The poet Carl Phillips said in an interview recently that, “A place must be made, still, for joy.” That’s probably always been the case but these days the need to cultivate positive feelings and attitudes may seem more critical. May we all find a time and place for joy, now, and in the days to come.
Pushcart Nomination
“Encomium for a Garden” (Spiritus, Fall 2022), was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This is one of those serendipitous poems that practically wrote itself. I may have changed a word or two and then changed it/them back, again. This is my favorite kind of poem to write, one that flows easily from pen to paper. My thanks to the editor, Mark Burrows, for forwarding it.
Winter Workshops
Cassie Premo Steel, author of Earth Joy Writing: Creating Harmony thorough Journaling and Nature, will lead an online writing workshop, Release the Dark, Receive the Light, sponsored by Ashland Creek Press, on January 2, at 11:a.m. www.https://ashlandcreekpress.com
Robin Farr, poet and co-editor of River Heron Review, will lead a four-session online workshop, Poetry Boost: From Title to Publication on Thursday nights from November 10 to December 8. www.https://riverheronreview.com
Writing Opportunities
Emergence Magazine
An online magazine with an annual print edition, Emergence publishes essays, op-eds, films, and audio stories about the “timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality,” according to their homepage. Focusing on “long-form content that is both thought-provoking and evergreen,” they also offer a weekly podcast with interviews, narrated essays, fiction, and more. www.https://emergencemagazine.org
Passager Journal and Books
Dedicated to the work of writers over the age of 50, Passager Journal publishes a twice-yearly print edition and now features a weekly podcast, too. Passager Books focuses on poetry collections, short fiction, and anthologies by writers who’ve been published in the journal and offers the Morgenthau Prize for a first book of poetry by a writer age 70 or older. www.https://passagerbooks.com
The Cincinnati Review is seeking poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations through December. (Submissions close once they meet their cap.) A print magazine out of the University of Cincinnati, it pays $30 per page for poetry. www.https://cincinnatireview.com
KAIROS Literary Magazine
Founded in 2016, this online magazine is looking for poetry, creative nonfiction, and op-ed pieces. Published tri-annually, submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. www.https://kairoslit.com Prairie Schooner is a print quarterly published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They’re seeking essays, interviews, reviews, short stories, and poetry now until May 1st. The Raz-Shumaker Book Prize opens January 15th. www.https://prairieschooner.unl.edu
Praise seemed to come instinctively to Mary Oliver. One of the most popular late twentieth-century poets, Oliver’s attention was often focused on the woods, ponds, and beaches that she explored in forays around her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In Upstream (2016), a collection of essays on nature and literature, she notes that early on she “did not think of language as the means to self-description…” but as a way “to notice, to contemplate, to praise…” One of my favorite poems, from New and Selected Poems Volume One (winner of the National Book Award) is “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard.” It captures me from the first line and doesn’t let go until the last line. I could say the same for most of Oliver’s poems, but this one feels as if I’m right there in the orchard listening to a youngish owl “flutter down the little aluminum ladder of his scream.”
If “attention is the beginning of devotion,” as she wrote, then wonder may be the beginning of praise — for the fox “so quiet — he moves like a red rain,” for the hawk with “one exquisite foot” attached to a twig, even for “The cracked bones/of the owl’s most recent feast…” For Oliver, attention most often means being in the presence of, whether it’s the owl in the orchard, a hermit crab on the beach, a hummingbird in a trumpet vine, or egrets at the edge of a pond. This attention to wildlife and the environment alerts her to possibility — the possibility of danger, of beauty, of death, of life, or simply of nothing “but the cold creek moving/over the old pebbles…”
Unlike the narrative “I” of Whitman, who she considered a childhood “friend,” Oliver’s “I” enjoys a relative position in the background. From this vantage point, she offers observations rich with detail, color, and music. She’s not afraid to use a well-placed exclamation point occasionally, or just as often, a question mark. “Are you listening, death?” she asks in “The Rabbit.” These kinds of questions don’t always come with answers, of course, but reflect a sense of mystery that permeates her work, a respect for not knowing and for silence.
