Peter Newton & Bart Solarczyk: Wednesday Haiku, #102

 Play It By Trust by Yoko Ono

winter afternoon
my father explains
the strength of a pawn

Peter Newton

 

Dali Atomicus by Philippe Halsman

Tune in a bucket
swinging
in the afterglow

Bart Solarczyk

Well Bucket and Bush Warbler

the fish
unaware of the bucket...
a cool evening

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

  

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Kenneth Rexroth: Sky Sea Birds Trees Earth House Beasts Flowers

I ran across this beautiful little Kenneth Rexroth book, Sky Sea Birds Trees Earth House Beast Flowers, in a local Pittsburgh used and rare bookshop, Caliban. The book comes from Unicorn Press, which I've written about before previously in a review of Hyakunin Isshu: 100 Poems by 100 Poets, back in April of this year. You can find plenty of info on this, one of America's finest small presses, back in that post, so I'll skip the background here.

This particular volume was published in 1971, is 1 of 375 trade copies and contains 11 poems with 13 pieces of art, all done by Rexroth himself. The poems, as well as the brushwork, are all Eastern inflected.

Slowly the moon rises
Over the quiet sea.
Slowly the face of my beloved
Forms in my mind.

The parallel feel of the two sets of two lines has the sensibility of haiku, minus the denouement. The comparison of memory to nature is an interesting one; there seems also to be an implied parallel as to time duration of the two events. Any poem that brings the human into nature, either in contrast or, even better, in harmony, has my close attention, as does this one.

Spring puddles give way
To young grass.
In the garden,
Willow catkins
Change to singing birds.

This might be easily characterized as waka, though the form is more specifically reminiscent of tanka, without the overt romantic element. Whatever it is called is not particularly relevant, except perhaps for the scholar. Here we are completely immersed in nature, presented with examples of the myriad changes which happen right before our eyes and yet so often go unseen. What I most admire here is that Rexroth has captured the miraculous quality of these changes by making them feel almost magical.

Of course that is just what it is, a miracle, a bit of natural magic, right before our eyes, which is seen so many times without seeing that it has become "ordinary" enough to ignore

A dawn in a tree of birds.
Another,
And then another.

This may be my favorite poem of the collection. Is it a haiku? Seen from one angle, not really, from another most definitely. How so? If seen as a series of days, it is closer in spirit to the previous poem, which takes place over a long period of time, hence not a haiku (if capturing a single moment is part of your haiku requirement). Seen from the other side, however, this could be a series of immediate moments, contiguous, taking place in mere seconds, as the rising light first hits one bird, than another, than another.

In fact, it doesn't have to be light at all directly hitting the tree - it could be the light breaking on the horizon and each individual bird's response, one after the other after the other, in song.

Yes, I like this poem very much.

Past midnight,
In the dark,
Under the winter stars,
Tendrils of ice
Creep through the duckweed.

This is another special poem, tanka-esque in form, which thrusts a human right in the middle of natural things. This poem has a bit of an ominous quality; it is past midnight, dark without moonlight, and our sense of hearing allows us to hear something creeping through the duckweed. Though the hearer realizes it is ice creeping and not some predator, still the tone of "creep" feels foreboding. The beauty here is that, though not a sentient being in our usual sense of understanding, ice does creep, so Rexroth has not committed any anthropomorphic hocus-pocus, something which would immediately turn me off.

In addition, ice creeping may have a truly ominous quality for one exposed to the elements without proper clothing and food. It may be winter that is doing the creeping, which may be something properly feared.

The years pass.
The generations
Of birds pass too.
You must watch carefully.
The same towhees and jays
Seem to have been in the same
Places
To thousands of generations
Of men.

This fifth poem captures some of the aspects of the poems already noted, particularly the passage of time. Thousands of generations of men pass through this poem, yet the poet admonishes his readers to watch carefully in the moment to see all time pass before you, a perfect conflation of eternity and the now.

One might almost say eternity in a moment: satori.

Fine, fine, fine stuff. Copies of this amazing little hand-sewn chapbook can be had much cheaper than I paid for it ($15) or you can pay a lot more. It's only money and this is only poetry (and art).

I'm thinking either way it's a bargain.  I know I got off cheap.

One of 13 pieces of art

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This week's poem from the Lilliput archive comes from issue #102, January 1999.    Once again Alan Catlin's painterly eye is in evidence, a master at work.

The Poet's Room

  Frayed chairs, shadows
  curve from windows
  mirrors silent as footprints
  covered by dew.

