moon traveller herald

  Many of my poetry books came to me on a whim. I found a Surrealist Anthology in the trash after a session at BU ended. A roommate left a book of Symbolists when he moved away. Some ancient texts were discovered in used book carrels and have survived several relocations. Jorge Luis Borges's place in this little library is different. His books are remarkably complete and stand together proudly. Borges himself was avidly comprehensive in his knowledge and letters, so the elongated space his work takes up in my small library makes sense. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Encyclopedia. He was frail and clinically myopic as a child. Yet he avidly explored the worlds of letters. He read and wrote as if the mantle of a Boethius, Voltaire, Humboldt or [Thomas] Young was upon him - as if he was the last man to know everything. When his genetic myopia led to blindness in the 1950s, Borges focused on poetry. He not only wrote it but also lectured on his method, which was as much tango as ...

i. Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm. Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said. [Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.] Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaiss...

The home library needs thinning. Some things get old. The Meaning of the Blues by Paul Oliver. When I was 16 this was all there was to help decypher Robert Johnson. It was educational. But just like some Conquistador Diary that paints an inapp picture of an unfamiliar civilization...this book wears with time. It doesnt wear well. Add to that a friend of mine had negative feelings about the author, who masqueraded as an anthropologist, but sought to commercially exploit the Blues. I read this sometimes, and it doesn't know anything much. I am saving the cover, because I think it may be by Milton Glaser..who did the poster for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits [Vol. 1] .. putting the rest of the book it in the Little Free Library Box on Tremont St. And that's the News, on The Meaning of the Blues, today. J.V.

  The Friends Basement book sale was an occasion to thin out the books around here – many which basically overfill the space, un-re-read. Said good ‘buy’ to this grimy tome: The Dream Songs (1972) by John Berryman. Before I knew it, I got to thinking. John Berryman today is probably in the category called cancelled, where he hangs out with Hemingway, the king of cancelled, and others. Like Hemingway his father shot himself, and like Hemingway he would commit suicide, jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis. Back in his day, pre-1972, he was a hard drinking big-ego professor poet full of confessional angst, in my humble opinion. His songs were an endless song of hisself in an un-understanding world. Great bearded poet who spilled out his guts at poetry readings, and later, probably, fell into the punch bowl, to be saved for a while, in my dream song,   by a caring co-ed. You see in his poems his battle with drink, which I should say does demand some sympathy. In his writing...

i. Thinking of early 20th Century poets lately, and the sense of cinema in their composition.  So many poems read for me like films -- ones that zeroed in on a blue mood of suspicious clarity. It's as if I flew on the wings of the camera into the modeled set of Citizen Kane -- the one with the neon blinking lighting on the roof of  the night club and going down a skylight to where the reporter interviews sad and drunken Susan Alexander. Blaise Cendrars, particularly, but also Garcia Lorca, and Guillermo Apollinaire seem influenced by the journalistic dispatch, extreme abstraction, the collage, and the camera eye view. I only discovered Cendrars recently  and was blown away by the mood his poems encompassed, bordering on something like a black&white Warner Bros movie - say,  Across the Pacific .    One poem leads to another when the spirit is right, and Cendrars eventually took me back to My Poetry Bookshelf and a work of Hart Crane.  ii. Both Crane...

Will come to this again. The Eternal Note of Sadness. Matthew Arnold pegged it, listening to the Ocean. Willie Nelson too – he said, Listen to what the blues are saying. It is in a lot of Medieval lyricism too. It's there on my book shelf in The Modern Library’s An Anthology of Medieval Lyrics. Edited by Angel Flores.* But let's get to the poem - from the north of France, in the 14th or 15th century, a girl is versifying. Take it away, Christine de Pisan. =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= =~>+*<~= If I’m in church more often now By Christine de Pisan If I’m in church more often now It’s just that I can see her there Fresh as new-opened roses are. Why gossip of it, why endow It with such consequence? Why stare If I’m in church more often now? Where I may go – or when – or how It is to come more near to her. Fools call me fool! It’s whose affair If I’m in church more often now? =~>+*<~= ...