She had her darker moments, some of them probably attributable to childhood trauma. In “A Visitor,” she struggles to come to grips with her estrangement from her father, a subject she discussed frankly in her later years. In one of her most well-known poems, “Wild Geese,” she writes, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine./Meanwhile the world goes on.” If there’s a secret to her appeal, I think it’s that she comes to the poem with an inclusive love for the world in all its imperfections — that and a willingness to embrace it again and again.
Writing Prompt: Gratitude
For this prompt, make a list of ten things you’re grateful for. They might be ordinary items around you — just-picked tomatoes, a set of salt and pepper shakers, or a glass of water, for instance, or they might be something more personal such as a family member, pet, or a prized possession. After completing your list, select the most promising subject and write continuously about that for at least five minutes, or more. When you’ve run out of steam, take a look at what you’ve come up with. Is there a poem there, or more than one poem? After fine-tuning your work, let it sit for several days. Then go back and have a second look. If it’s redundant, remove the deadwood. If it feels incomplete, you may want to weave in some additional details, or consider posing a question and answering it.
Writing Opportunities
Poetry Northwest is accepting poetry submissions from October 1st to November 30th. https://www.poetrynw.org
The Colorado Prize for Poetry is open for submissions of full-length manuscripts (48-100 pages) from October 1st to January 14th. https://www.coloradoreview.colostate.edu
Haiku sometimes arrive intact and read just right. But more often than not (at least in my case), they can benefit from revision. This process is the subject of the article, “Haiku as Discovery,” forthcoming in the fall issue of Seashores, #8 (https://www.haikuspirit.org).
Recent Haiku
old pine: Modern Haiku, issue #54.1, Fall 2022
empty swings: Haiku Corner, Japan Society, #34, 2022
Questions naturally arise in first drafts but they can help during the later stages of composition, too, if we’re stalled, or seeking to develop a theme. The right question can move us from reason to intuition, from the prosaic to the unexpected.The following questions all have one thing in common — they ask “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” or “how:”
“What is the world?”(from Book of a Monastic Life, by Rilke)
“Which side am I supposed to be on?” (from the poem of the same title by W.H. Auden)
“How can you look at the Neva…?” (from White Flock, by Anna Akhmatova)
“Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when…?” (from The Swan, by Mary Oliver)
“What can I say to someone…?” (from The Fire in the Center, by Rumi)
“Don’t you want God to want you?” (from The Tradition, by Jericho Brown)
“And what did I do today?” (from Kennedy’s Inauguration, by Robert Bly)
“When did we enter the heartless age?” (from Heartland, by Lisel Mueller)
Writing Opportunities
The Maine Review is open for submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (including hybrid forms) from September 1st to November 30th. A triannual online journal, MeR “publishes culturally significant writing by writers living in Maine, across the country, and around the world. https://www.mainereview.com
Third Coast Magazine, out of Western Michigan University, will be accepting poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from September 15th to October 15th. Work published in Third Coast has gone on to win both O’Henry Prizes and Pushcart Prizes. https://www.thirdcoastmagazine.com
Born and raised in Ames, Iowa, Ted Kooser has lived for many years in Garland, Nebraska. A teacher of poetry and nonfiction at the University of Nebraska in nearby Lincoln, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize also edits a weekly poetry column, “American Life in Poetry” (www.https://americanlifeinpoetry.org). His poetry depicts a fading world as seen in Ektachrome slides — of family, land, pets, antique teacups, old vehicles and tools — and as Brad Leithauser noted in the New York Times Book Review, it “is rare for its sense of being so firmly and enduringly rooted in one locale.” His poems speak of the weather, arbiter of crop futures and human futures — of hoarfrost and blizzards, searing heat and floods. But they also celebrate the small moments of the heart and everyday pleasures. In the poem, “At Nightfall,” the poet describes the flight of a barn swallow bringing back one white feather to her nest in the rafters, and in “A Morning in Early Spring,” he notes, “In the first light I bend to one knee. I fill the old bowl of my hands/with wet leaves and lift them…”
Reaching beyond the boundaries of small town life, his writing reminds us of our common connections. As David Mason observed in Prairie Schooner, this poetry is beyond regionalism — it’s about “perception itself, the signs of human habitation, the uncertainty of human knowledge and accomplishment.” At times, it can seem almost archeological, as in the poem “The Red Wing Church,” which describes a partially deconstructed church, or in “In the Basement of the Goodwill Store,” a place populated by “doll heads, and rust,” and an old man “trying on glasses.,,,” “…through which he looks to see you looking back.” Kooser’a poetry exhibits what, in Hindu philosophy, is called Sakshi, or witness, a neutral perspective of looking at the world. This quality is apparent in several poems from Kindest Regards — in “Old Soldier’s Home,” for instance, and in “A Letter in October,” but there are many other examples. While Sakshi has been described as the witness of the flow of thought and feeling in an ever-changing world, Chitchhaya, is the reflection of the ego or the residue, it might be said, of personality. It resembles “the moon with its bruises,” the “chalk” on the porch post, “the old yellow shell” of a snakeskin, and “a whisper of dust,” to quote Kooser. This quality of witness in his poetry appears as emotion filtered through a frayed screen door, as a face behind a lace curtain, a tenuous separation between inside and out.
