Peter Orlovsky, 1933-2010

Peter Orlovsky (Allen Ginsberg)

Peter Orlovsky: a beautiful remembrance from Tom Clark and accounting of his passing by Anne Waldman.

today again
death draws nearer...
the wildflowers

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

Ghetto Defendent: Issa's Sunday Service, #53

Today is the birthday of drummer Topper Headon of the Clash - this occasion of its celebration being something of a miracle and here's why - and, to that end, this week's selection for the Sunday Service is "Ghetto Defendent," from the album Combat Rock. The cut features a vocal reading by the indomitable, immortal Allen Ginsberg. And now for something really special:

Mick Jones band, Carbon: Silicon, w/special guest

Since I am immersed in the poet Gerald Stern at the moment (more on this in Friday's post), here is Stern's lovely "Lilacs for Ginsberg." And an audio reading may be found here.



Lilacs for Ginsberg

I was most interested in what they looked like dead
and I could learn to love them so I waited
for three or four days until the brown set in
and there was a certain reverse curl to the leaf by
which in putting my finger on the main artery
beside the throat I knew the blood had passed on
to someplace else and he was talking to two
demons from the afterlife although it was
just like the mountains in New York State since there was
smoke in the sky and they were yelping and he was
speaking in his telltale New Jersey English
and saying the same thing over and over the way he
did when he was onstage and his white shirt was
perfect and the lack of air and the lack of light
aged the lilacs but he was sitting on a lily
in one or two seconds and he forgot about Eighth Street
and fame and cancer and bent down to pick a loose
diamond but more important than that he talked
to the demons in French and sang with his tinny voice
nor did he go on about his yellowing sickness
but counted the clusters and said they were only stars
and there were two universes entwined, the
white and the purple, or they were just crumbs or specks
that he could sprinkle on his pie nor could he
exactly remember his sorrow except when he pressed
the lilacs to his face or when he stooped
to bury himself in the bush, then for a moment
he almost did, for lilacs clear the mind
and all the elaborations were possible in their
dear smell and even his death which was so
good and thoughtful became, for a moment sorrowful.




Such lovely, amazing enjambment! As Gerald mentions in his reading, when we say lilacs, poetry fans think Whitman, so there you are. Lilacs for Lincoln, lilacs for Ginsberg!

And since we're smelling flowers here, of course, it's onto the man himself.




Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
----sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
----Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
----box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
----pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
----of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
----surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
----machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
----sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
----stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
----rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
----on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
----shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
----dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
----memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
----Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
----treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
----poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
----knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
----and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
----past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
----crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
----and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
----a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
----soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
----wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
----from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
----fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
----my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
----locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
----skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
----mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
----of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
----modern--all that civilization spotting your
----crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
----eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
----home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
----bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
----of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
----tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
----more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
----cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
----milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
----& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
----standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
----in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
----lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
----to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
----grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
----monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
----grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
----railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
----flower? when did you look at your skin and
----decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
----the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
----shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
----sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
----not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
----it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
----too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
----bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
----beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
----by our own seed & golden hairy naked
----accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
----formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
----eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
----riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
----sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

This week's poem from the Lilliput archive comes from issue #79, June 1996.

driving through Ohio

the sun set
like a gutterball
ten-pen Columbus
refusing to go down

Virgil Hervey

Onward to week 54, but first:






good timing!
at all 53 post towns
umbrella-hatted blossom viewers

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

Ed Baker on Albert Huffstickler

Please click art to enlarge

In response to last week's posting on Albert Huffstickler, poet/artist Ed Baker sent along a rendition of one of Huff's "Cafe Poems," with a haiga-like presentation. In the interest of truth or history or some such cultural folderol, Ed sent along an original drawing from 2003, entitled "Sophie's Song #123"; he added Huff's poem, a black dress, lipstick, and a discerning eye, resulting in the above rendition. Below is the original.

Sophie's Song #123

It's not often you come along a true original. Huff, certainly, is one of a kind. Ed is also as unique as they come. John Martone, Cid Corman, Diane Di Prima, Charlie Mehrhoff, Miriam Sagan ... these are just a few poets I've had the privilege to work with whose work is beyond comparison.

This go round, my appreciation to Ed, whose forthcoming broadside will be one of the 4 new issues of Lilliput Review that will start rolling out early in June. Stay tuned.

