when unknown gardens arrive by mail...

i've posted in the past about receiving something in the mail, and the packing material ended up being as interesting, or more interesting, than the thing it was protecting. a few days ago i received this garden - basically the back cover torn from a discarded hardback book - which was used to keep a photograph from being bent in the mail. no idea as to the title and the words it was once attached to, but it is now sitting upon my bookshelf as one more window...

by the prophet of the earth...

by the prophet of the earth was written as a kind of ethnobotanical guide to the plants of arizona as used by the pima indians, and is largely a list of plants and how the pima people used them for food, medicine, and other uses. it's a beautiful book, designed by merle armitage in 1949. armitage had a very crisp graphic style, and everything looks a bit like he worked with wood blocks and is a nice hybrid of modernist and folk art tendencies. a book on american indian culture seems totally fitted to his aesthetic, and indeed many of his books are related to the desert. here are some nice bits:

some keys to pima pronunciation:
ai as in aisle: e.g. vaila, dance
ee as in eel: e.g. eebdak, heart
a as in papa: e.g. babat, frog (i like how this word sounds so much like a frog sound)
i as in pit: e.g. itdam, upon
yi approaches a softly aspirated vi: e.g. cofyi, woman

protection against whirlwinds:
lewis told me he has a brother who lives at casa blanca and when he sees a whirlwind approaching, he steps out of his house, crosses his index fingers, and hums. with this method he keeps the whirlwind from entering his house, it just passes by.

flutes:
the fair one's attention is saught... to do this, he takes his flute, an instrument of cane with four holes, and, seating himself beneath a bush near her dwelling, keeps up a plaintive noise for hours. the music is continued day after day, until she acknowledges him.

a solitary decoration...

robert creeley founded the divers press in 1950 while living in palma, mallorca, spain. divers was a small press that published a series of beautiful small editions for about 4 years, until creeley started working at black mountain college in 1955.

creeley met katue kitasono, a japanese artist, through kitasono's connection to kenneth rexroth. kitasono was a poet as well as an abstract painter and publisher in the 1930's of the avant garde poetry journal vou. vou,"introduced sound poems, dadaist absurdities and work harkening the eventual development of surrealism in japan." the journal was also championed by ezra pound, with whom kitasono had a lot of influence, through a 30 year written correspondence even though they'd never met.

in 1954 divers published a beautiful small book of kitasono's poems and pictures. it contains 5 poems and several geometric abstractions. in a 1987 interview, creeley said it was one of the divers books he remembered most vividly, and i think it was probably because of these crisp and quiet josef albers influenced images.

there are many beautiful moments in this little book, including phrases like "the lightning paints the street like a zebra" and "kissing is sad with smells of lead and gasoline and sea-weed"- that connect the seemingly simple language constructions, to the sweet little abstract images pictured above.

i really love the language; and since the english is kitasono's own translation from japanese, the words feel very particular - especially if you read the poems out loud. as with the images, if any bit of the language was changed, the whole thing would fall apart.

here's my favorite poem:

'a solitary decoration'

i lightly dodged, today too from my destiny
and went across a bridge of melancholy
passed through a small pagan town
which smelled of onion and leek;
then there came to be seen scattered under the cloudy sky,
decayed pales, boards, and roofs:
such a sight soothed me and gave
a balance to my heart.
i tread on the seaweeds, the drifting fragments,
and look at the waves bristling up, the sea-gulls on the wing:
i lie on the poor nettles like a withered collie
to recollect my little fame, my dispute, and my time of pleasure that are gone,
i muse on my light boat, my body, and my liquid medicine,
with my cheek against the slope of this dark century of calamity
i sadly call for an eternal cure.