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The Art and Craft of Poetry

In case anybody hasn’t heard, April was National Poetry Month, but any time is a good time to enjoy poetry in its various forms. Here are a few recent offerings:

Three Simple Lines: A Writers Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, by Natalie Goldberg (New World Library, 176 pages). Natalie Goldberg’s latest offering on the art and practice of writing takes her to Japan where she explores the origins of haiku among the country’s ancient temples and hidden gardens. Classic haiku by masters such as Basho, Buson, Issa, and Chiyo-ni appear in a narrative “as irresistible as a mountain stream…” says author Henry Shukman, “…and come alive in ways that still the mind, expand time, and open the heart.” As insightful as Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Writing the Landscape of Your Mind, this book reminds us of what it means to be open to growth, and how the practice of writing — and haiku, in particular —lends itself to mindfulness.

How to Write a Form Poem, by Tanya Runyon (T.S. Poetry Press). Even poets who primarily write free verse are likely to find this this “how to” book useful. It contains instructions and prompts for writing ten traditional forms, such as sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, haiku, and pantoums. Included are dozens of examples from Runyon and other poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, Natasha Trethewey, Frank O’Hara, Matsuo Basho, and Wallace Stevens. An author and teacher, Runyon has also written How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem, both of which are geared for use in classrooms. 

Accidental Gardens, by Rob Carney (Stormbird Press). This is Carney’s take on the contemplative Japanese form of haibun. First used by Basho in the 17th century, the term refers to a hybrid genre that combines haiku with prose — typically, observations such as travel logs, and sketches of people, activities, or landscapes. Basho’s Okku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior) is probably the most well-known example of the form. Comprised of four sections — 42 haibun in all — each of the short ruminations in Accidental Gardens ends with a brief poem or compelling image. Focusing on the natural world and our reckless disregard for the environment, the collection reads as “a journey through the absurdity, tragedy, and black comedy of late-stage capitalist and consumerist America,” writes author Nick Hunt. A professor of English at Utah Valley University, Carney has published seven other poetry collections.  

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Books Noted:

Black Girl, Call Home, by Jasmine Mans, is one of the most anticipated books of 2021, according O, the Oprah Magazine, and is “arresting as only spoken word artistry can be.” The publisher (Berkley Books) describes it as a “literary coming of age narrative” and “a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood.” It features many of Mans’ viral YouTube poems in print for the first time, as well as active phone numbers that readers can dial to hear her perform “bonus poems.” Poet Danez Smith has written that “Mans takes up the tools of Brooks (Gwendolyn) and Sanchez (Sonia) into her good hands and chisels us an urgent and grand work, proving why she’s the favorite of all the girls in the back of the bus.” Raised in Newark, New Jersey, Mans graduated from The University of Wisconsin Madison with a B.A. in African American Studies and currently serves as resident poet of the Newark Public Library. 

Spencer Reece, who struggled with rejection for years before his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale,was published to acclaim in 2004, now has a memoir out, The Secret Gospel of Mark: a Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). Poetry and faith are intimately linked in this saga that chronicles his battle with alcoholism, his orientation as a gay man, and his calling to the Episcopal priesthood. Chapters explore the work of mentor-poets who inspired him along the way, from Emily Dickenson and George Herbert, to Elizabeth Bishop and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others. National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon writes that Reece “brings into sharp focus a life of authentic despair and ultimate redemption…it is a tender but unforgiving, clear-sighted exposition of Christian faith.” Poet Carolyn Forche’, Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, calls it “A profound and necessary work, luminous and full of grace.”

Love Unknown: the Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, by Thomas Travasino, isn’t new — it came out in 2019 — but it’s notable for the comprehensive account it offers of this “poet’s poet.” Bishop published sparingly, but she won both the Pulitzer Prize (for Poems: North & South/A Cold Springin 1955) and the National Book Award (for her Complete Poems in 1970). Her poetry is “marked by precise description of the physical world” — much of it inspired by her extensive travels — while “her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing,” according to the Poetry Foundation. Her style is characterized by structured rhyme and a syntax that often reads more as prose than as formal verse. A selection of her work, including “The Armadillo,” can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.

