Harry Musick (1946 - 2013)

Harry M. Musick, book and flea market maven, student of philosophy, U.S. Marine, author of just one published chapbook of prose and poetry: "Poems For The Abnormal Mind" (Soap Box Publishing, Stamford Connecticut, 1978).  Here are three excerpts:



     The nights were cold, and the moon left shadows of forthcoming danger.  Lurking in the darkness half starved animals waited silently for their prey.  Howls from dying beasts saturated the silence.  Fits of laughter echoed from the mouths of mindless men.

     The mortal chose to sit on the mountain for eternity.  He composed songs.  He sang to the goddess.  The music with a magic melody drifted to earth, compelling other mortals to conquer other peaks only to find that nothing existed but their own madness.




a river of blood
of human infamy
                       meandering
through a forest
with black
leafless trees
                  towering
toward the dark,
             the starless heavens,
sprouting branches
                            upward
                             away
from a scarlet sea.
Each tree
            a huge bulk
                            of stone
bled its guts
upon the foam
                   which bubbled


    

Kiss me softly gentle wind;
I am sighing.
Tales from a painful heart
Keep my loves from dying.

poem by Anselm Hollo (1934 - 2013)

Buffalo Limited Edition Fortune Cookie


Comrade Lenin's watch: always ten minutes fast
Señor Buddha had no watch at all
 just sat there watching the sky evolve
he too gone now like Mr. Edward Hopper
and yesterday's grasshopper
         so do not ask for whom the car honks
watch out for that bicyclist whirring near
 early & late     
remember those whom you hold dear








first published in intent. Letter of Talk, Thinking, & Document
(vol. 3 No. 2 & 3, Summer/Fall 1991)
edited John Clarke

Dafydd Ap Gwilym

Dafydd ap Gwilym, slightly older than Chaucer, melded the tradition of courtly love poetry with innovation to traditional Welsh meter and rhyme.  Rachel Bromwich had written: "It is a general belief that poetry is untranslatable except at a cost of so great a loss as to call in question the reasons for ever attempting it.  Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetry is an extreme example of the validity of this interdiction, since his awdlau and cywyddau made their primary appeal to the ears of the original audiences: rarely - if ever - did these audiences see his poems in writing."  (Dafydd Ap Gwilym: A Selection Of Poems, Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, 1982).  Not to enter into a controversy about translation, especially since I believe it can be an invaluable labor of love, but medieval Welsh poetry is simply not possible to translate literally into a poetry in English.  And English was the oppressor's language - Dafydd having lived in the 14th century, "between the fall of Llywelyn and the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dwr." ("The Story of Dafydd ap Gwilym" by Gwyn Thomas with Illustrations by Margaret Jones - published by Y Lolfa, Talybont, 2004).  Of course one could attempt what Pound did in "Cathay" or what Blackburn did with "El Cid" or what Logue did with Homer.... There are some translations on the web,  published by The Swansea Project.   

He was the greatest, certainly the most well-known, medieval Welsh poet, though perhaps there are those who regard his colleague, friend and rival in the composition of cynghanedd and cywdd, Gruffudd Gryg, as his equal.   

Much of his poetry concerns love's frustrations; often the poems are self-deprecating, even sardonic; however, his irony is sometimes imbued with the beauty of the natural world, the forests of Wales, and the birds and beasts who live there, and his work uses racy and erotic language within the internal rhymes, stress, assonance, and alliterations of the cynghanedd, or harmony, as Dr. Bromwich had noted in her exceptional text: "Cynghanedd was an organic growth which like the cywydd itself, became permanently stablilized in its lasting form in the 14th century.  It had evolved slowly over the previous two centuries in the long lines of nine or ten or twelve syllables in the awdlau composed by the court poets who were Dafydd's predecessors."  She modestly asserts that her translations should be regarded as prose. 

Here are two very brief excerpts from her 1982 book (with an Introduction by Thomas Parry), which features the Welsh, interfacing.



from: The Girls of Llanbadarn  ("Merched Llanbadarn")

I am distraught with passion:
a plague on all the parish girls!
because I never - violation of trysts -
was able to win even one of them,
no maiden - a gentle request -
nor little maid, nor hag, nor wife.

What bashfulness is this, what mischief?
How have I failed, that they'll have none of me?
What harm, to lass with slender brows,
to meet me in the forest's thick-set dark?
No cause of shame to her
to see me in my leafy lair.

---------------

And when I have long surveyed
across my feathers, the people of my parish
one sweet tender lass will say
to her companion, lively, famous, wise:

"That grey-faced flirt of a boy
wearing in his head his sister's hair,
lascivious is the look he has,
he has a side-long glance, he must know mischief well."

"Is that how it is with him?"
the other by her side replies,
"He'll get no answer while the world endures,
to the devil with him, stupid thing!"

Shocking to me was the bright girls's curse,
a trifling payment for distracting love.
Needs must that I contrive to cease
this habit, with its tantalizing dreams.
It is imperative that I become
a hermit - job for a dejected man.
Because of ever looking - awful lesson -
over my shoulder, an image of distress,
it has befallen me, though poetry's friend,
to go wry-headed, without any mate.




And, in much the same vein, (but with angry final quatrain) from "Cyngor y Biogen" or "The Magpie's Advice"


I, the poet of a lissom girl
in the greenwood, joyful enough
yet weary-hearted from remembering her;
my spirit being refreshed within
for sheer joy of seeing the trees
with vital force, having donned new clothes
and the shoots of vine and wheat
after the sun-shot rain and dew,
and the green leaves, on the valley's brow,
and the thorn-tree, fresh, white-nosed.
By Heaven, there was also
the Magpie, most cunning bird in the world
building - lovely stratagem -
in the tangled crest of the thicket's core
an ambitious tenement of leaves and clay and lime,
and her mate was helping her.

--------------------

The Magpie muttered - indictment of my anguish -
proud, sharp-beaked, upon a thorn-bush:
"Great is your fuss, a vain and bitter chant,
old man, all by yourself,
better it were for you, by Mary of eloquent fame,
to be beside the fire, you grey old man,
rather than here, amidst the dew and rain,
in the greenwood, in a chilly shower."

"Shut up, and leave me here in peace
if only for an hour, until my tryst.
It is my passion for a lovely, faithful girl
that causes me this tumult."

"It is but vain for you, servant of passion,
despicable grey old man, half imbecile;
-a foolish sign of the labour of love -
to rave about a sparkling girl."

--------------------

"You Magpie, black your head,
help me, if you are so wise,
and give me the best advice
that you may know for my sore sickness."

"I would impart to you sound advice
before May comes, and do it, if you will.
You have no right, poet, to the handsome girl:
there is for you but one advice
since you are so deep in verses, become a hermit,
alas, you foolish man!  and love no more."

By my faith, God witness it,
if ever yet I see a Magpie's nest
from this time on, she will not have
God knows, either egg or fledgeling.

Spain: Buffalo Days

Hunched in an old felt green armchair at 1001 Lafayette Ave.
Must have been Jeremy Taylor introduced us all
Because of the demonstrations against HUAC.

Hunched over a small acoustic guitar,
He played in the classical style
Almost painfully sweet these melodies he was inventing
Moreso coming from a man of such power.

He had drawn the cover of Landscape of Contemporary Cinema
My first published book, co-authored with Leon Lewis.
His work even then defined Iconic.
And Cindy, writing short stories under the name N. Howard.

Riding security with the Road Vultures.
Protecting by this act many young undergrads
Otherwise might have been beaten that day
During the protest at the McCarthy-era Committee's
Leaving D.C.'s confines first time in years....
Given the keys to the city, Buffalo, 1964.

Around the monument across from City Hall they rode
Spain in the lead, holding aloft
(Was it in his right hand, or his left?)
The black anarchist flag
Of the Spanish Civil War.

It was truly a sight to behold!

