In the Azure ...

More on Jonathan's quote book over at Natures.

Just A Note on the Reading ...

Despite having read Jonathan in the sixties and seventies (the artist Ray Kass, then a student at Chapel Hill, as I was, turned me on to his work, I believe), I hadn't heard him read live till a couple of years ago when he read at a party for the Center board. He was delightful, of course, funny, droll. And he still does humor well, a rare talent. He's been reading from the excellent Jubilant Thicket for the past year, so this time out decided to read instead from a book of quotations he's been assembling. He calls it "If You Can Kill A Snake With It, It's Not Poetry". It featured, as you might expect, words from a diverse range of folks, from Sparky Anderson to Charles Olson and Bucky Fuller. Jeffrey Beam reminds me that

Jonathan's been working on the quote book for years and there are some editions
already available including Quote UnQuote from Ten Speed Press which features the snake quote on the cover. It was published in 1989. And Gnomon Press did an even earlier version.

The Gnomon book was In the Azure Over the Squalor, a slim volume of forty-eight pages, which came out in 1985; it already cited Robert Duncan's proposition that "Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond", and W.C. Field's reply, when asked if he had his life to live over, what would he do differently:"I'd live over a saloon." And two or three hundred others. Last time I checked, it was still somewhat in print, if one looked hard enough.

Tom read from At Dusk Iridescent, of course, including the crown of sonnets, and from Coromandel. I appreciated his comments about what he was working toward in the new work.

More later. I'm reading this afternoon on WPVM as part of their pledge drive, so tune in at 103.5 FM.