poetry

Twenty One

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The following prose poem is from my book PLUM BLOSSOMS, an 81 poem narrative about the peregrinations through Japan of the banished Zen monk Master Ko

a path through woods banked in drifts, glazed, up the hillside as the snow covered red tile roof comes and goes, skewed by green snow laden limbs

with the dim light of the back dock leading them on

stomping feet up shoveled steps,

dog barks and a portly balding man says well well well, so you have come back

so i have, says master ko

i do beg your pardon, sir, i spoke to the dog

yet here i am, says master ko, and you, too, professor, here you are

dog barks up at one and again at the other

you have me at a disadvantage, says the professor

many students, one professor, says master ko

ah, so it is

you have exchanged the lecture hall for the refectory, philosophy for recipes

so i have, so i have; less, i find, is more, nothingness is the kernel of the infinite

dog nudges master ko’s hand, but the abstruse remains

a look, then: so who is this fellow, dawg, that you have brought to my door, asks the professor, and invites them in for oatmeal and eggs

and so,  as the morning wears, in come women, sprightly or stooped,  who pad quietly in to eat and go

with rosy cheeked children well in tow

and old men with knobby red knuckles and broken nails, the frail veined hands cradling

chipped cups large and small of blue and black and red and yellow while

fuzzy headed novices scurry about swabbing tables and sweeping floors

oatmeal and eggs and white plastic spoons with

the lopeared mongrel asleep in the pantry, muzzle upon 

his crisscrossed paws

ladling thick cooked oats into offered bowls

gapped tooth grin

belly full

slapping a knee

TWO POEMS

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american centigrade

lean dogs crisscrunching backyard paths

frozen puddles of December rain blueblack

night …

a satellite crosses the southwestern sky

standing on the snowbanked

tumble of riverroar

boulders grumble midstream

jetstream desolate unseen

american centigrade

too much colder than farenheit

the litter of frozen crows, bleak blueblack nights …

someone saying the ol’ mercury dipped

down to 9 degrees just before sun up

jumble of ghetto poor drugsters

gamble and preen maelstrom

havoc undreamed

nights black and blue

frozen puddles of December rain

lean dogs crisscrunching back alley trash

1985 Brightwood

ilwaco wash

stiff winds down the jetty

whipping rain

rusting wrecks off disappointment

ilwaco wash

gray weathered trunks, masts

lapping dark pebbles

streaming crick cold in dense fog

through banks of white snow

otter tracks and deer droppings

damn, she says as

her pink slacks

droop down stumbling up the

drunken concrete steps

of dimaggio’s fisherman’s wharf

half-masted and damn, she says the

boozy old blond

oh damn

the pink slack salmon

lapping narrow ankles

bareassed

she stoops to retrieve

her pretty pink mudsullied pants

gathering in ilwaco wash

down the jetty of stiff winds

whipping rain

rusting the wrecks of disappointment

1995 Brightwood

A SQUAT PEN

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Seamus Heaney (pronounce the name as you will, ‘Hay’nee or ‘Hee’nee, the poet will not object; no, but perhaps a smile, a shrug, everyone has their way, he might say, but does not), an Irishman born and raised on the family farm near Castledawson northwest of Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the spring of 1939 published his first book of poetry in 1966. Death Of A Naturalist proved an auspicious beginning for the man. His perceptive eye of both the rural landscape and the people working that land conjured up images that became exquisite linguistic phrasing and compelling shades of meaning announcing the arrival of a master.

Born a Catholic in a country dominated ruthlessly by Protestants, he earned a degree in English Literature from Queen’s University in Belfast and subsequently his license to teach. He taught at various Catholic schools, was introduced to the poetry of Peter Kavanaugh and never looked back. He clung to his life in Belfast until 1972. ‘The Troubles’ of 1971, the murders and bombings, the hate and invective finally moved him to a cottage south of Dublin.

Heaney always considered himself an Irishman, and it was the heavy thumb of the United Kingdom as much as the violence which moved him south. When told he was to be included in an anthology of British poets, he politely refused the offer; and later, after fame had elevated him sufficiently, he was offered the post of Britain’s poet laureate which he also turned down.

‘Digging’ is as good an introduction to Heaney’s work as one might want. The descriptives ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial’ are often bandied about in literary matters. The first is easiest thought of as ‘rural,’ and the latter as ‘urban.’ Denotations aside, provincial often carries a pejorative taint of uneducated and backwards while parochial is thought of as intellectual and modern.

