newborn insects, blue. In the unsullied juice, glazed and ductile. A cry that distills the light: through the fissures in fruit trees; under mossy water clinging to the shadows. The     papillae, the grottos. In herbaceous dyes, instilled. From flustered touch.     Luster oozing, buttersweet: from ferocious pleasures, from play splayed in pulses.                             Hinge (Wrapped in the night's aura, in violaceous clamor, refined, the child, with the softened root of his tongue     expectant, touches, from that smooth, unsustainable, lubricity - a sensitive lily     folding into the rocks if it senses the stigma, the ardor of light - the substance, the     arris fine and vibrant -in the ecstatic petal, distended- {jewel pulsing half-open; udder}, the acid juice bland {ice}, the salt marsh, the delicate sap {cabbala}, the nectar of the firefly.) Coral Bracho, Firefly Under the Tongue, selected poems translated by Forrest Gander (New Directions) The first book in English by this Mexican poet. A poetic going against the traffic flow.   ...Kierkegaard's remark that while life can only be understood retrospectively, it must be lived prospectively. Often, when I think of my guilt over all the things I didn't do for my mother-whether through unwillingness or inability, though actually I don't think that much matters-I think of that phrase. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Of course, I know that on the most basic level, this entire way of thinking is not only useless but absurd as well. One cannot live one's life bending to another person's desires on the basis of some actual conclusion that one likely will out live them. And yet I don't think I am alone in wishing I had been able to do so, no matter how weird or stupid it may sound. But when she wept, and she wept often, I did so little. -David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, a son's memoir (Simon & Schuster): a short book, yet overpowering meditation, on the loss of one's mother, who happens to be Susan Sontag. Singular and probing.   MORE ! Martin Ramirez, Brooke Davis Anderson w/ various essayists: Ramirez (1895-1963) self-taught draftsman and innovative collagist, left his native Mexico in 1925 to struggle up any work to support a wife and child back home, only to end up jobless during the Great Depression on the streets of California where he was picked up in 1931, supposedly confused, unable to communicate in English and taken to a psychiatric hospital where he would spend the rest of his life, labeled catatonic-schizophrenic, shaping his intricate and both playful and disturbing pieces. The Writer's Brush, paintings, drawings and sculpture by writers by Donald Friedman (Mid-List Press / www.midlist. org) with essays by William Gass and John Updike, not at all a bad pairing, showcasing 400 reproductions by 200 writers from Blake to Russell Edson (is that a stretch, come to think of it?). A beautiful book, wide open display, with excellent commentary about each writer and their work involved. Hand Puppets, Paul Klee (Hatje Kantz) from 1916-1925, while his son Felix was still a youngster, the famous artist handcrafted puppets for the boy made of most anything close to hand, which is their appeal. The artist working on his fantasy and whimsy, some rather ugly, crazy, homespun magic with names like "Electrical Spook" or "White-Haired Eskimo" a total of 50 puppets were made. All have lasted to make quite a gang photograph. With 0ver 180 illustrations. Text by Felix Klee and others. A good time, for a long time, has been had by all. Now & Then, Robert Hass (Shoemaker & Hoard) when Hass was poet laureate he kept up a syndicated column between the years 1997-2000 on the subject of poets and their poetry. He would often offer a poem to speak for itself and then add his own two-cents of insight and personal reflection. Most of the poets were well known in the poetry sphere, which means the majority were unknown to a syndicated audience, so it worked its magic. Poetry got out there, out of the temples and the towers and the grottos, and that's always a good thing. With appreciations to Wallace Stevens and Joni Mitchell and next to nothing from outer fringe poets, or Language, and startling new poets. One would think one day we will be awarded with a true poet laureate who will take the job seriously and roll up the sleeves and learn everything they don't know about poetry, byway or reading poets they don't know and should know and we should too, and share them with the same delicious discovery. For now, we will persist in spreading poetry that is acceptable to the masses just barely and watch 95% of published poetry go unread for two or three favorite flavors of the season. Havanas in Camelot, William Styron (Random): I have a weak spot for Styron, always have. I liked all his novels from the Marines to Sophie. It took some guts back in the day to bring out a book written as black slave rebel Nat Turner, when you're a white southerner and oh yeah, your grandfather was a slave owner. The book was controversial then and now it sells for peanuts, but it should be read. Styron comes from that time of white writer giants: Mailer, Matthiessen, Baldwin, Capote, Arthur Miller and he writes some lightly sweet appreciations about a few of these guys in this small book of very wise stuff. The camelot is all about John Kennedy and the whole of the book surrounds itself around a humanist - heck a socialist, certainly a hardworking liberal mind, when those times and events were still possible. Styron was one of the original steering captains of The Paris Review and I believe it was up to him that Jack Kerouac got an early piece in. He also worked on the Modern Library editorial board and later (included in the book) wrote an apologetic essay about the dirty politics that goes on with such committees. A seemingly honest man who struggled openly and bravely with racism, depression, liars and loves. Even his prostate. It sort of makes for a clear bell writing ring to all of these pieces. Don't expect James Joyce. Styron made his best writing 20 years before his death. The latter books were a regular guy, and there's not enough of them in this writing life. ~ Dear Bob, The Next Ten Thousand Years are here on my desk. A sturdy tome indeed, and beautifully done. I like the way each poem is centered on the page, with plenty of breathing room, and the way the "transvisions" are interspersed without, so that it all becomes a seamless whole. And the preface and afterword like two bookends. The only thing I'm missing is some info about the various authors Cid translated--like who is Marcel Cohen? I'd like to know more about him. And also, are the poems presented chronologically or is that the order you and Ce came up with? At any rate you two have done a terrific job. I've only read the first 50 pages or so and already had my socks blown off several times; "TEEN WEANING" "the gift," "CINCINNATI"--wow, are we talking about the real thing, or what? Great to have all that work in one place, so you can pop open the book just about anywhere and find something substantial enough to last the whole day long. A veritable treasure chest, and you folks have given us the key. So you have every reason to be one proud co-editor indeed. Hats off to a job finely done. All fer now... Cheers, Mark ed: the book we are merrily fussing about is The Next One Thousand Years the Selected Poems of Cid Corman, edited by Ce Rosenow & Bob Arnold (Longhouse) see more here Dear Mark, Good maintenance and joyous reader letter from you about those 1000 Years. And smart cookie points about the book, well taken. I figure Marcel Cohen can be googled, give it a try. He's a terrific - as you can see - prose stylist and poet nutcracker from Paris. We've never met but have been in touch over three decades, though not recently. If you happen to run across his address please supply because I must get him a copy of the book. D. Cahen as well. I published both guys in Longhouse over many cycles. These were wholesome poets Cid found, or they found him, and as he translated he sent me everything like I was the city desk...out they'd come from Longhouse in our little packets. Cohen was later published, Cid's translations, in a collection from Burning Deck....almost all the pieces first from Longhouse. I'd wager this book is right up your line. The Emperor Peacock Moth. You like the title already, right? The order of the poems in the 1000 Years is our instinct. I know all the biographies of everyone, including Cid, can now be found on the web or in digging, and I love a book that enlists digging. Like shoveling a path to the road. There are handouts: the shovel was a gift, now use it. As I read through the book last night like a guy who can't get enough of his new truck and just has to sit in it in the driveway, I'm already tempted to think there could have been more poems, and then again I worked hard and Ce worked hard with a zen stick. Cut back, go along, be happy. Allow one poem (and Cid can do it) to ripple the page. There is a great bunch of work in this book no one has ever seen, since I hold three unpublished manuscripts from Cid. I can't think of anyone in American letters who has passed away in the last decade who is more the candidate for that rediscovery or plain discovery than Corman. He worked in a soap bubble the last 30 years, garnering all sorts of lost children poets who came to his door via the mail, while the majority of his contemporaries had either been burned away from him or hopelessly spent. Ginsberg doesn't even come close to being as 'beat' as Corman was. He was the original hipcat daddy who kept it up throughout his life, sans the attraction by the popular fluff, and notably because he was such a genuine hardworking normal soul. He over wrote like a motherfucker and I have to laugh (as I did with Cid) at how much shit there is to plow through to get to the resounding ring. Man, that's poetry. I'm laying a stone stairway right now, some rock as large as sofa cushions, and there is no available space to plow through. Once handling these monsters you get one chance and one chance only to decide, position and drop. Each stone brought out of the snow melting woods by wheelbarrow. By the time they get to the job site they have a name. The biggest difference in the world between the stone handman and the stone backhoe flippers. I believe there is the same in poetry. Cid was a handman and it may be best one doesn't get too much of a peek at all the thousands of pages gone to fallow. Compost, turn in and under, move it along....or else he may be judged as a writing fool. Which he was! I adore the controversy of thought, and the best books leave some questioning, but never about the worth. We're just back from three days on the sea. We found a shanty on the beach, the days were splendid, we melted winter out of the blood and almost demolished into pieces because of it. Found two local libraries where we fed in a frenzy of new books and films saved for the night hours, so sleeping wasn't important for me at least...and a Korean sportie vehicle at 35 mpg that got us down and back as a rental. The ultimate shot to the arm. Now back to snow leaving, mud staying, and stonework all's well, Bob ~   MUTINY ON BOARD Some people don't think with their heads, a sorry situation that you simply can't allow. When your feet, stomach, and ovaries begin to make decisions instead of your brain, you should immediately and ruthlessly put down that first stage of rebellion before it turns into a mutiny. If your right hand causes you to sin, you know what you have to do. And this is just an example, nothing more. If the right hand was chosen as a symbol, it's precisely because of its importance, but there's no reason to have misgivings about your other parts: cut them off, cut them off, cut them off and throw them as far away as you can! All you need is a good head on your shoulders, and a simple home-made guillotine that you yourself can build. ~ VAN GOGH II They say Van Gogh cut off his ear for a prostitute. Others affirm it happened in a fight with Gauguin. Some scientists insist he did it because he suffered from Meniere's Syndrome and was tormented by the ringing in his ears. I was a little girl, and I saw him with my own eyes, and I can assure you he did it for this, to use it as a seed, said the ancient woman from Arles, pointing with pride to the tree laden with spiral shaped fruit, like soft hairy snails. - Ana Maria Shua, Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction, trans.Rhonda Dahl Buchanan (White Pine Press / www.whitepine.org) The Argentina writer's agile fictions between shiny covers   (Film/DVD) I just watched Blast of Silence (1961) last night, a film precious few have seen. Imagine a director (like John Cassavetes but not) making a film without any Peter Falk, without anyone, and so he stars in it himself, with voice over narration written by the great Waldo Salt using a pseudonym. At one point there is such a shortage of actors or money, the protagonist is being chased by two hoods, but on the next cut one of the hoods has disappeared or dropped out or hasn't shown, so the protagonist ends up shooting himself chasing himself! There's no other choice. My sort of cinema. Allen Baron's lean gritty hitman classic of a kind showed two years after Cassavete's Shadows and introduced Baron as "Frank Baby Boy Bono". The big framed black & white shots of Harlem, St. Mark's Place, Penn Station, and Jamaica Bay are a world gone by. Now in noir heaven via Criterion. ~   THE ESSENTIAL One learns that the essential wasn't books wasn't records wasn't cats wasn't paraisos in bloom spilling over the sidewalks nor even the large moon -white- in the windows it wasn't the sea lapping the shore the murmur fragile against the seawall nor friends no longer seen nor childhood streets nor that bar where we made love with our eyes. The essential was something else. ~ PROXIMITIES I don't need to go very far to dream A train to the suburbs is enough for me Some rusted tracks that run along the seashore and I feel I'm already in another world My ignorance of the nomenclature allows me to baptize with other names My foreignness - I am the foreigner, the passing stranger- is the universal citizenship of dreams. - Cristina Peri Rossi State of Exile (City Lights, Pocket Poets #58) translated by Marilyn Buck. A native of Uruguay and with her life threatened by military regime, in 1972 Rossi relocated to Spain where she lives today. Marilyn Buck has lived as intriguing - a life-long activist, in 1985 she was convicted of conspiracy in the New Jersey prison escape of Assata Shakur. Now serving a sentence of eighty years, Buck works and translates with fellow prisoners inside. Her sureness and elegance treating Rossi is all ours.   A thoughtful study - combining scientific background with an individual's advocacy - that' the heart of Golden Wings & Hairy Toes (New England) by wildlife blazer Todd McLeish...who is often leaving home from Rhode Island for tracking lynx in Maine or trapping and studying the Indiana Bat in Vermont, two of the fourteen profiles of New England's most endangered wildlife, flora and fauna protected in this book. So what's so special about Cape Cod Bay? No one really knows, other than that it's the only known winter feeding ground in the world for North Atlantic right whales. About thirty whales - 10 percent of the total population - visit the bay each winter to feed. Where the rest of the population spends the winter and early spring no one knows for sure. Those whales that enter the bay can usually count on finding dense aggregations of copepods to sustain them for a few weeks.   