Issa's Sunday Service, #22: "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"

Last week, it was mourning the death of a great poet/rocker, Jim Carroll. It's fitting then that this week we celebrate the birth of another great rocker/poet, Nick Cave. This is Cave's (& the Bad Seeds) second appearance on Issa's Sunday Service and, though I promised myself to keep the repeats to a minimum, at least to start out, my extremely biased opinions are showing.


There She Goes, My Beautiful World

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

John Wilmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabokov wrote on index cards,
at a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And Johnny Thunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years
I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospital

I will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I'll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I'll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting life

I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it
If you've got a field, that don't yield,
well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse,
but then I weren't much of a poet

I will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
O Come on
Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Anybody who name checks Wilmot (and he's not referring to the talented and generous Eddie Anderson of Jack Benny fame), St. John of the Cross, and Philip Larkin, beside numerous others, is an instant inductee into the LitRock Hall of Fame as far as I'm concerned. Here's a video of the song performed during the Abattoir Blues tour.





This week's poem is from Lilliput Review #31, April 1992, to commemorate the passing of blues composer, arranger, consciousness objector, and bass player extraordinaire Willie Dixon, arguably the prime mover of urban blues. Unbelievably, these are just a few of the songs he wrote: Back Door Man, Bring It On Home, Diddy Wah Diddy, Down in the Bottom, Evil, Hoochie Coochie Man, I Ain't Superstitious, I Can't Quit You Baby, I Just Want to Make Love to You, Little Red Rooster, Mellow Down Easy, Pain in My Heart, Seventh Son, The Same Thing, Tollin' Bells, Wang Dang Doodle, You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover (which has already made an appearance on Issa's Sunday Service), and You Shook Me.

The Death of Willie Dixon

Late January, a handful of
leaves on a single tree -
the wind.

K. Shabee

a corrupt world
in its latter days...
but cherry blossoms!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Big Glitch and a Few Poems

Cover, w/tea stain, by Albert Huffstickler

* The above image was added afterwards, making some of what follows obsolete. *

Well, the year is starting out with a different kind of bang, not exactly one I'd hoped for or anticipated. With one issue in the rear view, another popped up immediately before I could get out of the way: computer problems.

I can't really figure out what is going on at the moment. I've been running all kind of diagnostics but the best I can sort out is that it must be some kind of virus. I can surf at the moment and minimally check email and blogger, but I don't seem to be able to upload images and when posting occasionally get broken connection messages. This may take awhile to sort out and things could be intermittent at best for the next little while.

Since today is Archive Tuesday, I'm going to try to post a few poems without the cover image. This week's trip into the past arrives at April 1994, issue #55. The further we go back in time, the wordier the work, if still limited to 10 lines. My evolution, as editor and just plain folk, is evident, at least to me. Enjoy.





Inside Spring

A robin walks across
a quiet street, as if
there's a choice.

K. Shabee

Summer

shining shining
black crow strutting
open-beaked
across the dried crumbling
street

Michael Estabrook

a new eden

time to chase god
out of the garden, restore
forests, listen again
to a wisdom of serpents
to voices of trees,
time to take on
all that terrible
knowing

Will Inman

Painting

The feeling
jumps
from deep
inside
your gut
to canvas
in a lump
of red
which will be
someone else's
sun

Suzanne Bowers

Cafe Poem

The woman in
the corner,
white on black,
white skin,
black hair,
black dress,
lights a
long, white
cigarette,
the orange flame
bright
against her cheek.

Albert Huffstickler

Looking these over, I notice I chose the most minimal, so it doesn't appear much different than usual. You'll have to trust me on the wordiness part.

I'll keep plugging away at this end, but this computer thing doesn't have a good feel. I've got all the files for Lilliput saved to a separate portable hard drive so, if I've got clean the whole disk and start from scratch, it is doable, if painful.

More soon ...


Hopefully.

Don

PS If the print size is minuscule, I apologize. See aforementioned glitch. This is my second shot at posting this; the first put an early, incomplete draft up.

George Carlin in Twain and Swift Territory

Dali/Quixote Napkin by Tom Kane (w/tea stain)

The following is a small excerpt from the 2007 George Carlin special "It's Bad For Ya." In some ways it is a humorous take on similar territory explored in the recent Robinson Jeffers post. Once again, Twain and Vonnegut and Swift come to mind, the great satirists who cared enough to rip their beloved fellow travelers a new one for the sake of redemption. The pitch Carlin builds here nearly takes him out of comedy all together; though he might have lost a step or two physically in his later years, he was never more scintillating, acerbic, and spot-on as in this portrait of the human condition. (It's hard to imagine that a language disclaimer is necessary at a small press poetry blog but here you go: George uses many of those famous seven words and more, so you've been warned).




