Yearly Archives: 2018

128 posts

Amazon, Again. Still.

poetry

amaz

Ah, Amazon dot all-is-never-calm. Because it’s true what they say: The more you eat, the hungrier you get. With people, eating begets eating (thus the obesity epidemic). With corporations, jonesing money begets jonesing money (thus, in Amazon’s case, the something-silly profits).

I’ve already complained about Amazon’s insatiable appetite on these pages, especially as seen through its recent acquisition of Goodreads, a place I’ve been hanging out in since shortly after its inception, but I won’t let that stop me.

This week I received an e-mail from Amazon stating that its Prime program was going up $2 a month (apparently their profits had dropped from “ridiculous” to merely “spectacular”).

This on the heels of Goodreads’ “Giveaway” program going pay-to-play, meaning authors like me would have to pony up $119 for the right to post one of my books in the “Giveaway” program.

Ah, no. No on both counts. I’m done with “Giveaways,” both in entering my books from a writer’s perspective and in entering my name to win from a reader’s perspective. I’m also done with Prime.

But enough with using up real estate HERE on the matter. I decided instead to post my argument and raison d’être (French for “raisins forever”) over at my other blog, New England States, where I haven’t posted anything since the Rutherford B. Hayes Administration, seems. Why? Because I’ve been so busy living, breathing, writing, and reading poetry over here.

Amazing, isn’t it? Dot and calm, too.

“When in Trouble Depend Upon Imagination.”

poetry poetry books

Thanks to The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, I’m getting to know another New York School poet (as you’ll recall, Frank O’Hara just stopped by for lunch a few weeks back). I like to read introductions to poetry collections because you usually pick up salient quotes from the poet. In this case, Peter Gizzi, author of the intro, does not disappoint, as he shares a few bon mots from Barbara.

Guest said her primary task as a poet was “to invoke the unseen, to unmask it.” This is a variation of the more familiar call for poets to observe what’s there–the visible we often choose not to view due to negligence or engagement with the rat-race (or one might say, today, “social-network”) world, which distracts us. Gizzi calls it “the poetry of revelation and of mystery,” a nice mixture if you can get it.

Guest wrote essays as well as poems, giving Gizzi additional grist for his introduction’s mill. In one essay called “Wounded Joy,” Guest writes, “The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page so that we are aware of another aspect of the art….What we are setting out to do is to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that it overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page.”

Is this just a fancy way of describing resonance–the way works of art that speak to us resemble ripples from poetic stones thrown into the pond of a reader’s brain?

Guest aligned herself with the abstract expressionists, those who believed in “letting the subject find itself.” For Guest, Gizzi writes, “the poem begins in silence” as opposed to noise. Guest says the poem “should not be programmatic, or didactic, or show-off,” rather readers should “go inside the poem itself and be in the dark at the beginning of the journey.”

This contrasts a bit with St. Billy of Collins’ proclamation that no poem should start off in the dark and be in the least bit confusing–that it should, in fact, establish itself in such a way that the reader has a footing and a compass to begin the journey. Differences of opinion make for poetic horse races, as they say.

Back to Guest: “The forces of the imagination from which strength is drawn have a disruptive and capricious power. If the imagination is indulged too freely, it may run wild and destroy or be destructive to the artists….If not used imagination may shrivel up. Baudelaire continually reminds us that the magic of art is inseparable from its risks….”

Guest, author of the words, “When in trouble depend upon imagination,” realized it for the double-edged sword it could be. Moderation in all things, we are told, and we think of alcohol and food first and foremost. Maybe, Barbara reminds us, we should be thinking of imagination, too. Like the Promethean gift of fire, it is incredibly useful until it blows outside of man’s control. Then it is Frankenstein’s monster after not eating for three days. Look out!

Jumping around this massive tome, I find many of the poem’s a challenge in that they tend to be longer works and many are all over the page using space in novel and challenging ways. Call it the conservative in me, but the poem I chose to end this entry is easier on the eyes and the gray matter.

Envoy, then: a little Guest for the rest of this post.

Barrels by Barbara Guest

Y otras pasan; y viéndome tan triste,
toman un poquito de ti
en la abrupta arruga de mi hondo dolor.
Cesar Vellejo

I won’t let anybody

take a drink

out of this barrel of tears

I’ve collected from you.

Least of all another woman.

I see her coming along.

I know the type.