EARTHWARD: Not to get too heavy about the political mind and philosophizing, but for the past 30-40 years it has really been all about getting one's shit together, and few have. Writing more and more diatribes and even beneficial counsel is okay, but the work is really at hand to save the planet and be of the Earth. We squandered miserably since 1970 when I well remember the first Earth Day. I worked with a snag of others at shutting down our high-school to celebrate the event and likewise protest the war machine. Susan was washing off oil spilled seabirds on the California coast with hundreds of other good Samaritans. We had our marker then and there to wake up and begin the work. Many have, but the majority went soft and dumb...and now we have the dumbest President in history telling us the new marker is set for 2025! Too late, bud. It's now or never, and it may be already too late. Handling, handwork, old tried and true conversation, is the essence of coordination.   Two lost Beat angels now make an appearance in one of the legendary pocket poet series from City Lights (www.citylights.com)- Tau by Philip Lamantia, the poet's second collection of poems scheduled for release in 1955 from Bern Porter but held back by Lamantia because of his evolving religious beliefs, joined at the hip by the lost treasure of John Hoffman's Journey to the End. At the infamous Sixth Gallery reading of 1955 San Francisco, where Howl was heard and Kerouac cheered the proceedings on, Lamantia read none of his own work and instead shared the poems of his close friend Hoffman who had died three years earlier in Mexico and Allen Ginsberg memorialized in Howl "who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving / behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the / lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago". Here is poetry shot on the wing and it's only sin is promiscuity. PREPONDERANCE I write your name where birds Swoop overhead in frenzy Where the sea throws broken bottles The thirsty and the shipwrecked die Where the sea builds doorways Which only the wind destroys I write your name on these thresholds That shift on the ballast sand Where birds foretell a shape of doom Reading it by phosphor Where the sun lies behind and scattered On the shape drenched shore - John Hoffman Addicted to heroin, Hoffman was found dead on such a beach at Zihuatanejo in Mexico, possibly overdosed and exposed to the sun.   I'm just getting down into August Kleinzahler's, Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Farrar) new & selected poems. Few poets working today, under the age of 60 or so, work with such a delicious concentration of say Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams. Somewhere else Kleinzahler quipped when arranging a book of poems he has a working motto: "start well, end well" and he follows this to a tee in this collection gathering up the best and brightest from some ten other books of poems. The opening long poem of the book has us out on the western plains - myths, heritage, pop culture and the poet's guise with tone and the turn of a phrase. The last poem is storming another sort of plain, with the Tartars - In their furs and silk panties/ Snub-nosed monkey men with cinders for eyes / Attached to their ponies like centaurs / Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians. I know such beasts didn't ride ponies but this is a poet who will adjust anything to make a poem dominant and sing. I like that nerve. So now I'm steering to the middle of the book. For its range and price, I'd say one of the best new books out there leaving April as poetry month. Take it with you right into May.   I am also midway through this fine and highly attractive cloth edition anthology - Forgotten Bread (Heyday Books/www.heydaybooks.com) of first-generation Armenian American Writers (1912-present time), gathered quite personally and adept by the poet/editor David Kherdian, himself the son of parents who were survivors of the Armenian Genocide. A glossary for the language and an appendix reaching into pockets of other writers, in-depth biographies, contacts, Armenian publications and presses. This book comes booted up. Expect well over 400 pages of mystical, huckster, poetic, feminine, as well as many mustachioed maestros, not the least being William Saroyan, one of the very famous of the tribe, and his childhood buddy A.I Bezzerides who wrote the novel Long Haul of which the film noir classic They Drive By Night was adapted. Where do these natural storytellers come from? Check out just a brief snatch from Bezzerides background, "It began even before he was born in Ottoman Turkey, when his Armenian mother was swindled into marriage by a Greek man twenty-four years her senior who peddled goods from the backs of donkeys. When she learned she was pregnant, she tried five differ ent ways to abort him. He was one year old in 1909 when his father, a dollar bill in his pocket, settled the family in Fresno and tried to make his way hawking fruits and vegetables in the neighborhoods of Armenians, Italians, and Volga Germans." You get stories under your belt living under this sort of roof. This is but a snippet from Mark Arax, who writes an introductory essay on Bezzerides, as others write for each of the sixteen other writers Kherdian has chosen. I'm telling you, it is a cookbook looking book in heft and ingredients, with prose and poetry, the younger thinking of the older, sweet syrup peaches, kitchen talk and aromas and visits because every other Armenian is a poet. AND! just in from New Directions (www.ndpublishing.com) so much good I can't close down shop just yet: two large volumes forthcoming this summer from Kenneth Patchen, the greatest cowboy angel in American poetry since Whitman. Don't think ten gallon hat; think the outlaw and the sheriff in one. We Meet will bring back to us some of Patchen's most exhilarating books -with the poet's happy to be alive illustrations - Because It Is, A Letter To God, Poemscapes, Hurrah For Anything, and Aflame & Afun of Walking Faces. If that doesn't stop you in your tracks, here's a second feast and even more of the poet's hard to find wonders in one soft cover: The Walking Away World will include the very best of the picture-poem collections, prepared during Patchen's last dozen years: Wonderings, But Even So, and Hallelujah Anyway. Ever the innovators, New Directions has even snagged young folk bandit Devendra Banhart to marshall a preface for We Meet, while Jim Woodring welcomes us into the picture-books, which were often done in color and may be found in earlier publications. To some, Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was the great granddad to the Beats, or the last hurrah to the likes of Michelangelo and William Blake. An invalid for a good portion of his adult years after a mishap helping a buddy uncouple bumpers between two vehicles, he would go on to wed deeply and long with Miriam Oikemus , tour and record his poetry to jazz with Charles Mingus and others, and make a poetry whether sitting or in the prone position. One of the unstoppables. Because to understand one must begin somewhere   VIRGINIA TECH The "loner" is me, the one who stopped listening, the one with the hidden fuse, with the fist of blind clench, with the hole in his heart, with the cool guns, the one who blasts away, who kills because, just because, who