                  Alan Catlin

looking younger than me
the scarecrow casts
his shadow

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Get Down Moses: Issa's Sunday Service, #102

NOTE: I'm happy to say that the problem with the listening widgets from grooveshark is solved and so the widget has returned to the Sunday Service.  In addition, I've added one to last week's post of Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso) by Sonic Youth if you'd care to give a listen.

If there is anyone who is later to the game when it comes to appreciating Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros are you ever in for a treat.  Run right out and give a listen to all their songs - an excellent band lead by one of the great musicians of rock, Joe Strummer.

Today's selection is another in a long line of litrock songs that reference the Bible.  Just as one of rock's primary progenitor, the Blues, was known as the devil's music, a sort of secular Cain to Gospel music's Abel, so, too, rock is deeply rooted in the Bible.   This particular song not only mentions the Bible but the title is an allusion to the well-known spiritual, "Go Down, Moses."  There is also the Faulkner book of the same title, but I'm not thinking Joe was going there.

Nice title, that.  Here's the lyrics:



Get Down Moses
 
Once I got to the mountain top, tell you what I could see,
Prairie full of lost souls running from the priests of iniquity
Where the hell was Elijah?
What do you do when the prophecy game was through?

We gotta take the walls of Jericho
Put your lips together and blow
To the very top
They say the truth crystallizes like jewels in the rock, in the rock

Get Down Moses - part another sea
Carve another tablet out of L.S.D.
Get Down Moses - out in Tennessee
Get Down Moses - down in the street
The blood is washing down all the gravel to our feet
Get Down Moses - down in the pit

Lying in a dream, cross battle field,
Crashing on a downtown strip,
Looking in the eyes of the diamonds and the spies and the hip
Who's sponsoring the crack ghetto?
Who's lecturing? Who's in the know and in the don't know?

You better take the walls of Jericho
Put your lips together and blow
Goin' to the very top
Where the truth crystallizes like jewels, in the rock, in the rock

Get Down Moses - from the eagle's aerie
We gotta to make new friends out of old enemies
Get Down Moses - back in Tennessee
Get Down Moses - down with the dreads
They got a lotta reasoning in a dreadhead
Get Down Moses - down in the street
Get Down Moses

Get Down Moses - part another sea
Carve another tablet out of L.S.D.
Get Down Moses - out in Tennessee
Get Down Moses - down in the street
The blood is washing down all the gravel to our feet
Get Down Moses - down in the pit
Get Down Moses

Get Down Moses

Get Down Moses
We need to eat, we gotta chew it over with our wisdom teeth
Get Down Moses

Yes, indeed, "Where the truth crystallizes like jewels, in the rock, in the rock."

The rock, the rock.


Finally, here's an electric live performance, with varied lyrics, just a month before Joe's death:






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


This week's feature poems come from Lilliput Review #94 and sat side-by-side on a tiny little page.  One is by the artist/poet Wayne Hogan, the other by Huff (Albert Huffstickler).  They make as good companions as they did 13 plus years ago in December 1997.

  The Way It Is And Will Be Was

Paddling
up a Venetian canal
leaving a trail you'll never
come back on but
can see from a long way off
as it lasts only
a moment in the pouring rain

Wayne Hogan

the rain
knits us
with threads
of silver

Albert Huffstickler

And a third old codger just joined the party, making four by my count.  Who brought the cards?





a day for wandering
a day for haiku...
spring rain

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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The Glass Bead Game: Issa's Sunday Service, #96

Today's featured song is only the second instrumental so far in this ongoing literature meets rock and roll project - the first actually did have a few words, but was largely instrumental.  Today's selection is courtesy of The Thievery Corporation.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the inspiration for today's selection, is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors.  Largely overlooked by fans and readers in general, it is certainly one of the finest novels of the 20th century, well deserving of the Nobel Prize that it garnered for its author.  It reprises all the great themes of Hesse's career, from duality through transcendence.  There are bits of all of his great books here, if in slightly disguised forms: Siddharta, Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Journey to the East, as well as many of his early student novels.

Narrated by a fictional biographer, with introductory and supplementary material, the larger part of the book passes for a partial biography of Joseph Knecht, a great Masters of the Bead Game or Magister Ludi.   Set in the 25th century, it relates the story of the intellectual province of Castalia, where the students all learn the glass bead game, a sort of interdisciplinary exercise of connections among all the great fields (literature, music, science etc.).

The folly of such an exercise, removed as it is from "the real world," slowly and steadily becomes apparent, no matter how attractive the concept.  And attractive it is; witness the proliferation of exercises online attempting to recreate its chief philosophical premise (& that's just a handful).

