moon traveller herald

UPDATED OCCASSIONALLY - Jack Vaughan  At Kafka's Home --- The magenta purple dawning sky ahead - it lights the foggy green salt marsh and its pools || as the new england corridor train grunt-grouches east at sunrise - on connecticut shores a' dewing || as the train crew talks about geography - and drinks morning black coffee. - June 2010 ---- Strange Edison Electrical Illumination At about the age of 10, Edison goes to the creek with young friend George Lockwood, who disappears in the eddies to drown. Edison observes the creek water for a long time, maybe rapt by the dying Lockwood’s breath bubbles. At last, after the long wait for Lockwood to surface, Edison finally goes home to dinner and to bed without telling anyone about the event. Meanwhile, a party searches for Lockwood – eventually they come to hear Edison’s story of his drowning. Self-taught polymath,  noted as a man of amazing concentration.  He could look intently at what was there and...

 I read the news today oboy. SS united states/ship i was so proud to see\ss united states/ was rusting bucket south o philly/they taking it down to where the mermaids go/ \gonna sink it in the gulf of Mexico

  I read about Synthesia early today. It is an application that looks to economically offer AI-video production capabilites. The goal is mainly for ads for small vendors, and they offer a brief sampling opportunity for free, which I used to present a snip from a poem I wrote about the Age of Metaphysical poetry..And this was the result. Thanks Yvonne and Synthesia! To read the full poem, go here.

  Acme Oyster House - Circa 1996 [APRIL 4, 2024] - White Panther Party Activist, jazz writer, MC5 band manager and poet John Sinclair, famously and unfairly imprisoned in 1969 for marijuana use, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82. His cause, as potently sung in John Lennon’s It Aint Fair John Sinclair [in the stir for breathing air] became an important rally point in the fight to legalize pot. His influence was also important in helping to create a politically radical school of high-powered rock n roll. That notwithstanding, he also diligently promoted a school of writing known as Jazz Poetry. The school could also be called Blues Poetry. In the '80s Sinclair moved to New Orleans, started doing a radio show, and started writing and performing poetry, mostly about blues.  His masterwork Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," took the lives of the 20th Century American blues artists and applied a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form to its representation. Si...

Box of Glass Eyes  : Rewrite                i. A box of glass eyes At the Harvard Museum Glass eyes that look at me with tenderness like the glass sea anemone That echo the whimsy Of the visible golden rod dirty That carry the pacing meanness of Dingoes in the zoo The eyes like dreaming butterflies cased before Jerry Lewis comes dusting eyes for the big day waiting.                ii. Like the bones in the valley set to jump up and start dancing The glassine eyeballs too will fly Until that day they rest the pleasant rest of chocolates In a box Eyes that were made by Von Meyer The glass shop pipette wizard Visage manifester alchemist of a mélange   hearty transparent and fragil e People will visit and eye Until the great day of rumbling. Of great spirit dancing The day of glass eyes leaving their box .               ...

The Early Days of Poetry The word expired on a virus splaat! the asteroid  took off its hat metaphors were facile and easy you picked them off a tree all sleepy & sneezy before the academy.                                   - J.V. ca. 1985 Red Star very bitter cold industrial plain south of Marquette in the way early winter morning  on way to class and sickening smell of Red Star Yeast factory in action hanging in the frigid air. - J.V. ca. 2010 Film Dream I've gotten a job sort of an assignment to drive an individual from Chicago to Milwaukee. Very futuristic airport the modern style white like a stellar sail clipper.  The person I have to pick up is sort of Austrian nobility. Not very talkative. Has small entourage of people who are also not talking too much. I want to get going but we have to wait. some kind of backstory will flash now and then. Story has something to do with ...

  i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay just me and my racine buddies on the hottest august day they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play but when came sunday  went looking for kerouac's grave he was a lonesome traveller who showed the world another way on the road and in the dharma the holy poet sadly prayed we thought he'd send a message an eminission from the grave then a dove rose in the meadow where the peoples memories must stay and we went in the direction the spot from where it came the bird like a flying beer can showed the place where ti jean laid  on the hottest august day.                         -jack vaughan This opened up upon listening to Champon Jack Dupree - a song where he searched a graveyard for his motherl. W...

Boston By Sandra Lim When I first moved to this city to take a job, and the snows began to fall, a slow sadness took hold of me. Someone left a tiny pencil drawing of a sailboat on the ceiling of my bedroom, and I would stare up at it each night, thinking that it would eventually stir. I met someone that first spring, and I didn’t love him. But I very much wanted someone to look at me in all my youth and feminine momentum. Sandra Lim’s poetry collections include Loveliest Grotesque and The Wilderness and The Curious Thing.  https://nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/19/boston/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Comment on the poem - This was a poem I came across that really rang my bell. First, it firmly fits a place, a place I knew, Boston, and I too had the experience of coming here. Looking at a room. Meeting someone. The details so apt, in a room - one in which a former tenant had drawn on the wall a boat a'sailing. Our heroine in the poem - she...