As I mentioned in last Thursday's weekly post, due to schedule changes at my paying job, the archival posts will now be on Tuesday and this is the first. This week it's issue #57 of Lilliput Review, from June 1994. Hope you enjoy the selections, including a poem by the late Michael McNeilley, author of the Lilliput broadside 15 sexual haiku/senryu, a visual art/poem, and one for Kurt Cobain. Has it really been 14 years?



down they came

down they came and I wiped
them out ----the bastards
-------they'll be back I know
-------sit over there ---so don't then
they'll be back I tell you
you'd better listen ---we'd better
-------hurry we've just got time
-------to get one in
we'll be ready for them next time
won't we but we'd better hurry
-------shit here they come ----here
-------take this no wait

Michael McNeilley

The Light Above It Is Burned Out

The stepladder's closed,
leaning against the stacks.

If it were in Humanities,
symbolism would shine all over.

In Government Documents, it waits
for the maintenance man to get off break.

H. Edgar Hix

More InSerts

NowHere

Richard Kostelanetz

Global Village

The noon spider
spins a porch-web,
silk lines snaring
my thought. I see
5.5 billion humans
in a single fly
abuzz by the dusk

Walt Franklin

Brautigan and Bukowski
------------i.m. kc
With first light and your sigh,
the heavy dew evaporates
from the pane.

K. Shabee

best,
Don

Robert Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields and More

The book by Robert Bly chosen for the Near Perfect Book of Poetry list is Silence in the Snowy Fields. The book was written largely at the same time and in the same location as much of The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright. In fact, Bly is the friend referred to in The Blessing, which was featured in last Thursday's post.

As you know if you are a regular around here, the Near Perfect list is reader nominated and remains an ongoing project. As such, I don't necessarily have to agree with the choices; this is a communal thing. I hope to be featuring a poem or three from each of the nominated books by way of sharing the work valued by regular readers of poetry.

Which brings us back to Silence in the Snowy Fields. I'm a fan of Robert Bly, I think he has written more than his share of very good poems and has done more promoting the art of poetry than many of our laureates ever have. That being said, I've read Silence through twice over the past couple of months and, well, it didn't really grab me in a big way. So, this is by way of saying I'm not the final arbiter in this. I featured one poem from Silence back in July. Here are two more that stood out for me:

Watering The Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

Where We Must Look For Help

The dove returns: it found no resting place:
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas;
Beneath ark eaves
The dove shall magnify the tiger's bed;
Give the dove peace.
The split-tail swallows leave the sill at dawn;
At dusk, blue swallows shall return.
On the third day the crow shall fly;
The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,
The crow shall find new mud to walk upon.

The horses on Bly's farm played a large part in American poetry it would seem. The second poem feels pretty average until you hit the last two lines; suddenly the language rises to the image, transmutes to archetypal myth, and we are forced to see the cliche of a familiar story in a very different way.

Silence was Bly's first book and it is considered groundbreaking for its time, clearing out some of the cobwebs of what had been for many years a fairly staid American poetry scene. I'll be sharing one more poem from Silence in the coming days. For a very sizable preview of Silence in the Snowy Fields, check it out in google books.

This week's featured back issue of Lilliput Review is #60, a little different in layout and approach. It even comes with a title: "Poems Without Segues II." The whole idea was a matter of expediency; I had more poems on hand than I could, at that time, deal with, and so threw nuance to the wind and simply printed them. #60 was originally published in August 1994.

Artwork by Harland Ristau

Since the scan actually includes 6 poems from the cover (click on the image above for a readable version), I'll be featuring more poems than usual. What follows are some selections from the other 7 jam-packed pages.



breezy--
the spider's thread
warps a sunbeam

William Hart

waves break
on the cusp
of our bed--
I cradle
her moans,
moonlit
between my
crescent thighs

Janet Mason

from Rainy Day Sweetish Bakery

I think the rain
is falling
on my mother's
grave I think
it falls
very quietly.
I think there
is a tree there
and it catches
the drops
and sifts them
down
silently.

Albert Huffstickler

Ely Cathedral

Seeing you from a distance
I knew at once
O Ship of the Fens
How right it was
to make you metaphor

Hugh Hennedy

There is me
and this tree
and that bird

and there is morning.
Suzanne Bowers

trumpet curves stagelight -
the rainy street outside

christien gholson

Self Aggrandizing Poet
The head of the dead window box
flower bows away from
the grimy window in
the town with
your name.