Looking at the book shelf today, I am going to pull one from earlier in the Moon Traveller transit. Bob Watt has a special place in my space. When Robert Steffens read his poetry at a St Cathernines H.S. guest lecture, it connected what Dylan was doing with what we were living in (Wisconsin). And things began to open up from there. I'd say the poems are best when read, and they arent unlike a droll comedian's monologue. The important thing about his poetry was that, like a 3-chord Velvet Underground song, it beckoned you to try it yourself. He called himself of the school of Inferior Poetry. Kind of like Punk Rock. I did a write up on Bob's passing (we'd kind of gotten to know him enough to say 'hi' on the street later in Milwaukee, and Madison), and that tribute is located here . To emphasize the Everyman Angle of Watt - Jeff De Mark tells the story of working as a substitute English teacher at Eureka high in the early 90s the teacher once gave me a week to...

It’s not possible to quickly and simply convey a whole culture’s poetry, and I wont try. But in China of yore, poetry was the premier art form, and it evolved into an incredible subtle opus, that was heavy on a note you might call the blues note. Here I look into this.  The poem is Amusing Myself by Li Bai, who wrote during the Tang Dynasty -- in my youth was more often known as Li Po in the West. Let's say Tu Fu was the Willie Mays of the time and era - that would make Li Bai the Mickey Mantle. It’s a shapshot view of Chinese poetry, including drinking, concise strange scenes and the music of regret. Drinking, I was unaware of nightfall. Fallen flowers Filled my robe. Drunk, I arose And walked by the stream In the moonlight. The birds had all gone, Men also were few.                       -Li Bai A review of a review of Chinese art show at the Met in 2007 drew some words that struck me on this...

Art and the spiritual overlap, at least for me, at least sometimes. Catholic upbringing was such that I went to church every school day for 8 years, and I wont try to estimate how many Sundays over many more. At every mass, there is reading of Psalms. These come from the Hebrew.  In my youth, these were read in Latin, which created a type of drone-like song that mapped easily forward even as they were done in English. The song of the psalm sets a constant poem churning in your head. So, no Psalms follow, but bit from my book of Hebrew Verse, a book with poems in fragment form. As always, the blues is knockin. Like many of these, it's bleak, with some leaven.  Bring me a scroll, get me ink and a quill and I shall blacken it today with my tale of woe. When I read it, my eyes will flow like fountains, for in the grave I shall not shed any tears. I shall bewail this lovely form, which my friends, both men and women, will rush to the charnel house and shall bewail ...

The poet Robert Kelly tells a story of a woman who, despite nagging sisters and clucking hen country folks of the town found love – actually, found Eros – and actually her name was Psyche. An excerpt from near the end.  …Eros said “we have lived here too long even the rocks are the town’s rocks & the trees drink poison from the shadows of the the townfolk on their roots we must build a labyrinth to hide the monster of our perfected love’ so they went out of the cave & built the first city in the world & called it this & said it was the end of the family & Love said ‘here we can live, here the city can nourish men & free them from all the things but themselves together here we can through all complexity one day find ourselves again’ & Love hid themselves in his city. Excerpt p.161, The East Side Scene, American Poetry, 1960-1965, A Doubleday Anchor Book, 1972 The East Side Scene was a dear book of poetr...

Introducing My poetry book shelf. A new Section of Moon Traveller Herald for 2019. Let's get it down! Among the earliest poems in English is The Wanderer.The style then was musically heavy on alliteration which may have for those folks been a better mnemonic aid than rhyme. Grill Marcus spoke at one time about the Old Weird America. Here, the Old Weird Britain calls you by your name. Part of soliloquies bleak unto blues. Here's a bit: Who liveth alone longeth for mercy Maker's mercy Though he must traverse tracks of sea Sick at heart - Trouble with oars ice cold waters The ways of exile – Weird is set fast. Excerpt, p.70; The Wanderer, The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics, 1966

Reading from three favorite poetry anthologies on the back porch on June 17 (anniversary of Watergate breakin!) The three tomes are 1-The Poetry of Surrealism, 2-Sunflower Splendor and 3-Technicians of the Sacred. Unfortunately, the images for the 2 and 3 get swapped in the production. The three poems are Phantom of the Clouds by Guillaume Apollnaire (TR. Michael Benedikt; Dreaming of Li Po 1,2 (actually two poems) by Tu Fu (TR. Eugene Eoyang); and, a stanza of Night Births (from the Kumulip by Keaulumoku) (Tr. Rothenberg?) We finishwork and watch a movie or TV. To go to another place. Poems bring you to another place, too - one of musical language and concise images. I used to have more time and would be out on the porch or out in the woods, maybe with wine, tobacco, and bag full of books that worked the magic. Now, doing that, well, it is more rare. These poems bring you to a street scene as the modern western world unfolds in Paris in the early 20th century; take you to dre...