I can tell you what she’ll

be wearing.

I know the type

I won’t like it.

She’ll look at that barrel

she’s had a few in her day.

Not that she’s ever filled one.

She’ll remark casually,

“Sweet water,

good to wash my hair.”

And who doesn’t know

tears are purer

than rain water

and softer on the hair.

Just as she steps toward it

and makes for the cup,

I’ll see phantom you

and what you were

brought up by the sea.

And scraps of paper

from this ditch of my brain

will float on the water

and choke her.

Random Thoughts: MLK Eve Edition

humor Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

There’s a certain poetry in quotidian things, like getting out of bed, for instance, when the room is cold and the bed is warm. It gets you thinking ahead: the cold of bathroom floor tiles on your soles, the gooseflesh on your exposed body as you dress, the tiny jingle of license tags as the dog lifts his head when you come down the stairs, and mostly, the vigor of outdoor air rushing in and out of your nose, sometimes smelling piney and sometimes just dry and wintery, while the crows who have been up for hours laugh overhead. All this, while you’re still in bed!
This is why mentors advise you carry a small pad of paper with pencil: those snippets of thought, that mortar that will some day hold the bricks of a mighty poetic wall. Yes, it’s tough finding pencils in bed and when you’re in the shower, but I just make a rhyme of the idea, singing it in my head, until I can get to the paper.
A 3-day weekend is a marvelous thing. I especially like the “island day,” Sunday, a piece of luxury real estate in the middle. Usually Sunday carries a pall–wherein the monkey mind thinks of Monday, but on an island day? No. Just turquoise ocean, palm trees, and coconuts on the beach.
This weekend we meditate on Martin Luther King, Jr., and his message. Especially this weekend. MLK had a dream, but he’d have a nightmare in the decidedly White House were he alive today. “We shall overcome.”
This year, the MLK federal holiday falls on his actual birthday: Jan. 15th. (King was born in 1929.)
The best vow I ever made as a reader? Diversifying. If you thought that was financial talk, think again. Last year I branched away from my steady diet of fiction (comfort food) and started putting more fiber in my reading diet with nonfiction, short story collections, YA, and especially poetry. Oddly, it’s changed the way I read everything–even my comfort food–because these genres use different techniques and thus require of the reader different skills. Poetry, for instance, slows me down, invites rereading and marveling at how words are used. Reading it makes me notice the sloppiness of many novelists (where words are a luxury often abused) and the beauty when novelists (writers’ writers) treasure words like a poet. I’m seeing that now as I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
It’s never too late for a “New Year’s resolution,” by the way. I hope you’ll try the Eclectic Reading Plan in 2018 yourself.
The more I write poetry, the more I realize the toughest part is nailing the end of a poem. True of novels, too. How many novels have horrible endings? Too many.
Which is why I so appreciate James Wright’s ending to the oddly-named “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “I have wasted my life.” This while he is engaging in an activity most westerners would consider a “waste of time”–lying in a hammock! What’s irony to some is all-too-obvious to Buddhists.
Seems every time I experiment with my poetry, I get some reader who critiques it by advising that I change the part I experimented on. I’m beginning to think that you can’t experiment unless you go solo and just send the poem out, unvetted. I mean, of course it’s weird! It’s an experiment! Flying kites in lightning storms is weird, too!
How do you know you’ve made it or are on your way to making it in the poetry world? You publish a “Collected Poems.” (Meaning: You have enough poems to collect, so they’d better be good!)
Although society is less religious than it used to be, there’s no denying the innate appeal of church bells riding the crisp air to your ears. The sound is both sad and beautiful, a wonderful match.
I love it when writers from the past visit your poetry and make themselves at home. In my first book it was Turgenev and Tolstoy. In my latest it is James Wright, Jack Gilbert, and Ernest Hemingway. They’re good company, all of them, and make for good cameos in a poem.
Favorite good deed: Pushing Raymond Carver’s collected poems on unsuspecting readers. The man’s unjustly labeled as a short story master when, in fact, he is a short story AND poetry master, especially if you like narrative poetry and simple poetry that does not do its best imitation of a Rubik’s Cube.
Some of my poems are starting to rhyme unbidden. What’s up with that? I’m not going to question it, though. Never question something Robert Frost ran with.
Speaking of, it took England to discover what America had the chance to figure out first: Frost was one bad-ass poet! Thank you, England, and sorry about that little Tea Party thing in Boston Harbor.
My wife still isn’t sure about the title Lost Sherpa of Happiness. My daughter loves it.
Between Christmas and January birthday, I am (and will be) happily awash in new books, including new poets: Barbara Guest and Wendell Berry so far, with more on the way (like the poetic cavalry riding over the hill in stanzas to the meter of horse hooves).
Some say writing a blog distracts you from the real deal (writing poetry). Some say it’s an essential warm-up for the real deal. And some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. (Frost would say “either will suffice.”) For now, I’m sticking with the blog.
Thanks for putting up with another in this regular feature called randomness. Happy Day of Rest. I hope you make like Wright in a hammock today. Read, write, muse. Let it be. The world is much ado about nothing, after all….

