Mary Oliver: Today

Mary Oliver's new book, A Thousand Mornings, has, as all her books do, a handful of very fine pieces. It's well worth reading; I find myself returning to poem after poem. There is a delicate simplicity, a certain lyric sleight of hand she performs that transports us to that place of awe and revelation. Here is a poem from that collection: 


Today

Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

~ Mary Oliver




Wednesday Haiku will return next week. 

on a snowy day
the temple is packed...
pigeons, sparrows

 Issa

 translated by David G. Lanoue 

best,
Don 

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Farm Country: Mary Oliver

Farm Country

    I have sharpened my knives, I have
    Put on the heavy apron.

    Maybe you think life is chicken soup, served
    In blue willow-pattern bowls.

    I have put on my boots and opened
    The kitchen door and stepped out

    Into the sunshine.  I have crossed the lawn.
    I have entered

    The hen house.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is a plain speaking poet, as exemplified by this early poem.   She is a perfect example of a poet who continually is writing the same poem over and over again, perhaps to a fault, but you're more likely to  hear that from her than me.  Often her poems describe direct encounters with nature, in which the narrator has a revelation or a transcendent moment or plainly, simply, is.

"Farm Country" is nature from a different approach.  More to the point, it comes round to the lesson all her finest poems teach, if by an even plainer, less circuitous route than usual.  Is it that the route hasn't been traveled before that gives her work its power and resonance?  Hardly.  She reminds us, she insists on reminding us, of what is all around us that we have simply stopped paying attention at the possible cost, without putting too fine a point on it, of our souls.

These words are ones which, in translation, Issa and Bashō most assuredly would concur.

killing a chicken--
the willow at the gate
so green

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

David Giannini has just dropped me a note to let me know that today, by the old Japanese calender, is Issa's death day.  So here is one of his finest pieces, his death poem:

A bath when you're born,
a bath when you die,
how stupid

Issa
translated by Robert Hass

best,
Don

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Mary Oliver: Evidence

It's been said that every great poet (or artist, or novelist etc.) is simply writing the same great poem over again and again. The poet herself first and foremost understands this deeply, deeply - it runs to the source, the unexplainable essence from which it springs.

Have you not heard the sparrow, singing?

Most critics have written off Mary Oliver a long time ago. They may acknowledge that she has written a number of very good, if not great, poems (& who among them can say the same, eh, William Logan?) but now, they say, she just repeats past glories, retreads the same old tropes.

And the waves, do they not repeat past glories, retread old tropes?

Imagine, in your life as a poet, toiling day in and day out, for a lifetime, how ever long, imagine having written a handful of poems that deeply touched the lives of others, some who have devoted their lives to the word, others who have not.

Imagine.

Mary Oliver has touched the lives of many and she has done it by tapping deep into the well-spring not only of what makes us human, but also into what it is to live. She shares the great subjects and themes of no less than Whitman and Emerson and Snyder and Berry and Wordsworth and Thoreau. She is formidable, in her way.

If you are a Mary Oliver fan, as I am, you will enjoy very much her new book, Evidence. If you are not, perhaps there is nothing here that will win you over. But there are a handful of poems in this collection which revisit that well and it is pure and it is cold and it is deep.

You will find no workshop Evian here, friends.

And who among us can say the same, a handful of poems, pure and cold and deep?

Yes, there are poems that are working through the same images, the same thoughts, the same themes. Some are light, very light, indeed. But they are true: true to her vision, true to her thought, true to herself. True to the world.

When she gifts another with a cherished possession (a bone from the ear of a whale, found deposited on the beach at the edge of the Atlantic) the significance of which she has written about previously, I felt, in fact, she was gifting her heart.

Imagine giving away the object that inspired a poem that tens of thousands of people read and loved. And the gift she receives in return is even more beautiful, one that Yeats and Lawrence would have admired, indeed.

