Noelle Kocot and Ed Baker

Like all projects of this sort, "Poem-A-Day," from the Academy of American Poets, is rather scattershot, though I have run across a few gems I enjoyed quite a bit. Today, congratulations go out to Noelle Kocot, whose poem, "The Peace That So Lovingly Descends," is featured at "Poem-A-Day." I get the poems via email, though you can see them in a bunch at the archive link above. All the poems have been selected from new books published this spring. Noelle has been published a number of times in Lillie and her work has a personal uniqueness that is hard to cultivate in so few words. Here's today's poem:

The Peace That So Lovingly Descends

"You" have transformed into "my loss."
The nettles in your vanished hair
Restore the absolute truth
Of warring animals without a haven.
I know, I'm as pathetic as a railroad
Without tracks. In June, I eat
The lonesome berries from the branches.
What can I say, except the forecast
Never changes. I sleep without you,
And the letters that you sent
Are now faded into failed lessons
Of an animal that's found a home. This.

Noelle Kocot

Also, the magnificent Ed Baker's "Points / Counterpoints" has been published by Fact-Simile Editions via Issuu free for all to enjoy. Did I say free? Issuu is a great way to publish this work, a blend of the written word, art, and unique topography. The book is challenging stylistically, from an earlier period of Ed's work (copyright states 1970, 1973), yet contains his trademark serious/playfulness that has evolved into the holy fool feel many cherish up to this day. There is a cut and paste element, accompanied by swirling typography, that may surprise those familiar with his current work. The execution might be a bit different but the philosophy is all Ed. This is a return to print of some poetic history and, since it is on Issuu and may be downloaded, printed, shared, or embedded, here you go:

spring begins--
more foolishness
for this fool

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Recent News and One from the Archive

Cover by Bobo

Some misc. items of interest:

Jim Kacian, of Red Moon Press, has passed along the following "Call for Poems" that has a looming May 15th deadline:

Dimitar Anakiev is editing an international anthology of haiku dedicated to the topic of WAR. The editor invites all poets to submit their haiku written on the topic (particular interest: Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq . . . ). The poems may be previously published, no limitation in number of poems and style.

We are not interested in senryu. Japanese haiku is not free of human content but in fact links human with nature—in other words, it expresses the human in terms of nature. So "war" is human and nature is anything you want. Take for example famous haiku by Basho:

summer grass -

all that remains of

warrior's dreams

This poem has a natural topic (summer grass, a kigo) but its theme is human: "warrior dream" ( our theme: war!). We seek such haiku for the anthology and not senryu, which is another kind of poetry. Often Western poets confuse TOPIC with THEME. THEME in haiku is always human, and our choice is to do an anthology on human themes: WAR, DISCRIMINATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLENCE. (Like Basho above). So, please, do not send senryu. Thank you,

best wishes, Dimitar Anakiev

The poems should be sent by e-mail ASAP ( deadline: May 15) to"

haikukamesan at gmail dot com (written out to avoid bots ...)

For those who have not yet heard, nearly 200 years after his death, two new poems by Kobayashi Issa have been discovered. Here's an article from Mainichi Daily News with the details.

If you are not familiar with the work of the poet Lorine Niedecker, Ed Baker, the Hut's unofficial guru, has passed along this excellent website to share. Start with the poetry page; you won't be disappointed.

There is an interview with poet Noelle Kocot in a recent Publisher's Weekly. Over the years, Noelle has been very generous in sharing her work and has been published a number of times in Lillie.

After 4 months, I finished Anna Karenina. Don't ask. Of course, I read nearly two dozen books of poetry, plus Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, over the same period but, still, don't ask.

Recently, the always excellent Five Branch Tree website featured the following video, which I thought I'd pass on. There have also been some fine postings on David Young's book, Du Fu: A Life in Poetry. Along with great translations, some of David Young's own poems have been featured on Five Branch Tree. The music video, by the way, is entitled "Chinese Translation" and is by M. Ward:









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From the archives: Lilliput Review issue #35, from August 1992, was an all-women issue. Here's a handful of poems to enjoy:



Nocturnal

It was the leaves
louder than wind.
It was the hand
of darkness
in the leaves
came moving slowly
and the sound
of waiting in the leaves
louder than the wind.