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Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. I hope you can help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. Thank you, and may the book’s 63 poems bring a little Buddhist & Taoist joy into your life!

All This, Before Dawn…

poetry

dawn

I never quite understood night owls. People up until high hours are knocked down to small numbers. People who sleep their way to double digits again.

When I woke at 4 this morning, it was just me and the winter rain, like an old friend returned and calling me from the clapboards of the house, the newly-running gutters, the softly-gurgling drains.

Like me, every window is dark and reflective now. The world has constricted to the small circle of light I sit in with this book. It’s just the author, whispering, and me, listening, only occasionally interrupting in that complementary back-and-forth writers and readers have honored since Gutenberg.

The family still sleeps. The old dog, who got up briefly, settles at my feet, patiently waiting for my morning moment to expire so we can go out to meet the rain.

But first, this silence. This coffee. This book. All at a time when anything seems possible and everything feels refreshed and new.

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Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. Help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. Thank you, and may the book’s 63 poems bring a little Buddhist & Taoist joy into your life!

When Death Is Neither Dark Nor Depressing

poetry poetry books

When you write about death, a very western response is to label it “dark” or “depressing.” The Buddhists, who often meditate on their demise (and even on the grotesque look of what lies beneath their comely skin, eyes, and smile), would have it otherwise. They take a more pedestrian view of death, and it’s as fair a topic as what to wear today, that ant crossing the sidewalk, or the raindrop that just landed on your eyelash.

This point was driven home as I read the late Dick Allen’s last book, Zen Master Poems. He hits the usual topics of Buddhists, most of them quite simple (but not), and he does not veer from death, either. Reading his work only weeks after death took him to new lives was especially poignant. Let me share a few:

Sickness Is My Companion by Dick Allen

Sickness is my companion
that walks with me beside the sand garden
and follows me into the zendo room.

Death is my friend
that never leaves me to myself on a hilltop
and always awaits my footsteps.

The three of us,
sitting around a small table, sipping tea,
whispering among the rising fumes.

Reminiscent, isn’t it, of Siddhartha riding outside his palace walls to meet old age, sickness, and death. It was the catalyst for all that would follow, that. And another:

Awakening the Fire by Dick Allen

“Awakening the fire,” I call it.
You listen to people, you listen so deeply
you can hear their past lives,
the crackle of their funeral pyres,
and see smoke rising over the Ganges,
and there it is, that individual spark
that makes one life unlike any other.
You tease it out. You blow on it. You fan it.
You offer it a handful of dried tinder.
But that’s all you can do
and almost always
the spark glows momentarily and then
returns to ash.
Not this life. Not this life. Not this life.
Not even the next.

Safe travels, we wish Dick. None of us is far behind. Not in the perspective of the universe, where both people and their time are fleeting.

An Interview with the Lost Sherpa of Happiness

Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry

It’s not every day you track down a lost sherpa (if briefly). Not every day he agrees to pause for a brief interview, either. But yesterday, in single-digit weather, with wind gusts making it feel like sub-zero weather, LS did just that. As I learned a thing or two about poetry (or “life,” as he’d prefer you call it), I figured I’d share the back-and-forth:

KC: Why are you called the “Lost Sherpa of Happiness”? I mean, are you really lost?

LS: Not me. We.

KC: All lost?

LS: Look at the stars tonight, which are only the beginning, and consider your place here. What you know. What you don’t know. Does it seem disconcerting to be considered lost?

KC: Some readers of the book look at the cover and think the collection will be about Nepal or summiting Mount Everest or Buddhism, perhaps. Why does the book carry that title and that artwork?