Here's another poem from the informal Cafe series Huff was always working on. It was first published in the one and only "long line" edition of Lillie (#32, June 1992) - yes, sometimes the length of lines is as problematic as the number in this tiny little mag. Enjoy.

Cafe Poem

That little old lady has a purpose.
She's a cartographer completing the map of her life.
It's there on her face,
as contained, as exact as the will that lies
deep in that small, shrunken breast.
She looks around her, laughs.
Another line forms,
another move toward the completion she already envisions.
There's nothing more for us here.
Let's leave her to her work.

Albert Huffstickler

to the old woman
doing laundry, the evening
willow bows

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #52: "Cassidy"

It's week 52, a full year's worth of music with direct literary influences (LitRock) from Issa's Sunday Service. What better way to celebrate than with the Grateful Dead and their wonderful live cut, "Cassidy"?

The story behind "Cassidy" and it's odd spelling may be found here: Cassidy's Tale. Besides Neal Cassady, there is another Cassidy to which the song refers.

There you go.

It's hard to believe this is the first appearance by the Dead on the Sunday Service (though it isn't Neal Cassady's) - a few weeks back they did some backup up for the Reverend Gary Davis, but this is the first time as a headliner. The reason it seems appropriate to celebrate with a Dead song is their generosity over the years with their fans. Music as a shared, communal experience speaks volumes.

It's been an interesting year. Most of the 52 songs, with the exception of a few, can be heard on the Jukebox on the sidebar or at the Issa's Sunday Service homepage. The full list as they originally appeared may be found here. I had an interesting experience with one song; if you'd like to know the details, I'll be happy to supply them. Though you can hear it here, anytime. All I'll say is it's a good thing that the work of William Butler Yeats is out of copyright in the U.S. so this artist no longer will be accused of stealing and profiting, by violating copyright, as happened in the past (page down for details beginning with the 6th paragraph, especially the juicy bit about how said artist brags that his lyrics are better than Yeats).

I'm just saying.

To accompany the above tune, here's another live version of "Cassidy" from the Dead.

************************************

This week's feature poem comes from issue#78, March 1996 and is by Deloris Selinsky. Other poems from this issue were featured in two past posts.

make-up
heavily applied...
disguise on disguise

Deloris Selinsky

a face
like everyone else's...
the snail

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Albert Huffstickler: The Way of Art

The Way of Art

It seems to me that
paralleling the paths of action, devotion, etc.
there is a path called art
and that the sages of the East would recognize
Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Beethoven, William
------Carlos Williams
and addresses them as equals.
It's a matter of attention and discipline, isn't
------it?–
combined with a certain God-given ability.
It's what you're willing to go through, willing to
------give, isn't it?
It's the willingness to be a window
through which others can see
all the way out to infinity
and all the way back to themselves.

Albert Huffstickler

Opening his collection of selected poems, Why I Write in Coffee Houses and Diners, "The Way of Art" is a manifesto of sorts, if a word such as this would apply a poem by such a man, such a poet, as Albert Huffstickler.

Like all his work, the language is simple, the images are plain (in this case, being a philosophical piece, virtually non-existent), and it is drawn from reality; this time it is the reality of who he is and what he does rather than the reality of what surrounds him which is so predominates his other work. It is comprised of 4 simple sentences: one declarative, two questions, and a final summing up. At that, the questions themselves are rhetorical; he is leading the reader through as one would in conversation with a friend, saying "Here, here is what we do, here is why."

If I was forced back to the wall, finger thrust in my chest, and told, ok, one word, one word only to sum up one of the great small press poets of the 20th century, Albert Huffstickler, the word would be compassion. Plain and, perhaps, not simple, but compassion would be the word. All of his work, even that which looks intensely inward, is always ultimately pointed outward, is there for the sharing, the comparing, the summing up of who we are and what we are about on this little spinning pebble in the gutter of existence.

His work has always spoken to those for whom poetry has hardly ever even been a thought, let alone a purpose. This alone says all that needs to be said.

"The Way of Art" is a declaration of purpose, a declaration of intent. It is a spiritual poem, uncharacteristically referencing the masters, East and West, characteristically seeking after and finding an answer of sorts.

There is the many blossomed lotus; there are a thousand paths; there is one destination.

The purpose of the artist - "The Way of Art."


