Roberta Beary: Pittsburgh Reading, April 24th

http://lilliputreview.tumblr.com/post/116477064195/for-those-in-the-pittsburgh-area-one-week-from

Elitism

Photo by J. C. Butler

Elitism is an odd, sometimes funny, ofttimes sad, thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Walking about, you might stumble on a meadow full of daisies when emerging from a darkened wood. All seem the same; they are all quite lovely, having a collective presence, a certain oneness.

Cutting through the meadow, you see in the near distance a road, perhaps one you've taken before. There is a ditch, or trench, that runs along the side of the road, and there is a single daisy, near an adjoining culvert, in its full splendor.

This daisy stands out, errant though it may be. You - we - are attracted to it: it seems, somehow, finer than the rest.

Behind us now is the meadow, resplendent with daisies. Ahead, a ditch, with a single daisy, a daisy that stands out.

             

                    every
                    single
                    petal

                    every
                    one

Photo by Denise Lynn R.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Artwork by Okuhara Seiko



 

filling in

for temple flowers...

a willow

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Jeffrey Woodward: Evening in the Plaza - Small Press Friday

Haibun and I have had a rocky relationship over the years. I expect a certain something from the form and, it would seem, I'm very particular about that certain something. 

Let's go right to the heart of the matter: if the haiku doesn't work on its own, I'm out of there. 

Is this fair? Am I upholding my end of the relationship, am I demanding too much of a form that isn't simply haiku but haibun, the alchemical amalgam of prose and verse?

I suppose I'm not being fair but I've set a standard and I'm sticking with it. 

I'm happy to report that so is the poet Jeffrey Woodward, in his fine new collection, Evening in the Plaza: Haibun & Haiku, published by Tournesol Books of Detroit, MI. 

Evening is comprised of 40 titled haibun an 48 haiku, the later divided into 4 separate sections. Some of the haibun are outstanding, most notably "A Small Funeral," "Questions for the Flowers," "Family Album," "The Sweet Wild Grass," "Imago," and "Finis Terrae." There are many more that grabbed me, but these are the ones that had that special mix of great execution and personal (to me) appeal.

I'm sure there are others that will grab other readers.

A Small Funeral

Enough:   a    condolence   that  affords no
comfort, a eulogy too feeble to enliven the
perfect composure of its subject, a sermon
that  promises peace where peace will  not
serve ...

Against fair hopes  and  expectations,  to settle
now, as one must, for the recognized rites and
to commit this being,  so precious, to a lasting
rest, the homily and liturgy an obligation:

a book of wisdom
is set before the world
and autumn deepens

The  23rd  Psalm  recited  as,  also,  the  "Our
Father," the congregation files out and forms
a corridor as  if  to wait  not  upon this  final 
parting  but upon  the  arrival  of  a  dignitary.

a tiny coffin
ventures out like a whisper
into the bright day

 

Not far behind, there on the steps before the
great door of the church:

late autumn-
about the parish priest
the wind is black

The emotion, the power of this piece is almost beyond words. Where there is "a condolence / that affords not comfort" and a promised "peace where peace will not / serve ...," what might be said?

And then the poet says it.

Here, in words that follow the lamentation of neither comfort nor peace, comes just what is missing: a true eulogy, a sermon on loss, on pain and on sorrow. As the poem unfolds, "this being, so precious" begins to realize a final rest; the book of wisdom open, but it is autumn that keens, it is autumn that deepens. 

Now the being, the lost one, is a dignitary in the emotion of the attendees, played out in a ritual service after the formal one. The 23rd Psalm and Our Father echo, but it is the coffin itself that actually speaks, whispering out into the bright day the true message.

All ends with a perfect haiku - the wind, normally invisible, is manifest, and it is, yes, black.

What might be thought of as a companion haibun follows:

 ~~~~~

The Sweet Wild Grass

    That's    where    we   stood,     that's    where
    beforehand we  knew we'd end  up, a  gang of
    boys, on a hot midsummer day, loitering about
    a low retainer wall that marked an entrance to
    a   village   cemetery—someone    scuffling   his
    tennis  shoes in the  gravel, someone   chewing
    on a blade  of sweet  wild grass  plucked  from 
    the  broad  field  across   the  road,   someone
    retelling  an  exaggerated  tale that   an   uncle 
    had told

     Then the funeral party came, everybody in 
    black, everybody wrinkled and dry like pale 
    dust,   everybody  shuffling  along  in  dead
    silence  except  for the muffled sobbing  of 
    somebody somewhere 

    A rote recitation
    of the 23rd Psalm 
    and cicadas 

    Then a man in black suit and tie, a lean man
    with  a shock of white  hair, approached us 
    from that party, approached with a slow but
    deliberate gait, and  he drew  near and drew 
    with him the hush of his black flock 

    But  before he  reached  that  wall, before he
    might come  so close as  to  brush us with his
    breath or tell us whatever it was he would tell, 
    our gang  jumped  up  and   scurried  over  the 
    road,  each  boy   then  looking  back  over  a
    shoulder
 

    going quietly
    into the deep
    grass of summer