Here are 3 poems from Evidence that work for me; the are distinctly the Mary Oliver of my mind, not all pretty nature and beautiful this and lovely that. They are the Mary Oliver that senses death, right here, right now, all the time, and its power and its strength are its beauty, the beauty of life.

The beauty of death.




Li Po and the Moon

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:
at night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming
--and singing

then drowned as he reached for the moon's reflection.
Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been
--as desperate.

Not the moon, though.

Mary Oliver

Thinking of Swirler

One day I went out
--into a wonderful
----ongoing afternoon,
------it was fall,

the pine trees were brushing themselves
--against the sky
---as though they were painting it,
----and Swirler,

who was alive then,
--was walking slowly
---through the green bog,
----his neck

as thick as an ox,
--his antlers
----brushing against the trees,
-- -- his three good feet tapping

the softness beneath him
--and the fourth, from an old wound,
----swirling,
------I know he saw me

for he gave me a long look
--which was as precious as a few
----good words,
------since his eyes

were without terror.
--What do the creatures know?
----What in this world can we be certain about?
------How did he know I was nothing

but a harmless mumbler of words,
--some of which would be about him
----and this wind-whipped day?
------In a week he would be dead,

arrowed down by a man I like,
--though with some difficulty.
----In my house there are a hundred half-done poems.
------Each of us leaves an unfinished life.

Mary Oliver

Schubert

He takes such small steps
to express our longings.
Thank you, Schubert.

How many hours
do I sit here
aching to do

what I do not do
when, suddenly,
he throws a single note

higher than the others
so that I feel
the green field of hope,

and then, descending,
all this world's sorrow,
so deadly, so beautiful.

Mary Oliver

**************************************


This Sunday, I am going to start a new occasional series, entitled Issa's Sunday Service, which will include a song and a poem.

Because, well, there is just not enough going on around here ...

if my father were here--
dawn colors
over green fields

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Two Reviews: Basho and Mary Oliver

Matsuo Bashô

I ran across two reviews today that I thought are of particular interest. The first is by Curtis Dunlap from Blogging Along Tobacco Road of Bashô: the Complete Haiku, edited by Jane Reichhold and featured here in a previous post. Here is the opening of the review:

My haiku journey has been one of cultivating a growing awareness of my surroundings. Through study, trial, and error, I have learned to preserve moments in my life and, occasionally, share them through haiku. I likely would have ignored such opportunities for composing poems had I not studied the works of other poets. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking with a number of people who have inspired me through their friendship, advice, and poems. Such encounters have always fueled my haiku engine... (the review continues here)

The second review is of A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and comes from the A Poetic Matter blog. It begins as follows:

I have this fascination with poetry handbooks. I think it started after receiving my rejection letter to the MFA program at Colorado State. Looking back, the portfolio I submitted was atrocious, but I was still heartbroken. I’ve loved writing since the third grade when I wrote a story and totally ripped off the ending of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Why do so many children love the “it was all a dream” ending? Anyways, after getting rejected I didn’t do any creative writing for about 6 months. I don’t know why I took it so personally, but I was defeated. Eventually, I decided to try and figure out what was wrong with my poems– ... (continue reading here)

Both of these reviews manage to balance the personal and the professional, the subjective and objective, in just the right proportions to simultaneously engage and inform the reader. The first book I've read and found Curtis's review brought that experience into sharp focus and added some fine detail to that reading. The second I haven't read but will read now; I didn't imagine that this would be a title for me but the reviewer for A Poetic Matter was able to communicate very well why I it most certainly is.

Ironically, Oliver prefaces her Introduction to A Poetry Handbook with a poem by Bashô, creating one of those finely ringing, synchronous moments that, well, make life worth living:

The temple bell stops-
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Basho, translated by Robert Bly

And, oh, yeah, there's that Bly guy.