kills at will and, because there's nothing left but the dead, kills himself, suicided on top of all he's killed, and now you know what a market in old Baghdad feels like with its victims "in the wrong place at the wrong time," and why your mourning is going in one ear of the deaf tomorrow and out the deafening other. -Jack Hirschman, All That's Left (City Lights Books  www.citylights.com)   ALWAYS MUSIC PLAYING: ( all singles!) Come Down Easy, Spacemen; A Place Called Home, PJ Harvey; Wishing Well, Roy Harper; Roc Alpin, Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes; I'm Not There, Sonic Youth; Noche de Ronda, Freddy Fender; Naima, Angelique Kidjo; Yi-rrana, Letterstick Band; Reckoner, Radiohead; Tribute to the Cuarteto Patria, Eliades Ochoa; La Vai Alguem, Virginia Rosa; My Bucket's Got A Hole In It, Van Morrison; Far Away, Martha Wainwright; Witchita Lineman, Glenn Campbell; Gone, Gone, Gone, Alison Krauss/Robert Plant; The Wanderer, Dion; Bold Marauder, Mimi & Richard Farina; Hush, Deep Purple; Suspicion, cross-blend a version between Elvis (get rid of the horns) with Terry Stafford's backup girls quavering (w/ a nod to Doc Pomus); Dearest Dear, Shirley Collins; The Passenger, Iggy Pop; Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, OG Funk; Blues For Basie, Lalo Schifrin; Don't Leave Me Now, Amparanoia; Pancho & Lefty, Emmylou Harris; Requiem OP 48, Gabriel Faure; The Canyon, Jessi Colter; Espero, Alabina; Lullaby, Zulya; Holy Ghost, Unchain My Name, Elizabeth Cotton; You Are Related to a Psychopath, Macy Gray; Eight Miles High, Leo Kottke; a song I have no title for by Nadine as fine as any Neil Young ever sang; In Dreams, Roy Orbison; plus songs about mashed potatoes by Nat Kendricks and the Swans, gospel-ships by Ruby Vass; Sleepy John Estes with a mother who tells him to stop playing a-bum; and the great Wayfaring Stranger, by the just as great Almeda Riddle. - Bob Arnold late April 08   WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND : FOUR STRONG WINDS ~ The Brain has Corridors - Emily Dickinson   ...the poem must ride on its own melting. - Robert Frost   The printing press has made poetry too silent. I want it to be heard, to have the direct impact of speech. - Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1958)   A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. - -Martin Luther King, Jr.   I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it. - Richard Attenborough   ~ remembering Jonathan Williams Richard Widmark Rochelle Ratner Jules Dassin Ivan Dixon Dith Pran Cachao Frosty ~     RIGHT out of the chute, a million thanks to the sports freaks and opening day enthusiasts who practiced and expressed their rights of free speech by Booing! loudly, The Punk at the opening game for the Washington Generals. Sterling etiquette folks!     And, to the youngster who stood her ground and boldly asked John McCain - better known in these parts as Soldier Boy, or his nickname as a youth "McNasty" - as to why he was at his former high school giving one more campaign speech. Let's please call a "hero", in this day and age, what a hero is: a brave soul standing to ask the very important questions. Stirring thousands in their ennui to hopefully ask the same. Not continuing this nauseous platitude about some Vietnam War "hero" who smeared napalm over a countryside willy-nilly of the lives below, contributing to the three million Vietnamese dead from that war, and continuing to bolster an annual $713 billion military war chest, which is larger than the war budgets for all 190 countries of the world combined. McCain is a hero and a friend to that 10% of the world that owns 90% of the wealth. We may do better to champion "heroes" with faces like this young student, or wise Senator Robert Byrd who will go down in history-of-reason as the leader who stood alone questioning the second war in Iraq. Yes, we were stupid enough to have permitted two wars in the same place! I like our own heroes in Vermont: Senators Pat Leahy and James Jeffords who opposed this war from the start. Vermont may be the only state in the country where both senators cried "No." Another hero: Tomas Young, the disabled vet from Iraq in the new film Body of War who enlisted to fight in Afghanistan after the attacks on 9/11, and was shipped instead to the Neocons' oil playpen in Iraq. He's angry about that, paralyzed from a bullet to his spine, and fighting back like a soldier. In this film mothers and loved ones having lost their own young soldiers, come to touch his face, giving as he is, and one can see how his gentle reciprocity means the world to them. These are the heroes. Not a warmonger who never learned a lesson and wants an unlawful war to just bloody on.     FOU-RIRE   It really is amusing that for all the centuries of mankind the problem has been how to kill enough people and now it is how not to kill them all   Frank O'Hara     ~ Dear Ted, Well, the sun is out, through all the front windows of the house, warming up the rooms all its own, the fire down until about 4 o'clock when I rebuild and get ready for evening. But a hike out on the road an hour ago with Susan had nothing but February weather blowing through us. The road looks like a war zone anyway. We're pretty sure we haven't seen the roads all the way toward town as bad as this, pothole wise, in many years. We have to literally crawl the first five miles out of here, all on dirt, because of the teeth rattling pothole number. One every foot?, and often five sideways so there is no way to feign and dodge the buggers. So we take it at 15 mph for that whole five miles stretch and then add on 15 minutes more to the drive into town. Now it's 45 minutes. One reason I go out only once a week. Don't need the rattle, or pay the gas, or wear on the 19 year old truck, and there's plenty to do out here. If it wasn't for book orders, Susan would go out less than twice a week. I read'em, sell'em, pack'em. And publish a few, too. Cid's book The Next One Thousand Years, Cid Corman's selected poems ed. by Ce Rosenow & Bob Arnold (Longhouse 2008) [available now] arrived last week on a freight truck, luckily with an amiable driver. He got lost of course, despite our directions, and he was only coming right off the interstate in town and 10 minutes to Carson & Becky's house. Our way station until ice-station zebra melts out. We figure by May. I hate to think that, but it looks true. So with the driver on his cell-phone and the two of us using Carson's, we were able to pinpoint the driver out of a mud quagmire where he put himself and back onto tar road and an easy enough delivery to the door. The books were to arrive the next day but we saw that weather maker hurling toward us with nearly a foot of fresh cement, so we convinced the freight company to deliver a day earlier...and good we did. The book cartons are mainly at Carson's and we sledded in six cartons to our house for first use on orders. A bunch has already gone, I'm thrilled to say. My feelings on Obama are exactly yours, poor devil. He means very well and he's up against a threshing machine that all the liberal white boys can kowtow to (Kennedy, Kerry etc) but it's a whole other world for a Black 'kid' as many think of him. I've yet to hear any deliver a speech on race and life's reason as riveting as Obama delivered a few weeks ago; so much for the 'kid'. He's our only hope. What with another Clinton spoiled brat, and the nightmare of McCain. I do believe the country may be on the verge of committing double suicide of accepting first the Punk, and now Soldier Boy. If they do, they (and us with them) will receive our last will and testament. The world itself is already on the verge of drowning with global warming, and drought most likely before that. UN studies give us 40-50 years as a planet if we continue our destructive ways, and naturally we know no better than to not continue. As Bukowski once said it: 'There are locks on everything /that's the way Democracy works." Dream on. ~ "I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry," Barack Obama -all clever cynics know it will never happen, but piled up with the news, including the news from these cynics - always dreadful and on a loop - can't we let this little dream dream awhile? The young & the mighty need something in their hands, their minds, their own dreams.     