Pearl Pirie’s lists, reviews, interviews, etc. since 2005

tanka quote

親は子を育ててきたと言うけれど 勝手に赤い畑のトマト
Parents say their child is a creature they have raised, but the fact is this : each has ripened as it pleased, a red garden tomato.
A tanka by Tawara Machi
Haiku is becoming a generic word. Like sushi becoming indistinct from sashimi. What is the difference between the senryu and haiku according to Elizabeth St Jacques? (found via George Swede of, among many other poetic places Simply Haiku where he looks top-down and bottom up at what a haiku prescriptively and descriptively is)

Timeless classics?

Some poems time travel better. Translations can update the linguistic wardrobe I suppose.

Night Thoughts

I cannot sleep. The long, long
Night is full of bitterness.
I sit alone in my room,
beside a smoky lamp.
I rub my heavy eyelids
And idly turn the pages
Of my book. Again and again
I trim my brush and stir the ink.
The hours go by. The moon comes
In the open window, pale
And bright like new money.
At last I fall asleep and
I dream of the days on the
River at Tsa-feng, and the
Friends of my youth in Yen Chao.
young and happy we ran
Over the beautiful hills.
And now the years have gone by.
And I have never gone back.

Lu Yu (1125 – 1209) (translated by Kenneth Rexroth in the 1950s)

The New Directions Anthology of Jacket Magazine review pointed out this Kenneth Rexroth to me. Now I’m inundated in books. Poetry I requested from the library at all different weeks is coming in at once.

I wanted to read again Marianne Bluger‘s Tamarack and Clearcut and Lucille Clifton’s Next poems. I wanted to read more of this Rexroth fellow and more of Wallace Stevens in Collected poems, but not all at the same time. A pressured proffered blessing.

—

Lover Night

Disconcerted

Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams
~ Penseroso by Tekahionwake

Night is not a vast, but a bas relief,
or a tripping stone (productivity
stumbles). Mind artificially day-lit,
flick off lamp, news. Morning will appear soon,
chafed by color, ship-shape clatters, time split,
lasered into billionths. Pause. Bourgeoisie
evening mosaic; rub grouts of doubts.
Damp thunder, lawn chair rattles on concrete.
Consternation says come to bed with ye.
Soulless is all humanity to me.

Crave date with Lover Night, don’t fuss; modest
“right” clothes, words; bold, unconcerned, he fingers
past weave, excuse; unknits, unlocks verbal blocks,
insubstantial chatter of cloth and role
and names; he instructs: “see how hierarchy
of branch has dropped, leaves a natural hook?
Fabric? fabrications? Pride? Hang them.
Come into the palpable, silent, free.”
To-night. My keenest longing is to be

one who leaves certains (Counted Starlings
in sunned Cedar), recedes to black treeline,
proves “impenetrable forest” soft groaned,
guttural flesh. Stride dared gradients, steps
easy as sun’s sluice, unfettered, through fanned,
crisscrossed chaos of branches. As light beams
are senseless, I fall blind towards Night’s arms.
Muscles untwist, limp with no argument
to resist. Breathe, toes curled by dark stream.
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems

to take me as his birthright, united
as a shadow into a shadow’s own, as if
I were the waited for one, Another
to complete his Eternal, cloud-eyes born
to complement the tang of star-gaps, more
than even Polaris was for. His gleam
is no lacquered bowl over bee. His arc’s
high, thick, barrel chest to which I cling. He’s
a black latex brushed on my skin, a cream,
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.

Form: glosa. A glosa takes 4 lines of a poem, spins them out into 4 stanzas of 10 lines, each ending with the inspiring line. Lines 6, 9 and 10 rhyme.