HEARING FROM HERRING

A global problem with local impact. Still not understood the decline in what are unfortunately seen as "bait fish" will lead to a catastrophic decline in sea life if the overharvesting does not stop soon. Harvesting from lower in the ocean food chain is an all too familar example of the trail to ecosystem destruction. Think of a forest impacted by over cutting. Soon the large trees are gone and harvestable timber is redefined as younger and smaller growth. The demand for wood fuel in many parts of the world strips the forest of the growth of small trees and bush. If conditions allow it grassland appears for a time until over grazing and erosion finishes the job. On the way back home after a weekend in Maine, my alternator and battery quit, resulting in a night at Motel 6, not quite the fun poet Obeeduid had had the previous two nights camping out at Lake St. George State Park. Developing awareness and raising consciousness the poets Gary Lawless and Karin Spitfire held events all summer in the coastal towns of Maine where an once thriving sardine fishery allowed small town factories to process and can the fish for later consumption. The closing of the last operating sardine factory this year punctuated the effort.
One cosmic connect of the extra day on the road was the discovery of a column in the Worcester, MA. Telegram & Gazette newspaper (8/20/2010) by the outdoors writer Mark Blazis (markblazis@charter.net) The title "Giants gobbling up fish"

SHOW CAVES OF CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA

Crave an underground view
streams flowing out of dark chasm
deep below surface
water currents head down to deeper lair.
Darkness of side passages
branch channels in limestone
room to crawl away from the electric light
but not on a wild cave adventure today.

A Show Cave is all upright
grandmother with a walking stick
teenage girl shivering in shorts
stairs to climb, damp flattened floor
the wiring nearly as old as discovery day.

Light brought to show melting form.
Eyes open to beautiful structures
Water drip carried stone deposited
grows an inch in a hundred years.

Later shut my eyes and minds-eye
sees the glowing multiple forms
calcite crystal flowers, thousands of stalactites
pure white flowstone not frozen
but so slow time stills.

Inconsequential cave crickets above the entrance
the usual tales of fish without eyes
names carved on walls
near the surface roots dangle down,
they find a way.

Ceiling and walls black from woodsmoke
natives stored their corn
made a trading place for tribes
spirit world was strong
phosphorescent flakes a star map to a different heaven.

Our guide calls cities concentration camps.
She is still pissed about the small pox blankets.
She has been touring this stone
for most of her life.

July 31, 2010
near Huntington, Pennsylvania

CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE

Back from the Olson Conference held June 4-6, 2010 at Simon Fraser University's Segel Graduate School of Business in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt with the people and the surroundings. I have to think they found a way to a great success for this conference where the participants did not seem to need to create conflict inorder to be noticed; but strived to communicate instead. There were great differences of opinion but also careful conduct expressed in willingness to entertain ideas for their own sake. Course that is just my opinion. Who knows what dark underpinning of antithetical representation appeared when I was not looking? None I hope.

My comment the first day to the first of two roundtables on The Future of Olson Studies followed me around a bit for the rest of the conference. There was talk about the complexity of Olson and the necessity to study and understand his systems and antecedents (which wouldn't hurt, you understand) before reading his poetry. I just said, "Well, you don't have to. You can go ahead and read, enter the text. Bring whatever you have with you. Look around and bring out what you find, what is useful to you." Oh yes, 'negative capability' someone in the audience said. Probably because they were thinking the same thing themselves, a bunch of people came up to me and said they were glad I made those comments. Whoever said 'negative capability' really had it right. Those who know me know I am not a champion of ignorance. The anti-intellectualism of American culture is one of my country's biggest failings. Studying Olson has its own reward. The collection and archives at the University of Connecticut is suppost to be filled with material from a poet who wrote on all available materials with great profusion. Those who have visited these archives recommended them to the assembled as an almost necessary stop. You have to have "certain" credentials to be admitted, however. I'll have to try some time to see if I can get in.