Therese Arceneaux

Eve La Nuit

she was a sculptress
who felt eaten by men
gobbled up in their world
beaten
licked
her most famous piece
was an abstract view
some think of a bird
hungry
with a gaping mouth
or else a cock split open
or perhaps a serpent
who could tell an apple
from a woman

Belinda Subraman

our hearts beat

a flesh drum,
a circle cleared by
washing sorrow
far enough to see that

stars are round and
sea rim fans
to blue salt fingers
curving back to earth

Mary Schooler Rooney

Finally, yesterday was the anniversary of the passing of one of the blues greats, Reverend Gary Davis. Here's a very informal, yet powerful, performance of one of his great tunes, "Death Don't Have No Mercy:"

my dear one's hut--
lost amid blooming
blossoms

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

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

Tapping the Barometer, Why Buddha Sat Under the Tree, and Joe Pesci in Pittsburgh

The sad news of recent days is that the death of Hayden Carruth is reverberating through various poetic communities (no, I don't think there is only one, in practice or theory). Ed Baker was kind enough to send along notice, and point to a poem well worth sharing.

Agenda At 74
Tap barometer, burn trash,
put out seed for birds, tap
barometer, go to market
for doughnuts and Dutch
Masters, feed cat, write
President, tap barometer,
take baby aspirin, write
congressman, nap, watch
Bills vs. Patriots, tap
barometer, go to post
office and ask Diane if
it's cold enough for her,
go to diner and say "hi,
babe" to Mazie, go to
barber shop and read

Sports Illustrated, go
home, take a load off,
tap barometer, go to
liquor store for jug
(Gallo chablis), go
home, pee, etc., sweep
cellar stairs (be careful!),
write letter to editor,
count dimes, count quarters,
tap the fucking barometer ...

Hayden Carruth

This so perfectly captures a day in the life of an aging poet that it almost takes the breathe away with its understated quality and matter-of-fact resonance.

Beautiful.

Yesterday's poetry appreciation session went well, though not quite as I expected. Part of an overall package of programs for lifelong learners, the general attendance had been between 15 and 17; yesterday, there were 9. So it was cozy and comfortable. After a half hour intro, we got into the poems and folks didn't quite respond to the questions I'd prepared to stimulate discussion, so the session transmuted into more traditional class, with me riding herd all the way. Folks were much more comfortable with this and, as I pointed out various aspects of the poems (in a declarative rather than inquisitive manner), they began to respond and responded very well. Since I noticed three faces from last year, I didn't want to repeat poems I'd covered then so asked them where to start. One person wanted to hear the Ted Kooser poem ("For You, Friend"), so I told them I had two poems to lead into it and proceeded to show them how one poem directly and indirectly influenced the other. They were taken with the similarity of imagery (which the relationships are built on) and we just took off from there. They were enthused enough with the three poems ("Donal Og - Broken Vows," "Funeral Blues" by Auden, and "For You, Friend), that I decided to stretch it and go for the Shakespeare "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"), which really spun out well from the Kooser. They loved it, particularly when I read Howard Moss's poem of the same name:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Who says you're like one of the dog days?
You're nicer. And better.
Even in May, the weather can be gray,
And a summer sub-let doesn't last forever.
Sometimes the suns too hot;
Sometime it is not.
Who can stay young forever?
People break their necks or just drop dead!
But you? Never!
If there's just one condensed reader left
Who can figure out the abridged alphabet,
-----After you're dead and gone,
-----In this poem you'll live on!

I did this in my best "drop dead" Jersey accent and they loved it - when I heard the unrestrained laughter, I knew they were enjoying poetry and, so, I'd accomplished what I came for.

One of the more enlightening moments for me came during the questions that were asked as we were wrapping things up. One person in particular asked why is it that many times when she hears poets read, on places like the NewsHour, they just sound so flat and they drone on and on. As I paused to answer, everyone in the room was either vocally assenting or nodding their heads at this observation and I realized poets are very often their own worst enemies. My response was that I'd chosen works I love and greatly admire and those kinds of works for me contain a great deal of emotion that needs to be conveyed. They are works I believe in.

Everyone seems to lament the fact that no one reads poetry anymore and yet, when we have the opportunity to put our best faces forward, we drone on and on and on. And it is not just a matter of entertainment, though this too is a factor. A woman I ran into at the library an hour after class stopped me to say how much she enjoyed the session and how moved she always is by Auden's "Funeral Blues," to the point she has difficulty listening to it, yet finds it immensely powerful even in the extreme emotion it invokes. She noted how she could never have expressed those emotions in words yet the poet had gotten it perfectly. I told her the old adage was true: we look to our poets to speak for us, they give us our own voice.

That, friends, is poetry, to be touched deeply, to be moved permanently.

If you write something, you better believe in it. And if you believe in it, when you read it spin it like the bottle you want to land on just the right spot ...

