MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

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ROBERT BLY POETRY AND BANJO PICKIN

emilie brzezinski

I've been reading a fair amount of poetry the last several months. It started when I bought Louise Gluck's Collected Poems last year. It waits in a stack beside my reading / movie viewing chair beside my reading lamp, a floor lamp that is a half inch chrome pipe from floor to lamp and shade. I like a simple lamp. Louise Gluck inspired me to take John Berryman's, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, off the shelf to read a poem whenever the notion strikes. Bought a new book of poems by Bill Nixon, Brazen Throats, that concern Vietnam war. Then I brought down from the shelf Robert Lowell, then Robert Bly, May Swenson, Gregory Orr, Greg Kuzma and George Seferis, one at a time over a period of weeks. I went ahead and bought Robert Bly's new Selected Poems, Stealing Sugar From the Castle. These others I like an awful lot, but Bly satisfies what I want from a poem. That's not absolute. Like John Berryman's book, Love and Fame, takes my breath from first page to last. I feel in sync with Robert Bly's flow somehow. It's been at least twenty years, even more, since I've dipped into my poetry books. I read Bly in the past, in the decade of the 70s. I probably read more of him than any of the others of the post WW2 American poets. His book, Light Around The Body, satisfies me immensely. Bly wrote an anti-war poem of Vietnam called The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last. It is ten verses and eight pages. It's powerful. I heard Bly read it at a reading in 1975 or 76, College of Charleston. He read it powerfully, dramatically, loud without bombast, furious, making his statement on war in poetry. Poetry and pop songs that deal with politics die at the moment the political issue is over. Political poems date as quickly as fashions. I have a cassette tape of Bly reading Teeth-Mother. I played some of it for my old Regular Baptist preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, some time in the 1980s. He listened closely and said, "Who is that, Buck Shaw?" Shaw is a preacher in the county. I had to laugh inside. If Bly knew an old Appalachian preacher in the old way took hearing him read Teeth-Mother for an old-timey hillbilly preacher, Bly would love it. Giving it some thought, I imagine he'd be happy with the likeness. It fit. Bly was preaching, speaking dramatically with rhythmic emphases, the way the old-timers preached.

 

emilie brzezinski

 

Bly gets down and dirty in Teeth-Mother like the great anti-war song of the time by the Fugs, Kill For Peace. It went farther than any of the other anti-war songs of the time. Bly in Teeth-Mother does not tiptoe over modest sensibilities. He puts you in the fighter pilot's seat dropping napalm on a village. He puts you inside the grass hut when it explodes. He takes us on a flight roaring over jungle and rectangular fields driven by jet engines. The opening three lines:

 

 Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.

 Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets.

 

 Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over

          the huts with dirt floors.

 

 

This reading of the Teeth-Mother, half a century after the war that in Vietnam now is called the American War, the poem has not dated one minute. The war is historical by now, but Bly's poem has immediacy that brings it into the present moment, now, as we speak. I feel in the presence of important writing. After thumbing through the pages when the book arrived, stopping at short verses for brief previews, I went to The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last the first time sitting down with it. Read it three times so far. I love its rhythms. The words make their own rhythms. It has a good flow for reading aloud in a small auditorium, Bly a poet who draws a good-sized audience in the university world. He gives a good reading. Poets, who tend to be inward people, often don't like giving readings, and many are boring in the delivery. Bly holds the audience attention as a stage performer whose performance is talking, like a preacher. In the time I witnessed him reading he wore a big serape all the time. I took it for a stage prop, like musicians in bands have their stage shirts, that is in bands where they wear shirts. The serape gave color and pizzazz to his plain Minnesota protestant person. I don't know, but imagine he came up in Scandinavian Protestantism, in his case Norwegian. The preacher I grew up influenced by was Swedish from Minnesota. He was so hard core the Southern Baptist Association would not accept him though he tried every year to get in. He was zealous.