 ~~~~~

 
This poem at once seems almost a companion piece to the earlier poem, yet, really, there is no telling the chronology and even if they are related. Still, I had a Rashomon feeling while reading it, as if I was seeing the same event from a different perspective. 

If possible, this piece is even more powerful than the previous. Here there is a lost innocence, not simply of the deceased, if something like this might ever be described as simple, but of the young observers.

Perhaps this was their companion - after the first death, as Dylan Thomas wrote - in any case, the power of the event is palpable. In its specificity, the poem almost crosses over into the domain of short story.

But the same might be said of many a haiku, which is the beauty of condensation. 

Speaking of haiku, there are a number of very fine one's here:

with every blackbird,
the sun, too, settles deeper
into the cold trees

There are many superior qualities to this poem, not the least of which is its literalness: the settling of the sun, in the form of the birds (or reflected on those forms), into the trees as it sets on the horizon.

In addition to literalness, there is the poem's allusiveness - one can't help but think of Basho's famed poem of autumn, tree, and crow: 

 

on a bare branch
a crow has settled
autumn dusk

Woodward's poem is no mere pastiche or homage: it inhabits the same universe, the same world, both again literally and also figuratively. 

a nest -
nothing more,
nothing less

Here is an object for contemplation, akin in some ways to the famed half a glass of water. The reader at first seems to have little to work with, but this is not so.

Not at all. 

the cobblestone
of the city's old quarter
and red leaves

This is a poem of layer upon layer upon layer. It is a poem of civilization, a poem of nature and, for man, above all, a poem of time. 

Ultimately, for me, it is a poem of stunning beauty, stumbled upon in an ancient square, in a forgotten city ... in an exciting new book.

