Category: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry is my bag

Language Hat’s posting of a poem from the blog of the nine-year-old Julia Mayhew got me thinking about the role that strong parental support, and attention from adults generally, played in my own poetic career. It all started with the Christian Science Monitor’s annual contest for children’s poetry when I was seven years old: I got five dollars for a poem, five more for the accompanying picture, and best of all, my big brother DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I think it was the discovery of one thing my older brother didn’t excel at that really got me going, though the money was nice, too. The opening lines of my first poem, “The Elephant,” balanced understatement and redundancy:

The elephant, not all that hairy,
Stomps around on all four feet.

What’s great about poems by kids, of course, is how fresh, direct and kinetic the imagery can be. I was into my early teens, I think, before I started working more self-consciously on form and style. I remember one break-through poem that I wrote around the age of 14:

Tears on the plaster cheeks:
The ancient meditation mourned?
Uncross your legs, Buddha,
Come see the willow blossoms where they bloom.

– which is interesting too because it shows that even before I knew diddly about Buddhism or Daoism, I was already inclined in the latter direction.

I was working with an adult mentor, Jack McManis, by this point, so in retrospect I guess it’s not surprising that a bit of Jack’s strong emphasis on word music was already showing through. Later that same year, I closed a poem on transplanting cattail tubers with a stanza that pleased me not merely for its sound and imagery, but for the vatic tone – something I continue to strive for 25 years later:

I have seen a sea of cattail reeds
Rippling in the sun, rooted
In the wonderfully wet,
Whistling like the pipes of Pan
Over a broad water.

Of course, that was a good decade before the debut of the Internet, to say nothing of blogs. But my brothers and I did publish a zine of sorts, a natural history quarterly for which we had 35 subscribers, including some folks we didn’t even know. We were part of the Xerox revolution! That’s when I really learned how to write (and draw, and do calligraphy): my dad taught me the principles of good, clear prose composition in two hours. Given the kind of indifferent student I was in school, if I’d waited for my English teachers to teach me how to write, I doubt I ever would’ve learned.

So I’m all for kids writing blogs. One of the things that really impresses me about Julia Mayhew’s writing is the ease with which she assumes other personas. I don’t recall my own interest in dramatic monologue going nearly so far back. Of the poems currently on Mayhew’s index page, my favorite is this one:

I AM A BAG

I am a bag,filled with dirty
garments and when people
pick me up I feel like I am
going to split in half,little
people as big as me
stick their head in,yuck!
Their breath smells bad.
When big people come
they pull away little people
I think you call them bubies
or bibies or babies or
something like that,oh no!
I see bibies or babies in front
of me,Is there a nose plug?
YUCK!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Treasures of the snow

Some mornings I like to devote to reading rather than writing, feeling that since reading itself is chief among the acts of the imagination, it cannot be an entirely healthy thing day after day to employ my most creative hours mainly in the production of my own words. The structure and phrasing of the foregoing sentence may already suggest to the subtler reader in which era I have spent my morning. I started for some reason with Andrew Marvell, who writes so engagingly about gardens and the mind:

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade….
(“The Garden”)

*

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the Fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure,
Where Nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclos’d within the Gardens square
A dead and standing pool of Air:
And a more luscious Earth for them did knead,
Which stupifi’d them while it fed.
The Pink grew then as double as his Mind;
The nutriment did change the kind….
(“The Mower Against Gardens”)

Then I decided to try and find poems more appropriate to the season. In English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries, winter is usually portrayed in a negative light, symbolizing either frigidity and lack of feeling –

Shee’s but an honest whore that yields, although
She be as cold as ice, as pure as snow…
(Sir John Suckling, “Against Fruition”)

or the decrepitude associated with advanced age, as in Shakespeare’s famous 73rd sonnet:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang….

Both sets of meanings are at work in the following poem by John Donne, which I remembered too late to share on St. Lucy’s Day. But in fact it is a solstice poem, since before the reform of the calendar the solstice fell on December 13.

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,
Being the Shortest Day

‘Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
Were I a man, that I were one,
I needs must know; I should preferre,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
At this time to the Goat is runne
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

The pseudonymous Restoration-era poet Ephelia makes novel use of winter imagery at the beginning of an invitation to Platonic love, which is worth quoting in full for its novel subject matter, I think. (The complete text of Ephelia’s book, Female Poems On several Occasions, is thankfully now online. I found this poem however in Kissing The Rod: an Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, edited by Germaine Greer, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988.)

To Phylocles, inviting him to Friendship

1.
Best of thy Sex! if Sacred Friendship can
Dwell in the Bosom of inconstant Man;
As cold, and clear as Ice, as Snow unstain’d,
With Love’s loose Crimes unsully’d, unprofan’d.

2[.]
Or you a Woman, with that Name dare trust,
And think to Friendship’s Ties, we can be just;
In a strict League, together we’l combine,
And Friendship’s bright Example shine.

3.
We will forget the Difference of Sex,
Nor shall the World’s rude Censure us Perplex:
Think Me all Man: my Soul is Masculine,
And Capable of as great Things as Thine.

4.
I can be Gen’rous, Just, and Brave,
Secret, and Silent, as the Grave;
And if I cannot yield Relief,
I’l Sympathize in all thy Grief.

5.
I will not have a Thought from thee I’l hide,
In all my Actions, Thou shalt be my Guide;
In every Joy of mine, Thou shalt have share,
And I will bear a part in all thy Care.

6.
Why do I vainly Talk of what we’l do?
We’l mix our Souls, you shall be Me, I You;
And both so one, it shall be hard to say,
Which is Phylocles, which Ephelia.

7.
Our Ties shall be strong as the Chains of Fate,
Conqu’rors, and Kings our Joys shall Emulate;
Forgotten Friendship, held at first Divine,
T’ its native Purity we will refine.