In The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, author Christof Koch defines consciousness as subjective experience, “no matter how banal or exalted.”  It’s “the feeling of being alive,” he says, and speculates that it’s present in even the simplest life forms. A leader in the field of consciousness science, Koch asks the question, “How is it that a physical organ like the brain can give rise to feelings?” Arguing for a quantitative theory, he notes that science can now “detect and track the footsteps that any conscious experience leaves in the brain.” He doesn’t believe, however, that computers will ever feel. “Consciousness is not a clever hack. Experience does not arise out of computation,” he says. Nature has called his work “Invigorating…Koch tracks the ‘neural footprints’ of experience, swims off the wider shores of integrated information theory, and speculates about the ‘feeling of life itself’ in ravens, bees and octopuses —along with related ethical concerns.” (The MIT Press, 2019) 

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Amanda Gorman Shines as the Sixth, and Youngest, U.S. Inaugural Poet 

During the inaugural ceremony in Washington D.C. last month, twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman delivered her poem “The Hill We Climb” just days after the deadly insurrection there. Describing herself as “a skinny black girl, descended from slaves, and raised by a single mother,” her poem aspires to “envision a way in which our country can still come together and still heal,” she said in an article by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. Gorman, a recent Harvard graduate, was raised in Los Angeles where she sang in the youth choir and recited her poetry at St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Central L.A. “Í think a lot of times in cultures we think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with water. I think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with words, meaning that the poem was an opportunity to kind of resanctify, repurify, and reclaim, not just the Capitol Building, but American democracy and what it stands for,” she told Trevor Noah of the Daily Show. Inspiring and polished, Gorman’s performance was just about as good as it gets, at any age.

The focus on healing is shared by Richard Blanco, an openly gay Latino, who read his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural in 2013. Speaking to NBC’s Sandra Tulley, he suggested that “Poetry uses language to make us feel and think in new ways. That’s how it can help heal us — by asking questions we aren’t asking of ourselves and others, and by changing the conversation, the rhetoric, the discourse, so that we can see beyond the abstract language of sociopolitical jargon and arrive at greater truths,” said Blanco, who aims to “build bridges of empathy” with his poetry.

Maya Angelou was already a best-selling author with her candid memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” when she served as inaugural poet at the swearing in of President Bill Clinton in 1993.  Her recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning,” with its themes of inclusion and responsibility, was stirringly theatrical, calling on her training as an actor and speaker, and echoing the oral tradition of African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas. At least one critic has suggested that Angelou’s greatness is attributable to that poem, but her enduring message may be in her life as much as in those words, in her role as a black woman writer, teacher, activist, and humanitarian.

The tradition of the inaugural poem is relatively recent in U.S. history. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy was the first of four presidents to select a poet to compose and read an original poem for the inauguration. His choice of Robert Frost resulted in one of the most memorable images from that time. Standing at the podium, sunlight reflecting off his untamed white hair and the snow on the ground, Frost recited his poem, “The Gift Outright” — completely from memory. But that wasn’t the poem he’d planned on delivering. Glare from the snow prevented him from reading his original text, “Dedication, For John Kennedy His Inauguration,” composed for the occasion. Both works can be found in “The Poetry of Robert Frost” (Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1969). More recently, Miller Williams and Elizabeth Alexander have also served with distinction as inaugural poets for the second terms of Clinton and Obama. For more on this, see “Inaugural Poems in History,” www.poets.org.

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Karumi

The quality of karumi, or lightness, can be found in Basho’s haiku as early as 1667. He was twenty-three years old when he wrote the following:*

cherry blossoms

in the breeze — breaking out

in laughter 

Haruo Shirane, Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, has described karumi as “a focus on everyday subject matter, on the use of ordinary language, and on a relaxed rhythmical, seemingly artless expression.” Here the traditional topic of cherry blossoms takes on an unusually welcome aspect. Rather than contrasting the beauty of the flowers with sadness at their brevity, for instance, Basho depicts the exuberance of the moment. Is it the blossoms that have broken out in laughter or the poet? Or both? In this case, ambiguity adds to the impact of the lines.

Much haiku is celebratory in nature. An exclamatory haiku such as the one above is a good example of this. Another approach, common to the Basho school of haiku, presents two juxtaposed images, offering up a view that embraces them both. Below, a view of the garden, written near the end of Basho’s life, evokes a minimalist yet wholistic response: 

morning dew —

muddy melons

on the ground

Here there’s no trace of poetic conceit, just the pristine scene as Basho found it. In that sense, karumi may be considered not only in its literal sense as “not heavy or dark” but as possessed of a light artistic touch, allowing the reader to bring to the scene what he or she will. Even on his deathbed, Basho found an unexpected lightness:

flies everywhere —

how lucky they are to meet up

with a sick man

In the 20th century, Nakagawa Soen was a lifelong practitioner of haiku. As a literature student at Tokyo Imperial University, he wrote his thesis on Basho and later became a Zen monk and teacher. This haiku, written in 1946, presents two images pointing to the connection of ordinary things:

small plums

and dewdrops —

alive together

Although penetrating, there’s nothing heavy about these lines. Instead there’s a clarity and freshness, and a sense of happiness at the simple pleasures. We, too, are alive together with the plums and the dewdrops. How wonderful! These are the primary characteristics of karumi.