emilie brzezinski

Robert Bly's poems excite me in a way similar to how good lyrics in a pop song can excite me, like the Rolling Stones', Wild Horses or Brown Sugar, or like Jane's Addiction's Mountain Song and Pigs In Zen. Just now went to YouTube to hear Mountain Song. I'm remembering seeing the band in 1991 on their last tour, and what an ecstatic experience it was hearing them at concert volume, the guitars, the vocals. I've taken a moment to read about a dozen of Bly's poems picked randomly. In one way, his writing is natural with a smooth flow, and in another way, he goes into the subconscious dreamscape within using the "magical realism" of Latin American writers unto seeming obscurity. Example from a poem found opening the book randomly, The Sympathies of the Long Married:

          Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
          Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
          Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

He takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, as does Henry Miller in his prose in a different way, his own way. The present moment is full of associations from the past, from our deepest feelings to our deepest mind that includes insights from the higher self. I feel like Bly's poems start as an attempt to reach the higher self, a line at a time, a step at a time, he finds his way and enters a new world of understanding that includes the soul's understanding. Having this review of a poet I admired almost half a century ago, I'm finding subconscious influence of what I've learned from Robert Bly is at work unconsciously in my own writing, in my thinking, same as I found reviewing Henry Miller's writing. I had no idea how much Miller influenced my thinking and writing. Miller helped me to pay attention to the people around me, to appreciate each person's unique place at the center of the universe. I suspect Bly acted as a guide for me in his approach to a poem, in his search for the higher self within, to include the dream as reality, the same as looking out the window, seeing a donkey switching its tail and grazing, even to appreciate that which I otherwise might not. Bly's poems can be a discouragement to a young poet in the same way the banjo picking by Fred Cockerham can make a young banjo hopeful say, I'll never be able to do that no matter how much I practice or how long I live. Bly, like Cockerham, makes it seem so simple even a beginner could do it. But when you pay close attention to what he's doing, it can be like listening to a high school senior's valedictory talk to a second grader, over the head and unimaginably complex. For some, it becomes a goal. For others, it can be discouraging, not allowing that Fred Cockerham was once a beginner, too, learning his first chords and figuring out how to hold the strings down to make them ring and not go thud.

emilie brzezinski

I'm thinking of young Cheyanne, just turned seven, holding her first banjo looking for how to make the chords she could remember with her left hand, striking the strings and they go thud. It didn't matter. It was the first time her fingers had touched tuned banjo strings. Just that it made a sound delighted her. Of course, the adult impulse is to say you have to hold the strings down tight to make them ring, you don't hit the strings like that, you do it like this, giving instruction: I know more than you do. I said to myself, This is the first time she's ever held it, leave her alone, let her teach herself; that's how it's really done. I let go of my ridiculous mind and joined Cheyanne in her delight that she made the banjo say something. Didn't matter what, just let it say whatever it had to say. I feel an impulse to play for her Alice Gerrard singing, I'm goin around this world, I'm a banjo pickin girl, goin around this world, baby mine. But I don't want her to hear advanced banjo pickin yet, don't want to discourage her before she starts. That's for later when she finds the music. I want her own fascination to be her guide. Holding it, making sound with it, brings her light to the surface and makes her glow. It seems a deep inner need like she knew the banjo from a lifetime past. I'm recalling a time my banjo pickin friend Jr Maxwell told a guy who came to him asking Jr to teach him bluegrass banjo. Jr said, "If you can't figure it out for yourself, you don't want to play." I'm not going to hold Cheyanne to that, or anything. Will only encourage, not push. In my own writing as art form, not holding "art form" as something lofty, but everyday life, I am following the way of the mountain musician. It's not about money. It's about fun, having fun. It's not called playing because it's work. It's about going with your own style, what works for you, because it's fun. It's about playing better all the time, steps at a time, reaching for the best you can make it every time. It's called playing by ear. The ear tells the fingers what to do. There comes a time in the mastery of making music that mind leaves altogether, leaves an open passageway between ear and fingers. That's when the music flows. Writing the daily blog is my own form of banjo pickin, setting the music in motion and flowing with it. The most fun I have in any day is the day's writing. It's play. I listen to the rhythm as I write, and even sometimes leave mind in the writing. My own personal search is for a balance between head and heart, in the writing as well as in the living, to honor the feminine as well as the masculine, allow them to dance. Thank you, Robert Bly, and thank you, Henry Miller, for pointing the way for me to follow my own path, not somebody else's.

emilie brzezinski

 

 