  BU Researches Show The Moon Has a Comet-Like Tail. Every Month It Shoots a Beam Around Earth. https://t.co/5YWfaBUioh — Smiling Jack Vaughan (@SmilingVaughan) March 17, 2021 Described in animation by  @physicsJ Gausian Moon The full moon tonight is a pearl in a whirly smoke veil that is passing on over to Nova Scotia in silence And its halo assumes the copper and indigo colors of William Blake’s dramas The mountains of the moon The Sun’s distant light Looking back on the swirl of life  Looking back at this fool’s errand Earth And again I ask the sky  Who’s hostage am I? - Jack Vaughan [[ Same poem set with a different approach to abstraction- Hostage A smoky image the moon tonight a girl whirling in a veil moving toward Nova scotia dreaming. - Jack Vaughan

The summer wind carries clouds to sea over Wollaston beach The girls test the water roll up their hair mad pretty they look good together as my  sunshine on a cloudy day bear mother love clams its  her birthday 'yo i know he's rich' one girl says to her cell phone summer ebbs for both  old and young. --J.V.

Jack Vaughan 3 · City Hospital Blues This "Talk Song" goes back about 10 or 15 years at least. The story is that my Uncle Charles was on Intravenous Feeding for 30 days in Boston City Hospital during the 1919 Influenza Pandemic. I had been listening to an LP of Cecelia's - the "Arhoolie Bad Luck N' Trouble" release, which included the haunting Essie Jenkins' "Influenza Blues"-- and came to re-imagine my uncle's illness, through the spectre of Essie's poetic rumination. So, it is her Influenza blues through the lens of a family history. I was reluctant to trot this out, though it came to mind as we are in our own COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. But I am glad to post it now along with some explaination. As we know it, the IV feed was new and experimental technology at the time. My uncle was obviously in very difficult straits. As we know it, my grandmother spent most all of the 30 days at Charles's bedside praying, and for us his rec...

At the Supermarket on Tremont dressed liked Zorro, the Shiek and the Invisible Man, how abby normal-  the new normal, how great the anxiety in the Campbell Soup can.                              - Jack Vaughan

At the heart of Beat writing is the idea that spontaneity is crucial in expression. The method is best summarized in Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” – featuring such an apothegm as “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind” and “Blow as deep as you want to blow.” The immediate guide for Kerouac was jazz, most especially the bebop form led forward by Charlie Parker. But among the other influential jazz players there were many others that Kerouac followed. And among these was Lee Konitz, vaunted alto saxophonist who passed away last week at 92 in New York, from complications of Covid-19 and pneumonia. Although the brutal coronavirus caught up with him, Konitz was truly a survivor, one who followed his own beacon across a cavalcade of styles of jazz, continuing to play until very recently. His connection to Kerouac is enduringly important. Born in Chicago, Konitz as a lad was inspired by Benny Goodman. He went on to play with the Claude Thornhill orchestra, Stan Kento...

Big eyed country girl (Sudanese Country Sister) She was a country girl and she came into the town She was a country girl and she came into the town one thing about the girl she cant keep her damper down. Just a big eyed country girl Bright lights in a thrall Just a big eyed country girl Bright lights in a thrall She cant wait for the walk sign She cant hear her mama call. She got up off the bus Threw her two bags down She got up off the bus Threw those plastic bags down She was an up country girl and a stranger in the town. She had the champagne eyes A splendiffaferic ass Champagne eyes And spendiffehpheric ass when she move like that Got to go to Sunday Mass. Can I just share a moment In your cool TV chair? Watch the Watergate hearings Sniff your rare country air. Watch the Watergate hearings And move on out of here. Let’s go back up the country Where we will not be known All I got to ask Take me with you when you go Big ...

November is a Bee complex where dreams where dreams waltz like leaves The dead remind you that they are there Scratching electrons in electric air Near Where you’re living above your station And the docs are odd mechanics Mechanical Turks Lifting the hoods Interrupted endlessly just to pump gas eyeing the battery that won’t hold charge Advising you like Dr. Williams: “It’s just given up the ghost” You think back to the grey tube in the TV room of flickering fate Where pencil mustached Jack Bailey eminence Leads housewives through laments asking enthusiastically How would you like to be queen for a day? And their circumstances are measured with an applause meter as they tear up the meter measures Under neighbor Maude’s ironing board You crawl But you will wake up you got to get to your job Your morbid preoccupation Thinking Seeing November And you reach your destination. - Jack Vaughan

The Drunken Silenius Silenius tutor to Dionysus - buy that poet a port, upend the apple cart of hokum and decorum and spill the wine spodee-odee nowhere now to go but round and round while your young in the Fogg and larger Forest. Addenda 1 - I am a long way now from the portrait of the poet as a mystical drinker. But chance led me to the Fogg Museum, and more chance had me lingering, yesterday, while others came and went, in front of the painting, the painting by Francesco Fracanzano of a satyrists' symposium centered around young Silenius and his younger-yet student Dionysus (shown here idly peeing). Just like a songster soft-voiced  mountain singer who might have a special reverence for a bluesman like Skip James or Charlie Patton, I have learned to hold a regard for  the drunken poet - the one of less accomplishment but more traffic with the creative motherload because of his intoxicated immoderation. I think of Eric Burdon's Spi...

Santiago cathedral 700 years old     Looming right outside our window Intricate arched wooden doorway     Huge flower shaped  Stained glass   Gargoyle  animals   Snarling in stone with  twisted heads    of lost terrified men  Staring  down into eternity and     At bricks, washed by a fire hose at 2am   by Basque  workers  in green and orange  jump suits   Washing away beer and fear  Cleaning those bricks    So people can walk  Into  the old cathedral       With fresh feet                                    - Jeff DeMark, 2019

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...