"Somewhere (from West Side Story)": Issa's Sunday Service, #110

This week's Sunday Service selection is something of anomaly, catching Tom Waits in an embryonic period when his style was still developing with what is, for me, mixed results.  The song is "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) and, on paper, this is a marriage made in Beat heaven.

Maybe it's me but the deep irony that is the juxtaposition of the cracked down and out Waits' persona and this classic Romeo and Juliet inspired tune just doesn't quite connect.  Am I wrong?

Since I've evoked Shakespeare, or rather Sondheim, Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Waits have, here's a little something entitled "Romeo is Bleeding" from the Waits' album that also has "Somewhere," Blue Valentine.



Ok, we can't do this halfway.  Let's let 'em take it home:



Um, one step too far - West Side Story (the Horror Trailer):




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This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #81, first published in August 1996.  A little fable, speaking of horror, with a very hard kernel of truth.  Just look around; Lyn Stefenhagens has.

What Every Woman Knows
  Eve knew.  Helen knew
  what every woman knows.

  Every garden grows
  some bay, some rue,
  a line of yew;
  one blemished rose,
  one shroud of crows.

     Lyn Stefenhagens

will I be the next one
you caw over?
crows

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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R. H. Blyth on Waka and Haiku

R. H. Blyth

Waka as an Eastern poetic form has largely become synonymous with the term tanka, which was originally a 5 line poem of 31 Japanese syllables (on or mora) dealing predominately with courtly love.  In his 4 volume masterwork, entitled simply Haiku, R. H. Blyth has a section in volume 1 which deals with the complex relationship between haiku and tanka (waka).

I am going to not so deftly attempt to sidestep the complexities and cut straight to the heart of things philosophically as Blyth presents them.

So many waka have titles, but haiku have none, because their real subject is unmentionable.

I am not going to gloss the master Blyth.  I am, on occasion, going to step aside, effectively to let sink in the depth of what he has to say.   This statement is one of those times.

Unmentionable, indeed.  Blyth continues:

Haiku are self-obliterating; they are the real "Songs without words.

Again with the stepping aside thing.

Like Ulysses, let's go sentence by sentence or, better, like Finnegans Wake, word by word, syllable by syllable.  Next:

In waka there is still a kind of poetic haze between us and the thing.  The music of the words and the cadence of the lines induce in us a certain state of mind which we designate "poetic", but in haiku the melody and rhythm remove the barriers of custom and prejudice between ourselves and the object.

Hmn.  Next paragraph:

When we say "object", this does not mean that it is necessarily a material thing.

Good thing, too, because I was beginning to wander a bit there ... on to the meat of the matter:

What we gain (with waka) in lyrical sweetness and historical allusions, we lose in scope and freedom of imagination (with haiku).  (Waka) is like an illustrated novel ...

The master, Blyth, turns to another master, Bashō, to bring his point home:

Bashō wanted our daily prose turned into poetry, the realization that the commonest events and actions of life may be done significantly, (and) the deeper use of language, both written and spoken.  We live, as Lawrence said, like the illustrated covers of magazines.  Comforts is our aim, and dissatisfaction is all we achieve.  The aim of haiku is to live twenty four hours a day, that is, to put meaning into every moment, a meaning that may be intense or diffuse, but never ceases.

Haiku often turns the weak subjectivity of waka into an objectivity which is a more subtle subjectivity, or rather a regin where "subjective" and "objective" lose their meaning and validity.

"Comforts is our aim, and dissatisfaction is all we achieve."

There is a very great deal on the plate here for the beginner (i.e. me); one should proceed very slowly, there is profundity in great abundance.  I will only say that for Bashō haiku was a spiritual Way, the practice of writing it and the practice of reading it.  The Way of Haiku, like the Way of the Warrior, the Way of Tea, the Way of Flowers etc.  Blyth is leading us here but ... like haiku itself, he is showing us not telling.

And then a little bombshell:

When we try to separate waka and haiku, we come across that law mentioned before, the law that the more the mind endeavours to distinguish two things the closer they insensibly become; the more we assert their unity, the more they separate.  Both waka and haiku are the activity of the spirit of man, and we must not exaggerate the differences between them.

And you thought we weren't talking about particles and waves, modern quantum physics, which has just but recently seemingly affirmed the ancient teachings of Eastern philosophers.   Oh, no, wait, we're talking about haiku - right?  Blyth puts all his cards on the table, throwing off yet another brilliant definition of haiku in the process:

Waka began as literature, haiku as a kind of sporting with words.  Bashō made it literature, and yet something beyond and above literature, a process of discovery rather than of creation, using words as means, not ends, as a chisel that removes the rock hiding the statue beneath.