One of the most interesting presentations for me was by Jonathan Skinner. He showed a photograph of Charles Olson standing next to his research collection of notes, diagrams and map overlays of the Gloucestor, MA area, stuck on probably the biggest wall area available in Olson's Fort Square apartment. A continual work in progress for Olson. The partly disassembled map survives in the archive. This got me thinking about the levels of thinking interfacing the unknown and familiar. You have the map. You have the interior mental map and then you have walking the place mapped. Plus the rest like mythic, chronological and knowledge of prior events all brought to cognitive structure and perception

Having Ralph Maud present was invigorating. His life and sharp mind are what I want when I am 82 years-old as he is. Those of us still at the conference late Sunday got to hear his presentation of a dramatic reading of Olson's play Apollonius of Tyana. When I first met him on Friday afternoon, I wanted to ask him about one of the points of the larger dialog our panel members had been having in preparing for our presentation (one I have returned to more than once). The specific of it is that Tom Clark in his biography of Olson refers to the poem Cole's Island as an example of allegory. I do not find allegory as I place this poem's poetic work in the mythological present. I said to Ralph Maud in the poem Olson meets with the Death not some distant reference of. He said he met someone there. Which reminded me that the poem never identifies the stranger as Death absolutely, "it was not one thing more than that he was Death instantly that he came into sight." We talked some more about his biography of Charles Olson. How he felt he needed to write it as for all of his work showing inaccuracies in Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Tom Clark went and published a second printing without making any changes.

Of use was Kim Minkus talking about ways of reading a page, new technology and "the high energy construct" of Olson's Projective Verse being available and generated by performance using internet tools. I should say Minkus's Presentation was on Rachel Zolf's work which no doubt limited her talk. She did trace the investigative form of poetry to Charles Olson and made a nice point about the poet's use of space being invaded by digital space.

Jeanne Heuving gets my award for HOW COULD YOU LEAVE THAT OUT? Her presentation "Whose Projective Poetics?" shared ground with Jacqueline Turner's, who went just before her. The published letters between Frances Boldereff and Charles Olson showed he had a deep debt to Boldereff in regards to the ideas that shaped Projective Verse and other works. It was when she talked of "other energy sources" and even "stealing projective away from Olson" looking at contemporaries that followed in the decade of the 1950s without mentioning a prime energy source Jack Kerouac. Kerouac even said he invented "projective verse". Look at Mexico City Blues, the pages themselves how he broke open form and used space

Continued on Saturday morning by attending presentations on Projective Geometry and Dance. The three panels found under this topic were diverse and all very well done. Lisa Siraganian "Administering the Poem" As a propagandist and "artist/bureaucrat" Charles Olson had a life of qualitative success before he choose the life of a poet. What Siraganian intuited was the Idealized Admininistrator where an administrator must be a method expert and methods triumph over specialized knowledge. Interesting Olson life history in World of Ideas. He did a publication "projection of America directive" and progressive pro-labor circulating multi-media. How much carry over and carry on are the questions to fulfill. I can see forward, onward, projective as thematically similar but find the whole question less interesting then one good Olson poem. People have heard me say this before, the work is in the poetry itself. If the poem is not any good then the rest of it doesn't really matter. There are lots of words that if you are not sure of your originality you would be afraid to touch. macro and micro social norms also come into play. It is already fading but can anyone remember the word you were not allowed to say at this Conference (prophetic)

Kate Markoski brought us the dancing of Merce Cunningham. Mindscape picture of large Charles taking Cunningham's class at Black Mountain College and dancing with great particularity. Cunningham brought vision of dance being always individual, dancers own center the focus with position not oriented towards center front of stage. In Letters for Origin (letter of May 8, 1951) there is a passage on dance. "an investigation of the body as instrument" and the movement Olson was seeing in the glyphs he was studying, "the graphic of drama." He states as dictum: any player is (has to be) 1st dancer. I can report on the weekend's big mystery. Unless there is another description somewhere? Martin Duberman quotes Merce Cunningham on Olson as a dancer. "I enjoyed him... he was something like a light walrus." Looks like "walrus" wins and "elephant" loses.

I wondered if David Herd's presentation was on Secrets. I don't think it actually was. This was a case (and not the only one) where the presenter needed either more time or a less intellectually stacked setting. Herd's presentation required concentration which I apologize for not having enough at the time. Herd's title was From him only will the old state-secret come. I would like to read the whole paper if the opportunity comes my way. He pointed out how Charles Olson searched for sources on whaling used by Melville, however conceptualized deeper and gathered additional data which revealed more of the underlying social-economic structure. I could be off on this, but perhaps Herd then brought his own perspective to the source material as well as both Melville's and Olson's use of it. I did think; "Hey there are other poetic uses of that material" when Herd equated Capitalism with image of:

eight skeletons in a cave
shipped wreaked
by a whale stoving in
their vessel

Answering my question, he cleared up that he was referring to the eight men themselves. How their own choices had put them in a death trap. The reference to Capitalism put me more immediately in mind of the distant owners.

