Sam Hamill's Buson

 Painting by Buson

Bashō and Issa get most of the good press, Buson's work being portrayed at times as cold and aloof.  Still, compared to Shiki, Buson is downright engaged with the rest of us lowly mortals.

Last week I took a look at Sam Hamill's renderings of Bashō in his beautiful little book, The Sound of Water: Haiku by Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets.   This time round, it's the artistic, painterly Buson.

From this small selection (47) of Buson's haiku that Sam Hamill has translated, the following 5 grabbed my attention.

Utter loneliness-
another great pleasure
in autumn twilight

Here, the mutual virtue of loneliness and a lovely autumn twilight come together in a very distinctive way, calling to mind how sadness and beauty and transience all intersect in Japanese culture in the concept of wabi-sabi.

The thwack of an axe
in the heart of a thicket-
and woodpecker's tat-tats!

The comparisons and contrasts in the two essential elements of this haiku - the woodsman and the woodpecker - are really multiple.  It is not only the actions, it is the intent.  We think more of the contrast between the woodsman and the woodpecker but what they share is of greater importance.   This haiku resonates aurally, visually, and philosophically.

This cold winter night,
that old wooden-head buddha
would make a nice fire

Worthy of Issa, Buson's sentiment is known to all in need, whether of fuel, food, or love.  So easily our beliefs are put aside for our needs and right you are, as the poet said.   First and foremost here, however, is the need to laugh long and hard at ourselves.

In seasonal rain
along a nameless river
fear too has no name

It would seem that the speaker is lost, or at least in unknown territory, since the river's name isn't known.  This feeling evokes the fear itself, which is nameless because it is undifferentiated, it is irrational fear - fear of the unknown.  Lost, in an unfamiliar land, possibly in the torrential downpour of the rainy season, instinct takes over.  A most uncharacteristic haiku from a classical master.

Pure white plum blossoms
slowly begin to turn
the color of dawn

This last one is pure Buson.  How minutely observed the scene is - is dawn all one color, is the light a real color at all, or is the color of the plum blooms simply realized in the breaking light?  It would seem this haiku was done with a paint brush and not a writer's implement.

Next week, if all goes well, I'll take a peek at Hamill's Issa.

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

Looking back on issue #128 of Lilliput Review, I see it contained quite a few poems about mothers and death.  There is a truism to this one, by Michael Meyerhofer, that no prose may ever explain:

Her last night, my mother walked into
   the kitchen where I was standing
      and when I looked at her

I could see

the shadow of something huge
   passing over her face—

What's wrong, I asked.
I don't know, she said, and smiled.

Michael Meyerhofer

Here are two more, by two masters of another sort, the same topic:

hearing the downside
of melodic minor
mother's voice

Sheila Murphy

my dead mother--
every time I see the ocean
every time...

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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The Inexorable March to the Sea: the Lilliput Archive & Happy Paddy's Day

Cover by Oberc

In the inexorable march to the sea that is the ongoing survey of past issues of Lilliput Review, we've arrived at issue #45, from June 1993. The cover above is by the artist poet Lawrence Oberc. Here's a taste from the distant past:

use of religion

let the manna turn
moldy and green,
holy penicillin

Evan Klein

After Paging Through American Poetry Review
A Friend Sent Me In the Mail

This is the game: To compete.
Ads for books, ads for writing programs.
Poems like craftbaskets sold in tourist towns
to the tourist who wants to be an indian.
Evangelization. The sales pyramid.
And the secret desire leaking
from the new churchgoer:
----"If I sell what's been sold to me,
------------------------------I won't be lost alone..."

----------christien gholson

Form As An Intention

the fashion is to heal
and talk
the fashion is to sprinkle
histrionics over
former meals of drunkenness
the fashion is to go away
where bandaids have been laced
together like this
bundle of my etchings
(would you like to see my etchings?)

Sheila E. Murphy

Setting Hair

walls are what make horses bodies
just the right size
to lie atop the first color console television
that doesn't have to ride the back
of anyones small children
just to hold the balance
between both styles
of farrah fawcett hair dos

Stacey Sollfrey

-----This faint light:
-----the presence

-----of absence
-----in a room.

