Blues & Haiku: Big Mama Thornton & Peggy Heinrich

Over the years, Peggy Heinrich has published a number of outstanding haiku in the pages of Lilliput Review. 10 of her works were recently featured at santacruz.com. Of the featured haiku, I was particularly touched by:

holding my breath
until the cormorant
resurfaces

Peggy Heinrich

This, of course, reminds me of Bashō's cormorant poem, featured and discussed in a previous post. Here's Bashō, as translated by Lucien Stryk:

Cormorant fishing
how stirring
how saddening.

Bashō
translated by Lucien Styrk

For those unfamiliar with cormorant "fishing," the following explanation comes from that earlier post:

The verse about the cormorant fishing perhaps needs a gloss. Fisherman commonly used the cormorant to fish by tying a string around its neck so when the bird snared a fish it couldn't swallow and the "fisherman" would simply remove the fish and put the bird back in the water. Not quite fishing with hand grenades, but certainly in the same mode. What really captures the true Basho spirit here is that he is both stirred and saddened, he still sees the miracle of nature despite the appalling behavior of nature's "highest creation", man.

Peggy manages to capture the idea of being stirred, as in Styrk's version of Bashō, with a suggestion of sadness or, perhaps, horror.

Another poem that resonates from this selection seems so basic, so simple in image and execution, to approach cliché, and yet, and yet (as Issa said of the dewdrop world):

ebb tide
turning to look back
at my footprints

Peggy Heinrich

In some ways, this is a perfect modern haiku: precise, concise, a literal image capturing a specific moment that resonates mightily. There is not one wrong word here and each carries its weight. Three words are at this poems core: ebb, turning, and back. What each one of those words means individually and collectively makes the poem come together. It is something anyone whose been to a shoreline has experienced. Mixed in that experience is the cosmic feel of place, a sense of self as self, a sense of self as part of the whole, a sort of returning, a vague bit of romantic nostalgia ...

But, ah, I'm projecting and that's the point of great haiku, the interaction of reader and poem, bringing one's own experience to bear. The poem has a feeling of ending, but it could just as well be about beginning, or both.

A genuine haiku moment, so simple it might easily be overlooked, as we overlook things, ordinary things, each and every day. Haiku moments. Moments.

The now.


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On to the then, to risk a trite segue. Here is a moment, courtesy of Miss Late July (who also recently posted this), that is just too good for words. Big Mama Thornton. A very young Buddy Guy.

And, because once you get something like this started you can't stop, see if this one doesn't blow you out of the water:

Ok, so three's a charm: this one's for Janis (there is a reason this link has over 6 million hits), who was a huge fan of Big Mama (turn it UP):

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Featured this week are two poems from the archive, from Lilliput Review #143 (June 1993), to mull over:

when you say 'bird'
do you feel
your wings unfurl?

Jean Michel Guilliaumond

A Melody by Haydn

wild plums --- just --- out -of ---reach

James Magorian

And one from the master:

not giving a damn
that plum blossoms fall...
his stern face

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Jean Cocteau, Harlan Ellison, & Cid Corman

This past weekend , I fell in love with Jean Cocteau.

I've always been infatuated with him, frankly. His film Orpheus (1949) is one of my all-time favorites; Beauty and the Beast, too, is a wondrous achievement. I had the opportunity to go back and take a look see at the other two films in the Orphic Trilogy (The Blood of a Poet (1930) and The Testament of Orpheus (1959)) and they are truly amazing and should be of great interest to poets as well as film buffs. The dvd versions I took out of the library had some first-class extras; in the case of The Blood of a Poet, the biographical documentary Autobiography of an Unknown, directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky, accompanying the main feature was every bit as entertaining, putting Cocteau's life and career in perspective with heavy doses of the lyric surrealism that infuses all his work. I actually enjoyed it more, it has a polished feel as a documentary that somehow Blood does not have as a film. In many ways, The Blood of a Poet is an early rehearsal for Orpheus; I would actually recommend watching the later first, though it comes "second" in the trilogy. This is not to detract from Blood: it is excellent.

Similarly, The Testament of Orpheus is something of an anomaly as a film. It might stand alone without Orpheus yet it is greatly enhanced by it. It is Cocteau's farewell to film and he gathers together his previous motifs, characters and even actors who played various roles to make his final artistic statement in the medium. There is much humor here; Cocteau himself becomes the main character in the film, a sort of time traveling Orpheus, stuck in modern times. It is nearly as good as Orpheus and a beautiful chronicle of the poet's journey. Another interesting extra is Villa Santo Sospir, which is a 16mm color film shot by Cocteau at the summer home of a friend. It has the feel of a combination home movie and travelogue and focuses almost entirely on the house, which Cocteau painted inside and out with his unique artistic creations, making it a work of art in and of itself. It must be seen to be believed. Here's a brief glimpse to get the flavor:






Sticking with the theme of the artist, a clip of the always provocative, incredibly original Harlan Ellison is making the rounds about the need for a writer to be paid for her/his work. Check it out:






There is, of course, no small irony that the circulation of this clip, an excerpt of the film Dreams With Sharp Teeth, is, perhaps, violating the very principle he so passionately (& profanely, bless him) espouses. So, that being said, the above is being passed along in the interest of the greater good, if there be such a thing.

And, yes, Lilliput being the micropress mag that it is, can only pay in the bane of the poet's existence, contributor copies. Sigh. The layers are thick.

Let the beatings begin.

Before getting to the Lilliput samples, one final bit of news. Longhouse Publishers of Vermont has issued a number of Cid Corman related items, including a new selected poems, The Next One Thousand Years, which I can't wait to see. Bob Arnold of Longhouse has sent along two of his delightful slip card productions of works by Cid: a Rumi translation ("What can I do - friends?) and a work entitled New Proverbs. Here are two from the master, resonating as his work always does:

Any moment
yields as much.


Don't ask more of yourself
than the mirror does.

Cover by Wayne Hogan

Continuing with the theme of the artist's plight and segueing from Wayne Hogan's beautiful cover above, here is the man himself, this time wielding the written word to speak, as always, directly to the point. From #97:



How To Be An Artist

Save all your
string. Save all your
empty paper cups.
Save all your missing socks.
Save all your wasted
words. Save all your Indianhead
nickels. Yes, especially
your Indianhead nickels.

Wayne Hogan

Regarding This Poem

The idea was to put
together as one compelling
composite all those parts you
said you particularly liked from
poems of mine you rejected over
the years but on second thought
would the conglomeration work as a
whole and besides you have a ten
line limit but don't think
that I haven't noticed
the exceptions.

Kenneth Leonhardt

Returning home

after long work
two corbies
and a dove
cut a pale sky.

A second dove
nowhere in sight,
the world is still
too dark. We must

begin again.

Jim Tolan

Obituary

cigar box
(shaken like a rattle):
shoehorn, stubby pencil,
cuff-link.

James Magorian

Till next Thursday,

Don

PS Don't miss Alicia Ostriker's devastating poetic observation of the American psyche, Fix, on today's The Writer's Almanac.