Asa Benveniste

These two contiguous paragraphs posted below from the only published prose essay of poet and publisher/printer/book designer (Trigram Press) Asa Benvensite, are excerpted from Language: Enemy, Pursuit which was initially published by Poltroon Press (1980) and reprinted in mimeomimeo, issue number 4 (Winter 2010), edited by Kyle Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham.

There is unpublished correspondence between Asa and Cid Corman (between the UK and Kyoto) praising Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers, and there were notes toward an essay on Zukofsky, which he was writing toward the end of his life, but they seem to be lost.  There are also his "last letters" to me in the 1980's which I published in Branch Redd Review (issue #6, 2002).   Tom Raworth's obituary for Asa was published by Critical Quarterly, vol. 32, no.3.




Gematria.  A fierce confrontation with word, one of the best ways to barricade oneself against the confused inlay.  Linguistics is not language.  No one "understands" language.  Communication is the last word to use to describe its purpose. Though to every poet, as to every Kabbalist, there must be more to those words than their beauty.  That their meaninglessness itself is part of the divine (linguistic) fabric.  In the end, at the start, early Kabbalists believed that the whole of the Torah consisted of one word only, though each of the lettters had seventy aspects, and the Torah as a whole had 600,000 meanings, on four levels of interpretation, all leading to the profoundest meaning which was "meaninglesss," which was not open to understanding but was only itself.


And is that true of poetry? One thing it cannot be: story.  It must not be based on experience  "...one of the forms of paralysis" (Satie).  It cannot be descriptive.  It cannot be about love.  It cannot be about hate.  It cannot contain specific meaning. It must avoid sensuality.  It must not be capable of restatment in another language.  It must not be allegorical.  It cannot be translatable into a foreign language.  It must have no beginning or conclusion.  If it's "about" anything it must be about language.  It must be language.  That's the only kind of poem which will keep its divinity.  It must have 600,000 meanings and in the end be "meangingless."




 

Election Day

I voted for Obama in 2008, and I am  exercising my right not to vote today, but then New Jersey is not a swing state (now that Sinatra's gone), and is solid; and after his post-Sandy visit, maybe even  Chris Christie might just have another look at himself, and vote for him.  It is still a secret ballot after all.  Of course, one's cynicism remembers someone saying "it doesn't matter who you vote for, what matters is who counts the ballots."  Even though I have posted against Obama-driven policies and/or the lack of them, I can't believe the people of America will elect Romney.  If he is elected, will we still be permitted to say that Moby Dick is the greatest book ever written by an American?  Or will The Book Of Mormon be placed alongside it on the curriculum? 


If the land had not been abused, the rivers and the ocean would have someplace to go and to be absorbed naturally.  If only developers and their cohorts hadn't built apartments and expensive homes
where before there were only dunes (natural dunes) and sand....at least here on the South Jersey shore...yet, I myself bought into a beach and ocean view.  The probem was there, as Chris Gilmore once said, I came to the problem.

Aftermath

Nov. 1.  Am ok. Thanks to all those who tried to contact me.  No electricity three days, only battery radio.  Had written some stuff during the hurricane, but forget that, will just say must have been the eye here or near, much debris, damage, etc., ocean was wild of course, bulkhead outside this bldg. destroyed. The bldg. itself hard hit, though trees withstood it, but while waiting for electricity to come back, water pipe or some thing burst today and after some drenching, sons of building's plumber arrived to turn off the water at the main, so no water for I don't know how long, maybe a few days maybe a week or more?  I just don't know; maybe find out tomorrow; they won't let anyone from off shore come on island yet, and if you leave you can't return until they say so.  No deaths here I know of on this barrier island.  Being thrown back on oneself in the aftermath was, until the flooding and the fire alarm going loudly off, a rather spiritual enterprise of sorts though not necessarily recommended, and although the fire department said it was safe to go back inside, the alarm-fix people are not on island and have for the moment been denied entrance, so one waits.

Anyway, the lockdown is now lifted after 5 p.m. so I am fortunate, really, since I have a car and can go to a hotel offshore if need be.  However, only residents are permitted in now, and there will be long lines waiting to come over the Margate Bridge even when off island emergency services are allowed in to turn off the fire alarm.

For a more objective and less first-person impressionistic take on the hurricane as it hit Margate in particular, see www.athebeach.blogspot.com. for Nov. 1,  the blog of Glenn Klotz.

And thanks, great thanks, to all those who offered to put me  up.  I really didn't think there were so many  who cared.  ...  and to Keith, for the shout-out from across the seas.      

Margate, NJ



addendum: Nov. 2nd.

The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says

But that then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing which encloses
every thing, Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing
is anything but itself, measured so

(Charles Olson, Maximus, From Dogtown -I)

Times like these I wish my old friend Christopher Cook Gilmore were still here

A Mandatory (mandatory evacuation order) in force from tomorrow, the 28th.  I plan on going out only for batteries, maybe peanut butter.  No one allowed to go off or onto the island after 4.p.m., downbeach in lockdown.   Stocked up on bottled water, non-perishables.  Flashlight, since electrics will doubtless go off at some point.  Still, it would be nice to have a DVD of Key Largo.  No tellin' when you will be permitted to return if you leave - 3 nights maybe longer, who knows.  For the moment, I'm goin' nowhere.  Too out-of-it to make the 60 mile drive to hotel in Philadelphia (or some motel along the route) as I did last year during the Mandatory when Irene came ashore. Casino Hotels in Atlantic City closed.  Interesting how nary a seagull can be seen now on the beach.  Ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in exciting times." 

(Margate, NJ, October 28th. 12:30 a.m. - 2 a.m.)





"Same Day, Later"

Time to give thanks to Vince, in the Phila. suburbs, for checking in to find out how I'm doing, and to my oldest friend, Len, who e-mailed from out there in Wisconsin where he is Emeritus in Jurisprudence at the law school.  Perhaps he can explain to me how the then "liberal" majority on the Court, could have arrived at the decision they did in Kelo vs. City of New London, Connecticut.  I shake my head in bemused disbelief to find myself agreeing with Justice Thomas's concurring dissent. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the minority opinion.  Because of this decision your land and your home can be expropriated not simply because it is in the public good or "purpose" but now also in the economic good - even if the developers are private, even if they are foreign corporations.  This allows the "travesty" (as one geologist in Oklahoma called it) of the Canadian oil pipeline through Oklahoma and Texas, and the oil out for export, not even using American workers or parts manufactured in the U.S.  This is of course even before approval for the pipeline from Canada through Nebraska.    And permits fracking even if access by the owner is denied.  And moutain-top removal strip mining for coal.

--------

Most who are going to other places or homes, have left.  Some are staying.

Sorry no snaps (or video)  of ocean waves since I have no digital camera, or in fact any working camera except a Brownie Hawkeye sans film. 


Now it's evening.  High tide soon, Sandy due for landfall on Monday.  24 hours of rain to follow.  Power outages, if they happen, are always a drag at the very least.  Hopefully the pine trees outside my windows will survive the wind.

Well, I'm all in favor of better safe than sorry, but Govenor Soprano's mandatory evac order doesn't help the people of Atlantic City many of whom do not have the money to just go away for 3 days. Many are sent to Atlantic City with a one-way bus ticket from some misbegotten and doubtless uncaring social service outside of the area.  Some have to ride it out.  There are shelters of course, and Absecon Island emergency services are usually very good.  They could set up shelters in Trump's 2 casinos of course.  That'll be the day. 


High tide now passed.  Nothing exceptional happening here yet.  Poet Ketan Ben Caesar called from Philly.  Judy (www.magicbuckles.com)  from Oregon with an e-mail.  Paul, now on Buffalo Avenue, Ventnor, checking in with a call, monitoring things, looking after his elderly father, and with his girlfriend.  Then Nechama, my Israeli friend in Philadelphia, phoned to ask after me.  She and her partner, Eli, a bit concerned if their electrics go out since everything is electric where they live on the 11th floor in center city.  My cousin here in a condo down the road, also on the 11th floor, and everything electric there too,  Still, this isn't Syria, with random bombs. 