Perfect, as is a haiku by Bashō Blyth used to illustrate this section:

        Sparrows
In the field of rape,
       With flower-viewing faces.

                    Bashō

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I ran into the following courtesy of one of my favorite blogs, Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, and it was just too, too good not to pass on.  America by Allen Ginsberg, music by Tom Waits.  Listen to it.  Listen to it again.

Listen again.

Here's what they should be teaching in the treadmills that pass for higher education in this country.  This is history.










"America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."


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This week's feature poem is "Cannibal" by Sue De Kelver from Lilliput Review, #147 (which has been featured twice before - here and here), October 2005.  I've performed it live and it gets exactly the reaction you'd expect.

Cannibal
   When you've rent the flesh and sinew
    from my supple skeleton and you've
   sucked the last sweet drop of marrow
   leaving lonely, brittle bones
   will you save the jagged splinters
   to adorn your chieftain chest
   or scatter them like toothpicks
   over yesterday's dung.

   Sue De Kelver

evening--
he wipes horse dung off his hand
with a chrysanthemum

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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Tom Waits and Two James Wright Poems

I was reminded of this Tom Waits song from a recent Facebook posting and it immediately put me in mind of two James Wright poems, one for obvious reasons, the other maybe not so obvious.  In any case, I'm thinking out loud here: Merry Christmas, good holidays, and Happy New Year, folks.  









Two poems by James Wright

Hook
   I was only a young man
  In those days. On that evening
  The cold was so God damned
  Bitter there was nothing.
  Nothing. I was in trouble
  With a woman, and there was nothing
  There but me and dead snow.

  I stood on the street corner
  In Minneapolis, lashed
  This way and that.
  Wind rose from some pit,
  Hunting me.
  Another bus to Saint Paul
  Would arrive in three hours,
  If I was lucky.

  Then the young Sioux
  Loomed beside me, his scars
  Were just my age.

  Ain't got no bus here
  A long time, he said.
  You got enough money
  To get home on?

  What did they do
  To your hand? I answered.
  He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
  And slashed the wind.

  Oh, that? he said.
  I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
  You take this.

  Did you ever feel a man hold
  Sixty-five cents
  In a hook,
  And place it
  Gently
  In your freezing hand?

  I took it.
  It wasn't the money I needed.
  But I took it. 

   In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse 
   in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river
I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

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

Finally, a poem from issue #51, back in 1993, by the fine poet, Christien Gholson, to commemorate the day today.  It was #18 in the "Brobdingnag Feature Poem" series, in which the editor slips in a little something beyond the normal ten-line constraint.  Enjoy.

Sudden Compassion in the Alley Behind

      The Apartment, Christmas Day

  The Lords of Trash

   ride the beerbox skidding across black ice.

  Their laughter calls down the dead

  who will not accept their death,

  waiting behind black windows made of sudden crow wings.

  They tumble into the world

  and enter the bodies of flying ragleaves,

  freed from the ice, tossed blind

  back up through the black crow windows

  without a sound.

  Everything is alive like a merciful warning.

  Alive!

  Even those souls gnashing each other

  behind sudden dark windows, desperate

  to finish something that's already finished.

  The tossed leaves shimmer over starlings

  praising the chimney smoke that warms them

  and the leftover smoke opens its mouth,

  drinking down the seed husk coins

  the sparrow let fly onto the wind.

New Year's day -

everything is in blossom!

I feel about average.

Issa

translated by Robert Hass

By way of explanation, under the classical calendar in Japan, New Years is later in the year, about the 2nd or 3rd week in February, around the coming of spring.    Also, it is tradition that everyone celebrated their birthday on New Years.  Issa's undercutting of tradition here is really his poetic signature.

And quite funny.

Happy Christmas all, and, for the coming New Year, may you feel about average.


best,
Don

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Under the Greenwood Tree: Issa's Sunday Service, #73

This week's selection for Issa's Sunday Service has a double literary pedigree: it is a song written by William Shakespeare, from Act II, Scene V, of As You Like It and the title of a Thomas Hardy novel after the Shakespeare song. In any case, this is a fine adaptation by Donovan.

Back about two years ago, I had a little something to say about this Hardy novel while blogging at my other job.  Hardy is one of my unabashed favorites.  Shakespeare and Donovan, too, for that matter, though none seem to be in the haiku business.

Hmn.