LS: You have to stop thinking of the challenge we call “Everest” and the guidance we call “sherpa” as a place and a person. Then you will see that all the poems in this book are about “Everests” of a kind — challenges, obstacles, frustrations. The figurative mountains you’d see around you, if you looked, Nepal or not.

KC: But you yourself are only in one poem. The title poem that wraps the book up.

LS: I am both reader and writer as well. Therefore, I am in every poem. Reading and writing are all ways of walking, searching, observing. Sometimes choosing to question and more times choosing not to.

KC: What about section two of the book’s three parts–all animal poems. Is there a reason for this?

LS: It is a human propensity to box and label things, to demand order from our disorderly world. Yes, it’s true that the “Second Search” poems tell the stories of various birds and mammals and reptiles, but those stories are our stories. We are animals. We are that song sparrow singing, despite the hawk far above in the pine tree. We are that young raccoon trapped in a dumpster after enjoying someone’s thrown-away food. We are that dog just being a dog in a room with humans who demand silence from a dog not being a dog. As your American writer, Mark Twain, once said, humans are often less logical animals than the ones they feel superior to.

KC: What about the first search, the part where many poem’s recall your youth?

LS: Or your youth. Or any reader’s. As youths, we are often wiser than the elders. The nonconformism. The imagination. The openness and the wonder. Poems see this because, as has been said by the Buddha himself, we are all poets when we are children. Not writers of poetry. Observers of a world that is poetry. We look at things like we never could as adults who have been shaped by society, pressed by authority, molded by the tyranny of others’ opinions and demands and expectations.

KC: So I guess that means the last section is really not so much about twilight years…

LS: True. Life as wheel. The way the elderly finally free themselves of caring, becoming more open like the children they once were, preparing themselves for their next life, for freedom from samsara.

KC: Does this mean you are not lost, then?

LS: It means I am happy, and that “lost” is more word than state of being. There is great joy and discovery in being “lost.” That is the country these poems travel — “country” as in land, not nation with arbitrary borders (which, by their nature, can’t help but be arbitrary).

KC: Do you have a favorite among the poems in the book?

LS: Picking favorites would be like claiming individualism does not exist. It does exist. There are many faces to happiness, to sadness and to regret. All the human emotions we see on our journeys and searches.

KC: So, I gather, you have no intention of being found or finding what you’re looking for.

LS: In the words of the prophet, Bono (an Irish Buddha of sorts!), “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…” We all carry those words in our hearts. It’s how we interpret them. I embrace the negative contraction positively because it is the spirit of the present. Finding, searching, being lost. It is being. How else will we ever enjoy this “tenuous moment of wilderness,” as the last poem of the book terms it, called life?

KC: Thank you, and I won’t keep you any longer. Good luck with your fourth search. And thank you for sharing your pursuit of happiness in this book.

LS: (laughter) Thomas Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness. It is the pursuit itself, not the happiness you imagine ahead and out of reach. Take that with you on your own searches. See what you find….

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Lost Sherpa of Happiness Ken Craft

Robert Hass and I Chat a Little Prose and a Little Poetry

poetry poetry books

hass

In this our third and final entry on the exciting world of prose poetry, I present quoted bits from Bob (his new book, A Little Book on Form), interlaced by my responses. A friendly chat, if you will (or even if you won’t). As you will see, Robert Hass knows a lot more than me on the topic, but I’m here to learn.

RH: “There are at least two kinds of this kind of thing: proses that are one paragraph long and proses that are more than one paragraph long.

“The paragraph as a formal device differs from the stanza in that the proposition of the paragraph is unity.

“The proposition of a composition of one paragraph is completeness.

“A paragraph that goes on for much longer than a page breaks the basic contract of the paragraph.

“These are all expressive possibilities.”

KC: Amen to that contract bit. I can’t tell you how many classics I’ve read where, when you turn the page, you see a paragraph that swallows BOTH pages, left and right. It’s like taking a deep breath and diving in to swim the underwater length of an Olympic-sized pool.

RH: “What the texts for writers say is true: The four kinds of prose are narration, description, exposition, and argument.

“This expectation is also an expressive possibility.

“From the beginning, this kind of prose was torn between undermining its medium and appropriating it.”

KC: Huh?

RH: “So a paragraph, which is a proposition of unity, full of non sequiturs is a contradiction in terms. This is, has been an expressive possibility.