Heaney, with his themes of the country and working people, might be labeled provincial; but the man was an intellectual and his poetry linguistically deft and thematically complex. He is often contrasted with Yeats who was the intellectual, who would not deem to mingle with the hoi-polloi. Heaney, the poet, never stopped being also a teacher. He met and mingled and translated perceptions into that rare creation, poetry that squeezes the heart and moves the soul.

Below is a link to Heaney reading from his early poem ‘Digging.’ Though iambic pentameter is generally used, the meter and rhyme provides only a subtle structure on which the theme of the poem is built through imagery and poetics.

In a later poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney delves into the relationships that brew when abstraction contends with phenomenon. He speaks of the house his father built and that house becomes a metaphor that aptly describes the body of work that the poet has created.

The house that he had planned

‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know,’

A paradigm of rigour and correctness, Coleraine

Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,

Stood firmer than ever for its own idea

Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

His work has a rare narrative quality. Selected Works, 1966 – 1987 reads like a truncated novel that yet maintains its coherency and thematic power. The same can be said of each of his separate books. The man was a storyteller who probed deeper both objectively and subjectively with his poetry than most stories allow. And also, in Seeing Things, extinction, that of others and his own, comes to be addressed.

When light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond

Where wind got saltier, the day more hurried

Out in mid-channel between the pointed poles

That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.

EMPTY HEAD, OPEN HAND

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Begin with a ubiquitous story of tea: The professor visited the master to test his understanding of zen. The Master offered tea. As the tea steeped, cups were placed. The professor went on explaining his visit, explaining zen, explaining Buddhism and its import in Japanese life. The master lifted the pot and leaned to pour tea for the professor. As the cup filled, the professor became quiet. As tea began to run over the table and onto the tatami, the professor could no longer contain himself. Stop, he cried. Stop, it’s full, it’s full. The master withdrew the pot, setting it carefully onto a trivet. Just so, he said. 

Lyn Hejinian (1941 – 2024)

The brain of a human contains 86 billion nerve cells. Unlike a tin pail filled with water, sensations, perceptions, conceptions will never ‘fill’ the brain. Consider the man, like the professor, who is full of himself. The metaphor describes a person who has an exaggerated notion of self worth. Egocentricity is his stock and trade.  

Empty headed is another metaphor used to indicate a person who does not think before he acts and so often behaves impulsively and mistakenly. The metaphor often suggests an unintelligent person, though behavior is not necessarily related to intelligence. 

Many 19th century psychologists subscribed to Sherlock Holmes’ notion that the brain was a vessel whose volume was finite so best not to clutter it with nonsense.  

The cup of tea suggests the metaphor rather than the physical fact; and the professor might be described as empty headed despite his discourse. 

The master might also smile at the notion described above of empty headed. He would no doubt say that an empty head is just the thing. One cannot add to a full head. The metaphor has morphed from an impulsive person who acts without thinking to an intuitive person who acts without thinking. 

Consider poetry. E. E. Cummings, perhaps, a good place to start, a poem titled Since feeling is First: 

since feeling is first both 

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things 

will never wholly kiss you; 

wholly to be a fool 

while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 

and kisses are a better fate 

than wisdom 

lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry 

– the best gesture of my brain is less than 

your eyelids’ flutter which says 

we are for each other; then 

laugh, leaning back in my arms 

for life’s not a paragraph 

And death i think is no parenthesis 

This is not, obviously, a Shakespearian sonnet. This is: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?  

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.  

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. 

Consider: The dog ate the car. Though syntax and grammar are correct, diction has led us astray. Though understandable, the words make no sense. The reader might even feel somewhat used: the brain reads ‘cat,’ does a double take and so reads ‘car.’ 

If we write: the dog eating the car left spilt milk on the kitchen stool pigeons flying overhead; and then change the shape of the line to: 

the dog eating the car 

left spilt milk on the 

tumbled stool 

pigeons flying overhead 

What results is jumbled syntax and an open ended poem (of sorts) that invites (or perhaps repels) the reader into the process rather than closing him or her, as the case may be, out (slam). 

Shakespeare’s sonnet does not invite comment about form or grammar or syntax or diction. One may reflect, but the poem is a closed book. 

Poet, essayist, and educator Lyn Hejinian became the leading figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s which supported experimental and avant-garde poetics. She became more concerned with the specific issue of openess in both language and life after the death of her daughter-in-law at a young age. She rejected the notion of closure and thought that inclusion and acceptance (the open hand) were imperative to facing both the travails of daily life and writing words. 

In her essay ‘The Rejection of Closure,’ she writes: The ‘open text’ is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.

The open hand and the empty head are not two things.