Pilgrimage of poems: My body is a floating weed

Starting about a year ago, one of my friends invited me to participate in weekly poetic efforts on Facebook. First it was Haiku Wednesday—compose a three-line, 17-syllable poem in the format 5-7-5 and slap it up on your wall mid-week.

Considering their origins in the Japanese Zen tradition, they’re supposed to be focused on nature and the like. Mine are mostly about traffic, recruiters and other phenomena in the Valley they call Silicon. Well—I suppose they’re the natural environment here; because the unnatural has become the normal.

Then came Tanka Saturday—similar to Haiku, but Tanka (also known as “waka”) are 31 syllables and five lines: 5-7-5-7-7. Apparently waka were often used in the context of communication between lovers, but I didn’t know that when LQ ordered…uh, invited me to start writing them. So, again—I write about what I see around me, which is generally all the unremitting perfection that money can buy in a temperate climate.

Meaning—more traffic, recruiters, cookie-cutter entrepreneurs and the buzzwords everyone chatters to prove that they’re in strict conformity with the local notion of uniqueness. So—rockstars and ninjas and disruptors and all that ilk. And 90% male, whose photos are invariably shot in light blue long-sleeved shirts, no tie. Again, showing what raging innovators and outside-the-box thinkers (yes, that’s still a hot phrase) they are.

But okay, this isn’t about the nonsense that I write. It’s about people who know what they’re about with these poetic forms.

I believe this was the first haiku I ever saw; I would have been in high school. I remember wondering what a kiri tree is—if it was something botanically real, or some symbolic figment of Bashō’s imagery.

Won't you come and see

loneliness? Just one leaf

from the kiri tree.

It turns out there is a kiri tree:

Here’s one of his in the original transliteration, with several translations. Note that getting the sense of the poem in English sometimes results in violating the syllabic strictures:

Furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

The old pond,

A frog jumps in:

Plop!

Alan Watts

The old pond —

a frog jumps in,

sound of water.

Robert Hass

dark old pond

:

a frog plunks in

Dick Bakken:

Listen! a frog

Jumping into the stillness

Of an ancient pond!

Dorothy Britton

Both men and women were noted for their haiku and tanka. I’ll give you a couple of examples from Ono no Komachi, one of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals, writing about a traditionally tanka topic, love.

Thinking about him

I slept, only to have him

Appear before me

Had I known it was a dream,

I should never have wakened

So lonely am I

My body is a floating weed

Severed at the roots

Were there water to entice me,

I would follow it, I think.

Okay—two more, from Lady Ise, a contemporary of Komachi, and also one of the Thirty-six.

Because we suspected

the pillow would say "I know,"

we slept without it.

Nevertheless my name

is being bandied like dust.

And this one—well.

My body is like

A field wasted by winter.

If only

I, like the field burnt-over,

Awaited the return of spring.

Pilgrimage of poems: Gently smiling jaws

Last year during National Poetry Month I shared Lewis Carroll’s “Jaberwocky” with you. That one’s from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. So this year I thought I’d give you a couple of poems from Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.

Many of the poems in Alice are parodies of serious or admonitory or instructive poems and songs current when Lewis was writing the book. For example, Isaac Watts, an 18^th Century theologian, hymn writer and logician, was wont to serve up the likes of “Against Idleness and Mischief”, whose opening verse is:

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour,

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower!

Now, I like Watts’s hymns fine, and “Joy to the World” is one of my favorite Christmas carols. But this prissy stuff just erodes the enamel off my teeth.

So, here’s Carroll’s send-up of it; which, by the way, Alice recites when she’s just the teensiest bit loopy from all her transformations:

“How Doth the Little Crocodile”

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spread his claws,

And welcome little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

Then there’s his parody of James M. Sayles’s “Star of the Evening”, sung by the Mock Turtle:

“Turtle Soup”

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,

Waiting in a hot tureen!

Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,

    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,

Game, or any other dish?

Who would not give all else for two

Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

    Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,

    Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!

Death comes to great men and zookeepers

This being the week of April Fool’s Day, there’s been a lot of funny business going on around the Interwebs. Here are two of my favorites.