A book I recommend for lovers of haibun, haiku, and poetry itself. 

~~~~~ 

Photo by Denis Collette

onlookers
at a funeral...
the autumn wind

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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R. H. Blyth: Still Complaining - A Friday Idyll

Photo by Derpunk

Much of what is read in the commentary of R. H. Blyth's classic volumes on haiku might be considered as a kind of haibun, so close is he to the original, and so lyrical is his critical prose. Take this example, in which I've placed Issa's poem after the commentary which it originally preceded (to heighten the similarity to haibun) , from volume 3 of Haiku:

Issa is not grumbling at the grumbler. This verse has a prescript, "Man's desires are infinite, but his life is not." To want, to desire, is human, is thus divine, is part of our nature, is part of our Buddha nature. It is how we desire that decides whether we are a Buddha or an a ordinary man. It is not the grumbling, but how we grumble; it is the peevishness, querulousness, petulance that is 

An expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

This verse, written when Issa was fifty seven, is his considered criticism of human life. What distinguishes man from the lower animals is the very thing that degrades him below them.

This cool breeze
Through the summer room,—
But still complaining

     Issa
     tr. R. H. Blyth

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

Now, there is much to grumble about Blyth's commentary; I feel I can hear it now, so perhaps it is really coming from me and not some imaginary critic. Is being human thus, therefore, being divine? Yet, to be wrongheaded is not to be wrong. Is not this the very lesson imparted in the action taken, the thoughts penned?

Just read some D.H. Lawrence, whom Blyth greatly admired. Both perfected the art of being right via the act of being wrong. 

Something the Bard knew all about, desire that is (tricked up a bit). And then there is that other master. 

Or group of masters, but we are somehow beyond desire now, and returning through that wrong-headed back door.

This, this is truly human nature, truly Buddha nature.

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

Issa wrote some fine poems about breezes, as above.  Here are three, translated by David G. Lanoue:

in the spring breeze
already casting shadows...
irises

the cool breeze
meandering
arrives

saying my apology
to the sacred tree...
a cool breeze 

Photo by Seemann

best,

Don   

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On Translating Chiyo-ni: Isabel Winson-Sagan & Miriam Sagan - Small Press Friday

Woodcut of Chiyo-ni by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

A note: the following, a set of two translated poems by the haiku master poet, Chiyo-ni, embeded in a haibun style form, was sent along this way by Miriam Sagan and her daughter, Isabel Winson-Sagan. I have always loved Chiyo-ni; her work doesn't get nearly enough exposure to my taste. So, here's a little something to enjoy.

     Fiesta is over, although it is still hot. The sunflower seeds I planted inappropriately in the half barrels on the front porch almost touch the ceiling of the portal, and have finally bloomed. I think the thrashers might be gone--the stick nest in the cholla bush looks empty.

     My daughter Isabel and I sat down to translate Chiyo-ni, probably the most famous 18th century Japanese woman haiku poet--no easy task, but an exciting one. Autumn poems seemed appropriate.

     Chiyo-no writes:

mikazuki ni
hishihishi to mono to
shizumarinu.

 
     Isabel showed me how the kanji of the first line which reads in part "3 sun moon" means either new moon or crescent moon. Hishihishi is considered untranslatable and onomatopoetic--translator Patricia Donegan says it is a kind of awareness or feeling. 

     Here is our best effort:

at the new moon
bit by bit
everything hushes

   
  Then we tried:

hatsukari ya
iyoiyo nagaki
yo no kawari

 
      Iz was practically acting out the first line, jumping up and pointing--first wild geese! Then we had a tortuous  discussion about the rest which literally just means the nights are growing longer and longer. Where was the poetry? In a figurative turn, it seems.

first wild geese!
growing longer--
migrating night

   
     By then we were so hungry we had to go to the Tune-Up cafe around the corner and drink our favorite Arnold Palmers. I walked Iz half way home and came back through the dry neighborhood, watching the red ants.

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

after many nights
telling me bedtime stories
the geese have left 

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

Photo by Eric Frommer

best,
Don 

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Theresa Williams: The Galaxy to Ourselves

 
More than a few moons ago, a poet I know asked if I would look over her manuscript of a forthcoming collection, with the possibility of providing a back cover blurb.  Since I've always enjoyed her work, I was happy to do so.

The book, The Galaxy of Ourselves by Theresa Williams, was a volume of haibun.

I've never been a big fan of haibun.  There is a very fine balance between the prose and poetry elements of haibun and, usually, I find one, the other, or both deficient.  Rare, indeed, are the times when the two click and become that rare thing: a true haibun.  Though I probably couldn't come up with a decent definition of prose poetry, it is a form that, when done well, I love.  I probably know that it is unfair to ask the prose part of a haibun to be up to the level of a prose poem, but I do it anyway.  At the very least, the prose should build up to the ecstatic haiku moment.  I believe there should be some otherness, some building toward transcendence that requires a more charged language or imagery (or both) than is found in standard prose.

Think of The Great Gatsby, followed by the ultimate haiku:

So we beat on,
boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly
into the past.