-----Audrey Haerlin

Hearth fire crackles
your silhouette opens a door
inviting me in

William Galasso

a different view

hanging
from a maple tree
upside-down
I see the world
face to face

Garth Ferguson

Voyeur

that heavy breath
against smeared glass

the poet rubbing
windows

for the world to
peep through

Melissa Cannon

Well, since it's Paddy's Day and I'm working on more projects than I can count, I thought it might be time for a brief respite and some accompanying music. The first clip combines two of my favorite purveyors of urban Irish music, The Dubliners and The Pogues. To see Ronnie Drew stand side by side with Shawn McGowan is an Irish music fans idea of Fiddler's Green. If neither uttered a note, their separate unique stances sing endless refrains.

The 2nd clip is of an old time favorite singer/composer, Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan, whose recordings, aside from a cut or two here and there on an anthology, are literally unattainable. He is a long-time favorite of mine and I have none of his records. How sweet the irony then that the only place they may be obtained is via You Tube, where a handful of cuts appear in a static, still photo format. If anyone knows of any recordings out there that are available, I'm loosening those eye teeth as I type. Hope you enjoy this cut, which is but a taste of what he does so well.

Dominic Behan

In addition to the weekly tour through past issues of Lilliput on this blog, the Twitter poem-a-day from back issues of Lillies is progressing nicely. As with these weekly posts, each poem posted daily at Twitter is from a particular back issue, starting from the newest and heading backwards chronologically. The one caveat is the poem must be 140 characters (including spaces) or less. Today the poem is from issue #156. Check it out.


best,
Don

E. E. Cummings vs. e. e. cummings vs. the universe (The Universe)

Cover by Harland Ristau

Michael Dylan Welch, a fine haiku poet and contributing editor to Spring, the journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, has appended a comment to a recent post on E. E. Cummings' birthday that seemed both interesting and important enough to pass along.

Just a quick note to suggest that E. E. Cummings' name be treated with the normal capitals. The lowercasing of his name was just something that his book designers did -- not Cummings himself. The policy and practice of the E. E. Cummings Society (I'm a longtime contributing editor to its journal Spring), Liveright (Cummings' publisher), and George Firmage (Cummings' literary executor, although recently deceased himself) is to treat the poet's name with initial capitals. Despite popular practice and perception, lowercasing his name is simply incorrect. For more information, please visit the definitive articles on the subject at http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/caps.htm and http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/caps2.html.



The myth of lowercasing E. E. Cummings' name is not unlike the myth of 5-7-5 syllables for English-language haiku. Too many people, even well-meaning poets and textbooks, have borrowed the number without thinking about what the number is counting. Yet people cling to their beliefs in odd ways, and perhaps lowercasing Cummings' name is similar. Or in some cases, they simply have heard anything to counter their beliefs. Please give the two essays I linked to a good read and give them a chance to shift your world just a little bit.



Michael Dylan Welch

I'd like to thank Michael for sending this along. Cummings was one of the first poets that "spoke to me" as a teen, one of the first that motivated me to make a life of reading and writing (and editing) poetry. This is the first I've heard this, though that is not surprising since I'm hardly a scholar and have never read a full-length biography. The fact that this misnomer is so culturally all pervasive is truly amazing. I've followed and read Michael's links in their entirety and would urge others to do so if you need convincing.

It should be mentioned that probably what added to the confusion is that Cummings occasionally did use the lower case spelling but I think it is very clear that, overall, it was his desire that his name be capped in standard fashion.

The intrepid Ed Baker has followed Michael's comments with a link he sent along to a Wikipedia article, that has some interesting links of it's own, and links to the articles Michael cites above. Ed also posits the opinion that Cummings probably just went along with the publisher's whim when the lower case spelling was used and that's how the whole thing got legs.

This week I read a slim volume of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty entitled In Love With the Way and ran across a poem that reminded me of what is becoming my favorite Basho haiku (after reading it in so many different translations over the last few months). First, the Tang poem:



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

Grasses of the Ancient Plain

Tender grasses across the plain

Every year wither and grow back.

The wildfires fail to put an end to them,

With the breath of spring, they are reborn.

With their fragrances, they perfume the ancient way,
Emerald sheaves in the ancient ruins.
Agitated and quivering with nostalgia,
they bid farewell to the departing lord.

Bo Juyi

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

Here's Lucien Stryk's take on the Basho poem that came to mind:



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

Summer grasses,
all that remains
of soldiers' dreams.