Another aspect of the witness function in poetry concerns the acknowledgment of traumatic events such as those of war or social injustice, and this, too, can be found in his work, although it’s the exception. “Fort Robinson,” for instance, depicts the killing of infant magpies by grounds keepers on the site where the Northern Cheyenne were held captive one “terrible winter,” and “Blackout” describes domestic air raid practices during WWII as seen through the eyes of a six-year old. In “Blizzard Voices” he tells of the devastation of the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888. Sometimes, the subject involves economic upheaval, as in the poem “Three Steps in the Grass,” which tells how a desperate homeowner bulldozed his house and set it on fire to avoid paying property taxes.
One of his most compelling poems, “Pearl,” describes a visit he paid to a childhood friend of his late mother’s. It evokes not only a sense of loss and the isolation of old age, but a more intimate time when we communicated in person rather than through emails and text messages. It’s this depiction of a fading era that characterizes much of his poetry and has given him a reputation as an elegist. An abandoned tractor, rusty harness bells, a WWI helmet, and “a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls” are a few of the objects from the past that appear in his lines. But, besides a certain wistfulness for days gone by, his work contains a balance of fresh and worn, of young and old, and an abiding wonder at the present moment.
An Interview with Gail Entrekin, Editor of Canary Literary Magazine
Interviewed by Jerome Gagnon
The rise of ecopoetry during the last several years can be seen in the many publications devoted to the environment. Some of the newer periodicals are Ecotone, Emergence, Terrain, Flyway: A Journal of Writing, About Place , and Canary Literary Magazine. These publications carry on the tradition of reverence for nature found in world literatures and serve as witness to the effects of ecological devastation. One of the best of the on-line journalsis Canary Literary Magazine (www.https://canarylitmagazine.org. Started in 2007, it aims to “deepen awareness of the environment and enrich the well-being of the individual,” according to their home page.
I interviewed Editor Gail Entrekin (via email) to learn what influenced her to found Canary and what advice she would give to writers planning to submit their work. A poet, hiker, teacher, and quilt-maker, Gail earned an M.A. in English Lit/Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She’s also the poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press. She taught English and Creative Writing at Sierra College in Grass Valley and, for many years, worked with California Poets in the Schools, teaching poetry to children. Her books of poetry include The Art of Healing, with her husband, Charles Entrekin (2016), Rearrangement of the Invisible (2012), and Change (2005), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award.
Q. I’d like to start by saying how in awe I am with the overall work and aesthetics of the magazine. The combination of text and photographs is always very inviting visually. Can you please share with us what motivated you to found Canary?
A. I don’t know. It was the thing that was on my mind at the time. Our area of the world (Nevada City, CA) had been gold mined back in the day and there was mercury in many areas that was damaging the soil and the water supply. We were fighting the powers that be not to dam the beautiful and scenic Yuba River, and the air quality was heading down due to the pollution rising up to us on our mountain from Sacramento down below. The more I learned, the more upsetting it was. So it seemed to me that what I could do to help was small, but perhaps it would help some people to wake up. And if nothing else, it might serve as a reminder of all the beauty, the connection to the natural world that we were betraying and stood to lose.
