Friday, October 31, 2014

APPLE OF OUR EYE ~









Emily Dickinson's gravesite
w/ family members
Amherst, MA.
20 October 2014

photo 2014  © bob arnold









Thursday, October 30, 2014

AROUND THE BOOKSHOP 5 ~






Longhouse, Vermont






THE POSTHUMAN ~





Andrei Codrescu
photo Henke Olofsson



"Hippies were often misconstrued as being

antimaterialistic and Zen inclined, a misconception

aided by poets Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Diane

di Prima, and Philip Whalen, who were Zen

trained. In fact, the baroque imagination of LSD

led most young counterculturists away from

emptiness and toward fulsome teeming matters like

instant communication, better bodies, cosmetics,

immortality, and youth potions, all of which

translated two decades later into the internet and

biotech."

ANDREI CODRESCU   THE POSTHUMAN  DADA GUIDE

Princeton 2009













Wednesday, October 29, 2014

GALWAY KINNELL ~







Galway Kinnell
1927 ~ 2014


"Through it all, he held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
The New York Times, 29 October 2014






BRIAN JONES ~















Brian Jones
The Making of the Rolling Stones
Paul Trynka
Viking 2014



If you've read Keith Richards Life
— now read a biography of the founder of The Rolling Stones
it promises not to jive





Tuesday, October 28, 2014

CID CORMAN'S OF ( A PEEK ) ~








THE
CONTAGION


 


God is a symptom -

like philosophy.
We're sick to death of

each other and our

selves - contaminate
everything we

can get our minds on.




_____________________


Cid Corman





All last winter and into this winter approaching we have been working on editing, typing and designing the new issue from Longhouse of Cid Corman's final two volumes of

Expect it to reside in one big book.

 It will be out for release in 2015.

 This is a massive undertaking since Cid left the manuscript in ten loose leaf notebooks, all typed, with revisions on the original transcript to be deciphered
 (decades of receiving letters from him, no problem).

We're gaining and we thought we'd offer a peek with the poem above.

The poem is from Book 5, part III, under the heading "Transmutings."

 Considering the world at present, one can see Cid was twenty to thirty years ahead of himself.

[ BA ]

"Cid" drawing © bob arnold

 






Quiet Accomplishment
Remembering Cid Corman
by Gregory Dunne
Ekstasis Editions/Victoria, B.C.


In the meantime, here is Gregory Dunne's modest, well-built memoir of Cid Corman; concerning itself mainly with Cid's many decades in Japan, while threading throughout a fine juxtaposition of the poet and the poet's writings. Dunne also offers his sharp eye to the full opus of — quite valuable — as well as his interview with Cid Corman first published in American Poetry Review.










Monday, October 27, 2014

SMARTIES ~





YOUR SMART PHONE MESSAGE



 

you know

the social




order is

fucked

 


when the

assassin

 


ignores

his enemies

 


and instead

shoots

 


his

friends




one more tragedy. . .Seattle


no matter where my eye goes now — town & country —
 everyone but me & the crazy guy
 owns a smart phone
 has their ears plugged with buds, wears head phones
 is tuned IN while OUTdoors. 

They see and feel but don’t hear the breezes
 all parts of the day, their messages are constant
and when not there — expectant!

Life on the edge.


B O B   A R N O L D







RAY JOHNSON ~
















A  Y    J  H  N  S  O  N

not nothing
Edited by Elizabeth Zuba
essay by Kevin Killian
SIGLIO 2014


www.sigliopress.com















Ray Johnson has forever been my favorite modern artist (USA) — a mixture of so many — Duchamp, de Kooning, Picasso, Cornell, Cage, Brainard, Warhol, Bruce Conner, and somebody I'm missing. It's good to miss somebody, keep a space open.



"Dear Andy,

I telephoned John Cage and t old him
that you wanted me to  interview him for Inter
view and he laughed and laughed and said  "That's
the funniest thing I've ever heard."
I said  "Maybe we could not talk to each other
for a half hour?"

