Saturday, January 31, 2015

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THOMAS MERTON! ~












How to Enter a Big City 
Thomas James Merton
(1915-1968)
 

I

Swing by starwhite bones and
Lights tick in the middle.
Blue and white steel
Black and white
People hurrying along the wall.  
”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“

Curve behind the sun again  
Towers full of ice. Rich  
Glass houses, “Here,
Have a little of my blood,”  
Rich people!”

Wheat in towers. Meat on ice.
Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.  
Baseball between these sudden tracks.  
Yell past the red street—
Have you any water to drink, City?  
Rich glass buildings, give us milk!  
Give us coffee! Give us rum!

There are huge clouds all over the sky.
River smells of gasoline.
Cars after cars after cars, and then
A little yellow street goes by without a murmur.

There came a man
(”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)  
Who offered to sell us his bones.

Swing by starwhite buildings and  
Lights come to life with a sound  
Of bugs under the dead rib.

Miles of it. Still the same city.  


II

Do you know where you are going?  
Do you know whom you must meet?

Fortune, perhaps, or good news  
Or the doctor, or the ladies  
In the long bookstore,
The angry man in the milkbar  
The drunkard under the clock.  
Fortune, perhaps, or wonder  
Or, perhaps, death.

In any case, our tracks
Are aimed at a working horizon.
The buildings, turning twice about the sun,  
Settle in their respective positions.
Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City  
Consents to be recognized.


III

Then people come out into the light of afternoon,  
Covered all over with black powder,
And begin to attack one another with statements  
Or to ignore one another with horror.
Customs have not changed.
Young men full of coffee and
Old women with medicine under their skin
Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.

Everywhere there is optimism without love
And pessimism without understanding,
They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts  
Cannot agree to be at peace
With their own images, shadowing them in windows  
From store to store.


IV

Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds  
And savage ferns,
The brown-eyed daughters of ravens,
Sing in the lucky doors
While night comes down the street like the millennium  
Wrapping the houses in dark feathers
Soothing the town with a sign
Healing the strong wings of sunstroke.
Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies
Off my Kentucky collarbone.

The claws of the treacherous stars  
Renegade drums of wood
Endure the heavenward protest.  
Their music heaves and hides.  
Rain and foam and oil
Make sabbaths for our wounds.  
(Come, come, let all come home!)
The summer sighs, and runs.
My broken bird is under the whole town,  
My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving  
And there are real fountains under the floor.


V

Branches baptize our faces with silver
Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.  
Winds at last possess our empty country
There, there under the moon  
In parabolas of milk and iron  
The ghosts of historical men  
(Figures of sorrow and dust)
Weep along the hills like turpentine.  
And seas of flowering tobacco
Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.




_________________________________

The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
(New Directions)









Thursday, January 29, 2015

bpNichol ~














A fine poet
A fine press


This gift 
bookmark
brought home
to us from
a friend
while in
Vancouver




Wednesday, January 28, 2015

NOTHING LIKE JACK'S HOT DOGS ~








The first time I ever stepped up into Jack's Hot Dogs in North Adams, Massachusetts was fifty year ago this year. Can you believe your eyes and ears that the establishment is still in business? Yes it is.

 
In fact it may be one of the longest and enduring establishments in that dying slowly but surely Berkshire town, hard to admit for me as a native and as I recently roamed the streets with my true love. All my old haunts, except Jack's, are long gone. The shoe store, the clothing store, my mother's shoe store, my mother's clothing store, both movie theaters, the hardware store, my uncle Frank's lumberyard, where my father cut his own commercials at the local radio station for his lumberyard (Herb Alpert was the preferred music used as his theme), my dentist Doctor Greene, Lily's Music Shop where I bought my Dylan and Hendrix and Traffic and Led Zeppelin and Miles and where I looked a long time at Linda Ronstadt on an album cover sitting very pretty in a sty of pigs.