Q. Please tell us a little bit more about your background and what you find most satisfying about the editing process.
A. I started a local online publication for women first, to showcase and discuss work in progress (Women’s Writing Salon). It was wildly popular and I expanded it into a local reading series in Nevada City, where I was living at the time, Beyond that, I’ve been employed as an editor in one way or another, on and off, for about 40 years. I also run poetry critiquing workshops, and an important aspect of critiquing is noticing how line breaks, word choices, etc. contribute to the success or failure of a poet’s ability to reach their desired goal for the poem. I love, love, love the opportunity to read work by so many talented and passionate, mostly unknown writers that I would not have read otherwise — people leading their own quiet campaigns in their neighborhoods to save a small piece of the planet on their watch.
Q. What have you learned in your tenure as an editor?
A. At this point, the only things I learn are the new ways the language is changing: new pronoun usage, use of back slashes within lines, etc.
Q. Do you believe that Canary has had a concrete impact on environmental/ ecological issues?
A. No, I fear that we’ve had very little direct impact on the crisis at hand. I think most of our readership is already well aware of the loss of habitat and species that we’re experiencing. We circulate Canary to friends and fellow writers, though, and my hope is that someone becomes more aware of what’s happening and is able to have some small impact in their own world.
Q. What advice would you give to writers who are planning to submit their poetry, and how would you describe your editorial style?
A. I guess I’d give the same advice any editor would give: read the magazine before you submit, so you understand what kind of work we publish. Be sure to read our mission statement on our home page so you understand what we’re trying to accomplish. I never change anything larger than a comma or a spelling error without letting the author know what I’m doing. If I do more than that, I send them my edited version for approval. Poets are especially interested in the formatting of their poems and they don’t take well to unauthorized changes.
Q. Your mission statement says that the theme of the magazine is “the environmental crises and the losses of species and habitat.” Can you give us an example of a poem from one of your issues that addresses that? What is it that you admire, and how do you think your own tastes help or hinder the selection process?
A. The very first poem I selected for Canary was “Birdsong from My Patio”by Ellen Bass, which I solicited (and which considers the effects of pesticide and acid rain on birds and nature – jg). I hoped for more of these and, indeed, there are many. But after a while I branched out into broader stories of events which are contributing to these losses, and too many pieces that simply praise what IS. Some tell of human indifference to other living things, a broader way of considering what’s coming to pass. “Little Fires” by Christina Lovin, for example, in Issue #4 is about the bats we killed. I can think of so many…
As for the last part of your question, I like poems that have something at stake, that are authentic, and reflect both the passion of the poet and the skill and craft to convey that passion. I can’t know, of course, how who I am affects the decisions I make. I try hard to be open to all kinds of styles of poetry that are new to me or that initially fail to move me. Clichés, awkward language, confusion or lack of logical progression, and lack of images and/or metaphors are all serious drawbacks. But I feel very excited when I come across beautiful and well-crafted work that teaches or moves me. I want to share this work with the world. Those are the finest moments in this job.
Q. Thanks very much, Gail. I have just one last question — how do you approach beginning writers?
A. I always give a read to all pieces in a person’s submissions because sometimes a beginning writer stumbles onto one good poem. If I feel someone is almost there, I often say that and ask them to submit again in the future. I sometimes tell a writer who is really pretty good what I like and how I felt the poem fell short.
When the late Robert Bly’s English translations of 15th –century Indian poet-seer Kabir’s poems were first published in the 1970s they caused something of a stir. They didn’t much resemble the earlier translations in English by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill with their staid Victorian diction. In fact, Bly didn’t refer to them as translations at all, but as “versions.” Discarding a plethora of “thous” and “thees” and taking a more direct approach, his versions brought Kabir’s poems into the present day.
Tagore’s translations have their strengths, and they served Bly well as a literal reference. But they barely captured the subversive aspect that makes Kabir so much more than a religious poet (like Mirabai, he’s generally considered a saint in India). Intense, mystical, and beyond dogma, he refused to repeat spiritual truths that he hadn’t experienced himself. He debunked the idea that the soul unites with the ecstatic upon death, for instance, as in this line, per Bly:
“What you call ‘salvation’ is found in the time before death.”
