I'd Rather Be High: Issa's Sunday Service, #169

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"Just remember, duckies, everybody gets got"

David Bowie's new album, The Next Day, defines one very courageous way to head off into the sunset: with guns blazing. This is his most vibrant writing in many a year and nothing he turns his lens on is spared the fixed glare of intense, informed scrutiny. 

Today's song, "I'd Rather Be High," touches a lot of bases and, if it doesn't make it all around, it most certainly comports itself well.  The lit allusion comes in the first line with the introduction of Vladimir Nabokov (not his first appearance on the Sunday Service) - a number of his novels reference Gruenwald (The Gift and King, Queen, Knave, to name two). Here is an interesting paragraph from an article entitled "Nabokov's Berlin:"

It so happened that four bestselling German novels set in Berlin were written in the late 1920s, at the same time as Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave the German translation of which was not a bestseller. They were Menschen im Hotel by Vicky Baum, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, Fabian by Erich Kästner and Bruder und Schwester by Leonhard Frank. There is much more of Berlin to be seen in King, Queen, Knave than in any of them. Döblin’s extraordinary novel has more of the city only insofar as it has its idiom and its way of thinking; in this sense it is a close-up while Nabokov’s fiction stays at a neutral distance. But Döblin’s city itself is reduced to a few blocks between Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Platz. Döblin lived not far away, and I believe Nabokov never ventured into those proletarian quarters. Nabokov's Berlin by contrast is the "Russian Berlin" of Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, the city center and the city's parks and forests, notably the Grunewald.

Of course, I'm more intrigued by the sun-licked Nabokov himself - what, oh what, can you mean, Mr. Bowie? 

Oh, you mean that.

Beyond the lit allusion, there is a lot more to chew on here, as in many of the songs on this solid new album. The persona, and Bowie always has so many, is of interest, and what he is after, via that persona, is interesting, indeed. The lyrics are worth contemplation.  


I'd Rather Be High

Nabokov is sun-licked now
Upon the beach at Gruenwald
Brilliant and naked just
The way that authors looks

Clare and Lady Manners drink
Until the other cows go home
Gossip till their lips are bleeding
Politics and all

I'd rather be high
I'd rather be flying
I'd rather be dead
Or out of my head
Than training these guns 
on those men in the sand
I'd rather be high

The Thames was black, the tower dark
I flew to Cairo, find my regiment
City's full of generals
And generals full of shit

I stumble to the graveyard and I
Lay down by my parents, whisper
Just remember duckies
Everybody gets got

I'd rather be high
I'd rather be flying
I'd rather be dead
Or out of my head
Than training these guns 
on those men in the sand
I'd rather be high

I'm seventeen and my looks can prove it
I'm so afraid that I will lose it
I'd rather smoke and phone my ex
Be pleading for some teenage sex
Yeah

I'd rather be high
I'd rather be flying
I'd rather be dead
Or out of my head
Than training these guns 
on the men in the sand
I'd rather be high


Finally, Mr. Nabokov himself should have his say and here he is, in all his opinionated, loathing glory. This is the BBC documentary Life and 'Lolita." Enjoy. 

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

Ominaeshi by Koizumi

graveyard--
all alone a maiden flower
twisting

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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Just This by Margaret Chula: Small Press Friday

When and if the lyric poem approaches the beauty of a fresh blossom, we are in the presence of a master craftswoman. 

When it comes to the tanka form, Margaret Chula is that.

There is a deep richness in the finest of poems in this new collection, Just This, by Margaret Chula, a plumbing of the dark fertile soil of emotional depths fully, sensually experienced, with a delicacy as breathtaking as it is powerful. 

every leaf, weed, blossom
curves to the sun
my shears straddle
the dark place
between limbs

Always, there is a closeness to nature, as in all fine tanka.

felled by a typhoon
yet these maple leaves
turn a brilliant hue
   middle-age and married, why
   do I blush when I see you? 

How perfect it is that the question itself contains something like an answer.

swimming side by side
tails waving in unison
two silver carp
oh, to be that close again 
two lovers, drifting

There is something so right about this image, analogous in a beautifully precise manner.  There are as many definitions of love as there are of poetry and, yes, this is one of them.

once I gathered
dandelion flowers
for a spring bouquet
now I boil their jagged leaves
and drink their bitter tonic

  

Here is the other side of the very same coin, one side struck and minted with the image of two carp, the other with a cup of bitter brew.

circling 
my mind's disturbances
incense smoke
      in the meditation bowl
      nothing but dust 

  

Meditation ultimately brings us all to this point, of dust in the bowl - how the smoke entwines the unsettled mind, once again question and answer as one.  

Mountains and Rivers Press consistently presents some of the finest work in brief and Eastern forms. Their lineup of poets is as marvelous as it is formidable. I see some Cid Corman titles that I believe I need to be reading. Others also. 

But, for the moment, here is a marvelous collection of wonderous tanka by Margaret Chula. This is just but a taste - there are well over 100 poems to connect with. Get this volume direct from Mountains and Rivers - after all, it is Small Press Friday. 