As we haunted up and down and sideways on the sidewalk these places and store fronts were vacant, boarded up, echoes. A few of the side alleys were still there like mountain passes and how I loved them as a kid and how I still love them as an old timer, taking my sweetheart by the hand and down an alley way we'd go, flushing out into a parking lot and the back door to a vintage Italian restaurant opens and an old woman sticks her head out having eye contact with us at the same time we land in the lot looking wildly about and she waves us over that it's okay to come into her establishment that way, through the kitchen back door, around the pots and pans, the hot grilles and spitting grease and the young workers surprised we're suddenly there and quickly moving out to the front where there is no one at all but a sunny picture window and old tables with a fake flower vase at the center. How not to sit down? We sit. Order two pizza slices. The woman who invited us in serves us like it's a full course meal, she knows best, she's old town, disciplined, worked all her life, reminds me of my Irish aunts once down the road in Adams, except she is fully Italian. All gone. I'm in that moment.


There was a fish market on a side street up a hill in North Adams where my mother and I would stop on the incline and my mother would jerk up the emergency brake and leave me with the words she'd be back in a minute, and she almost was, with a roll of fish n' chips sopped in good grease of the newspaper, and we'd eat it all right there in the car where we sat. The town spread out before us through the windshield.



 


All gone but Jack's. The smallest restaurant I believe Sweetheart has ever been in and she loves it. Loves me. There's a short counter and maybe ten stools, it's all too small to count. Why bother? You're in a heavenly nest of short order cooks behind the counter grabbing orders as soon as you arrive, plunk down, and before you know it at 3 in the afternoon all the stools are taken. The guy next to me orders four hotdogs, two hamburgers, and a plate of french fries topped with a plate of onion rings. He's scrawny and thin. Eats this pile like he's lucky. No doubt a regular. Once you find and try Jack's you become a regular. The prices will set you back on your heels — a hot dog for $1.20. Hamburger the same. The fries are ridiculously nasty, ridiculously tasty and ridiculously cheap. A glass of Coke is 75 cents and the glass, I swear, is the same size glass used in my junior high school cafeteria just down the road from here. Except that school is also gone, as is my elementary school across the narrow street.  Pulverized. Disappeared. The great oak floors that snapped and buckled and gleamed.


 


Sit on the stool and watch the world of Jack's work. Two guys man the grille and the orders and a third guy is thumbing through receipts. His 'desk' is the narrow counter you're chowing down on. He's a foot from me, leaning over making meticulous on the orders and today's earnings. I stood up a moment curious as ever because I see a door in the back corner to somewhere and stick my head into another closet size space dark with an ATM machine and maybe two pinball or game machines. It looks ancient. Spooky. Sweetheart guards my stool with her hand or else it will be swiped by the next hunger artist.

 
There's a window that looks out where the cook does his magic but it's worthless with steam, grime and smeared sunshine. We're on the greatest side street in North Adams once known for bakeries and side dives and antique stores and other restaurants. You can walk up the street, jump across and hurdle the intersection of traffic coming out of Vermont and more Massachusetts, sidewind around a parking lot of a grocer's and come to Mass MOCA, the intellectual of the town. If the powers that be there haven't yet drawn together the vintage artwork and flavor of Jack's Hot Dogs and put it up on display in their museum as a supreme example of local-yokel, some one is missing their beat. Where Mass MOCA is was exactly where Sprague Electric was when I was a kid. You can walk through the museum and forget the artwork for the first visit and just admire and be overwhelmed by the original architecture of the former factory's massive wooden beams. I used to deliver sheetrock into this building with my cousin Alan. Two flights up. Heavy work.



 

I came for my first hot dog in 1965 off a lumber truck delivery with my co-worker Big John, a Polish monster lumberjack I drove hundreds of deliveries with between 1962-1969. I was the kid in the passenger seat, conservationist, know-it-all, and helping hand. John liked to eat. Eat big. He could just fit through the only door to the place, and in the summer it was a screen door.