Some of Ephelia’s poems in a more romantic vein were equally unconventional, such as “To one that asked me why I lov’d J.G,” which contains the immortal line, “And yet I love this false, this worthless Man.” Its opening lines contain a brief, neutral reference to winter weather:

Why do I Love? go, ask the Glorious Sun
Why every day it round the world doth Run:
Ask Thames and Tyber, why they ebb and flow:
Ask Damask Roses why in June they blow:
Ask Ice and Hail, the reason, why they’re Cold:
Decaying Beauties, why they will grow Old:
They’l tell thee, Fate, that every thing doth move,
Inforces them to this, and me to Love….

This précis of Nature’s unknowable order may owe something to the monumental achievement of 17th century English literature, the King James Bible – specifically, Job:

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?
or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,
Which I have reserved against the time of trouble,
against the day of battle and war?
By what way is the light parted,
which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?
Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters,
or a way for the lightning of thunder;
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is;
on the wilderness, wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground;
and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?
Hath the rain a father?
or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice?
and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
and the face of the deep is frozen.
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,
or loose the bands of Orion?
(Job 38:22-31)

Of course, if all else fails in the search for positive winter imagery, one can always quote out of context. John Dryden had something entirely different in mind when he wrote the following lines (in “Astraea Redux,” 1660), but they form an apt conclusion for this all-too-brief survey:

And now Time’s whiter Series is begun
Which in soft Centuries shall smoothly run.

__________

For those interested in pursuing the Ephelia enigma, this site purports to identify not merely the poet, but “J.G.” and most of her other subjects. Other scholars dispute this attribution, some even making the case that “she” was a male poet adopting a female persona.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Thinking in claymation

I’m sitting at a public terminal in one of the largest open-stack libraries in the United States. Behind me are rows and rows of shelving with the current issues of thousands of journals in the arts and humanities, including literary and poetry magazines. The curious thing is, I feel almost no urge to go browse them any more. I mean, poems on tree flesh! How retro! How barbaric!

But just now, when I explained this feeling to a librarian friend who stopped by to say hello, her reaction was that expecting everyone to go electronic is unfair. What about all those people over 65? My solution: clay tablets. Ashurbanipal had the right idea. Burn the library down and the “books” just get harder. That’s why we can still read the Epic of Gilgamesh today.

I’m serious. I think a lot about what will and will not survive the inevitable collapse of our civilization. Paper, digital and microform texts seem about equally doomed. “Can you imagine how many tablets that would take, and how much they would collectively weigh?” my friend objects. “How would you ever store them?” “Can you imagine how few texts will really stand the test of time?” I reply. I mean, how many commentaries on Hamlet does the world need?

Perhaps the best way to celebrate the impending one-year anniversary of the launch of this blog would be for me to pick two or three posts out of the 700 or so I’ve “published” here and inscribe them into clay. I used to be half-decent with calligraphy; clay would present an interesting challenge.

In any case, it would be fun to start one’s own clay tablet collection, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to reproduce the warning Ashurbanipal had posted in his library in the 7th century BCE.

Right above the computer monitor here is a wimpy little sign – on paper, of course – that reads, “Thank you for safeguarding the collections with a Library-approved-beverage container.” Yes, that’s right: whoever had these signs made up didn’t even grasp the rules of hyphenation.

Ashurbanipal didn’t thank patrons in advance for their cooperation. His warning read:

May all these gods curse anyone who breaks, defaces, or removes this tablet with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless as long as he lives; may they let his name, his seed be carried off from the land; and may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.

Who in the 7th century BCE would have guessed that Ashurbanipal’s library would outlast even the gods that were charged with its protection?
__________

The Blogger spellchecker doesn’t even include the word “blog”!? I tell you, this electronic civilization is a flash in the pan.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Carl Sandburg was a moron

A very brief history of modern poetry: Mallarmé banished the world. The poem became a room panelled in mirrors – all four walls, floor and ceiling – and the poet’s pen at the center in lieu of a sky. Whitman invited the world back in, all of it. Nothing was to be excluded. The walls of the room began to expand at an exponential rate. Physicists refer to this as the Big Bang – their own, two-word poem. Though it seems a little comical to give an unimaginable event the power to generate impossible sound waves, to rattle windows in their non-existent frames.

So anyway, that’s the point of free verse: either to free the pen from the tyranny of writing alogether, or else to make a place in the poem for everything, “poetic” or not. Free verse means that the poet is no longer a dictator, but a maker who gives full autonomy to her creations. It has little to do with the presence or absence of rhyme and meter. Almost everything rhymes if you listen right.

What do I hope to accomplish through my writing? I would like to de-mystify the mind and re-mystify the world. The one word I keep coming back to is incommensurate, even though I am never exactly certain what it means. The night before last when I walked out of my parents’ house after supper I could feel the fog all around like the moist breath of a large dark animal. When I got to the driveway a sudden fear gripped me. What’s that? Nothing but a trickle of water in a ditch that was usually dry. Whence this fear? I haven’t been afraid of the dark since I was eight years old! But just as I was saying this to myself, something in the woods right beyond my house very loudly cleared its throat. Half-growl, half-cough: the sound supposedly made by (for example) very large cats. I stood motionless in the driveway for a few minutes, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Then I walked slowly down the hill, heart pounding, nostrils flaring. Why hadn’t I left any lights on? As soon as I got in, I switched on both spotlights and walked out on the porch. The thick fog swallowed the light. “Little cat feet,” my ass!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Unkempt

The peculiar thing about these woods is their power to turn melodies into something else entirely. Yesterday afternoon, for instance: the sun hangs low in the treetops and gazing into it my mouth drops open, the tune I am whistling under my breath escapes and goes muttering off through the laurel. Two or three dried leaves turn over in their sleep. A dog barks in the distance.

No music can ever be stopped, because time can’t be stopped. Or so it seems to me at the moment. I am standing with the brow of the hill behind me, watching as the silhouettes of trees grow darker by the minute within their shining outlines. I have it within my power to freeze this moment forever in a poem, I say to myself. But it isn’t true.

