December 28, 2012

“The Resurrection of Form in Poetry” by David JamesPosted by Rattle

David James

THE RESURRECTION OF FORM IN POETRY

For 30 years, I’ve been a free verse writer. I was free to use any words in any pattern, flaunting the page without a thought of rhyme scheme, unhindered by syllable counting. Formal poetry was defined as that work from the past, by the Romantics, by Shakespeare and Chaucer, by poets before the printing press. Of course, I dabbled with forms here and there, merely as exercises, writing a ghazal, sestina, villanelle, sonnet, pantoum. I wrote in these forms so when some wag confronted me with one of them, I could say, “Oh, sure, I’ve written that.”

As I get older, however, I am being drawn to form and meter. And as I write more rhyming verse, using enjambment and mosaic rhyme patterns to mute the obviousness of sound, I have come to the conclusion that we have fallen down on the job. Contemporary poets have done little, if anything, to further the innovative use of end rhyme in literature.

Looking at the major forms of rhyming poetry, it’s obvious that no new forms have surfaced in over a century. The ghazal, a Persian form with couplets, is over 1000 years old. One of the most complex French forms, the sestina, originated in the 12th century with Arnaut Daniel. The Italian sonnet’s origin, a precursor to the English sonnet, dates back to the mid-1200’s, popularized by Petrarch (1304-1374). The French villanelle, our song-like refrain form, was standardized by the late 1500’s by Jean Passerat. The haiku first appeared in the 16th century. The most recent form, the pantoum, a Malaysian invention also containing repeating lines, became popular in Europe in the 1800’s. In the last 150 years, several generations of poets have turned their backs to formal verse, at least with regard to inventing innovative new forms for others to emulate.

As a lifelong free verse writer, I am intrigued when I venture into rhyming poetry. First, writing formal poetry alters my perceptions of the world. The rhymes, line requirements, and syllable restrictions change what I write and how I write in surprising ways. The restrictions send me into uncharted imaginative waters. My poems approach the material from a different vantage point, and I consistently end up saying what I never would have said if I was writing in free verse. The novelty and imaginative gyrations are both worth the attempts. The late great Richard Hugo voiced his appreciation for formal verse, particularly in overcoming writer’s block: “When you concentrate on the ‘rules of the game’ being played on the page, the real problem, blockage of the imagination, often goes away simply by virtue of being ignored. That’s why I write more formal poems when I go dry.”

Secondly, I have this longing to create my own forms, forms that thrive in today’s language and sensibilities. Personally, I find the age-old forms too restrictive and constraining. The sonnet and villanelle, though honorable, seem outdated for the world of the internet and global warming. Our challenge is to imagine the forms that speak to today’s culture and modern times.

So this is the gauntlet thrown down at the feet of poets: to create the contemporary forms of rhyming poetry that will outlive them. What forms will young poets be cutting their teeth on 150 years from now? What are the new types of formal poems for the 21st century? What legacy of form will this generation leave to the future, if any?

To get the movement started, I’ll provide two new examples of 21st century formal poetry. My goal is to invent forms that 1) have a certain flexibility, 2) do not emphasize the rhyming pattern, and 3) play off the strengths of free verse. The first is called a Karousel. It is a twenty line poem, four stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme pattern is the following: abcda ecdbe fdbcf gbcdg. The three inner lines (bcd) rotate in each stanza until they circle back to their original bcd form from stanza one. Though each stanza is enclosed in a rhyme, there are no metrical restrictions.

AS TIME GOES ON

As each year came and went,
the man noticed the tree
outside, the one in back,
how its bark shed
like fur, how it bent

and swayed in time to the wind.
He remembered how his dog tracked
in his last dirt before being found dead.
The man buried him, like the others, religiously.
With each year, something pinned

itself to the inside of his heart,
which he imagined was not red
anymore, but bruised and mildly
dry, an item to be stacked
on a shelf or a cart.

The years began to rain down,
one suddenly became three.
The man looked up into the black
sky. And then a strange thought in his head
fell, like the whole world, into the swollen ground.

My second example is called the Weave. It is less restrictive than a Karousel and can be written in two line stanzas, five line stanzas, or no separate stanzas at all. Its rhyme scheme follows this pattern: abcad befbg ehiej (and so on). The first and fourth lines rhyme, and the second line rhyme from the first stanza becomes the rhyme for the first and fourth lines in the following stanza. So, the second line from stanza one weaves into stanza two; the second line from stanza two weaves into stanza three. The following poem is an example of this form.

MILLIONS OF MINUTES

I’m drowning
in a pool of my own making
like a minnow at the bottom of the ocean.
It’s too dark to see. There’s a pounding
between my ears, peeling the flesh

off my brain, breaking
each good thought
into dust that dissolves in water.
Much of what we do could be called faking
it, going through the motions

so we won’t get caught.
But we learn too late, this one life,
these millions of minutes
can’t be bought
or sold, only used or wasted.

Whether or not these forms last or evolve is not important. Only time and fate will determine that. They are, however, forms that I have used and reused to make dozens of poems, new forms that have allowed me to see the world in a different light.

Even though rhyming poetry has fallen out of favor and practice with contemporary poets, that does not mean formal poetry must die a slow death. It is our right, perhaps our duty, to resurrect rhyme and meter and transform its use to capture the day. With a little imagination and attention, a new formal poetry can speak out in this terrible world.

—from Rattle e.4

__________

David James teaches for Oakland Community College. His most recent book is Trembling in Someone’s Palm from March Street Press. His other books include, A Heart Out of This World, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and three chapbooks, Do Not Give Dogs What Is Holy, I Dance Back, and I Will Peel This Mask Off. His one-act plays have been produced off-off-Broadway, as well as in Massachusetts and Michigan.

December 13, 2012

Interview with Bruce CohenPosted by Rattle

INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE COHEN Bruce Cohen's Disloyal Yo-Yo
ON
DISLOYAL YO-YO

Dream Horse Press
PO Box 2080
Aptos, Ca 95001-2080
ISBN-10: 0982115539
ISBN-13: 978-0982115534
80 pp., $17.95, Paper
www.dreamhorsepress.com

Note: The following interview was conducted by Timothy Green over email during August of 2009.

GREEN: When I came across Disloyal Yo-Yo, my first thought was, Can this really be Bruce Cohen’s first book? We’ve published several of your poems and an essay at Rattle, and your work always has the consistency and depth of someone well into a poetry career. Tell me about the book’s journey. Did you only recently start sending manuscripts around, or have you been shopping them for a while? What was the lag-time between first poem published, and first book published?

COHEN: That’s so nice of you to say that, Tim. I can’t, of course, speak for other poets, but I surmise that the notion of the “first book,” for many, may be a misnomer. If anyone were foolish enough, or had bad enough taste, to publish what would have, in actuality, been my first book, I don’t think you’d be tossing around words like “consistency” and “depth.” I was extremely lucky to have studied at The University of Arizona in the late ’70s with Steve Orlen and Jon Anderson and, although I did not entirely appreciate it at the time, I was surrounded, inspired and greatly influenced by some of the most talented poets of my generation, who happened to be friends and fellow classmates. To name-drop just a few, David Rivard, Michael Collier, Bill Olsen, Tony Hoagland and David Wojahn. It was clear to me, being realistic not humble, that I was simply not as talented as those folks, nor was I as ambitious. Furthermore, I was a little intimidated, and not at all attracted to the prospect of scratching and clawing to get a book out in the hopes of landing a university job in Podunk.

I recognized a few things about myself—I was in love with my girlfriend, soon to be wife, and wanted to raise a family. And I intuitively suspected that if my career were dependent upon poetry, my poetry might get stale and suffer. I didn’t want to publish a weak book. I liked money and comfort a little more than most poets seem to. And I worshipped poetry to the point that I didn’t really feel in a rush to publish. I knew I would compose poems for my entire life; it would be a constant in my world. That knowledge calmed me, left me less anxious. I felt that I could take my time, hone my craft, and I aspired to have every poem in my book published in magazines before I would send it off, which I did. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was so un-ambitious I originally thought if I could have just one poem accepted at a really good magazine, I would be satisfied. And I was, and am, honestly. The Ohio Review. Wayne Dodd was kind enough to have been receptive to my poems. And, as corny as it sounds, the fact that my poems were in the same magazine that had published James Wright was gold star. The acceptance note literally brought a tear to my eye.

The books now are gravy. Stuff occurred though, none the least of which was one son, then another, then another. I luckily landed well-paying gigs right out of graduate school as a director of academic support programs for athletes—first at The University of Arizona, then UC Berkeley, and, for the past twenty years, at The University of Connecticut. My anti-poetic career. My wife and I balanced our lives quite hectically—working different hours, getting the boys to all their sports’ events, music lessons, their brief and painful stints in Boy Scouts, SAT prep classes, the whole shebang. All the while, though sometimes sporadically, I kept writing and working on poems. To answer your question, in a nutshell, Disloyal Yo-Yo is comprised of poems that transpired over a ten-year period, and a good deal of the subject matter is what my pal Tony called “Domestic Surrealism.” Frankly, I had nothing else to write about as that was my day-to-day. Earlier poems are stashed somewhere. I always read a good deal of poetry and kept up with the new voices, and I came to the point where I said to myself—not egocentric mind you—that a good number of the first books that I was reading seemed no better than my stuff.

Only a couple of years ago did I start really thinking about sending my manuscripts out, so I read up on the contemporary process and thought, Jeez, it’s a lottery now! My best hope, I thought, was poetry-nepotism. I had good connections, but unfortunately my friends are honorable and ethical. I wonder where they went wrong? I was horrified that poets had to pay money for even a chance. It seemed to prey on the weak. What a scam, I thought—we helpless, meek poets were being victimized by The Man. Frankly, I felt a little deflated. I assumed my work would not stand out and my chances were non-existent. Nevertheless, I submitted to a few of the big contests without acceptance, although I think I was like a semi-finalist or finalist in some. I assumed they told many people that they were, just teasing-carrots to entice poets enough to keep them sending in their dough. So I said the hell with it and began concentrating on writing more intensely. The boys got older, driving themselves to games and such, so I started submitting poems, publishing in the magazines, and I eventually applied for a grant and was fortunate enough to get one. So I decided I’d put together a couple of manuscripts and be business-like about it. I took a chunk of the grant money and sent two manuscripts out to about fifteen places. I sort of forgot about them and all of a sudden, within the same week, I think, I got lucky, and both manuscripts were accepted. Voila.

