Regarding “Woodburners We Recommend”: Poet Bob Arnold writes, publishes, and distributes books in Guilford, Vermont. He is currently raising money to help displaced New Orleans musicians through street busking: poetry and fiddle, guitar and verse. You get so used to big bureaucratic relief efforts, Red Cross, FEMA, these sometime giants who arrive in your ruined neighborhood, stay a month, and then take off for the next disaster, that you lose sight of what one person can do to assist. A nation of activists is what we need. Yesterday Bob raised $40 on the streets that he’s sending on to a musicians’ relief effort. Today he sent $100 to a fund established by Preservation Hall. It takes just a little, to mean a lot…
Each one, reach one.
The poem below, by Mikhail Horowitz, was published by Bob Arnold in his Woodburners We Recommend series and is available as a postcard for $5 American money. Bob’s “mission statement” for the Woodburners’ series follows the poem.
A Woodburners We Recommend Publication 2005 series
Mikhail Horowitz
For New Orleans, 9/7/05
Love Thy Poet Postcard Series
For New Orleans, 9/7/05
Fell asleep last eve
to the TV tolling its knell
a bottomless bass chord
over the drowned ninth ward
& dreamed of divine intervention:
a congress of loas
& a subcommittee of spirits
raising & conjuring
all of the city’s pianos, &
sending them in a great
mahogany armada to plug the
levee, stopping the water &
stemming the flood of betrayal,
the deluge of political indifference,
with all the music of all the hearts
that made this city the soul
of these drowned States
~ Mikhail Horowitz
WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND PUBLICATION SERIES 2005
Available ~
Mikhail Horowitz. “For New Orleans, 9/7/05”. Longhouse, 2005. First edition.
Love Thy Poet 35. Card. Fine and bright. Limited edition. Poetry. $5 (+ $1 s/h).
As an act of goodwill and for poetry – Longhouse is sending out each month complete publications – online – of one poet (or more) we have published in booklet, broadside or postcard form for everyone to share.
It’s a way of giving back to many of you who have sent to us poems, letters, purchases and the same goodwill over the years. The series will fly in under the banner of our Woodburners We Recommend. It should also be felt as a certain warmth in memory to all our close and dear poetry comrades passed along – each one becoming more of a loss.
Each monthly booklet will also be available for purchase from Longhouse. Issued in a very limited keepsake edition of 50 copies. Starting in 2006 we will begin to reissue and present past issues from Longhouse of select poets. For those readers that travel back as far as 1972 when Longhouse began, you know poetry was released like bandits by the day, by the week, by the month, and always free. We have never taken on grants and meant poetry to be seen & heard & on poetry terms. From 2005, into the Infinite, and within the universal cyber cosmos, we would like to share multiple poets with you….and only ask that you share them further.
© 2005 Mikhail Horowitz
© September 2005 Bob & Susan Arnold at Longhouse
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