I listen for a while to the footsteps of a deer that seems to be in no particular hurry. At one point I hear the high, keening sound of a cedar waxwing up in the treetops, followed a moment later by a chickadee. From this bend in the trail I can travel in imagination on through the stand of large old oaks, past the clump of sapling beeches, above the wild grape tangles where the whirring arrows of ruffed grouse stirred up from the laurel so often lodge.

It doesn’t seem necessary to keep walking, though. I have the strong impression all of a sudden that everything is in its place. I remember the title of an early book by Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, which I like better than any other line or poem he’s ever come up with. A house held is a house kept clean – but what does cleanness mean, any more, in a world full of man-made chemicals with no analogue in nature?

Let’s talk about neatness, then, about straightening up. Each natural community, each portion of the land has its own ideas about keeping house: right here, for example, it says both fire and ice, trees and deer and steaming gutpiles. The top carnivores are missing, so we humans have to do the best we can without them.

The previous day’s high winds brought down numerous dead snags and rotten limbs. It amazes me how often a large tree can crash down without major injury to any of the trees around it. I remember years ago the reaction of one of our visitors – a very urbane intellectual from Lima, Peru – to the sight of a line of broken-down locust trees left by a recent ice storm: How are you going to fix them? he wanted to know. And some time before that, our elderly neighbor, who had grown up with an even-aged forest, told my father that the growing number of logs on the forest floor didn’t look right, especially if they happened to span the stream. The woods are so messy now, she complained, a few years after the gypsy moth caterpillars came through and sped things up a bit. Yes. And the stream would never again flow as quietly as it did through the monotonous pole-timber of her youth.

Out in Ohio, a dear friend of the family, a life-long nature lover, rails at the way her daughter insists on tidying up the woods behind her suburban home, picking up all the fallen branches, cleaning out the brush. The irony is that they have a big bird feeder and enjoy watching wildlife. The same daughter goes on periodic shopping sprees for clothes, then gives almost everything she buys to Goodwill or the Salvation Army because it would make her closets too messy if she tried to keep it all. Ah, charity.

To me, the messier the woods get, the more inviting they become. A young, even-aged forest has little to offer in terms of habitat, either for wildlife or for the imagination. Songs die somewhere down in the throat. On a late afternoon in early winter, with the clean outlines of aging trees against a sky blue to the horizon, I am reminded of water spilling over fallen logs or waves on a lake lapping against half-submerged hulks along a ragged shore. The impeded stream is the one that sings, Wendell Berry once pointed out.

Back up and along the edge of the spruce grove I go, admiring the three-inch-high forest of ground cedar that covers close to half an acre there. The eastern ridge and the mountains beyond glow orange-red in the setting sun. I find one of our hunter friends sitting against a tree, his rifle resting on his lap, at the edge of an area where my father cleared out the trees two years ago to preserve the view. Charlie’s younger son, who died in a automobile accident at the age of 17, used to still-hunt in this very spot.

I return his wave but am careful to keep silent. It strikes me that all the while I stood facing west he had been sitting here on the other side of the hill, facing east and seeing things he will probably never speak of to anyone. If and when Charlie gets a deer and has it butchered and stacked neatly in labeled packages in the freezer, every time he fries up a steak it will remind him of this afternoon and others like it: the quiet, the moving light, the thoughts that came and went of their own accord. Between the two of us, I think, we kept a pretty careful watch over things. If there were any motes of dust, I would have seen them.
__________

A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Housekeeping and Place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Longing (2): the hidden country

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Longing: Anthology and Meditation

 

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

*

The first text I want to present here today consists of an extended passage from the Kojiki, or Records of Ancient Matters, compiled by order of the Japanese imperial court and completed in 712 A.D. (Donald L. Philippi, tr., University of Tokyo Press, 1968).

After the death of the emperor, the crown prince Ki-Nasi-no-Karu was to have assumed the sun-lineage; but before he ascended the throne, he seduced his younger sister Karu-no-Opo-Iratume, singing this song:

Making a mountain paddy,
Because the mountain is high,
An irrigation pipe is run
Underneath the ground, secretly –

My beloved, whom I have visited
With secret visits;
My spouse, for whom I have wept
With a secret weeping –

Tonight at last
I caress her body with ease.

This is Sirage-Uta [a song ending in a raised pitch; or possibly, a song in the style of the ancient kingdom of Silla, on the Korean peninsula].

Also he sang these songs:

The hail beats down
On the bamboo grass
Sounding tasi-dasi [i.e., “to the full”] –
After sleeping with her to the full,
Then, even if she leaves me . . .
[or, “Then, even if people try to separate us . . . ]

*

With each other as beloved,
If only we sleep together,
Then, even if we are separated
Like threshed reeds, let us be separated [or “disheveled”] –
If only we sleep together.

These are Pina-Buri no Age-Uta [songs in the rustic style with elevated pitch and/or sentiment].

For this reason the various officials as well as all the people in the kingdom turned against Prince Karu and adhered to [his brother] Anapo-no-Miko.

Prince Karu flees, taking refuge at the palace of an ally. But when Anapo-no-Miko arrives with his army, this supposed ally turns the fugitive over to them, accompanied by appropriate songs (uta). (Presumably acknowledging the semi-divine character of the future emperor, the Kojiki describes the nobleman “lifting up his arms and hitting his thighs . . . dancing and singing.”)

When he was captured, the crown prince sang this song:

O sky-flying
Karu maiden –
Should I cry loudly,
People would know.
Like the pigeons
On Pasa Mountain,
I cry secretly.

Again he sang:

O sky-flying
Karu maiden:
Come hither secretly,
Sleep here and then go your way,
O Karu maiden!

Prince Karu was exiled to the hot springs of Iyo. When about to go into exile he sang this song:

The sky-flying
Birds are also messengers.
When you hear
The cry of the crane,
Ask my name of it.

These three songs are Amada-Buri [Field of Heaven songs].