GREEN: It’s great that you can keep poetry in perspective—few seem to do that, at least overtly. I’ve always felt that the writing is what matters, having that level of engagement with your own experience, and that everything else that may or may not come with it is incidental. So let’s talk about the writing process. Most of the poems in the book seem to start with a premise—exact life-time, the deli line of the dead, etc.—and then you let your imagination run with it. You might say the poems themselves are the disloyal yo-yos—once you let them go, we as readers have no idea whether they’ll come back to where they started, of if they’ll fly off to someplace new. Freedom and surprise, not as subjects, but as aesthetics, seem central. Is that what your writing process is like? Do you ever know where you’re going before you start to write, or is it always a surprise?

COHEN: Clever-clever, Tim—I never thought of the poems being disloyal yo-yos, but you are probably right. I like that notion, yes. If I recognize, or even get a whiff of, where the poem is going while I’m writing I stop writing or take a side street, walk backwards, hail a cab, something different. I’m constantly bored with myself, like most people I guess, (maybe that’s why we write poems and have hobbies) so why on earth would anyone wish to write what he already knows? If you know the outcome, why bother. Watching reruns of Law & Order is the exception however. Most of us, it seems, are not all that sharp—language is infinitely smarter, wiser, and funnier, than we. I’ve learned to trust it, see where it takes me. If I’m not writing out of language, I follow a situation that bangs my funny bone; it hurts badly, but I laugh, and likewise, follow those impulses. I’m as surprised by the direction of my poems as the reader must be. I hardly know what I’m doing till its over. I rarely have a clue.

That is applicable to most things in my life. I find the type of art that I enjoy most, whether it’s music, painting, cuisine, poetry, whatever, is surprising, mysterious, familiar but unfamiliar, posing questions, euphonious, shocking to the senses. I like to be simultaneously startled and comforted. I guess I am in a constant state of confusion and bewilderment and I’d rather not know what I think until I see how things string out, then, I want it all to have seemed inevitable. I guess I trust my sub-conscious, my intuition, “Leaping” as Bly suggests. In life I am afraid and often paralyzed, in poems I am fearless because nothing really is at stake at the moment of composition. I can throw poems out on their ears and try again. Nobody is watching me; it’s a secret murder. I am constantly struggling to figure out my poems during composition, to recognize truths and rhetorical patterns as I go along, unravel pleasing musical and intellectual puzzles that reveal themselves to me if I’m patient and quiet. For many years, because of long work-hours and young kids—we played zone—I wrote with one foot against the door which made my poems not fully realized, rushed out of necessity. I have a stack of unfinished poems. Now that I have a little more time, as I said, as soon as I can see around the next corner of a poem I go in a different direction, but not arbitrarily though, just another choice that seems to make sense at the moment. I don’t care how long a poem sits, even if it pesters and nags me.

For poetry, I live on my own time. If the poem wants to get worked on, seduce me, tell me something I don’t already know. Force me to work on you. It’s my job to listen, which I take seriously, but the poem has to meet me half-way. Perhaps that’s why end-rhyme drifted so far out of fashion. The sound of each word restricts, limits, your word choice and ultimately handcuffs your imagination. Then again, if you listen carefully, all words rhyme, so I don’t stress much about music although I love, love, a line with an abundance of accents, muscular lines, and I like imaginary handcuffs, handcuffs that I invent for myself in each poem, and I try like hell not to repeat my patterns, although I suppose we all do. The handcuffs are not kinky; I can still type with them on. I like to let my poems have their own lives; I like my poems to be sixteen-year-old inquisitive kids with a new driver’s license. Not reckless, just a little wild, a little Marlon Brando in his youth, but not stupid. I hope I have given them the proper guidance; I hope I raised them right, but ultimately they have to make it in the world on their own. Emily said something wonderful in a poem about that but I can’t remember what it is right now. Maybe I’ll wake up at 2 a.m., remember, and not write it down, which is one of my best poetic techniques. I don’t like to remember too precisely; I find it restricting. Life is surprising, shouldn’t art be? I am in constant wonder. I was taught to reinvent poetry every time I sat down to write. This is an intimidating concept for many writers; who wants that responsibility? Who is so brilliant to invent an art form? I know it’s impossible, but I find it extremely liberating. I have my own personal rules of course, but they change from poem to poem, and I make an effort to engage in linguistic and imagistic venues that are unfamiliar to me, to fracture my own rules, even within the same poem. I like to find new, cool moves in others’ poems and try to incorporate them into my own (I probably shouldn’t admit this).

When I was a kid, I learned basketball moves from Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. After a game I’d go out to the court and fantasize that I was “The Pearl” and imitate his signature spin move. Once I mastered his moves, I’d throw in my own little wrinkle, and the personal challenge for me would be to make my new move not seem at all like Earl’s. Earl in clever disguise. There are few truly original artists, no? Maybe none. Although everything I just said is truthful, it is also a lie. Does that answer your question Tim?

GREEN: Ha, yes, in about five different ways! So given this, that wild teenager behind the wheel, how do you put a coherent book together? Of all the poems you felt were good enough to be in the book, what percentage fit? How big is the B-side? And once you have that body of work that feels like a book, how do you go about ordering it? I noticed that “Domestic Surrealism II” precedes just plain “Domestic Surrealism.” What’s the reason to that rhyme?

COHEN: Oh, nice catch! I’m really bad at math, counting in particular, and thought nobody would read the book closely enough to notice. Actually, there was a point that I wrote a whole series of Domestic Surrealism poems, most of which I had to junk. The survivors, for whatever reasons, kept their original titles so when it was time to put the manuscript together I was concerned with the poems’ content, not the titles. I thought it interesting, as well, in a small way, to emphasize that the order that poems are written is not necessarily the proper order that they should appear in a book. I like books that have varied styles, which seem to have their own logic. I like the themes of individual poems to sort of play off one another; I like poems to be reactions to previous poems in manuscripts. I like the poems to snowball so that the book feels as though it has more substance and inertia than any of the individual poems. I’m not saying I accomplished this, but that’s, at least, what I was striving for. I like record albums that have no pauses between songs. Ultimately, my favorite poems are poems that seem to be born out of necessity and some form of obsession, poems that seem as though they had to be written, that spill over into something that’s life affirming, life altering, or life-repair, ideas and language that can no longer be contained in its human perception-form.

I also like loads of personality in voice, a normal human being talking to me. The poems in this collection, in my mind, are thematically connected in that way and in voice. Many are of the domestic variety, the day-to-day with raising my family, death of parents, nostalgic memories, swimming in their mildly surrealistic pools. I threw out a lot of poems that seemed to repeat and diminish strategies. I have many stalled poems, poems that run away from home and never call. I write many poems that simply never amount to much, are not pleasing to my aesthetic. So, the B-side takes up the lion’s share of my poetry universe.

As corny as it may sound, the poems that I ultimately selected for Disloyal Yo-Yo were poems that had meaning to me. I didn’t feel that this book could endure the same whimsy as some of my more recent stuff. In some ways, I think of this book as being somewhat flat, speaking directly. Order…that’s a tricky question…I ordered the poems the same way I write: intuitively. But because the book was composed over a number of years I was graced with a variety of styles, within my own limitations of course, and I love books whose poems seem varied but from the same voice. They were poems, I guess, that I wanted to have an attachment to, that were attached to me, and were personal without being exclusionary. As much as I can muster, I think of the book as being sincere, heartfelt.

GREEN: Well I think you succeeded on all those goals—if “imaginative” is the first adjective that comes to mind, then “honest” is certainly the second…the domesticity of “Domestic Surrealism” —there’s a sense that your true psychological home is within these poems. Do you ever feel naked, now that the book is out in the world? It’s one thing to confess to facts about your personal history, but it’s another thing altogether to expose the inner-workings of your own mind. I’m thinking in particular about the first poem in the book, “Sober Trees,” which ends with a revelation about the emptiness that fills half a life. Do you ever worry that family, friends, co-workers in your “anti-poetic career,” will read the book and learn a little too much?

COHEN: Yes, on all accounts. When I was younger I was quite worried that family, friends, drinking buddies, anti-poetry pals, would get to know more than I wanted to share, or think something strange about me. I didn’t know how the polar aspects of my life would fit together. It took time; the components had to come together, like a brash wine. Many of my “athletic” compatriots didn’t even know I wrote poetry until the book came out. Naturally some teased me in a semi-good-natured way. I didn’t want to mix my worlds; outer space DNA doesn’t inbreed well with human blood…many movies attest to that fact.

But now that I’m older, I guess I simply don’t care. I am who I am, comfortable in my cross-breeding alien skin. My real friends accept me for my inconsistencies, contradictions, complexities and flaws. Plus, my wife says my friends from the other world simply scratch their heads ’cause they don’t read poems and won’t spend the time to figure them out anyway…and, they’re probably too embarrassed to admit their ignorance of art or laziness. Some were kind enough to come to my first reading, bought the book and invented a compliment about one or two of the poems. I appreciated that. I guess I’m at the point in my life that I have no qualms about being myself and I hope my new poems benefit from that.

GREEN: I like that metaphor; poetry really is its own planet. Or maybe a little moon falling forever around the regular world. What do you think poetry’s place should be? What’s its purpose? You seem very grounded as a poet, happy to have it as just one aspect of a broader life. Do you feel content with our current cultural cosmology? I guess what I really want to know is, do you think your athletic friends’ disinterest in poetry is equivalent to a poet’s disinterested in, say, football? Is there any difference?

COHEN: I’m probably talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but I think poetry is elite and commonplace; most people don’t read contemporary poetry and certainly most people don’t spend the amount of intense time trying to compose it in a serious way, but if you stopped almost anyone on the street, I bet virtually everyone, at some time or another, has written a poem and certainly has read a poem. I’m a blue collar type of poet, an ordinary, regular American guy, who happens to have read a great deal of literature simply because I like it, in the same way I enjoy a number of things.