I went to the Panel: Olson and/or Apocalypse. This was a last moment choice. I was aimed at first at the panel that was going to discuss "the Archive" since Rootdrinker Institute has an archive which is growing but not as yet organizing. But after earlier discussion of "the Archive" I was not sure I could even get past the gatekeepers there. Now the gatekeepers to the Apocalypse that is a different story. There I have a seat saved. Peter O'Leary was the only announced presenter in town. Stephen Collis contributed a poem impression which was a imperative pleasure for me. What if they went to an Olson Conference and poetry broke out! Peter O'Leary's talk was titled "Fire against Wisdom:Olson and Synchronicity" Peter's own energy was pouring out like the sun. I enjoyed his style and conviction completely until later when talking with Jonathan Skinner, we discussed that topic (indirectly). There can be a bit of the zealous in presentation speech but it is a tough line because of the easy dismissal of the overzealous. I don't think Peter was overzealous except for maybe just a tiny tone. No problem, really, but for myself it was a reminder to keep questioning. The content of Peter's talk was along pathways I have traveled. Jung writes in his Forward to the I Ching a certain moment, not of time as in hours and calendars, but as "an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin." O'Leary spoke of acausal connective, not causal, meaning full of cross connective. Here are a couple of Casline bumper stickers: THERE IS ORDER IN RANDOMNESS (which is how I organically design my vegetable gardens) and CHANCE DOES NOT HAPPEN BY CHANCE.

The Panel I came to Vancouver to be a part of was the last panel on the last day of the Conference. called A Curriculum of the Soul: from Buffalo Out. It is like reviewing a friend's poetry book or even worst reviewing your own poetry book to comment on the panel you yourself are on. I think I'll take a clue from the proceedings and say a bit about the development and hoped for impact and let others give feedback and critiques on the panel itself. John Roche, who I met after seeing and then publishing his poem Joe the Poet in Rootdrinker, was able to swap information and stories about Charles Olson's Buffalo days and The Institute of Further Studies. I remember asking him if he thought Charles Olson would be remembered as a poet or if he would be assigned to "the dust bin of history" (cliche). Ken Warren and House Organ became known to me through multiple vectors. Michael Boughn and Shuffaloff, I believe I found on my own even though I first read his work in the CofS fascicle Mind. I unconnectedly found a website when on a search through the innersphere and remember showing a copy to Dennis Sullivan in Smitty's Tavern and saying this is a guy we should meet. Hoa Nguyen also became interesting after I read an interview in which she discussed her personal take on teaching Olson's work. I had heard of Skanky Possum through Albert Glover. Glover I first met on campus at St. Lawrence University. He was carrying his medicine pouch and had a carved staff decorated with feathers and was pointed out to me as the poetry teacher which looked about right. The lead up to the panel presentation in Vancouver involved some long e-mail streams; Hoa's Buffalo reading when I met her and Ken for the first time; compressed research into the letters between Jack Clarke and Albert Glover regarding CofS and other matters and distribution of From Buffalo Out poem packet. We had shared and individual goals for what we wanted to accomplish in Vancouver. Sharing the stage as a panel and helping to create space for Albert Glover to expound and share insights on the "great project" brought to culmination in the form of a book A Curriculum of the Soul was one of the ones our gang prized.

Whatever wave of the event I was riding put me next to Renee Rodin and other poets from local Vancouver at the concluding poetry bash at W2-Storyeum. A great cave of a place with about seventy people there to hear poets from out of town and from the Olson Conference read. Stephen Collis happy to introduce me as from the Normanskill Watershed and not Albany, New York. Nice to leave their city with such bright and affectionate support as I return to the local, something like water seeping from a hill. Each poet dependent on their own time situation. Our application of poetry depending on who we are (who I am) with the variation always fitted to the individual's moment, though the fundamental lines of direction are of course the same.

MICHAEL CZARNECKI: 28 DAYS ON US ROUTE 20

Michael Czarnecki May 15, 2010

Michael Czarnecki is traveling and writing his way across country for the next 23 days, 28 days all told. Day 3 was spent in Albany County, New York State. Michael Czarnecki is poetry reading and blog journaling his way along US Route 20 all the way. Here is his site where he records his journey: www.foothillspublishing.com/us20/. You can look up his schedule and maybe meet up with him at one of his readings. He is also poetry reading 4 times in Montana on his way back (Route 20 doesn't go through Montana...too bad). We got the only workshop on the trip. A three hour affair on the travel writing form Haibun. In talking about travel writing Michael mentioned David Grayson, who he discovered while reading Lin Yutang. He said Grayson doesn't actually travel all that much but has a style of observation and simple prose that Michael tries to incorporate in his own journal work. The criticism that Grayson has language that is too simple is not at all a negative to Michael. "Simple good!" he said in a monosyllabic way (just kidding Michael) For the Haibun form itself look to poet Matsuo Basho's famous travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North described as a journey away from the familar in search of deeper meaning through zen. Writing Haibun is a choice as it requires a different focus. Not just for writing of spiritual poetic pilgrimages as Basho did, but for riding prose over the changing journey of sensation, writing to move one along and then add haiku to bring a stop and fill the moment.