------------------------------------------


Here is a selection of 20 short poems by Huff, the tip of the iceberg, really, that were published over the years in Lilliput Review and have made an appearance here at Issa's Untidy Hut or on the former Lillie blog, Beneath Cherry Blossoms. If these amaze you as much as they do me just think: the longer lyric was really Huff's strength, anywhere between 24 and 60 or so lines. He told me he started writing short poems, sitting in the various diners and coffee shops he habituated, specifically for Lilliput.

I could never thank him enough.

20 Poems by Huff

We forget we're mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home

Gullied Lives

Raw ravines
corrugated
by wind and rain
and time.

Hearts don't break.
They weather.

Something random
in the morning air.
Something not
to be named.
Something that starts
where the music ends.

Cafe Poem

That little old lady has a purpose.
She's a cartographer completing the map of her life.
It's there on her face,
as contained, as exact as the will that lies
deep in that small, sunken breast.
She looks around her, laughs.
Another line forms,
another move toward the completion she already envisions.
There's nothing more for us here.
Let's leave her to her work.

--

Cafe Poem

The woman in
the corner,
white on black,
white skin,
black hair,
black dress,
lights a
long, white
cigarette,
the orange flame
bright
against her cheek.

Memory

You are a dark space
in which a circle
of tiny turquoise stones
revolves endlessly.

Laundromat

This is how Hopper would have painted it:
the line of yellow dryers
catching the sunlight from the broad window.
Man with his hand reached up to the coin slot,
head turned to the side as though reflecting,
woman bent over the wide table
intent on sorting,
another standing hands at her side, looking off -
as though visiting another country;
each thing as it is,
not reaching beyond the scene for his symbols,
saying merely, "On such and such a day,
it was just as I show you."
Each person, each object, static
but the light a pilgrim.

Status Quo

My father, the stone,
rests in my heart
awaiting his completion
with a dry persistence.

I let him wait.
As all stones must,
he is learning patience.

I sought my heart
among the shadows
and found instead
a burnished leaf

I'm getting old now
I think I'll marry
the rain
and settle down

I think there is a way
to sculpt silence.
Perhaps that’s what
poems are:
sculptures of silence.

Like a blind dog
I turn my nose
to the wind
and truth
enters me.

We have to learn
not to replace
perception with knowledge.
Forget science.
Pierced by starlight,
I know what a star is.

Write on my tombstone:
Once so easily distracted,
now focused.

In the house of rain
there are many mansions

I wanted to understand
so much all at once
but learned:
to understand everything,
begin with one breath.

And now your shadow
falling across the page.
Where are you?
Why have you abandoned
your shadow?

We forget we're
mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home.

All those
I have mourned
will die
with my dying:
my mother's hopes,
and my father's doom:
all the faces,
all the rooms.

And you too shall
pass, the autumn
tells me, shaking
its leaves
in my face.

Albert Huffstickler

Issa is busy today muddling over the above. In the interim, he left this:

with a just-yanked
radish
pointing the way

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Hamlet Letters, 3: Henry Miller

Anais Nin and Henry Miller

Here is the third and last quotation from The Hamlet Letters by Henry Miller (in case you missed the first two, they may be found here and here):

Similarly, it seems to me, the dreams of the idiots today and for the last hundred years or so, will also be realized in the centuries to come. That dream is of economic independence, and I have no doubt it will be achieved, though perhaps in a way and through a form of life wholly unexpected. I believe that the Machine will be incarnated and will dominate man's life in dual fashion, as he has allowed himself to be dominated in the past by other ideas. I believe it will take centuries yet for man to pierce the fallacy of the machine way of life. I believe there will even be a certain amount of good resulting from his life with the machine, but ultimately it will be discarded–because it has no reality. The subservience to the machine seems to me almost like the last lesson for the narrow restricted personal view of life which man has. The world will really become the Hell which the machine, as a surrogate form of life, symbolizes. Man will come face to face with himself and see himself as a substitute for the real thing. He will have to surrender his narrow conception of life, his unreal desire for security and peace, for a protection from without, a protection wholly artificial and created out of fear. He will have to learn to live, not only with others, but with himself. He will discover that his comfortable world of economic bliss and security is in reality a straitjacket. He will see that he is surrounded by useless appendages to himself, the concrete manifestations and crystallizations of his own fears. The machine will become a myth as the Avenging Furies of the Greeks have become myth for us. Nothing can prevent this long and tedious experiment, for this is the real desire which is at the root of our present-day conflicts. It doesn't matter what ideal or ideology is proclaimed, in what name men fight and die: what is real and what will be made manifest is this desire for economic security. They will have it, the men to come, and they will wrestle with the evil which is bound up in this specious blessing. There will be men a thousand or two thousand years hence who, in their frantic desire to preserve the status quo, the era of economic bliss, will point to us of today as an example of the horrible condition from which they escaped and into which they are in danger of relapsing. But they will not relapse back into our condition of things. They will relapse forward; they will fall back blindly on the invisible wave which carries the human race on from round to round of ever-increasing reality. They will be carried forward as dead matter, as the debris and detritus of a vanished order. The Hamlet dilemma, which today we call neurosis, seems to me to be a symbolic expression or manifestation of man's plight when caught between the turn of the tides. There comes a moment when action and inaction seem alike futile, when the heart is black and empty and to consult it yields nothing. At such moments those who have lived by illusion find themselves high and dry, thrown up on the shore like the wrack of the sea, there to disintegrate and be swallowed up by the elemental forces. Whole worlds can go to bits like that, living out what you would call a "biological death," a death which Gutkind calls the Mamser world of unreality and confusion, the ghostly world of Hamlet, the Avitchi of the Buddhists, which is none other than a world of "effects." Here the unreal world of ideas, dogmas, superstitions, hopes, illusions flounders in one continuous nightmare–a reality more vivid than anything known in life because life had been nothing but a long evasion, a sleep.