And what in the world happened with PBS news when announcing the passing of Richard Widmark at 93? That's a long life and one that covered over 50 films from Night & the City, Kiss of Death, Pickup on South Street, Madigan - any one of these high rollers can be snatched off the perennial favorite movie list. I first remember Widmark as the lean and cagey Jim Bowie crackling off the 1960 drive-in screen in The Alamo. Widmark knew how the west was won being born in Sunrise, Montana. PBS gave us only two-minutes of remembrance and it was one of Widmark's most despicable characters: the sadist Tommy Udo, strapping in and tossing down a stairway, in a wheelchair never mind, one unsuspecting old woman. Thanks for the memories PBS. Go watch Richard Widmark at work in the Sam Fuller film, and I like it that his daughter did marry Sandy Koufax.   Since Americans use a swimming pool full of oil every second; that's every second, or four swimming pools since you started this sentence...let's move onto book reviews, notices, recommendations and poems. Maybe a film or two to see. Some music rising high over the trees in the background. SOME GREAT STUFF: I am gifted such all the time, or in the mail, or found in the hunt - great new stuff to read - you don't know what you're missing if you don't act on it. Here's the contact points and addresses, so no excuses. If in question, then Google and find out more. Scraping around for one good book will bring up three. Hit the last of the small bookshops. A sale there is like a blood transfusion for these vanishing book-love species, don't be fooled. Many of these folks are some of the last grounded dreamers. Dig into Internet bookshops like ours at Longhouse, and others. Try forgetting about yourself, and My Space, and your blog for a moment - the whole equation out there is to stop real conversation and make you think you're "it". You ain't. Not without someone else. Support your local poet, press, grocer, musician, writers, plumbers, builders, potters, weavers, hardware stores. Stay out of the Box Stores, they're diseased, you don't want to be diseased..... - House Organ, ed. Kenneth Warren (1250 Belle Ave., Lakewood, Ohio 44107): the new issue/spring 2008 is packed full and dedicated to Vincent Ferrini and other poets. - Something Red, Mark Terrill ( Stay at Home Press - www.planbpress. com): clear-eyed prose poems not messing with your mind. Same with: - North of the Cities, Louis Jenkins (Will o' the Wisp Books - www.willothewispbooks.com): never read a dull book by this poet, and I mean never. - Cadillac Cicatrix, ed. Benjamin Spencer(www.cadillaccicatrix.com): from Carmel, California state of the mind and poetry and art, with a fine tribute to Cid Corman. - Susquehanna, Dale Smith (Punch Press, 810 Richmond Ave., Buffalo, NY. 14222-1167): in the grand tradition of Paul Metcalf, a 'speculative historical commentary and lyric' Dale humbly proposes, the first part of The Lunar Perspective. Proof in the pudding publisher Rich Owens and his author work so well together, this beauty is one to own. - Ron Silliman's website - - Silliman is viagra, sans the desire. Though his high-wire website is town crier visible and continuous like a professional athlete is behind the helm. It's busybody poetry at its zenith. Finest for its appreciations; but watch out for the pied-piper.   ~     For nearly 50 years, the American painter, and friend to poets, Alex Katz, has been painting portraits of his wife Ada. Alex Katz Paints Ada (The Jewish Museum/Yale 2006) is the alluring book gathering of those portraits, along with an appreciation by Robert Storr and essays from Lawrence Alloway and James Schuyler, who remembers a day he posed for a painting with Ada and Rudy Burckhardt. Each day, for a month, I put up on display one more painting from the book and let Ada just take over the room. Like narcissus bulbs in a water bowl, by the window. "Blue Umbrella 2" for early spring rain days has been just the thing to watch.     Joseph Cornell has always been capable of stopping-time and putting any of us into his time. Just take the time. I have been staying current for decades now with each book that has been issued on either the artist's life, or one magnificent showcase after the other made into sturdy volumes to own. Joseph Cornell, Navigating the Imagination, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan (Peabody/Smithsonian/Yale) is the latest retrospective and maybe the best yet. Whether you read in one-sitting some playful study of Cornell, or go wide and far with this celebration of collages, found materials, film, assemblages, even a little of Cornell goes a long way. "Cabinet of Curiosity" may have been the better title standing this furniture piece book up on its end and opening the doorways in.     Probably the filmmaker not to watch when you've come home busted flat from work is Catherine Breillat. Every single one of her films must be seen though, one way or another. Her best work may remain her first and still most controversial film A Real Young Girl, and each film after this one has followed track. Be fearless with her. She should show up between "Pierre Brasseur" and "Walter Brennan" in David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film but, alas, she's missing from my third edition. After a week of CB, best to put on reserve: The Sound of Music, Heidi, Swiss Family Robinson, Snow White and toss in Bambi.     As we're losing the Earth, more and more lovely and exquisite and challenging books are coming out celebrating planet life. Is this a swan song? We (human beings) have become the endangered species as we lose a daily touch and stability with an appreciation and stewardship of land and the animal kingdoms. In the breathtaking Planet Earth, where one can sink into the morass and hidden world of the snow and amur leopards, everywhere the film crew ventured, poachers were there. They come in all disguises now. A new book that companions nicely with the Planet Earth series, is Alessandro Rocca's Natural Architecture (Princeton) where the architect takes us on an international excursion of structures, buildings, nests, bridges, spiritual retreats and more, all built by found objects, or stone, wood, branch weavings, straw and clay. Humble settings. Not just a land art but land love and land home, starting from scratch and making dominion. Beautifully illustrated. One of the 'makers' Armin Schubert has this to share: As a producer of natural artifacts my choice goes to materials nature provides generously: stones, pebbles, branches and twigs, scrap timber, earth...I ambitiously gather and reorganize these utterly unspectacular pieces based on their characteristics, and I give them new forms and new meanings. As elements of natural architecture, these leftovers take on dignity and value. ~   Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions) Selected Poems, Frank O'Hara ed. Mark Ford (Knopf) That Little Something, Charles Simic (Harcourt) The Ghost Soldiers, James Tate (Ecco) Suddenly I'm reading four books by elderly