“Sky-flying” is a conventional epithet for “Karu,” based on the homology with kari, wild geese.

The translator elsewhere notes that, in ancient Japanese religion, birds were credited with the power of revitalizing a person and/or in transporting the spirit. Also, Japanese believed until quite recently that a living person’s spirit could manifest itself in more than one location at the same time. Thus, I suppose, it wouldn’t have been necessary for the prince to have died in order for a crane to transport something of his name/spirit/essence back to the yearning princess. At any rate, the birds are more like avatars than passive messengers here.

Then he sang this song:

If the great lord
Is exiled to an island,
There are ships [or “burial caskets”]
By which I may return.
Leave my sitting-mat alone!
Although I speak
Of sitting-mats, I really mean:
Leave my wife alone!

This song is Pina-Buri no Kata-Orosi [song in a rustic style with a half-descending pitch].

This song has the force of a spell. Prince Karu is threatening to come back from beyond the grave, a threat that would have been taken very seriously. Philippi notes that “the sitting mats of travelers were carefully kept at home and preserved from pollution during their absence in order to ensure their safe return.”

So-Toposi-no-Miko [i.e., Princess Karu] presented a song; the song said:

Oh, do not go, lest you tread
On the oyster shells
On the beach of Apine
Of the summer grass –
Spend the night and return in the morning!

Philippi: “The place name Apine may also mean ‘sleep together.'”

Then later, overwhelmed by her feeling, she went after him. At the time she sang this song:

Since you have set out,
Many days have passed.
Like the yama-tadu [elderberry] tree,
I will go in search of you;
I can no longer wait.

Since the text itself interrupts the narrative to comment on poetics, perhaps it’s O.K. if I do the same? These – like the first song attributed to the Princess – are both borrowed wholesale from the oral tradition; the last exists in a slightly different version, with different attribution, in the Manyoshu. (Like many of these songs, it employs a device called a pillow-word: a conventional simile based on a homophonal relationship, i.e., a cross between a pun and a metaphor.)

When she caught up with him, he had been waiting and yearning for her, and he sang this song:

On Mount Patuse
Of the hidden country,
On the large ridges
Are erected banners,
On the small ridges
Are erected banners.

As upon a large ridge,
Do you rely upon our troth,
Ah, my beloved spouse.

Like a Tuki bow
Reclining,
Like an Adusa bow
Standing up –

Later, I shall hold you close,
Ah, my beloved spouse!

Philippi notes, “. . . Komoru, ‘to conceal oneself’ . . . might be interpreted here as ‘to hide within the tomb.’ Patuse is known as an ancient burial place. Banners were set up in religious ceremonies and funerals.”

Again he sang this song:

On the river of Patuse
Of the hidden country,
In the upper shallows
A sacred post was staked,
In the lower shallows
A true post was staked.

On the sacred post
Was hung a mirror,
On the true post
Was hung a jewel.

My beloved,
Who is to me as a mirror,
My spouse,
Who is to me as a jewel –

Only if I hear
That she is there,
Do I wish to go home,
Do I yearn for my country.

Thus singing, they committed suicide together.

These two songs are Yomi-Uta [“reading songs,” probably meaning they were chanted with little inflection].

The actions described in the first and second stanzas of this final song have strong theurgic connotations, perhaps evoking rites to cleanse oneself of the pollution of death. Prince Karu is singing a song of conjuration to his wife/sister/mirror, collapsing the present into the immediate future of their death, and the wild country around them into the other world’s back-of-beyond. (Philippi cites a Japanese scholar who “believes this [song] was originally a prayer for safety during a journey.”)

If I quote at such length, risking copyright infringement, it is only because I suspect that the Kojiki is not nearly as well known as it should be among fans of world literature. The translation available on the Internet, by Basil Hall Chamberlain, is painful to read, both for its stilted language and its lack of scholarship. Many of the songs are extremely difficult to translate, so Donald Philippi’s expertise is indispensible. (In addition to his translation of the Kojiki, I highly recommend Philippi’s This Wine of Peace, This Wine of Laughter: A Complete Anthology of Japan’s Earliest Songs [Mushinsha, 1968].)

As Philippi observes, the Prince and Princess Karu story provides “the earliest documentary evidence of the double suicides that so enlivened the stage during the Edo period” a thousand years later. “In fact, the theatre-conscious commentator Nakajima [Etsuji] even claims that this chapter reflects a rudimentary dramatic performance.” I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. In addition, their song exchange prefigures the widespread practice of frequent poem exchanges between friends and lovers that so shaped literary expression during the Heian Period.

The contrast with the Biblical story about the rape of Tamar by her brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13) is striking. Stylistically, they couldn’t be farther apart. In its psychological depth, the entire David cycle resembles a modern novel, while the Prince and Princess Karu story anticipates the poetic profundity of later monogatari. And despite similar openings, the two stories diverge quite widely. Amnon experiences revulsion the moment he has consummated his passion for his sister, and sends her rudely away. The real, enduring longing in that story is revealed at the very end of the chapter, after Amnon is murdered by his brother Absolom in retaliation: “So Absalom fled, and went to Geshur, and was there three years. And the soul of king David longed to go forth unto Absalom: for he was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing he was dead.”

