Craig Hill writes from his Poetry Scorecard:

As much as I love the electronic community I am engaged by — we sow connections wherever we can here in rural America — I love even more the surprises that fill my mailbox, that technological throwback. Today’s delight: Investigations & Other Sequences by Marton Koppany, poet, translator, and editor residing in Budapest, published by Ahadada Books. How do they find us?

In a few words: this is as good as minimalism gets — simple and profound, humorous and gut-wrenchingly serious, language at perhaps its finest (pun intended).

Investigations & Other Sequences may be purchased in our online store.

I guess what I miss most from so much of the post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing is pure story-telling. I like a compelling story, having grown up around my paternal grandmother, Ora Kinder Glass, and my maternal grandfather, David Gow. Both were wonderful story tellers, Ora from Flatwoods, Virginia, with her Southern Gothic, and Dave with resources as far ranging as “I Love A Mystery” to family stories about his youth spent in a house with a tragic history in Rosedale, Maryland. I remember sitting for half a Sunday listening to my grandfather’s stories. And though I haven’t seen Ora, or “Muzzy” as she wanted us to call her, for about 20 years now, I’d love to sit down with her with a digital recorder and get some of what she says down in her own language. (She’s in her middle 90’s now, so I’d better hurry, I guess.) In fact, when I write some of my work, I do it in her voice. I can actually hear her speech patterns as I write. Writers talk about an “ideal audience” for their work, but the stories (and voices) of Dave and Ora are part of my creating, not part of my audience.

To continue with narrative poems, I’d like to include a small part of Leo Connellan’s “Crossing America.” This incredible, 21 page narrative concerns a man and a woman hitching across America in the early 1960s.

IV.

Cold, light off the road. Wreck of
a stranded car in the yard. Climbed in
thinking within, we could wrap ourselves
against cold cutting our livers
with its fingernails.

I went to the lit house fearing shotgun flash,
but there was no heat in the house either.
In a shack off the road a woman let me in
out of the brutal cold. She hovered with
eight children everywhichway on their one bed.

She let me in from freezing but she got up
and sat in a rocking chair and kept me
talking all night.

On the one hand she couldn’t bring herself
to let me freeze outdoors and at the same time
didn’t dare to trust me with closed eyes.

I knew she could kill me. I am alive
because I have recognized
death very close.

Where was the father of eight children
on this cold night.

I can see him, scrawny neck hunched over
steering wheel of a huge trailer truck,
maybe climbing Deer Lodge, Montanna mountain
with his false teeth on the seat beside him,
tired and thin and maybe not for long on the road.
I know him. He has given us a ride.

I told her my lady was cold in the wreck
but in that smug way one presumes that another
deserves what they get for being damn fool
to go traipsing with some idiot man
through the back washes of a continent,
she simply would not let her in out of the cold.

I told her our trip. She didn’t believe
me. No one just comes to your house
who really has done all these things!
Both of us were relieved when morning broke.
She carried my death with her
right to the door if I wanted it.

“Lobster Claw” is yet another of Connellan’s narrative poems that I hope to share with you, in part, in future.

Robinson Jeffers is another narrative poet I admire.

Ramon Guthrie. Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems (Persia Books). I particularly like his last series of poems, written while fighting the cancer that eventually killed him–esp. a moving poem on prehistoric cave paintings called “The Making of the Bear,” which tells of the struggle of the artist to create something that will endure, even if it’s in total blackness and cut off from the world by a flooded chamber. It goes, in part:

I found the cave was easier going this time,
but the torrent sucked and swirled up to the ceiling.
I moved half into it to test its tug.
It grabbed me, pulled me under. The bladder buoying me,
I found a shallow dome that let my nose just clear
the water. Strange, there with death so sure, I thought
not for my women nor their young but for the bear
that I would leave unfinished. Him I commended
to the spirits of the dark….

[And it ends like this]:

There
in that total lack of light
is where my bear is.
No one will ever see him
but he still
is there.

Guthrie died on Nov. 22, 1973. This is one gentleman I would have liked to have spoken to. I was just publishing my first small booklet of poems at that time.