tea, coffee, water
old writings brought to surface
quench poet's thirsty mind

After the workshop Michael has said he wanted to explore Route 20. I took him to the Albany pine bush to show him the old native's road, a footpath network, the literal beaten path of a time before whitemen and horses. Following East Old State Road I looked for a stop for some walking off into the pine. True exploration as I had never walked in this area before. I did take a group of schoolkids on a traverse of the State Preserve a few years ago so I knew it was terrian where it would be easy to get lost because of the sameness of topography and vegetation. The size of the pitch pine was impressive. Michael pointed out the sharpe prickles on each tip of cone scale which are an outstanding feature of this tree. There were old cones on the trees and ground. New cones ripen in September.

against the bright sky
twisted trunk sprays grasping branch
turns backward forward
A little map reading got us to our next site. Glass Pond in Guilderland. These small ponds form where the east branch of the Hungerkill joins the main branch. They are right on Route 20 so both locals and travelers notice the marshy expanse and see duck and other waterfowl visiting. Not much farther along the Hungerkill joins the Normanskill just upstream from the Route 155 bridge. The Schoolcraft family ran a glass factory next to Glass Pond where Henry Rowe Schoolcraft learned the family business. Schoolcraft and his wife Jane Schoolcraft did some of the earliest collecting of native folklore and mythology with emphasis on native culture and language. I wanted to show Michael Glass Pond before I took him to the Guilderland Library History Room which has a nice collection of old books including some written by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. In my FootHills Publishing book Thirty Poems my poem THE MYSTERY OF THE GHOST HAUNTED HILLS is dedicated to the late local historian Arthur B. Gregg. I was able to show Michael the heart of this fine collection of books was Arthur Gregg's private library. In the poem Gregg looks for the grave of Colonel Abraham Wemple and speaks of the flooding of the Wemple homestead to make a reservoir. On this day we were able to trace the landscape mentioned in the poem and add to the "history" by making some new memories.
Later in the evening, after some good conversation and a few homemade beers (gift of Martha Healy and Sandor Schuman) Michael, either loading or unloading, lost his photos from the day. I had wanted to make Czarnecki's US ROUTE 20 Journey known to readers of this blog. There are good number spread across the United States. Also I wanted to post some Day 3 photos that I took.

scraps of paper fall
sent machine by machine home
memory recalls

LEAP AND THE STEEP ROCKY TRAIL WILL APPEAR

Our Poet's Tour of the Catskill Mountains included views of greening mountains, small two-lane roads and indirect routes to almost everyplace we wished to reach. Woodstock area poet Will Nixon met Martha Healy, Sandor Schuman and me at the parking lot for the hiking trail up Mount Tremper. Our day was to also include a visit to Woodchuck Lodge, poet John Burroughs' summer house and grave site in Roxbury, New York (build on his old family farm). Burroughs had another writer's retreat built in a wild area less then a mile from his West Park, New York home. A small building with slabwood siding called "Slabsides." For over two years a group of local poets met there to share their own and others work. In part, the result is a new anthology of contemporary nature poems titled Universe at Your Door:The Slabsides Poets, edited by Will Nixon and Alison Koffler from Post Traumatic Press, 104 Orchard Lane North, Woodstock, NY 12498 (dswbike@aol.com). Will started our hike by discussing John Burroughs and I had brought some poems and quotes of his. As Will pointed out for a poet who today is largely forgotten, John Burroughs was amazingly popular and in his life time read by millions. He hung out with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt on the level of collected friendship. Will said Burroughs hated the automobile at first but then Henry Ford gave him one and he changed his opinion. You do not have a million readers without having influence and celebrity. At his funeral the photographers, newspapermen and other reporters outnumbered family members and seemed more interested in photographing the rich and famous than anything else.
Since Will has written of quail in his book My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse. I read a stanza from John Burroughs poem The Partridge:

Ah! ruffed drummer, let thy wings
Beat a march the days will heed,
Wake and spur the tardy spring,
Till minstrel voices jocund ring
And spring is spring in very deed

This seemed like a nice energetic poem to start our hike with but first Will Nixon demonstrated how by flapping wings a partridge makes their drumming sound. We soon discovered we had hit the peak of spring flower bloom on Mount Tremper. The different colors and varieties of violets alone could fill a guide book. Sandy was taking his own pictures, especially of the few he couldn't identify. I pointed out that violet leaves make good salad greens and ate some to prove it.

