Moment to Moment [Paperback]

David Budbill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1999

Alternating between the loveable irrascibility and self-mocking humor reminiscent of the poet Cold Mountain (Han Shan), Budbill's poems view the modern world from the viewpoint of a New England hermit-scholar. Remarkable for their generous spirit, accessibility and biting criticism, these poems present a poet of strong mind and voice.

"Budbill both informs and moves. He is, in short, a delight and a comfort."- Wendell Berry

"Budbill writes out of the real, contemporary, New England, not from the past, not from the cellar holes. He speaks from the New England which is Appalachia - poverty, exploitation, and good people."-Donald Hall

David Budbill is the author of numerous books of poetry, ?ction, and drama, and is an occasional commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." With bassist William Parker, Budbill performs a duet collaboration entitled "Zen Mountains / Zen Streets." He lives in rural Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

Review

After A Walk On A Gray, Drizzling, Cold Spring Morning: The 13th Of...
After Labor Day
After Li Yi
After Reading A Poem From The Book Of Songs
After Reading Meng Chiao's 'seeing Off Master T'an'
After Reading Ou-yang Hsiu's Poem Called 'spring Walk To The ...
After Reading Po Chu-i's 'drunk, Facing Crimson Leaves'
After Ryokan's Poem Called White Hair
After Thirty Years
An Age Of Academic Mandarins
Ahimsa Next Time Maybe Or The Taoist Mountain Recluse Stands In His...
All Of Us
All Summer
All The Raucous Birds Of Summer
Alone And Lonely
Always In These Ancient Chinese Paintings
Another Kind Of Travel
Another Lie
As In Ryokan's Brushwork
Autumn And Crickets
Bathroom Reading: After A Poem By Han Shan
Be Glad
Bugs In A Bowl
Calling For Po Chu-i
The Cycle Of The Seasons
Dilemma
During The Warblers' Spring Migration, While Feeling Sorry For ...
The End Of Winter
The First Green Of Spring
Flawed Verse: After A Poem By Han Shan
For Owl Wing
For Wang Wei
Haiku And Tanka For Shrike
Harmonizing With Tu Fu's 'written On The Wall At Chang's Hermitage'
Home
How
How And Why You Should Be Circumspect About Your Inner Life
How He Writes
How It Is
I Am Still Here Because For Example
In Ryokan's Company
In The Ancient Tradition
Laid Up In Bed
Letter To Ni Tsan
Li Po And Wang Wei
Like The Clouds
Melancholy Thoughts
The Music Of My Own Kind Too
My Face
My Fate Is To Rebel
My Old Woman
No Trail
North Is Nowhere
Note To Myself
Nothing Much
Old Poet Refuses To Leave Home
Old Red Beard, My Friend
On Hearing That These Poems Would Be Published In A Book
On The Road To Buddhahood
One Summer Afternoon Many Years Ago While Visiting My Friend Joel...
Pao Chao And Now
The Progress Of Ambition
Quiet And Seldom Seen
Quoting T'ao Ch'ien
Ryokan Was A Beggar
The Sixth Of January
Small Song Of Praise At Christmastime For Chickadee
Snowshoes On Judevine Mountain
So Says Wang Wei
A Stillness, Absolute, Profound
Stillness, O Stillness
The Story Of Chi Mu Chain
The Story Of Yu-ling
Such Self-indulgence And Sloth!
Teapots As Visions Of How Poetry And The World Might Be
Three Decades
The Three Goals
To A Friend
Trying To Be Who I Already Am
An Unassuming Grandeur
Variation On A Theme By Another Recluse Who Also Thought About...
What Good Does It Do?
What Happened Today: The Twentieth Of January
What I Did Today: The Sixth Of May
What Issa Heard
What It Is Like To Read The Ancients
What Keeps Me Here?
What Would It Be Like?
What's The Difference?
When I Came To Judevine Mountain
When I Get Depressed
Where I Live
Which
Which Of Them Sees More Clearly?
Who I Love
A Winter Night
You False Masters Of Serenity
The Young Woodchuck
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

For the past thirty-five years, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Vermont Arts Council. A former commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, his poetry is featured frequently on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

Product Details

• Paperback: 118 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; 1 edition (September 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591330
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591334
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #879,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940 to a streetcar driver and a minister's daughter. He is the author of eight books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, a picture book for children, dozens of essays, introductions, speeches and book reviews, the libretto for an opera and is a performance poet on two CDs. He was for a time a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

David's latest book of poems, PARK SONGS: A POEM/PLAY, will be published by Exterminating Angel Press in September of 2012

David's new play, A SONG FOR MY FATHER, premiered in 2010 with two separate productions. For review excerpts, still photos, etc. go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/sfmfpl.html

In September of 2011 Copper Canyon Press published HAPPY LIFE, his third book of poems in a series. As of January 2012 HAPPY LIFE had been on the poetry.org best seller list for 24 weeks.

In July of 2005 Copper Canyon Press published his second book of poems in a series called WHILE WE'VE STILL GOT FEET. http://www.davidbudbill.com/wwsgf.html

In September of 1999 Copper Canyon Press published the first book of poems in a series: MOMENT TO MOMENT: POEMS OF A MOUNTAIN RECLUSE. http://www.davidbudbill.com/motomo.html

Garrison Keillor reads frequently from David's poems on his National Public Radio program The Writer's Almanac. http://www.davidbudbill.com/twadb.html

David tours occasionally with avant-garde bassist and composer, William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. In 2003 the three released, SONGS FOR A SUFFERING WORLD: A PRAYER FOR PEACE, A PROTEST AGAINST WAR. http://www.davidbudbill.com/songsfasw.html William Parker and David also released in 1999, ZEN MOUNTAINS-ZEN STREETS: A DUET FOR POET AND IMPROVISED BASS, http://www.davidbudbill.com/zenmount.html, a two-CD set of a live performance. Both CDs are available on the Boxholder Records label.