Hmn. Is there an echo in here?



best,
Don

Mockingbird and the Cherry Tree

Found bit, from Mary Oliver's prose poem, West Wind #7 from her book West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems. This is the second verse:


---Today Bill tells us - for a mockingbird has begun to sing -
---how a friend came during the summer and filled a bowl with
---fruit from the cherry tree. Then, leaving the bowl on the
---stoop, he went inside to sit with Bill at the kitchen table. To-
---gether Bill and his friend watched the mockingbird come to
---the bowl, take the cherries one by one, fly back across the yard
---and drop them under the branches of the tree. When the
---bowl was empty the bird settled again in the leaves and began
---to sing vigorously.

---Mary Oliver

And darling Issa:

gate's cherry tree
all this flit-flit flitting
is work!

Issa translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Top 5 Poetry Books of 2008

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

Top Five Poetry Books of 2008


The Door by Margaret Atwood

On Love and Barley: the Haiku of Basho, translated by Lucien Stryk

Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities, by Olena Kalytiak Davis

One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds

At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audiobook)

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

Above is a list of the top five poetry books I read in 2008, culled from a list about 8 times the size. Only 1 of the 5 were published in 2008, but that's really not surprising, at least to me. The Basho title is an obvious offshoot from the Basho Haiku Challenge, instituted here this year. And the Mary Oliver title comes from my research for the 3 Poems Discussion group I moderate at work. The complete Emily Dickinson would have made this list if I'd finished it instead of hunting and pecking my way through. A book called West Wind by Oliver, which I'm currently reading, most certainly would have been in the running as it may be her best print collection I've read so far. The audio book At Blackwater Pond, which I listened to since there is no companion print volume, is in fact her best collection overall. It was particularly interesting to me that the poems she selected from various volumes were not necessarily included in either of her collections of selected poems, sending the message that perhaps she might have selected differently if she'd had her druthers (or maybe she just changed her mind). I probably should say I read quite a few Basho and Oliver titles that did not make the list.

The Sharon Olds' title made it on the strength of its final third. The poems that open the collection are not quite up to her usual excellent standards but the poems in the final section, dealing with her mother's death, have the devastating power of her very best work.

Here's to a peaceful, happy, and decidedly more lyrical new year,

best,
Don

R. H. Blyth's Haiku

Last night I wandered from my previously stated purpose of mining R. H. Blyth for more Shiki translations and sat down with the 1st volume of R. H. Blyth's 4 volume Haiku, opening it up to the preface and beginning to read. I was positively knocked out; it is, simply, transcendent. I've plumbed these 4 volumes over the years for many of the hundreds and hundreds of poems by acknowledged Japanese masters of the haiku, by poet and by season (the later being the general schema of the volumes). Let me let Blyth speak for himself:

-----

The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of as consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in peoples and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature.

-----There seems to me no necessity, however, to make a Spenglerian attempt to show from historical examples how there has been a movement towards ideas, ideas, abstractions; and a corresponding revulsion from them. In our own individual lives, and in the larger movements of the human spirit these two contradictory tendencies are more or less visible always, everywhere. There is a quite noticeable flow towards religion in the early world, and in the early life of almost every person,-and a later ebb from it, using the word "religion" here in the sense of a means of escape from this life.

-----The Japanese, by an accident of geography, and because of something in their national character, took part in the developments of this "return to nature," which in the Far East began (to give them a local habitation and a name) with Enô, the 6th Chinese Patriarch of Zen, 637-713 A. D. The Chinese, again because of their geography perhaps, have always had a strong tendency in poetry and philosophy towards the vast and vague, the general and sententious. It was left, therefore, to the Japanese to undertake this "return to things" in haiku, but it must be clearly understood that what we return to is never the same as what we once left, for we have ourselves changed in the meantime. So we go back to the old savage animism, and superstition, and common life of man and spirits and trees and stones,-and yet there is a difference. Things have taken on something of the tenuous nature of the abstractions they turned into. Again, spring and autumn, for example, non-existant, arbitrary distinctions, have attained a body and palpability they never before had. We also, we are the things,-and yet we are ourselves, in a perpetual limbo of heaven and hell.

