Currently Reading: histories to remember and forget

A Monk’s Fine Robes: haiku sequence from Cambodia by Terry Ann Carter (leaf press, Canada, 2011)

hibiscus blossoms
girls paint their nails
for the tourists

There’s a compression and density, no filler line to be a vehicle for kigo. Each line works and expands to change the vantage point as you walk thru. Some of the poems in this collection have been in various magazines and anthologies and some won the Origami Crane contest.
grain, issue 38.4 (Summer, 2011, Canada), p. 21, Gary Barwin, 2 poems

All connections are pataphysical. All categories. Even the number two is one.

Something to stop in. We spend a good deal of time narrowing in on discerning this from that, categorizing even with a certain amount of conflating going against the current of seeing distinctions. Where to tether in relativism, in a quantum flux universe?
Killdeer by Phil Hall (BookThug, Canada, 2011), p. 39,

[…]a final symbolic knell in 1994 at the signing of the NAFTA agreement
Mulroney & Reagan singing together at the White House
(The windfall of Canadian literature in the ’60s & ’70s — was a crop from an already toppled tree)

The essays look back like memoirs in places but provide context for the broader than one person.
p. 27 but the one person is also broader than one.

I got a degree in writing –& I published a first book – way before writing became my compulsive practice.
Since then I have learned to always put the art before the course

lol, didn’t get that until I heard it aloud.
p. 28

[…] my snout also caught a glorious whiff of the death of my past
I thought I had killed off all that haunted me by writing well
I had written atrociously –& my doodling toward islands of repair – hadn’t even begun yet

How many times does that happen. Words as cement shoes and doff one hand with the other and walk away. And yet. The excellent achievement of words and it’s danderduff.
The Poetry of Men’s Lives: an International Anthology, edited by Fred Moramarco and Al Zolynas (University of Georgia Press, USA, 2004)
This is the second all-men’s anthology they have done. The editors in 1992 did an American only one called Men of Our Times. This men’s anthology has over 250 poets in translation from over 100 countries to tell the story of men, childhood, lives, loves, family, work, mentors and rivals and other categories, all arranged by region as well. Here an excerpt of p. 310 by Nobuo Ayukawa who emerged at Japan’s preeminent modernist writer following WWII, translated by Oketani Shogo and Leza Lowitz

[…] our discussion was limited
to our job histories and how many children we had.
Everyone had become his old age.
Someone took his medicine,
and night came so early […]
We had a nice conversation
and ate lunch cheerfully —
noon is a safe time.
On a day that smelled of rock and sky,
waves, sand,
and flowers
there was no place
to mourn.

p. 137 from Secret of Fire from Abdul Wahab al-Bayati starts off

On the last day
I kissed her hands,
Her eyes / her lips.
I said to her: you are now
Ripe like an apple
Half of you: a woman
The other half: impossible to describe.
The words
Escaped me
And I escaped them
Now I pray
Both of us collapsed.

Clear Light: haiku by Alan Spence (Canongate, Scotland, 2005)
p. 99

making tea
as if nothing
had happened

This Scottish poet has a clarity in the poems but there’s sediment rather than sentiment. They aren’t glossy simple poems. There are nods to what is excluded.
Some poets as they process experience into language put the experience thru the juice extractor, keep only nectar and throw away fibrous things. Some regulate experience and add filler to make it come to the level one wants. Some make miniature models keeping the original proportions and he seems to write more to that model.
p 113

after everything
the simple absolution
of the rain