white guys, that dying breed in the poetry world. The two best books of the bunch are masterpieces written from the 1950s when guys like these ruled the post world war universe. Not necessarily these two - Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Frank O'Hara - but they resembled the breed in appearance, though certainly not intent. Ferlinghetti remains an anarchist in spirit and a successful businessman at heart through his City Lights Books shrine, where one could argue he stands alone as the achieved Beat. Still alive, money in his pocket, his paintings on the wall, poetry from the streets, translated and respected everywhere. He knew every Beat poet there ever was and personally supplied the hippie movement with reading material. Frank O'Hara, gay and swarthy, with that broken, crinkled nose, abruptly cutdown in life so long ago when Martin Luther King was still alive, is now given a second selected poems, wide berthed and gloriously showcased as if an art book edition, as of course his poems always were. The front cover photograph by George Montgomery is ideal. A little under twenty years of poetry is here, returning us to a winner, the master city planner. So joyous, playful and remaining ever balanced. O'Hara described it best, Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances. I've been reading all four books, since I've known these poets work for the past forty years, overlapped and intermingled and so when I get tired of one, I pick up another without taking a break, just read. One can do that with the 50s guys, they're conversational, logical, deadly humorous, serious about it...in their time they were working against stuffed shirts with dead language. Language hopped with these guys. Language 'leapt' (as Robert Bly would have it) by the time Charles Simic and James Tate turned up with rabbits out of their hats, and nothing up their sleeves. A lost pilot here, and 'crumbs, crumbs', 'crumbs' everywhere! Now it seems to be 'breasts' or 'chickens' more than ever for Simic, and Tate has achieved with his prose poems a novel length of exhaustion, or delight (pick your poison), with each poem. I can read three, maybe four poems a day, and then I need to take a breather. The book lasts longer, and this book is twice as long as the previous prose poem entertainment Return to the City of White Donkeys. He's still writing some of the best prose poems out of America since Russell Edson. Since his notoriety as the fifteenth poet laureate of the United States, Charles Simic seems to be publishing a new book of poems every year. The poems are still mumbling with magic, but it's sort of standup comic timing, a 'gotcha' through those tinted glasses. Unlike Robert Creeley- whose later poetry Simic doesn't care for- Simic wouldn't dare veer off his course of predictable paradigms. Nothing wrong with a formula if readers never notice they are being swallowed whole. I'd recommend reading all four books as one big bash. The O'Hara looks and reads the finest by far, a stand out. The Tate comes as an e-book you can link to as well. The Simic is so-so clever, other-worldly, that much smoke and mirrors cotton candy. The Ferlinghetti is a reprint of a masterwork, all gussied up with a colorful dustjacket, though it's the same circus font of the 50s classic model for the interior text, and a complete CD of the poet reading since he was always one of the best with that playful tone of sarcasm and lilt. It'd be a exciting day on Earth to have Frank O'Hara, so many poems, spinning off an accommodating CD. But that'd be getting greedy.       HEROIC SCULPTURE   We join the animals not when we fuck          or shit not when tear falls but when                   staring into light                   we think Frank O' Hara   ~   I sadly read many fine blog and appreciations after the death of Jonathan Williams. I love seeing poets come to bat for their pals, and I can only live with myself and mankind if I likewise see it happening for the poets while they are still alive. Otherwise, what are we doing? Williams was a class act at speaking up for and supporting the outsider, the backward but bird-fluted voice, art and lullabies and poetries of all sorts of stripes. He'd done it with his Jargon press since college age and he passed away, royally even, as an old man. His books were always published, even if only the choir read them, but the quality was lasting stuff. He's going to stick around, and so is Jargon because Black Mountain isn't going to topple quite yet, nor all those names, or the buddies he made, and the enriched ingredients of how the man was formed himself. Mud and wattle. A thatch hut, a long gone walking trail, good books and good humor and so good memories of the guy. We never met but we spoke on the phone once upon a time about Lorine Niedecker and a book I published he wanted in quantities to give as gifts to his friends. See what I mean - thinking of others, even if he did sometimes come across in print as a crank. His photographs are marvelous and personal. His poetry swept in with the rain. When I was on the phone with Williams it gave me the opportunity to tell him how I wrote him once in the late 1960s when I was a boy about my enthusiasm for discovering Kenneth Patchen and all the wholesome work he did for that poet. He wrote me back a full page letter about Patchen, beautifully typed and enthused. It was the first letter I ever received from another writer. It was so important and respectful, and conscientious, that I bet it'll stay in me and become my last.     NONTIME To live through a week to live through a year through thirty then seventy years But there were years no one counted royal years when we played under ancient oaks and eternity was with us Julia Hartwig   In Praise of the Unfinished, selected poems translated by John & Bogdana Carpenter (Knopf) ~   MUSIC TO MY EARS: Amargosa, Amargosa: the bands first recording - that's Carson Arnold, drums; Luke Q. Stafford, guitar; Josh Steele, bass. Last heard, the band was quickly hired by the bartender at a friendly club and shut down when the owner visited and couldn't believe the decibel count. A fine badge of honor fellas! See their website for copies of this reasonably priced rash of glory. Or buy directly through Longhouse. The New Lost City Ramblers, Volume 5 (crusaders for old time music); Rosa Passos, Amorosa; Eric Dolphy, Out There; Blue Mitchell, Blue's Mood; Margaret MacArthur and Family, On the Mountain High       ~ Bob Arnold, Green River, Vermont 6 April 08     WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND, SPRING COMING 2008   - remembering - Gordon Zahn Buddy Miles Roy Scheider William F. Buckley, Jr. Hands can give love as well as accept it. They can communicate, and that is said to be a dangerously rare thing in this world. And if it is true, as I believe it to be, that there is a direct ratio between experience and appreciation, then it will also be true that the more one learns how to live through one's hands, the more one lives inwardly. - MFK Fisher, from the essay "Made, With Love, By Hand" in the new collection of assorted short works A Stew Or A Story (Shoemaker & Hoard)   I think perhaps it's this way in art. The spirit of the thing calls to your soul. First it hails it in passing and your soul pauses and shouts back, "Coming." But the soul dwells in your innermost being and it has a lot of courts and rooms and things to pass through, doors and furniture and clutter to go round and through, and she has to pass through and round all this impedimenta before she can get out in the open and catch up and sometimes she can't go on at all but is all snarled up in obstructions. But sometimes she does go direct and clear and catches up and goes along. Sometimes they can only go a little bit of way together and sometimes quite far, but after a certain distance she always has to drop back. But, oh, if you could only go far enough to see the beauty of the whole complete thought that has called out to you! - Emily Carr, April 16, 1934 from Hundreds and Thousands, the Journals (Clarke Irwin)     VALENTINE.   