We joked at the headlines, Noted Bioregional Poet Dies From Plant Ingestion Outside of His Known Watershed. I checked, violet leaves are edible and so are the flowers. Reading more John Burroughs while on the hike, we got I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. We didn't hear any patridge druming but I did hear the quiet of an owl in flight. What we thought was a fish crow was also determined by sound, more croak than caw.
Leap and the net will appear is another John Burroughs quote. This "wisdom" led to some good natured (pun intended) revisions and warnings. It was agreed that Burroughs didn't mean this literally. "It's a metaphor!" Sandy kindly pointed out.

The trail wasn't steep but the way was long. Martha decided to enjoy a spot part way up the mountain and Will and Sandy decided to take pity on my weary legs and removed a nice portion of the upward trail so I didn't have to go as far that last 3/4 mile. Then they added it back plus more on the long downward hike so I am not sure I gained anything and man it was a long way back to the parking lot.
The visit to Woodchuck Lodge was a great end to the day. Visually different then the trails with weathered house, stone fences, broad fields and ancient trees. I was interested in the Spring Houses at the Lodge and also near the John Burroughs grave site. One old apple tree had to be well over a hundred years old

Will Nixon pointed out the hill named "clump" mentioned in a Will Christman poem. In a sense we were recreating Christman's annual visit to see his friend John Burroughs and even followed the same roads back to Albany. I drove down past the Christman Preserve to show Williams Hollow Farm, the Christman home, to Sandor and Martha.

--- Alan Casline

View of Clump Hill at Burroughs Farm

John Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge

ON SITE: BRUCE HOLSAPPLE NEW MEXICO

DRY COUNTRY


waiting for a white truck
at United States Post Office
Magdelena, N.M. 87825
no one told me half the
people in New Mexico
drove white pick-ups!
Bruce Holsapple says “I figured”
spying me standing outside
writing in my pocket notebook
and then I still almost followed
the wrong white truck—only
paused cause I saw a passenger
Bruce stops at every turn onto a
different road—“Did you notice how
the last road followed along in the arroyo?”
ravens roost in the cliff
below his house—drink from
the small pond he fills—
at his doorstep


poem by Alan Casline
3/26/2010

ravens roost cliff

Alan Casline: I have the whole world against me. I can’t even get the ink out of the pen. There is something not allowing me to write.

Bruce Holsapple: Pencil—go to pencil.

A.C.: I know. I know. I don’t have one with me. I like pencil. I went to look at the pictographs (I call them) near Albuquerque.

figure of man
next to spiraling form
next to scar in rock
where petroglyphs
were broken away
were cut/ sharp tool
on canyon ridge
sun glare precedes
1st ray over the rim

powerline
glyph
different power
airplane rumble
dig for a quiet energy

B.H.: So what do you think of New Mexico so far?

A.C.: I like it, I like it.

B.H.: Yeah…real different than New England or New York.

A.C.: Yeah, well—what watershed, rivers, creeks, I consider myself to be a Normanskill poet—I live in that watershed, which is an approach—I have three little poems called the three pillars of local poetry—one of them is called THE WELL. It just talks about the town may change but the well doesn’t change—that not just the well but those people you find using the well—that’s where you find wisdom.

B.H.: That’s in FROM BUFFALO OUT isn’t it?

A.C.: No, no—there’s another piece in there, which is my piece on local poetry. Says “dig out the spring”—literally dig out the spring. Which is true, I have dug out more than one spring. But—as far as the Southwest goes…what I’ve found out since I got here - wow – it is even more true here – the well is the town!

B.H.: Everything revolves around the water.

A.C.: All these settlements…

B.H.: Yeah – you can’t do anything without water for sure. We are up above the Rio Grande—this water here if it flows anywhere it flows down into the Rio Salada. The Rio Grande is a central rift and the mountains are lifting up on either side – we are up above here so the water is kind of flowing down, wherever it is flowing down – it loops around down here.