Even though I probably could, I find it pretentious and annoying to make esoteric literary allusions in poems, so I don’t. (Yeah, I get it; you’re smart and well read.) I like accessible poems, though some might argue that some of mine are not. I’m not a footnote type of guy and I’m sort of lazy and don’t want to look stuff up. Now which Greek God was that? What was his super power? But my approach to writing is not lazy; it’s blue collar, working man. I write something every day whether I feel like it or not and put my time in. I go to work sick. I’m rarely inspired and I have no patience for waiting for some sort of Muse. In fact, I don’t think I have a Muse, I just try to talk to people in my poems who I know and want to talk to. My father got up at five every morning, went to work and never complained. I try to do that—especially with my poetry. Lunch pail stuff.

Many of the “athletic” people whom I’ve been friends with for many years are not what you might think. Many are extremely thoughtful, well-read, interesting people, open to ideas. And they work hard and laugh off failure. What I learned from them is you recruit 20 players and, if you’re lucky, you get one who is good. They move on. I have no qualms about writing twenty poems to get one decent one. It’s a sort of rain off a duck’s back approach. I’m rarely wedded to any one particular poem. If it doesn’t work out; I write another. People involved in sports still have to fracture the myth that they are only interested in physical prowess and intellectualism is not part of their lives. Athletes, by and large, respect hard work and accomplishment, in any realm. I guess I don’t see them as that different from poets I know and respect…so I guess I would respectfully disagree: I don’t think as a rule of thumb, that poets are disinterested in football or vice versa. Everyone seems different, right? After a billion gene possibilities at this point of Man’s existence, we’re all mutts anyway.

But getting back on track, I do think on some level that poems should be accessible to anyone willing to read carefully. An alien could not come to earth and watch a football game and appreciate all the idiosyncrasies and nuances or even the rules of the game, without instruction. Poetry is similar I think, except, the average person does have the linguistic skill to appreciate a poem with no training, if the poet does a good job. Why do people love Frost so much? Plain talk? There’s something to be said about the simple and direct.

There are moments in my life that something happens and a line from a poem I love pops into my brain and I have a life-insight due to that poem and conversely have a deeper understanding of the poem than I’d ever had. It’s as though I instinctively knew the poem was wonderful and I should remember it, but I didn’t know why or when I’d have to draw on it. Then it happens, and it is. I have no idea what poetry’s purpose is for anyone other than myself. It helps me digest the world so that it goes down easier. It’s comforting in that I know there are others out them like me; it makes me less lonely. It makes me recognize something I didn’t know I knew, or explains something that I sensed but never fully grasped.
And images. I love inventive images and the music of American diction. And surprises and life-insight. I like the way interesting people talk, people who are excited or resigned to something. I get bored easily so I enjoy folks who have lots of interests, lots of passion…I don’t find it inconsistent for someone to love the New York Football Giants and John Ashbery. In fact, those are the people I like best. That’s how my boys were raised and they seem fairly well grounded and normal. You can bring up any topic and they seem comfortable with the conversation; all things are simultaneously important and unimportant. In fact, didn’t the Ancient Greeks, (one son alluded to them as the Ancient Geeks) who were fairly smart guys, have to pass some type of intellectual test before qualifying for the Olympics? I think I remember reading that somewhere.

It’s a Zen thing, too, I think: all things being of equal value, having their place. As much as I love poetry and find it useful in my everyday life, I’m not sure it’s more important to me than the Giants winning the Super bowl and, clearly, I recognize that it’s not important to everyone. Should we be pedaling poetry door-to-door like religious zealots? Passing out pamphlets? Poetry helps me understand what it is I am and sports help me forget, abandon myself temporarily, as do other things: gardening, TV, etc. It’s a sort of ying and yang see-saw. If you think about the show Kung Fu, Grasshopper was quite spiritual, exploring the intricacies of the natural and human dimension, or lack thereof, with Master Po, unraveling the nature of the universe in prime time. But, when confronted with bad guys, who often were one dimensional (clue), and who demonstrated a single obsession, he would kick their ass, in perfect slow motion. Hence, you can be a tough guy and poet. I guess those type of poets are my favorites, except Rilke. I like Rilke but he wouldn’t survive in a street fight, unless Rodin had his back.

So I appreciate you saying I’m grounded. I have tried to keep things in balance, in perspective. I do the best I can at my job, raising my family, working on poems, given my own imperfections and flaws. As I said, my wife and I made some serious sacrifices to make sure the boys got to their games and music lessons, do/did well school—and did my poetry suffer, my production, as a result? Of course, but that’s who I am. And that suffering may have contributed to my development as a poet. Poetry is what I studied in college, what I have always done since I was a kid; it’s been a central passion in my life; it’s been a constant. When things are going badly in life it is a pal and mistress, when things are going well, it patiently waits on the sidelines, holding an umbrella for me, to ward off rain or the excessive sun. It has no demands and infinite demands on me. Although poetry is somewhat different, of course, from song lyrics, most everyone enjoys music, so can’t we say almost everyone loves poetry? One can almost always hear the radio blasting from passing cars in summer when the windows are rolled down. We all sing along in our cars or in front of the mirror in our private teenage rooms. And the molecules of the music evaporate into the air. So maybe poetry is a kind of artistic physics, and our cultural cosmology is that real poetry can neither be created nor destroyed. Wow! How did I get here?

GREEN: Well, that’s what I was trying to get at—I think there’s a tendency to overvalue contemporary poetry, in a way, simply because it’s under-appreciated in our culture. If I had to choose between poetry and recreational sports, I’d probably choose poetry, but it wouldn’t be an easy decision. They’re each important in entirely different ways, and I’d never thought of it in terms of yin/yan before, but that model fits. And strangely, it’s the action of sports that quiets the mind, and the inaction of poetry that disquiets.

Let’s take a little breather—tell us your five favorite poems, if you can. Not your own, but no restrictions, just the first five that come to mind. I see interviewers ask about favorite poets all the time, but I think it’s more interesting to be specific. Gives us something of digestible length to run and look up.

COHEN: Oh God, Tim, that is a wicked hard question…I love so many poems, and my favorite poems are not necessarily written by my favorite poets, but maybe they are… What do my choices say about who I am as a writer? I would say, Lowell, “Memories of West Street” and “Lepke,” two Larkin poems, “Reference Back” and “Talking in Bed,” “Musee De Beaux Art,” Auden of course, “Refusals,” Jon Anderson, and Weldon Kees, one of the Robinson poems, but I can’t remember which one…I’ll have to look it up.

GREEN: Well that’s why I asked it—three of the poems you mentioned I’ve never read. I’m going to run off to Google when we’re done and see if I can find them. There are so many great poems in the world, sometimes the best thing poets can share is simply suggested reading.

Okay, back to you. It seems this is the year you’ve cashed in on your patience—this fall, your second book, Swerve, is coming out from Black Lawrence Press, just six months or so after your first. In an email to me, you described Disloyal Yo-Yo as the “older and more civilized” book. So what does the uncivilized Bruce Cohen look like? How does Swerve swerve? Tell us a little about the book.

COHEN: I would like it documented, in this interview, that yesterday I was at the Mets’ game with two of my sons and we witnessed the first game-ending unassisted triple play since 1927!

I think in Disloyal Yo-Yo, mostly, I’m talking to myself, and if other people eavesdrop, so be it. In Swerve, the pace and voice and music are more frenetic, obsessive. I am talking to others, more publically, mostly. For lack of a better description, I think the poems are a little more zany, out there, anxious, unafraid. Stylistically, I was influenced by those poets who had a more quirky sensibility and a tone, who wrote with heavier accents and more in-your-face alliteration, internal rhymes and bluntness. Quirkier syntax. Not that I’m a very subtle writer, but I think I pushed that envelope a little and the poems are unabashedly brash and speedy. Not seeing, or caring to see, that which is in front of me, going faster than I probably should in poems—not in real life; in real life I’m a wicked slow driver, I swerve when a little girl runs into the road following her soccer ball or a couch falls off the pick-up in front of me after a tire blows out, but I keep going, because, in life, mostly that’s what we do. We close our eyes, hope for the best, and keep going. That’s what we have to do to make any sort of progress in small and large ways. We all know people who are frozen in a particular time due to some horrific catastrophe or life-altering event, and it’s sad. They live forever in that terrible moment. We pity them and secretly, or not so secretly, are glad it is not happening to us. Life gets thrown at you from every direction, meteorites hit the earth, and maybe the people who survive are the ones who dodge the flying objects, who are able to swerve. Those who are light on their toes without heavy suitcases.

And I want to be among them. I never wanted to be a helpless victim in art; I never wanted to be afraid to take risks in poems: I always aspired to say “the hardest thing.” Even though it’s possible, I never wanted my poems to sound like other people’s poems. I believe the poems in Swerve have a little more courage and gusto than Disloyal Yo-Yo, more confidence, a little more of myself. In life, I’m extremely responsible. In my newer poems, not so much. I hope that you never know what I will do or say. So you have to pay attention and hold onto your wallet or you may crash or find yourself alone on a deserted street with no way of getting home, no ID. You can’t even prove who you are, and you might have to start from scratch, re-invent the world, and would that be such a terrible thing? In art, of course not.

GREEN: Or football! Thanks, Bruce, this has been terrific.

—from Rattle e.7, Fall 2009

October 25, 2012

STORM CROP by Stacie LeathermanPosted by Rattle

Review by Anita Sullivan Storm Crop by Stacie Leatherman

STORM CROP
by Stacie Leatherman

BlazeVOX [books]
76 Inwood Place
Buffalo, NY 14209
ISBN: 978-1-60964-051-4
2011, 120 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

I admit it. I have a fixed idea of what a poem should do and be. It’s not the same fixed idea still held by many members of the largely non-poetry-reading public, who after 100 years of evidence to the contrary, will persist with the bewildered question, “Isn’t poetry supposed to rhyme?” It’s certainly not the same idea I held five years ago, much less six months. Nonetheless, over many years of relishing what I believe to be an enormous variety of poetic material, I–like many other poets and readers of poetry–have naturally developed a set of limits beyond which a thing simply doesn’t do what I expect poetry to do.