Yes, I know, it's not a haiku, but you get the idea.

In most haibun I read, the prose is either an explanation or extension of the haiku.  For me, the measurement for this is simple: can the haiku stand alone?  If it can't, the bottom drops out.  No true haiku, no true haibun.

The Galaxy of Ourselves, thankfully, repeatedly, proves me wrong.

As with many wonderful books of poetry,  The Galaxy of Ourselves is the chronicle of a journey.  In some books, the journey is figurative, in others quite literal.  Like the haibun, Theresa Williams' journey is a blend, a fine blend of the figurative and the literal.

If the theme of The Galaxy of Ourselves were a heavenly body, it would be one which we, the readers and the poet, circle around again and again.  In this case the theme or leitmotif is the loss of a companion, a friend, a husband, a lover, whose absence is as if a physical presence, with the weight of gravity, which we constantly parallel and are drawn to, to which we constantly return.

The haibun that chronicle the poet's journey do not stick strictly to a particular approach.  Sometimes the haiku comes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes, as is more traditional, at the end.  This approach feels natural, feels organic: the haibun overall is what it is, it comes into being in its own right and, as it result, it feels, as it should, precisely so. 

The journey, with the poet Ryokan and a dog as occasional companions, goes up and down rivers, across plains, and through the vast landscape of memory.  It celebrates the mystery of not knowing, the pain, joy and suffering of the journey, the bedrock certainty of the unknown.  Here are three fine examples:


Out There

The great steamship Arabia was built here in
Brownsville, the city that dies beside the Monongahela
River, the city where my own journey begins.  I will
float a thousand miles to Cairo, faring better, I  hope
than Arabia, which disappeared in Missouri mud in
1856. More than a century later, when the ship was
found, the trappings of daily life were intact: cooking
pots, shoes, flasks, and pipes. But where the beloved?
This human sadness, no one is immune. Even Ryokan
sleeps with his sleeves turned back to show his grief.
And, traveling by boat, Princess Kagami once said,
"Even a breeze may fail me when I desire it." And now
my own boat is ready. I push off. Out there: remnants
of the Teays, salt licks where mammoths died beneath
the muck, earth tombs of the mound builders.

veiled stars
a coal train clattering
on the tracks

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

In Repair


In 1878, the Steamer John Porter, up from New
Orleans, suffered a broken rocker shaft and stopped at
Gallipolis, bringing the yellow fever that killed 66-
people. Today a man comes into the shoe repair
wanting new soles on his cowboy boots and the scuff
marks doctored. He's middle-aged, tired and thin. His
wife was sick a long time before she died.  "I got
married again," the man says, making an uncomfortable
sound deep in his throat. He takes out his wallet. "See,
here's a picture of her right here." The cobbler takes a
deep, long look at the photograph and nods his approval.
Then he delicately slips a boot over a metal form.

sandstone pillar
it marks the height
of prior floods
                                                   
--------------- 

Parting with Grief

We live a life of emotions, moving from one to another
sometimes with great difficulty. Parting with grief, for
instance, might be like trying to go through a river lock
for the very first time. One imagines getting stuck
outside the impossible gate, forever circling. One
imagines cutting the motor, drifting toward the bank,
watching the stag come to drink. How he burns. The
wound is red, the skin transparent over the ribs. The
clenching heart can be seen.

evening
a figure passing by
a lighted window

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

One thing I like very much about these poems is the room that they leave the viewer, the reader, the listener, to wander.  The emotional arena opens up like a Midwestern field on a crystal clear, cold evening or, better still,  the sky above that field, a vast emotional canvas filled with stars.

A galaxy.

Looking back on the blurb I wrote so many months ago, I wondered how I would feel now, rereading the book many months later.  Here's that blurb:

Beyond form, beyond style, there is a great wisdom here -
in the mundane, the everyday, in sorrow, in grief, in joy,
in ecstasy - which is the essence of the word, the essence
of poetry.  It deserves the greatest compliment any book
might receive: this is life.

So long ago these words were written: did they still ring true?  Reading the blurb again, I remembered I originally read the book again and again and again, not so much for the little details it might give up through close attention as to let the pure feeling wash over me again and again, a feeling of wisdom and love and wonder.

Turns out this is one of the very rare times, indeed, when I wouldn't change a word.

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

to my window
he comes as usual...
thin mist

                    Issa
                    translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Wednesday Haiku will return next week.

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The American Haibun by Donna Fleischer

Donna Fleischer

I've spent a lot of time avoiding haibun.  That's right, I have my reasons.  In order to counter this particular bias, I am going to reprint a short article on American haibun by Donna Fleischer, followed by an example of one of Donna's own.

Donna's opinions are, of course, her own, but they wouldn't be here if I didn't have the greatest respect for them.


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

The American Haibun : Donna Fleischer (© 2008)

My ongoing work with haiku, begun in the nineties, led me to the
Japanese haibun, an unusual blend of prose and haiku, somewhat
autobiographical, and relatively new in the hands of American