A.C.: The Rio Salada, that’s a tributary of the Rio Grande?

B.H.: Well—tributary is kind of a funny word. It flows sometimes and other times it doesn’t flow. We came up the road from Magdalena and then took dirt roads for the last eighteen miles. The house is close to where Abbe Spring is and this is called Abbe Spring Canyon. Where the water flows is basically into the Rio Salada which goes down into the Rio Grande eventually and you crossed over that when you drove south—a big wide swath of sand, that’s the Rio Salada. It flows two or three times a year tops. It is still watershed. It is flowing under the surface all the time. That is where, it was on the Rio Salada, when the Navajo were trying to escape persecution, settled a camp over here and just stayed put and out of everyone’s way until they were rediscovered in almost 1900 - No one knew there were a band of Navajo here. They were staying where the spring is.

A.C.: When you send me a picture of where your house is I thought—Oh you live in the brush land, now I get out to New Mexico and I find you live in a forest – comparatively. There is a lot of cellulose, a lot of woody fiber out there.

B.H.: Ha, ha! The elevation allows—they call them cedar out here. They are actually juniper trees and Pinyons. Some are old, really old.

BRUCE HOLSAPPLE POEM

Elevation


Out walking the dirt road
past my place (for exercise)
& as the road climbs
the pinion & juniper
give way to scrub oak
ponderosa pine

good for the lungs—humph!
(all the dust that drivers
swooshing by, put up)

spot a half-familiar plant
grassy tuft of thick blades
amid native grass & goldenrod
I know you, I said
kneeling, then peered down
over my shoulder
back to where I first learned
this weed, “goat’s beard”
saw through myself
to that desperate time

the distance
took my breath

***

Mysterious older man
named Charley, can’t hear well
thin body, white beard
slightly stooped
bicycles to town & back—
keeping active
I’d guess

walking the mountains
with his dog
I’d seen their tracks
& it takes them half the time, an hour
to reach the top of North Baldy

but the inspiration is what I want to know
for he’s climbed the peaks hereabout
many times

huh, he says, looking in my eyes

it’s a personal question

fear would be one response
the lack of integrity

fun would be another

huh, he says, looking in my eyes

***

I climbed Ladrones on Thanksgiving
where thieves once hid sheep
stolen from pueblos to the east
3 hours up, no path,
ate a precarious tuna sandwich on a protruding rock lip
wide eyed, huge reddish plains
east & north, & the other ranges,
Magdalenas or Gallinas

felt changed, saw differently—
to the degree I had climbed,
overcome myself
—thought so, at least

& working back down thru
a stony crowded canyon
pushed thru brush & cactus
hopping rocks, sliding on my backside,
wore holes thru my pants, both back pockets—
I discover this at home—lost my wallet,
credit cards, licenses

Going back up that canyon the next day
2/3s to the top, where it narrowed,
such a tangle of scrub oak, apache plume,
cholla, up, around, thru,
massive rocks, drop offs,
I’m down on all fours
cactus thorns, arms streaked with scars
close to stopping, stopped at
a small cliff I’d slid over,
flopped down from,
my fat black wallet
plunked into the sand

BIG NIGHT: FEATURING POET HOA NGUYEN IN BUFFALO

Dear Hoa,

So nice to meet you face-to-face in Buffalo last Saturday. You got to go snowshoeing at a preserve and saw great grackle you said and I arriving early got to walk around downtown with wet snow above, below and running off my hat. I won't pretend I'm noble and gave money to all the panhandlers, just two out of three. For one it was "busfare" and for another "to call home" but the third guy wanted money for a cup of coffee, that's a no...I could of used a cup myself about then, so screw him... I kept walking reading the names of streets. I saw Jefferson Street so I thought it was going to be a President thing but turned out not. As I like to say, I wasn't lost just off the path and I got all swung around somewhere and back to the 468 Washington Street place about a hour later. The trip to hear you read made too much sense in a solid extension of impulse and urge. You live in Austin, Texas and I doubt you will be this close again before our panel in Vancouver. Of our two vehicles, I took the one with 4-wheel drive and living as long as I have in New York State the Thurway becomes a familar road. Wasn't bad, there were bands of storms but nothing that sat down to wait for you, just kind of blowing in and blowing through. Bring Jack Kerouac into it (lunacy, wild foolishness and extravagant folly are the fountain for creative art) so of course I would drive three hundred miles to hear a poem (BALLERINA IN A MUSIC BOX).