*all versions by jg

Writing Prompt

This haiku prompt is aligned with the Basho school, using juxtaposed images. The purpose isn’t to create great haiku necessarily, but to gain flexibility in different ways of observing. Try juxtaposing an image of:

  • something large with something small
  • something animate with something inanimate
  • an experience of one sense perception with one of a different sense perception
  • nature with an emotion
  • something old with something new
  • something appealing with something unappealing

Then, play around with the lines, mixing and matching them to see what possibilities come up.

Poems, for Now

Last month I was invited to join with other poets for a Zoom reading sponsored by the River Heron Review out of Bucks County, PA. Hosted by co-founders Judith Lagana and Robbin Farr, it showcased work addressing the socio-political climate that appeared in the online venue Poems for Now. The reading provided a chance to see and hear poets from around the country and offered a refreshing change from the jingoistic language so prevalent today. Kudos to all those who participated and thanks to Judith and Robbin for making it all come together. www.riverheronreview.com

How to Haiku

Thanks to editor Bruce Ross for including the haiku, “sheltering in place” in the Fall/Winter edition of Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, out of Maine (www.autumnmoonhaiku.com). The author of How to Haiku, a Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms, Ross seeks selections that “express feeling connected to nature” and that “produce a haiku moment…”

Joy Harjo Reads

As part of the Poetry Society of America’s “Reading Through the Decades” series, U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo reads How to make good baked salmon from the river, by Nora Marks Dauenhauer: https://poetrysociety.org/features/reading-through-the-decades/joy-harjo-reads-nora-marks-dauenhauer.

“On Grief in the Holidays…”

Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, speaks to Kat Chow on how she processes grief during the holidays and her rituals for the new year (NPR, 12/2/20). https://www.npr.org.

New Year Wishes

Here we are in December, wrapping up a rough year as the pandemic continues to take its toll. The light at the end of the tunnel, of course, is that there’s a vaccine on the horizon. It may not be a cure-all but it promises to save thousands of lives around the world. I’m grateful for that, and for the many gestures of generosity and courage I see and hear about every day. May this season bring hope and not just more hype, and may it be a time of light and healing as we move forward into the new year.            

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On the Road with Basho

Few poets personify the archetype of the wanderer so much as the 17th century Japanese writer Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). He developed a hybrid form, haibun, to reflect both his inner and outer journeys, alternating prose passages with three brief lines that came to be known as haiku. His travels were a way for him to keep his work fresh while also giving him a freedom he wouldn’t otherwise have had as a civil servant, scholar, or monk. In 1687, he started a solo journey that’s reflected in his travelogue, Notes for My Knapsack (Oi no kabumi). Here he describes riding his horse during a storm and stopping beside rice fields*:

winter rice fields,

my horse and I — shadows

in the rain  

Rather than rely on literary allusions to cherished sites, Basho wanted to visit them in person, and this practice gives his work veracity and a sense of immediacy as in this haiku, dated 1688 and composed while on a stay at the temple of Zenko-ji, located below Mount Obasute:

dissolving all thoughts

of the four sects — moonlight

over Mount Obasute

(The reference to sects refers to the various schools of Buddhism.)

In 1689, he embarked on a five months long journey with his friend and student, Sora, and this trip is portrayed in his most well-known work, The Narrow Road to the North (Oku no hosomichi). Moved by the turn out of his pupils to see the pair off in their little boat, he composed these memorable lines: 

grasses are fading,

birds are chattering — and tears

blur the eyes of fishes

Early on, they paused at a grotto at Back View Falls (Urami-no-taki), where they sat in meditation behind the waterfall, still considered a sacred pilgrimage site today:

hearing water fall

from the inside out — entering

summer’s temple

In his final years he visited Ueno, Nara, Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka, among other places, meeting with students, and continuing to cultivate the notion of lightness, or karumi. In Osaka, he became ill and died there in the fall of 1694. These are among his last lines, reflecting his dedication to haiku, renga, and life on the road: 