K. Shabee

And a Brobdingnag poem from Huff:

Laundromat

This is how Hopper would have painted it:
the line of yellow dryers
catching the sunlight from the broad window.
Man with his hand reached up to the coin slot,
head turned to the side as though reflecting,
woman bent over the wide table
intent on sorting,
another standing hands at her side, looking off -
as though visiting another country;
each thing as it is,
not reaching beyond the scene for his symbols,
saying merely, "On such and such a day,
it was just as I show you."
Each person, each object, static
but the light a pilgrim.

Albert Huffstickler

best,
Don

Shiki and Camille Paglia Meet on a Bleak December Morning

Cover by Wayne Hogan

Over the last few weeks, I've been reading a wide variety of material, including a biography of Basho, Mary Oliver's Dream Work, and Sharon Olds' new book, One Secret Thing.

It has been a true lyrical cornucopia. Both the Oliver and Olds books are very good, indeed. I added the Oliver book to the list of Near Perfect Books of Poetry, which I never do lightly, at least when it comes to my own nominations. In some ways, the Olds' volume is the more powerful, but it lacks the overall consistency of Oliver's. One Secret Thing builds momentum to a very powerful set of poems about the passing of her mother that will stand with her finest work, no mean feat.

I'm about three quarters of the way through Matsuo Basho: The Master Haiku Poet by Makoto Ueda and it strikes a fine balance of biography and critical overview. I'll be getting back to it in depth in a future post.

Most problematic of all, however, was the gathering of Shiki poems. There is not much out there, folks, and what is out there is decidedly underwhelming. I have often wondered why Robert Haas' The Essential Haiku only included works by Basho, Issa, and Buson. I'm beginning to think I know why.

I'm at a loss to explain the paucity of translations of Shiki's work. He was steeped in and revered the Japanese cultural tradition. Something about his work must be less "universal" than Basho, Issa, and Buson. He was technically proficient, his poems seeming to be very painterly, very imagistic. I'm speculating here, at best; I've not seen much that engages these points but, suffice it to say, that I'm weaving together threads in an attempt to get a better picture. Somewhere I read that he was prolific (tens of thousands of poems) in his short life, yet he seems to have the least amount of works translated into English (and it seems, with exception of two or 3 volumes, to be the same two dozen poems or so translated over and over) of the big four haikuists.

So, to remedy this paucity of work, I decided to take a look around my fairly sizable collection of haiku anthologies and see what was what. A few I consulted had Shiki by yielded nothing new. Today I'm going to concentrate on three of the dozen or so I perused.

The first I looked at was the Dover The Classic Tradition of Haiku edited Fabuion Bowers. I'm a big fan of this modest little volume, primarily because Bowers culled his selections from multiple translators, including Burton Watson, Harold Henderson, Hiroaki Sato, Lafcadio Hearn, Makoto Ueda, R. H. Blyth, Sanford Goldstein, and William Higginson, among others. This volume contains 21 Shiki poems, of which I marked 4 as noteworthy. Of the four, three were new to me and one is probably for Shiki nearly as famous as the frog/water poem is for Basho:



I've turned my back
On Buddha
How cool the moon!

Translated by Alex Kerr

Men are disgusting.
They argue over
The price of orchids.

Translated by Alex Kerr

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

Translated by Alex Kerr

Buddha-death
the moonflower's face
the snake gourd's fart

Translated by Janine Beichman

The Kerr translation of the classic Shiki poem written as he contemplated his own demise is not as good as others I've read (i.e. "Remember me / as a persimmon eater / who loved haiku"). The other three are quite good; all four inject an element of the personal into the work that makes them all the more universal, an irony that would not be lost on William Faulkner.

The next collection I looked at was Classic Haiku: The Greatest Japanese Poetry From Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki and Their Followers, edited by Tom Lowenstein. There are 38 poems by Shiki in this collection and I marked 5 for further review.



Wind in summer:
and all my unlined writing
paper's blowing off my desk.

This year I fell ill when
the peonies were in flower,
and got better with the chrysanthemums.

How cool it has become!
I've completely forgotten
that I'd planned to steal some melons.

A flash of lightning.
Between trees in the forest
I caught a glimpse of water.

How lonely I felt
on a cold, cold night
when I killed that spider.





