Issa's Untidy Hut: Mountains and Rivers Press

Friday, June 28, 2013

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

PS. Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 168 songs

Friday, August 26, 2011

Walking By Myself Again: Santoka, translated by Scott Watson

I have great affection for the various lyric renderings by Scott Watson of classic haiku masters such as Bashō and Taneda Santoka; in fact, I've published a few of his translations, as well as Scott's own wonderful poems, in both Lilliput Review and on Issa's Untidy Hut. Let it, therefore, be duly noted that there may be some bias here.

Just sayin'.

It gave me great pleasure awhile back to receive a copy of Walking by My Self Again, versions of Santoka, by Scott Watson, from Japan's Bookgirl Press, and now being distributed in the US by Ce Rosenow's Mountains and Rivers Press.

The abstract of this review is as follows: this is a book that belongs on the shelf of any Eastern poetry aficionado, a book that in its straightforward power and simplicity can turn the head of anyone who appreciates the essence, the core, of what drives a poet to scratch or tap or sing a few words into life.

Into life.

Scott's renderings bring an astute sensibility to a poetic task: translating a master poet. I have read enough Santoka translations to know that these are very different indeed, and, I am happy to report, different in a very good way.

Here are 5 one-lines renditions from early in the book

left as they fall tea flowers falling is all

whatever it all is it all is blossoming

in rain camellia flowers not yet falling

all day too noone came fireflies

able to meet again camellia in bloom

If I might be so bold as to call these perfect - these are perfect. Perhaps, they are not perfect translations - I can't argue that, I don't know the language. D. T. Suzuki might disqualify me from even reading the poem, so there is that.

So, you probably shouldn't be paying any attention to me.

However, these poems, as a meeting of the minds and hearts of Santoka and Watson, a dovetailing of the English and Japanese languages, these poems are as near perfect as someone who has no qualifications to say so can ascertain.

The first three are precise poems of the moment, a moment perfectly captured. Poem four isolates an all too pervasive feeling. Poem five is a fine blend of the human and the natural, each aspect, in its essence, experiencing the exact same is-ness so well delineated in the first four.

Another beautiful poem of the moment, as imagistic in its own way as the fine work of Buson is:

neither waiting
nor not waiting
moonlight weeds

I love the double negative of the 2nd hinge line, reminding me somehow of a Dutch door swinging both ways. The Way that is not the way is the way. Which way? This Way:

pine boughs all drooping hail Buddha

One does not often hear of the compassion of Santoka, certainly not as often as one hears of Issa's. Yet next is a poem full, over-full, with compassion for a fellow spirit:

it's that always-tied-nothing-but-barking-to-do dog

Oh, I remember what it's like to be tied up in the backyard like that, all day, everyday. You, too? To forget that is to forget our humanity, to forget everything, really. This is about your soul.

I believe I'll leave it there; to end on a note of compassion is, truly, not to end at all. The way that is The Way.

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

This week's poem comes from Lilliput Review, #171, from December 2009. Enjoy.