Questions?

No, I didn't think so. Once again, a nod to Ed Baker for pointing me to this great little volume by Henry Miller. The astuteness, intellect, and prescience must be experienced to be believed.

Prophetic is often not too strong a word when it comes to the artist.

the human goblins
bow their heads...
dew dripping down

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny: Issa's Sunday Service, #51

Following the lead of Frank Zappa in his liner notes to We're Only in It for the Money, I'm going to recommend that you read Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" before listening to "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny."

Ah, now that's better, isn't it. Next week, if all goes well (which is a little joke I'm sharing with a few hundred of my closest friends), we'll be celebrating the first full year, 52 weeks, of Issa's Sunday Service. Stay tuned. Should the litrock continue?

Hmn.

This week's Lilliput feature poem comes from issue #77, March 1996. It's by Graham Duncan and it's one Kafka might have liked:

Fire Sermon

Steady there.
Mark this.
Tinder.
We are tinder
the world readies
for its spark.

Graham Duncan

And when it all shakes out, money, fire, and the whole damn thing, it's all down to this:

heat shimmers--
even horse shit
becomes money

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

250 Near Perfect Books of Poetry

This weekend the "Near Perfect Books of Poetry" list hit the milestone number of 250. It all started back just two years ago and has grown to quite an expansive list. It even spawned a "German Near Perfect Books of Poetry" list. The last two volumes added this weekend were two books by Gary Snyder. Hard to believe the list had come this far without an appearance by one of the 20th century's predominant poets.

A nice byproduct of all this is I've given away hundreds of issues of Lilliput Review to those making suggestions for the list. The offer still stands - 2 free current issues of Lillie for a suggestion of a near perfect book of poetry. There are many poetry readers out there and, no doubt, some of you will notice that your favorite volume of poetry is not included. Here's the list. Something missing? Let me know, either via a comment or directly at "lilliput review AT gmail DOT com (spelled out to avoid pesky harvesting bots).

Certainly, when it comes to lists there is plenty to quibble about here. What this is intended as, however, is a resource for folks looking for some poetry to read that actually moved someone. Period. Nothing definitive. Do some titles not belong here? Sure. Are there monumental gaps? Absolutely no doubt. This is a reader created list and as such it comes, warts and all, without apology. It's a communal effort with the aforementioned byproduct: 2 free issues of a small press magazine that glories in the short poem.

Later this week, I'll be adding one of my "new" favorite books of poems, Paradise Poems by Gerald Stern. And, yes, I was moved.