I was familiar with all 5 of these haiku from different translations, yet something about these grabbed me. I don't remember any mention of stealing in previous versions of "How cool it has become" but I may just be mistaking it for one of Basho's melon poems.

The third book I looked at was Harold G. Henderson's An Introduction to Haiku, which contains a whole chapter, with appended poems, on Shiki. Henderson provides a biographical context for the poetry and gives an overall assessment of the work. There are a total of 44 haiku, of which I marked a dismal 3 as worth another look-see:



To ears
--defiled by sermons-
----a cuckoo.

Haiku! Reading through
--three thousand, I have here
----persimmons - two!

The Moor

Spring moor:
---for what do people go, for what
------do they return?




Two of these three were unfamiliar to me and that was pleasing. Yet overall from the 3 volumes it is really a minimal number of haiku: 12 poems out of 99. Still there are 12 poems I'm happy to be more familiar with now. I have some more anthologies to go through here, including the 4 volume R. H. Blyth classic work on haiku, so perhaps I'll have more to add in the future. The University of Virginia website contains over 80 of Janine Beichman's translations of Shiki's haiku and tankas. I hope to go through these sometime soon also. If you'd like to take a look at how technical translation can get and how many different translations of one single haiku there might be, check out "Of Persimmons and Bells," which analyzes Shiki's most famous poem from here till next Thursday (or the Thursday after). The poem is one of those that resonates with significance in Japanese culture and for the Japanophile but doesn't quite do it for a novice like myself. Frankly, all in all the analysis enters deeper waters than I dare tread.

Speaking of deep and fascinating waters, check out Camille Paglia's "Final Cut: the Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn," in which she explains how she picked the poems for her popular book on great work. As always with Paglia, she manages to simultaneously trash people while praising them (and, of course, just plain trashes others). You get all of her bias and prejudice and yet she brings the big guns to the table and cannot be easily ignored. She has far too much to teach. I've read Break, Blow Burn (subtitled: "Camille Paglia Read Forty-Three of the Worlds Best Poems") and I'm happy that I did.

Regular readers of Lilliput Review and this blog are familiar with Dennis Maloney, who has co-edited with Robert Alexander a new volume on prose poetry, entitled The House of Your Dream: an International Collection of Prose Poetry. Here's a partial list of contributors that is quite formidable, indeed.

Well, because of last week's holiday, there was no regular archival Thursday posting featuring samplings of a back issue of Lillie (you may have noticed, however, I've been posting daily for about a month or so, a little experiment to see how close to the edge I can get - I'm not sure how long this will continue, but Thursday will remain the regular weekly day for a generally long, leisurely post with poems, with news of interest and glib non sequitars popping up in between). This week's back issue is #64 from December 1994, with a delightful cover by Wayne Hogan, pictured above. Enjoy.



----------------------------------------------------------

Van Gogh

We, sane as sympathy,
integrate, liberate,
allocate and war.
In madman's color, you
may have changed the world
the only way it can be.

Betty Davis

Having a Cigarette with Frank O'Hara After Lunch

High above the Times Square of a young boy,
a billboard blows smoke through a
shared memory, where it settles,
lightly, scenting this page.

K. Shabee

Calculated Risk

Some poems never get written:
living them through was enough.

Kate Stewart

Open Mike

Lyric charlatans offer poetic
rhapsodies to their friends,
pat their hands together
and laugh with nervous
relief when a heckler
guilty of profane
candor, is flung
out the door
to complete his
poem in the street

William Harris III

Note

When I was far from you,
only one bird
flew across the mountainside,
skimming above trees and fog.
A crow,
its cry like a dropped rag.
One crow.
It was enough.

James Owens

The Meeting

Meeting you
on a crowded city street
after twenty years,
your face is almost unchanged,
blue eyes
still direct,
an easy smile,
deeper voice;
your slow compromise
with laughter.

William Beyer

Marriage

The small flock of bones in my hand
have settled to sleep on your breast,
chirping together as they sink back
through the hours of this long day,
back to the darkness around us and in us.

James Owens

night invocation

your tongue is a nightgown.
dress me in it, o blessed raven,
as i prepare for bed.
brush out my hair
with the strong ribs
of your feathers.
lend your words to me
that i may know what i hear
once sleep has come.

jen besemer

Clematis

Woven around itself,
the unpruned tendriled
tangle of split stems
supports
the skeletal trellis
which long ago
gave up
stilting this vine
that flowers
on old wood.

Janet Bernichon

Sappho to Erinna

Come. It's morning.
Let me brush the stars
from your hair.

Noelle Kocot

best,
Don