All these calls - sometimes I go a whole week or more without conversation except to ask to get a refill please on the coffee.  As old and as hearing-impaired as I am, I reckon it is still Romantic here in a storm.  Not a monster one though heading right for New Jersey.  Winds up to Cat. 1, the news now reports. Tomorrow morning through evening is the big day they say.....   

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915)

There's Wisdom In Women





"Oh love is fair and love is rare;" my dear one she said,

"But love goes lightly over."  I bowed her foolish head,

And kissed her hair and laughed at her.  Such a child was she;

So new to love, so true to love, and she spoke so bitterly.



But there's wisdom in women, of more than they have known,

And thoughts go racing through them, are wiser than their own,

Or how should my dear one, being ignorant and young,

Have cried on love so bitterly, with so true a tongue?



(June 1913)





The  first new edition of The Collected Poems Of Rupert Brooke in almost 100 years was published in 2010 by The Oleander Press (Cambridge, England), with an Introduction by Lorna Beckett (Chair, The Rupert Brooke Society).

poem by R.S. Thomas

A Peasant



Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind -
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind's attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed even in death's confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

CHAVS

In this new book, published by Verso, Owen Jones analyses the hidden agendas in the Britain of  Thatcher-Blair-Cameron; however it is applicable to American politics as well, where, as one commentator points out, in the U.S. "the illusion is similarly perpetuated...that the middle class is all that matters."  Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth' and as Eric Hobsbawm notes in his praise of the book, it is "passionate and well-documented."  Jones writes that "the demonization of the working class is the ridiculing of the conquered by the conqueror....the fashionable idea that people at the bottom deserve their lot in life....Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society would quickly grind to a halt.  On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better."  The demonization was "an offensive against working-class communities, industries, values and institutions. No longer was being working class something to be proud of: it was something to escape from, never mind to celebrate. The wealthy were adulated.  All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned.  This vision did not come from nowhere.  It was the culmination of a class war. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves. Old working-class values, like solidarity, were replaced by dog-eat-dog individualism."  The ideal was "a property-owning individual who looked after themselves, their family, and no one else.  Aspiration meant yearning for a bigger car or a bigger house."  Working-class communities "were seen as the left-behinds, the remnants of an old world that had been trampled on by the inevitable march of history.  There was to be no sympathy for them: on the contrary, they were to be caricatured and despised."

On William Bligh

There is a curious movement afoot to restore the reputation of the villainous Captain Bligh. Two books, The Bounty, by Caroline Alexander, now a decade old, and a new book, Bligh:William Bligh In The South Seas,  by Anne Salmond, both postulate that Bligh was hard done by, not a bad chap at all.  The latter book was favorably reviewed in The London Review Of Books (24 May 2012).  Both books ignore the best book on the Mutiny, which is What Happened On The Bounty, by Bengt Danielsson, published in 1962. Danielsson, the only non-Norwegian on the KON TIKI, settled in Tahiti, where he and his wife wrote Love In The South Seas, among other books.  Although Danielsson does not entirely trash Bligh, his is the only non-fiction book which takes into consideration the oral evidence gathered from Tahitian people concerning the Mutiny. The British establishment spin-doctors who actually promoted Bligh from Lieutenant to Captain after the court-martial were the same Royal Society scoundrels who falsified the accounts of Cook's Hawaiian journals (see To Steal A Kingdom by Michael Dougherty (Island Style Press, Hawaii, 1992).  Dougherty's account of Hawaiian history, cultural history, and the disgraceful exploitation of the Hawaiian people is enlightening, names names, discloses motives.  His well-researched and accurate text is widely read and studied in Hawaii.          Bligh needed to reinforce his megalomania by making the long voyage in the open boat, thus proving he was one of the world's best navigators.  Other than the Tahitians (who navigated the entire Pacific by "dead reckoning" - i.e. no sextant nor compass, just the stars above) he may well have been, but he could have sailed less than a thousand miles to the island of Tubuai, a place he had anchored in before, but insisted to the men in his boat that Tubuai was a cannibal island.  True, Tubuai was against the prevailing trade winds, but the Bounty mutineers had returned there for supplies, and it would have not been an overwhelmingly difficult journey.  Fletcher Christian had expected Bligh to make for the Tongas, an easy voyage, but Bligh was obsessed with returning to England to report the mutiny, and he knew that he'd have to wait well over a year or more for a British ship at Tubuai or the Tongas, whereas if he could make the Dutch East Indies, Timor, he would have an excellent chance of finding a British ship to immediately take him to London. 12 of the men on Bligh's boat died before reaching London, and Bligh was not present at the trial of those mutineers who remained on Tahiti and were either eventually captured or gave themselves up.  The evidence he gave was simply in a written statement.  This resulted in the execution of three of the mutineers: Thomas Burkett, Thomas Ellison, and John Millward.  These three had no family connections to save them from the gallows, were only working-class seamen.  In fact, after his promotion, there were two other subsequent mutinies against Bligh, in 1804, when he was given only a "reprimand" for "tyranny and  unofficer-like conduct and ungentlemanly behaviour" and in 1806, after he was appointed Governor of New South Wales and held prisoner in his residence for a year during the infamous "rum rebellion" in Australia.  After he returned to England he was promoted to Vice-Admiral and made a Fellow of the Royal Society!   He died in 1817 and is buried in St. Mary's churchyard in Lambeth. The first clear evidence of what I can only call Bligh's insanity (seemingly a compulsive-obsessive disorder) was his attempt to reach Tahiti by sailing around Cape Horn, risking both his ship and the lives of the men under his command.  He had to turn back and went around Good Hope, the usual route, losing several months, which is why he had to anchor in Tahiti for five months during the South Pacific hurricane season to collect the uru (breadfruit) with which the British imperialists wanted to feed the slave population of the West Indies.  Of course, Bligh himself was in a closet sexually, which explains why he refused to participate in any of the "amorous pastimes" (as Danielsson puts it) of the open-hearted people of Polynesia. (I had sent this information to the London Review Of Books as a riposte to their favorable review of the new book on Bligh,  but of course they declined to publish.  What the LRB does often publish are the nasty ravings of one of its editors, Andrew O'Hagen, who takes great pleasure in trying to sully the reputation of his fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his noble life and fine writings of the South Seas during the last years of his life, saying, for example, that Stevenson was really a homosexual (the "evidence" for this being his dandyish mode of dress) and that his Jekyll and Hyde was really a book about Stevenson's hidden homo-erotic life.  Recently, in the June 2, 2012 issue of that journal, he took delight in criticising Hemingway, ostensibly for becoming an alcoholic, but actually for the manliness and courage in wartime of his activities, falsifying what Hemingway did and did not do, and then denigrating  not only his great and lasting literary achievments, but his deep friendship with Fitzgerald.  I do find it irksome that people who can't write their way out of a paper bag so easily find establishment outlets for their jealousy and bile.  In the same way, writers of literary Theory, which came primarily from France, epitomised the condescending nature of academicians in Britain and in the U.S. who rapidly took it up, defaming creative efforts they themselves obviously aspired to but could not achieve.)

fin de siecle

Jeremy Hilton & the FIRE project

After 35 issues over a period of 17 years, English poet and editor-publisher of the poetry journal, Fire, Jeremy Hilton, has packed it in, leaving him more time to concentrate on his own poetry and also on his musical compositions in the European classical tradition, the  most recent of which was performed last month at Lauderdale House in London. Author of 10 published collections of poetry, he is one of Britain's best poets, with appearances beginning in the early 1970's in the now legendary 20 issues of Poetry Review edited by Eric Mottram.