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Here's an amateur video of Tom Waits performing Lawerence Ferlinghetti's poem "Firemen" from Pictures of the Gone World at the recent Litquake festival in San Francisco.  This is the long version with a typically wonderful Waits intro.

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Lilliput Review #109 featured a parcel of haiku and other short-short pieces.  Here's one that was a little longer, calling an old friend to mind, reminding us of the true value of much literary criticism, and all the moon's light:

Ephemera

Po Chui, we are told, wrote
too many poems on subjects
of no special significance.

Across eleven centuries
we can still see the poet's brush
draw the least leaf to life.

The critic's words, as our breaths
on a winter's night, are
bright in the moon's light.

Robert Chute

Lute

my lute set aside
          on the little table
lazily I meditate
          on cherishing feelings
the reason I don't bother
          to strum and pluck?
there's a breeze over the strings
          and it plays itself

Po Chu-i
translated by James M. Cryer

Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants.

Issa
translated by Robert Hass

best,
Don

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Who Are You by Tom Waits: Issa's Sunday Service, #64

Detail of Ophelia by John Everett Millais

This week, in a post about identity, Miss Late July appended a video of a song by Tom Waits entitled "Who Are You?," which somehow had gotten under the radar here at Issa's Sunday Service. So, with this sincere tip of the hat to MLJ, this week's selection has, in a sense, been reader selected. From the album Bone Machine, it's arrangement harkens back to his well-known "hit," "Downtown Train." The illusion here is to Hamlet, via the reference to Ophelia. What, you say, there are many other Ophelias out there. Maybe, but when you take a good hard look at the lyrics - well, you decide.





Who Are You

They're lining up
To mad dog your tilt-a-whirl
3 shots for a dollar
Win a real live doll
All the lies that you tell
I believed them so well. Take them back
Take them back to your red house
For that fearful leap into the dark
I did my time
In the jail of your arms
Now Ophelia wants to know
Where she should turn
Tell me...what did you do
What did you do the last time?
Why don't you do that
Go on ahead and take this the wrong way
Time's not your friend
Do you cry. Do you pray
Do you wish them away
Are you still leaving nothing
But bones in the way
Did you bury the carnival
Lions and all
Excuse me while I sharpen my nails
And just who are you this time?
You look rather tired
(Who drinks from your shoe)
Are you pretending to love
Well I hear that it pays well
How do your pistol and your Bible and your
Sleeping pills go?
Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?

Well I fell in love
With your sailor's mouth and your wounded eyes
You better get down on the floor
Don't you know this is war
Tell me who are you this time?
Tell me who are you this time?

I saw Tom Waits back in 1979 and its really hard to describe how formidable and moving an experience that was. Fortunately, I don't have to grope for words because here, courtesy of his website and YouTube, is a live performance from that same year; certainly the Theatre le Palace in Paris doesn't quite have the ambiance of the New Jersey venue I was at, but it'll have to do. This is full-blown, balls-out, in-character, and incendiary rendering of "Heart Attack and Vine." Enjoy.






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


This week's feature poem is from Lilliput Review, #98, from July 1998, and is by the inimitable Albert Huffstickler. I can't believe I've never featured this poem before but, well, there you go.

Hope enters shyly,
swinging her small grey purse.

Albert Huffstickler

Finally, here's a poem by Issa, translated by Robert Hass, that I came across in the book Essential Haiku, while doing background work for this fall's session for lifelong learners on haiku. I wonder what they'd think of this one?

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
isn't art.

Issa
translated by Robert Hass

Hass, in his note to this translation, says the original is really "Writing nonsense" and he "turned it up a little." The story is that this was Issa's response to a request for a poem about "new snow" for a contest. As Hass observes, "The joke is that it is a perfectly correct haiku and uses the seasonal phrase 'new snow,' which symbolizes, of course, freshness and purity."



best,
Don

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Tom Waits and Jack Gilbert: A Song and a Poem

Tom Waits

One song, one poem:

This popped up on the ipod on the way to work and, as it always does after I hear it, has been haunting me all week. No candidate for Issa's Sunday Service, still I thought it well worth posting the haunting "What's He Building in There," with the clichéd hope that I'd get rid of it that way.

It's all yours. Good luck passing it on ...