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THANK YOU FOR THIS DAY

 

raoul dufy

Day 4 of blogathon, the prompt is lists of future artistic goals over the next five years. First thing to mind was McKenzie Wren's opening to Day 2, the chorus from David Bowie's song from the early 1970s, "We've got five years." The other association that popped into mind almost simultaneously was the Soviet Five Year Plans. Through the 1950s and 60s, American propaganda was fixed on evil Communist Russia such that it became reality: Communism = Evil, Five Year Plans are stupid. It's what Communists do. You have to be of a certain age to remember that time, like in my generation you had to be of a certain age to remember the Depression. Nobody bothered to notice what the Soviets were doing was not Communism, but that was neither here nor there. Actuality has no role in propaganda. Calling orange juice ketchup doesn't make it anything but orange juice. This is where a five year plan takes my head. It doesn't mean I agree that five year plans are stupid or Communism is evil, only these are my associations. The language of propaganda. It's not that I mean it really is, only that it's my historical association. It's a bundle of personal and historical associations that makes it an unreality for me to say I want to make the world a better place or I want to spread joy or I want to be an ambassador for good, whatever that is. It doesn't even mean I disagree with people who see the good as something laudable. This is illusion, good is not always "good." Uplifting is not always elevating. I'm getting into splitting hairs territory; it's time to abandon that line of thinking. It leads ultimately to the brain is a universe of atoms floating in spirals through nothingness, which leads to looking out the window at the snowbirds hopping about in the snow the other side of the glass picking up their daily seeds. Caterpillar just now appealed to me for attention, Mao. Took a moment to rub the top of her head and her neck, tell her I love her from the heart. I took the moment to bring my own head back to the world of perception where seeing is believing, leaving off that believing doesn't have much to do with reality, and reality is different from individual to individual. I mean the reality we collectively agree upon, like gravity keeps footprints off the ceiling.

 

raoul dufy

 

My entire childhood was spent in a church where I was told several times a week that I might not be alive tomorrow. Any moment may be my last. It stuck. I've never been able to imagine a future for myself. I've seen too many variables flying about every situation and have lived long enough to see that even Noam Chomsky doesn't know the future. One unforeseeable moment can change everything. Like the assassination of Archduke (?) Franz Ferdinand with an improvised explosive device set Europe into a "World War."  The rings that go out from this one splash in time will continue to the horizon. I have a really strong feeling such an unforeseeable moment is around a nearby corner. 911 was not it, because it was foreseeable and seen coming. "We didn't have any intelligence." Duh. A child raised believing the Truth in the likelihood of not waking up in the morning, plus we might get nuked any day, I've lived with "no hope of tomorrow" as evidence of the importance of living my life today. I've also lived long enough to notice that it aint necessarily so. I woke up a lot of mornings. The last thing I had to say to that argument was to an old preacher's wife, one of the really old-fashioned kind, of which we have many today, a haughty old thing pretending humility, the worst gossip in the church and kept a smokescreen of piety about herself obscuring the inner bitch, the self her husband and kids knew well. She was on the verge of feeble when, going out the church-house door, I assisted her descent of the four steps. She thanked me. I said, "See you next time." She said, "We have no guarantee of that." I thought, Lord have mercy, don't I know it,  and said, "I'll pretend I do, and if I don't it won't matter." She didn't even give my clever young frivolity an harrumph. It was the last time I saw her. She wasn't able to leave home soon after, then hospital and nursing home. She was steeped in a lifetime of old Calvinist, Puritan mind of post-medieval northern Europe and Britain, like her husband and her daddy, believed anything fun was the devil himself, the kind of thinking that pushed me toward atheism. The moment with her on the church-house steps was after my awakening. I don't mean awakening here to mean enlightenment, only the kick-start of awareness. The awakening turned me away from heavy serious thinking to a more light-hearted attitude toward experience. I don't mean Boca Raton Barbie, nor do I mean System Of A Down.