This is reasonable, of course–to have borders around your reading preferences, provided you water them now and then so they won’t petrify or ossify, and you can still chop your way through to the jungle outside. But to be a good reader, when and how am I allowed to be annoyed, puzzled, and just plain bored by a published grouping of words presented to me as “poems,” that, in the end, I am unable to muster any sustained attention for, even if I know the work represents a skilled and passionately realized version of a category of poetry fully robust in our time?

This is the dilemma that I face when I am confronted with what I understand to be “language poetry”–that is, poetry that offers words and word-groupings for their own sake, not so much for what they mean, but simply to let them have a go as beings at large in their own world. I am at a loss to know how to read this stuff.

In my own bewilderment, I hereby offer a brief chronicle of a recent journey through a collection of such poems by Stacie Leatherman, called Storm Crop.

* * *

The collection is arranged as an abecedarium, which means in this case that each poem’s title is simply a letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order–27 poems including an extra at the end. This would tend to suggest to the reader that the subject matter will be pretty wide open.

Sometimes “abecedarium” is called a poetic form, but I don’t think it is, because letters of the alphabet alone do not invite or cause a repeatable pattern complex enough to wrap itself around an entire poem. Leatherman herself, in an interview with Emprise Review, responds to the matter of the abecedarium by vacillating back and forth between how important form is to her work, and how much she feels the necessity to flout it. “Too much control can be death to a poem,” she says, and on the other hand, “Form has always been important to me.” She seems to regard the abecedarium as a “strict parameter” (i.e. poetic form) and thus chose it as a way to organize her poems. But she adds, “I didn’t do too much C is for that, L is for that, before it started to wander away.” I think she enjoyed keeping the letters as titles because they gave her freedom from form, and offered a lantern in the dark whenever poetic inspiration faltered. Not a bad way to operate at all.

And speaking of lanterns in the dark, the alphabet acted for me as a set of training wheels while I was floundering through the poems trying to figure out how they were meant to be read. In the end, I basically left the fickle alphabet behind, because it seemed to me that what emerged instead of a “form,” or even a coherent set of ideas, was a structure more like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, tending to coalesce around certain areas or fields. In this case, the two main force fields that I eventually felt my way into were the brain and the body.

All language poetry, by my understanding, is fundamentally word-oriented, and brain-oriented. In using the word “brain” I am deliberately calling up the split between “mind” and “body,” and I would place “brain” firmly with the physical–that is, the bodily realm. This kind of category talk invokes the three-way physical (body), emotional (heart), spiritual (soul, mind, imagination) model that has been around for centuries in a variety of religious and cultural contexts.

I receive Leatherman’s as primarily brain/body poems rather than mind/body poems. And this may be, for me, the rub. Since I am very much a mind and heart poet (I say that clinically, as in a category, not arrogantly, as in “I am a warm vibrant person and you are a cold intellectual fish”), it has been difficult for me to find a way into these poems at all, much less a charitable one. The same holds true for other poems or collections that compute for me as “language poetry.” Here, then, is my–what shall we say–my incomplete gloss of Storm Crop.

* * *

A – The first poem opens with (what turns out to be) a declaration of the brain and body theme: “the body’s metric/not the end but the anarchic, semantic crust….” The reader feels the immediate excitement of a journey that might include tantalizing literary allusions as well as some viscerally satisfying realism.

There is also, in this first poem, the suggestion of a game, a kind of treasure hunt. What are the rules? See if you can find, buried among the wooly fragments, a discrete thread to hold onto. In this case, the thread keeps re-appearing as the letter A itself, standing alone as if it were a character: “A for birds of paradise”; “A is for order. Paradox”; “A for the before that was never before.”

The ascetic, martinet reader is somewhat mollified. Perhaps the seemingly interchangeable sentence fragments that signal this to be language poetry will have a cumulative purpose after all.

B – Here the poet continues the alphabet game with a new device. “Dear B,” the poem begins. How charming! A letter to a letter. Reading further in this lineated poem, I found references to letter-ish matters, such as Braille, “unabridged edition.” And the word “letter” itself is repeated often enough to satisfy the neophyte treasure hunter. In addition, the body is featured as a kind of counter to the brain, so that the reader might begin to think back to the opening of the A poem and suspect “Oh, this collection is going to be a neat game, in which the alphabet is utilized in a dazzling variety of ways, and there is a battlecock and shuttledore between physical and mental….”

Feeling cautiously excited, I moved ahead to C, D, and E.

C – But alas, already the poem seems to regret signing a contract with the abecedarium, and begins to wiggle out of any further obligations to continue that game. Granted, there are a lot of C words poked into this poem, but they lack whimsy, imagination, any suggestion of an attempt to resonate with one another or anything else. They seem to be there simply out of a vague, residual duty to C-ness, with no need for either music or meaning.

D – The alphabet weakens even further. “Eventually D knocks, we want nothing to do with it,” says the poem in the 2nd long paragraph of a four-paragraph prose poem. The poem seems to sputter, making spasmodic feints with the letter as if the poet is trying to work herself up to a subject.

E – This poem is built out of questions which seem to emerge from a despondent lover questioning her value as a physical being. The body theme asserts itself once more. But the questions feel empty, lacking the heft of true anguish. Perhaps if there were a context around them, they would have a chance to growl and crawl and start generating that strange miasma that always seems to rise above a good poem….

At this point (deprived of my miasma) I felt myself descending into a slough of despond, so I thought to change my attitude by changing my reading strategy. This kind of poetry seems to call for a “gang reading” approach–I mean, surely the devotees of the genre must have developed a skimming technique, a way of ingesting all the verbiage that only peripherally involves the expectation of clarity and new insight. I tried a kind of Scrooge McDuck approach–if you remember the Disney comic book character who used to enjoy his swimming pool full of money: “First I dive around in it like a porpoise; then I burrow through it like a gopher; then I toss it up and let it fall onto my head.”

“What’s the speech of sand?” says the F poem, and “Precision, my dear, isn’t everything,” admonishes G.

Bolstered by these insights, I just jumped into the pool, letting the words flow over me, hoping they would sink into nooks and crannies of brain, heart, and spirit they might not usually sink into. Above all, by this time, I wanted to feel something.

I found many wonderful lines, such as “I joyous,” unexpectedly in the middle of the letter J poem. In the L poem I got a sniff of surrealism, and wanted more. The R poem was musical in its religious imagery and repetitions, and probably would qualify as my favorite in the collection.

But. Nevertheless. “What is it, exactly, I missed,” says the Z poem (without a question mark), and I would say the same. For despite my efforts I came away from this collection feeling my insides all cluttered with words, as happens with the flash-flash images during the preview segment of the contemporary movie-theatre experience. I could not get away from my habitual need for some kind of moving-towards, a charging up, a clearing of paths; instead the whole thing felt static, confused, and in some way disingenuous. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” said the Little Prince, and I agree this might well be so. But in a good poem what is essential is urgently present somewhere, or it is not. Both possibilities do exist. I simply could not, in this collection, read my way into a sufficient vitality to keep my imagination alive.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

October 1, 2012

On Translating Nikos Gatsos’ Amorgos by Anita SullivanPosted by Rattle

Anita Sullivan

ON TRANSLATING NIKOS GATSOS’ AMORGOS

I want to tell you about a Greek poem I once spent an entire year translating, even though it’s only eight pages long if scrunched into the generic single-spaced, 11-point online screed that passes for elegant reading nowadays.

The booklet I translated from was 35 pages, double-spaced, in a lovely italic font, and thus would qualify as “free-range” by allowing enough pacing room for each of the many wild creatures enclosed therein.

Legend has it that Nikos Gatsos wrote “Amorgos” during a single night in 1943, when he was 33 and World War II was tearing his country apart. The poem is divided into six sections, each one composed in a totally different style, but each part achingly lyrical and stunning in the force and uncanny aptness of its images. I have no idea why this poem remains so little known outside of Greece.

It may find its way to a wider audience now, because of the recent popularity of “language poetry,” which it resembles but most certainly is not. “Amorgos” has been called “a surrealist epic,” and if you accept this (which I do), you are taking on the idea that the work must be downright nuclear in its fission capacities. That is, in order to fit the entire Story of Greece into a poem slightly shorter than Eliot’s Four Quartets without directly mentioning Odysseus, Helen, Troy, the Argonauts, or any of the Olympian gods, is an awesome feat. The poem imbricates–a word I learned recently–which means it is constructed like overlapping roof tiles. You can’t stop reading, not because there is a plot that keeps you hanging, but because you are always sliding down to the next little section of roof.

For me, “Amorgos” feels like a kind of cross between Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” I was driven to translate the entire poem because at a very vulnerable time in my life, someone in a dark coffee house passed me a fragment from the end of Part I:

And so she sleeps, my tender love, naked among cherry blossoms,
a girl unwithering as an almond branch,
with her head leaning on the crook of her arm, and her other hand
resting upon her golden coin,
upon its comforting warmth, while slowly and quietly like a thief
from the window of spring, enters the Morning Star that shall waken her!

Notice! Notice! Notice! The exclamation point so unashamedly placed at the end. A quick glance through the rest of the poem shows how rare, how deliberate was this placement, like setting a stone into a mosaic. A poet earns trust by such delicate attention to the doorways through which love may pass unemcumbered.

The golden coin, the almond branch, the thief, the Morning Star–all these are essential poetic material in Greek tradition, but you don’t have to know that to feel yourself swimming in what could become “formula” if carelessly arranged. As soon as I learned enough Greek to read this fragment in the original, I sought out the rest. At the time I was unable to find an English translation of the entire poem*, so I sat with my dictionary and began to generate a picture puzzle by translating word, after word. This is a foolish and desperate way to go about such a task, but sometimes it’s the only way possible.

