Richard K. Ostrander & Ramesh Anand: Wednesday Haiku, #132

Photo by Gaspi *YG

Grandma's supple hands
After cleaning my skinned knee
Wringing a chicken's neck

Richard K. Ostrander

Photo by DCSL

distant hill
the river carrying
the spring

Ramesh Anand

Woodblock by Hiroshige

the distant mountain's
blossoms cast their light...
east window

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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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 176 songs

Issa's Sunday Service, #132: "Goodbye, Hello"

Lao Tzu

Goodbye Hello - Tim Buckley
The antique people are down in the dungeons
Run by machines and afraid of the tax
Their heads in the grave and their hands on their eyes
Hauling their hearts around circular tracks
Pretending forever their masquerade towers
Are not really riddled with widening cracks
And I wave goodbye to iron
And smile hello to the air

O the new children dance ------ I am young
All around the balloons ------ I will live
Swaying by chance ------ I am strong
To the breeze from the moon ------ I can give
Painting the sky ------ You the strange
With the colors of sun ------ Seed of day
Freely they fly ------ Feel the change
As all become one ------ Know the Way

The velocity addicts explode on the highways
Ignoring the journey and moving so fast
Their nerves fall apart and they gasp but can't breathe
They run from the cops of the skeleton past
Petrified by tradition in a nightmare they stagger
Into nowhere at all and they look up aghast
And I wave goodbye to speed
And smile hello to a rose

O the new children play ------ I am young
Under the juniper trees ------ I will live
Sky blue or gray ------ I am strong
They continue at ease ------ I can give
Moving so slow ------ You the strange
That serenely they can ------ Seed of day
Gracefully grow ------ Feel the change
And yes still understand ------ Know the Way

The king and the queen in their castle of billboards
Sleepwalk down the hallways dragging behind
All their possessions and transient treasures
As they go to worship the electronic shrine
On which is playing the late late commercial
In that hollowest house of the opulent blind
And I wave goodbye to Mammon
And smile hello to a stream

O the new children buy ------ I am young
All the world for a song ------ I will live
Without a dime ------ I am strong
To which they belong ------ I can give
Nobody owns ------ You the strange
Anything anywhere ------ Seed of day
Everyone's grown ------ Feel the change
Up so big they can share ------ Know the Way

The vaudeville generals cavort on the stage
And shatter their audience with submachine guns
And Freedom and Violence the acrobat clowns
Do a balancing act on the graves of our sons
While the tapdancing Emperor sings "War is peace"
And Love the Magician disappears in the fun
And I wave goodbye to murder
And smile hello to the rain

O the new children can't ------ I am young
Tell a foe from a friend ------ I will live
Quick to enchant ------ I am strong
And so glad to extend ------ I can give
Handfuls of dawn ------ You the strange
To kaleidoscope men ------ Seed of day
Come from beyond ------ Feel the change
The Great Wall of Skin ------ Know the Way

The bloodless husbands are jesters who listen
Like sheep to the shrieks and commands of their wives
And the men who aren't men leave the women alone
See them all faking love on a bed made of knives
Afraid to discover or trust in their bodies
And in secret divorce they will never survive
And I wave goodbye to ashes
And smile hello to a girl

O the new children kiss ------ I am young
They are so proud to learn ------ I will live
Womanwood bliss ------ I am strong
And the manfire that burns ------ I can give
Knowing no fear ------ You the strange
They take off their clothes ------ Seed of day
Honest and clear ------ Feel the change
As a river that flows ------ Know the Way

The antique people are fading out slowly
Like newspapers flaming in mind suicide
Godless and sexless directionless loons
Their sham sandcastles dissolve in the tide
They put on their deathmasks and compromise daily
The new children will live for the elders have died
And I wave goodbye to America
And smile hello to the world


So, why is this song selected as Litrock, one might ask.  This line, and its variations, are what does it -

As a river that flows ------ Know the Way

- and it's the caps that cap it.  Know the Tao, Know the Way.

Know the Tao, Know the Way.

blown to the big river
floating away...
cherry 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 132 song

Modern Haiku, Autumn, 2010

Learning about oneself through reading may certainly be a way, a Way to transcendence that is.  Obviously, this is a function of how we read as much as what we read.  I want to suggest that the act of reading itself can be every bit as important and every bit as creative as the acts of writing, painting, and playing.


What I'm dancing around here is I've continued to learn a lot about myself through the conversation of reading, the conversation between the writer and the reader. Admittedly, at first one might think it a bit one sided.  Still, in many ways, all discussions we have with others are really a way to talk to ourselves.

The conversation we have with a writer/poet via their work can very much serve this function.  You will never change their opinion, but you may come to a deeper understanding of it and your own. Focusing  particularly on haiku challenges the reader to simultaneously view the vastness of the outer world and the equal vastness of the inner one.

Hence, these Friday reviews.


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Modern Haiku is one of the finest haiku journals available today, whether we are talking about traditional or experimental (or a combo thereof) outlets for haiku.  Whenever I settle in to read a new issue, I find it an never-ending source of wisdom, humor, and inspiration.  This week I thought I'd take a look at a recent issue.