More favorites: Cormac McCarthy–Almost anything, but especially his Outer Dark. Too bad the movie version of All The Pretty Horses was turned into such a farce. I still recall the ridiculous scene in which a poker-faced Mexican executes a fancy dance step while staring down the young protagonist of the story.
Leo Connellan. New and Collected Poems. (Paragon House). Leo was a long-term associate of mine–part good guy, part bug-bear. I first read and reviewed Crossing America in 1977 for Charles Plymell’s Northeast Rising Sun magazine, and that began our connection. Leo was a type-writer ribbon salesman at the time, but I arranged a tour of Maryland colleges for him to bring in some much-needed dough. What I didn’t suspect was that Leo was in the grip of alcoholism and he proceeded to offend just about everyone he met, including my fiance at that time, and almost all the hosting professors. After a friend and I saw him off at the bus station, with a six-pack under his arm and a pint in his pocket, I swore I’d never talk to him again, but around 1983, I wrote. Leo had licked the addiction, and was busy writing the poems that would become The Clear-Blue Lobster Water Country. We were buddies after that. More about my late friend Leo Connellan and his powerful narrative poems in the future.
Roy Fisher–Poems 1955–1987.
Frank Wedekind. Spring Awakening.
Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy. Just reading it again.
Emily Dickinson. Of course!
Gertrude Stein. Ditto. For poetry her “Tender Buttons” and “Portraits.”
Lew Welch. His Selected is his best. I especially like “Wobbly Rock” and “The Song of the Turkey Buzzard.” His letters are good too, and his book on writing poetry is a must. More on him later.
David Meltzer. Almost everything he writes.
Sharon Doubiago. Ditto.
Weldon Kees. Ditto.
Herman Melville. Besides the obvious, Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities–a flawed masterwork, and a crazy prose poem that has, in parts, the intensity of another favorite–
Insidore Ducasse. Maldoror, and Poesies. Esp. The Lykiard translation.
In Art:
Franz Marc.
Emile Nolde. There’s currently a Nolde exhibit in Tokyo that I hope to see this week.
Frank Auerbach.
The mezzotints of Yozo Hamaguchi. Exquisite! I had a chance to see a major restrospective of his work two years ago and the glowing colors of his cherries and those delicate butterflies highlighted against the subtle gradations of color in his backgrounds stay with me yet.
I highly recommend all of the writers and artists in this list! More to come.

Here’s an interesting bit from The Affair of the Poisons, pgs. 407-8: “A recent authority has suggested that under relentless interrogation witches ‘engaged in a peculiar kind of dialogue with their interlocutors, adapting their responses to meet expectations’ and it is now recognised that under extreme stress individuals will ‘mingle themes from their cultural milieu with elements derived from dream and fantasy to generate self-incriminating narratives which have their own psychological significance’.

And this, on the ability for influencing human behavior displayed by the brain-infecting Toxoplasma: ” Psychologists have found that Toxoplasma changes the personality of its human hosts, bringing different shifts to men and women. Men become less willing to submit to the moral standards of a community, less worried about being punished for breaking society’s rules, more distrustful of other people. Women become more outgoing and warmhearted. Both changes seem to break down the fear that might keep a host out of danger. They’re hardly enough to make a person throw themselves at lions, but they’re a very personal reminder of the ways in which parasites try to take control of their destiny.” Parasite Rex, pgs. 93-94. Toxoplasma is easily picked up from pets and is a common parasite in humans. Zimmer’s point is that all hosts infected by this parasite seem to show a disregard for their own lives: infected rats, for instance will be attracted by the scent of cat urine, instead of repelled and of course this helps the parasite proliferate. Apparently human hosts are not immune. I know many men and women who would fall under Zimmer’s above mentioned categories. Makes one wonder how much human personality–esp. among those who work around animals, or who have pets–owes to the parasites swimming in and around their neurons.

For English language haiku buffs: Jean Toomer, author of Cane, one of my all-time favorites, also wrote haiku in the 1920s. A good example can be found in Jones’ and Latimer’s The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer. (U. of N. Carolina Press). This fact should be added to the “official” histories of English language haiku as presented in Wm. Higginson’s books and the Haiku Anthology. Interesting that both Toomer and Richard Wright, both contemporary African-American writers should be attracted to haiku at about the same time. What about Langston Hughes?

It’s a glorious morning here in Shin-Urayasu, Japan. CNN’s droning on in the background while we await the election results.

Welcome to the new Ahadada Books Site! In this space I hope to list, comment on, and perhaps review (as per my time and energy) the books that I’m reading and the various materials that come in through the transom. On the way we’ll address whatever topics present themselves.
The Zohar, Vol. IV. (Sperling Translation). I have been mining this glorious work since 1979.
Georg Buchner. Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings. (Penguin). Always a favorite–particularly the metaphors in Danton’s Death.
Carl Zimmer. Parasite Rex (Random House). Tape worms, parasitic wasps, guinea worms and more!
John James. Collected Poems. (Salt). I particularly like the early work.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Army Life In A Black Regiment. (Penguin).
Anne Somerset. The Affair of the Poisons; Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. Five Stars! One of the most complete accounts of the scandal that rocked Versailles. Is uncannily similar to the Salem witchcraft trials, I think, through it precedes the American tragedy by a generation. I hope to finish this one this evening.
Janine Beichman. Embracing The Firebird; Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Fremale Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry. U. of Hawai’i Press. Just started this one, but it promises to be a fruitful read.
Well, enough blogging for tonight!