Vrzhu Birthday Greetings

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and the world laughs at you."

"I don't disagree with people.  I merely point out how wrong they are."

***

Hwaet. It’s been a while since we’ve done birthday greetings here at Vrzhu, but today and tomorrow are jam-packed:

May 8, 1930 Gary Snyder
May 8, 1592 Francis Quarles
May 9, 1938 Charles Simic
May 9, 1895 Lucian Blaga
May 9, 1265 Dante Alighieri

So here’s our first installment: Gary Snyder

As For Poets
Gary Snyder

As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems,
Need help from no man.

The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn absolute zero
Fossil love pumped back up.

The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tiny
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky--
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

Why I Take Good Care Of My Macintosh Computer
Gary Snyder

Because it broods under it's hood like a perched falcon
Because it jumps like a skittish horse
    and sometimes throws me
Because it is pokey when cold
Because plastic is a sad, strong material
    that is charming to rodents
Because it is flighty
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers
Because it leaps forward and backward
    is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a rock
& it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of
    gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods
    strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at
    "delete" so it teaches
    of impermanence and pain;
& because my computer and me are both brief
    in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me
    right inside the tent
And it goes with me out every morning
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Riprap
Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
              placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
              in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
              riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
              straying planets,
These poems, people,
              lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
              and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
              four-dimensional
Game of Go.
              ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
              a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
              with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
              all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I saw Gary Snyder at the Folger Library in 1995, and he was impressive.  I used two of my five words of Japanese, and he replied with about 20, which, or course, I didn’t know. We also talked about how we  liked the little moleskine notebooks. I wish we'd talked about fuseki, which is the pure poetry part of Go, but I was too shy.  In Go, the board is set so that the grain of the wood runs from one player to the other, rather than like a fence, dividing them.  This is to show that the two players are united in a common effort: the making of the game. The grain of a poem, too, should join the writer and the reader, from one to the other, in a united effort, the making of the poem.

Anyway, he was completely charming. During his reading he recounted talking to some high-ranking economist who said that oil will never reach $100 a barrel. To which Gary Snyder replied, I don’t know. It just hit $50 a barrel, didn’t it?

Here’s a news item:

May 8, 2008. NEW YORK - Gasoline and crude oil jumped to new records Thursday, with gas rising 3 cents to an average national price of nearly $3.65 a gallon and oil crossing $124 a barrel for the first time.

Happy birthday, Gary.