A site called Global Edition reported that the Copenhagen Zoo “killed several of its staff members…in order to create four new job openings.” A bit macabre, perhaps; but entirely plausible given the zoo’s recent activities.

But this one, from NPR, just had me rolling. You have to listen to it, because it is just, um, cherce. Picture, if you will, an update of Citizen Kane. By a “Canadian auteur.”

One of the best lines was, “So why did he die without Facebook friends?”

Well, I think the answer is self-evident:

“Yes, way!”

Pilgrimage of poems: Schooled in every grace

For today’s National Poetry Month poem, I’m giving you “Richard Cory”, by E.A. Robinson. It dates from around the turn of the last century.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king –

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

I’m not particularly a fan of Robinson, but you have to read him in any American lit class. And it does appeal to you when you're young, because of the tone of weltschmerz and the irony.  

The thing about this poem is that I came to read it after hearing Simon and Garfunkel’s adaptation, so I’ll give you that, too, and let you decide which you like better. 

Listening to this again, I detect a lot more sneering in the tone, which probably appealed to me as a teen. Now I just find it a bit excessive. Well, everything except the bullet in the head; that part's okay.

Pilgrimage of poems: A crowd of corpses

In case you’ve somehow missed it, this year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. There’s gonna be a whole lotta fanfare about it for the next four years, mostly from the governments of the countries that brought it to us in the first place. And publishing houses, and TV networks, of course.

But, as I’ve noted elsewhere, it produced quite a lot of poetry; some of it truly and utterly cringeworthy, but some extremely powerful. In the days preceding smartphone videos going viral, the discipline of writing poems could capture a considerable part of the experience and the emotions of that cataclysmic convergence of technological advances, imperial policies, and just plain unfuckingbeievable stupidity.

Although I’ve read a lot of it—mostly the British poets—I’m still making new discoveries, including this from Anna Akhmatova, whose work I know somewhat from a class in Russian humanities. This kind of gives us a prologue to the cataclysm:

"July 1914"

     I

All month a smell of burning, of dry peat

smouldering in the bogs.

Even the birds have stopped singing,

the aspen does not tremble.

The god of wrath glares in the sky,

the fields have been parched since Easter.

A one-legged pilgrim stood in the yard

with his mouth full of prophecies:

'Beware of terrible times...the earth

opening for a crowd of corpses.

Expect famine, earthquakes, plagues,

and heavens darkened by eclipses.

'But our land will not be divided

by the enemy at his pleasure:

the Mother-of-God will spread

a white shroud over these great sorrows.'

    II

From the burning woods drifts

the sweet smell of juniper.

Widows grieve over their brood,

the village rings with lamentation.

If the land thirsted, it was not in vain,

nor were the prayers wasted;

for a warm red rain soaks

the trampled fields.

Low, low hangs the empty sky,

tender is the voice of the supplicant:

'They wound Thy most holy body,

They are casting lots for Thy garments.'

It’s the same sense of the world holding its breath that you get from Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (and the film based on it), or Barbara Tuchman’s opening chapter in The Guns of August.

Akhmatova later experienced the first months of the siege of Leningrad, and—like so many of her fellow writers—suppression by Stalin and his successors.

I’m giving you another view of the home front (of the war in progress)—this time from one of my verymost favorite poets ever, e.e. cummings. If you want his view on war in general, you need to read "Plato told". Well, you should read it regardless, just because it's stunning. But here he is on this particular war:

“my sweet old etcetera”

my sweet old etcetera

aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what

is more did tell you just

what everybody was fighting

for,

my sister

isabel created hundreds

(and

hundreds)of socks not to

mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera

bravely of course my father used

to become hoarse talking about how it was

a privilege and if only he

could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly

in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,

et

 cetera, of

Your smile

eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

You’ll find this view in a lot of accounts from serving soldiers on both sides of the war.

I’ll be sharing more of Cummings, and of World War I poets, later in the month.

Pilgrimage of poems: The hooly blisful martir for to seke

It’s the First of April, so you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, yes—well done! We’ve got 30 days of poems and poets ahead of us!

