my respects. she sounds like she was an astonishing person
KS
On 24/08/07, M. Borges Accardi <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> For those of you who knew her and her work, the poet Philomene Long died this week in Venice, CA.??For 17 years or so she was my neighbor and friend.
>
> The Subject heading of a refusal to mourn seemed appropriate--for many reasons.
>
> Philomene Long was born in Greenwich Village. Among the very first sounds she heard were those of poets howling their poems and jumping out the windows. She had two principal influences in common with Jack Kerouac: St. Theresa and Huckleberry Finn. At the age of eighteen she entered a convent as a wild teenager. After five years behind cloister walls she escaped in the middle of the night down the side of a mountain to Venice West where she lived among the poets, saints, and mad ones.
>
>
> Philomene Long's books of poems include ODD PHENOMENON IN AN ABANDONED CITY, THE DREAM AWAKENING, THE GHOSTS OF VENICE WEST, THE BOOK OF SLEEP(with her husband, John Thomas), and her most recent book, PIERCING STONE WITH THE EYE OF ZEN. Her work has appeared in High Performance, the L.A. Times, the L.A. Weekly, Ten Directions, Caffeine, Black Ace, and Grand Passion: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets and Beyond. She has directed seven films, including The California Missions (with Martin Sheen) and The Beats: An Existential Comedy (with Allen Ginsberg).
>
> She was active in the Venice literary community--especially Beyond Baroque.
>
> http://www.smmirror.com/volume3/issue51/the_beat_queen.asp
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 4:59 pm
> Subject: A refusal to mourn ...
>
>
>
>
> "In that great poem A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child
> in London, with its dark, magnificent, proud movement, we see Death
> in its reality -- as a return to the beginning of things, as a robing,
> a sacred investiture in those who have been our friends since the
> beginning of Time. Bird, beast, and flower have their part in the
> making of mankind. The water drop is holy, the wheat ear a place of
> prayer. The 'fathering and all-humbling darkness' itself is a
> begetting force. Even grief, even tears, are a begetting. 'The
> stations of the breath' are the stations of the Cross."
>
> -- Edith Sitwell
>
>
> Is the unstated fact that the poem is about a child who died in the
> Blitz make this a political poem? Does knowing or not knowing it
> change the poem?
>
> --
> ===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
>
> ===================================
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
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