Some have gone so far as to suggest that the internet itself is the glass bead game manifest.  We won't go down that road but we will take some time to chill to the groove of The Thievery Corporation, a dance-acid jazz-trip hop band, that knows the ins and outs of the outs and ins.  I just learned of them last week and I'm already listening to third of four albums I could rustle up from the library and, well, they make me relax and smile.

So there you go.   The cut may have nothing more to do with The Glass Bead Game than a shared title, but if it made me mellow, well there will be no argument from me.

Sticking with the theme of the unusual, here is a composition performed by Jacques Burtin performed on the kora, entitled "La Lumiere Matin (Morning Light)," a piece the composer describes as a prelude to The Glass Bead Game.








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This week's featured poems come from Lilliput Review, #102.   It is a triad of pieces that all appeared together on a single page, the stitch just tight enough to pull us through ...

Our hearts are empty for the Beloved,
and streetlamps are endless in the night.

W. T. Ranney

Dangerous kisses
pull us closer to heaven
Nowhere left to go

Kate Isaacson

The Goddess's Sweethearts

All those guys
holding hands with Kali are
already rotting away

Tom Riley

even the heavenly gods
crowd 'round...
plum blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

PS  Get 2 free issues     Get 2 more free issues     Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature.  Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 96 songs
Hear 'em all at once on the the LitRock Jukebox

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Brautigan Goes Fishing and Gary Hotham Lands One

Cover by Harland Ristau

I have a favorite poem from one of the books suggested for the Near Perfect Books of Poetry list: it's from Silence in the Snowy Fields, which I read this week:

"Taking My Hands"

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages ...
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.

Robert Bly

Gary Hotham's "Modest Proposal" chapbook, Missed Appointment, has been featured in a posting from David Giacalone's f/k/a, my favorite blog of haiku and legal issues (you read that right). A nice selection of five poems from the chap that's worth a look see. As mentioned in a previous post here, Gary's book has been awarded an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America's annual Kanterman Memorial Book Awards. Copies are available for the always low price of $3.00.


In what's got to be the odd news of the week comes a report that a fishing video, circa 1974, going by the name Tarpon, has just been released. Perhaps it's not so odd that a fishing video from 1974 should come out on DVD, considering the monumental environmental shifts that have occurred in the last 35 years. What is odd is that the video features Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, and Jim Harrison.


Huh?


Well, yeah, it's true. Here's a review of the DVD release posted at the blog of thefin.com, featuring a great Brautigan quote. The other review at MidCurrent posits that this is some of the only film footage of Mr. B., which I can't confirm but sounds about right to me (a quick check of the Internet Archive came up a zero; at youtube, lots of folks have put Brautigan audio to their own films but no actual B footage). Collectors, dust off those credit cards!

In a biggish British brouhaha over poetry, I believe I'll come down on the side of AB FAB actress Joanna Lumley. Seems to me that as far as "The Poets" are concerned, it's all just hard cheese.

John Harter is still on my mind. Here's his obit from the Everett Washington Herald:

"December 1940 to May 2008

We have lost a great N.W. artist, John Harter, and we will miss him. He is survived by two sisters; and one brother; plus many other family members and friends.

A Celebration of his Life and Art will be held starting at 3 p.m., on July 19, 2008, in his sister's garden."

We should all be remembered so well.

Some back issue news. In a moment of clerical inspiration, I decided to hypertext the back issues featured in the (mostly) Thursday weekly postings here at IUH, plus the postings from the old Beneath Cherry Blossoms blog and index them on the Lillput Review Archive page at the Lillie website, to come up with a one stop MegaArchive. Ok, the name's a tad hyperbolic but at the link you can find sample poems from 55 back issues of Lilliput Review, somewhere between 150 and 200 poems.

The plan now is to continue to index these weekly samplings on that page and provide a portal to some fine short poetry. Right now, I'm going to start filling in some issues I've missed in the transition between blogs and then resume the countdown, which is pausing at #81, when that's finished.

So, this week's feature issue is #102, from January 1999, and it starts with a mix of metaphor (as opposed to a mixed metaphor) and philosophy:


Thirst Logic

All poems
should have blood.

If not blood,
water. If not

water, a mouth,
some teeth, a voice,

a predilection
for love.

Ken Waldman

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

Dangerous kisses
pull us closer to heaven
Nowhere left to go

Kate Isaacson

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



Fact of Life

Nails
driven into green wood
will loosen
and back out.

Graham Duncan

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


best,
Don