----------

 Photo by Randy Son of Robert

butterfly flitting--
I too am made
of dust

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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eve luckring & Joel Dias-Porter: Wednesday Haiku, #121

Photo by jenny downing

open mouthed to the morning poppies

                    eve luckring

 

 Sakura petal on a windshield by yuu

April drizzle-
Windshield wiper blades heavy
with cherry blossoms.

Joel Dias-Porter

Photo by Oggie Dog

even in the mouth
of the gutter pipe...
lotuses

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Issa's Sunday Service, #168

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Until just a few days ago, I was unaware of this recording by Joni Mitchell of William Butler Yeats' monumental modern poem, "The Second Coming." And, now that I am, I'm not really sure what to think. 

Ms. Mitchell is well known for a wide strain of crankiness - ask those who have attended her concerts (she walked off at Live Aid in Giant Stadium in 1986 to the bemusement of myself and 55,000 other attendees), ask Bob Dylan, ask record executives, ask the Woodstock Generation, ask Madonna (and Grace Slick and the estate of Janis Joplin) ... well, you get the idea.

Still an artist is an artist and, though I'm not real sure that this recording is anything if not her opinion of where we are now (ok, W.B.'s opinion, too, of where we were then), it is arguably one which happens to be at least in part true (as with some of the above - eh, Woodstock generation?). 

What is beyond doubt is she has given us some of the truly great music over the last handful of decades. Here is a 30 minute concert from 1970 which shows the range of her talent early in her career: 

   

In closing, I suppose it might simply be best to let Mr. Yeats speak for himself, and all of us, in what is, if not the greatest, one of the greatest poems of the 20th century:


The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know 
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--------------- 

well, well
coming home in the rain...
god of the poor *

                                                     Issa

                                                     translated by David Lanoue

* Note by David Lanoue: Issa, who was poor, fancies that the "poverty god" (bimbô-gami) was his special tutelary deity. Like the poet, this god can't seem to catch a break. According to Shinto belief, in Tenth Month all of Japan's gods vacate their shrines to congregate at the Izumo-Taisha Shrine. The god of the poor trudges home in the rain.

 Bimbō-Gami - God of Poverty

best,

Don

 

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From Brain Pickings: Henry Miller's Notice to Visitors

Courtesy of a fav site around this way, Books, Inq., comes a delightful posting on Brain Pickings. A little something for those in the know and those not. 

Cheers, Henry.

Click on image to expand  

mute cicada--
he, too, perfectly
at peace

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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Eric Burke & Rehn Kovacic: Wednesday Haiku, #120

Photo by jinxmcc

house painters --
the young walnut tree's
branches tied back

Eric Burke

 

 Art by Charles Livingston Bull

 After
    the downpour—
         a mockingbird.

      Rehn Kovacic

Mockingbird (detail) by James Audubon

from his hole the snake
glances back...
corrupt world of desire

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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Huff Dedication Redux: John Paul Moore

(Click on rectangle in bottom right corner of frame to expand ↑)

 

What follows is a report from John Paul Moore on the Huff's Corner Dedication in Austin, Texas, which took place last month. My thanks to him, and all the Austin folks, for sending along all the details and allowing me to share them on the web with the folks who love Huff and his work. 

Cheers, John, and all.

------------------------------- 

 Honoring and sustaining community at Huff's Corner Dedication

Under clear blue skies of a particularly lovely Saturday morning May 4, more than 50 of Albert Huffstickler's friends, neighbors, readers, admirers and fellow poets dedicated Huffstickler Green to the memory of the late Bard of Hyde Park at 38th and Duval.

Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) or Huff, as he was known to his many friends, was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Award who crafted his poems and drawings and smoked and talked and drank coffee in Hyde Park for most of the last decades of his life. (See Pecan Press, May 2013.) The dedication was the kind of  low-key, human-scale event his friends agreed Huff would have wanted.

HPNA Co-President Ashley Schweickart presided over the formal ceremony, retelling the story of the creation of Huff's special corner and attempting to mention each of the scores of people who were part of the effort in all three neighborhoods which converge here--Hancock, Hyde Park and North University--and beyond.

Ashley also announced and expressed the neighbors' gratitude for the essential cooperation of adjoining property owner David Triche, and the added generosity of Michael Biechlin, who contributed not only the landscape design for the Green, but has volunteered that his company, Groundsmasters, will maintain the green for the crucial first six months of the new plantings.

She then recognized the HPNA members who organized the dedication: Chair Kathy Lawrence, Mark Fishman, and John Paul Moore, who read a Proclamation sponsored by Councilperson Kathie Tovo and signed by Mayor Lee Leffingwell officially designating May 4, 2013 as Huffstickler Green Dedication Day in Austin.

The resolution reads, in part "This green space was created through a cooperative effort of Hyde Park, Hancock and North University Neighborhood Associations, Austin Energy, the City's Public Works Department, Austin Parks Foundation, Austin Poetry Society and the Lilliput Review…"

Ashley then turned the podium over to Elzy Cogswell, president of the Austin Poetry Society, for the part Huff would have liked best: The reading of poetry, both Huff's and those he inspired, and the telling of stories about this kind, gentle, honest man.