writers.The first haibun are found in Matsuo Bashō’s (1644 –
1694) travel diaries in which he recorded his outer and inner
journeys on foot throughout 17th century Japan, of which, Oku
no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Interior, is the best known.

To illustrate, I would like to borrow that famous frog from Bashō’s
haiku in a translation from the Japanese by R. H. Blyth:

The old pond:
A frog jumps in, —
The sound of the water.

Let’s say that hearing a frog jump into a pond evokes feeling, and
that the sound and feeling fold into one another as a gestalt, a
whole that is greater than the constituent feeling and sense that
came before it, and now to be experienced as revelatory — a
generalized state of heightened awareness, or bliss.

In a swerve to postmodernism, I invoke the French Surrealist
writer and artist, André Breton (1896 – 1966), who spoke of the
point sublime, a writing site where unlike things meet one another,
create instantaneous juxtapositions, which best of all engender
some sort of pleasure, only then to careen out of focus and logic.
The haibun form is just such a site.

A haibun typically could begin with one or several poetically
charged prose paragraphs that make palpable, once more, the
interplay of something perceived and something felt. This
description in turn deepens into yet a second form, the haiku,
that astonishes with a direct, vivid, and almost artless experience
of the natural and imaginative realms from which it arises. The
haiku is a synergistic leap from the poetic prose environment
which sets it up and to which it indirectly relates.

In form and content the composition of a haiku is a practice in
restraint. One wants to notice the ordinary in life, and
accordingly, to minimize the use of literary devices such as
rhyme or metaphor for the sake of creating an implicit poetic
experience of mystery and transience. The more or less eleven
English syllables or seventeen Japanese onji — the duration of
a breath — allow for the silences, too. A season word or
suggestion involves the senses and so anchors one in the
concrete. Eventually images enlivened by feeling attain a depth
of experience and insight. A frog jumps into the water, a haiku
bubbles up.

further reading

Find scholarly work on the hokku, the forerunner of haiku, online at http://hokku.wordpress.com/ .

English translations of Japanese haibun include:

Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō (1689) — Each of the translations by Cid Corman and Sam Hamill, while quite different from one another, are excellent.

English language haibun:

   bottle rockets, a journal collection of short verse
   word pond at http://donnafleischer.wordpress.com/
   Frogpond, International Journal of the Haiku Society of America
   Journey to the Interior, Bruce Ross, editor
   Modern Haiku, An Independent Journal of Haiku and Haiku
        Studies
   Red Moon Press, annual contemporary haibun
        anthologies, Jim Kacian, general editor
   Contemporary Haibun Online, Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, Ken
        Jones, editors
   endless small waves, haibun by Bruce Ross, (Ontario Canada:
        HMS Press, 2008)
   indra’s net, haibun by Donna Fleischer, (Wethersfield, CT: bottle
        rockets press, 2003)


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


On Usedom

We find our way, Betty, and I, to her beloved friends’ doorstep in
Neeberg, a German village of 30 on the Baltic Sea island of
Usedom. Once the summer home to Russian czars, German
kaisers. Today Ruth and Werner, Tabea, ten, and four-year-old
rambunctious Joram greet us in English and soccer scores. My
first morning after sharing chocolate muesli I wander far afield
in poppies with the drowned poet Paul Celan, writing this in my
head. Time in waves; wild blackberry paths to the sea; East
Frisian black tea with brown rum and a sugar cube; fish at night,
netted each morning from the Baltic near our door by the village
fisherman (also the mayor, real estate agent, emergency medic,
and reporter), born, grown up, and still in his place

pulling the dark net
to his wee boat at dawn
September moon slips through


Treks on foot skirting deep, loamy furrows and rootstocks,
gleeful, me and Moritz (elegant, like his neuroscience theories),
from one end of town to another with far-ranging conversation
and pockets of silence. Getting to know an other — hey! there’s
Tom, the mayor’s sea-wizened black-and-white cat, looking to
us and out at sea. I recite Bob Arnold’s poem SURE to him. He
seems to relate


The cat hides away all
Day asleep and thinks nothing
Of coming out and wanting a kiss


Convergences for dinner, stories, laughter; new friends, Moritz,
of course, and Bettina, a psychoanalyst; more poetry, running out
of wine, fireplace ablaze, and politics of an unforgettable campaign
year, 2008, these Germans reassured in Barack Obama, in
America

Flying home. Over Germany, England, Ireland, the Atlantic. The
world and our lives with it so vast and collapsible.

---- Donna Fleischer


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


This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #157 (did I say #157?) by W. T. Ranney ( .   .   . ), a virtually unheralded small press poet from Ithaca who has been a long time favorite of mine.  Try this one on for size and see what you think:

Parked cars creak in the heat.  Old men drunks
astumble with paper bags.  O America you're on
strike!  Telephone poles go on for blocks.  AT&T
and the Associated Press and the FBI and me.
Nice trees flutter in the breeze.  It's a lazy
hazy day don't ya know.  Bugs zoom around and my
heart is a butterfly in love.  The sun moves
slowly across the sky concealed above the white
clouds.  Now the trees crowd round the
apartment!  The melancholy of the day reflects
on the white walls.  O lotus on the pond above
the water!  in the world yet not really of it!

                           W. T. Ranney

in my sake cup
down the hatch!
the Milky Way

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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