dll, lb, hh 

daddy long leg 

dragonfly rests 

ok, a pic of Walden--looks like trash in the left foreground tree 

in a further rare evidence of readership, Stephen Vincent makes a comment below to put me and the less verifiable readers of this blog on to a book by Michael Pollan "Second Nature". which I should like to read (and categorize!). I am much taken with the picture I have in my mind of Thoreau sitting in the doorway of his cabin (see below, altho that replica sits about 1/2 mile from where HDT had it), frying up his johnnycakes, writing in his journal. he was single-minded in his curiosity. sometimes he's such a nut, like his suggestion that you could make a nice home out of a coffin-sized railroad box. which you could (if protection from rain when you slept were your main concern), but try to convince the good folk. to read Thoreau is to confront the current boundaries. Walden, as I've mentioned, is much fenced in, and there's no hope of trying to follow the crow's flightpath to the places he mentions in his journal, the land covetously belongs to somebody else. anyway, it is fun to imagine Thoreau's enormous beanfield, since the land is now thickly forested where he grew his beans. and now I lament the garden I will leave. terraforming a patch of grass into a wildness of flowering things has been a distracted pleasure for me. my gardening dwindled due to lack of time, lack of money, lack of energy. a drought stressed it, our penchant for going away at peak weed time didn't help, and moles/voles killed off bulbs, hosta and such like to devastating degree. so now it is a garden of super bad hardy types: daylily and daffodil (I love them both), plus interesting intruders like wilkweed and goldenrod, both of which, I am told, are cherished in European gardens, weeds tho they may seem hereabouts. Williams advising: leave the dirt on the roots...

thanks to Eileen Tabios for taking notice. going public with my book list just seemed right. I think of Whitman telling of helping a runaway slave. maybe he did, but it doesn't matter. there's a courage and reality in just his saying so. likewise (sort of), which of any of these books I've read doesn't matter in at least the context of listing them. the list presents the boundaries I inhabit and perhaps the ones I am trying to break thru. I'd like to see it of any writer. Eileen's going to the trouble of including publication info, which I had ought to do but it's just too much more work right now. a friend of mine has a card (perhaps he's made a database by now) for every book he buys (even for his daughter), with all the usual info plus price, where bought and I think other obsessive-compulsive considerations. I suspect he started making cards when he began buying books. the prospect of iemizing 100s, 1000s, of books is daunting. I separated books by genre, sloppy boundaries to say the least. there will be almost no scifi or mystery, of which I've owned plenty, because I have or will get rid of them. which means my Literature category includes Fu Manchu (which I prize: swear to god!!!) and all sorts of books that only attain such a title in 2nd rate suburban bookstores. I stuck Thoreau's journals in my perplexing Philosophy category, not having at the time figured I would post my Nature type books, which I crowd with Science (thus my lone economic books is mixed with fields guides and such). my perplexing Criticism category has its own curious curveballs of in/exclusion. of course the Bramhall Decimal System is based on convenience not logic, mostly. I think I would as soon have Ron Silliman's New Sentence parked in poetry, because for me that is their usage. reasonably enough (to me) I initially placed the few Elizabethan playwrights into poetry, prior to establishing the Literature group, but that came to seem awkward as I was shovelling other play collections into Lit. and so the story goes. the whole thing, bottom line: it seems interesting to do this listing.

leaf 

sand 

take note that Eileen Tabios is also listing her books. it is an interesting idea.

exit ramp

An award winning attorney with green for resolution. Each poem filed
into appropriate blots, until expressed rather late in tailing off. Each
award fished from the finest water. The waves were as tender as Brooklyn
sub-let. The change of firing, when only you can read thru. Thru goes
the endless wile, a patch on some stasis trumpet while bringing up the
mostly forgotten. Cold piano tone of a sump pump for given over. More
radiation from various sources, not even a light by excuse. Change
forgot the dream of which the night seemed filled. Rattle of drum
snares, somehow impressive.

I've added Joel Weishaus' archive site to my links. a lot of great pieces there. literate productions that make deft use of html potential (not whistle and flash).

antics 

colours 

killer butterfly 

bumblebee 

Walkin' Henry Thoreau rises from the grave to read an invisible book ON HIS BIRTHDAY 

hollyhock and oak 

pond 

I'm glad David Hess is talking Rimbaud. persist, David, persist. M Rimbaud is a complex character, ripe for romanticization, but worth cutting thru to. David (Mr Hess) is focusing resolutely on some primo issues. the renunciation factor, let's take the shimmer away. and bring on Emily Dickinson, whose renunciation isn't of the same sort exactly as Rimbaud but it tingles with something that WE perhaps had ought to consider. sometimes (not always) I think, Rimbaud, Stein, and what the heck have we Jetsons added. I can answer that.

I have added a still partial list of our history books at expoetical. I realize that it's just a list of books but it has meaning for me at least. a writer reads (I don't know the degree to which this might NOT be true). some readers are quite scholarly, tho I imagine there's a point where you must choose one or tother for fullest commitment. Ron Silliman writes of taking years to read DuPlessis' Drafts, at the expense of lengthy works by Waldman and Fitterman and whatever other works. both Pound (according to Williams) and Samuel Johnson (according to Boswell) admit that it is not necessary to read everything, their scholarship ran that way. I have been amongst these books (everything listed here), in whatever degree, for the past 35 years. roughly for that long have I been collecting books as a writer, with that determination. these are books I have devoured, have learned from (or hope to), have felt obliged to read, have read and disliked, have somehow 'related' to. I know I haven't read all the Civil War books, but even so the Civil War is an interest of mine, as the list may indicate. I can't always point to how, in my writing, these books have consequence. mostly it's just the sense of marching towards something. I would say, for instance, that anyone with a lot of spiritual books (like the numerous books on buddhism that I have), indicates a restlessness. if I were 'more buddhist' I wouldn't want and/or need them. my pile of poetry books suggests my learning path (not expertise) in the craft. you can see that particularly in the writers NOT included. the main point to this list is as a catalogue for my own benefit, so I can find books. we will be moving in the fall so this is a logical time to perform the task.

folded 

milkweed 

profusion 

hollyhock