It’s National Poetry Month. As I did last year, I’m going to share poems that have significance for me—they may or may not be classics, or epics or any of that nonsense. I’m delving into my history, my joys, my sorrows and finding poems that have spoken to me in one way or another. And they may or may not speak to you—in any manner of ways.

Last year I started out with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, because it contains the telling line, “April is the cruelest month”. This year I’m setting the WAYBAC Machine to a much earlier commentary on the month: the “Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales.

If you’ve ever taken an English lit class, you’ll know the one I mean. Back in the very mists of time, there was Beowulf. Then a whole bunch of…I don’t know, stuff. And then The Canterbury Tales.

Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories ostensibly told by a group of pilgrims on their way from Southwark (London) to Canterbury, the site of the murder of Saint Thomas à Becket. Because there were no video games, Internet, cable TV or, indeed, iTunes, the travelers hung out together and told each other tales for entertainment when they stopped at night. It was probably the greatest work of Geoffrey Chaucer, whose day job was as a bureaucrat in the employ of both Edward III and Richard II.

(I grimace to bring this up, but you may recall Geoffrey Chaucer from that ridiculous mash-up film The Knight’s Tale. I’d prefer that you remove that character from your mind, although I don’t object whatsoever to holding up the image of Paul Bettany as the personification of the poet.)

So—the tales are quite the collection to read, especially if you were in high school when you were first introduced to them, as I was. (Remember Mr. Sheinkopf from last year?) It’s weird at that age to think of medieval folks both having sex and telling really bawdy stories about it.

(Okay—probably not so weird to kids today, what with Internet porn, cable TV and rap. But back in the last century? Oh, baby!)

Anyhow, Chaucer introduces the tales with the Prologue, wherein he sets the pilgrimage context. According to him, April is the month when, after the rains of early spring, things begin stirring throughout the world—flowers, birds, animals. And people just naturally feel the urge to go on pilgrimage.

I’m giving it to you in Chaucer’s original because in two different lit classes I had to memorize and recite it, all the way to the folk longing to hit the road. You cannot imagine the relief when you get to the word "pilgrimages," even if it's pronounced "pilgrimahzhes". If you really feel you need a “translation”, you can find it here.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

So saddle up, pilgrims; we’re heading out for a month of poetry.

Gratitude Monday: ¡Viva César!

Another point of gratitude today—it’s César Chávez day here in California, and though he died more than 20 years ago, I am still deeply grateful for the man and his work.

Chávez is largely responsible for publicizing the idea that the men, women and children who harvest our crops deserve basic human and humane conditions. Like potable water, and toilet facilities, and a pesticide-free environment. Oh—and a living wage. How’s that for radical?

But it was, when he began organizing what became the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s here in California. Field workers—mostly Latinos, and migrants—were completely at the mercy (of which there was little) of the large agribusiness concerns. Chávez and the UFW changed that by, among other non-violent strategies, successfully calling for consumer boycotts of both lettuce and grapes—enormous moneyspinners for the big farms.

Things aren’t really a paradise here in the fields; but they are so very much better because César Chávez spoke up for the notion that the people who bring in the crops are, in fact, human.

I’m grateful for his courage, and I’m glad that California recognizes it and celebrates his birthday officially.

Gratitude Monday: Friends with (book) benefits

As you might deduce from my earlier post about my relationship with books, I read a lot. Because I love learning and I love doing it through books. But there’s another aspect to being a bibliobroad for which I’m extremely grateful—and that’s being given books and recommendations for books from friends. And I have a lot of those.

In fact, in the past week I’ve gone through three such, and am currently working on a fourth. The ones I finished are god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens; The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued his Empire, by Jack Weatherford; and All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, by Max Hastings.

I’m still chowing down, so to speak, on The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food, by John S. Allen.

Now, see—I probably would have got round to Hastings’s narrative history of World War II on my own, because of me being a military historian; and he’s written compellingly on a number of conflicts. (I particularly recommend his Warriors: Portraits from the Battle Field, which is a series of concise biographies of men and women who were at their finest when they were literally under the gun.) But I hadn’t, and I can’t tell you how much delight I took in unwrapping the Christmas paper a couple of years ago and finding it. My completely non-military friend Marcia just got it perfectly right.

