Vollmann, Miles, Godard, & Kerouac's Big Sur

Browse Inside this book

Lately, I've been dipping into the new William Vollmann book, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with some thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. The subtitle is so long, amazon cuts it off at "Hou," which is all you really need to know about amazon as a "bookseller." The following is from the first chapter and concerns kimonos used in contemporary Noh Theater:

The weaving of the old kimonos is finer than today's, not only visually but also structurally; in them Mr. Umewaka [today's leading Noh actor] can move more freely, or I should say less constrictedly, thanks to some peculiar fashioning of the sleeves which would now cost millions of yen to reproduce. Moreover, he tells me, the artificial fertilizer ingested by the plants on which twenty-first century silkworms feed weakens the silk."

Something that, on many different levels, should give us all pause.


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Two of my favorite things: the music of Miles Davis and Jean Luc Godard's film Alphaville. Who can resist a mash up on this level; certainly not me. One of the blogs on my Quick List on the sidebar, Five Branch Tree, posted this the other day and I told Brian I'd love to pass it on. So here it is. I first saw Alphaville almost 40 years ago as a teen and even than it seemed to be simultaneously set in the distant future and the not so distant past. Haunting, poetic, absurd, and illuminating, this is on a par with Cocteau's Orpheus Trilogy: a film not to be missed, all these years later.







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It's hard to imagine anyone, Godard, Miles, anyone, making a better trailer for the Kerouac film, One Fast Move or I'm Gone, than this one, which I believe my buddy Mr. Baker tipped my way. Sam Shepherd reading, Tom Wait's with a devastatingly brief observation - just wonderful. In addition, these equally brief, equally spot-on thoughts:

"I would say it [Kerouac's work] was based on observation, it was
based on imagination, it was based on benzedrine, also."

And

"Oh, Jack ..... Jack, Jack , Jack.

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And, finally, for this lazy blissful hot height of summer Friday, when maybe the heat wave breaks and maybe it doesn't, here's one of Pittsburgh's finest purveyors of the short form, Bart Solarczyk, from Lilliput Review #146, October 2005, reminding us that we've forgotten what Father Walt really had to say:

Walt Whitman's Watching

We sweat & we wipe
work the world's rhythm
sway with the grass & leaves

we drink the day's end
ignore the astronomer
gazing at the stars in our cups

we speak what we will
across cyberspace
bold water, flesh & air

so snuggle up
take off your clothes
let me write a poem on you.

Bart Solarczyk

stinging bug
you too someday, some time...
dewy grass

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Sketchbook Call for Poems; Mr. Davis, Mr. Roethke, & Mr. Gilbert

Miles Davis

A call for poems opens things up today from the online publication Sketchbook. Carefully read the guidelines and I would suggest you go to their website to get a feel for what they use and an idea of all the many things they do.


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Sketchbook
A Journal of Eastern & Western Writing Forms

Announcing May / June "Sunflower(s)" 2009 Kukai

The May / June 2009 Kukai theme is "sunflower(s)" . Use the exact
words "sunflower(s)" in the haiku. No more than a total of three
haiku may be submitted. Haiku submitted to the kukai should
not be workshopped, appear on-line in forums, or in print.


Haiku

Author, Country

To: kukaieditor@poetrywriting.org
Subject:sunflower(s) kukai

Submissions: Friday, May 01, 2009 – Saturday, June 20, 2009
Midnight.

Voting: Sunday, June 21 - Sunday, June 28, 2009, Midnight.

The results will be published in the Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sketchbook.

Recent letters to the Sketchbook editors and discussions on
various forums indicate that some assumptions about a kukai
must be spelled out. From now on (April 1, 2008), Haiku
entered in the Sketchbook kukai must be previously unpublished;
they must not be workshopped; they must not appear on any
ist, forum, group, blog, or in print. In short, if the haiku has
appeared on the internet or in print we consider it to have been
published. The voting in a kukai is anonymous and publication
anywhere voids anonymity. Any haiku found to be previously
published will be disqualified.


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Celebrate Theodore Roethke's birthday reading his poems here

In addition, Garrison Keillor gives an overview of Roethke and reads a great poem from Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven, entitled "Happily Planting the Beans Too Early" in today's Writer's Almanac. I tried embedding it without any luck, so here's the poem:

Happily Planting the Beans too Early

I waited until the sun was going down
to plant the bean seedlings. I was
beginning on the peas when the phone rang.
It was a long conversation about what
living this way in the woods might
be doing to me. It was dark by the time
I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches
and read the second half of a novel.
Found myself out in the April moonlight
putting the rest of the pea shoots into
the soft earth. It was after midnight.
There was a bird calling intermittently
and I could hear the stream down below.
She was probably right about me getting
strange. After all, Basho and Tolstoy
at the end were at least going somewhere.

Jack Gilbert

It's also Miles Davis day and I'm unabashed fan, of all periods. So here's something newer, live in Munich in 1987, with apologies to classic fans; my feet are, however, moving now.

spring breeze--
where my feet are pointed
I'm on my way

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Lilliput Review Back Issue: Homage

Cover by Guy R. Being

Today's featured back issue of Lilliput Review is #42, from March 1993. It was a rare theme issue: homage was that theme and, interestingly if my memory serves me well (it was 16 years ago), it was not an announced theme. It just came together that way. Enjoy.

Satie Revisited #14

if all goes
well
no one may be well ;
the worse,
the better, and if you see
any moment of light
it's like finding
moonlight
in your midnight sherry

Harland Ristau

Rimbaud

some one legged man
chained against the furnace wall
screaming:

hell has no power over pagans

charlie mehrhoff

Ode to T. S. Eliot

I can see clearly now
the need to be cheerful
anyway

Carl Mayfield

Salvador Dali

I can imagine myself
Slumped over a counter
In a downtown diner,
But not in a Salvador Dali

T. N. Turner

Jesus Christ

w/ a good roof,
everything else
is rain rolling

Eric Williamson

And the quote that started the whole issue off:

"If Al Green had one tit, I'd marry the motherfucker." Miles Davis

Richard Houff's poem above is simultaneously a concrete poem and a found poem; his young son had done the image and he added the title. Without Miles Davis, or Al Green for that matter, there never would have been a world worth living in.

I still miss Harland Ristau, very much. This one's for you, bud.

in honor of the equinox
the hedge
turns green

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don