Basho

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


I've linked up to some more Bo Juyi (or Bai Juyi) poems above, but here's another I ran across in a Witter Bynner translation:

A Suggestion to My Friend Liu

There's a gleam of green in an old bottle,
There's a stir of red in the quiet stove,
There's a feeling of snow in the dusk outside -
What about a cup of wine inside?

I've been busy this past week getting over a nasty cold and contacting folks about the Basho Haiku Challenge. Because I lost some time to the former, I'm still busy with the later but hope to be getting to it over the next 10 or so days.

Here's a bit of interesting news from the Japanese paper The Mainichi Daily News for those with a fondness for ancient Japanese poetry, specifically the Manyoshu. Also a great notice from the New York Times on a new film by one my favorite counterculture heroes, Patti Smith. And finally, for fans of Albert Huffstickler, Nerve Cowboy has posted the poems Huff published there from 1996 to 2002.

Johnny Baranski's Pencil Flowers is one of the books from the Near Perfect Books of Poetry list and tiny words (if you click their link, you'll see a fine haiku by the Basho Challenge winner, Roberta Beary) has posted a couple of his haiku. Here's one:

New Year's morning--
old haiku linked together
with cobwebs

I hope to be regularly posting samples from books selected for the Near Perfect list in the regular Thursday postings when time and space allow (almost slipped into a Star Trek episode there), sometimes with samples from the Back Issue archive and sometimes alone.

This week's back issue is #71, from August 1995. Full of many flights of fancy, we are all brought down to earth from lyrically ethereal realms by the ever insightful (balloon: here, pin: here) Wayne Hogan. Enjoy.



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

your body

each piece a shining eye
examining
the rest of the explosion.

scarecrow

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



Air served at room temperature reverberates until we snow.

Sheila E. Murphy

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

late summer rain
one droplet among many
catches my eye, trickles down the glass
thoughts of you
so different from all the rest

Cathy Drinkwater Better

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



the dead spider's web
holds the morning catch --
opaque beads of dew

Dorothy McLaughlin

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

New And Collected Poems

-----------I.
Sun's branches leap
from the fingers across town
a one-way sign.

----------II.
Talk Walks on
the wild side, spokes spin
too fast to be.

----------III.
Silence squiggles and
creeps upstream, history
giggles.

Wayne Hogan

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



Perhaps, we should end it all with the man himself, EEC, having the last word in a poem ya just don't see everyday:


--

----Seeker of Truth

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

Till next time,

Don

How to Read a Poem (& Why)

Cover by Gustave Doré

In just under two weeks, I will be conducting a poetry appreciation class, entitled "How to Read a Poem (& Why)" (not a very original title, but to the point, and a tad better than last year's "Poetry: Mystery and Magic") for a local lifelong learning program. This will be followed a week after with the first meeting of a new poetry discussion group at the library, called "3 Poems By..., which will focus on 3 representative poems by one particular poet, this time round Emily Dickinson. And a week after that, I'll be speaking to a class at the library and information service school on topics a tad arcane for general interest.

After that, my calendar is relatively free for the next 49 or so weeks.

I've mentioned the poetry appreciation class in passing previously and a number of folks asked me to elaborate, so here goes. The class consists of a general introductory "lecture" wherein I prat on for 40 or so minutes about essentially what poetry means to me and why it is important in people's lives, even folks who only encounter it a handful of times in their lives. Two basic texts that I found very helpful in preparing are both entitled "How to Read a Poem", one by Molly Peacock and the other by Edward Hirsch. They help a great deal with the how part of the program and Peacock is also very strong with the why. I use a few poems to illustrate some points in the introduction and open the lecture with James Wright's The Jewel. This year I'm going to try and tuck in some Issa haikus based on Robert Hass's reading and may also use Billy Collins's poem Introduction to Poetry to illustrate how not to read a poem. I heavily stress that poetry is not about answers, it's about questions, usually the big ones, to which there are no pat answers, hence the frequent refrain "oh, poetry, yeah, it's great, but I just don't get it." The great poems are a constant rephrasing of the big questions. As the great haiku critic, R. H. Blyth, said: "Poetry is never in the answers but in the questions - or rather between question and answer, between the known and unknown." I try to reassure everyone by hammering this home a number of ways and then follow with a single sheet handout of tips on how to read a poem.