Ray"




____________





Saturday, October 25, 2014

Friday, October 24, 2014

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT DRAWING ~








Jean-Michel Basquiat







Work From the Shorr Family Collection

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Fred Hoffman

Thursday, October 23, 2014

GERRY LOOSE (FAULT LINE) ~





Fault Line

Gerry Loose

Vagabond Voices

Glasgow, Scotland






light does not fall

night does not fall

night rises

as dawn rises

twilight becomes

arriving



Tuesday, October 21, 2014

AROUND THE BOOKSHOP 4 ~













MICHAUX ~












Thousand Times Broken
Three Books
HENRI MICHAUX
Translated from the French
by Gillian Conoley
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS 2014






______________________





 What's needed


















 



A CRYSTAL
MAN












Monday, October 20, 2014

MERRILL GILFILLAN ~








Merrill Gilfillan
  







Laurel Bloomery:
"The Past Is Distant"

  


The past is distant.


The redbird whistling in the distance


is the distance.









Middle March



Why would a meadowlark

     be singing

           on a deadbeat day like this?









Two Hawks



Two hawks

in honeyed circles interlocked

on the one thought.








Sweetgrass Hills



These Northern Lights

     so hard

          to read by.









Hare's Ear



That boy

     raised by meadowlarks

          talks funny.









Wind in the Trees



Wake up at two

wondering about the monkeys

in the dark zoo.









Autumn Sky



And now we know for certain

to be in two places at once

not nearly enough.




 ___________________________




Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1945 and today living in Colorado, Longhouse has published Merrill, and these chosen poems are a certain personal bias very late at night with a pencil flicking onto small poems read by one small light. It some times happens this way.

Let it be known there are many other poems in this book of flight, longer and prose poem and middle size, too. All sizes. Like shoes.


 [ BA ]





Photographs by John Sarsgard


 ___________

Red Mavis
Merrill Gilfillan
Flood Editions, 2014








Sunday, October 19, 2014

LIKE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS ~










Like Musical Instruments
83 Contemporary American Poets
John Sarsgard, photographs
Larry Fagin, edited (poems)
Broadstone Books
Frankfort, Kentucky
2014




Saturday, October 18, 2014

START WITH THE TREE (CODA) ~










The ten inch tee-hinge bolted into place.







Again, use the truck as saw-horse and build the chapel doors.







A view into the work site from the road.






The versatile portable drill, and versatile short screws.







After the traveler passes by on the road along the stone wall comes the chalkboard and often a poem.








One finished pine door, and one more to match. I wanted to build both doors over two days, then take the third day off with Sweetheart and our bicycles.







The overhead lumber rack is now in place.







Bed the screw.








Getting ready to hang two doors.








These two jacks, who have traveled with me for decades (and look it) are the helpers deluxe when coming to lift the doors into position. Spruce blocks, wood shingle shims, any old board also help the installment along.



 




After one of two doors is bolted into place (not screws), measure out and see how the next door has a clearance magic of "1/4." That's what you're shooting for.








Both doors up and plumb, windows aligned, closing without complaint.








Here we have the doors almost finished, painted two-color and a brace against the door waiting for hardware to be installed. The bottom of both doors will have a hinged flap installed to be lifted during deep snow (winter) and back down for normal use.








If you look closely, the day after I finished building the chapel, a tree crew scheduled for October arrived a month earlier than expected, with a crane, and removed a mammoth white pine tree and this twin sugar maple tree right next to the chapel. You can see the saw chips on the stonewall. I asked the crew to leave ten feet of one of the maple trees and level the top. On that top I plan to install something . . . the ideas are percolating. The new sunshine, without the trees, is quite a gift.









Begin stenciling the big doors — one first coat and then go over the petals, free hand, with a second coat. The building will be stenciled with one thick tube of yellow paint.










Tap tap tap the color in and don't let your hand slip. The masking tape doesn't work on the painted steel surface anyway.









The rarely seen back wall faces the woods and for the moment has one line trace of leaves. I will do another line of leaves higher up before snow falls.









Some times with stenciling, a little is better than a lot more.








Remember the scaffolding? — well, after I dismantled that, I chopped some of it up and built this ladder to the second floor loft. It's all built into the space between the studs and takes up no extra room.







The finished building with stenciled doors and both flaps on the bottom of the doors to be lifted only when needed. The extra long 6 x 6 sill to the left of the photograph has since been cut back close to the post and beveled. We're done.








Scott's "Archer" (steward) was sent decades ago here to us from his ironworks in Maine.
We brought him over to this new spot to see how he likes it. So far, not a peep.





fini

photos 2014  © bob & susan arnold