For me, the story from the Kojiki perfectly encapsulates that special sense of longing for unattainable and/or transient beauty that permeates Japanese literature, from the elegies and laments of Kakinomoto no Hitomaru through the great Heian Period poets and novelists such as Ono no Komachi and Lady Murasaki, to the Heike Monogatari and even some of the works of famous monk-poets such as Saigyo, Basho and Ryokan, not to mention the dramas of Seami and Chickamatsu. Donald Keene, the most prolific English-language translator and critic of Japanese literature, put it this way:

Beyond the preference for simplicity and the natural qualities of things lies what is perhaps the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal, perishability. The desire in the West has generally been to achieve artistic immortality, and this has led men to erect monuments in deathless marble. . . . The Japanese have built for impermanence, though paradoxically some of the oldest buildings in the world exist in Japan . . . . Whatever the subject matter of the old poems, the underlying meaning was often an expression of grief over the fragility of beauty and love. Yet the Japanese were keenly aware that without this mortality there could be no beauty.
(Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture, Kodansha, 1971)

Pathos, like other emotions, can best be gotten at through indirection: the blank spaces on the landscape painting no less than the words not uttered outright in a poem are essential to draw the viewer, listener or reader in. The animist mindset of Shinto helped focus poets’ attention on particularities, on the possibilities for sudden illumination inherent in a beautiful detail, long before the introduction of Zen Buddhism. Among the things to which autonomy and spiritual power were attributed, place names, personal names and all other poetic words occupied a prominent position. As the preface to the 9th-century anthology Kokinshu put it:

Japanese poetry has its seeds in the human heart, and takes form in the countless leaves that are words. So much happens to us while we live in this world that we must voice the thoughts that are in our hearts, conveying them through the things we see and the things we hear. We hear the bush warbler singing in the flowers or the voice of frogs that live in the water and know that among all living creatures there is not one that does not have its song. It is poetry that, without exerting force, can move heaven and earth, wake the feelings of the unseen gods and spirits, soften the relations between man and woman, and soothe the heart of the fierce warrior.

(Burton Watson, tr., in From the Country of Eight Islands, Doubleday, 1981)

Out of the countless expressions of this uniquely Japanese take on longing that I could cite from the modern era, let me round off this post with two poems by Takamura Kotaro. Takamura was a sculptor – the son of a carver of Buddhist images – and one of the first 20th-century poets to write successfully in the vernacular. Some of his most memorable poems are those he wrote for and about his common-law wife and fellow artist Chieko, chronicling their three-decade-long relationship from first meeting through her eventual, chronic insanity and death.

Both these poems are translated by Hiroaki Sato, from Chieko and Other Poems of Takamura Kotaro (University Press of Hawaii, 1980).

Chieko Playing With Flowers


Where there is no one on the sands of Kojukuri
Sitting on the sand Chieko plays alone.
Innumerable friends call to Chieko.
Chii, chii, chii, chii, chii –
Leaving tiny footprints in the sand,
plovers come near her.
Chieko who is always talking to herself
raises both hands to call them.
Chii, chii, chii –
Plovers beg for the shells in her hands.
Chieko scatters them here and there.
Rising up in a flock the plovers call Chieko.
Chii, chii, chii, chii, chii –
Leaving off entirely the task of being human,
now having passed into the natural world
Chieko seems just a speck.
Some two hundred yards off in the windbreak, in the evening sun
bathed in pine pollen I stand, forgetting time.

*

Invaluable Chieko

Chieko sees what one cannot see,
hears what one cannot hear.

Chieko goes where one cannot go,
does what one cannot do.

Chieko does not see the living me,
yearns for the me behind me.

Chieko has cast off the weight of suffering,
has strayed out to the endless, desolate zone of beauty.

I persistently hear her call to me, but
Chieko no longer has a ticket to the human world.

Just as I prepare to post, I hear the cries of wild geese overhead, invisible in the thick fog.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Of fools and poets

A few days ago in The Middlewesterner, Tom was describing a minor discovery he made while visiting one of his target communities, L’Anse, Michigan:

That’s how they get the logs on those log trucks to look as if they have been loaded with such care! I see a fellow atop his load, sawing the logs to an even length along the driver’s side.

If my wife were with me, I suppose she’d say “I knew they did that.” Well, I didn’t know. She understands the world far better than I do. I think when poets like me are born, they’re not given the same program that everyone else gets. We don’t get a program coming in; we don’t get a score card; hell, they don’t even tell us what the game is.

This is a sentiment I can identify with wholeheartedly. My own incomprehension of the way things work remains acute, hard as I’ve tried to educate myself. For example, though licensed to drive, I rarely do, because I find it almost impossible to keep my eyes on the road – that’s where all the boring stuff is. (After reading Tom’s blog for a little while, I concluded that the only reason he avoids accidents is that he lives in a part of the country where the roads are flat and straight. Also, he seems to pull over every few miles to look around more thoroughly.)

My Dad and I often have opposite views about how or whether to carry out any given task. When, several years ago, I was redoing the guest bedroom, I thought that the thing to do would be to paint the walls white and turn them into a permanent record of our guests. We’d keep a supply of crayons in the room and invite everyone who stayed there to draw something, whatever they liked. I couldn’t – and still can’t – see a darn thing wrong with that idea. However, I wasn’t paying for the materials, and I don’t own the house. So the walls ended up papered, instead.

Actually, my Dad frequently solicits my opinion before doing a job, and we’ll joke about the likelihood that I will automatically disagree with whatever he says, and that he will go ahead and do it his way after hearing me out. But sometimes one of my ideas out of left field will strike his fancy. And sometimes, too, his more linear approach turns out to have been twice as crazy as anything I could’ve come up with, and I get to pick on him about it forever after.

It’s not so much that poets are fools, I think, as that natural-born fools are drawn to the practice of poetry and other creative arts. It wasn’t always so. Well into the Middle Ages, the court jester remained a very different person from the bard; the former was allowed far more leeway to criticize and satirize than the latter. Bards are the keepers of tradition and the eulogists of national and heroic exploits, and they tend to identify strongly with the interests of their patrons. (I use the present tense because this is still the case with the griots of West Africa.) I’ve always felt that had we grown up in a more traditional society, it would be my older brother, with his capacious memory and facility with languages, who’d be the poet. I would have been the fool. It’s only since the Romantic Revolt that creative artists have been able to make a virtue out of “marching to a different drummer,” as Thoreau put it. And in the 20th century, it became all but unthinkable for a poet in a free society not to stand with the downtrodden and the oppressed.