Then we'll just plunge into the poetry.

I've prepared 10 or 11 poems for discussion and base what I do on the tried and true method of book discussion groups: I prepare between 5 to 10 open-ended questions based on each individual poem and use some of these to get the discussion going. Once the ice is broken, I simply guide the discussion of each work to help elucidate and provide clarity.

Since this is my second year doing this program and there is a slim possibility that there might be one or two folks in the class that where in it last year, I'm thinking, based on Elvis Costello's tour of a few years back (the one when he brought out a spinning wheel with 70 or so songs from his catalog and spun it on stage to create the evening's set), I may let the class choose which poems to do. Previously, I had a prepared order because I chose some poems with shared themes and imagery (in Auden's case borrowed imagery, in the kindest sense of the word). I'll have to see how that goes. I also have some video and audio to break up the monotony of me and that seems to go over well with the older crowd.

Here are the poems:

• Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
• Never Again Will Birds' Song Be the The Same by Robert Frost
• Donal Og, an anonymous Irish ballad, translated by Lady Gregory
• Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden
• For You by Ted Kooser
• Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
  
• A Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson
• Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
• Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop
• maggie and milly and molly and may by e. e. cummings

Some of these poems have subtle relationships (the first two), others more direct (the next 3, plus the last of that group of three and the next poem), the next two subtle again (with the Kenyon harking back to the 2nd group) and finally two unrelated individual poems. If past experience is any measure, we'll get through 4 or 5 poems. If I was to do them in order, and I still may, this would probably be the order I would do them in. I have video for the Frost (Voices and Visions), Donal Og (in John Huston's excellent film adaptation of James Joyce's story The Dead), and the Auden (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and audio for the Bishop. There is audio available for some of the others but it just doesn't have the "sparkle" that video brings; the Bishop I love, however, since she laughs at her own poem while reading it.

Here is the recitation of Donal Og from The Dead, to give you a taste:





Yesterday, I did a brief post for the birthdays of William Carlos Williams and Ken Kesey and a friend, WF, from across the pond sent this little poem by Richard Brautigan, a Issa's Untidy Hut regular, concerning WCW's birthday (or maybe not):


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

"September 3 (The William Carlos Williams Mistake"
I had severe insomnia last night with
the past, the present, and the future detailing
----themselves
like: Oh, the shit we run through our minds!
Then I remembered it was Dr. William Carlos
Williams' birthday and that made me feel better
-----until almost dawn.


---------Note:

---------September 3rd is not
---------Dr. William Carlos Williams
---------birthday. It is the birthday
---------of a girlfriend.
---------Dr. William Carlos Williams
---------was born on September 17th, 1883.

---------An interesting mistake.

Richard Brautigan

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

-
Hmn, it's amazing how this man's mind worked and how he found poetry in the most minute things.

I'm happy to report that I've received over 100 haiku for the Basho Haiku Challenge. The great response has sparked still more manic ideas on my part, so keep the haiku coming and pass the word on to friends. More about the manic ideas later.

This week's smash from the past is Lilliput Review #77, from March 1996. Hope something grabs you here.



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


Zen American Style
If you don't want
to hear
anymore talk
about the void

then say hello
to the trojan horse

Mark Hartenbach

Landlocked
You can't drive the seagulls
away by pointing
toward the horizon

Tom Riley

insatiability rewinds old sorrow and records lust over it

Sheila E. Murphy

from poems for Leecia written when she was little
-----------------If in sleep
-----------------beside you
-----------------I should
-----------------murmur
-----------------"Shiva" --
-----------------will you answer
-----------------with just "Mama --
-----------------go to sleep now?"

-----------------Sylvia Manning

the saddest lines
are hunting
joy in every island

Richard Alan Bunch

f-----------------

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

till next time,
Don

Mary Oliver, Pantheism, and the Big G

Cover by Kevin Friend

Lots of very interesting poetry related news this week, beginning with Mary Oliver. As something of an early preview to my posting of a review of her new book of poems, Red Bird, on Eleventh Stack (a blog from my day job), here's that post, which will be appearing next week, possibly in a slightly different form:

"Even at her most agnostic, her most atheistic, Mary Oliver was always a spiritual, even a religious, writer. Her embracing of nature is all-encompassing, recalling the preoccupation of no less a poetic figure than William Wordsworth. In recent years, as seen in her last few books, she has evinced a new found faith beyond the more general pantheism that always seemed to be just below the surface of many of her finest poems.