 

raoul dufy

 

In the past I attempted to make some plans, but didn't believe them. In late-Twenties I bought a two-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, to save it for old age. It was something I wanted to read in my later years. I have two sets of the two volumes. I've never opened any of them. They are preserved on my bookshelf. In the mid-1980s I discovered Australian writer, Patrick White and read him, one after the other. Came a day I did not want to read everything yet and be done with him. I wanted to save the rest for my later years for something I know I will enjoy to the max. Neither White nor Proust appeal to me now as something I want to read. I want to finish a couple books by Chris Hedges I'd begun at the same time. I want to finish a history of China that calls to me. I want to find a good history of the Persian Empire. I'd also like to find a history of Kazakhstan before it was broken up into the -stans. I have a wonderful history of the Ottoman Empire that I want to read again. I'd like to reread Diana Eck's beautiful book, Banaras City of Light. And there are so many I want to read again. I want to read more poems by John Berryman. I want to finish the four volumes of Andre Gide's Journals. I want to read more in the discourses of Upasni Maharaj. I want to reread some plays by Harold Pinter. I don't have time for Proust. He's too far down the list. There's no way this body will hold out that long. A few days ago I was thinking I want to take Julio Cortazar's novel, 62: A Model Kit, off the shelf, not to read all of it, unless I choose to, but to read a few pages at a time randomly. The novel itself is in 62 sections or chapters to be read in any order the reader chooses. Thought I might read a few, I love his writing, for the joy of reading his sentences. I went to the shelf and took it down. It's nice to see it again. Too many years have gone by without reading him. It may end up in a stack on the floor, but it was a good feeling to touch its cover and flip the pages. I don't dare say I will indeed read in it. Tomorrow I may say tomorrow. And I may take it as soon as I'm finished writing to the reading chair, put on the reading glasses, have a cup of hot chocolate, feet up off the floor, and read for an hour in bliss with sunlight to read by.

 

raoul dufy

 

As you have accurately guessed by now, this mind doesn't do well with goals. I could plan a goal today and next week it will be something that was important a week ago. For appointments I write in black or red on a wall calendar with inch and a half by inch and three quarters rectangles for each number. If an appointment doesn't get written there, it's forgotten. I've never taken to goals, goals being a sort of plan, the carrot on the stick to keep the donkey going. I can't even conceive imagining one goal, certainly not five, and then five more goals for this year, in addition. It makes my psychic bodies explode. Goals are motivated by desire for success. I'm recalling in ninth grade running around the football field track at a tournament chasing the guy running in front of me I had to beat to win. I never liked that feeling, having to beat somebody to win. It didn't feel right then, doesn't feel right now. It's the winning I have no desire for. I don't want to win a lottery because I don't want the trauma of overnight unlimited wealth and every snake on earth having a bead on me. I like my life on Waterfall Road where I have a hard time finding the money every year to pay property taxes you'd laugh at in awe for being so little. I never wanted to climb the ladder of success. Soon after high school I tried to go against that thinking by reading Atlas Shrugged and Think and Growä Rich. It all made me gag. What do I give a shit about a bunch of rich people needing to live underground because they hate everybody else. I'd rather read Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. At least reading Dharma Bums made me feel cool. Think and Grow Rich made me feel poor and worthless. I could not give my mind to continuous meditation on money and/or success. Robert Lowell was an uber-successful American poet with plenty of money, his name in perpetuity on his chair in the inner sanctum of American Poetry, and he went *pop* that's it cat shit. It evidently didn't mean all that much to him. John Berryman too. Randall Jarrell jumped in front of a car on the interstate at night. They had caught the carrots on the stick they started out wanting, fame, to be well thought of, and in some cases money. Like, Wow. I don't want to find my life so regrettable I need to bail out and see if I can finish saying Geronimo. I'll just take it a day at a time and play like I'm doing something spiritual.   

 

raoul dufy

 

 

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MEANDERING RAMBLE THAT STARTS THERE AND ENDS HERE

red, tj worthington

Talking with my friend Carole this morning, we noted how tired we both are of the word racism, how universal it is, and now Glen Beck calling Obama a racist and Limbaugh losing advertisers. If Boner were not disingenuous in everything he said, I'd laugh at him all the harder now that he wants to pay the US debt to China and stop paying federal employees until the debt is paid. He says that is "sound" reasoning. He gets a government paycheck too, but exceptions are made for the law makers. Maybe it is sound from the point of view of somebody who hates 99% of the American people. The one percent he is working for is not you and me. We're the ones he is working against. It's another stab at Social Security. A pattern I've seen too often is the republican method of chipping away at our democracy, social security, and the constitution, like woodpeckers, getting them out of the way of the corporatocracy: it always works. The democrats let them and never reverse the police state legislation. The "sequester" played into the republican hand. It hit the people who work for a living hard, the intent. Systematically, the republican lock-step defiance of the American people uses the more ignorant (dangerous) half of the population to help in the crusade against the educated, as in dictatorial regimes. First target of authoritarians is predictably the educated (liberals), starting with the intellectuals, the very people a society needs for self-awareness, equally important in a society as in an individual.