If some contemporary poets still act as griots, it is for social movements rather than for individuals: thus, for example, Adrienne Rich (feminism), Gary Snyder (environmentalism), Martin Espada (Puerto Rican nationalism), Linda Hogan (American Indian rights and consciousness), Mark Doty (gay rights and consciousness), etc. But the analogy is weak, because each of these poets is also a strong individualist with her or his own, unique perspective; they are hardly spokespeople. In fact, I think that the bards and poets laureate of centuries past would find their strongest analogue in the modern P.R. flunky.

I should really read up on the history of court jesters. Rulers have always sought the council of sages. When, where and why did it first become necessary to balance the influence of the wise by consulting a fool?

The authors of the Bible were unconfused about the difference between the wise man and the fool. “A thistle got stuck in a drunkard’s hand, and a proverb in the mouth of a fool,” says Proverbs 26:9 in James Kugel’s translation. Kugel, a noted Old Testament scholar, goes on to explain:

A fool, in the world of wisdom, is not someone who is stupid any more than a “sage” or “wise man” is necessarily brilliant. But just as the wise man is someone who walks the path of wisdom – following the canons of restraint and patience that were the pillars of the wisdom outlook – so the fool is someone who does not follow the wisdom outlook, who does not live in accordance with wisdom’s insights. Indeed, “foolish” and “wicked’ are virtual synonyms in Proverbs, as are “wise” and “righteous.” And just as humanity, according to the severe, abstract spirituality of this worldview, is uncompromisingly divided into the righteous and the wicked, so it is divided between the wise and the foolish, with no room in between for intermediates.
(The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations, The Free Press, 1999)

Only with the great disillusionments of the Common Era, perhaps – the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Christ’s failure to return, Imam Al-Askari’s failure to return – came the recognition that wisdom and foolishness were not so far apart, and that a fool might be worth listening to. Probably, too, some of the age-old Chinese traditions about crazy, eccentric and inebriated sages traveled west along the Silk Road. Be that as it may, each of the would-be world religions acquired its so-called holy fools. Just the other day I picked up a remaindered copy of Idries Shah’s The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (Penguin Arkana, 1993), Sufi teaching stories credited to, or told about, the most famous fool of them all.

Nasrudin was a real person, a Naqshbandi Sufi from somewhere in Central Asia. (Click here for a lousy photo of a public statue of Mullah Nasrudin astride his donkey in downtown Bukhara, and follow the link to a site with some pretty good versions of Nasrudin stories.) Many of the sayings attributed to him are also credited to others, though, and it’s almost impossible to glean a coherent biography from the morass of inconsistent traditions about his life. According to one tradition, he even served as a court advisor to the conqueror Tamerlane. Another tradition has him serving as a judge:

The Mulla was made a magistrate. During his first case the plaintiff argued so persuasively that he exclaimed:
‘I believe you are right!’
The clerk of the Court begged him to restrain himself, for the defendant had not been heard yet.
Nasrudin was so carried away by the eloquence of the defendant that he cried out as soon as the man had finished his evidence:
‘I believe you are right!’
The clerk of the court could not allow this.
‘Your honor, they cannot both be right!’
‘I believe you are right!’ said Nasrudin.

In Nasrudin’s unique brand of foolishness, it’s not always immediately obvious that any serious point is being made.

Nasrudin entered the teahouse and declaimed:
‘The Moon is more useful than the Sun.’
‘Why, Mulla?’
‘We need the light more during the night than during the day.’

Though his humor was sometimes directed against the arrogant and the deluded, most often Nasrudin sought to teach by counter-example, as it were. Thus, while their perspectives may have been similar, Nasrudin’s approach was much subtler than Diogenes’. Instead of scorning others, he holds himself up for scorn. (As a sometime advisor to a despot, this may have been a simple survival strategy.)

‘I can see in the dark,’ boasted Nasrudin one day in the teahouse.
‘If that is so, why do we sometimes see you carrying a light through the streets?’
‘Only to prevent other people from colliding with me.’

The problem with being a sage or guru, it seems to me, is that other people would want to emulate you – to their and your own ultimate undoing. As the Sufis recognize more than anyone else, it’s all too easy to get up caught up in the inner logic of one’s own stories or beliefs, and forget that they most likely have little to do with the true Story.

The Mulla was walking down the village street deep in thought, when some urchins began to throw stones at him. He was taken by surprise, and besides he was not a big man.
‘Don’t do that, and I will tell you something of interest to you.’
‘All right, what is it? But no philosophy.’
‘The Emir is giving a banquet to all comers.’
The children ran off towards the Emir’s house as Nasrudin warmed to his theme, the delicacies and the delights of the entertainment . . .
He looked up and saw them disappearing into the distance. Suddenly he tucked up his robes and started to sprint after them. ‘I’d better go and see,’ he panted to himself, ‘because it might be true after all.’

Laugh all you want, but that sounds very much like something I would do.

*

Sir, I admit your general rule:
That every poet is a fool.
Though you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.
(attributed variously to Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior and Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

My eyes have been playing tricks on me lately. Yesterday I was walking across the lawn under the black walnut trees just as a breeze picked up. The yellow leaves started raining down, and I stood watching for a couple moments, entranced. One of the leaves had other ideas – it got to the ground, then took off again, twirling across the lawn. I finally realized it was actually a sulfur butterfly.

Then I took a detour through the shed yard to check on the progress of a clump of gorgeous New England asters. I’m intending to transplant them into my front garden after they die down. A couple of bees were busy pollinating. No wait – yellow jackets. No again: syrphid flies. Bees don’t hover. (You need two wings for that – four’s too many.)

Well, O.K., that’s actually a pretty common mistake; evolution has seen to that. But on Thursday, I thought I saw a college student with two heads. I had just descended the front steps of the library on Penn State’s University Park campus. I noticed a person or persons sitting with his/their back(s) to me on the lawn off to the right, with two heads that seemed almost fused together. My prurient interests were piqued, and I slowed down for a better look. I had to almost stop walking to verify that there was, in fact, only a single torso. Finally, I realized I was looking at a single head with a hell of a lot of very springy hair tied in a ponytail. The rounded ponytail was fully as large as the head.