I have to admit, I approached this newer work with the kind of trepidation one has when hearing of a life-altering event involving a close friend; confronting a new found faith in others that one does not necessarily share can be a daunting thing, most especially when it concerns an old friend. I'm happy to report that, as may be seen in her new collection of poems, Red Bird, this faith is not only a logical extension of her previous beliefs, it in fact firmly accentuates what has come before.

Mary Oliver's wide appeal beyond the usual poetry reading community is easy to understand; her poems are rendered in simple basic vocabulary, are no less beautiful for that simplicity, and concern the every day world around us. Her perception of things is acute; she points out in nature what we all might see if we took the time and had the patience to truly look. Beyond capturing the moment, she also supplies the resonance from which meaning may flow. When she is good, she is transcendent. When she is average, she is at least always interesting. Red Bird is a volume that may be read straight through and then bears, in fact induces, repeated readings. It is cohesive in that its overarching theme is present throughout. There are more than a handful of excellent poems here. Listen to this excerpt from Straight Talk from Fox:

Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons

making love, arguing, talking about God

as if he were an idea instead of grass,

instead of stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den.

Highlights include this poem, along with Invitation, Night and the River, There is a Place Beyond Ambition, We Should Be Prepared, This Day and Probably Tomorrow Also, the fabulous Of Love, I am the one; well I could go on. There is even a powerful political poem, Of the Empire, that telescopes the general to the particular in a most damning fashion. If you listen closely, you may find there is a message just for you, as in the beginning of Invitation:

Oh do you have time

to linger

for just a little while

out of your busy

and very important day

for the goldfinches

that have gathered

in a field of thistles …

There is a wisdom here, the wisdom of long life, of loss, of longing, and of acceptance. But most of all there is beauty, a beauty not to be missed."

Oddly enough, while reading this book through a second time, I got to thinking once again about the idea of a near perfect volume of poems. Red Bird contains many, well, not very good poems. Yet, still and all, it is a very good collection, precisely because the inferior work in this case informs the overall collection. The overarching theme is consistent throughout and, in one sense, though obviously supplying its subject, it also strengthens its voice. Here is a little 4 line poem that perfectly captures what I try to get at in the review:



So every day

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.



Now, if the G word puts you off, so be it; for me, the spiritual element is almost Buddhist, especially in light of Oliver's preoccupation with nature and its resonance in our lives. If you do nothing, pick this book up in your local independent shop or Borders or B & N (or, better still, your library) and read one poem: Of Love. It alone is worth the cover price (and more).

Some interesting tidbits around the web include the Village Voice reprint of an article from April 1958 written by Kenneth Rexroth on the Beats. Ted Kooser, the subject of a recent post here, is participating in a project sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress entitled American Life in Poetry, which supplies "a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem ..." Poetry bloggers take note: at 161 columns and counting, that's a lot of presupplied content. For poetry lovers there are a lot of new poems to be exposed to, by both well and relatively unknown modern American poets.

In addition, there is a great 20 minute documentary on one of my favorite contemporary poets, Gerald Stern, entitled Gerald Stern: Still Burning, at the website Poetry Matters Now, which features a parcel of video readings and is worth a bookmark.

And, finally, in the news department, can it be true that the poetry volume that moved an entire generation, A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is really be 50 years old? And, of course, anyone that would ask that question ... If by some chance you haven't read this one, don't hesitate; it most certainly would be on my list of the most important books of poems of the last century.

Well, believe it or not there is more, but the day job beckons. So, in closing, here are some sample poems from Lilliput Review #94 (December 1997), the cover of which appears above.


the rain
knits us
with threads
of silver

Albert Huffstickler

from Epistles

A word, once sent abroad,
flies irrevocably.

Quintus Horace

And then there is this one line gem - I do love one line poems:




celibacy, a masking forcibly redundant

Sheila E. Murphy

Finally,




Cosmoses were
swinging in the war-ruined city:
softly like now.

Kiyoe Kitamura

Till soon (or next Thursday, whatever comes first),

Don