on the vast way —

not tilling the same small plot

year after year

worn and ill —

this traveling heart lingers

in autumn fields

*all haiku versions by jg

New Poems and Haiku

Thanks to the editors of the River Heron Review’s Poems, for Now, for selecting an ekphrastic poem inspired by the early Chinese painting, Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute: The Story of Lady Wenji. The painted scroll (artist unknown) and poems by Lui Shang still resonate today with themes of war and its consequences.Thanks also to the editors of the upcoming Buddhist Haiku Anthology: The Awakened One, to the editors of Cattails, a journal from the United Haiku and Tanka Society, and to Wales Haiku Journal. 

The Fires

As I write this, over a million acres have burned on the west coast, several people have died, and thousands have evacuated. The scope of the devastation is almost incomprehensible. My prayers go out to the victims of this tragedy and their families, and to all those men and women who are working to save property and lives — firefighters, healthcare workers, law enforcement, and so many others — our prayers and gratitude for your service.

The fires aren’t limited to California, Oregon, and Washington. Conditions stemming from global warming have contributed to “climate fires” in other states such as Colorado, Idaho, and Alaska. There are currently 97 large fires “that have burned 4.7 million acres across several states,” according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In Oregon, which has been particularly hard hit, the Mayor of Ashland, John Stromberg, has set up a website for contributions to help the recovery process. It can be found at ashland.or.us/ashlandresponse.

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Recent Books

Urgency and Tradition in Jericho Brown’s Latest Collection

One of the traditions referred to in Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is poetical — he’s writing in the lyric tradition, short poems that express intense feelings about his experiences as a black, gay man from the south.  (He’s currently an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta.)  Another is political, echoing those writers before him who have depicted the pain and injustice African Americans have experienced in this country for hundreds of years.  In their citation for the Pulitzer, the judges stated that his lyrics “combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”  This is especially apparent in the title poem, which compares the lives of at-risk black men to the brief lives of flowers, and in Bullet Points, both of which have been widely circulated since the violent deaths of George Floyd and others at the hands of police.  Bullet Points “was not born out of a sense of protest from me.  It’s a poem born out of a sense of desperation that comes from a fact in my life.  I don’t want anybody saying that I killed myself if I’m ever in police custody,” Brown has said (The Guardian, June 5, 2020).  Demonstrating that the personal is the political, these poems “question why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater…”, the publishers have written.  “Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither — or survive.”  The Academy of American Poets offers lesson plans for poems about social justice, including The Tradition; for more information, visit their site at www.poets.org.

In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forche’

In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993), poet Carolyn Forche’ gathered the work of more than 140 twentieth-century poets who bear witness to war, imprisonment, torture, censorship, or exile, defending “the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion” (Mason Gazette).  The landmark anthology appeared twelve years after the second collection of her own poetry, The Country Between Us (Jonathan Cape, 1981), which was based on her experiences in El Salvador in the 1970s with Amnesty International.  Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Seidenbaum observed that those poems “chronicle the awakening of a political consciousness and are themselves acts of commitment: to concepts and persons, to responsibility, to action.”  The 1981 Lamont Poetry Selection, it was also the winner of the James Laughlin Award.  Now, in her most recent volume, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), Forche’s unflinching gaze takes in landscapes from five continents, scarred by the effects of violence and environmental degradation.  In The Museum of Stones, the first poem in the collection, the poet gathers images of stones from “ruins of choirs and shipyards…from temples and tombs…stone from the tunnel lined with bones…stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown…”, curating them on the page with the dedication of an anthropologist.  Contemplative and elegiac, the poems invite us “to consider the sometimes unrecognized, though always felt, ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know,” writes Hilton Als in the New Yorker.  A selection of Forche’s poems can be found on the website of The Academy of American Poets, along with lesson plans; for more information, visit www.poets.org.

Behind the Mask: New Poetry Anthology by Humboldt Poets

News stories about the pandemic that cite the alarming rise of cases around the country can leave you feeling depressed, if not hopeless.  An abundance of facts and figures often leaves out the human element.  A new anthology of poetry: Behind the Mask, 40 Quarantine Poems from Humboldt County, edited by David Holper and Anne Fricke, addresses that gap.  Holper, who is Poet Laureate of Eureka, CA, says that “the book captures the range of emotions that many people are feeling during this time,” according to an article from The Lost Coast Outpost (www.lostcoastoutpost.com).  The new book evolved from a Facebook group, “Poetry on the Edge.”  After the site had accumulated over 100 poems, Holper thought it would be a good idea to collect them in a book and solicited further submissions, asking poet Anne Fricke to help with the project.  “It’s frightening— the virus, the economics — some people are depressed by it,” he said.  “I think you’ll see that in some of the poems.  But some are also whimsical.  We tried to include a range.”  Behind the Mask is available to purchase in print or can be downloaded free from the above site.