pine swamp and glade valley from air bellows, tj worthington

Hitler took the German people's progress and turned it against them, set them back half a century. And I don't mean to be beating the dead horse of comparisons to Hitler too obvious to mention, esp that he was none too brite. Germany in the 1930s was in the foreground of modern art, until the war der Fuhrer lock-step marched the German people into, lured by promises of wealth and power. Artist Max Beckmann and several other German artists of the time exiled themselves to escape the anti-human machine their country had become over money and security. The same happened in the time of ww1. It was the exiles (draft dodgers) who kept the continuum of German art going. In warrior cultures artists are exiles at home, so it is natural for an artist to leave war making to the warrior people that create war because they want war. Artists do not want war nor lean toward racism or nationalism. The most committed artists have no choice but to exile themselves. Max Ernst another one from the ww2 period with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Andre Breton and plenty of others were run out of Paris by the German invasion, these to America. European artists in the time of ww2 spread over the world like dandelion seed-parachutes sailing on the wind, like Tibetan monks since 1957.

max ernst

Technologically advanced countries periodically run their artists and intellectuals off so the serious game of war can be played at the expense of as many people as possible, population control, enriching wealth the purpose. Weapons manufacturing is the biggest business on earth. The wars need to keep on going to keep the business going. The whole earth is covered with the weaponry of war, from Africa where they use machine guns mounted on the back of Nissan pickups and machetes, to Asian genocides, to American destruction of economies and lives in poverty stricken, defenseless countries without allies. I feel for the retired dictator in Guatemala sentenced for the rest of his life in prison for taking the American lure to destroy his own country from within to make it easier prey for corporate rape, and to make himself some money in the tradition of Latin American dictators. It went flip-flop on him. He was turned upon by the CIA, like Noriega and Pinochet. I doubt he'll be allowed to write a memoir. CIA is even more fickle than people with Money. Fickle behavior I take for absence of the most basic level of moral integrity. This is why I have never wanted money. I've never wanted the illusion of power or wealth, because moral integrity had, for some cluster of reasons, been more important to me in my youth. I don't mean to say in the absolute to the point of preaching, but practical, everyday-life forgiveness for slipping on the tightwire. It's not the straight line that is the Way, anyway. The Way is meandering like a mountain creek and a river, and farther along, the delta. I'm in my delta phase, wildly meandering slow-motion mind. I love it.

joan miro

Am I not a nutcase? Hmm. This could be an opening line in a Pinter play. I'm glad my time on earth overlapped Harold Pinter's time on earth. If I had any brains, I'd be reading Pinter's plays again, seeing them in new light, forty years later, including the experience of seeing a few on stage and film. There is much I'd like to re-read at this time of the life. The times I have tried it, I've been disappointed more than enlightened. Much of the time, it's I liked that? John Berryman's Dream Songs sing to me now. Before, they were obscure. They're still obscure, but now I can ride the flow in them like in music. I can hear the song. It's (distantly) like listening to John Lee Hooker, "One night I was layin down, I heard my papa tell mama, let that boy boogie woogie, it's in him, it's got to come out." I started Moby Dick once to re-read and was bored right away. I saved the big two-volume edition of Proust for my old age. Now that I'm here, I don't want to read it. What do I care about 19th Century pretentious French society? Maybe in a film by Andrzej Wajda, but not to sit and read when I could be enjoying so much more, like Ralph Stanley's memoir, or The Killing of Crazy Horse, or much else I feel like reading now, the Nation magazine, Gide's Journals, or The Way Things Go, Lucas Carpenter's new book of poems. .

Salvador dali

 

 

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