In the Autumn 2010 issue, comprehensively edited by Charles Trumbull,  I noted 70 (!) haiku, of an astounding 400 in this issue, to return to for review.  In my experience, that percentage of good haiku is almost unprecedented, in either book, journal or online resource form.

heartsick
my dad beneath the old tree
leaving

Michele Root-Bernstein

This is a beautiful poem in its ambiguity; one could make a case for it being about a living father walking away, or about a dead father being buried beneath the old tree, leaving in an only slightly more figurative sense.  A third possibility, predicated on the word heartsick, is that the father is being observed visiting a lost love one and is heartsick with grief.

In the case of the dead father, I get the very moving feeling of a continual present in the verb leaving; though he is gone permanently in death, he is also always leaving, at least in an organic way, and most definitely in emotional and psychological ways.  If one is dead and buried beneath the tree, one will become part of the "old" tree itself and there is something heart-full about that reading.

The essential question, no matter what the reading, is what is the observer/narrator seeing and feeling.

Poppy field
Forever
Men at war

Daniel Py

Ever since World War I, the poppy has become a memorial for those who died in service.  This poem is subtle in its possible meanings.   The word forever acts as a hinged door that swings both ways: the poppy field is forever, men at war are forever.  There is an irony in the essential truth, underscored in their linking, impling that men and poppies are forever what they are.

Here is the four line poem that Moina Michael, who conceived of the idea of the poppy as a memorial, wrote about her idea of the poppy and humans at war:

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

dew evaporates
on the stone, which also
will pass

Umberto Senegal

Many traditional haiku compare incongruous elements, usually the very large and the very small (seeing the entire Milky Way through a torn shade, for instance).  Here Senegal extends the notion to time itself, the dew evaporating instantly, the stone over decades or centuries or longer.   All things pass, even the rock, even the mountain, even the earth.

No prayer necessary
just listen
to the rain

Umberto Senegal

A brilliant poem by Senegal, this one beautiful to the point of tears.  Nothing is left out of this poem, everything that is needed is included: all of life and the whole universe.

my logical mind
of no value
among the red leaves

Michael Fessler

For the persona here, the logical mind won't do.  Though s/he may use the logical mind to measure, catalog, and analyze the red leaves, for the true value none of this is necessary.  The poem turns on that value and the red leaves are in every sense as the rain is in Senegal's previous poem.

the swan's wake
touches both banks—
choices I have to make

Michael Ketchek

On one level, this seems to me to be a very complex haiku, indeed.  In some traditional haiku, there is a 2 line image/event and a 1 line resolution or comment; in this haiku, it is the image which brings the wonderful complexity.  The reader sees that there are perhaps two choices that emanate from one source, there are two banks touched.  Are the two banks really different?

The waves of the swan's wake, emanating as they do from one source, do they not suggest that either or perhaps both choices are correct?  The image is so beautiful I would argue for it to be implying the harmony of all things, the harmony of opposites: the non-duality of life itself.

But I'll wager I could be very wrong.  Sometimes reading good haiku is like viewing a Jackson Pollack; I'm sure of what I "see" in it, but are you sure of what I see in it?

the pianist's
page-turners
slightly parted
lips

Eve Luckring

This poem reminds me, in its precise, beautiful image, of Bashō's haiku of the woman wrapping dumplings, brushing back a stray hair with a finger.   Such gorgeous music here, one can almost hear it.

a sin of omission bright autumn leaves

Peggy Willis Lyles

What has the speaker forgotten or left undone that the consequences might be at once dire and brilliant?  You tell me.

evening bell
swallows fly through
the deep tone

John Martone

I imagine a swallows path changing when they encounter the sonic wave of the bell.  The patterns of sound and the waves are united in such a way that one can hardly imagine mere words would even be capable of.  Martone is one of our important poets and this is a truly fine poem.   Here is another by John:

measured
by these dim eyes
the distance
between stars

John Martone

As alluded to above, many fine haiku deal with apparent incongruities, large contrasts that at first seem irreconcilable.  The poet here shows us how it's done.  Caught between the diminutive space between two human eyes is the distance between two far off stars, two worlds.  Not only that, be the viewer's eyes are dim, emphasizing strongly their diminutive nature (via a neat pun) and the extra difficulty which is overcome all the same.

All is one, all is one.

he says a word
I say a word
autumn deepens

Takahama Kyoshi

This is another fine and full poem.    It is at once literal and figurative, practical in its observation and philosophical in its resonance.  Like Martone's haiku, their is a sense of unity and timelessness, a poem that transcends any age or interpretation.

And one final poem, I'll let speak for itself:

gnats swarming—
   the setting sun
      finding each one

Carl Mayfield

When it comes to haiku, I am certainly no expert.  Part of the practice of haiku is reading long and deep, both the classic poets and contemporaries.  It is a way of talking to ourselves, talking to each other, talking to the world. Besides simply stepping outdoors (or looking very carefully within), I can think of few better ways of experiencing haiku than a subscription to Modern Haiku. 

You won't be disappointed. 


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This week's feature poem comes from Lilliput Review, #132, July 2003.  Enjoy.

Hinges creak.
Dung beetles work.
The prayer wheel turns.