Believed to be the son of a Moslem weaver, Kabir was likely familiar with Sufi texts and, it’s said, was initiated as a young man by Ramananda, an ecstatic Hindu holy man. This cross-pollination of faiths may have prepared him to internalize the underlying wisdom they share. Love in the here and now is what inspires Kabir, an ecstatic love that has him reeling, as in the great circle dances of the bhakti devotees of his day. It comes through clearly in Bly’s words when Kabir says:
“If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his.”
And here:
“How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy,
he sings in his own little boat.”
Speaking about Bly’s versions with journalist Katy Butler (Poetry as Path), Hindi scholar Linda Hess commented that, “If you want to look at things from a scholarly point of view, they aren’t translations. But you should forget the scholarly point of view and see Bly’s work as picking up an oral tradition and transmitting it, giving his versions with real insight.”
The immediacy of these poems is just as evocative today as it was when they were first published over fifty years ago, and Bly’s contribution to the revival of interest in ecstatic poetry can’t be overstated.
The Kabir Book: Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Versions by Robert Bly, Beacon Press, 1971, 1977
Kabir: Ecstatic Poems, by Robert Bly, Beacon Press, 2004
Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, edited by Robert Bly, Harper Collins, 1995 (anthology)
Born into a royal family in Rajasthan, India, the 16th century poet/saint Mirabai (1498-1547?) followed the path of bhakti. One of the four traditional branches of yoga, bhakti encourages a personal connection to God or deity through the practice of dancing, singing, and recitations of poems and praises. So intense was Mirabai’s religious devotion that her marriage and relations with her in-laws suffered from it. Fleeing persecution, she lived an unconventional life, wandering from village to village and singing praises to Sri Krishna, whom she addressed as “Dark One.” Approximately two-hundred of these bhajans are attributed to her but she may have written as many as six-hundred to a thousand of them. They swing between the poles of presence and absence, at times depicting ecstatic states, at other times loss and the longing for union:*
“Mira has met the love that ignites stars
and sends bees swirling from the hive.
The fragrance of that love is sweeter than jasmine.”
“Dark One, where have you gone?
Without a word from you I’m desperate
like a fish flopping in a pail.”
“When supreme love has left the throne
of the heart, what good is the world
with all its perfumes and riches?”
As scholar Holly Hillgardner points out in Longing and Letting Go: Christian and Hindu Practices of Passionate Non-attachment (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016), “Separation (thus) serves not as a preliminary step on the path to ultimate fulfillment, but as an integral part of the beginning, middle, and end of the path itself”…“and grief cannot be sidestepped.”
A 2009 collection, Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, translated by poets Jane Hirshfield and Robert Bly, offers a bittersweet taste of this bhakti. Hirshfield brings to the project her experience translating Japanese poems from the 8th and 9th centuries (Ink of the Dark Moon) and a gift for revealing the ineffable in the everyday; Bly demonstrates a deep affinity for the subject matter and the same level of care seen in his earlier translations of Indian poet/saint Kabir. Together, they honor Mirabai’s originals while transporting them sensitively into the 21st century.
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Jane Hirshfield and Robert Bly (Translators), Beacon Press, 2009
The Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World, Edited with Commentary by Ivan McGregor, Poetry Chaikhana
*versions by jg
Opportunities
The Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Contest is open from June 27th to July 31st. Sponsored by the Center for Interfaith Relations, the contest offers $500 and publication of the winning poem in Parabola Magazine. Runners-up will each receive $100. https://www.centerforinterfaithrelations.submittable.com
Santa Fe Literary Review, an annual print and online journal, is accepting submissions now until November 1st. Committed to “promoting a diverse range of writers and artists,” they seek CNF, fiction, poetry, and visual art. This year’s suggested theme is “Myth: Invention, Legend and Lore.” https://www.sfcc.edu/santafe-literary-review
Next time
Versions of Kabir, plus more writing opportunities.