I can't be objective about Fire having first met Jeremy in 1976 when Allen and Elaine Fisher invited me to accompany them on a journey up North to see Jeff Nuttall, and to stop off on the way to visit with Paul Buck and Glenda George, and Ulli Freer.  In recent years, Jeremy and I have become good friends, and he has published my own work, poetry and essays (once as a Guest Editorial), in many issues, well over 30 pages, in the print journal, including the final number, and in six of the dozen or so issues he's put online. (see www.poetrymagazines.org.uk - #'s 26, 17, 12, 11, 9, 8).

However, it is fair to say that Fire was as much a Project as a poetry journal.  Most issues ran to well over 250 tightly packed pages, and Jeremy idealistically refused all grants from Arts funding bodies, preferring to finance each issue from his pension as a social case-worker.  He accepted new work by more previously unpublished poets (and "emerging" poets) in the 17 years than any other editor in the history of English small press publishing, and in each issue published the work of schoolchildren/teenage poets alongside the poetry of old-timers like myself.  As Jeremy had written, his aim was to publish poetry which "doesn't fit within the narrow stereotypes of so many magazines."

In fact you'd be hard-pressed to name very many UK innovative/experimental/"unorthodox"/ poets who did not appear in the mag at least once or twice, and there were many "regulars" among the usual suspects besides myself: Colin Simms, John Welch, Chris Torrance, Harry Guest, Owen Davis, to name but five.  Jeremy was also more open to submissions from the U.S. than most other British editors, and the list of distinguished American poets he published includes Adrian C. Louis, Lyn Lifshin, Philip Levine, Barbara Guest, and others less-well known like the late Albert Huffstickler.

Double Issue 29/30 (The International Issue) ran to 400 pages of work from around the world, in English and in translations from poets including Anselm Hollo, Jonathan Griffin, Anthony Rudolf, Joseph P. Clancy (translating Bobi Jones), Thomas Land (translating Radnoti), Ketaki Kushari Dyson (translating Buddhadeva Bose), and many many others.

Like others approaching 3 score and 10, Jeremy has been slowed some by health problems; however, he and his longtime partner, Kim Taplin, poet and prose eco-warrior (and mother-in-law of journalist/author Luke Harding), continue their birding activities from the old farmhouse in rural Oxfordshire.

Blessings and best wishes to my friend on the successful completion of his project.

(from London, April 2012)

Whitman Larkin

Goodbye, my Fancy!
Farewell, dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune or whether I may ever see you again.
So Good-bye my Fancy.





Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass.
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Byron

"The appeal of the Byronic hero is not hard to understand. He is, in Herbert Read's delightful phrase, the "super-realist personality" who by the absolute courage of his defiance of moral and social taboos becomes "the unconfessed hero of humanity." He exists in one form or another in the dream life of all of us, whether we like it or not, as the embodiment of those impulses cramped or inhibited by society. He is the expression of our social insecurity, our distrust of our fellows, our dissatisfaction with authority, our disillusionment with social achievement. He is the symbol of our defiant refusal to accept the insignificant role of the individual ego in society or the universe which modern knowledge forces upon us. In short, he represents the ego in conflict with the forces battering to subdue or destroy it - the ego which triumphs even in its moment of defeat." (Edward E. Bostetter, Introduction to Byron's "Selected Poetry And Letters" - Rinehart Editions)



Yet, inevitably:


So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as Bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

with thanks to my friend Keith Woolnough

Here's an excerpt from Longfellow in response to "F. Scott" Romney, who would be POTUS, and who believes the "very poor" are different from him, and, like Oliver Twist, mustn't ask for more.

Titled "Challenge" the poem closes Jack London's book THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS.



There is a greater army
That besets us round with strife,
A starving, numberless army
At all the gates of life.

The poverty-stricken millions
Who challenge our wine and bread,
And impeach us all as traitors,
Both the living an the dead.

And whenever I sit at the banquet,
Where the feast and song are high,
Amid the mirth and music
I can hear that fearful cry.

And hollow and haggard faces
Look into the lighted hall,
And wasted hands are extended
To catch the crumbs that fall.

And within there is light and plenty,
And odors fill the air;
But without there is cold and darkness,
And hunger and despair.

And there in the camp of famine,
In wind, and cold, and rain,
Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
Lies dead upon the plain.

Sweet Lorine

"I was Blondie" she wrote....   "I worked the print shop right down among em the folk from whom all poetry flows and dreadfully much else"     I can understand why Mark Scroggins, in his biography of Zukofsky, fought shy of  Lorine Niedecker's role in Z's life and his poetry; however, as Margot Peters notes in LORINE NIEDECKER A POET'S LIFE (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2011) :   "Scroggins's exclusion of LN from a life of LZ seems inexplicable unless one knows that LZ's son, Paul Zukofsky controls his literary estate and hence any biography.  PZ is, by all accounts, an obsessively private person determined to eradicate anything that might discredit his father."   There is much to discredit Louis Zukofsky personally: his wieldling his power over Lorine Niedecker to the extent that, in addition to bullying her into an abortion of what would have been, as it turned out, twins, although she wanted the child and had said she would never bother him for requests for money and would live as a single-parent mother back in Wisconsin,  he is responsible for having her, against her will, destroy all parts of her letters to him (and his to her) except those parts dealing specifically with attention and praise for his, Zukofsky's, poetry.  And all of their early intimate correspondence.  Of course Margot Peters's biography, though clearly written and most readable, and well-researched, does read sometimes (in its relating hearsay "evidence" in lieu of a microphone in Zukofsky's bedroom in his apartment in Manhattan where Lorine visited and stayed several times)  like a Janet Evanovitch novel.  Now I like her protagonist, Stephanie Plum, as well or more as the next guy.  I'm not overly keen on it all in a biography.  We learn, for example, that Pound and Zukofsky had sexual relations, Z considering P a "sexual predator"; that Jerry Reisman was Zukofsky's sexual partner before Lorine arrived on the scene.  Not a lot of authentication for this, but maybe it's common knowledge, I wouldn't know.    Mark Scroggins skips too lightly over the "family romance" of the Orthodox Jewish Zukofsky family into which Louis was born, except to say that when he was bullied as a young boy on the streets, he would recite his way out of it by doing the Yiddish version of "Hiawatha" by Solomon Bloomgarden.  It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that he was never going to allow, if he could help it, a child of his to be born to a shiksa.  And he was not averse to having her type out all of his manuscripts, including the first parts of "A" his "poem of a life" in 23 plus one often arcane installments which go on and on too often like a broken record (except for A 16).  He uses language to keep his subconscious repressed or at least at bay while constructing what he perceives as moving closer to music in the exactitude and precision of words.  As Basil Bunting commented, sometimes it worked, although too often it was failed experiment (BBC Cassettes, conversation with Eric Mottram). In my opinion, Zukofsky is the most highly-overrated of 20th century innovative poets.  This is despite the exceptionally high opinion which both Cid Corman and my dear friend Asa Benveniste had of his work, and was celebrated between them in unpublished correspondence.  And the highly successful cognitive explication of 80 FLOWERS, by my old friend Leon Lewis (published in "The Writer's Chronicle" volume 40, number 4). All agreed Zukofsky was beyond difficult as a man.  The friendship with George Oppen went to breaking-point when Oppen admitted he preferred his own poems to Z's.  And Bunting was taken aback meeting Zukofsky again in New York, after a Bunting reading Z did not attend, and spending "a painful hour" later with him, describing Z as "very bitter and, strangely, very jealous."  The Artist is a Monster Cocteau wrote, and though no monster, Z was certainly a bit of a schmuck.    Niedecker survived her broken heart syndrome, worked her sad way through the "For Paul" poems, and went on to become the greater poet of the two.  Wintergreen Ridge is one of the most outstanding eco-poems ever written, praising "Women / of good wild stock" who   Stood stolid Before machines They stopped bulldozers   cold We want it for all time they said       Peters' bio does give you a fair sense of the hard rural poverty Niedecker lived in and through most all of her life.  Having made a pilgrimage some years ago with my oldest friend, Leonard V. Kaplan, then a professor at Wisconsin College of Law in Madison, I can attest to the almost dire nature of where/how she lived, having not even indoor plumbing for many years.  Her late-life marriage brought her a bit of comfort of sorts, and Cid Corman made the only tape of her reading her poems, just a few months before she died in 1970.  Her nickname was "Squeaky" in high school, and the remnants of that voice are present enough on the tape so that her detractors have commented on her "girlish" rather than "mature" voice.  "Every woman adores a Fascist" Sylvia Plath had written, and despite decades of failing eyesight (she used a magnifying glass over her spectacles to read), she faithfully, one might say slavishly, typed Z's manuscripts, which he sent to her from New York.  Zukofsky's work is polar opposite of Bukowski's (original spelling of his name: Bukofsky), and it is the avant garde end of Academia (an oxymoron) who now read Z's poetry.  When Zukofsky and his wife, Celia, and son, formed "a closed Trinity" as Carl Rakosi said, Lorine was ex-communicated.  Z's major work, "A", is, as Eric Mottram writes in the issue of John Taggart's MAPS devoted to Z's work, "Autobiography, organic poem, and history contrasted to perfection in art.  But this is a pattern of alibis for constructing an organic vision which takes place within the stasis of perfection."   Rita Dove omits both Niedecker and Zukofsky, along with Oppen, and of course so many others (Dorn!) in her Penguin American poetry anthology, in the pursuit of what?  Crow Jim? Not excellence, certainly, or why publish Amiri Baraka's weakest poems, which include his anti-Jewish prejudice, rather than his best work.  I reckon Dove either is ignorant of innovative poetry, willfully or not, or just has her own axe to grind against it.  Her anthology continues the tradition of the monied establishment dumbing-down  American life and Letters by setting up a Canon which keeps many of the omitted major poets out of mass distribution, just as Eliot, at Faber & Faber, kept Williams out (the first edition of WCW being published in the UK not until 1964, when Williams was already one year dead) and away from publishers' radar, and kept most if not all heterosexual poets at arm's length from Faber during his tenure there.  Niedecker is one of our great twentieth century poets.  Even though she spent years of her life scrubbing hospital floors in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, she never lost her dedication, and her idealistic belief in poetry as a Way.  Some of her short poems, like "I rose from marsh mud"; "There's a better shine"; "I married"; and a few others, are among the best we have.