My original translation has disappeared, as if it were eaten by the wild and the holy. This is as it should be. But later, I found that several others had fallen in love with the poem and like me, had sought to transfer it into English with some of its original power intact.

In reverse, can you imagine translating Gerard Manley Hopkins into anything else? Or Ginsberg’s “Howl” for that matter? Such poems are part charm, part riddle–the meaning is so embedded in the language itself that your translating criterion becomes something totally insane, like: I want the readers of this poem in English to end up lying on the ground in the exact same position as the original Greek readers must have been flung after they read the poem for the first time in 1943.

Coming cold, from another culture, to a lyric poem that makes syntactic sense (that is, it’s mostly constructed in complete sentences), but whose vocabulary of icons is meant to set up an entire super-structure of ideas made from the stuff of shared myth–you have to be very methodical and beat back your tendency to “poeticize.” Only thus will the roof-tiles begin to overlap on your page, and then–even more miraculously–you will start to feel entire sub-sections coalescing into larger tiles, and the whole poem will reveal itself as an ancient Greek Chorus rising in enormous shadows from where it has been long flattened across the stones. The chorus has something to say that builds in increments. Here is one increment, from Part 2:

And may your heart not yield
May your tears not fall on this implacable earth
As once on the icy wastes rolled the tear of a penguin.

Two important images here, water and eyes, will keep returning. For example, in the third stanza of Part 3:

In the courtyard of the embittered the eye has run dry
The brain has turned to ice and the heart petrified

In the short Part 5 he again combines wet with dry: “…amid sighs, tears, hunger, lamentations, and the ashes of underground wells.”

Thus the poem builds, as does Nature herself, accreting material by way of a spiral motion.

With what might seem an almost draconian economy, almost every “thing” the poet mentions comes back around again, filtered, enriched and purified by intercourse with other “things” being similarly whirled. In the opening lines, which immediately evoke the voyage of Odysseus, and which I believe reflect the overcharged imagination of the young poet heading into his all-night writing binge, he quickly veers away from what might have turned into a deliberately crafted parody or extended metaphor on this theme. And by that veering, he is able to introduce a variety of images that ring out over and over throughout the rest of the poem:

With their country tangled up in their sails, and their oars hanging
in the wind
The shipwrecked sailors slept like stunned dead beasts amid sheets
of sponges
But the eyes of the seaweed are twisted towards the sea
Hoping the south wind will bring them back to life again
with newly-dyed sails
For one lost elephant is always worth more than the trembling breasts
of a girl
May the roofs of the deserted mountain chapels light up
with desire for the evening star
May birds come in waves to the masts of the lemon trees
With a new way of walking, a steady white breathing
Only then shall come the small-winded bodies of swans
who have been waiting immaculate, motionless and tender
Amid the steam-rollers of commerce and the cyclones of market-gardens
When the eyes of the women turned to coal and the hearts of the
chestnut-sellers were broken
When the harvest was stopped and the hopes of crickets began.

Gatsos is dealing from a dear, cherished and largely traditional core-collection of images: the sea, tender young love, eyes, birds, fruit trees, winds and stars by name and location–all remnants of a centuries-old horticulturally-based, and seagoing village society. The images are both specific to Greece and universal (some of one, some of the other), and he doles them out with such finesse that there is always time to forget one before it comes around again. This is essential. In Part 4, for example, the water that has been locked up in ice and in dryness, suddenly begins to flow:

Wake, murmuring water, from the root of the pine tree to find the eyes of sparrows and to revive them by watering the earth with the fragrance of basil and the whistling of lizards.

If there is a central idea emerging from the poem, it would be “persist, do not give up in the face of this current misery and dreadfulness.” Why? Because…

Somewhere an immortal rock exists where a human angel once passing by, inscribed his name and a song as yet unknown by anyone…

When this stone is found again, and the song bursts out, then the world will change:

…the snows will melt on the mountains, the wind will sing like a bird, the swallows will come to life, the osiers will quiver, and men with cold eyes and pale faces, hearing the bells in the cracked belfries ringing by themselves, will find holiday caps to wear and gay-colored ribbons to tie on their shoes. For then no one will ever joke again, the blood of brooks will overflow…and the timid girls will come slowly and quietly to cast their last garments into the flames and to dance about them nakedly…

Gatsos might have neatly wrapped the poem up at the end of Part 4: “but I keep in my fingers the music for a better day.”

Or, with Part 5, a short rant on the quixotic nature of humans.

But instead, he closes with a love poem to Poetry whom he is, in real life, about to abandon. It is an extraordinarily tender and brave lament, from a gifted bridegroom who makes the choice to renounce the One he loves best. “Poems come easily to me. It is the making of a poetry that is difficult. The telling of the truths,” he said later, after this poem had become famous in Greece.

“Amorgos” was a rapid journey through a treacherous swamp by someone with an uncanny and totally flawless gift for stepping on the few solid stones hidden beneath the surface so as never to drown in the mud. What Gatsos feared, I believe, is not that he would start missing stones, but that the swamp would gradually turn into a shallow pool of pebbles and he wouldn’t even notice. This would be bad for him, but also bad for Poetry itself. So, to avoid the curse of his own potential glibness, this young man chose for the rest of his life to restrict his word skills to translating other poets, and writing song lyrics**. To me this seems a tragic act, fully worthy of his mythical heritage.

With Part 6, the final section of ‘Amorgos,’ he sings an achingly beautiful farewell to Poetry:

Year after year I wrestled with ink and mallet, my tormented heart
With gold and fire to make you an embroidery
The hyacinth of an orange tree
A flowering quince to console you
I who once touched you with the eyes of the Pleiades
And embraced you with the mane of the moon, and we danced together
In the summer meadows
On the stubble fields, and we ate together the cut clover
Dark, vast wild one with all those pebbles around your neck, all those
Tiny colored stones in your hair

__________

*The excerpts from “Amorgos” are my own translations, from the 1987 edition, published by Ikaros, Athens. I have been guided by the translations of Sally Purcell: from her 1980 version, posthumously published in 2004 as a 64-page book by Anvil Press Poetry, London; and of Diana Gilliland Wright, copyright October 2007, www.nauplion.net. Other translations are available, for example from Kimon Friar and Marjorie Chambers, and I have another one or two floating around as anonymous xeroxes. The more the better, is what I say.

** This is in no way meant to imply that song lyrics can never be “as good as real poetry,” although they usually are not. What I mean here is that Gatsos himself apparently saw a difference between being a words-only poet, and being a poet who wrote his words to be set to music, and he deliberately chose to maintain that distinction in his life work. An excellent book of his song lyrics in Greek comes from Ikaros, Athens, 1995 (third edition), and the title, which is lineated like a small poem, translates “blow breeze, blow me/ but don’t let up until. . .”

The final song in this posthumously-published collection is a segment of a cycle entitled “Mani Vespers,” that the publisher indicates in an epilogue was a large, many-part work the poet had been occupied with for years. The book was delayed in publication because Gatsos wished to have the cycle included in its entirety, but apparently died before he was able to finish it. Is it possible that he was working his way back into poetry through the medium of his beloved songs?

__________

Anita Sullivan is and essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems, and writes regularly for the Weekly Hubris. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

August 19, 2012

“Blue Hand” by Virginia SlachmanPosted by Rattle

Virginia Slachman

BLUE HAND

The artist must search deeply into his own soul, develop and
tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not
remain a glove without a hand.
—Wassily Kandinsky

Today at the glass factory I fell in love with a blue-veined reticulated glass

hand. Heavy, cold and translucent, it is not a hand held out in love

or forgiveness. This hand is simply a hand, simply itself

devoid of intention. I admire most, beyond its heft and cool

presence, its detachment. I am much too fond

of detachment. As was Kant; his devotion to disinterest

spawns beauty like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. Across the way

men in overalls dismantle an old house—whining power tools

mix with wood’s hollow call. I should be reading

Lorca but instead I’m flipping through a book on ornament, page after page

of hand-wrought symmetry in gilt and finely wrought intricacies;

the knots, the flowers, the pendulous, hanging and spotted

pointillistic moments of pure color and form. Today I sent my daughter

a new pair of gloves—black, supple leather with a cashmere lining. I can

still feel the weight and smooth elegance of that blue hand, cold

as my mother’s the day she died. I wasn’t with her though I recall the March

day. I make myself picture touching her hands, cool and a little

blue, the veins full of motionless tide that just seconds before

had rocked to a halt after the pump stilled. For Lorca, the darkness of death

is the light of the imagination. I’m not sorry to be devoid

of feeling. Its absence leaves the mind’s blue light

cool and composed, yet even it struggles against the infinite which is

without reason. There is nothing of use to say about our private

losses. The house across the way is now merely mounds of stacked

bricks—clay and straw molded by men gone to dust long before the cool

calculation of economy judged it

extraneous. The book’s heft contains millennia we’ve strived

against disorder, constructing geometry’s repeatable patterns—

squares the haven of protection, lines of predictable journeys

and a good end; countless lotus baptizing us over and over in pure

radiance. How we make whole the fragments of reason—a vase, a wall,

a stone relief … things that call to mind

what is lost. My talisman is the body’s enactments: a blue hand

standing in a pool of light. And my daughter’s—warm, thriving.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

__________

Virginia Slachman: “My poems are frustrating and bull-headed. This poem (I thought) was about art, about an eerie blue glass hand I saw and couldn’t get out of my mind. But of course it’s not about art. It’s about what terrifies us—love and loss.” (web)

June 2, 2012

“Knock on the Sky and Listen to the Sound: On Zen Buddhism and Poetry” by Dick AllenPosted by Rattle

Dick Allen

KNOCK ON THE SKY AND LISTEN TO THE SOUND:
ON ZEN BUDDHISM & POETRY

The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain
       To see what he could see

       To see what he could see,
       To see what he could see.

The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain
       Was all that he could see.

       Was all that he could see,
       Was all that he could see,
The other side of the mountain,
       Was all that he could see!
             —Author Unknown

I’m fourteen, just having crossed a sunlit meadow in upstate New York. Now, I’m climbing down a gully to the shallow Kayaderosseras Creek below.