The List

The Clean Dark by Robert Adamson

The Golden Bird by Robert Adamson

Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova

The Fall — Jordie Albiston

A Nostalgist's Map of America by Agha Shaid Ali

Chrysanthemum Love by Fay Aoyagi

The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery

Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery

Some Trees by John Ashbery

Salute--to Singing by Gennady Aygi

Restoration Poems by Ed Baker

Pencil Flowers by Johnny Baranski

Back Roads to Far Towns by Bashô, translated by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu

Bashô And His Interpreters by Makoto Ueda

On Love and Barley by Bashô, translated by Lucien Styrk

The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (any & all translations)

Weeping for Lost Babylon — Eric Beach

Actual Air by David Berman

The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan

Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Silence In The Snowy Fields by Robert Bly

Turkish Pears in August by Robert Bly

Kerrisdale Elegies by George Bowering

The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan

Poems of Madness & Angel by Ray Bremser

Life Supports by William Bronk

Moment to Moment by David Budbill

The Last Night of the Earth Poems — Charles Bukowski

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski

Complete Poems by Basil Bunting

Dreaming of Robert de Niro — Grant Caldwell

Thirst by Patrick Carrington

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth

Fear of Dreaming by Jim Carroll

Woman Haiku Master by Chiyo-ni

California Poems by James Koller

The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins

Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

Selected Poems by Robert Creeley

Places/Everyone by Jim Daniels

Totem by Luke Davies

Forth A Raven by Christina Davis

And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Variations by Bill Deemer

Loba by Diane Di Prima (Wingbow, Penguin)

Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima

Griffon by Stephen Dobyns

Hello La Jolla by Ed Dorn

Small Favors by Barbara Drake

Space Before A by Barbara Drake

Streets of the Long Voyage — Michael Dransfield

Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry, tr. J. P. Seaton & D. Maloney

The Caged Tiger by Louis Dudek

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy

Roots and Branches by Robert Duncan

What Goes On: Selected & New Poems by Stephen Dunn

Miracles of the Sainted Earth by Victoria Edwards Tester

Things Stirring Together or Far Away by Larry Eigner

The World and Its Streets by Larry Eigner

Then, And Now by Ted Enslin

The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

Prufrock and Other Observations by T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hand by Martin Espada

Tryst by Angie Estes

Donna Juanita and the Love of Boys, by Gabrielle Everall

Against the Forgetting by Hans Faverey

Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlighetti

The Whole Song: Selected Poems by Vincent Ferrini

Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché

From the Country of Eight Islands, ed. by Hiroaki Sato & B. Watson

From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, ed. by B. ---Hendrickson & R. Johnson

West-Running Brook by Robert Frost

A bud — Claire Gaskin

Poet in New York by Frederico Garcia Lorca (trans. by B. Bellitt)

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

Insects of South Corvallis by Charles Goodrich

Without by Donald Hall

The Haiku Anthology, 3rd edition, edited by Cor van den Heuvel

Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison

Braided Creek: a Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser

book of resurrection by mark hartenbach

Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass

Station Island by Seamus Heaney

My Life by Lyn Hejinian

Best of Adrian Henri

Barbarian in the Garden by Zbigniew Herbert

Phosphorus by Alicia Hokanson

Spring Essence by Xuan Hu'o'ng Ho, translated by J. Balaban

The Never Ending by Andrew Hudgins

Working on My Death Chant by Albert Huffstickler

Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

Crow by Ted Hughes

Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes

Tread the Dark by David Ignatow

The Dumpling Field by Kobayashi Issa, trans. by Lucien Styrk

A Few Flies and I: Haiku by Issa

Inch by Inch by Issa, translated by Nanao Sakaki

Jade Mountain: anthology of Chinese Poetry, ed. by W. Bynner

Lost World by Randall Jarrell

The Beginning of the End by Robinson Jeffers

The Book of the Green Man by Ronald Johnson

Hojoki by Kamo Chomei

The Ancient Rain by Bob Kaufman

Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac

The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go by Eliot Khalil Wilson