In other news, the Basho Haiku Challenge entries will be accepted up until midnight this evening. The response has been quite amazing and I'm very pleased. I finished up David Landis Barnhill's translations, Bashō's Haiku, and had intended to report on that today but am running out of space and time, so I'll postpone it until next week. Suffice to say that of the over 700 haiku, I marked 35 that grabbed me.

Eventually, when I run out of back issues to feature, I've got a couple of ideas about featuring different work here on a weekly basis. One of the ideas I mentioned previously is to showcase work from the books on the Near Perfect list (157 and counting). Though I'm not going to begin that now, I ran across a video of one of the poets on the list, the amazing and powerful and moving Etheridge Knight. Here is a video rendition of his poem, "The Idea of Ancestry."







This week's featured back issue is a special one, issue #75, from January 1996. As a milestone number, I came up with the idea to solicit poems, all to be entitled "Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree." I received lots of work and featured 14 poems in the issue, 13 entitled "Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree" (the 14th was called "The Joke" - and that's another story). So, here's a handful of the best, including the "Winner":




Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
there is no tree
no Buddha
& no contest.

please go home.

C Ra McGuirt
"Winning"poem

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
Because.
Because he is.
Because he is waiting.
Because he is waiting for you.

Evans Burn

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
To learn that
the words of
the prophets are
written on
subway walls.

Alan Catlin

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
When you read Nazi books
why do you always turn
straight to the pictures?

Noelle Kocot

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
Buddha did not sit
under the tree.
The tree stood
next to Buddha.

Laura Kim

Why Did Buddha Sit Under the Tree
When two or more are gathered in my name

Marty Campbell

Best of luck and thanks to everyone participating in the Basho Haiku Contest,

Don

Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Hotham

This week, while doing collection maintenance at my day job as a librarian, I ran across a small volume of poems by Kenneth Rexroth, which I had not seen before. I was intrigued by the at once old school and small press looks of the book, which is entitled The Silver Swan: Poems Written in Kyoto, 1974-75. A very early publication of the mainstream “small press” Copper Canyon, it is comprised of 16 short poems with facing characters in the Japanese style, fairly primitive in execution. Though uncredited, they may possibly be by Rexroth himself.

I enjoyed the volume; three poems in particular seize the day, as it were. Here they are:



For Ruth Stephen

Twilit snow,
The last time I saw it
Was with you.
Now you are dead
By your own hand
After great pain.
Twilit snow.



Asagumori

On the forest path
The leaves fall. In the withered
Grass the crickets sing
Their last songs.
Through dew and dusk
I walk the paths you once walked,
My sleeves wet with memory.




Late Spring.
Before he goes, the uguisu
Says over and over again
The simple lesson no man
Knows, because
No man can ever learn.




Rexroth is widely known for his help in the continued popularization of Eastern forms in the West via his many collections of translations (100 Poems from the Japanese, 100 Poems from the Chinese etc.), which followed in the footsteps of such greats as Waley, Blyth, and others. The poems in this volume demonstrate the Eastern influence and his own mastery of the short form in English. Long out of print, Silver Swan can, of course, be found in the recent Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth and also in the more affordable Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems. Both these later editions include 12 additional poems, including one long one among the short, which can be read in its entirety here.

Ah, yes, less is more, indeed.

Gary Hotham’s Modest Proposal Chapbook, Missed Appointment, has received another positive review, this time in the current Frogpond: check it out here (if blurry, zoom in).







Cover by Wayne Hogan


This week's sampling of poems from past issues comes from October 2005: Lilliput #147. It begins with a couple of my favorite kind of short poems, ones that might be characterized as presenting a cosmos in a teacup:



Stranger

I first saw her in the mirror of the burnt hall
Her white hair spreading across Europe ....

Daniele Pantano

History of the Moon

Nights go, sitting up
to tend this flame:

not the center,
where it burns fat and yellow

-the edge,
thin, blue and infinite.

James Owens

And here's a couple of more little beauties:


The people of my native village
have changed after many years,
but at the gate
the fragrance
of plum blossoms remains.

Ki-no Tsurayuki
translated by Dennis Maloney & Hide Oshiro

The Library of Why

The shelves are empty.

Noelle Kocot

fable

I've had
no luck
finding
the forest
I was supposed
to have been
lost in
forever
and ever

Mark DeCarteret

Hopefully, by next week's posting I'll have an announcement about the next volume in the Modest Proposal Chapbook series and some more info about when to expect #'s 161 and #162 to hit the mails. Until then ...

best,
Don