The First Festival of Modern Poetry took place in San Francisco in April, 1947. Organized by Madeleine Gleason, founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild, the two-night event featured readings by twelve poets including Gleason, William Everson (Brother Antonius), Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Kenneth Rexroth. Together with poets Robert Creeley, Kay Boyle, and other transplants to the Bay Area, they comprised what came to be known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Although her work was overshadowed by the advent of the Beats in the mid-1950s, Gleason continued to publish throughout the 1960s and 70s. Her poetry was featured in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry:1945-1960 and Collected Poems:1919-1979, with an introduction by Robert Duncan, was published posthumously in 1999. Samples of her work can be found at www.poetryfoundation.com.
Exploring North Beach and Telegraph Hill
Centered around Washington Square, just below Telegraph Hill, San Francisco’s North Beach district is the kind of neighborhood where poets scribble at sidewalk cafes and seniors practice Tai Chi in the park. Although the Beat movement that once flourished there is long gone, you can still get a feel for it at Café Trieste, 601 Vallejo Street. It’s a good spot to sip a cappuccino at a sidewalk table while writing in your journal or catching up on emails. Just up the street from Café Trieste, TheBeat Museum, 540 Broadway (near the corner of Columbus Avenue), features books, manuscripts and ephemera of poet Allen Ginsberg (Howl), novelist Jack Kerouac (On the Road), and other North Beach habitués of the 1950s and 60s.
No tour of North Beach would be complete without a visit to City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue (near Broadway). Co-founded by legendary poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who served as San Francisco’s first poet laureate, it carries a wide range of literature, counter culture magazines, and poetry broadsides. You’re likely to find a copy of Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman on the shelves, along with Ferlinghetti’s classic, A Coney Island of the Mind, not to mentionan array of current releases.
Vesuvio Cafe, 255 Columbus Avenue (across Jack Kerouac Alley from City Lights), has been a bohemian watering hole since the 1940’s. Enjoy a glass of wine and people watch from a window seat, or jot down some random free verse on your napkin.
On and Off the Streets
San Francisco has changed dramatically over the years but it’s still a place of surprising beauty. Although much of the downtown and South of Market areas have acquired a bland, corporate look, North Beach has managed to maintain its quirky charm. Part of the fun of exploring the area is leaving your car behind. Narrow side streets are lined with bay-windowed flats while sidewalks merge into stairways that practically beg to be investigated. If you’ve got your walking shoes on, head up Telegraph Hill Boulevard to Coit Tower and Pioneer Park for the 360-degree bay and city views. Funded by Lillian Hitchcock Coit, the tower was designed in a pared down classical style by Arthur Brown, who also designed City Hall, and was completed in 1933. After checking out the tower’s WPA murals by artists such as Clifford Wright, consider trekking down the Filbert Steps on the eastern side of the hill where a colorful flock of green parrots can sometimes be seen. At the bottom of the steps you’ll find Levi-Strauss Plaza with its “participatory” fountain, just across from the palm tree-lined Embarcadero.
Summer Reading
Did you know that you can borrow digital and audio books for free on your library card? Just download the Hoopla and Libby Apps on your device, set up your account, and you can borrow up to six books for a month at a time. (An added advantage of Libby is that it works with Kindle.)
Opportunities
Salt Hill Journal is now accepting poetry submissions to September 5th, along with nonfiction, fiction, and art year round. https://salthilljournal.net
Parenthesis Journal is now accepting poetry submissions to September 1st, along with art and photographs. https://parenthesisjournal.com
Orison Books is now accepting entries in multiple genres for a chapbook contest to July 1st. Manuscripts should be between 25-45 pages. https://orisonbooks.com
Recently, I’ve been updating a batch of haiku and adding newer ones to the mix. The goal is to get them into publishable form, but the more immediate focus is just on relaxing and enjoying the process. There’s another factor at play, too, and that’s the benefit to be had from a regular practice that builds on itself. Time spent at the keyboard or easel (or engaged in any art form) is nurturing time for the psyche. I don’t think we can ever get too much of that.
Voices of Nature
With its de-emphasis on the “I” and emphasis on nature, traditional haiku often invite us to let go of our preoccupations, if only for a moment. The following haiku by Issa (1763-1827) is a good example of that:*
at home on a branch
racing downriver — a cricket
chirruping
This piece locates the reader in its environment with just two words, “branch” and “downriver.” Here, the cricket appears as a locus of experience, at home and singing from its perch as the world rushes by.