Knock Upon Silence by Carolyn Kizer

The Essential Etheridge Knight by Etheridge Knight

Three Way Tavern by Ko Hun

The Art of Love by Kenneth Koch

New Addresses by Kenneth Koch

Geography of the Forehead by Ron Koertge

Pleasure Dome by Yusef Komunyakaa

All This Everyday by Joanne Kyger

The Blood of the Air by Philip Lamantia

O Taste and See by Denise Levertov

The Sorrow Dance by Denise Levertov

What Work Is by Philip Levine

Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell

The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy

Verso by Pattie McCarthy

Touch to My Tongue by Daphne Marlatt

dogwood & honeysuckle by john martone

ordinary fool by john martone

After All by William Matthews

The Nice Narrows: New and Selected Poems by Samuel Menashe

Asian Figures by W. S. Merwin

The Lice by W. S. Merwin

The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin

The Vixen by W. S. Merwin

At Dusk Iridescent by Thomas Meyer

Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints by Jack Micheline

Temple Dusk by Mitsu Suzuki

Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale

Forever Home by Lenard D. Moore

The Dillinger Books (various) by Todd Moore

Deadly Nightshade by Barbara Moraff

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

Cloudless at First by Hilda Morley

Eyes: the Poetry of Jim Morrison

The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story by Rusty Morrison

Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry, ed. by Stephen Berg

New American Poetry, 1945-1960, ed. by Donald Allen

Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda tr. Merwin

Next Room of the Dream by Howard Nemerov

Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh

Still Water by bpnichol

The Granite Pail by Lorine Niedecker

My Friend Tree by Lorine Niedecker

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

Collected Poems by Frank O'Hara

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

American Primitive by Mary Oliver

Dream Work by Mary Oliver

Owl and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver

West Wind: Poems & Prose Poems by Mary Oliver

Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing, translated by Sam Hamill

Why Not by Joel Oppenheimer

100 Poems from the Chinese, ed. by Kenneth Rexroth

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds

The Distances by Charles Olson

In Cold Hell, In Thicket by Charles Olson

Spearmint and Rosemary by Charles Olson

The Ink Dark Moon by Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, trans. by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

Primitive by George Oppen

The Yellow Floor by Gil Ott

Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat by Hosai Ozaki, tr. Hiroaki Sato

Great Balls of Fire by Ron Padgett

Notes Towards a Family by John Perlman

Three Years Rings by John Perlman

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Plath: Poems by Sylvia Plath (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

Collected Early Poems by Ezra Pound

The Yuan Chen Variations by F. T. Prince

Collected Poems by Sally Purcell

Droles de Journal by Carl Rakoski

Raising the Dead by Ron Rash

The Waiting Room at the End of the World by Jeff Rath

zen tele-grams by paul reps

The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart by Kenneth Rexroth

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese tr. by Kenneth Rexroth

Book of Images by Rainer Maria Rilke

New Poems (1908), the Other Part by Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Snow)

Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Edward Snow)

The Concrete River by Luis Rodriquez

Say Uncle by Kay Ryan

Rainswayed Nights by Max Ryan

Awesome Nightfall by Saigyo

Poems of a Mountain Home by Saigyo

The Kingdom by Frank Samperi

Quadrifariam by Frank Samperi

Spiritual Necessity by Frank Samperi

Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg

Investigative Poetry by Ed Sanders

Grass and Tree Cairn by Santoka, translated by Hiroaki Sato

The Morning of a Poem by James Schuyler

Buffalo Head Solos by Tim Seibles

Hammerlock by Tim Seibles

Selected Poems by Anne Sexton

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Itinerary by Reginald Shepherd

Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror by Nathan Shepherdson

Selected Poems by Masaoka Shiki

Axe Handles by Gary Snyder

Turtle Island by Gary Snyder

Elements of San Joaquin by Gary Soto

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford

China Basin by Clemens Starck

Journeyman's Wages by Clemens Starck

Traveling Incognito by Clemens Starck

The Steel Crickert, variations/translations by Stephen Berg

The Color Wheel by Timothy Steele

Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

Bunch Grass by Robert Sund

New Math by Cole Swenson

Poems New and Collected by Wisława Szymborska translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska

Poems to Eat by Takuboku, translated by Carl Sesar

Memoir of a Hawk by James Tate

Return to the City of White Donkeys by James Tate

Collected Poems - Dylan Thomas

Bittersweet by James Tipton

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

Goodstone by Fred Voss

Argonaut Rose by Diane Wakoski

Cap of Darkness by Diane Wakoski

Collected Greed Parts 1-13 by Diane Wakoski

Inside the Blood Factory by Diane Wakoski

Helping the Dreamer by Anne Waldman

Hermit Poems by Lew Welch

The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners

Scenes of Life at the Capital by Philip Whalen

Severance Pay by Philip Whalen

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Blues and Roots/Rue and Bluets by Jonathan Williams

Paterson by William Carlos Williams

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Sinking of Clay City by Robert Wrigley

Littlefoot by Charles Wright

The Beforelife by Franz Wright

Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright

The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright.

Selected Poems by James Wright

This Journey by James Wright

Radiant Silhouette by John Yau

The Tower by W.B. Yeats

Elegy on Toy Piano by Dean Young

River of Stars by Yosano Akiko, tr. S. Hamill & K. Matsui Gibson

Where Time Goes by Sander Zulauf

even Mount Fuji
makes the list...
New Year's inventory

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don