-----It was necessary for us to prostrate ourselves before the Buddha, to spend nine long years wall-gazing, to be born in the Western Paradise. But now, no more. Now we have to come back from Nirvana to this world, the only one. We have to live, not with Christ in glory, but with Jesus and his mother and father and brothers and sisters. We return to the friends of our childhood, the rain on the window-pane; the long silent roads of night, the waves of the shore that never cease to fall; the moon, so near and yet so far; all the sensations of texture, timbre, weight and shape, those precious treasures and inexhaustible riches of every-day life.

-----Haiku may well seem at first sight a poor substitute for the glowing visions of Heaven and Paradise seen of pale-lipped asceties. As Arnold says:

----------Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
----------How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!

Haiku have a simplicity that is deceptive both with regard to their depth of content and to their origins, and it is the aim of this and succeeding volumes to show that haiku require our purest and most profound spiritual appreciation, for they represent a whole world, the Eastern World, of religious and poetic experience. Haiku is the final flower of all Eastern culture; it is also a way of living.

There are some deep, even ticklish and, occasionally, seemingly nonsensical waters to navigate here. Be that as it may, my thought is sit at the feet of a master and learn. If there is anyway for someone from the West to understand what haiku actually means in Japanese culture, this is it. No matter whether you agree or disagree with Blyth; there is just too much here not to revel in. Admittedly, this is the beginning of a potentially long, four volume journey but I'm hoping to see it through in '09. I have a feeling I'm going to need a good deal more of pluck than lucky, but I'll just have to see. And I'll report back.

Here's a couple of poems I came across this week worth a gander:

Mary Oliver's Morning Poem

Jane Kenyon's Taking Down the Tree

The Oliver poem is an outgrowth of all the reading I've been doing for the 3 Poems discussion group; it is a good one, really representative of all her work. If ever there was a poet constantly working and reworking the same territory, it is Mary Oliver and, despite what many critics have to say, this is just why she should be cherished. She points to nature in its myriad manifestations and takes from it a solid, spiritual, all-encompassing world view.

Not too shabby.

For more on Oliver, check out my post on Eleventh Stack dealing with her best collection, the audiobook entitled At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver.

The Kenyon poem nails what many of us will be doing over the coming days and weeks, taking down the tree. In this piece, Kenyon harkens back to the pre-Christian tradition of the solistice tree and its original purpose, something we all know and feel on an instinctual level but rarely articulate. Darkness, be damned.

Right now, I'm reading poetry volumes by Richard Brautigan, Robert Bly, and James Wright in preparation for featuring work that has been selected for the Near Perfect Books of Poetry list (183 and counting - will we make to 200?). Three poems from the Wright volume, The Branch Will Not Break, have already posted. In addition, I'm reading From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright from Lost Hills Books for a future print and possibly blog review. Like so much tree tinsel, the Blyth volume has distracted me from Matsuo Basho: The Master Haiku Poet by Makoto Ueda, which I will be getting back to I hope.

If I'm not careful, I'm gonna run out of bookmarks.

This week's dip into the Lilliput archive comes from October 1994, with a nifty, if slightly faded cover by the irrepressible Wayne Hogan. Hope something grabs you here.

Cover art by Wayne Hogan

As This Morning

we have forgotten so much:
how afternoon light
will warm us. the
way our bodies are.
how fingers will move
into a shadow so
slight, there is
hardly room for
the world.

Mike James

After Sex

I watch her getting dressed.
She dips her head slowly,
her hair flops away
from the crown
in a swirling semaphore
of golden petals.
Clothes float up from the floor
like butterflies.

John Grey

Monoepic

Wonder.

