Vitro Nasu

Tom Clark, 2010. Poet – photo by John Sarsgard

Beyond the Pale an extraordinary blog by Tom Clark.

Tom Clark Renowned Poet and Biographer dies in North Berkeley traffic collision.

Jacket Interview
(Tom Clark thought Ron Padgett was a far superior poet of my generation.. )
Ron Padgett and Paterson – (scroll down)

Samuel Beckett – My Family with extraordinary photos from Jakarta Indonesia here (from Tom Clark’s blog)

(Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon)

LA Times obit

The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-’70s, they were married and living together at Eagle Creek, fellow poets enjoying a fantasy of mind and body — of sex, work and homemaking.

“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote.

Paris Review

Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros.
He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love.

New Yorker -Between Solitude and Loneliness (Hall’s short Story)

“Work, love, build a house, and die,” he wrote. “But build a house.” – Donald Hall

Poetry foundation

Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

Nusch Eluard
The combustive Nusch Eluard Born: June 21, 1906

René Char – Lucidity is the Wound Closest to the Sun

René Char with Picasso
Protesting with Picasso on the heights of the Mont Ventoux against the nuclear installations.

Resistance in Every way

obéissez à vos cochons qui existent;
j’obéis à mes dieux qui n’existent point.

obey your pigs who exist;
I obey my gods who do not.

Coffee & Cigarettes, Cafe Society

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Simone de Beauvoir – Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren.

(Picasso, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus and Picasso’s dog)

Seamus Heaney ( Putting Feelings into Words)

Photo of Samuel Beckett by Steve Schapiro

Beckett was asked by a reporter how a small country like Ireland could have produced so many great writers since the last half of the nineteenth century.

“It’s the priests and the British, Beckett replied tersely. “They have buggered us into existence. After all, when you are in the last bloody ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.” (Page 282, A biography of Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair.)

Samuel Beckett Archive

Digital image by Fung Lin Hall
(Kitch invades the sacred land or Our Lady of the Desert)

Happy St Patick’s Day (See Frank McCourt and other Irish luminaries)

High Hopes in Ireland (see Irish art here)

The wind that shakes the Barley

Les Poets Maudits
Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Brussels Oct 07, 1873

Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud

Happy Valentine!
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Jan Palach – a Poem by David Shapiro, his collaboration with architect John Hejduk

Happy birthday David Shaprio

Read Poem For You here.

Maggie Cheung, Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung are “In the Mood for Sitting Down on the Stairs.
Chinese cinema album

Pierre Clementi (28 September 1942 – 27 December 1999)
Archive here.

Beloved the one who sits down
(Cesar Vallejo)

Beloved be the unknown man and his wife.
My fellow man with sleeves, neck and eyes!
Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back.
The one who wears a torn shoe in the rain.
Beloved be the bald man without hat.
The one who catches a finger in the door.
Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame.
The one who pays with what he does not have…
Beloved be the ones who sit down.
Beloved be the one who works by the day, by the month, by the hour.
Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame.
The person who goes, at the order of his hands, to the movies.
The one who pays with what he does not have.
The one who sleeps on his back.
The one who no longer remembers his childhood.
Beloved be the one who sits down.
Beloved be the just man without thorns.
The bald man without hat.
The thief without roses.
The one who wears a watch and has seen God.
The one who has honor and does not die!

(Seeing the photo of Hong Kong movie stars sitting on the stairs, the reader offered me this poem.)

Langston
Photo by Gordon Parks

Daybreak in Alabama

Daybreak In Alabama – Poem by Langston Hughes

When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
Langston Hughes

Jukebox Love song (previous post)

W.S. Merwin – (wiki)

During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin’s unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin’s writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands’ rainforests.

The Ascetic Insight of W. S Merwin (New Yorker)

“For the Anniversary of My Death”:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Maui Now birthday tribute to W.S. Merwin

The State of Hawaiʻi will also be present, issuing a Gubernatorial Proclamation proclaiming Sept. 30, 2017, as “W.S. Merwin Day” in Hawaiʻi and presenting Merwin with a special Gubernatorial Commendation for his life-long achievements.

On reading slowly and reading what you want and the beauty of trees.

A Great American Poet in Conversation with Paul Holdengraber

John Ashbery by Larry Rivers

NYtimes Obit

The Guardian obit

John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

Poetry Foundation

Interview – John Ashbery (Paris Review)

John Ashbery by Jill Krementz
(painting on the wall by Jane Freilicher)

John Ashbery

Portrait of John Ashbery by Jane Freilicher

Fairefield Porter -Portrait of Schuyler and John Ashbery.. 57-58

Fairefield Porter Respect for Things as they are – (previous post on John Ashbery and Fairefield Porter)

Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker)

His early work was serene and beautiful; he then became rather frantic and trippy. He had a period of majesty unrivalled in recent poetry, stretching from the seventies through the nineties. His last phase was a kind of inventory of his mind, among the most interesting anyone has ever known. His method was to “snip off a length” of his consciousness, he said. It was, in part, a strike against the solemnities of achieved reputation, which confronted him everywhere in the forms of syllabi and colloquia.

Where is Rimbaud? (see a photo of John Ashbery and Rimbaud)

See a mixed media collage by John Ashbery (via Art News obit)

Jean Cocteau by Man Ray
see portrait by Modigliani and other links here.

Jean Cocteau Part II

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing. Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau (more quotes here)

Postcards from Paris

(With Francois Truffaut )

Self-Portrait by Jean Cocteau in a letter to Paul Valéry…
Rilke and Paul Valery (previous post)

(Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau)
Paris Review – A Brief Strange Life of Raymond Radiguet.

Beauty and the Beast

Fairefield Porter -Portrait of Schuyler and John Ashbery.. 57-58

Fairefield Porter – was born on June 10, 1907 – a painter and an art critic.

On Fairefield Porter Respect For Things As They Are
by JOHN ASHBERY

Mystery that is essential to reality – Fairefield Porter

John Ashbery (Harpers – )

He has often said that the artist’s role is to make himself misunderstood, but such a position needn’t be taken as mere obfuscation. It might be entertained as a sort of blessing or benediction, something akin to the one he offers in
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”:

Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate

Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.He has often said that the artist’s role is to make himself misunderstood, but such a position needn’t be taken as mere obfuscation. It might be entertained as a sort of blessing or benediction, something akin to the one he offers in

Ashbury’s poem from Paris Review

Larry Rivers: Pyrography: Poem and Portrait of John Ashbery II, 76 x 58 inches, 1977
A Vanguard of Friends

Ashbery and Rimbaud

Where is Rimbaud? (Previous post)