review of Donato Mancini's Aethel--

"A gorgeous collection of concrete poetry, Aethel uses a variety of fonts and spatial layouts, contrasting and shifting between each piece. Each poem presents a new jumble of text, an arrangement of letters and fonts shaped into amorphous bursts on the page. Each work is imbued with a certain grace, a rounded beauty that leaks from one age of the page to the next. The more eye catching pieces are the ones like “Blood of a Concrete Poet” and “I Think Therefore I’m Not Sure” that use the American Sign Language hand diagrams and brief arrows as a unique way to portray movement and construct new phrases from visual matter..."

new books on Trees--

"A medlar smells of Pimms with cucumber, hawthorn of unwashed underwear, pollarded trees are “cruelly elegant”, big trees are terribly thirsty and can drink 9,000 gallons a year, gingkos are terrifying and Sitka spruce needs as much as thirty inches of rain per annum. Sitka is exquisitely light. The Wright brothers built their Kitty Hawk with it. “Surprisingly for such a dour tree, you can strike a jolly tune from its light wood and it is used in the sounding boards of violins and guitars...”

Vancouver trees

review of two books on George Oppen--

"For this reason, as Nicholls demonstrates, Oppen's poems rarely contain philosophical arguments, just as they rarely contain political arguments. The wonder of existence is registered not only in what Oppen's poems say--

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down--
That they are there!

--but in their manner of saying: rather than providing the evidence of completed thought, the poems disclose the process of thinking as it happens. Nicholls is more interested in Oppen as a thinker than as a poet, but he allows Oppen to be everything that he was, refusing--like Oppen himself--to ask poetry to shoulder responsibilities it cannot bear..."

EPC/George Oppen Home Page

nice short piece on Gram Parsons & Frank Sanford--

"But it makes me feel bitter
Each time it begins
Calling me home, hickory wind..."

via

from Bolano's "Nazi Literature in the Americas"--The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys--

"He began to write poetry at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, while his elder brother was making his name with "The Path to Glory", he produced fifty mimeographed copies of his first book, at his own expense and risk. It was a series of thirty epigrams entitled "Anthology of the Best Argentine Jokes"; over one weekend he personally sold all the copies to members of the Boca gangs. In April 1973, employing the same editorial strategy, he published his story "The Invasion of Chile", an exercise in black humor (some passages resemble a splatter movie script) about a hypothetical war between the two republics. In December of the same year he published the manifesto "We’re Not Going to Take It", in which he attacked the league’s umpires, whom he accused of bias, lack of physical fitness, and, in some cases, drug use..."

poems by Lissa Wolsak (here "marqueed" by Jack Kimball) & Robert Mittenthal (above) at The Kootenay School of Writing, this Saturday at Spartacus Books 319 E. Hastings...

local trees

Killer of Sheep turned out to be as good as its reputation...

farewell Suzanne Pleshette

addendum to Payday/Naked Prey note below: Cornel Wilde directed Torn in the graphic gritty, Fulleresque Beach Red in 1967, based on a long narrative poem by Peter Bowman, published just after the war, which I have somewhere. The film shows up on TCM.

local trees

some trees from the magnificent & easy to use Library of Congress Flickr site...

"Unwanted Christmas Tree Blocking Sidewalk" from Mongibeddu in Maine...

interesting article on archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes--

"Was her bold attempt to make archeology sexy her downfall? The documents left behind offer fascinating clues, but it is a challenge to find the "real" Jacquetta. There are gems in the spoil heap: a table charting her child's height and weight; a poem begun on civil-service notepaper; a Newnham College shopping list heavy with biscuits and flowers; train times for clandestine meetings with Jack; educational postcards to Nicolas; studio photos; snaps of family pets; lists of bird sightings; excitedly shared purchases from New York department stores and pueblo gift shops; a single long silver-grey hair left on her dark cape in the wardrobe of her last bedroom..."


her magnificent A Land, which I've tried to be influenced by!

a Caturday tribute to the late great Ivor Cutler---

Shoplifters

Pussy On The Mat

The Dirty Dinner

Looking for truth with a pin

Go and Sit Upon the Grass

his Telegraph obit...

Bookslut has an interview with terrific poet Laynie Brown--

"Paradox is not synonymous with contradiction. Through this lens any separation, such as forest from sentence is illusory..."

via Ron a tough review of Alter's Psalms though nice to hear a good word for the underrated Jerusalem Bible (didn't know Tolkien did Jonah...)

two great movies finally out on DVD--The Naked Prey & Payday, with Cornel Wilde & Rip Torn, respectively...

The Triumph of Bush

"It’s assumed that the plastic fantastic alternative universe fashioned by the Bushies and the neocons—remember the famous boast to Ron Suskind from the unnamed Bush aide in The New York Times Magazine, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”?—has ignominiously popped upon contact with brute reality, sending a former demigod such as Donald Rumsfeld crashing into the cornfield and ejecting Condoleezza Rice into an endless orbit of mortified futility. But perhaps we’re the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything’s worked out as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted—that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren’t bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods..."