Bill Sherman in Commemoration of the International "Human Rights Day"

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Christopher Logue, R.I.P.

It wasn't until late 1962, when I was a young (21 year old) Teaching Fellow in the English Department of the State U. of N.Y. at Buffalo, doing an M.A., that I began to fully feel and understand the extremes of terrible beauty and transformative power of poetry, beyond any I had previously experienced. It was when I encountered the new English version/translation of Book 16 of THE ILIAD by Christopher Logue, first published in issue number 28 of THE PARIS REVIEW.

Here is the final section.



Coming behind you in the dusk you felt
-What was it? - felt the darkness part and then
APOLLO!
Who had been patient with you,
Struck.

His hand came out of the east,
And in his wrist lay eternity.
And every atom of his mythic weight
Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.
And it hit the small of your back, Patroclus...
Your eyes leant out. Achilles' helmet rang
Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of enemy horses,
And Achilles' breastplate (five copper plys
Mastered with even bronze) split like a pod.
And you were footless... staggering... amazed
Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,
Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes
And the noise, like weirs heard far away.
So you staggered, blind eyes open,
Dabbling your astounded fingers in the vomit
On your chest.
And all the Trojans lay and stared at you,
Propped themselves up and stared at you,
Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
All of them just lay and stared
Except a boy called Euphorbus.
He took his chance and threw. Straight.
The javelin went through both calves,
Stitching your knees together, and you fell
(Not noticing your pain) and tried to crawl,
Towards the fleet, and - even now - snatching
Euphorbus' ankle, Ah! and got it? No...
Not a boy's ankle that you got.
But Hector's

Standing above you,
His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
Putting his spear through...ach, and saying,
"Why tears, Patroclus?
Did you hope to melt Troy down
And make our women carry home the ingots for you?
I can just imagine it!
You and your marvellous Achilles sitting,
Him with his upright finger wagging, saying,
"Don't show your face in here again, Patroclus,
Unless it's red with Hector's blood."
You fool.
You weak, impudent, silly little fool."
And Patroclus,
Shaking his voice out of his body, says
"Big Mouth,
Remember it took three of you to kill me,
A god, a boy, and last of all a hero!
I can hear Death
Calling my name and yet,
Somehow it sounds like "Hector"
And when I close my eyes
I see Achilles' face with Death's voice coming out of it."

Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand like water,
Hector drew out his spear and said,
"Perhaps."

Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Are We Feeling Safer Now?

--- On Fri, 11/18/11, mailbot@news.yahoo.com <mailbot@news.yahoo.com> wrote: From: mailbot@news.yahoo.com <mailbot@news.yahoo.com> Subject: Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Yahoo! News To: branchredd@yahoo.com Date: Friday, November 18, 2011, 4:17 PM Your friend branchredd@yahoo.com has shared a link with you. Personal message:No Comment Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/army-tests-hypersonic-weapon-over-pacific-025853085.html The Army on Thursday conducted its first flight test of a new weapon capable of traveling five times the speed of sound. Read the full story

Joe Frazier.....R.I.P.

"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries a reminder
Of ev'ry glove that layed him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
'I am leaving, I am leaving'
But the fighter still remains"

Obama goes on another holiday....

As if playing golf every weekend isn't enough time off in addition to his other vacations, readers of my blog know that although I've visited Hawaii as often as finances and health allow (and tried for years to get teaching work there), and have spent even more time when younger in Polynesie francais, even for a time being granted a carte de sejour (Residency) there, I've never been to Guam, but I continue to be moved by the overlooked plight of the people there as evidenced in the blog titled "The Drowning Mermaid" and the blog titled "Peace and Justice for Guam and the Pacific". Guam is officially a part of the U.S. Empire and continues to be decimated by our increasing military presence there. Because of protests in Okinawa and Korea, mostly having to do with continued rape by American military scum of young native girls (and children) in both places, and the closure of some bases there, Guam, to where the military is beginning to further relocate, suffers. Our only South Pacific colony, American Samoa, with a large navy base, has been almost culturally genocided by the encroachment of our "culture" - if one can call cheeseburgers and vulgarity, culture. Perhaps it is too late to save Guam from the same fate. However, Obama did promise the people of Guam he would go there after the election to see what was going on with the military in relation to the people and the protest movement.  He has not done so. Thus I am appalled by Obama's going on yet another out of the U.S. holiday under the guise of meeting his fellow "leaders" - most no better than the dictators of China. First they all meet in Hawaii, obviously the preferred holiday spot for our President (a wonderful place to have grown up, but I do get a sense he was always an alienated outsider there - probably something like "repitition compulsion" working), for whom I have lost more and more respect as his time in office passes. Then he travels on to places like Bali and Australia (to firm up Australian support for the Afghan war) just as his wife travelled on taxpayer money (millions for the security detail alone) to Spain and India. & for what? To what end? Really, is he no better than the dimmest of all the right-wing dim bulbs, megalomaniac politicians and jejune hacks vying to replace him? Surely, he must be. Or is it all just the weapons trade and corporate Mammonism now.

(& this from the Honolulu Star-Advertizer (one of the daily newspapers): The managers of Iolani Palace objected to its closure during the gathering of Obama and the APEC oligarchs....22 protestors were arrested and removed from the grounds of the Palace and all workers summarily laid off during the time of the visit of Obama and the Asian dictators. These Hawaiians are supporters of the Sovereignty Movement in Hawaii - which continues to protest against the long continuing illegal seizure and annexation of the islands (before people there - though not a majority of native Hawaiian people, voted for statehood) and its militarization - the first incursion of the U.S. Empire outside of the mainland. It is the first serious secessionist movement since the Civil War. Obama never visits any island other than
Oahu, and always stays, when there, on the Kaneohe military complex (with its adjoining golf course) or at multi-million dollar vacation homes of his sponsors nearby.)