Probably none of this will make it into a poem. Nor does it mean much of anything, I think. And now that I’ve put it out on the web, I feel my obligations to it are pretty much at an end. If you need any of it – a second head, I mean, or a leaf that turns into a butterfly – you’re more than welcome.

I like the web. You can find all sorts of things you’ve always wanted but not very much. It’s a great place to search for lost keys – not because there are more keys, but because there’s greater visibility. Sometimes I even think up things to lose, just for the joy of looking.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Stories and understories

Another clear, cold morning. The leaves of the red maples across the driveway are beginning to turn, and up in the woods the black gum understory glows yellow and orange, a foretaste of glory soon to come. The water in the stream has finally returned to normal after last Friday’s thirty-year flood, revealing newly carved, raw banks, sand and gravel bars, and even some new waterfalls.

This morning I am afflicted with a kind of restlessness I rarely feel at other times of year, a sort of map hunger. It is not specifically a travel bug, though certainly hopping in a car – if I had one – and following back roads all day would be one way to assuage it. Exploring more intimate landscapes – if I had a significant other – would be another way. Instead, I shall attempt to distract myself with the usual mixture of busyness and woolgathering.

It has always struck me as a bit sad that the coloring of the understory doesn’t play a bigger part in most peoples’ autumnal narratives. In another couple of weeks, those who can spare the time will drive north, perhaps to Pine Creek Gorge (a.k.a. the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania), to goggle at maples and birches in their fall plumage. But in my view, the obvious colors of those young forests can’t hold a candle to the range and subtlety of black gum, found widely as a sub-canopy tree here in the oak forests of central Pennsylvania. Whether or not the oaks themselves will color up properly is always impossible to predict; when they do, the deep, earth-toned reds and oranges provide a pleasing contrast with the incandescent sugar maple and dependably yellow tulip trees and elms. But by then the black gums will have shed their leaves, opening up the understory just in time for the witch hazel to show off their pale yellow blossoms against the year-round green of mountain laurel.

For many of the forest’s most charismatic inhabitants, of course, “the story is the understory,” as the title of a local conference for forest landowners put it a few years ago. Though foresters shudder at the thought of a future forest dominated by commercially useless species like black gum, the fact is that their many lateral branches, abundant fruit and (eventually) generous hollows provide numerous benefits to many species of songbirds and mammals. The dominance of black gum is of course unnatural – like virtually every aspect of present forest composition. Or, to put it differently, it represents a natural response to highly unnatural conditions, especially the regeneration of an even-age forest following the virtually complete clearcutting of the state a hundred years ago, and the absence of top predators and other keystone species and processes (especially wildfire and the passenger pigeon). Severe overbrowsing by white-tailed deer has created unnaturally open, park-like woods throughout much of Pennsylvania; ridgetop oak-heath forests are among the few communities where some sort of understory and even limited regeneration of canopy species has continued, thanks largely to the protection that mountain laurel thickets afford to tree seedlings.

I have dwelt on these themes here only once before that I can remember. That’s one of the most prominent ways in which Via Negativa does not fairly represent my day-to-day thinking, which is haunted by specters of environmental degradation on a daily if not hourly basis. An amusing – and, I thought, highly flattering – comment yesterday prompted the realization that, yes, this blog functions as a refuge of sorts for my most handicapped, maladapted and ill-begotten musings. An asylum, you might say. In response to yesterday’s brain fart about calla lilies, Leslee wrote, “You are completely insane, ya know. And the weird thing is, after reading your blog I sometimes start to think in a similarly warped way. But just for a few minutes. I don’t know if this is good or bad. Probably both.”

But I’m not like this in real life, honest! Or am I?

*

I wrote up our September 11 “Poets for Peace” reading for a local, alternative newspaper yesterday at the urging a friend, who is helping them get through a difficult transition period between editors. It would have been a little awkward, I felt, for the moderator to try and write a piece of objective journalism, so I cast it instead as an editorial. I had planned to try and quote a few lines from almost everyone who read, but that didn’t work out. The first few paragraphs described the rationale and modus operandi, which will be familiar to readers of my original blog post about it. I went on to quote from a couple of the readers whose work I thought would most resonate with a general audience. But for y’all, let me just quote from the conclusion:

Two different readers opened with poems by Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great 13th century Afghani-Persian poet and mystic. But possibly the most haunting of the afternoon’s poems were those of Lee Peterson, the “Emerging Poet-in-Residence” at Penn State’s Altoona College, from her just-published Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia (Kent State University Press, 2004). Reading in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper, Peterson channeled voices like that of Sabiha, in “The National Library”:

I had decided to study history at university
the day the library started burning.
I was loaded down with books on my way to my parents’ home.

People darted. They jerked like fish
caught on a huge, dry stone. . . .

As this, the lead poem in Peterson’s book, reminds us, written words are among the first casualties of war. Even in the United States, it is becoming increasingly easy to imagine a future in which certain forms of expression are banned; under the so-called Patriot Act, libraries and librarians have already witnessed government-sanctioned assaults on our constitutional rights. I don’t think any of us who organized the “Poets for Peace” reading expected that it would be controversial, and we sent out press releases in good faith. Thus, for me, one of the biggest surprises of the afternoon – aside from the high quality of the readings – was the complete lack of coverage by the local press. That evening, I perused the September 11 edition of the Centre Daily Times. It contained a special feature on “What the Flag Means to Me.”

I worry that the meaning of September 11 will be increasingly confined to themes of patriotic martyrdom and wounded pride. In the future, will American schoolchildren remember the World Trade Center attacks the way Serbian schoolchildren remember the disastrous Battle of Kosovo in the 14th century? As poets, I feel we have a special responsibility to honor all points off view and give voice to all perspectives in order to forestall the tyranny of a single, acceptable interpretation. Lee Peterson’s “Kosovo Polje: The Field of Blackbirds,” imagines what such a reduction has meant for this archetypal battlefield, the ground zero of Serbian epic poetry:

. . . even the worms found new homes.

