The Sound of Water: the Closing Section

This final look at Sam Hamill's volume of haiku translations, The Sound of Water, focuses on the section entitled "Other Poets," specifically meaning everyone except Bashō, Buson, and Issa, all of whom we covered in previous posts.

To learn how to die
watch cherry blossoms, observe
chrysanthemums

Anonymous

Simple, really, yet we need to be reminded time and time again.  It is what makes haiku a way, as in a Way, if you pay attention.

Returning from a funeral
I saw this very moon
high above the moor

Kyorai

There is a bait and switch, which-shell-is-the-moon-under-quality to this poem.  Which moon, did you say?

All of them, of course.

True obedience:
silently the flowers speak
to the inner ear

Onitsura

This poem, particularly this rendition, runs quite deep.  First, true obedience to ... what?  Hamill has captured how silence speaks rather nicely, rather slyly, really.  I've seen another version, by Blyth, I believe, that mentions "the inner ear also."  Though certainly not fair to Hamill, perhaps, like the inner ear, we should be true to the poet, Onitsura.   Perhaps the also is incorrect, but if it is, there is a contrast of two different types of obedience and two different types of hearing. 

Aside from these, there was also Moritake's famed blossom returning to the branch (butterfly!) - for an animated version of that haiku, see this previous post.  I didn't much like Hamill's translation "Those falling blossoms / all return to the branch / when I watch butterflies" and, while looking for another, I stumbled on this poem, which I believe may also be by Moritake

           their moves
learned from falling petals
         butterflies 

I really love this poem; I'm gonna see if an old man can learn some moves from falling petals. Here is another version of Moritake's "falling blossom(s)"

A fallen blossom
come back to its branch?
No, a butterfly!

Moritake

That's much better.  Perhaps, the Hamill translation is of a different poem?  No way to tell, since the original is not included.


To pick a mere 3 poems to highlight of 42 seems mighty stingy, yet there you are.  I went back and read the section a couple of times - there are some lovely images and ideas, perhaps if I was in another mood, but the section ended up being slightly disappointing.  There is another poem familiar to me - perhaps this is an appropriate way to close:

Just when the sermon
has finally dirtied my ears-
the cuckoo

Shiki

That and everything else being said, though the last section is disappointing, there are so many great renditions in The Sound of Water that it is worth many more times what it's going for ($3 plus bucks) for on used book sights like abebooks.  It can be slipped in a hip or shirt pocket; Issa, Buson, Bashō, and all tend to be pretty good company in the doctor's office, or the woods, or on the bus. 

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This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #127, November 2002.

Morning View From A Rainy Room

there is nothing I
must do a voice
floats warmly
by fine rain
and steam and tea hot
bath I shiver
petal on the path.

Mark Jackley

going outside
plum blossoms dive in...
my lucky tea

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue 

Google translator version: "Department included jumping out of a plum, if"

best,
Don

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Miscellany: Jackley, Gilbert, Gregg, Merwin & the Lilliput Archive

Cover by Harland Ristau

Mark Jackley, who has contributed some great work to Lilliput Review, has a new collection of poems out, entitled Cracks and Slats, from Amsterdam Press, part of the pertly named Gob Pile Chapbook Series. Here's a neat little poem from that collection, one of the endless variations in poetry on immortalizing a loved one:

Poet and Daughter

I am my words,
ink and pixels,

you my link
to eternity,

the bright and vast
intensity

of the
empty page.

Mark Jackley

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I can't remember where I ran across this enjoyable reading from the 90's by a Lilliput favorite, Jack Gilbert, along with Linda Gregg:





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Just now, while reading over some of W. S. Merwin's latest from The Shadow of Sirius, have learned that he has won the Pulitzer Prize, much deserved I think. The following is from that collection, from which I've featured two other poems previously:

Lake Shore in Half Light

There is a question I want to ask
and I can't remember it
I keep trying to
I know it is the same question
it has always been
in fact I seem to know
almost everything about it
leading me to the lake shore
at daybreak or twilight
and to whatever is standing
next to the question
as a body stands next to its shadow
but the question is not a shadow
if I knew who discovered
zero I might ask
what there was before

W. S. Merwin

If you bought one book of poetry this year, you probably couldn't do much better than this fine collection continuing a remarkable poetic journey.