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Poets on the Pandemic

A new anthology, Together in this Sudden Strangeness, edited by Alice Quinn and due as an ebook by Knopf in June, collects the work of over eighty poets who express their anxieties about life and writing during the pandemic.  Ada Limon, among those featured in the collection, observes that she initially felt “flattened and silenced” by the shutdown, according to a report on the site www.https://voalearningenglish.com.  In her recent poem, “The End of Poetry,” (New Yorker, April 27, 2020), she lists a series of subjects that she found “she could no longer access” during these uncertain times (see “Writing Prompts”).  Some of the other poets included in the new book are Major Jackson, Amit Majmudar, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield, Jenny Xie, and Julia Guez.  Poems cover topics such as parenting, grief, and the loneliness of social distancing.

Pandemic Haiku: Volume One, an anthology initiated by a haiku posted on Facebook by Iowa writer and therapist Robin Schinnow, is one of the best-selling books on Amazon in its category, according to a May 16th article in the Des Moines Register.  “People’s feelings, questions, and support are an important part of recording this event,” said editorial coordinator Cathie Gebhart, who helped produce the book containing over 100 haiku.  All proceeds from sales go to the Outreach Program of Des Moines, Iowa.

Native American Poetry Anthologies

Joy Harjo has been appointed to a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate.  An enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, she’s working on an anthology of Native American poetry along with an online resource featuring biographies and recordings of Native poets, entitled, “Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples’ Poetry.”

The first anthology in thirty years of Native poets “exclusively from the United States,” New Poets of Native Nations (Greywolf Press, 2018) contains the work of twenty-one indigenous authors.  Edited by Heid E. Erdich, an Ojibwe writer and scholar enrolled at Turtle Mountain, it won the American Book Award and has been described by The Washington Post as “A wonderful introduction to the diverse landscape of native voices.”

Michael McClure (1932–2020)

Michael McClure, who participated in the legendary San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 that helped launch the west coast literary movement of the Beat Poets, died May 4th at the age of 87.  A former Playwright in Residence at San Francisco’s Magic Theater, McClure is the author of the controversial play, “The Beard,” as well as thirty books, and is co-author of the song, “Mercedes Benz,” popularized by Janis Joplin.  (A selection of his haiku can be found online at Terebess Asia Online).  Robert Creeley said of his work that he “shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D. H. Lawrence,” to which might also be added the names of Basho and Chuang Tzu.  In her recent tribute, “Remembering Michael McClure, Poet, Teacher, Friend,” historian Rebecca Solnit writes, “He helped transform the culture.  He was an opener of doors and a builder of bridges.”  www.https://lithub.com

Buddhism and the Beats

Buddhism was the primary philosophical foundation for several of the Beats, a term coined to describe the free-spirited literary innovators who came into prominence in the mid-1950s.  Jack Kerouac studied Buddhism and wrote about it in “Some of the Dharma,” Gary Snyder lived as a Zen monk in Japan, Michael McClure practiced tantric yoga and Zen, Allen Ginsberg and Diane Di Prima embraced both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Bob Kaufman converted in his later years, and Philip Whalen was ordained as a Zen Priest in the Soto school, serving as Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco.  Despite being initially disparaged by some (but not all) in the literary establishment, the work of the Beats helped to introduce the principles of Buddhism into mainstream American culture and broadened the range and style of American poetry — notably, linking it to the breath in free verse and haiku.

Philip Whalen is one of the lesser known figures of the Beats.  A participant in the landmark Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955 (along with Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and Gary Snyder), he lived for a time as a monk in Kyoto, Japan, at the San Francisco Zen Center, and later as head monk of Dharma Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  By the early 1990s he was nearly blind, but that didn’t stop him from welcoming practitioners to the Hartford Street meditation hall.  His poetry appeared in The New American Poetry 1945 – 1960, edited by Donald Allen (Grove Press, NY, 1999), in Overtime: Selected Poems by Philip Whalen (Penguin, NY, 1999), and in The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, Conn, 2007).  Many of his poems function as a form of quasi-meditation, honoring the moments of everyday life while framing that within the larger historical and philosophical context of Buddhism.  A selection of his work that appeared posthumously in Lion’s Roar illustrates this point (Poems & Zen Talks of Philip Whalen).  David Kherdian puts it this way: “Whalen has managed to espouse the religious principles of Zen Buddhism without renouncing the world around him, retaining a humorous, whimsical balance in his poems, and mixing the pleasures of California life with contemplation…”  (Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists).

English romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley, American Transcendentalists Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and early Asian writers such as Han Shan, Du Fu, and Dogen, were the literary forebears of Whalen and his contemporaries, notably Gary Snyder.  In Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Snyder’s translations of the work of Han Shan marry the spirit of the originals with his background as a scholar, monk, mountain climber, fire lookout, and trail builder.  Reflecting a deep connection to nature, his poetry and essays bring the principle of reverence for life (ahimsa or non-harming) into the ecological movement.  Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 collection, Turtle Island (New Directions), he has written that, “One of the major challenges facing our large current human populations is what role we should play in regard to the many thousands of other living beings we share the planet with.”  Now aged 90, Snyder is a long-time resident of the Sierra foothills in California, near Nevada City.

The late Michael McClure’s work also reflects a profound awareness of nature, especially animal nature, and this was evident early on when he presented his poem For the Death of 100 Whales at the Six Gallery reading (he was 22 at the time).  The author of fourteen volumes of poetry, more than twenty plays, two novels, and four collections of essays, his poetry “combined spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and “body language” to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal,” according to the Poetry Foundation.  In an interview with Rebecca Foresmen in the New Yorker (January 14, 2013), he mentions that he “practiced tantric yoga in my early life, and now practice Zen to Hua-Yen, or Flower Garden Buddhism…a practice intended to elucidate the actual moment of Buddha’s enlightenment.”  Many of his Zen poems can be found in the volume, Touching the Edge, Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha (Shambala Publications, 1999).  A recipient of the Obie Award for Best Play (The Beard) and the Alfred Jarry Award, he co-authored the song, Mercedes Benz, with Janis Joplin.

Known primarily for his novels, Jack Kerouac was also a poet, haikuist, and Buddhist scholar.  With the publication in 1957 of his second novel, On the Road, he became an “overnight sensation” and the key figure of the Beats.  This was followed two years later by The Dharma Bums, which was dedicated to Han Shan, hermit poet of the Tang dynasty.  Another semi-autobiographical tale, this one centered on his quest for spiritual awakening while on a mountain climbing trip with Gary Snyder.  According to Allen Ginsberg (Negative Capability: Kerouac’s Buddhist Ethic, Tricycle, Fall, 1992), Kerouac was introduced to Buddhism through A Buddhist Bible, a collection of Buddhist sutras translated by Dwight Goddard that presents the Four Noble Truths and the three “marks” of existence: suffering, impermanence, and anatman or “no permanent self.”  This was the impetus for Kerouac’s collection of meditations, Some of the Dharma, begun in 1953 and published by Viking in 1997.  He was awarded a posthumous honorary degree in 2007 by the University of Massachusetts Lowell (his hometown) and his Collected Poems was published in 2012 by Library of America.

Besides Jack Kerouac of On the Road fame, Allen Ginsberg is probably the most recognizable of the Beat writers.  Born in Newark, New Jersey, he attended Columbia University in the 1940s, studying briefly with critic and teacher Lionel Trilling. While living in Manhattan, he met Kerouac, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), and Gregory Corso (Gasoline Alley), who also came to be associated with the Beats.  Relocating to San Francisco in the mid-1950s with his life partner Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg read his declamatory poem, Howl, at the Six Gallery event to much acclaim.  Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was present at the reading, recognized Ginsberg’s potential, sending him a telegram the following day that read: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” (echoing Emerson’s words to Walt Whitman).  When Ferlinghetti went on to publish Howl in 1956 as a paperback under his City Lights imprint, the publicity from the subsequent obscenity trial (which exonerated Ferlinghetti) all but assured Ginsberg’s role as one of the main voices for an alternative literature movement.  His interest in Eastern religion prompted travel to India, where he met His Holiness The Dalai Lama and His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche.  On his return, he became a student of Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.  He also served on the board of Maitri, an Aids hospice in San Francisco.  Although Ginsberg was shunned by some in the east coast literary establishment, his collection, The Fall of America, won the National Book Award and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Diane Di Prima attended Swathmore College but dropped out to pursue writing in Manhattan in the late 1950s, editing the newspaper The Floating Bear (with LeRoi Jones) and co-founding the New York Poet’s Theater.  Her first volume of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was published by Totem Press in 1958.  Relocating to the West Coast in the early 1960s, she studied with Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center and, upon his death, with Chogyam Trungpa in Boulder, where she taught for several years at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.  In the 1990s, she became a student of Lama Tarchin Rinpoche, the late Tibetan Dzochen master.  Her poetry blends political, personal, and spiritual themes in an intimate, stream-of-consciousness mode.  “I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally,” she has said.  “I wanted everything that was possible to a woman in a female body…”  A fictionalized story of her early life, Memoirs of a Beatnik, was published by Olympia Press in 1969, and her selected poems, Pieces of a Song, was published by City Lights in 1990.  This was followed by a memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, published by Viking in 2001.  A recipient of the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement (2006) and a former Poet Laureate of San Francisco (2009), Di Prima has lived in the city for over thirty years.  Now 85, she continues to write and has taken up watercolor painting.