I pause.

Not my feet, but everything else shifts—as if I’d been watching a slide show and someone had inserted a totally different slide than the ones I’d seen.

And I lose myself. Rather, I lose my individualistic Self.

No separate meadow. No gully. No Kayaderosseras Creek. No me. No distinctions between me and everything that a moment before was Other …

The slides abruptly shift again and I’m back. Me. Fourteen. Descending a mundane gully to a mundane creek with a Budweiser can floating in it. White pines lining the gully. A crow’s caw. Slap at a black fly trying to bite my arm.

It’s an experience had by most humans at one time or another.

The Numinous, or the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“fearful and fascinating mystery”) is the term coined by Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face
to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know
even as also I am known.
—1 Corinthians 13:12

In Buddhism, unlike in monotheistic religions, it’s not a glimpse or gaze but an immersion. There’s no glass, no other side. As Buddhists experience it, they at least for the brief period realize both Wholeness and Holiness, Yin and Yang simultaneously.

It’s the basic Buddhist and Eastern belief in Non-Dualism.

Literally millions and millions of poems seek to capture the unholdable experience of Mysticism. Some will compare it to the experience of “the Other,” but it’s not that. Buberians might say it’s the “I-Thou” experience, but it’s not that. William James would call it the core religious experience, as would Evelyn Underhill. Even at its most mundane, it’s the “runner’s high” when the runner enters a trance of homeostasis. Aspects of Mysticism provide the commonality shared by all religions, both East and West.

A first and primary characteristic of Zen Buddhist poetry is an assumption that (this is how Gerard Manley Hopkins would put it) “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” only in this case it’s not the Western Civilization monotheistic God but the Eastern and Buddhist way of using “God” to mean “All” or “holiness” or “Numinous” pervading everything, including what we blindly think of as our individual Selves as separate from other Selves or kinds of Selves.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

Whenever I think about the realization that it’s impossible, incredible, wondrous, unfathomable to be alive, and that no matter how hard I try I can’t hold this realization for very long, lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” come into my head:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count there are only you and I together.
But when I look up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you …

In his Notes to the poem, Eliot references a delusion experienced by exhausted Antarctic explorers. And most critics identify the presence of the third figure as Christ. For me, the lines evoke what Zen Buddhists would call the “True Self ” that’s always there but is also almost always unrecognized in our daily clouded lives.

Attempting to arrive at commonalities shared by Zen Buddhism and poetry influenced by Zen Buddhism, I’ve found these words: Wholeness or Holiness, Is-Ness, Mindfulness, Reasonlessness, Calmness, Presentness.

Buddhist or Buddhist-influenced or oriented poetry is the antithesis of Confessionalist Poetry, that I-stressing dominant poetic sensibility and form of the second half of the 20th Century which has continued into the first part of the 21st Century. At its best, Confessionalism illuminates the turmoils of the individual “I” as representative of other individual humans; at its worse it turns narcissistic and self-pitying, even into a kind of glorification of suffering and desire.

In our century, it’s important to note that the “I” used in Buddhist-oriented poems is not the Confessional “I,” but the “I” that’s more a persona, an “I” that stands for almost anyone.

I’m often tempted to say Mindfulness is Poetry and Poetry is Mindfulness. Still, that’s not quite true. Mindfulness—that quality of acute attention to the Now, to precisely and specifically to what one is seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, thinking, feeling right Now—is at once a technique, a purpose and a result of Poetry. It is contained within but not the main stress of types of poems such as narrative, dramatic and epic. It is, however, the main stress of lyric and meditative poetry, our century’s hugely dominant types.

The primary stress on Mindfulness in modern and contemporary poetry comes from Imagism, particularly as used by Ezra Pound and exemplified by his famous haiku-inspired poem, “In the Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

No ideas but in things.
—William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” has become equally important for modern and contemporary poetry. This tiny poem is actually a fragment from a longer poem and was given its title by others. The fragment states that “so much depends” upon a rain-water glazed wheelbarrow beside white chickens. When the conundrum the poem poses is answered or understood—that is, what is this “so much”?—the student’s face may break into a look of dawning revelation. Not a breakthrough into Satori, but close.

Satori. Sudden enlightenment and a state of consciousness attained by intuitive illumination representing the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism. Rhymes with Satori: backstory, centaury, clerestory, fish story, ghost story, John Dory, Noyori, Old Glory, outlawry, self-glory, short story, sob story, vainglory, war story.
—Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Everything depends on one’s ability to realize a thing for what it is, not to think about the red wheelbarrow, not to read the poem as symbolic, but just to see the thing itself. Ideally, if one can do this, she or he will be mindfully in the Present, desireless, at least momentarily free from suffering.

The main admonition given by almost all poets and poetry writing teachers in the last one hundred years: “Show, don’t tell.”

The entirety of Buddha’s Flower Sermon was Buddha simply holding up a flower and smiling at the assembled audience.

Poetry is a way of revealing the strangeness in the ordinary and the ordinary in the strange. For this, Mindfulness or acute attention is necessary.

From “Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop:

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

From “Hamlen Brook,” by Richard Wilbur, in which a trout swims …

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brush
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face
In which deep cloudlets pass
And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch trees plunges down.

From “Spiderweb,” by Kay Ryan:

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s always
hauling coarse
rope, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible.

Acute seeing and describing is transformational. A poem, one might say, can be a locking device, catching and holding something in a certain way for all time, so that one can never look at a familiar thing the same way again.

Buddhism calls for this way of experiencing, also, with such famous admonitions as (before enlightenment), “Chop wood, carry water” (after enlightenment), “Chop wood, carry water.”

Always the specific. To do things with great attention to the smallest detail, to the sacredness of things, which is also the mark of true craft in Zen Buddhism, in poetry, and in living.

As for finding the Familiar in the Strange, over and over poems seek to illuminate. Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” asked for “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In Emily Dickinson, it’s the fly “with blue, unstumbling buzz” in the deathbed room. And what is more strange than Death.

In a poem we might identify as Zen Buddhist there’s forever an element of actual calm or stillness or silence. The entire poem may create such a sense, as do many haikus, and many of Arthur Waley’s great translations.

IN THE MOUNTAINS ON A SUMMER DAY

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
—Li Po, translated by Arthur Waley

In Arthur Waley’s translations, which could be called versions and are sometimes regarded as poems by Waley as much as by the poet he’s translating, a part of the stillness and calm is created by the use of end\ stops, many lines being complete sentences. Enjambment is used infrequently. Such handling of lines creates a quiet painting effect, as if after each line is painted (here we are close to Asian languages’ use of calligraphy) the artist steps back, considering, before he or she adds another brushstroke line.

James Wright used a similar technique in “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (note how the poem’s title echoes titles of Chinese and Japanese poems and paintings). This is from that poem’s closure:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Slow down, you move too fast.
Got to make the morning last.
—from “59th Street Bridge Song,” by Simon and Garfunkle

When I find myself in times of troubles, mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
—from “Let It Be,” by The Beatles

The famous way of jarring a Zen Buddhist disciple, or anyone for that matter, into Satori is with a koan. The most famous one:

Two hands clap and there is a sound.
What is the sound of one hand?
—Hakuin Ekaku

The “key” to “answering” a koan is to discard reason, discard all attempts to find a rational answer to the question and simply let the answer happen. For some, the answer to the koan of the one hand clap might be “Libby’s Peaches!” or “The man fell off the cliff ” or “You forgot to feed the cat.” Whatever it is, the one posing the question will immediately know if the answer is “right,” as will the person who provides the answer.

I am doing the impossible, trying to explain the irrational.

Which can’t be explained. But of course it can be.

Here is a basic assumption: As in the Book of Job and to some extent in Ecclesiastes, the Nature of the Universe is unknowable except by God (as narrowly or widely defined). There are no Absolutes, but since the saying of this is itself an Absolute, it has to be phrased differently: There both are and are not Absolutes. Yet even that can be construed as an Absolute statement, so maybe the closest we can come is There are and are not Absolutes and this statement seems to be both true and untrue.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (italics below are mine):

uncertainty principle, physical principle, enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, that places an absolute, theoretical limit on the combined accuracy of certain pairs of simultaneous, related measurements. The accuracy of a measurement is given by the uncertainty in the result; if the measurement is exact, the uncertainty is zero. According to the uncertainty principle, the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of simultaneous measurements of position and momentum in a given direction cannot be less than Planck’s constant h divided by 4π. The principle also limits the accuracies of simultaneous measurements of energy and of the time required to make the energy measurement. The value of Planck’s constant is extremely small, so that the effect of the limitations imposed by the uncertainty principle are not noticeable on the large scale of ordinary measurements; however, on the scale of atoms and elementary particles the effect of the uncertainty principle is very important. Because of the uncertainties existing at this level, a picture of the submicroscopic world emerges as one of statistical probabilities rather than measurable certainties. On the large scale it is still possible to speak of causality in a framework described in terms of space and time; on the atomic scale this is not possible. Such a description would require exact measurements of such quantities as position, speed, energy, and time, and these quantities cannot be measured exactly because of the uncertainty principle. It does not limit the accuracy of single measurements, of nonsimultaneous measurements, or of simultaneous measurements of pairs of quantities other than those specifically restricted by the principle. Even so, its restrictions are sufficient to prevent scientists from being able to make absolute predictions about future states of the system being studied. The uncertainty principle has been elevated by some thinkers to the status of a philosophical principle, called the principle of indeterminacy, which has been taken by some to limit causality in general.
—Columbia Encyclopedia

The medium is the message.
—Marshall McLuhan

Popularized understandings of contemporary physics and quantum mechanics theories are in effect Memes which point to Non-Dualism rather than Dualism as being the basic nature of the universe. The basic tenets of the West’s three major monotheistic religions, Christianity,
Judaism and Islam, are dualistic, whereas the basic tenets of Buddhism are not.

However, the core mysticism elements in Western religions are non-dualistic.