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2009 is the 20th anniversary of Lilliput Review and the archive countdown to issue #1 will, if it continues on its current one-posting-per-week pace, finish up sometime in early 2010. This week's feature issue is #38 from October 1992, with a cover by the late great Harland Ristau. Themed as duos and trios, each page contained poems related in groups of two or threes. Here's a couple of poems that grab me today, 17 years later:




chimney smoke
mingling with mist and snow
evening

Jonas Winet

Postcard

A light wet snow
waters the back yard.
I watch from the sofa.
I miss your small hands.

Bart Solarczyk

learn to love/ then learn to
lose what you love/ learn to
lose love/ learn to love/ to
lose/ learn/ love

Coral Hull

she comes home
still pissed
lets in a fly

William Hart

swatting a fly
looking at
a mountain

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Basho, Burns, Brautigan, Amy Lowell, and Jacko?

Cover art by John Bennett

Busy, busy times, so posts for the next couple of weeks will be sporadic and brief. The Basho Haiku Challenge is off to a great start, with lots of entries coming in. Thanks very much to Poet Hound, Haiku and Horror , Blogging Along Tobacco Road, and trout fishing in minnesota for getting the word out. I'm sure there are some others, too, that I don't know about, but thanks all.

So, keep the haiku coming in, folks. Instructions may be found at the Basho Haiku Challenge link, above.

And keep spreading the word.

As alluded to above, not much progress on any fronts. I haven't read any fiction in over a month and I am seriously jonesing. When I see the piles as I go room to room, you can't imagine the variety of voices I hear calling to me from every corner: classic, modern, sci-fi, horror, any damn thing. They all want to be read and I want to read them all and the discipline is killing me.

I continue to read, however, for both the haiku challenge and a future Modest Proposal project, two different translations of Basho, one at work and one at home. At home, I'm reading the Jane Reichhold Basho: the Complete Haiku, which is the prize for the challenge and, I'm happy to say, I'm beginning to warm to it a bit. All the translations I've read so far have had one thing to recommend them: specifically, Basho himself. This may seem ludicrous but what I mean specifically is that I seem to be encountering different aspects of the same poet in the different translations. A poem I loved in one translation, I'm indifferent to the next and, of course, vice versa. At work, I'm still reading David Landis Budhill's Basho's Journey which, after the Reichhold, is the most complete and has notes for every poem. They'll be more details on both of these volumes in future posts.

Come mid-October, I hope to be working on the new issues, #'s 165 & 166, along with a new chapbook in the Modest Proposal series, a second volume of translations from 100 Poems by 100 Poets, by Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro. This volume will concentrate on poems of nature following the previous Unending Night, which contained love poems.

Jilly Dybka at Poetry Hut has pointed to a beautiful, pointed September poem by one of my favorite poets, Amy Lowell (particularly her shorter poems). Here it is, September, 1918; I think you'll enjoy it.

A Richard Brautigan poem, Star Holes, seems to be making the blog/live journal rounds. This guy just won't lay down and, of course, that's why we love him. Here it is:

Star Holes
I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,

watching light
pour itself toward
me.

The light pours
itself through
a small hole
in the sky.

I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things
are faraway.

Richard Brautigan

Finally, in the news of the truly odd, Michael Jackson has reportedly recorded musical versions of the work of Robert Burns. If I didn't read it in The Guardian, I wouldn't have believed it.

You know what: I still don't believe it.

This week's issue from the Lilliput archive is #78 from March 1996.



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I sought my heart
among the shadows
and found instead
a burnished leaf

Albert Huffstickler

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Drag me in,
you are a night that is just beginning.
You are a room I've seen
but have never slept in.
Your shoulder pushes against
the world's edge, and the sky
scrapes softly on my cheek.

Ali Kress

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Selfless
-----The pulsing
of the soft brown muslin curtain,
for example

And the quietness of rain,
taking you apart

Mark Jackley

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Thank You
To the pirate faced biker
streaming slowly down
Marshall Avenue,
colors jazzed in the
night time light,
front wheeled Harley
out to here, black
jacket man with beard
of steel, who saw my
one year old boy craning
in his blue stroller
and waved.

Michael Finley

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Poem Inspired by Hokusai, #7

Hokusai
in hell
draws perfect
circles
one inside
the other.

Alan Catlin

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When My Ashes Have Cooled Down

Pitch me to the nearest wind.
I'll find my way home.

Bart Solarczyk

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best,
Don