Issa's Untidy Hut: Michael Jackson

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Basho, Burns, Brautigan, Amy Lowell, and Jacko?

Cover art by John Bennett

Busy, busy times, so posts for the next couple of weeks will be sporadic and brief. The Basho Haiku Challenge is off to a great start, with lots of entries coming in. Thanks very much to Poet Hound, Haiku and Horror , Blogging Along Tobacco Road, and trout fishing in minnesota for getting the word out. I'm sure there are some others, too, that I don't know about, but thanks all.

So, keep the haiku coming in, folks. Instructions may be found at the Basho Haiku Challenge link, above.

And keep spreading the word.

As alluded to above, not much progress on any fronts. I haven't read any fiction in over a month and I am seriously jonesing. When I see the piles as I go room to room, you can't imagine the variety of voices I hear calling to me from every corner: classic, modern, sci-fi, horror, any damn thing. They all want to be read and I want to read them all and the discipline is killing me.

I continue to read, however, for both the haiku challenge and a future Modest Proposal project, two different translations of Basho, one at work and one at home. At home, I'm reading the Jane Reichhold Basho: the Complete Haiku, which is the prize for the challenge and, I'm happy to say, I'm beginning to warm to it a bit. All the translations I've read so far have had one thing to recommend them: specifically, Basho himself. This may seem ludicrous but what I mean specifically is that I seem to be encountering different aspects of the same poet in the different translations. A poem I loved in one translation, I'm indifferent to the next and, of course, vice versa. At work, I'm still reading David Landis Budhill's Basho's Journey which, after the Reichhold, is the most complete and has notes for every poem. They'll be more details on both of these volumes in future posts.

Come mid-October, I hope to be working on the new issues, #'s 165 & 166, along with a new chapbook in the Modest Proposal series, a second volume of translations from 100 Poems by 100 Poets, by Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro. This volume will concentrate on poems of nature following the previous Unending Night, which contained love poems.

Jilly Dybka at Poetry Hut has pointed to a beautiful, pointed September poem by one of my favorite poets, Amy Lowell (particularly her shorter poems). Here it is, September, 1918; I think you'll enjoy it.

A Richard Brautigan poem, Star Holes, seems to be making the blog/live journal rounds. This guy just won't lay down and, of course, that's why we love him. Here it is:

Star Holes
I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,

watching light
pour itself toward
me.

The light pours
itself through
a small hole
in the sky.

I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things
are faraway.
Richard Brautigan

Finally, in the news of the truly odd, Michael Jackson has reportedly recorded musical versions of the work of Robert Burns. If I didn't read it in The Guardian, I wouldn't have believed it.

You know what: I still don't believe it.

This week's issue from the Lilliput archive is #78 from March 1996.

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

I sought my heart
among the shadows
and found instead
a burnished leaf

Albert Huffstickler

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

Drag me in,
you are a night that is just beginning.
You are a room I've seen
but have never slept in.
Your shoulder pushes against
the world's edge, and the sky
scrapes softly on my cheek.
Ali Kress

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

Selfless
-----The pulsing
of the soft brown muslin curtain,
for example

And the quietness of rain,
taking you apart

Mark Jackley

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

Thank You
To the pirate faced biker
streaming slowly down
Marshall Avenue,
colors jazzed in the
night time light,
front wheeled Harley
out to here, black
jacket man with beard
of steel, who saw my
one year old boy craning
in his blue stroller
and waved.
Michael Finley