Richard Kostelanetz

and O
------how he loved is tenderness
-------------when he touched her

John Elsberg

November Sunday Madonna

curls into herself,
the last leaf
on the maple
wind blown
and twitching
still holding on

Lyn Lifshin

¶writing is motionless
-when I am done.
-my shadow
-on the path of the path.

Scarecrow

best,
Don

James Wright and Mary Oliver

Continuing a look at James Wright's classic volume The Branch Will Not Break, here is a poem of a revelation in reverse, if you will:

Depressed By A Book Of Bad Poetry, I Walk
--Toward An Unused Pasture And Invite
-----------The Insects to Join Me

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone,
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment, and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.

James Wright

I have spent a good deal of time reading boatloads of Mary Oliver lately. She is the next poet we will be covering in the 3 Poems By discussion group at my place of employment. Though she undoubtedly would have done Wright's poem very differently, the method, the tone, and the sentiment might be remarkably similar. Oliver is all about observation, musing, and revelation (and, occasionally, transcendence).

All of that may be found in the following, though the order is decidedly different. Here is a description by Oliver, complete with grasshopper, of exactly what Wright is doing after being disgusted by that bad poetry:


The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

best,
Don

Dickinson, Yosano Akiko, and Basho

Cover art by Harland Ristau

I'm currently working on a couple of projects concerning Emily Dickinson which I'll probably be discussing in future postings. For the moment, for those who didn't see/hear it, I'd like to refer you to The Writer's Almanac for yesterday's rendition of "I shall keep singing!", which, like much of the best of her work, seems so simplistic on the surface but resonates like all get-out.

Over the past year and into the foreseeable future, I have and will be continuing to publish Dennis Maloney's translations of the work of my favorite tanka poet, Yosano Akiko. At least four new poems are forthcoming in the next two issues of Lilliput. In the meantime, here are a couple of older translations by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki:

There are numberless steps
Up to my heart.
He climbed perhaps two or three.

Like my heart,
Which is waiting for you,
This bouquet of flowers will wither
Before tonight has passed.

The white iris
And the purple iris
Grow side by side in the pond,
Yet never open their hearts
To each other.

I've been perusing Basho and His Interpreters by Makoto Ueda, one of the Near Perfect Books of Poems list; the list has now grown to 28 items, with lots of folks taking advantage of the two free issues offer. In addition to being an all new translation of Basho's work, the poems are accompanied by extensive notes and commentaries which are very helpful in bridging the historical and cultural gaps for Westerners. Here are a few:

night . . . silently
in the moonlight, a worm
digs into a chestnut



in the seasonal rain
the crane's legs
have become shorter



with morning glories
a man eats breakfast
- that is what I am

Finally, before getting to this week's archive issue of Lillie, I'd like to mention that their is an excellent article/interview on/with Mary Oliver, in the Block Island Times. When asked to name her favorite poets, she said "Whitman, Whitman, Whitman!" I knew there was a reason I liked her: Whitman was my choice on the Near Perfect Books of Poems list.

This week's archive issue is #90, from July 1997, with a great cover by the late, very much missed Harland Ristau. Here's a couple of little gems that opened that issue:

The Wrong Path

One more mile again
another dew thunders falling
from the leaf's edge

Laura Bast-Russo

the way
is not
the map

John Viera

from Reroutings III

ID ____ RID ____ RIDE

Richard Kostelanetz

And, to close out, by the queen of the small press:

I Don't Want To Move

pillow that smells like skin
your fingers ----- light on
water in a Monet ----- that
will change before the
paint drys

Lyn Lifshin

best,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the Near Perfect Books page.

Mary Oliver, Pantheism, and the Big G

Cover by Kevin Friend

Lots of very interesting poetry related news this week, beginning with Mary Oliver. As something of an early preview to my posting of a review of her new book of poems, Red Bird, on Eleventh Stack (a blog from my day job), here's that post, which will be appearing next week, possibly in a slightly different form:

"Even at her most agnostic, her most atheistic, Mary Oliver was always a spiritual, even a religious, writer. Her embracing of nature is all-encompassing, recalling the preoccupation of no less a poetic figure than William Wordsworth. In recent years, as seen in her last few books, she has evinced a new found faith beyond the more general pantheism that always seemed to be just below the surface of many of her finest poems.