“The prose poem came into existence not only during the age of prose and the age of realism, but at the moment when prose and realism were just beginning to enjoy the prestige of art.”

KC: I enjoy that, too. I’m a prestige guy from way-back.

RH: “This kind of prose was sired by ambivalence and envy. The ‘prose poet’ is either worshipping at or pissing on the altar of narration, description, exposition, and argument. Or both.

“To write this kind of prose you probably have to love or hate the characteristic rhythms of prose.

“The rhythms of poetry have quicker access to the unconscious than the rhythms of prose. It may be that this is one of the reasons many people prefer prose to verse. It does not make an indecent claim on the reader’s person at the outset.”

KC: I personally hate it when people make indecent claims on my person. Unless it’s my wife.

RH: “One of the obvious possibilities of this kind of prose was to fill it full of the devices that people identify as lyrical as a kind of alchemy to transform prose and the world of prose into poetry. This was the way of Rimbaud.

“Another possibility was to thwart the expectations of prose. Cubist prose, like Tender Buttons [Gertrude Stein], did it at the level of grammar. Surrealist prose did it at the level of representation and at the level of sequence.

“In all three cases, varying in intensity, the idea was to use the medium in ways that would subvert the usual expectations of the medium.”

KC: I’m loving this. And I think I’m even getting it. Especially how poetry has quicker access to the unconscious than prose. There’s clearly a difference when you read the two. Even when you read a poem side by side with its ugly duckling cousin, a “prose poem” (whose name is even ugly). Uh, would you mind passing the peanuts?

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Help keep the word-of-mouth buzz rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy. (And as Amazon likes to say, “Only Three Remaining! Order Now!”)

Prose Poem: Hero in Minotaur’s Clothing?

poetry

minotaur

One poet Robert Hass mentioned as a periodic practitioner of the “prose poem” was Zbigniew Herbert, who offers “an example of the way it appropriates fable.” For today’s discussion purposes, below is a copy of Herbert’s prose poem “The History of the Minotaur” as translated into English by Alissa Valles.

As you read, ask yourself this: Does it look like poetry or prose to you? Is it “poetry” only because it is, like the ugly duckling (read: quacking swan) walking with ducks, that is, a poem only because it is in a book surrounded by other poems?

And this: Is it rife with poetic devices? Does the humor work to its poetic advantage? The snappy ending, maybe?

Me? I have no horse in this race and couldn’t tell you if I did. The good news is, I’m not sure the established poet and professor and winner of the Pulitzer Prize–Mr. Hass–could, either. If ever a man needed his poetic license to get out of a difficult spot, this is it!

The History of the Minotaur

by Zbigniew Herbert

The true history of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A. He was–despite later rumors–the authentic son of King Minos and Pasiphaë. The little boy was born healthy, but with an abnormally large head–which fortune-tellers read as a sign of his future wisdom. In fact with the years the Minotaur grew into a robust, slightly melancholy idiot. The king decided to give him up to be educated as a priest. But the priests explained that they couldn’t accept the feeble-minded prince, for that might diminish the authority of religion, already undermined by the invention of the wheel.

Minos then brought in the engineer Daedalus, who was fashionable in Greece at the time as the creator of a popular branch of pedagogical architecture. And so the labyrinth arose. Within its system of pathways from elementary to more and more complicated, its variations in levels and rungs of abstraction, it was supposed to train the Minotaur prince in the principles of correct thinking.

So the unhappy prince wandered along the pathways of induction and deduction, prodded by his preceptors, gazing blankly at ideological frescos. He didn’t get them at all.
Having exhausted all his resources, King Minos resolved to get rid of this disgrace to the royal line. He brought in (again from Greece, which was known for its able men) the ace assassin Theseus. And Theseus killed the Minotaur. On this point myth and history agree.

Through the labyrinth–now a useless primer–Theseus makes his way back carrying the big, bloody head of the Minotaur with its goggling eyes, in which for the first time wisdom had begun to sprout–of a kind ordinarily attributed to experience.

There you go! One of the prose poems touted by Mr. Hass himself. Is it my favorite in my much-esteemed Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert 1956-1998? Not hardly, but that matters not and is not pertinent to our exploration of the form.

In our next post, more Robert Hass debating with himself over the stormy marriage of prose and poetry. It’s like reality TV. Only in a book. Tune in tomorrow!