The double-slit experiment, sometimes called Young’s experiment, is a demonstration that matter and energy can display characteristics of both waves and particles. In the basic version of the experiment, a coherent light source such as a laser beam illuminates a thin plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate. The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen—a result that would not be expected if light consisted strictly of particles. However, at the screen, the light is always found to be absorbed as though it were composed of discrete particles or photons. This establishes the principle known as wave–particle duality.
—Wikipedia

A quote I may have somewhat disremembered from the original Hawaii Five-O, as said by Jack Lord: “That’s the Yin and Yang of it, Dann-0.”

E=mc2

From the t-shirt advertisement, “Does Schrödinger’s Cat Live?”:

Every student of physics knows that Schrödinger’s 1935 paper regarding a hypothetical paradox involving a cat has perplexed and annoyed physics geeks for years. The basic idea; If the outcome of a circumstance is presently unknown and by observing the circumstance you will disrupt it, then it exists in all possible states simultaneously … Don’t get it? We propose the following thought experiment: Give your friend enough money to purchase the “Schrödinger’s Cat” shirt (don’t forget the shipping). Tell your friend to take the money and lock himself in a room with a cigarette lighter. Let your friend know that once in the room he is to randomly choose either to burn the money, or return in five minutes with the money intact. We emphasize that this must be completely random (aka, impossible for a human to determine, but bear with us). Your friend must then stay in this box for eternity. Hey, that’s how thought experiments work. Hopefully he/she is OK with that. Since you have no idea whether your friend will destroy the money, you will simultaneously either lose or recover that money. So in a quantum sense, if you extend that logic, you will simultaneously either be able to purchase or not purchase this very t-shirt which enabled you to make the choice in the first place. Isn’t physics fun? 100% cotton heavyweight t-shirt in black with “Schrödinger’s Cat is Dead” on the front and “Schrödinger’s Cat is Not Dead” on the back …
—ThinkGeek, Online

The Observer in the act of observing affects that which is being observed.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance
—from “Among School Children” by W.B. Yeats

Even though the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Double-Split Experiment and the Schrödinger’s Cat Experiment apply to microcosms and not really to macrocosms, the metaphors they provide significantly affect human consciousness concerning the Truth of Existence.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Double-Slit Experiment, and the Schrödinger’s Cat Experiment, as popularly somewhat understood, lead to the 21st Century’s increasing assumption that the basic nature of the universe is unknowable, absurd, chaotic, random, governed by chance and whim.

Or Zen.

Add Chaos and Complexity Theory: Edward Lorenz, Chaos Theory’s first experimenter, discovered and proved that small changes in initial conditions, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in southern Iowa, produce large changes in long term outcomes. Whether or not the butterfly flaps its wings causes, ten days later, a lightning and thunderstorm in Connecticut on a previously balmy day. Or not.

Chaos theory may also apply to cause and effect, or karma.

Chaos theory, some say, may explain the occurrences of wars.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
—Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Reasonlessness is important in Buddhism. We’re not to waste our time on the unknowable and unfathomable and must just accept it. If we can get out of the way the futile struggle to rationally explain the irrational, if we can accept that the Nature of the Universe is Absurd, we might be able to deal with more manageable matters, such as how to “eliminate” suffering through the application of the Eightfold Path.

Modern and contemporary poetry written with a Buddhist-like sensibility is greatly distanced from the likes of rational satires of Alexander Pope.

The use of Surrealism or New Surrealism in contemporary poetry, consciously or subconsciously on the part of the poet, reflects a basic assumption about unknowability. A surrealistic effect in a poem, albeit in a minor way, leads to a dissonance in the senses, a derangement that can cause the poem’s reader to suddenly see things in a new and different way.

Since in New Surrealism, the assumption is that the basic Nature of the Universe is absurd, satire is directed at those who don’t believe things have changed, at those who irrationally believe the world can be explained by rational means.

“There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden.”
—Candide, by Voltaire

And you know something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
—from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Bob Dylan

For Western readers, something as simple as the inclusion of an exotic word or phrase from China or Japan has the effect of deranging the senses, the use of the exotic suddenly plunging the poem’s reader into an alternate reality.

T.S. Eliot ends “The Wasteland” with “Shantih shantih shantih” or, as translated, “The Peace that passeth understanding.”

Version 1:

Let us gaze off into the mountains
Where mist is rising.

Version 2:

Let us gaze off into the Quinling Mountains
Where mist is rising.

Version 3:

Let us gaze off into the Adirondack Mountains
Where mist is rising.

Why is “Version 2” so much more moving than “Version 3”?

How can the feeling of “Version 2” be rendered in a contemporary American poem?

Seldom remarked upon but often present is how inexpensive and convenient poetry is. You can hear it for nothing. You can carry it around in your head—or on a small piece of paper if you wish—from place to place, state to state, country to country. You can memorize it and keep it forever. At the drop of a hat, you can say it out loud for its content, for its feeling, for how the words roll around upon and drop off your tongue.

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
—Alfred, Lord Tennison

THE RHODORA
On being asked, whence is the flower

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Orientalism and mysticism. Emerson owned an extensive library of Oriental literature in translation and was well versed in the texts and sacred writings of Hinduism (the Vedas and Upanishads), Buddhism, Confusianism, and Islam. Thoreau was introduced to Oriental religion and literature at Harvard and maintained an avid interest in Eastern spiritual lore throughout his life. Whitman’s interest in the Orient, though less formal and disciplined, was just as keen as that of Emerson and Thoreau, as is evident from even a cursory reading of Leaves of Grass. In addition to their belief in cosmic unity, in the ultimate interconnection and harmony of all things, these authors also absorbed from their Oriental sources the view that the phenomenal world—Nature—is a sort of Mayan veil which partly reveals, partly conceals, an ultimate Oneness.
—David L. Simpson, “Transcendentalism,” Online

Over and over, poetry calls attention to eternal things that don’t have to be purchased, particularly things in Nature such as Wordsworthian daffodils, the Frostian deer in Frost’s “Two Look at Two,” the trout in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.”

Easily recognizable is how Buddhism stresses desirelessness as it seeks to mitigate Dukkha (suffering) by its Seven Noble Truths. Buddhism identifies the cause for Dukkha as desire, craving, wanting things to be different from what they are, letting ourselves be attached to things.

Buddhism is often called a philosophy of non-Attachment.

I got plenty of nothin’
And nothin’ plenty for me
I got no car, got no mule,
And I got no misery

…

Seems with plenty,
That you sure got to worry
How to keep the devil away …
—from Porgy & Bess, by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward

The recognitions and acceptances of Wholeness, Reasonlessness, Mindfulness, Calmness as fundamental recognitions and acceptances of things for what they are rather than what can be read into them may lead to the further recognition and acceptance of Desirelessness.

A reason why meditation is so stressed in Buddhism, especially in zazen, is because it encourages the practitioner to become enraptured with only the Present. In meditation, thoughts—especially thoughts of the Past and the Future—are brushed away. The more they fade the more tranquility is achieved.

Many aspects common to Buddhism and poetry encourage the practitioner or reader (who may be the same) to live in the Present. True Mindfulness is only possible if all one’s attention is focused on the Present, for no one can fully and truly have the experience of plum tasting, for instance, without being all-at-once here.

From “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

…

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

The word “Present” contains within itself both itself as a state of time and itself as a gift.

To stay in the Present is in some ways like letting a Lifesaver or small hard candy dissolve in your mouth. Initially, most can do this, sucking on the sweetness. Soon, however, as the lozenge is further dissolved and diminished, the impulse to use the teeth to crunch and chew it is almost irresistible. It requires either a major effort of will to allow the lozenge to become nothing or it requires an utter Calmness, acceptance of what is, a Desirelessness.

When I was just out of graduate school, my wife and I bought an inexpensive limited edition of a Giacometti print. It is an utterly simple line drawing of a tall, thin figure.

Easy, I scoffed, and sat about trying to draw an equivalent on the sketchpad I’d bought for that purpose.

Hundreds of attempts later, I gave up.

I could copy, I could approximate, but I couldn’t imbue my sketches with the feeling Giacometti had bought to his.

Anyone trying to draw an ensō will likely feel the same frustration.

Ensō is a Japanese word meaning “circle” and a concept strongly associated with Zen. Ensō is one of the most common subjects of Japanese calligraphy even though it is a symbol and not a character. It symbolizes the Absolute, enlightenment, strength, elegance, the Universe, and the void; it can also symbolize the Japanese aesthetic itself. As an “expression of the moment” it is often considered a form of minimalist expressionist art.

In Zen Buddhist painting, ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body/spirit create. The brushed ink of the circle is usually done on silk or rice paper in one movement (but the great Bankei used two strokes sometimes) and there is no possibility of modification: it shows the expressive movement of the spirit at that time. Zen Buddhists “believe that the character of the artist is fully exposed in how she or he draws an ensō. Only a person who is mentally and spiritually complete can draw a true ensō. Some artists will practice drawing an ensō daily, as a kind of spiritual exercise.”¹ Some artists paint ensō with an opening in the circle, while others complete the circle. For the former, the opening may express various ideas, for example that the ensō is not separate, but is part of something greater, or that imperfection is an essential and inherent aspect of existence (see also the idea of broken symmetry). The principle of controlling the balance of composition through asymmetry and irregularity is an important aspect of the Japanese aesthetic: Fukinsei, the denial of perfection. The ensō is also a sacred symbol in the Zen school of Buddhism, and is often used by Zen masters as a form of signature in their religious artwork.
—Wikipedia

¹ Seo, Audrey Yoshiko; Loori, John Daido (2009). Ensō: Zen Circles of Enlightenment. Weatherhill. ISBN 1-59030-608-2.

Those who have tried writing English language haiku, with the commonly prescribed 5-7-5 structure, will know what I’m going to say: It is quite easy to write a haiku. Follow the syllable structure. Put in a season. Use specific imagery. Include something that looks like it will be or is a sudden realization and Shazam, you’ve got it.

Haiku writing, in Japan, is a favorite exercise and even party game for many, including members of garden clubs.

In America, it’s a favorite poem writing exercise for kindergarten children.

Millions and millions and millions of haiku!

Yet almost none are the real thing.