I have to admit, I approached this newer work with the kind of trepidation one has when hearing of a life-altering event involving a close friend; confronting a new found faith in others that one does not necessarily share can be a daunting thing, most especially when it concerns an old friend. I'm happy to report that, as may be seen in her new collection of poems, Red Bird, this faith is not only a logical extension of her previous beliefs, it in fact firmly accentuates what has come before.

Mary Oliver's wide appeal beyond the usual poetry reading community is easy to understand; her poems are rendered in simple basic vocabulary, are no less beautiful for that simplicity, and concern the every day world around us. Her perception of things is acute; she points out in nature what we all might see if we took the time and had the patience to truly look. Beyond capturing the moment, she also supplies the resonance from which meaning may flow. When she is good, she is transcendent. When she is average, she is at least always interesting. Red Bird is a volume that may be read straight through and then bears, in fact induces, repeated readings. It is cohesive in that its overarching theme is present throughout. There are more than a handful of excellent poems here. Listen to this excerpt from Straight Talk from Fox:

Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons

making love, arguing, talking about God

as if he were an idea instead of grass,

instead of stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den.

Highlights include this poem, along with Invitation, Night and the River, There is a Place Beyond Ambition, We Should Be Prepared, This Day and Probably Tomorrow Also, the fabulous Of Love, I am the one; well I could go on. There is even a powerful political poem, Of the Empire, that telescopes the general to the particular in a most damning fashion. If you listen closely, you may find there is a message just for you, as in the beginning of Invitation:

Oh do you have time

to linger

for just a little while

out of your busy

and very important day

for the goldfinches

that have gathered

in a field of thistles …

There is a wisdom here, the wisdom of long life, of loss, of longing, and of acceptance. But most of all there is beauty, a beauty not to be missed."

Oddly enough, while reading this book through a second time, I got to thinking once again about the idea of a near perfect volume of poems. Red Bird contains many, well, not very good poems. Yet, still and all, it is a very good collection, precisely because the inferior work in this case informs the overall collection. The overarching theme is consistent throughout and, in one sense, though obviously supplying its subject, it also strengthens its voice. Here is a little 4 line poem that perfectly captures what I try to get at in the review:



So every day

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.



Now, if the G word puts you off, so be it; for me, the spiritual element is almost Buddhist, especially in light of Oliver's preoccupation with nature and its resonance in our lives. If you do nothing, pick this book up in your local independent shop or Borders or B & N (or, better still, your library) and read one poem: Of Love. It alone is worth the cover price (and more).

Some interesting tidbits around the web include the Village Voice reprint of an article from April 1958 written by Kenneth Rexroth on the Beats. Ted Kooser, the subject of a recent post here, is participating in a project sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress entitled American Life in Poetry, which supplies "a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem ..." Poetry bloggers take note: at 161 columns and counting, that's a lot of presupplied content. For poetry lovers there are a lot of new poems to be exposed to, by both well and relatively unknown modern American poets.

In addition, there is a great 20 minute documentary on one of my favorite contemporary poets, Gerald Stern, entitled Gerald Stern: Still Burning, at the website Poetry Matters Now, which features a parcel of video readings and is worth a bookmark.

And, finally, in the news department, can it be true that the poetry volume that moved an entire generation, A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is really be 50 years old? And, of course, anyone that would ask that question ... If by some chance you haven't read this one, don't hesitate; it most certainly would be on my list of the most important books of poems of the last century.

Well, believe it or not there is more, but the day job beckons. So, in closing, here are some sample poems from Lilliput Review #94 (December 1997), the cover of which appears above.


the rain
knits us
with threads
of silver

Albert Huffstickler

from Epistles

A word, once sent abroad,
flies irrevocably.