In 1999 also, Chelsea Green Publishing Company published a revised, expanded and updated version of JUDEVINE: THE COMPLETE POEMS, first published in 1991. http://www.davidbudbill.com/jude.html

The play JUDEVINE, http://www.davidbudbill.com/judedvd.html, which is based on the book, has now been produced 65 times in 24 states. The 1990 American Conservatory Theatre Production in San Francisco won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Ensemble Performance for that year.

David is also the creator and editor of THE JUDEVINE MOUNTAIN EMAILITE: A CYBERZINE: AN ON-LINE AND ON-GOING JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND OPINION, which is available on this website. For back issues go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/jme.html

In 2000 David wrote the libretto for an opera, with music by composer Erik Nielsen, called A FLEETING ANIMAL: AN OPERA FROM JUDEVINE, http://www.davidbudbill.com/fleeting.html, which is based on two characters from the Judevine poems. A FLEETING ANIMAL premiered in Vermont in October of 2000 to rave reviews and packed houses.

David received his first Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from New England College, in Henniker, New Hampshire, in January 2009.

Among David Budbill's prizes and honors are: a National Endowment for the Arts Play Writing Fellowship in 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for Fiction in 1978. In 2002 the Vermont Arts Council gave David the Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

In New York City David has performed at John Zorn's The Stone, The China Institute, Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center, The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, The Knitting Factory, The Great Hall at Cooper Union, The Carpathian Orthodox Church, The Orenzantz Center, among numerous other venues. He has also performed with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble.

The Los Angeles Daily News says that David Budbill writes "with rare honesty, affection and grace--and with language so precise and descriptive you will know immediately you're soul-deep in something extraordinary."

The Chicago Sun Times has described Budbill's writing as "Wrenchingly real, fiercely emotional and unexpectedly funny."

For an extended essay on David Budbill and his various books, refer to DAVID BUDBILL (1940-) by Nathan J. Jandl in AMERICAN WRITERS: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Jay Parini, Editor-in-Chief, SUPPLEMENT XIX: David Budbill to Bruce Weigl, Charles Scribner's Sons, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning

as of 18 January 2012

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The sound of a page turning.", November 30, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moment to Moment (Paperback)

"Then I quit the world, and withdrew into these mountains/ as I could lose my self and see the world/ with clear and simple eyes" (p. 21). These 98 poems were written by a mountain recluse, Judevine Mountain. According to the book jacket, David Budbill discovered the hermit living in the woods behind his house. These poems gaze inward, into the "sweet Zen emptiness" (p. 100) of the "almost sixty"-year-old poet's reclusive life. (It is no coincidence that Budbill was born in 1940 and is a poet also.) He calls his life "a vessel of silence" (p. 5) that allows him "room for thoughts to wander" (p. 17). He writes: I have known a solitude and stillness so profound/ that my own breath/ is the only evidence there is any life around" (p. 15).

These poems cannot avoid comparison to the 1200-year old songs of reclusive-poet, Han Shan (better known as "Cold Mountain). Cold Mountain was a true hermit and genuine sage. Bill Porter (a.k.a. "Red Pine") is the most recent translator of Cold Mountain. He likens hermit poets to "a mountain stream that brings fresh water down into town" (Tricycle, Winter 2000). In our "age of frantic travel" (p. 11), "a time of get and spend" (p. 92) for those "who yammer about money all the time" (p. 33), Judevine Mountain's wise poems have much to offer. "Struggle is what it means to be alive and free" (p. 37). "The end of life is in the mirror" (p. 59). "Be glad with just a cup of tea,/ a bird's song,/ a small book of plain poems, and your anonymity" (p. 47).

This collection raises the question of whether Judevine Mountain really "quit the world," as he claims, to live the solitary life of a true recluse, for he remains connected to the outside world through the telephone (pp. 51, 88), "health-insurance premiums, property taxes and car-repair bills" (p. 27). While it may not be the work of a true solitary, this "small book of plain poems" is insightful, rewarding, and at times even humorous. If this collection leaves you wanting more, then wander further upstream to Red Pine's COLLECTED SONGS OF COLD MOUNTAIN (2000).

G. Merritt

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems of Humor and Peace, July 1, 2001

By 

Larry R. Smith "Midwest Reviewer" (Huron, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Moment to Moment (Paperback)

David Budbill has given us an essential book...poems that make us laugh and teach us of the humility of everyday living. Like Zen poet Han Shan, Budbill writes as a "crazy cloud," Zen mountain poet who celebrates the commonplace. The book moves through seven sections, from laughter to senses to sensibility, a clear and barebones book of poems that really matter.

5.0 out of 5 stars Hallelujah, March 20, 2010

By 

Jack Weber (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Moment to Moment (Paperback)

These poems are more than cups of warm tea for any evening. They have taken me home, to my best self, to my own best songs, which have spilled from me unbidden since receiving this book in the mail a few days ago, after too many years from first having discovered David's work in The Sun. I don't know why I waited so long. I am a persnickety poet and a particular reader, and these poems somehow reach my every depths, a comforting breath through the passing days. I sense already that I have found a brother, a friend in the wilderness and sanctity of David's poetry, a companion who will live with me for many years to come, over and over, deeper and deeper I will enter these poems in my own Judevine in the middle of the sea. The care, the crafting is all there...the honest cleverness, the humor, the paring, the exquisite art of poetry, honed and honed: yet still fresh, surprising, alive, never glib. Thank you, David, for caring so much for what you are here for, dedicating your life to such sincere madness as the sanity of great poetry. Amen.