Bob Kaufman was one of the finest poets — and one of the least known — to come out of the Beat movement.  Regarded as the “Black Rimbaud” in France, his work exemplifies the ideal of free-flowing spontaneity valued by Kerouac and others, in part because much of his poetry was composed orally to jazz accompaniment and later written down.  Born and raised in Louisiana (one of thirteen children), he attended the New School in New York City, moving to San Francisco in 1958.  A convert to Buddhism and a founder of the influential poetry publication “Beatitude” with Allen Ginsberg and others, he published three volumes of poetry in his lifetime: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions, 1965), The Golden Sardine (City Lights Books, 1967), and Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978 (New Directions, 1981).  Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he took a vow of silence, not speaking until the end of the Vietnam War (Poetry Foundation).

 

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Silence

We began to notice the silence in the first few days after the shutdown.  There was no longer the white noise of traffic from the nearby state highway, and the comings and goings of cars on our block had tapered off.  Something seemed different in the call of birds, too, as if they were testing this new quiet, listening to the resonance of their songs.

Walking to the local market yesterday, I found myself sauntering — a practice, and a word, that seems to have gone out of fashion.  It’s not so much about the need to hurry to my destination these days as it is about enjoying the scenery along the way.   The hills are still green.  A few horses graze below the ridge.  Roses are in bloom, and the scent of flowering citrus blossoms is in the air.  Does silence have a scent?  Well, no, not exactly.  But it permeates the scent, just as it permeates my thoughts.

I hope the current shutdown helps to “flatten the curve” of COVID infections — that we’ll all be back to work, again, soon, that schools can safely reopen, and business as usual will return to our communities.  But this may not happen as soon as we wish, at least not entirely.  So I also hope that something of this moment stays with us, something more than uncertainty and fear.  That we’ll listen for the silence that underscores political messaging, birdcalls, and the sound of our own breathing.

Writing Prompt: Settling in with Haiku

Haiku have a way of occurring out of the blue, but you may want to try a “haiku walk” in your neighborhood or in a local park to refresh your senses and mind to what’s going on around you — to nature “as it is,” minus the usual preoccupations.  In Japan, these walks are known as ginkoo (gin -singing, praising, poem-making; koo – walking).  You may want to take a notebook and pen along so that you can jot down a few key words about your experiences.  These may serve the basis of one or more haiku later.

If that’s not possible, list some of the memorable places you’ve visited.  What was the outstanding thing, event, or experience about your visit to each of them?  Compose a haiku about one or more of these places, incorporating a seasonal image, or possibly a reference to your feelings or state of mind at the time.

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Poetry of the Pandemic

The first poem I read about the pandemic was written by Lynn Unger, San Francisco Bay Area minister and author of Blessing of the Bread, and it’s still the one that resonates with me most.  Pandemic originally appeared on her blog and later was the subject of an article in the Chicago Tribune, March 13th.  Reflecting on the practice of social distancing, Unger offers that it’s not something we do to remove ourselves emotionally from others, but to affirm a sense of compassion for each other.  It’s a message I’d yet to hear from Washington, and I don’t think we can hear it often enough.

Poets have written about epidemics in the past — Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) wrote A Litany in a Time of Plague, John Davies wrote The Triumph of the Dead, and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote The Plague, to name just a few examples.  More recently, Rafael Campo (1964 – ) wrote Silence = Death about the Aids epidemic and Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of the U.K., wrote Lockdown.