Don't get me wrong, not to throw all of my poems out the car window as I drive down Main Street, good sense and my wife's concern meant I had a motel room in Batavia for Saturday night. I got to meet Kenneth Warren and John Roche was there so only Michael Boughn was not in the room. I was not there to make waves. I was explicitly not there to make waves. Calm deep still pool, that's me. Seriously, great crowd & on a stormy night had to be over a hundred people. This is not like a critical review or news report so please, to the other performers "I enjoyed it all" and to say anything is to slight the scope of everyone's efforts. Thanks Just Buffalo and Buffalo Poets Theater and the band Gut Flora. When Hoa Nguyen started to read there came over me a sweet contentment. The first poem out was one of hers I remember best. The NFL football playoffs are on T.V. and she is there in the room pretending they are all celebrating her Aquarious birthday. It is just congruent, weirdly so, as so many poets would detach & maybe add their social commentary but Hoa emerses. Here is the action, the tension and ultimately in the totality of her work the vector towards decency and the good. She brings her poetic consciousness and not judgements, awareness shapes, picking out bits (but I can't say "no joke or no lie" right Hoa?) and then we get it, all the commentary fuzz on the furniture "I disappear - I disappear."

When you mentioned tonic, Spring tonic, I wanted to yell out sassafras root! which the traditional Spring tonic of the St. Lawrence River Valley farmers was kept in a glass jar just inside the door to the cellar and I can remember this one old woman saying her father made her drink four or five swallows every day starting in late March to shake off lethargy. The recipe was secret and could contain a number of ingredients (the mints, ginger, willow bark, etc.) but they all had sassafras root from what I can tell. (Rootdrinker) Any of my good poet friends, I would of yelled out, but I couldn't with you, we are barely introduced. There is something to look forward to or maybe not? I enjoyed when you said "That is the herbal lesson portion" and again you had another lesson for the audience. Handing out lessons as part of a poetry reading that is an opening concept for me. Like hearing Ed Sanders be funny and thinking there is a use for humor and I can be funny and not be irrelevant. Poet as teacher and we haven't even gotten into the authority of Charles Olson. If you can, send me a copy of your essay that The University of Iowa is publishing in their anthology Poets on Teaching. I say the three hats of poet, editor, publisher are the same hat. You must know about that. Your thread involving grackles interests me and that you hated them at first and then came to love them. UGLY POEM of line "raucous perches" does get ugly, such uglies are the seasonings of reality. There is alot more to talk about when we meet again. We poets have a corner of our own in Smitty's Tavern in Voorheesville. I had Kiss a Bomb Tattoo, your book from Austin's Effing Press, with me on Sunday and it got passed around. Sorry if that hurts book sales and none of the pages were upside down either.

It was cool to talk with you, John and Ken at one time. Maybe using the power of the allmighty staple we can put together a poetry bundle to send around. Hope all is well.

Best, Alan

BARE HILL ABOVE VINE VALLEY, CANADAIGUA LAKE WATERSHED

BARE HILL


bare hill — Seneca sacred place

bomb-fire hi-jinks for villagers

and faded lovers – blacken memory
















windswept of snow

winter day — sky solid blue

jet like ant on pebble surface

slice of sky


--- Alan Casline

NANAO SAKAKI

IN WHICH I THROW A FLAT DEAD SQUIRREL OFF THE NORMANSKILL BRIDGE IN HOMAGE OF NANAO SAKAKI

Nature is not fuzzy and warm.
-Gary Snyder
















Charlie’s walk on suburban streets
He’ll sniff-out I’ll see
dead carcasses
pets and predators
Village Street Cleaners will eventually come by
or the Village Crew that chips fallen branches
and picks up owners’ trimmings left
at the curb
a bird, or a snake or a squirrel
might lie in the road for weeks

without rhyme or reason
but sometimes
I’ll come back with a shovel and bury the squirrel
you could throw them in the garbage bin
ship them on to the landfill
that’s what happens to most
small creatures

under a leaf pile is enough for fleeting life wren
it is nothing about sanitation for me
just a little bit more
to cover a creature with earth
pray soul
wings to heaven

Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe
a memorial today held for
Nanao Sakaki
died last year on December 21st He was 86
















cold snap for days when I see the squirrel
“Some car got you good”
Charlie sniffs. I pull him away
squirrel’s mouth is pulled back in bloody maniacal grin
one dead eye open and looking at me
I bet you are frozen flat I think
funny true when I kick him out of the road
he comes up solid frozen stiff
top side sprawled limbs
bottom flat as a piece of paper





















three days later, the twenty-first of December
a frozen dead squirrel sits in the passenger seat
of my old green Windstar Van
cirrus clouds up high blue sky wide straight drifted apart vapor trail line
“The poetic arguments,” I tell the squirrel. “shouldn’t be bandied about
as if a trail of words and the uncertainty of perceptions
even a call for cultural revolution
really would convince anyone. If you don’t feel alive, every particle alive,
every piece alive,
every dead squirrel carcass alive, stone, sound, breath,
every journey, every time Nanao appears alive
then it must be a dead world.
But I don’t have to tell you that do I squirrel”






























the Comfort Inn parking lot is close to the bridge.
red and blue police lights flash on the Albany side
either a breakdown or a traffic ticket
nothing to concern a man with a dead squirrel and a mission
three crow reluctantly move out of my parking place
“Scavengers. You’ll get your due”
a cloud of small brown birds flow in and out of the field in front of us
exhale, breath in beauty… thank you Nanao
















dance with high step lighter touch
cleared path
of roadway on to the 9-W bridge
to the very middle
cosmic giggle praise to the burning mad ones
ahimsa, nonharming, go in peace, totem squirrel,
totem bridge
tossed high over the mesh restraining fence
down to the icy water of the stream
out of sight destination unknown


Alan Casline
December 21, 2009
Normanskill stream

SPONTANEUS GLYPH POETRY AND READING IN CANTON, NEW YORK

elm trees at dawn November 7, 2009

When in Maine this October I picked up a nearly complete set of Science History of the Universe, published by The Current Literature Publishing Company, New York (1911). There is something especially interesting is reading one hundred year old scholarship and science. I do not have any of the "oh we are so much smarter now" attitude. I'm intensely interested in the words, phrases, metaphors, threads of thoughts, all the older ways of thinking. The section on Literature by is by the Managing Editor for the entire series Francis Rolt-Wheeler. He says in beginning that the essential difference between Speech and Writing is "the former appeals to the ear, the latter to the eye." He writes that the Chinese never conceived a smaller unit than a word and only when "an alien people" the Phenicians took to their own language the best "expedients at which Egypt arrived"did the alphabet come to be.
glyph of poetry at the yoga loft

For some time as a book-maker as well as a poet and writer, I've wondered at what the poem as an energy field consisted of when the page is "decorated" by an additional graphic image. Another book that is holding my interest is Daniel Belgrad's THE CULTURE OF SPONTANEITY published by The University of Chicago Press (1998). Both books have chapters on the beginning of writing, movement from picture to pictograph. Details of time and abstract conceptions are difficult to convey from the single picture. A record in pictograph form ( think a cartoon strip) can more completely tell a story. Belgard's Chapter 3 is titled Ideogram and his interest is how the avant-garde artists used native american pre-Columbian art to link ideas in paintings through "spontaneous picture-writing" Belgard also associates a number of poets ( such as Charles Olson's cultural-political project of reaching back and down) with a rejection of the abstract and impersonal qualities in modern culture's lack of attention to the local and specific life. The next stage of writing, referred to as the ideogram and as "hieroglyph" or simply "glyph" (think Chinese characters) is favored because it avoids the complete abstraction of phonetic alphabets and operates differently as "image" Ezra Pound wrote on his poetic method (1914), "the image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language." The associations found with the field create complexities of meaning, expression and energy.

Poets from Top: Albert Glover, Dale Hobson, Paul Doty

Such is my introduction to my glyph of poetry at the yoga loft. After our four person reading set up in the yoga loft above The Blackbird Cafe in Canton, I left town and drove to my cabin. I knew I was staying there on what might be a cold November night and so I had set a fire in the woodstove the last time I was there, earlier in October. I had driven the four plus hours from Albany, N.Y. staring out at about 2 pm and found the mountains and highland from Newcomb to past Colton covered with snow. Thankfully as I came down off of Waterman Hill there was only a powdering of white. It turned out to be a cold night with temperatures in the twenties. Liquid in the evening, the marsh was frozen surface by the next morning. I was still buzzed from poetry by the time I got the lamps lit and the room warm. There was a good poetry crowd at the reading and my fellow poets, Paul Doty, Albert Glover and Dale Hobson delivered in good form as I would expect them to. My mind and heart were racing, filled with their words and of the social "intersubjectivity" of new and old voices, new and old friends. I took advantage by craving two new woodblocks and inscribing the ideogram in which I hope to communicate to them (and you). The greek is graphein to scratch, write and so I scratch and record an inspiring event.