Advice to a Prophet by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Alley Cat Allies @ www.alleycat.org.

Spending half an hour or so trying to help clean and winterize (and trap and neuter) in support of the feral cat population under the boardwalk in atlantic city, one sees that it is not cats who are dirty, but we humans. sadly, more and more homeless people are choosing to sleep under the jersey shore boardwalks, even in winter, rather than go to a homeless shelter. people have always slept under atlantic city boardwalks, and since the advent of casinos, more and more atlantic city has become a place which "caters to losers." i've been living on this barrier island (absecon island) with atlantic city at the north end, and three small suburban beach towns, ventnor, margate, and longport, to the south, sharing the island, for over 15 years. it is the closest beach and ocean to philadelphia, where i was born and raised, and my parents used to bring me here as a child. i sold the old row house in the Feltonville section of Philadelphia my grandfather built, and where i grew up, and to where I retreated for almost a decade after my parents' deaths in the 1980's. it had by then become one of philadelphia's most "troubled" neighborhoods, though not a hard-core ghetto, just the usual working-class/lower middle-class place plagued for the past 25 years with steeet crime, graffiti even on trees, drive-by shootings, and all the trauma of inner city life. eventually, i moved to margate, buying a small one bedroom condo apartment. now i have to sell that as well and live frugally somewhere for the duration since my funds are disappearing, like so many others in America. the 1944 hurricane wiped out the boardwalk in margate and longport, and the decision was not to rebuild, so the many miles of boardwalk now extend from the inlet at the northern tip of the island down through atlantic city and ventnor. pressured by pork-barrel interests, the municipalities chose to allow the often incompetent "army core of engineers" to build artificial sand dunes between the boardwalk and the ocean in atlantic city and in ventnor in order to protect the casino interests (initially the casino executives wanted to tear down the entire boardwalk so as to more effectively keep people inside) and the multi-million-dollar beachfront homes. now the dunes block the views of ocean from the boardwalk while reducing ocean breezes, and providing, some have said, a home for rats (certainly for rubbish). most people downbeach from atlantic city are quite well-off: doctors, lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs and ceo's, investment counselors and bankers, and who knows what. but you can still see the signs of hard times everywhere. the atlantic city violent crime endemic to the u.s., businesses closing down, property values diminishing, workers laid off, etc. most all previous mayors of atlantic city over the past 50 years or so have been indicted upon or even before leaving office, and some have served time in prison, so i would venture to say atlantic city is one of america's most corruption-ridden cities. (of course, in current tv programs extolling new jersey's crass subculture, we lap up the romanticization of crime and criminals and even the lack of signs of intelligent life in general.) the casinos only made it worse. corzine was the governor before christie. so far he has managed to avoid prison while accumulating his fortune over the years as former head of Goldman-Sachs and buying his way into the senate and governorship. the current governor, who has brought back deer culls and bear culls and the cull of wild birds in the local wetlands sanctuary (Forsythe wildlife refuge - a migration route safe stopover for thousands of birds (for thusands of years) flying south for the winter and returning in the spring) is, like most all politicians, a great friend to the very wealthy, and to hunters. on a personal level, he is the most obese politico since Taft, and i reckon he is bound to spontaneously combust someday, like the character named Krook in Dickens' Bleak House. once, when queried about his weight when so many on the planet are starving, he responded by saying people who work at IHOP or McDonalds, etc., have to have jobs and eat too. if one takes a hard look at new jersey's cities, like camden and others (even the state capitol, trenton), one sees the results of the total disgrace to governance brought about by christie and his predecessors. so obviously, animals and animal rights, are not exactly anyone's priority - except for the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in the Brigantine area of south jersey. the first cause i ever donated any money to, in a beginning attempt 45 years ago, to help stop the slaughter of baby seals in canada, still continues as cruel and unjustified murder. on the high seas, Sea Shepherd is more than worthy of our support, if you have an interest in these things. Sea Shepherd and not Greenpeace, is now most effective in trying to stop whale-hunting and other illegal activities. the Japanese are probably the worst offenders, especially in their shark-hunting, cutting off the fins of the shark and tossing them back in the ocean to die horrific deaths so they can swill their shark-fin soup. we kill millions of sharks every year, usually in this manner. oceans are often called "shark-infested" as if the sea were not their natural home. not to mention the concentration camps/extermination camps for turkeys and other creatures we gobble up. PETA is in my opinion the best large activist organization in support of the non-human life with which we share the planet. but the slaughter of rare animals just goes on, from Ohio to Africa (where poaching is unabated, the rhino being hunted to extinction for the supposed medicinal value of its horn, exported primarily to china and southeast asia). natural habitat is destroyed so that developers and their sponsors (as human advocates of Mammon are called) can construct more and more houses and golf-courses and gated communties primarily for the mega-rich. well, Alley-Cat Allies is a small (though now national) animal protection group doing what they can for the cat population in atlantic city. the number of animals being put-down in overcrowded and underfunded animal shelters is sickening. i'm not an eco-warrior, not even, i must shamefacedly admit, a vegetarian (though i must say it would be nice to have at least one vegetarian restaurant on this barrier island; there's not even one in all of atlantic county). some of new jersey's boardwalks are constructed with amazon rainforest wood, although this practice was in-part stopped by the persistence and hard work of local activists here, pointing out not simply other alternatives to amazon wood but noting how so-called civic leaders were lining their pockets with these import deals while causing not just grief, but contributing to the many murders of amazonian tribespeople by the logging industry there and their hitmen. i suppose i have pretty much given up on people as the years pass.... however, "something further may follow of this masquerade".....

a little light relief

THE PURIST by Ogden Nash



I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day his missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

Robert Duncan

re: politicians and Presidents and seekers of high office, an excerpt from "A Poem Beginning With A Line By Pindar"



...where among these did the power reside
that moves the heart? What flower of the nation
bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture?

...hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities.
For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing?
Noble men in the quiet of morning hear
Indians singing the continent's violent requiem.

...hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war.
Where among these did the spirit reside
that restores the land to productive order?

How sad "amid lanes and through old woods"
echoes Whitman's love for Lincoln!

SUNSET OF KALAUPAPA

Sunset Of Kalaupapa by Sammy Kuahine

The Sunset of Kalaupapa
Smiles through the evening rain;
The tradewinds of Kalaupapa
Sing like an old refrain
There's music of romancing,
Moonlight and stars above;
Your magic charms, your dancing
Fill every night with love...



This snippet of lovely song is printed in Alan Brennert's 2003 novel, MOLOKA'I, a heartfelt and beautiful book, and although a traditional historical and sentimental fiction, far superior to most American novels of the past decade.

It is clearly well-researched, and uses as partial source material, an anthology of interviews with patients, THE SEPARATING SICKNESS (1979); and a wonderful autobiography: OLIVIA - MY LIFE OF EXILE IN KALAUPAPA (1988), by Olivia Robello Breitha, which moved me to tears when first I began reading it many years ago in Kaunakakai, and whose author is the dedicatee of W.S. Merwin's great and magisterial 300 page poem THE FOLDING CLIFFS.



There is still no vaccine to prevent Hansen's Disease, although antibiotics, now provided free by the World Health Organization, arrests its development in most cases. In 2010, there were still over 250,000 new cases reported worldwide and many many more unreported due to the stigma of this oldest affliction known to man. There remain over 10 million suffering from this disease. When it was imported from China, where it was endemic since earliest civilization there, Polynesians had no immunity to it, nor to the other plagues and blights visited upon them. King Kamehameha V created the settlement at Kalaupapa, with much pressure from American business interests, to isolate the infected from the general population, the first boatload of exiles arriving in 1866. "Sunset Of Kalaupapa" Brennert writes in his "author's note" at the end of his novel, is "the only known musical composition by a Kalaupapa resident." Like Moa Tetua, the 19th century Tahitian poet who also suffered from Hansen's, and whose songs were translated by Samuel Elbert and Muriel Rukeyser (and four of which were published by Eliot Weinberger) Samson Kuahine was blind.