In fairness, it’s taken me several months to get through it; I could only do about 20-30 pages per day, and it’s more than 700 pages long if you read the citations, which I do. But Hastings filters that war through quotes from a variety of sources, the bulk of them ordinary people—housewives, students, factory workers, soldiers. You can find the usual self-serving crap from the politicians, generals and tycoons elsewhere; this one has the view from the ground in so many ways.

I got the pointer to Hitchens from a Facebook friend—in the past month I also read his memoir, Hitch-22, and the book he wrote while dying of esophageal cancer, Mortality. I would never have been driven to him without the push, because I’d read him occasionally in Vanity Fair, and—like all VF contributors—he had an attitude out to here, which could be summed up in one sentence: “I am published in Vanity Fair. Look on my works, ye puny, and despair.” There’s no piece in that publication in which the writer does not form a major focus of the story. (Dominick Dunne was another example.) I find this irritating after about the third instance, and as far as Hitchens went, most of his stuff struck me as more political manifesto than anything you could call actual reporting.

The three Hitchens books exhibited this in the extreme. Well, okay—one was a memoir, so that should get a pass. (Although I found it very interesting that, while he goes into great detail about his political beliefs and friendships with various men—and atheism, of course—there is no mention of his first wife, only passing reference to his second, and you wouldn’t know he had three children if you didn’t look him up in external sources.)

Hitchens is a very stylish writer, no doubt about it; no one knows that better than he himself. I’d have liked to see some examples of that put to use in just reporting something—in fact, he had quite an extensive career as a journalist, and I wonder how good his reporting was, because everything I’ve read is pretty much diatribe in one form or another. (I’m not saying he was not a brave man; he put himself in harm’s way many times to cover stories in unpleasant places. He even went through a “controlled” form of waterboarding so he could write about the experience for VF. It was one of his more measured pieces.) He strikes me as showing a schoolboyish relish in taking cheap shots and name-calling; if you express views different from his, you’re a gargoyle, or a boobie. Sometimes you’re a short gargoyle.

I also found some of his historical facts, ah, inaccurate (in two of his books); and when I come across bad facts that I easily recognize I always wonder what else is wrong that I don’t know about. Plus, if you’re going to engage in acts of political snark using historical events in support, it would be more impressive if you got your facts right. Certainly there should have been an editor to point this stuff out, but perhaps if you’re a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, you don’t need no stinkin’ fact checkers?

Well, I suppose much can be forgiven because he really knows how to turn a phrase. Going from Hitch to Weatherford was like eating a plateful of brown rice and steamed vegetables the day after having your entire dinner comprising nothing-but-nachos accompanied by a grande bowl of guacamole washed down by several birdbath-sized margaritas on the rocks made with Reposado and a couple of shots of Grand Marnier floating on top. With that crust of salt around the rim, too, because with Hitchens there are no half measures.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens was a gift from another friend—and another bibliobroad. Over the years I’ve got the most interesting books from her, including a study of redheads, history of the Little Black Dress, and the one I’m currently working on, about humans’ biological and cultural approaches to food. Carol Ann doesn’t need an occasion to send a book—sometimes I just am surprised when something appears in the mail, because she came across something she thought I’d find interesting. Mongol Queens just appeared beside my door mid-way through last month. Yay!

I’d actually read Weatherford’s earlier work, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. It was quite interesting, although I’m generally not a fan of the notion that “Nation/Ethnic group X saved/made civilization” all on its own. Nonetheless, I’d really enjoyed it. I thought this one was interesting, too—evidently Genghis Khan’s gifts for ruling and bringing people together was passed on to his female offspring, not his male progeny. I thought he could have made his point with somewhat less verbiage, but I’m always open to new explorations and interpretations of the past. And I don’t know a whole lot about Asian history.

And now I’m finding out a whole lot more about the biology of eating. It’s another book that I probably wouldn’t have sought out for myself (although if I’d come across it in a library display, I probably would have checked it out), so another change in direction courtesy of a friend. A lot of tasting takes place in the brain, it seems. Like so many other things. I’ve just got to the chapter on memories of food and eating. Yum.

Well, I could go on, but you take my point. Today I’m grateful for friends who feed my learning habit with books—on all kinds of subjects.