It is this proliferation, this spawn of haikus, that I suspect is the main cause for American Zen Buddhist poetry not being taken very seriously—a case of the okay drowning out the best.

American haiku, tanka, and forms derived from them and similar to them have, with a few notable exceptions, always seemed to me to be faux poetry, suffering particularly from being pseudo-profound. There are too many little gasps of wonder I associate with New Agers. It is oh so meaningful. There’s an air of reverence about it which smacks of arrogant self-approval. It feels worked. It feels thought. Or if it’s felt, what’s felt, sadly, is a cliché or an easy clichéd phrase. There’s nothing really held back as there is in all genuine poetry. It’s a stab, rather than a caress. Or, alternately, there’s no zaniness to it, no crazy wisdom.

As I get older, the less and less interested I am in writing poems the Past, and in writing nostalgic or elegiac poems. This may be a of my Buddhism, my continual attempts to live in the Present.

At a poetry conference, during a workshop I’m conducting, we’re discussing what makes a poem “contemporary” and “universal.” For the former, it may be that an awareness of technology and some acknowledgement or inclusion of technology and its impact on society is necessary. For the latter, perhaps the English language poem should use rhyme/meter? But the really interesting part of the discussion comes when someone says that “universal poetry is pastoral poetry.”

Is Buddhist or Zen Buddhist poetry a kind of pastoral poetry?

If you take away the shepherds and the cows, is traditional Buddhist poetry, with its misty mountains, steep mountain paths, monks’ huts, single leaves floating on the river, calmness, tranquility, lack of deep desire for other than the Present (so long as there is wine and visiting friends), heavily or primarily pastoral?

In the end is my beginning.
—from “The Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot

IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST TO
“EXPLAIN THE SECRET OF TEACHING”

If I explained aloud, then it wouldn’t be a true explanation,
And if I transmitted it on paper, then where would be the secret?
At a western window on a rainy autumn night
White hair in the guttering lamplight, asleep facing the bed.
—Gido Shushin, translated by David Pollack

The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain
       To see what he could see

       To see what he could see,
       To see what he could see.

The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain
       Was all that he could see.

       Was all that he could see,
       Was all that he could see,
The other side of the mountain,
       Was all that he could see!
             —Author Unknown

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

May 5, 2012

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT by Paul HostovskyPosted by Rattle

Review by Barrett Warner A Little in Love a Lot by Paul Hostovsky

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT
by Paul Hostovsky

Main Street Rag
PO BOX 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
ISBN 978-1-59948-303-0
2011, 90 pp.,$14.00
www.mainstreetrag.com

Journeyman poet Paul Hostovsky is lucky that Major League Baseball doesn’t drug test poetry. The piss in his collection, A Little in Love A Lot, is full of steroids. His poems begin so easy and innocent, but then the juice kicks and Hostovsky plugs in another amp. In the sonnet “Pop Flies,” two buddies hit pop flies to each other. A bully comes along, walking his Doberman Pinscher:

He asks me gruffly for a turn at bat, and the Doberman
growls…silently surrender
the bat and ball. A wind dies on the schoolyard.

He tosses the ball up, swings at the exact second
that the Doberman, sniffing a game, jumps for the ball
and catches the bat in his head—suddenly there’s blood
everywhere, the Doberman’s seizing, dying…

What happens in the schoolyard tends to happen in the bedroom–a rumbling before each poem transforms choir boy into werewolf. Hostovsky skillfully uses both personalities, the night and the day of himself, to cut through the world’s barriers in order to feel empathy. He writes: “The way out/ isn’t under or/ over or around/ or even through./ It’s with. With/ is the only way out.”

Make no mistake, these are not dark alley poems, but Hostovsky’s fears of dying unloved and alone shade the Wonder Years neighborhood of these ballads, rants, and comedies. For most of us the great abyss is only the shallow grave. Hostovsky’s is the Grand Canyon. If you squint you can see him at the bottom working a shovel, digging the hole deeper. When he reaches Hell he keeps on going, laughing at times, yelling out his love songs: “the background music…/ so loud it was in the foreground.”

These urgent poems of desperate, funny, compelling observations are placated by the metaphor of love and sex in the author’s quest for empathy. True connection between spouses, lovers, friends, neighbors, demented aunts, fathers and sons is almost impossible for Hostovsky, in spite of an otherworldly harmony teasing him at every jagged turn. Porcupines mate after all. So do elephants. Even a turkey buzzard will raise its feathered hem and wink for love.

Move over Woody Allen. In “Love and Death” a couple makes love “on her all-encompassing couch” and afterwards, sipping tea, the speaker volunteers, “I love sitting here opposite you in our underwear,/ talking about death.” Hostovsky is just warming up. “I assert there really is no death, there is only// life, which has no opposite because/ it is all-encompassing.” His lover then tells the story of a relative dying of pancreatic cancer, three months of the kind of pain no one else could bear for three hours. The speaker gives her “a peck” and goes “into the kitchen to make more tea.” There, he watches the flame for three minutes waiting for the water to boil.

The characters in Hostovsky’s poems look out the same window but witness very different versions of life. Agreements are rare, polite arguments are plenty. People seem to work out a system of taking turns being right and wrong, giving love, receiving it. “The Debate at Duffy’s” begins: “She said that sex was a yearning of the soul./ He said it was a very compelling argument/ of the body.” The two argue the length of the baseball game being played on television while filling and draining their cups until she wins “in the bottom of the ninth.” Another poem, “Kiss,” takes place on a train “heading south/ all the seats/ facing north/ like the meeting/ of east and west/ our heads turning slowly/ on the headrests/ towards each other/ like two completely/ different ways of life/ coming together.” The poem ends with the suggestion of kissing: “exchanging aloft/ the moist and crumpled/ messages”–of our lips, Hostovsky wisely lets the reader suppose.

Opposites might attract, but they also might blow each other’s brains out. “We are all attracted to suffering/ and repulsed by it, too./ This doesn’t make the world go around exactly./ It isn’t a law of physics technically./ But it may have something to do/ with the relationships of bodies/ in the universe.” “Cholera” parodies magic realism. A lover has read Love in the Time of Cholera whereas the speaker can’t get past fifty pages without dreaming of cholera. He says, “I think cholera is one of those words, that,/ if divorced from its meaning, would make a beautiful/ name for a girl. Like Treblinka.” The lover “gave me a pained look in the dream then, and I wondered/ if it meant you didn’t agree with me, or if it meant/ that what you were eating didn’t agree with you./ Either way, it was plain to see that you were suffering.”

Hostovsky modulates this contrary world of apartness between intimates by offering several poems which convey the resemblances between strangers. In “Waiting Room” a woman with a portable oxygen tank stands in front of the exotic fish tank: “The woman looks like the fish/ with her bulging eyes and her yellow rain coat.” In “Uncanny”:

Bob Dylan in his late 60’s
looks a lot like my mother.
It’s partly the nose,
Partly the big hair.

Hostovsky understands that gesture is essential to holding the doubtful reader at bay. He’s made a career out of it, working as a sign language interpreter. One of the hearing, his is a blended family of a deaf partner, and one deaf and one hearing child. Perhaps this experience is why a young speaker doesn’t just raise his hand for emphasis, he holds his “palm up in the air like one who is trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not it has started to rain.” Likewise, the co-ed in his German class has a charming defect: “I whispered Ich liebe dich into her umlaut—that pair of moles on her left earlobe.” Such fantastic detail and kinetic gesture would rival that in any silent movie. They keep the poems moving too quickly for the reader to dare jump off. It’s best to just hang on for the climax. Some poets like Billy Collins will gently lay down a reader in the soft bed of a poem’s ending and perhaps give the reader’s toe a wiggle pinch. Hostovsky often will leave us lying in a ditch, dashed and wrecked with enervating surprises. His brilliant seduction begins when we’re just coming-to after an unexpected turn. Hostovsky weaves the abstract and the concrete when we’re most vulnerable. In “Tree Poem” a father sits in a tree contemplating suicide after a day at work. He does this every day when he arrives home. After twenty lines of deliberation, “he climbed down from the tree in the car in the garage/ every time, and walked back into his life with a few/ leaves and twigs still sticking to his head.” Sticking. Nice, very nice.

“Miracles” also weaves the abstract, but also is one of those rare wildcards Hostovsky sometimes deals which explain the greater sum:

Spiritual texts are the most boring in the world.
None of them mentions a bicycle,
or a ferris wheel, or baseball, or sea lions, or ice cream.
They just lump them all together into “the world.”
The “world of appearances.”The “world of illusions.”
You can walk through this world and not
believe it for a minute…
And when the doctor comes in with his numbers
which are your numbers, you can
not believe that either. You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ear, pool on the floor where your eyes
and his eyes have fallen. He won’t
mention the bicycle, or the ferris wheel which is
taking up a lot of room right now in the little
examining room where a sea lion has clambered up
onto the table and is barking, and the baseballs are flying,
and the vendors are hawking ice cream—because he can’t
see them. He can’t perform a miracle.

A Little in Love A Lot is Hostovsky’s miracle, because finally, the miracle is not about sea lions or feeling detached from a lover or dying. The miracle is language itself. These are poems about poetry, each of them an impossible glancing shot, salted with nods to the masters. Writing about a graveyard where he steals quarters off “Naughton’s tombstone” which are left there by descendants, Hostovsky is writing about stealing from traditional poetry, getting it how he can, “because I need them/ for the parking meters/ when I’m driving…Naughton has plenty/ and doesn’t drive anymore anyway.” Alone in a Burger King, Hostovsky remembers Rilke’s commandment about making art, and guiltily believes he cannot call forth riches from his experience. Quite suddenly a family enters, “and while their parents order they play/ duck duck goose, touching all the tables,/ and all the chairs, the girl behind the boy/ following him, copying him and laughing/ louder and louder, because it’s all so wonderful/ here at Burger King, which they seem to have/ all to themselves, except for one man in a booth/ smiling, writing something down on a piece of paper.”

____________

Barrett Warner’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Comstock Review, Natural Bridge, Freshwater, Quarter After Eight, and others. His chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face was published by Tropos Press.

Rattle: Poetry

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