Elzy began by reading an email from Don Wentworth, editor of the Lilliput Review, a poetry journal that published many Huffstickler poems since its founding 1989 in Pittsburgh, Pa. Wentworth has been promoting a Huff memorial to the readers of the Review and his blog for a number of years.

"As you all know, whether with words or his simple presence,the most important thing he accomplished is Huff touched the hearts of those he met and those who read his work very deeply, indeed" Wentworth wrote, adding, "Lilliput Review has had quite a few accomplishments over the years. Being listed on this proclamation I will always cherish as the greatest."

Claire Rivers, a student at Hyde Park's Griffin School, read from Huff's work, followed by a procession of speakers sharing their verses and memories, including David Jewell, Valerie Inman, Sylvia Manning, Joe Hoppe, Lou Faiel-Dattilo, Thom O Austin, Dennis Cole, Ron Hartman, Greg Gauntner, Grant Thomas, Ralph Hausser, Wade Martin and Ken Martin.

As the verse and stories unfolded, many of them intensely personal and revelatory of the kind of man Huff was, one neighbor, moved by the words, turned to another and said, "This is what these old neighborhoods are for: telling stories, keeping history alive, providing community."

At the HPNA general May membership meeting, Hyde Park Mayor for Life Dorothy Richter asked to be recognized to praise the dedication and Huff's Corner. On his own initiative, Oliver Franklin, the new curator of the Elisabet Ney Museum, proposed the creation of a regular Huffstickler event at the Museum, due to be re-opened after renovations June 1.

The basket passed at the dedication yielded several hundred dollars in contributions and pledges to go toward a permanent installation honoring Huff at the Green, and at least one more suggestion for what words might be appropriate, from the collection of Huff's poems distributed as keepsakes of the ceremony, was this:

I didn't ask
to be a poet.
They were having
a yard sale in Heaven
and it was
the only thing
I could afford.

Albert Huffstickler

Mary Ingle, the North University neighborhood leader who played a pivotal role in creation of the green, has agreed to keep working with her Hyde Park and Hancock neighbors on continuing improvement and maintenance of the Green. Stay tuned. And Long Live Huff.

John Paul Moore

------------------------------- 

Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim

She had a brother who died of cancer

"We never touched in our family.

I keep thinking about it.

I never touched him before he died."

Her eyes distant

as though she stood now on the brink of live,

leaned forward, arms outstretched ...

This is not a poem.

It's something else

less conclusive, more final:

a single butterfly wing,

intact, perfect,

dropped by the wind

on the summer grass.

         Albert Huffstickler

Photo by Jenny Downing

just one blade
of thick summer grass
works fine

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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Ed Markowski's treeee: Small Press Friday

treeeee

Ed Markowski, one of our foremost poets in the brief form, has been experimenting with old school graphics and the short poem. He's sent along a number of wonderful little pieces and agreed to let me share this one with you.

I particularly like how his use of graphics is more lyrical than literal, a visual equivalent of the poems themselves as seen in the piece above, which is called treeeee. 

Nightingale & Roses by Hokusai

samurai--
even the nightingale
gives orders

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

 

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Gary LeBel & Kerry J. Heckman: Wednesday Haiku, #119

Had to call twice:
black lab romping
in a moonlit meadow

Gary LeBel

 

overnight snowfall 
my secret stirs
salt on the pavement 

Kerry J. Heckman

Catching Fireflies by Toyohara Chikanobu

guiding the way
to firefly-viewing...
the hut's dog 

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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There is a Mountain: Issa's Sunday Service, #167

Mt. Fuji by Fg2

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I could have sworn a dozen times over that "There is a Mountain" by Donovan had previously been on the Sunday Service but it seems not. This is a lovely little song, based on a Zen aphorism, with added lyrics that have a imagistic/haiku feel.

The song's origins go way down the alley. Wikipedia nails it, so here's the details: 

The lyrics refer to a Buddhist saying originally formulated by Qingyuan Weixin, later translated by D.T. Suzuki in his Essays in Zen Buddhism, one of the first books to popularize Buddhism in Europe and the US. Qingyuan writes

Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers. 

There are lots of versions (the best of all the Donovan versions is Live at the Hollywood Bowl, the one you are can listen to above) - long jams by the Allman Brothers and quoted by the Grateful Dead in their song "Alligator" (or the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead together), Kenny Loggins, a duet of Donovan and Bobbie Gentry, but the strangest of all is the following:





"There Is A Mountain"

The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is
The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is

The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within
Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain

Oh Juanita, oh Juanita, oh Juanita, I call your name Ah Oh,
The snow will be a blinding sight to see, as it lies on yonder hillside.

The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is
The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is
Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within
Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain 


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

Fuji san by Maki_C30D

making mountains rise
in the clouds...
cawing crow

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don   

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