Remember a funny night my family made a circle by and by like standing on the shore a heart a visceral thing. This moment my heart's clear. We'll plant (my heart) a tree here. My heart my heart my heart. Is glad. - Tony Tost, Complex Sleep (Iowa) : one of the beauties from Tony's new book, although not nearly representing the entrancing range of the book. One has to read-complete the long poem "Complex Sleep", something I don't dare just tear a piece off here as example. You've something to look forward to. ----- FILM (DVD): Mother & Son (Aleksei Ananishnov) film as a painting, often shot through hand-painted glass and mirrors, the majority of it outdoors, a son cares for his dying mother, thus experiencing a transformation of living/dying all his own. Vassilisa the Beautiful (Aleksandr Rou) one of the restored masterpieces from Russian film tale fantasy, giving George Pal a run for his money. Made in 1939 with monsters, a gateway spider and even Baba Yaga, plus a hero and heroine who must earn their passage. The wild, bears, and lore are particularly well done. Baba Yaga's witchery will show up again years down the road in Rou's Golden Horns, where the imaginative witch turns two little sisters into glorious does, and the mother rushes to the rescue breaking the spell with the help of one golden deer. Great stuff in a mudpie political season. Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura) one of the most harrowing films ever made, finally on dvd. Imamura's visceral classic with its fluid framing, documentary and melodramatic charge, the bold overhead and voyeuristic camera peers, solid characterization of the director's passion for strong earth women and troubled men. From Japan, a true story of a serial killer on the loose for 78 days. The director turns off the casual viewer in the first half hour of rabid stabbing, then steers his ship, bloodless, way, way under the skin. Few directors anywhere have ventured where Imamura's career has situated, ever solid and changing before our eyes. He had a life-size latex doll on the screen 40 years before any "Lars" came to being. In his early years he worked with Ozu and found the master's routine repugnant. Years go by without any film, then out comes a stunner. Find what you can find in a world that issues claptrap by the greasy bucket loads, while this director's greats await in the can. Sergi Paradjanov - magician; artist of collages, ceramics, dolls; frontiersman of cinema, passed away in his 60s in 1990 after making films since 1954. He made many films of all sizes and merit, but his four masterpieces remain, and now on dvd - Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), The Color of Pomegranates (1970), The Legend of the Surami (1984), Ashik Kerib (1988) - he'd lived a few more years after this, wrote a few more film scripts for others, and was gone. Not forgotten. A courageous Armenian who lived in the Ukraine and through his Ukrainian themes. A student of the great Dovzhenko. His rejection of the official state of socialist realism and his dislike of the Soviet regime made plenty of enemies for him. Compared to most rebel artists in America from the 60s, they lived a cakewalk. In 1973 Paradjanov was tossed into prison for five years on trumped up charges of homosexuality and illegal trafficking in religious icons, many seen in full glory in his films. His crimes? "To show the Caucasus through Lermontov's eyes" as in Ashik Kerib, or the laces of ethnography, God, love, beauty and tragedy in Shadows...still one of the most expressionistic wonders ever put to film. Often using non-actors to an authentic time period pitch, costumes of magnificence, blood from the lamb, the woodchopper's rhythm of the forest, just watch his camera glide through Georgian legends. As a child he liked to sit in the bathroom and sing arias. His films will outlive any regime. Bill Viola - another look, after years, at the film master of installation video : I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986). I believe a much better film is here if you leave the humans out and all the natural world in - patient studying in fine hair detail Canadian glaciers, animal remains, the progression of a snail, chick out of egg, and a mesmerizing survey of a stationary owl, amongst so much else of this cosmos. (Film) Just a note to keep an eye on the rising career of young Joseph Gordon-Levitt - something all his own and quite Heath Ledger like in his overall concentration - check out Mysterious Skin, Brick, The Lookout and Stop-Loss. He was already wise beyond his years in the fluffy tv spin "3rd Rock From the Sun". ----- OTHER BOOKS IN A ONE-TWO PUNCH Riding Toward Everywhere, William T. Vollmann (Ecco): now an industry unto himself, Vollmann takes up hoboing & trains, with The Dharma Bums as insight and his own photographs from the rail yards, boxcars and towns landed tousled up in. If you've read his others books, this is a quick study. The Beats, Mike Evans (Running Press): a quite concise, Brit. view of the Beat Generation frontier from Kerouac to Kesey. Loaded with photographs and a very appealing study and showcase of the personalities and the associated eras and schools. A bit of Black Mountain makes its way in, and at the threshold of flower power. The layout and text reveals a wisdom and insight just beginning to be seen in US counterparts. The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Harvard): half the size of his collected poems and just as interesting, where the main bulk was written almost a decade before the poet published his first book A Boy's Will (1913). He told a fellow New Englander: "out of what we don't know and so can't be hurt by, poetry; out of knowledge, prose." Take it from there. It's important to listen to farmers. Books on Fire, Lucien X. Polastron (Inner Traditions): an outstanding, yet depressing book, about the destruction of libraries throughout history. From the burning of the towering library of Alexandria (a few times) to the US Marines watching/participating in the looting and destruction of museums in Baghdad and Mosul in 2003. Welcome to the history of mongols far and wide, the igniters. If we believe the horrors the Neocons have unleashed upon the world are terrible, and they are, imagine it's 1401 and Tamerlane's hoards are sweeping away from a razed Baghdad, with 120 towers mounted in their wake, stacked each with 750 of the inhabitants' heads! Happy reading. The book's index is infuriating trying to rodeo, and failing, the author's monumental energy and recall. Otherwise, I hand it to a small press gifting us with such a volume. Hideaways, Sonya Faure (Flammarion): I've built my share since a child of forts in the woods, first shelters, used materials huts and forty years later I'm still building them and collecting a library of equal minds on the subject - this one being one of the finest, ranging from seaside to the woods, cityscapes, downright cabins, shacks, tree houses and Swiss Family Robinson escapes. Balanced nicely with appreciative text and smart photographs. There's always a slender thread between the cutesy / ephemeral, to the authentic and spirited. Chalk this up as the latter. Go get lost in the building of one's life. Speaking of building & builders - Ireland's Coracle has just issued a fanciful decorative cloth bound edition of Tom Browne's hand-built small houses made in his shed after he gave up his building jobs. These are replica models of real homes, made from the same building materials Tom used on his house building jobs. Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutt's replica home is colorfully shown on the cover of the book as made by Tom. The interior of this house-made-book are the personal stories as shared by Erica, a builder of books and country ways all her own. It's a gem. Small Houses, Erica Van Horn (Coracle: www.coracle.ie) Becoming an old guy, after decades of teaching and writing a few classics in the education field (36 Children ; The Open Classroom) Herbert Kohl, Painting Chinese (Bloomsbury) Kohl wonders how best to keep himself engaged - taking up lessons and learning Chinese landscape painting is one of the answers. It allows him to take part in the reverse angle of becoming a student and learning from those much younger and from diverse backgrounds. A short book that nicely completes the meditation. Few have taken with them on the same trails, mountain tops and seashore hikes as Tom Slayton does in Searching for Thoreau (Images From the Past). Following the same routes as Henry David Thoreau blazed and providing detailed maps of the original's footway. "Not only for strength, but for beauty the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness." Tom Slayton pulls it off from his woodland brother's very words. Julio Cortazar isn't going very far - some hundreds of miles in his VW camper aboard the Paris-Marseilles freeway that would normally take ten hours of travel time. With his young wife Carol Dunlop, they will do it together over thirty-three days, never leaving the highway. Roughing nights at campsites and rest areas, eating out of their own pan, writing up their daily journals and meetings with fellow travelers, along the way they would write this book Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago) by typewriter on a picnic table in the shade, from their laps, on the steady fly a la Cortazar. Not to be missed, as we miss them, both authors would pass away within a year or two of their sojourn. What's the road book about? what every great road has been about - the large of minutiae. Moondog, the Viking of the 6th Avenue, Robert Scotto (Process) with a 28 track CD spinning over five decades, plus rare photographs and details from the very early years of the mysterious blind and homeless street musician and composer's life, to his last decades when his works were performed by European orchestras. This is the authorized biography, with a preface by the musician's friend Philip Glass, who tolerated, barely, the carousing after women and the trash left behind in his home while he put-up Moondog for a year. Glass, of course, knew the Viking was of the solitary hero composer school, which includes Ruggles, Ives, Partch and a few other mavericks still awaiting full appreciation. Vietnam Zippos, Sherry Buchanan (Chicago) independent scholar Sherry Buchanan has done a great service - tapping into the times and folk culture of American GIs in the Vietnam war (1965-1973) ranging with the simple flipcap zippo lighter, which was used both as an igniter of thatched roof huts of Vietnamese villagers by the peacekeeper American troops, as well as a signature piece, tattoo style engravings etched into the GIs zippo lighters of War & Peace and other blunt reflections. A hardback decorative book showcased beautifully throughout with Zippos from the extensive collection of Bradford Edwards, a candid commentary by Buchanan guides us well, and the price is right. Good Fences, William Hubbell (Down East) excellent photographs, both historical and contemporary, with personal commentary along the trail of stone fences and other projects by the author, including well-drawn features with stone wallers around New England, this wide layout book edition is lavish all the way around from the author's appreciations to the publisher's respect and contribution. The synthesis is balanced and correct. The cover photograph of well-locked rubble, shim and top-rock will make any stone lover smile. Two Carpenters, J. Ritchie Garrison (U/Tennessee Press) a stunning book, documenting through two New England builders, Calvin & George Stearns, during their period of the early nineteenth century, the influences, work habits, tools, as well as building and business practices that networked and filtered between city life and customs and rural communities (Northfield, Ma. / Brattleboro, Vt.) where the Stearns traveled between and finally settled into. Many homes they built in these communities are sturdy and pronounced to this day, revealing a legacy of character and tradition, borrowing and adaptation, perseverance. The detail of homes and locations, maps and routes is extensive and pinpointing. You'll want to come for a visit. The Poem of a Life, Mark Scroggins (Shoemaker & Hoard) I'll leave the scholars to do the scholarly criticism, of which Mark Scroggins is but one, and elegantly so, but this is a beautiful book top to bottom for any reader. The reader wishing to be introduced to Louis Zukofsky; and the reader, like myself, who has been reading LZ for 40 years (which is the range of time the poet took to carve out his masterpiece "A"). There is an achieved great long poem ("A") for the mountain climbers of the book club, and there are bushels and bushels of short poems, as seriously carved out of a certain Hebraic, numerological, music, word-joyed granite. Scroggins misses no points - as he was guided a bit by the poet's own autobiography (Autobiography, 1970): the love and respect for LZ's wife Celia and family is here; all the poet friends spanning from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, straight up to that Boston boys two-some Cid Corman and Robert Creeley, with Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen in-between; LZs immigrant background: a father who pressed pants until he was 81 years of age and proved much more health hardy than his hypochondriac son - the son put it into the poetry muscle; and finally Scroggins gifts us with such a deep measure of appreciation for Zukofsky's craft, poems, trials, music, the beautiful overall. Here is a book that looks terrific in the hand. The often worrisome LZ nearly greeting us with a smile from the cover. Part of the publishing team is Jack Shoemaker who goes back eons through the skirts and frills of American poetry the last five decades and literally, like many of us, grew up with Zukofsky being almost a mad scientist name in the den of poets. Shoemaker brings the book home for us. And Mark Scroggins decides to stay away from the cauldron of gossip and spittle from the personal insight of Jerry Reisman, a student of Zukofsky's when the latter was a high school teacher in the late 20s. The two became very close friends until a breakup in the late 40s, and resentment from Reisman, thereafter, seemed to ring the bowl. There will be others, no doubt, weighing in on LZ and his relationship with one wondrous Lorine Niedecker and I await those building blocks. For now, Scroggins seems complete at remaining sensitive and decent to his subject, without minimizing the portrait's edge. Until shown differently, this is Leon Edel caliber scholarship from an author who ran one of Zukofsky's principles straight down the line "the poet's task is to think with things as they exist." Here here. ~   SAVORING THE SCRAPS My grandfather carved the crust from the bread. My favorite. I ate it up. My wife, making pie, gives me the apple peel she pares off in an endless S. Give me your discards. I will digest and savor the scraps -