One of Basho’s students, who later became a nun, Chigestsu (1632-1706) was also adept at conveying the voices of nature:*
songbird riffing
outside the window — pausing
from dishwashing
Here’s another domestic scene, this one from Ryokan (1758-1831):*
sounds of pot scrubbing
mixed with the voices
of tree frogs
A good haiku offers more than an escape from our cares; it may also depict them as universal, as these lines by Chigetsu suggest:*
a murmur now,
cry of the katydid
grown old
Onitsura (1660-1738) manages to depict the music of silence in these three lines, no small feat:*
silent music
of blossoms, drifting
through air
This one, by Buson (1716-1784), isn’t exactly a voice, yet still evokes its subject:*
winter night —
the patter of rats, walking
across dishes
A follower of Pure Land Buddhism, Issa suggests a kinship between nature and faith in the following haiku. There’s something about the call of geese overhead that commands attention and announces our “place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver has put it:*
passing overhead,
a flock of wild geese, chanting
Amida Buddha’s name
Besides his well-known lines about the dreams of “lost warriors,” written in 1689 (and mentioned in my last post), Basho wrote another war-related haiku that year after visiting a shrine to the warrior Sanemori:*
how sorrowful —
under an old helmet,
cries of a cricket
Is Basho’s sorrow for the cricket and/or Sanemori? Or is it for the folly of war, in general? This piece leaves much unsaid. What does it evoke for you? For more on this subject, see Basho’s classic Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings.
*versions by jg
Haiku Writing Prompt:
Find a comfortable and safe place in nature to relax for ten minutes or more. Begin by jotting down a list of any sounds you may hear, whether natural or mechanical. Select one and then add to this an appropriate kigo or seasonal word that connotes the time of year. (Some examples of words for summer that appear in kigo dictionaries are dandelion, sunflower, lightning, summer dew, ice water, firefly, and so on.) Practice shaping the words you selected into phrases that form a viable haiku, whether in a 5-7-5 syllable format or something close to that. Limit the number of syllables to 17, more or less. Then go back and look at your lines again, making any changes or additions that clarify or add depth.
National Poetry Month began in April, 1996, spearheaded by the Academy of American Poets. Visit their website to sign up for Poem-a-Day, to order a free poster, and find out the many ways you can celebrate poetry at home and in the classroom. www.poets.org
The Beauty of Passing Things
Traditional Japanese haiku often show an appreciation for the aesthetic of transience, known as mono no aware (the beauty of passing things). The following two haiku by Basho, below, include seasonal references, evoking transience with images from the natural world:*
spring fades —
birds cry out, and tears
blur the eyes of carp
In these lines, Basho depicts nature as sentient. Birds and fish seem to be aware of spring’s passing, possibly even lamenting it. There’s an intimacy that suggests the poet shares a connection with the creatures and cycles of nature.
This next one, written at the site of a famous battle, reminds me of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. Both deal with the folly of dreams of conquest, yet Basho’s lines suggest the element of rebirth in nature and, by extension, in human nature:*
dried grasses —
all that remains of the dreams
of lost warriors
*versions by jg
Recent Publications
Humana Obscura is a print and online journal that focuses on work “where the human element is concealed but not entirely absent, aiming to revive the nature genre,” according to their website. Founded in 2020, they seek poetry, short prose, and artwork in a variety of mediums. “Notes from Snow Mountain” (Spring 2022, issue #4) is a brief account of a hiking trip on Mt. Lassen, known originally by the name Snow Mountain (or Kohm Yah-mah-nee in Maidu). www.humanaobscura.com
Canary is an online journal “that explores one’s engagement with the natural world.” They seek poetry, essays, and fiction “that address the environmental crisis with its heartbreaking loss of habitat and species.” “Sleeping Deer in the Afternoon” (Spring 2022, issue #56) depicts an encounter with a group of deer sleeping in an orchard. www.canarylitmagazine.org
cattails is an online journal that publishes “new and unpublished English haiku, senryu , tanka, and haibun with translations in the poets’ own language. “baby squirrel” (April 2022) was written several years ago, but the use of the adverb “this” suggests otherwise. www.cattailsjournal.com
Jerome Gagnon Blog 