Not Shutting Down in a Shut Down

The demands of sheltering in place can be daunting.  “Feelings of anxiety can creep up when you’re sheltering in place,” according to Jei Africa, Director of the Behavioral Health and Recovery Services at the Marin County Health and Human Services Department.  In a recent story in the Marin Independent Journal, he’s quoted as saying, “You could have trouble sleeping, not feeling like eating or eating too much, shortness of breath, heart racing or feeling irritable or impatient.”  Keeping stress levels down is important, and this can be done by “controlling the things you can control,” he says.  His advice: “Exercise, limit exposure to news and social media, keep in contact with friends and family, eat healthy, get enough sleep and make sure to have a solid connection with your main health care provider.”

Saving City Lights

Like other small businesses that are suffering from the economic impact of the health crisis, the futures of many independent bookstores are threatened, including the legendary City Lights bookstore and publishing company in San Francisco’s North Beach.  Founded by poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it helped to launch the careers of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lenore Kandel, and many others.  A recent message from Elaine Katzenberger, Publisher and CEO of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, described City Lights as “a steady beacon…there whenever we need a place to feel at home with our fellow humans, their ideas and aspirations, their curiosities and their wild dreams of a new beginning.”  The landmark store, opened in 1953, has been closed since March 16th and currently has no way to generate sales.  The good news is that a GoFundMe campaign exceeded the initial goal of $300,000 in just a few days, raising over $400,000.  The store will go on, Katzenberger says, at least for now.  “Knowing that City Lights is beloved is one thing, but to have that love manifest itself with such momentum and indomitable power, well, that’s something I don’t quite know how to find words for.”

Acknowledging Grief

In an interview with Amapour & Co. on PBS (available on YouTube), grief and dying expert David Kessler observes that many people are now grieving for the loss of loved ones but, in addition, we’re also mourning for the world we’ve lost.  “Everything has changed,” he says, and “it’s sinking into us that next week the world’s not going back to normal.”  Acknowledging grief over our losses is important, he adds.  “If we name it, it allows us to be sad, to cry, to feel those emotions…suppressing them isn’t going to work.”  His most recent book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief (Scribners, 2019) explains that these six stages aren’t linear, and that in acknowledging our felt experience, we can begin to find meaning, and healing, in that.  The process is deeply personal one, and what’s meaningful for one person may not be for another.  For Kessler, it comes in the form of helping others through his lectures and writing.

West Marin Review

Thanks to West Marin Review of Point Reyes Station, California, and especially to co-founder Madeleine Corson, whose attention to my poem Temple Snow helped it come to life.  Their website describes the journal as “influenced by the natural beauty of the land and water, and the surrounding agricultural lands and open space.”  A collaborative effort with Point Reyes Books and Black Mountain Circle, the latest issue is due shortly.  https://www.westmarinreview.org

 

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The Comfort of Haiku

The practice of haiku cultivates awareness of what is, and this awareness can offer a kind of psychological comfort for what ails us. Shiki, who suffered from tuberculosis, rarely addressed his condition directly in haiku.  Yet, his verses provided him with a more expansive lens with which to view his condition and the world, one that encompassed both light and dark.  I like this one:*

winter cold —

gulping medicine, saving

the tangerine for later

Here, the tangerine suggests a healing purpose as much as whatever formula Shiki was ingesting: beauty is medicine, too, and so is color, shape, and texture.  And then, what a comfort to hold a small, perfectly ripe tangerine, to peel it, expose the pulp, release the pungent scent, and taste the juicy tartness.  Even on his sickbed, Shiki noted the allure of all this.

African-American novelist Richard Wright (“Native Son”) was introduced to haiku through the translations of R. H. Blythe in 1959 and, during the last eighteen months of his life, he wrote hundreds of them.  Struggling to recover from amoebic dysentery and often bedridden, “he was never without his haiku binder under his arm,” writes his daughter, Julia, in the introduction to Wright’s collection, “Haiku, The Last Poems of an American Icon,” (Arcade, 2012).  “I believe his haiku were a self-developed antidote against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath…”, she observes.  Others have suggested that his passion for haiku was something more than therapeutic, that it offered the structure (and brevity) for deep contemplation, and for transcending the political and racial boundaries of his work.  I think that both of these suggestions are probably true — that writing haiku kept the streams of Wright’s creative imagination alive during a time of stress and suffering, and helped to allieve that suffering, as well.

*version by j.g.