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And here's a poem found last week on the Writer's Almanac site well worth passing on, from Jack Gilbert's excellent collection, Refusing Heaven:


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert

dragonfly--
flying two feet
then two feet more

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

What Keeps Mankind Alive: Issa's Sunday Service, #32

This week's Issa's Sunday Service features two repeat offenders: Tom Waits (as musician) performing the work of Bertolt Brecht (as inspiration), in this case "What Keeps Mankind Alive," a devastating little ditty if ever there was one. Monday, December 7th is the birthday of Mr. Waits, hence this week's selection. The song comes from The Threepenny Opera, with lyrics by Brecht and music by Kurt Weill. Here's the words:

What Keeps Mankind Alive

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Happy birthday, Mr. Waits. And, as a little present, here is ol' Uncle Bill, of Naked Lunch fame, to give his rendition of same:

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

This week's feature poem comes from issue #48, a broadside entitled Tibetan Gun Flower by the poet Charlie Mehrhoff. Back in August, I read one of the poems from this broadside, "springtime in a city park,"(page down a bit to see) at the Six Gallery Press reading. Recently, I posted another, entitled "fact:", at the daily Twitter feed (which cross-posts to Facebook). For those of you who don't lean in those directions, here it is:

fact:

to think that god had to become me
in order to throw his cigarette out the window,
write these words.

Charlie Mehrhoff

And here's another from that same broadside, previously unposted:

leaf, green leaf
her shadow
upon the silence of an empty road
that is poetry.

Charlie Mehrhoff

And, of course, the last word goes to the master:

a wood fire--
her shadow in the window
pulling thread

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Home I'll Never Be: Issa's Sunday Service, #26

This week was the anniversary of Jack Kerouac's death so for today's Issa's Sunday Service here is Tom Waits performing "Home I'll Never Be." The words are supposedly by Kerouac himself; I haven't been able to verify that except to say that it is everywhere on the net. If anyone knows the history of this particular piece, I'd appreciate it and will share it with readers. Meanwhile, enjoy the Waits performance.

In addition, here's the band Low Anthem performing "Home I'll Never Be," noting that it was recorded by Kerouac and comes from On The Road. Still, any further details would be appreciated.






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

This week's feature poems closed out Lilliput Review issue #39, way back in 1992. Hope something grabs you here.

Circle

we move in time with the wind's hands
swaying the greendesire ashleaf branches
the way our two bodies sway moonmaked
with the breeze rhythm learned
from watching the wind seduce the ash

christien gholson

Night in Akumal, Mexico

The sky has pulled its shade
down to the sea that now
caresses the shore like a
secret lover softly sighing
like a lullaby to which the
coconut trees sway a gentle
hula crickets sing their songs
to the stars and the hidden
insects dance about my porch
light like a coven it is quiet
now more quiet than a dream
more tranquil than nothing at all

Cheryl Townsend

1992

My feet aren't working.
The clock is dead.
There's a new world coming:
beauty's headlights
blind us
from a distance.

Bart Solarcyzk

evening cicada--
a last loud song
to autumn

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Muddy Waters and Kurt Weill

You know you may have lived a good life when there is room for Muddy Waters (born 4/4/1913) and Kurt Weill (died 4/3/1950). I have been very fortunate, indeed.

Muddy, born McKinley Morganfield, has been a part of my musical experience for over 40 years, discovered in high school, along with Willie Dixon, while studying the record sleeves of, among others, the Rolling Stones. Muddy was the key that opened the door; with Muddy came Willie, and James Cotton, Buddy Guy, Otis Spann, Jimmie Rogers, Pinetop Perkins, Lafayette Leake, Little Walter and back, back to Lightnin' Hopkins and Robert Johnson, and Son House.

It's safe to say that the world would have been a bleaker, more hostile place for me, without these amazing musicians who could touch the soul with a single, aching, sustained note.

Kurt Weill came later, though Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" had captured the popular imagination early on. I'm sure that I was really first captivated with his music via Judy Collins' recording of "Pirate Jenny" on her seminal In My Life album. His collaborations with Bertolt Brecht are the stuff of legend and certainly what catapulted him into the public eye. The music, however, sustains those lyrics and has been hugely influential, even with someone as seemingly removed as the composer Tom Waits. There have been anthologies of popular interpretations of Weill's music over the years, which can give someone without a classical background an easy way in (it did me). I highly recommend both collections.

So, on this musical Friday, first here's Muddy, with "Crawlin' King Snake" followed by audio of the classic "Got My Mojo Workin':"












Here are three songs by Weill/Brecht sung by Lotte Lenya from a 1962 (or 1958 - I found conflicting dates) episode of the television series "Monitor" filmed by Ken Russell, followed by the scathing contemporary interpretation of "What Keeps Man Alive" by Tom Waits:

making a duet
with my flute...
cry of a deer

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don