Quintus Horace

And then there is this one line gem - I do love one line poems:




celibacy, a masking forcibly redundant

Sheila E. Murphy

Finally,




Cosmoses were
swinging in the war-ruined city:
softly like now.

Kiyoe Kitamura

Till soon (or next Thursday, whatever comes first),

Don

"There are so many stories ..."

Cover art by John Bennett & Cornpuff

Last week was the anniversary of the birth of James Wright, one of finest poets America produced in the 20th century. His combination of moving lyricism and deep-felt sadness served as a model for some of the best 20th century poetry to follow. White Pine Press, which I mentioned in my last posting, has recently reissued the wonderful collection of prose/prose
poem pieces The Shape of Light by Wright. Most of the pieces in this book run from a paragraph to a few pages and center around an Italian journey. The following, in its entirety, is one two line sentence that captures the flavor of this resonating book:

Saying Dante Outloud

You can feel the muscles and veins rippling in widening
and rising circles, like a bird in flight under your tongue.

Also in my last posting, I mentioned the latest chapbook by Gary Hotham in the "Modest Proposal" series, Missed Appointment. Here a few of poems from that collection:

window, window...
the child pressing against
the rain

missed appointment---
late morning sun spreading over
the faded sofa

farewell party---
the sweetness of the cake
hard to swallow

Over the past two weeks, I've added 8 more issues to the Back Issue Archive, each containing 6 poems per issue, for a total of 11 issues. I will be posting more back issues to this archive on a regular basis for general reading and to give newcomers a chance to see what Lilliput is all about. Combined with the samples given in the 7 previous postings in this blog and over 30 postings in the old Beneath Cherry Blossoms (beware, pop-up zone) blog, there are now sample poems from nearly 50 back issues available.

Also, a page of Small Press Links has been added to the homepage this week in my regular effort to transfer over material from the old homepage. Do feel free to suggest other small press links, particularly to pages for Lilliput poets and mags that count themseleves among Lilliput's friends.

So, what is the title of this posting about anyway? Well, over the last few weeks I've been slowly going through Mary Oliver's stellar collection, House of Light, where I came across the following, from the poem Snake:

There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.

Frequently, I'm asked for the magazine's guidelines and, of course, I provide the usual, poems under 10 lines, a 3 poem limit per batch etc. But qualitatively, the above two lines might serve very well, indeed.

Finally, it's on to a selection of poems #134, which originally appeared in October 2003:

2003
Just before spring
the war begins

but - - ignorant - -

the pink blossoms
keep opening
their tiny fists

Judith Toler

what far off peace
some will war for--right here
a moon

Scott Watson

Rain at the window
wood doves of the morning's first
light. How long, how long?

David Lindley

a long sleepless night-
your voice on my machine
saying hello
again and again
while the rain softly falls

James Rohrer

Till next week,
Don

Gary Hotham and Yosano Akiko (& more)

Cover art by Wayne Hogan

This morning I've received notice that one of Gary Hotham's poems from Missed Appointment, #17 in the "Modest Proposal Chapbook" series, has been reprinted in the Mainichi Daily News of Tokyo. If you click on the Mainichi link, not only will you see Gary's insightful poem but also 14 other fine haikus, including Francis Masat's excellent "dusk --" and a gem by this site's patron, Issa, translated by Isamu Hashimoto. Congrats, Gary.

