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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting,
And Please Take a Look At Our Blog
Summer
2005,
Volume Four, Number Three, First Second |
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1888, Arles: a Very Good Year We Celebrate Vincent Van Gogh, and his great, mad, lonely vision A few of our favorite paintings
the
See Van Gogh, The Complete Paintings, edited by W. S. Walther and Ranier Metzger, Taschen, 2001. (Printed in Slovenia.) Paper. $25.19 from Amazon (A bargain) The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin Classics, Edited and selected by Ronald D. Leeuw and Trnalated by Leonard Pomerands, 1997. $14.95 or less What are the greatest movies of all time? How many excellent ones are there, after nearly 100 years of movie making? Many, but they are not great. Only a few have achieved that difficult status. And Gangs of New York is one of them.
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The movie is utterly convincing. We are immediately thrust into the action of two huge street gangs confronting each other in deadly fashion in 1846 New York City. Bill the Butcher's gang licks Priest Vallon's gang, and the snow is afterwards covered with bloody carnage. By 1863 Priest's son has grown to vengeful manhood, and we do not have to guess how it will turn out, only watch progress towards the inevitable end. Martin Scorsese does not disappoint. Along the way to the dénouement, Amsterdam shares Jennie Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) angrily with Bill, which motivates his respectful adversary to try to go kindly with him. We know he will not, however. But there is honor among gang leaders, if not among their gangs. The movie is a tour d' force for Day-Lewis, who has matured into a very fine and convincing actor. But it is Scorsese's genius for movie making that leads the film seamlessly from beginning to end, and nominates it for one of the finest movies of all time. Some more scenes from Gangs:
Tell us your favorites and maybe we will publish your list. Or add some to ours. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any special order: 1. Citizen Kane 2. Apocalypse Now Redux 3. The Godfather, part 1 4. Once Upon a Time in America 5. The Third Man 6. All That Jazz 7. Casablanca (thanks, Scott) 8. Gandhi 9. Reds 10. Chinatown 11. House of Sand and Fog 12. Ordinary People 13. Gangs of New York Once Upon a Time in America Flesh and The Devil Ingmar Bergman Revisited The Past Recaptured Dune Again? Nora Things You Can Tell Lord of the Rings House of Sand and Fog Sylvia The Hours Return of the Lord of The Rings Girl With a Pearl Earring Before Sunset Before Sunrise Oblomov The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind The Piano Teacher
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Coming Up Next... J.M. Coetzee--his boyhood, youth, and mature novels. The South African writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 POETRY SECTION Poem du jour New, from just about our favorite practicing poet, W. S. Merwin: JUST THIS When I think of the patience I have had back in the dark before I remember or knew it was night until the light came all at once at the speed it was born to with all the time in the world to fly through not concerned about ever arriving and then the gathering of the first stars unhurried in their flowering space and far into the story the planets cooling slowly and the ages of rain then the seas starting to bear memory the gaze of the first cell at its waking how did this haste begin this little time at any time this reading by lightning scarcely a word this nothing this heaven printed without permission but with thanks from The New Yorker, June 6, 2005 We salute. . . PHILIP WHALEN
As he lay dying, Philip Whalen told friends, "Just lay me to rest on a bed of frozen raspberries." And they did. (Just kidding. Probably he was cremated, in tried-and-true Buddhist fashion, and his remains scattered to the Pacific. Tell us, if he was not.) Whalen was one of the Beat poets of mid-century America, whose ravings were centered in the San Francisco/ Berkeley area. He was a lifelong friend of Allen Ginsberg and was greatly influenced by Ginsberg's poetry great outcry of rage in the poem, Howl. But a good case could be made for their influencing each other. In 1955, Whalen joined Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and Gary Snyder for the historic reading at Six Gallery. Organized by Kenneth Rexroth, who was later identified as the "Godfather of the Beats," the reading took place in a former auto repair shop at Fillmore and Union for an audience of 150. In Kerouac's roman à clef novel, The Dharma Bums, he was Warren Coughlin and described as "a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat, who was advertised by Japhy [Ryder, i.e. Gary Snyder] "(privately in my ear) as being more than meets the eye. You'll see. He'll make the top of your head fly away, boy, with a choice chance word." Love that "chance choice word" of Kerouac's. Now, that is top-grade good writing! This was 1955. I arrived on the scene a year later, when Ginsberg and Kerouac were now well known, and becoming cultural icons. The intellectual axis in the Bay Area was split: there were the Beats, centered in Berkeley and North Beach, and there were the academics, in both the University of California, the University of San Francisco, and elsewhere. There was a minimum mixing between the two cultures. I was intent on getting a Ph.D. in English and was discouraged from mixing with the pot-smoking, wine-drinking, scruffy street people; my mentors were Roethke, Lowell, Thomas, Auden, and Stevens. It may have been the wrong choice, but I was no poet, and over time I have come to have grudging respect for Ginsberg and his circle. For there was no doubt, then and now, that he was as its center. And his work signifies an important turn in American literature. As for Kerouac, many of