 ~ Bob Arnold








Tuesday, January 27, 2015

MURIEL SPARK ~









Muriel Spark 

The Informed Air
New Directions
2014




http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-muriel-spark-saw




Novels:

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968)
The Driver’s Seat (1970)
Not to Disturb (1971)
The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
Territorial Rights (1979)
Loitering with Intent (1981)
The Only Problem (1984)
A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
Symposium (1990)
Reality and Dreams (1996)
Aiding and Abetting (2000)
The Finishing School (2004)


 

Critical Biographies:

John Masefield (1953)
“Child of Light”: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951) completely revised as “Mary Shelley” (1987)


 

Biography:

Editor:
Selected poems of Emily Brontë (1952)
The Brontë Letters (1954) 


 

Joint Editor:

Tribute to Wordsworth (1950)
Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (1953)
My Best Mary: Selected Letters of Mary Shelley (1953)
Letters of John Henry Newman (1957)


 

Radio Plays:

The Dry River Bed
The Interview
The Party through the Wall
The Danger Zone


 

Play:

Doctors of Philosophy (1963) (staged 1962)

 

Poetry:

The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952)
Collected Poems I (1967)
Going Up to Sotheby’s and other Poems (1982)
All the Poems of Muriel Spark (2004)


 

Short Stories:

The Go-Away Bird (1958)
Voices at Play (1961)
Collected Stories I (1967)
Bang-Bang You’re Dead and Other Stories (1982)
The Stories of Muriel Spark (1987)
The Collected Stories (1994)
Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories (1997)
All the Stories of Muriel Spark (2001)
The Complete Short Stories (2001)
The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark (2003)


 

For Children:

The Very Fine Clock (1969)
The French Window and The Small Telephone (1993)


 

Omnibus editions:

Omnibus I (1993)
Omnibus II (1994)
Omnibus III (1996)
Omnibus IV (1997)


 

Autobiography:

Curriculum Vitae (1992)

 

The following novels were filmed:

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), which was a Command Performance and for which Maggie Smith won an Oscar.
“The Driver’s Seat” (1974), starring Liz Taylor, Mona Washbourne and Andy Warhol
“The Abbess of Crewe” (1977) as “Nasty Habits”, starring Glenda Jackson and Melina Mercouri


 

The following novels have been adapted for TV:

The Girls of Slender Means (1975)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1978)
Memento Mori (1992)
And the Stories: The Black Madonna and You Should Have Seen the Mess (BBC2)


 

The following novels have been adapted for the stage:

Memento Mori (1964)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966)
The Girls of Slender Means (2009)


 

The following novels have been adapted for the radio:

The Ballad of Peckham Rye (winner of the Italia Prize for Dramatic radio 1962)
The Girls of Slender Means (1964)
The Comforters (1957)
Memento Mori (1964)

Monday, January 26, 2015

Srečko Kosovel ~









 Srečko Kosovel

( 1904-1926, Slovenia )





AUGUST


I love the quiet August rain
that cools the forests and fields,
the gray sky, the fresh wind
that comes to the heart's quiet.


Quietly it comes to the carefree heart,
which is quietly open to sadness.
No longer crushed or glum,
grief giving way to joy.


Now all is fulfilled, the gray
clouds fragrant and melancholy.
In the rain and in the field
the dark wet poplars rocking.







MY POEM



My poem's an explosion,
savage rending. Dissonance.
My poem won't reach you,
who by God's will and providence
are dead aesthetes, museum moths.
My poem is my face.









A SMALL COAT



I would like to walk around
in a small coat of
words.


But hidden underneath should be
a warm, bright world.


What is wealth?
What is luxury?
For me it is this:
a small coat I have,
and this coat is like
no other.









I WENT FOR A RIDE


I went for a ride in a golden boat
across the red waters of evening
through the trees
and along the grassy shore.
I was rowing,
I, the golden boatman . . .


But a storm blew in
and the sun fell
from its height,
so that everything less golden
shone forth
more clearly, more alive,
newly born —
I stepped ashore.


Red clouds tore
from my heart.
I saw them,
and I followed them
across the world.









STREET LAMP


Why be human if being human
is so difficult? Become the lamp
by the roadside that quietly sheds
its light on man.
Be as it is, for as it is
he will always have a human face.
Be good to him, this man,
and impartial like a lamp
that quietly illuminates the faces
of drunkards, vagabonds, and students
along the solitary road.