Mark Jaworski

mountain mist--
the beautiful voice
of the dung-hauler

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 84 songs
Hear all 84 at once on the the LitRock Jukebox

Subscribe to Lilliput Review

Found Items Friday ...

Found in a used copy of Carl Jacobi's Revelations in Black

Herein, some misc items, seen around the web and in print, for your perusal while I knuckle under, working on the 4 presentations I have to do in the next 8 or so weeks: they are specifically on haiku, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, and, for work, customer service as a vocation or a way.

This first item, found in an old paperback copy of a horror novel I picked up probably 10 years ago, shows a shopper, on a meager (probably early 70's) budget, who has her priorities straight: Books, Drinks, Shop, and Food.  We can only hope that the remaining $45 was as wisely allotted.

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A Wallace Stevens quote found somewhere on the net:

"Poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem," observed Wallace Stevens.

Ancedote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

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Here is the short film, in three parts, on the magnificent Gerald Stern, entitled Still Burning.   He has a brand new volume, Early Collected Poems, 1965-1992, which contains the books, Rejoicings, Lucky Life, The Red Coal, Paradise Poems, Lovesick, and Bread Without Sugar, his first six.  It not only contains some of the best, most accessible, heartrending American poems of the 2nd half of the 20th century, but it is dedicated "To the Sorrowful."

You know who you are. 

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To complement the Stern film, an interview with his old pal, Jack Gilbert, another fine poet, from the Paris Review.

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In a very positive review (link is an excerpt) of the debut collection by Evgenia Citkowitz entitled Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella, Joyce Carol Oates pulls a great quote from W. H. Auden:

This [collection] is not elevated tragedy or even the more familiar fissures of domestic drama but the stoic-melancholy vision of W. H. Auden, for whom "the crack in the teacup opens / a lane to the land of the dead."

It is amazing, how a brief quote from a longer work can open up its world, ironically not unlike the little crack in the little teacup ...

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

"I'll love till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.

"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With all your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

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Here's a 49 second visualization of the haiku by Moritake, "drifting back to the branch:"

"drifting back to the branch" by Moritake from arjuno kecil

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This week's feature poem from the archive comes from Lilliput Review #132, July 2003.  Enjoy.

at the edge of the world

to ask
           why the wave drowns
           the fisherman
is to give
           the wave
           humanity
and to take
           away our own

Jeff Stumpo

And Issa, to wrap it up:


hey boatman
no pissing on the moon
in the waves!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue 

best,
Don

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

New Website, New Index, Proust, A Modest Proposal & More.

Artwork by Tom Blessing

Lots new at Lilliput Review this week, but first a tip of the hat to the patron saint of Lilliput, Jonathan Swift (no one seems to have done a decent Swiftian homepage - any takers?). This past week saw the anniversary of Swift's birth, which is the perfect occasion to reacquaint ourselves with his satirical work that continues to resonate painfully in the 21st century: A Modest Proposal. If you don't have the time to read it, listen to or download the mp3 of the LibriVox version here.







If you clicked the Lilliput link here or above, you will see that there is a brand new homepage. Since jettisoning the Tripod blog and webpage, my life has become considerably easier. In both the new webpage and blog, there are no pop-ups, no ads, no bs. Enjoy and let me know what you think.







Even bigger news is a brand new index to issues #'s 1-158 of Lilliput producer by the poet, editor and indexer, M. Kei. This is a wonderful tool that covers all of Lilliput's first 18 years of publication and, in the pdf format, is searchable by author, title and keyword. I am incredibly grateful to M. Kei for all his input and very hard work, indeed.







This week I ran across an interesting new book, Proust As A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer investigates the anticipation of scientific findings in the arts, dealing individually with, among others, Whitman, Cezanne and Proust (be sure not to miss the "Summarize Proust" page at the Proust site, wherein various readers summarize In Search of Lost Time in 5 words or less, with Monthy Python's original premise duly noted. The chapter on Proust is a revelation and, via his premise, cuts to the essence of In Search of Lost Time, his masterwork. From that chapter:





"Neuroscience now knows that Proust was right. Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown has shown - in a science paper wittily entitled "Testing the Proustian Hypothesis" - that our senses of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental. This is because smell and taste are the only sense that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses (sight, touch, and hearing) are first processed by the thalmus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past."





Another great, very odd find this week is Invisible Republic. I stumbled on this while searching for Charles Mingus' autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. It is an amazing, free mix of music, spoken word and politics. Check it out. You won't be disappointed.





Finally, it's on to the tour of Lilliput back issues, this time round it is #132. At the head of this post you will see artwork by Tom Blessing from this issue. Some poems follow:





"speak low"
kurt weill is still
here when we need him,

for it's an even longer
time from may until
never.

~ Gerald Locklin





Window shade drawn
to the grey autumn rain ...
a lamp silhouettes a moth

~ Rebecca Lily






Endless October
a maze of centuries
and only my nose bleeds

~ Phoebe Reeves





And finally, from the Irish poet Giovanni Malito, who died too soon:


lone blackbird
in the far away sky
-- all of it

~ Giovanni Malito






Until next time, Don .