Powell & Montgomery

Theories of War

Hemingway wrote
in Across The River
(maybe you have to be male
and of a certain age
to appreciate it, I
loved it, so did CCG
as I recall...

Monty wouldn't move
unless he had 8 to 1 advantage
& Powell upped that to beyond 10
or even 12 to 1 *



Chasen'd & wiser
he returns honorably
to criticize
Cheney



* i.e. doctrine of "overwhelming force"

ZIZEK (on liberalism and capitalism)

from LIVING IN THE END TIMES BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK (Verso, London & New York, 2010)

For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit peoples to an ethical ideal held to be universal is "the crime which contains all crimes," the mother of all crimes -it amounts to the brutal imposition of one's own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of "moral temptation": politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered "realistic," taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not moral exhortations....An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a "politics of the lesser evil," its ambition is to bring about the "least worst society possible," thus preventing a greater evil....Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of human terror.....However, the liberal critique of the "tyranny of the Good" comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, replicates the features of the very enemy it claims to be fighting....Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological language....The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism and politcal liberalism. Jean-Claude Michea perspicuously links these two meanings of the term "right": the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense of human rights - often its sole remaining raison d'etre. Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin....Today the meaning of "liberalism" moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free-market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.)....It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the "fight against discrimination" is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, "would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere."....What liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, "a mechanism whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point interpellating individuals into subjects." The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it - all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to "re-create" himself or herself. There is a problem with this liberal vision which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as "socialization" which it simultaneously undermines, thereby sawing off the branch on which it is sitting....This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism....That is to say, whence comes the Stalinist drive-to-expand, the incessant push to increase productivity, to further "develop" the scope and quality of production? Here we should correct Heidegger: it comes not from some general will-to-power or will-to-technological domination, but from the inherent structure of capitalist reproduction which can survive only through its incessant expansion and for which this ever-expanding reproduction, not some final state, is itself the only true goal of the entire movement....Only in capitalism is exploitation "naturalized," inscribed into the functioning of the economy, and not the result of extra-economic pressure and violence. This is why, with capitalism, we enjoy personal freedom and equality: there is no need for explicit social domination, since domination is already implicit in the structure of the production process.



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(& a personal footnote on how to turn a trillion dollar deficit into a surplus, create jobs, reduce the power of the greed-laden, and even restore a modest sense of u.s. exceptionalism as "the last best hope on the planet")


Cease all current wars immediately, keeping military might in reserve, and if necessary, employ in other ways, like overseeing proper food distribution to the world's starving millions.

Make it illegal for large corporations to outsource work overseas. (It would be fair to raise tax on corporations and the mega-rich back to what they were under Eisenhower or even Reagan (who is no right-wing icon when it comes to taxation levels on the wealthiest); however, there seems little point since tax lawyers, corporate accountants, et. al., would find loopholes.) To outsource continues to exploit people overseas by paying low wages, thus increasing the profits of the corporation and making other nations and peoples dependent on the greed of capitalist enterprise. (I note that multi-millionaires are now being called "job creators" when they used to be called greedy bosses or corporate criminals, and of course they create only that which brings more wealth to them. They have never been asked to prove they create jobs in the amount of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is the figure being bandied about.)

End all foreign aid to dictatorships (like Saudi Arabia) and all countries where our tax dollars go into corrupt pockets and an increase of their military power.

Create a National Health Service making medical care a right not a privilege as every other civilized country on earth has done. (This would also reduce the power of large insurance companies - insurance being perhaps the biggest racket in America. A side effect also might be more who are dedicated healers entering the medical profession, not simply people in it for the money.)

And as an almost equally improbable happening, perhaps someday the Supreme Court will reverse Sierra Club v. Morton, making Justice Douglas' dissent, and Justice Blackmun's dissent as well, the majority opinion. ....I suppose it's not impossible. Plessy v. Ferguson was reversed after all.



(added on Oct. 11th/Oct.12th)

Of course, to change the nature of the callous corruption which rules the U.S., we might begin with educational priorities, not simply more teachers and smaller class sizes, but, at the top, abolish athletic scholarships, since most who attend college in this way cannot put two sentences together without spelling or grammatical mistakes. (I write from teaching experience in two large American universities.) In fact, in big-money sport no professional athlete should be making millions per annum. Why pay men (and women) high wages to play children's games. As Charles Olson had said: "It is an excuse for homosexual behavior in public." But then we wouldn't have lawyers and agents using others as they do, and overpaid sportscasters, and coaches, and an entire absurd system of billionaire owners. Glued to TV or mindless in stadiums, it is an opiate of the people, although as a few professional athletes have had the forthrightness to admit, it reduces violent crime rates, in much the same way that prostitution reduces rape rates. It is a sign of our immaturity as a nation. Our educational system is a laughing stock. Higher education should be free to those who qualify. However, we have always been an anti-intellectual nation, ever since the Republic became an Empire. In fact, I believe that those with more than a few million in assets should be put under house arrest (if we can find enough honest law enforcement) until it is ascertained that their money was earned honestly. Ah, but then doubtless we'd have more prison overcrowding and abuse. The infrastructure of the country could be rebuilt and millions of unemployed put to work, but then those who live off the backs of people in developing countries and here will cry "socialism" as if capitalism were mentioned or enshrined anywhere in the Constitution as America's path. We could outlaw manufacture and distribution of "weapons of mass destruction" but the truth is that people here don't think of a decent and fair society for the most part, only more loot and gadgets and toys and celebrity-worship to fill the void.

a poem by Philip Levine

THE INVENTION OF THE FADO

"Our Miasma" the locals call it, city
of hills, old barrios, a great harbor.
The year is 1904, a war beginning
in the east. Deserters, anarchists, Jews
come for refuge. We could be among them -
though we aren't - men without women,
on fire with longing. I'll show you one,
my grandfather, Yusel Pryzkulnik, who performs
in the Cafe Tulipe. Look how he stands,
one hand thrust into his jacket pocket,
a cotton scarf around his throat, a gray fedora
tipped slightly back, and stares into the haze
of tobacco smoke and does not even blink.
You are not this man chanting Sephardic hymns,
you did not lose an older brother, dragged
off one dawn by the police in long gray coats
never to return, nor did you watch your father
hung for butchering a chicken on a Saint's Day.
He enters your life slowly, not in the song
that lingers above the drinkers, not in smoke
blown over water or salt spray or words
put down by me or even the whisper
of his own voice, raw, torn, and barely heard
above the roar of all the waiting wars.
Lisbon was his: the young - both rich and poor -
climbed the cobbled lanes of the Alfama
to wait for hours to hear the faint echo
of his private sorrows. Widows in black,
half-drunken sailors, men without mothers
went to hear music that was not music.
One day he was gone into no one knows what,
gone forever and the songs vanished with him.
Now, go to the mirror. Look: it's not you
as you thought you were, it's not me either,
it's not anyone we worked to become.
It's the spring of '99. The wild roses riot
along the fence, the lilacs are late
to cast their shades on the purple mounds
we bowed to, and again the dead have found
a way into the hearts we swore were stone.



(published in the UK in FIRE,(#21), edited by Jeremy Hilton, Oxfordshire, 2003)

Len Fulton

Others have written on and noted the passing of poetry maven and activist Len Fulton. I'd just like to add a public footnote that although I never met him, I know his interests were wide-ranging indeed and he was always open to publishing explorations in arcane areas. In his "small press review" (volume 34, #7/8, 2002) he published an essay of mine as a "Guest Editorial" debunking claims of decipherment of the RongoRongo script of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). And early on in his Dustbooks venture, he published the wonderful book of poetry, NIGHT CONVERSATIONS WITH NONE OTHER (Dustbooks, 1977), by my dearly-missed friend, the great Indian-American poet Shreela Ray.