Be a lamp
if you can't be human,
for being human is difficult.
A human has just two hands
but he should help thousands.
So be a lamp by the roadside
shining on a thousand happy faces,
shining for the lonely, the aimless.
Be a lamp with a single light,
man in a magic square
signaling with a green arm.
Be a lamp, a lamp,
a lamp.









SAD HOUR


The old world is dying in me.
A sad hour comes.
In a streak of gold comes
new mysticism.
Human mysticism.
Magnetic blaze of the heart.
Human eyes glow —
radium in the night.
Death — a retreat from life.
O happy death.




_____________________

 translated from the Slovene by
Ana Jelnikar & Barbara Siegel Carlson


Look Back, Look Ahead
The selected poems of Srečko Kosovel 
Ugly Duckling Presse
2010  


Sunday, January 25, 2015

ONCE IN VERMONT ~








 
Traditional dancing at the Malikha lodge
  photo ~ Brigitte Lacombe for The New York Times




It isn't Vermont, but present day Myanmar, although I can remember a time in back hills Vermont
where this lush description of pure simple nothingness/everything, was also my own habitat:



"Here, local people tend to retire and rise with the sun. Each new day is announced not by cellphones, clock radios or the beeping of other digital devices, but by the first insomniac rooster’s prelight reveille, a clarion call that quickly triggers a wrap-around sonic cacophony, as every other backsliding rooster in the neighborhood joins in to herald the dawn. Then from across the river, where rice paddies step down to the shore, come the sounds of crying babies, laughing children and the chopping of wood. Only then does the sky begin to brighten and smoke begin to curl up from cooking fires. And when the sun finally does burst forth to limn the frieze of jagged, snow-capped peaks behind the forested foothills, it is, indeed, like being present at creation."



Read more of this fascinating article by Orville Schell, long in the tooth with Asia, old & new, as well as the whole of the Pacific Rim.









Friday, January 23, 2015

NEW! CID CORMAN OF VOLUME 4 & 5 ~
















                                                                                                       OF


                                                                             So many days and

                                                                             so many nights ex-

                                                                             act infinity



                                                                            The petals of the

                                                                            flowers of an in-

                                                                            dissoluble light.


                                                                                                                 CC








ANNOUNCING
The final volumes to Corman's opus in one book ~ 

of

volumes 4 & 5

by

C I D   C O R M A N


_________________




1500 poems

850 pages

edited by Bob Arnold

available in a limited edition from, limited quantity available

L O N G H O U S E

____________________


ORDER HERE ~

Shipping is priority mail only for US orders
insured with tracking

$100
plus $7 US mail priority

Paypal, credit card, or check






~

International orders, $100
 plus $40 air priority rate

Paypal or credit card









Longhouse
 Publishers & Booksellers
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, Vermont
05303 





OTHER NEW TITLES FROM LONGHOUSE



_________________________







CARSON ARNOLD
If I Blinked Through
These Windows
Collected Music Writings     
a big soaking book of youth      ~ $20









 









 J.D. WHITNEY
 Sweeping The Broom Shorter ~
 Selected Poems     ~ $15


two different covers ~ take your pick!


















BOB ARNOLD & JASON CLARK
 Sapline     
maple sugaring in Vermont     ~ $12










 

 

 MALCOLM RITCHIE
Small Lines On The Great Earth

poems from Scotland     ~ $15












BOB ARNOLD
My Sweetest Friend  
poems from brother to sister     ~ $15










DUDLEY LAUFMAN
 The Islandian 
Poems & Fables
journey to another land     ~ $12




    

 


BOB ARNOLD   
Go West
c'mon! travel westward by train   ~ $15














BOB ARNOLD  
Start With The Tree
photographs by Susan Arnold
a lifetime of building & marriage      ~ $20





FORTHCOMING BOOK TITLES BY~

JANINE POMMY VEGA

LORINE NIEDECKER

ROBIN MAGOWAN






Thursday, January 22, 2015

SNOWY OWL ~







S N O W Y    O W L

Photograph: Christopher Millette/AP



Rare — we caught two snowy owls
in flight above a family neighborhood
flying spruce tree to spruce tree
of western massachusetts in late 2014