This week also saw the anniversary of the birth of Yosano Akiko. Yosano almost singlehandedly revitalized the tanka form for modern readers. She is one of the premiere poets of that form and to this day remains my personal favorite. I'm happy to say it has been one of my greatest thrills as an editor to be publishing Dennis Maloney's new translations of Yosano Akiko in recent Lillies, with more to come in forthcoming issues. Here are a few examples from recent numbers:


#26

Unable to touch
The hot tide of blood
Beneath my tender skin.
Do you feel lonely
Teacher of the way?
(from Lilliput Review #153)



#14

You came from Saga, near water
Love god of a single night.
The poem you composed
Within the silk bed,
Please keep it secret.
(from Lilliput Review #155)



#372

Listen lord!
Love is the voice of admiration
For violets
in the purple evening.
(from Lilliput Review #157)



Dennis, by the way, is the editor and publisher of one of the finest American small presses in business today, White Pine Press. White Pine has published and continues to publish some of the very best classic and modern Eastern and contemporary world poetry, including recent reissues of work by Sonia Sanchez and James Wright.

On the reading shelf right now are Mary Oliver's House of Light, Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and an advanced reading copy of Manil Suri's new novel, The Age of Shiva. Doyle will be appearing here in Pittsburgh at the Drue Heinz Lectures series next month, which many folks are looking forward to. Reading these two novels at once, I've been struck not only by the obvious differences compared to America, but by the similarities, particularly on how all three cultures treat women. The rituals and rites of passage may differ; the results are the same, all adding up to tragic inequality that one could never have dreamt dragging on into the 21st century. On my daily walk to work, I am reminded of this by a piece of incisive graffiti: "No War But Class War."

So it goes, as the much missed sage would say.

After much resistance, I've been reading Mary Oliver's work on and off over the last year. She is much maligned; one particularly unjust criticism is that she writes the same poem over and over again. It is hard to believe that this criticism was actually leveled by a fellow "poet." It seems to completely misunderstand the vocation that is poetry. I wonder what Dickinson, Willie Dixon, Issa, or Picasso might say to this, all of whom might have the same criticism leveled at them.

This week's sample of Lilliput poems comes from issue #133. Enjoy.


endless
the arrival

you are
going from

~ John Phillips



October Leaves

bleed veined beauty
pure enough
to suffocate art

while we look on
with loosened hair.

~ Larsen Bowker




Shiki wrote eighteen
thousand Haiku: How many leaves
has a willow tree?

~ Robert Chute



Everybody knows that
autumn is a ghost,
haunting us with memories
of things that never happened.

~ Albert Huffstickler




My flesh heart needs teeth
and all of Buddha's koans
will not jar them loose.

~ Mary Rooney

Finally, in particular for those new to Lillie, there are samples from three past issues up in the new archive page on the (also new) website. Check it out.

Best until next time, Don.

Swimming Up Ladders, All Our Different Ways

Contributor copies for issues #159 & 160 went out in the mail this past weekend, so the full run of Lillies will be following over the coming weeks. My apologies to subscribers as things are even later than usual.

I just finished Tristram Shandy today and I can’t praise it enough. Just a fantastic, hilarious piece of fiction. Sterne is right up there with Swift, Rabelais, Voltarie and Cervantes as an early satiric genius, if not the best of them all. Also, I’ve been working my way through Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen’s first book of poems, recently reissued in a 50th anniversary edition. Sadly, I can’t recommend it. A selected edition of his work might be able to scrape 2 or 3 poems from this volume; even that might be pushing it. I enjoy Cohen immensely, both song and lyric. This is just one book that should have remained obscure.

Also I was working my way through Mary Oliver’s House of Light when I ran across this unexpected (by me anyway) gem.


The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make yourself a light,”
said the Buddha
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.


Issue #130 of Lilliput is a broadside of the work of the wonderful Miriam Sagan. Entitled Fish Ladder: 19 Tanka, here is a modest selection:


Through the fish window
we saw the silver salmon
swim up the ladders
of the dam, and thought
suddenly of our lives

You don’t dream
of anything—
not the sea
not the past
not those
houses that open

Watching
the silver-backed gorillas
watch us through the glass
you wonder what it means
to be “a person”

Girl-child by the edge
of the sea, you have come down
to crab shell,
rounded
beach stone, tide swell, where
everything changes.

We all give thanks in such different ways … Don