Now only crows play in the weeds
or watch from the swinging heads of pines
while men root the dust

for the one thing they claim
will take them back and back and back.

*

And let me finish up here by saying what I didn’t have space for in the editorial: Serbian epic poetry, for all its focus on violence and nationalism, is great stuff! Check out the translation of The Battle of Kosovo by John Matthias and Vladeta Vuckovic (Ohio University Press, 1987). The complete text, which includes a preface by Charles Simic, is available on-line.

Simic describes what a performance of the oral epic was like:

One day in school, in what must have been my fifth or sixth grade, they announced that a guslar would perform for us. This was unexpected. Most city people in those days had never heard a gusle being played, and as for us kids, brought up as we were on American popular music, the prospect meant next to nothing. In any case, at the appointed time we were herded into the gym where an old peasant, sitting stiffly in a chair and holding a one-stringed instrument, awaited us. When we had quieted down, he started to play the gusle.

I still remember my astonishment at what I heard. I suppose I expected the old instrument to sound beautiful, the singing to be inspiring as our history books told us was the case. Gusle, however, can hardly be heard in a large room. The sound of that one string is faint, rasping, screechy, tentative. The chanting that goes with it is toneless, monotonous, and unrelieved by vocal flourishes of any kind. The singer simply doesn’t show off. There’s nothing to do but pay close attention to the words which the guslar enunciates with great emphasis and clarity. We heard The Death of the Mother of the Jugovici that day and a couple of others. After a while, the poem and the archaic, other-worldly-sounding instrument began to get to me and everybody else. Our anonymous ancestor poet knew what he was doing. This stubborn drone combined with the sublime lyricism of the poem touched the rawest spot in our psyche. The old wounds were reopened.

The early modernist Serbian poet and critic, Stanislav Vinaver, says that the sound of gusle is the sound of defeat. That, of course, is what the poems in the Kosovo Cycle are all about. Serbs are possibly unique among peoples in that in their national epic poetry they celebrate defeat. Other people sing of the triumphs of their conquering heroes while the Serbs sing of the tragic sense of life. In the eyes of the universe, the poems tell us, the most cherished tribal ambitions are nothing. Even the idea of statehood is tragic. Poor Turks, the poet is suggesting, look what’s in store for them.

Listen:

Yes, and from Jerusalem, O from that holy place,
A great gray bird, a taloned falcon flew!
And in his beak he held a gentle swallow.
But wait! it’s not a falcon, this gray bird,
It is a saint, Holy Saint Eliyah:
And he bears with him no gentle swallow
But a letter from the Blessed Mother.
He brings it to the Tsar at Kosovo
And places it upon his trembling knees.
And thus the letter itself speaks to the Tsar:
“Lazar! Lazar! Tsar of noble family,
Which kingdom is it that you long for most?
Will you choose a heavenly crown today?
Or will you choose an earthly crown?
If you choose the earth then saddle horses,
Tighten girths- have your knights put on
Their swords and make a dawn attack against
The Turks: your enemy will be destroyed.
But if you choose the skies then build a church-
O, not of stone but out of silk and velvet-
Gather up your forces take the bread and wine,
For all shall perish, perish utterly,
And you, O Tsar, shall perish with them.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Solving for Y

Blogging Rule #1: When inspiration eludes you, steal. (One of the few practices that truly unites us as bloggers!)

So this morning in the poetry news blog dumbfoundry – basically, the one-stop shop for all your po’ news needs – I’m reading a rare, non-news entry with an idea so good I’m just going to quote it in its entirety:

I would like to see a magazine Y that publishes only pieces rejected by magazine X. An anti-X magazine. You have to submit a copy of the rejection from X with your poem. If Y chooses to publish your poem, it also publishes the text of the rejection from X. (X could be more than one magazine.)

An excellent idea, I immediately opined, and set myself to thinking of possible titles. However, being still basically uninspired, I’m hoping some of y’all can do a bit better. Here’s what I came up with so far:
Sub/Mission
Exorcision
Nix
Pariah
Sump Pump
Settling Pond
Flotsam
Gristle
Grout
Phlegm
Egest
Ack!
Sin Offering
Public Flogging

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Whose moods these are

This post has had a brief but troubled history. The first time I tried to post it last night, I lost my intranet connection and it disappeared – and for once, I hadn’t saved a copy first. Lesson learned. So, I reconstructed it from memory and posted again. This time, the post appeared, but every other post I’d ever made to Via Negativa, all my archives, disappeared. “Whose moods these are” sat alone on the screen, grinning at me like the goddamned Cheshire Cat. I hit the “edit posts” page: nothing else there. Archives: blank. But all was not lost – my “High points” links all still worked! I clicked around frantically. Finally I went back to the “edit posts” page, hit “display last 300 posts,” and waited. Success! The house of Via Negativa was back to normal (?) again – no sign of that lousy cat in the stovepipe hat! So I clicked on the next-to-most-recent post, “Quiddity,” and hit publish. Long, deep sigh of relief. Off to bed and a night of stress-free dreams. Or so I thought.

This morning, when I published “Words on the street” (“The zombies ate my homework”), the Blogger zombies returned. Oh no! They killed Henry!

Needless to say, I have no idea what’s going on. But here’s the text of that post again. What bums me out is that it had a couple of good comments, and I don’t know how to reattach them at the bottom. But here’s the link. You can continue to use this thread, if you wish. Haloscan notifies me of every new comment, regardless of where it’s posted.
__________

Rearranging some wise words from The Blog of Henry David Thoreau:

The poet is a man who lives at last
By watching his moods. An old poet comes
At last to watch his moods as narrowly as
A cat does a mouse.

The entry, originally written on August 28, 1851, continues with a paean to “the ordinary,” by which Thoreau means, ultimately, “the eyes to see the things which you possess.”

Ah, was that your mouse I had for supper?