us liked his work and likened him to Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. Of course he was neither. He tried to offend us into thinking otherwise and partly succeeded. He wrote poetry, too. Like the others, some of it was good, but much of it was wordy and vague. All of it was dynamic, literary, and sincere. In the end, that may be all that really matters. Buddhism played a large role in how the Beats looked at life and formed their value system. It was not a passing phase but an Americanization of a foreign religion, and it became an essential part of their literary production and not just a bunch of oddball tags attached to their writing, though at the time many of us felt differently about the foreign words mixed into our English. Yet Buddhism held a fascination for some of us, and we determined to learn more about it and its precepts. Of that San Francisco group, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen produced a body of work which, when viewed in long retrospect, shows both carelessness and occasional precision. There are scattered islands of greatness in among a lot of noise and clutter in their work. Some of them remained friends, all of their lives. Whalen lived much of his life in Kyoto, Japan, where he became a Buddhist monk. In his late years, he was Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco. These poets are well worth a serious read, and we have tried to give them just that. The poems in the column to the right were drawn from Whalen's book of selected poems, Overtime, Penguin Poets Edition, 1999. Kingfisher examined Robert Creeley in its usual cursory fashion in the previous issue. (Winter 2004-5, Volume 4, Number Two). Now it is Whalen's turn in the barrel. And soon it will be Gary Snyder's. And after him, perhaps that monolith, Ginsberg. Stay tuned to Kingfisher.
Click on hyperlink below for more Whalen biography. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/27/BA219137.DTL
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SOME POEMS BY PHILIP WHALEN The Vision of Delight The man
driving the expensive car Neither
of them might be related to the small girl Against the back rest. Her dress was white her hair all neatly arranged Grotesque white fangs protruded from her mouth Without distorting it. She looked serenely straight ahead. She was the queen attended by her court lady and chauffeur Not going to the Safeway store, clearly not needing The automobile, who can appear anywhere any time Such is her tremendous power 21:vii:74 [Whalen dated his poem as indicated above: first the day of the month, then a colon, then the roman numerals for the month, another colon, and finally the year. Hence: July 21, 1974, Ed and the opening stanza of ] Murals Not Yet Dreamed The first panel is occupied with Storm and Night Battle: Handsome Allegorical Embellishments fruits and flowers Antique masks and fantastic animals or birds amid trailing vines and scallop shells, leaves, Wild Men, Trophies, Instruments of Music profusely beribboned and garlanded The whole supported on sculptured brackets or consoles Decorated with partially draped Atlantids wreathed with oaken crowns [. . . .] 11-12:vi:74 Up in Michigan Tough branch stems blue Chicory flowers Down flat leaves almost dandelion Blue delicate five-tooth petal edge Almost invisible thread hair center :Lots of Queen Anne's lace, Joel misquotes Williams, "Wild carrot invades a whole field" Big leaf trees where land floats outward Glacier tundra peat prairie The sun rises in the north Allensdale, Michigan, 13:vii:73 [Evidently meant as a tribute to Hemingway, with the ending phrase "The sun rises in the north" mysteriously concluding the poem, nonsensically, the poem still has some good things in it, and so it is included in this brief survey.] A major poem, "Bleakness, Farewell," dated 7-10:v:64, revised 26:i:65, was read over Radio Station KPFA, Berkeley. It is too long to quote in its entirety, so I have unfairly selected only a couple of significant passages: ". . . A friend of mine made up the following routine: 'You are a stranger here. You find our practices offensive? It is our practice to be offensive to strangers.' I feel the same way." * "Hi, Marlene." "Hi, Maxine. Where are you going?" "I've got to go to the LIBRARY!" * ". . . If the product is ugly enough, poisonous enough and expensive enough, all Americans will buy it--they will cut down on food, sex, curiosity, and even their own fits of paranoia in order to spend more money on the product." ". . .In heaven, all Americans are Chairman of the Board, from 10 until 3 every day without fail. . . . They are quite often called to the White House where God consults with them privately about how to run the Universe--for even in heaven there are Problems. . . . And finally from his very long and significant poem on his birthday, c. 1967-9, he reminds us of his Oregon roots, his Reed education, and his geographic connection with Ken Kesey and long friendship with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder: "And to those admirers of my work who find me an unpleasant man Remember I am a harvested field Winter orchard beehive And to all my friends a secret unheard message: I'm always afraid you'll find out how much I love you Then you'll hate me. How much does this matter, anymore? Two zeroes is one hundred Black to move and win. Awake or asleep I live by the light of a hollow pearl" Kyoto-San Francisco-Kyoto 1967-1969 Comments and selections by Editor Robert Arnold
BACK ISSUES Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S.Merwin/Richard Ford issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue. Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 1, Robert Sund and Graham Greene Issue. Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 Saul Bellow and Robert Creeley Issue. Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 3 Philip Whalen and Vincent Van Gogh Issue.
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