moon traveller herald

I may kill this blog if Google does not improve its support of basic MS commands and functions.

Hey did I tell anybody the Moon Traveller is on summer sojourn? Yup, I'm working on a symphony in the Berkshires. Hope that's duly noted. Till Fall yall! When the grants run out!

The blues line is a long line but it reached magnificent acme in the work of artistssuch as Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Chester Burnett, John Lee Hooker, McKinley Morganfield, Roosevelt Sykes and others among an initiate group that grew up (in very many cases) in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and in many other cases survived to venture north to Chicago and Detroit and be recorded. Their work ultimately influenced culture, art and music, including 1950s' and 1960s' rock n roll and rock. These blues poets forged art under conditions of poverty and repression as well as amidst frantic social and technological upheaval, and their music reflected a syncopated and prophetic world that still obtains. In "Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," poet John Sinclair takes the meager history that has built up around the above mentioned and other essential blues artists, applies a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form, and magically and quite sympathe...

A couple of years agoe we had a discussion, trying to remember encounter with Ginsberg and Dylan. We each remembered different things in different relief. Kind of like the four gospels, which diverge somewhat. I wrote a version down around 1976 or 1977, that Jan and Val Mazelis ran in Shoreline Erosion, which I have altered since then to be more a flat out prose poem. Because it was nearer the event I take it to be possibly accurate. Last summer when I saw Dave in NYC he'd just gotten note from late Allen Ginsberg via a friend who'd he told this story too. Al's advice at end same as start: First thought best thought! I have at times since then this to brood over : Read Chronicles. Where schmucks were parking out on Dylan’s roof - like raccoons - as no doubt he tried to sleep. We weren’t too different. Can’t take back lost time or call as a witness those Wheels on Fire. I wish I’d been less than dumb star infatuated fan. Wish I hadnt told Ginsberg I was 'looking for s...

Before a bardic push, a respite. Reading on the backporch, 2010.

Got to Worcester for centenary tribute to poet Charles Olson. Was late to the late show – always get lost in Worcester - but saw the last part of Ed Sanders’ reading. Good stuff. With his Strum Stick. Doing Doggtown. Loose Peach Gown. How Sweet I Roamed. Transcendeary! There is a record out now: Be Free – The Fugs Final CD (Part 2) … gasp! Get it! Not because it is the last one. Get it because Ed does the Loose Peach Gown Song, and The Laughing Song. And Tuli (remember him selling little broadsides on the N.Y. street) does Greenwich Village of My Dreams (a great moment in 21st Century Surrealism)plus Backward Jewish Soldiers. New and in the tradition. You will need time to relax with this. So start with the paean to relaxation: Goofitude. Today NPR had a nice review of Be Free that included comments of college mate Larry Sloman. Audio and text.

[Note 2010-02-26-1] “I was carrying with me a little instrument from the ‘60s” – said Sanders in Experimenting with Sappho’s poetry . The device Sanders describes could well be a Dübreq Stylophone , an early portable electronic synthesizer. In ‘’1968: A History in Verse [ p.209 ] he recalls buying just such an instrument in Montreal on Sept 15, 1968. He indicates this as the beginning of the Electronic Bard System effort.