Amy Winehouse : in lieu of a Kaddish

Amid the chaos of the final weeks of her life, Amy Winehouse could still be entrancing, writes Alexandra Topping

Alexandra Topping
Thursday July 28 2011
The Guardian


Sitting on the bar after closing time in her local in Camden, the lights dimmed and the doors locked, Amy Winehouse knew how to hold an audience, even before she became famous. After a night of drinks and laughter, she would perch her tiny frame on the bar, take up a guitar and sing.

"Everybody would just stop and be entranced," said Dougie Charles-Ridler, co-owner of the pub and long-time friend of the singer. In those days, Winehouse was a good-time girl with a big mouth and an attitude to match. "I remember when I first met her I asked what she did and she just said, 'I'm a jazz singer,' he said. "No one had ever given that response before."

But the picture friends paint of the woman she became is suffused with a different type of light. No longer able to chat to old friends undisturbed, or throw herself behind the bar to serve a few lucky punters, she would go into the pub on her own on a Monday or Tuesday, often in the quiet of an afternoon, stand in front of the jukebox and turn it up loud.

"Recently she'd always be with two bouncers rather than two friends," said veteran lads' mag journalist Piers Hernu, who had known Winehouse through friends and the Camden scene for years. "People wouldn't go up to her any more, she wouldn't talk to people. She just became increasingly alienated from her own world."

She was alone, it seems, for the last night of her life. During his 40-minute eulogy at her funeral on Tuesday her father, Mitch, said the singer had stayed in her Camden Square townhouse. After seeing a doctor for a routine appointment at around 8.30pm, she played drums and sang into the early hours, until her bouncer told her to keep it down. He heard her footsteps overhead for a while, then it went quiet. When he went to check on her in the morning she appeared to be sleeping, and it was only after checking again at 4pm on Saturday afternoon that he realised she was dead.

How she died remains unclear. A postmortem examination carried out on Monday proved inconclusive and, from the information released so far, the days leading up to her death seem relatively uneventful. On Friday she saw her boyfriend, the film director Reg Traviss, and they talked about the wedding they were going to. Winehouse was trying to decide what to wear. Her mother has said that at lunch on the same day the singer had seemed "out of it", but they had spent an enjoyable day together and among the last things her daughter had said was: "I love you, Mum."

On Wednesday, the last time Charles-Ridler saw her, she seemed in good spirits. "She jumped into my arms she hardly weighed anything and wrapped her legs around my waist," he said. Asking the singer if she was all right, he received a response that was typically Winehouse. "'Course I am, darlin'," she said, and walked off like Eric Morecambe.

The same night she made a surprise public appearance with her godchild, the 15-year-old soul singer Dionne Bromfield, at the Roundhouse. The video, if not painful, is uncomfortable viewing. Winehouse comes on stage and lifts Bromfield up with the force of her embrace. Then, dressed in skinny jeans and a black polo T-shirt she dances sporadically, turning to the drummer, laughing and turning away. When Bromfield briefly holds the microphone to Winehouse's mouth, she does not sing.

Some of Winehouse's appearances this year held promise for those desperate to see the singer back to her Grammy-winning best. During a five-date tour of Brazil in January some performances, such as a rendition of the Moulin Rouge song Boulevard of Broken Dreams gave a tantalising glimpse of the talent that had been obscured for many years. Then, after another stint in rehab in early June, Winehouse played a seven-song set to a small group of family and friends at London's 100 Club on 12 June. She was "coherent" and "back on form" according to according to one observer, while Mitch Winehouse, during his eulogy, called it a great night. "Her voice was good, her wit and timing were perfect," he said.

But then, just six days later, painfully, dramatically and very publicly Winehouse came tumbling off the wagon. On the first night of a "comeback" tour of Europe in Belgrade she appeared on stage an hour late. Visibly drunk, she seemed barely able to remember the lyrics she had written and was finally booed off stage by fans who had just wanted to hear her sing.

Days later her management cancelled the 12-date tour, saying the singer would be given "as long as it takes" to sort herself out. "Everyone was absolutely gobsmacked," a source close to the management told the Guardian. "The hotel had been told to remove all traces of alcohol, but what can you do? She is a 27-year-old woman and if an addict wants to get hold of alcohol, they will do."

Questions were asked about why Winehouse was touring, and why she had gone on stage, but those close to her had every reason to think she was "back on track" professionally, the source added. "There was no reason to expect a disaster, things had seemed on the up."

In recent days Raye Cosbert, Winehouse's manager from the Metropolis management company, and the co-president of Island Records, Darcus Beese, have taken pains to swat down reports that the shambolic performance had created a rift between them, issuing a statement saying they had always stood "shoulder to shoulder" to give Winehouse "our total support and all the love her huge talent and wonderful human spirit deserved".

But while few doubt that everyone in Winehouse's entourage label, management, family were doing their best to help her recovery, a source close to Universal, Island's mother label, said that after seeing the Serbia performance: "Everybody was shocked she was doing anything. It was very odd to us. Obviously it didn't help, it couldn't have."

Mitch Winehouse said this week that his daughter had been off hard drugs for three years, and was trying to tackle the alcohol problems that were so painfully apparent in Serbia.

"People focus on the drugs, but the biggest problem was Amy's alcoholism," said Hernu. "It had the worst effect on her little frame. It basically gave in."

Winehouse's addictions whether to drink, or the harder drugs that seemed to control her life for years have been played out in the public arena. The photographic documentation of her demons appear even more ghoulish now: Winehouse with her trademark black eyeliner swoops smeared across her face her pink ballerinas caked in blood and dirt and her then husband Blake Fielder-Civil's face covered in scratches in 2007; barefaced, distressed and wearing only a bra and jeans...

And her death, like her life, has been lit by the glare of dozens of camera flashes. At the messy and makeshift shrine outside Winehouse's home, with its vodka bottles and cigarette packets, flowers and portraits, some fans cried. Others took oddly awkward photographs of themselves outside the place where she spent her last hours.

One fan, waiting to watch her coffin go past outside Golders Green crematorium on Tuesday, said the incessant coverage had pulled fans closer to her. "We saw her deterioration every day, in every picture," said 18-year-old Amy Swan. "It was like we were on a journey with her. So many people just wanted her to get better."

But there were others who wanted her to play up to her hellraising image.

Musician Liam Bailey, who became friends with Winehouse after she signed him to her own label Lioness Records, described going to a Pete Doherty gig with her last year. "I was gobsmacked by the attention," he said. "There were people offering her drinks, saying they loved her, other people throwing stuff, saying things I don't want to repeat. And all the time the bullying from the paparazzi was horrendous."

Propping up the bar at the Hawley Arms, not a seething den of iniquity but rather a tastefully decorated, candle-lit pub with a rock'n'roll edge, Charles-Ridler said Winehouse could find no respite from it. "She couldn't go anywhere, it was always in her face," he said. "And she was the most anti-fame person. She could play in front of 60,000 people and then be in here, and much happier, pulling pints the next night."

The fact that she could no longer do that added to her isolation, said Hernu. "Coming back to England, London and more specifically to Camden didn't seem to work for her," he said. "She couldn't do what she loved which was bouncing around Camden talking to everyone. She was bored and she was lonely."

The analysis of what caused her eventual demise, on Saturday 23 July, aged 27, will be dissected minutely over the coming weeks. But, said Charles-Ridler, those who peered into her life should also take a moment to look at their own.

"Yes she did this to herself, yes she was self-destructive, but she was a victim too," he said. "We all have to take a bit of responsibilty, us the public, the paparazzi. She was a star, but I want people to remember that she was also just a girl."