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NEW ANTHOLOGY "FULL MOON ON K STREET" POEM ABOUT WASHINGTON DC BY POETS OF WASHINGTON DC

Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC
Kim Roberts, editor

Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes.  All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political.

Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet,Elizabeth Alexander.

Full Moon on K Street is available at Busboys & Poets, Politics and Prose in Washington DC and elsewhere!

Reviews:

The Washington Post called it "the first anthology of modern poetry to be wholly for, about and by current and former Washington residents—[that] teems with poets who've distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years."

The Current Newspaper's family of neighborhood papers (The Northwest Current, Georgetown Current, and Dupont Current) noted, "If you love D.C., even if you haven't read a poem since high school, you'll find that the book is full of intriguing perspectives on familiar places and events...And for newcomers--or those who want to send the book to folks back home--the introduction to each poem explains the local references."

The Hill Rag acclaimed, "What better place for a poetry journal than the nation's capital?"

Q&A with editor Kim Roberts by Plan B Press publisher stevenallenmay.

Plan B Press: What prompted you to start Beltway Poetry Quarterly online magazine?

Kim Roberts:  It was the idea of my friend Kathy Keler. Kathy is a painter and graphic designer, and she started a website called "washingtonart" to showcase other area visual artists. She thought it would be a great idea to pair this with some poems, and--after convincing me, since I initially took some convincing--Kathy taught me some basics of html, and designed the logo and overall look of the journal. I can't believe that it will be ten years old this coming January! The journal has taught me so much, and introduced me to so many poets.

Plan B Press: The anthology, Full Moon on K Street has evolved from a celebration of Beltway Magazine to a more sweeping look at the city’s poetry over the past 50 years. How did that happen?

Kim Roberts:  The anthology is an overlapping of my several obsessions: poetry, of course, but also literary history, and the built environment. love cities--their architecture, their grid, the way large groups of people use the space--and I love DC especially. I've looked at a lot of other anthologies, and nothing like this exists--a portrait of the city from 1950 to the present, and the places within the city that have meant something special to these authors.

Plan B Press: What types of obstacles have you had to deal with in preparing the anthology? What has been most frustrating and most rewarding in the effort?

Kim Roberts:  Compiling an anthology is much harder than I imagined! There were lots of authors I knew I wanted to include, and I looked back over their work, and was surprised to see that many never wrote poems set in DC. That includes such authors as wide ranging as Larry Neal, Archibald MacLeish, Owen Dodson, and Anthony Hecht. There were other authors, such as Dierdra Baldwin, Gloria Oden, and Haki Madhubuti who did not respond to my request for poems. It would have been lovely to have included all of them. But there were lots of wonderful coups as well. I spoke to the next-of-kin of many authors who have passed away who were enthusiastic about the project. Some, like Ed Cox's family, were thrilled to be reminded that their loved ones are still read and loved by the larger literary community. I am so grateful to them (as well as the families of Hilary Tham, Ann Darr, Betty Parry, and others) for the warm responses they gave. I was also gratified by the poets who--like Myra Sklarew--decided to write poems specifically for this anthology. And I was pleased to be able to track down so many authors who once lived in DC and have since moved away, such as Michael Lally, Gray Jacobik, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Sharan Strange. There are also poets included who I think should be better known to readers. I was able to get permission to reprint a poem by Essex Hemphill, the pioneering African-American gay rights activist whose poetry is a revelation, but whose work was long kept out of circulation by family members wanting to preserve their privacy. There are poems by Percy Johnston, a leader of the Howard Poets of the 1970s, and Eugene McCarthy, best remembered as a Senator and five-time Presidential candidate. Their poems, different as they are, show great humor and an deep engagement with the world around them. Jose Emilio Pacheco, little known here, is widely considered Mexico's greatest living poet. He taught at the University of Maryland for one semester a year for many years, and his poem about Sligo Creek is a terrific addition to the book. And Gaston Neal, who published so little during his lifetime but was a mentor to so many, is included with a tribute poem to Sterling Brown.

 

 

 

You can catch readings from Full Moon on K Street by poets who appear in this wonderful anthology here:

March 22
Poet's Corner radio show, featuring a reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Teri Ellen Cross, Hayes Davis, David Moore. Interviewed by Abdul Ali.
Monday, 7:00 pm
WPFW 89.3 FM

March 23
Poetry at Noon: Reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Jonetta Rose Barras, Merrill Leffler, Ramola D, and Venus Thrash.
Tuesday, 12:00 pm
Free. Library of Congress, Jefferson Building, Whittall Pavilion, First St. SE, DC. (202) 707-5394.

A NEW BEGINNING.....

COMING SOON......

 

From the sublime to the two of Vrzhu's favorite people.

Kristen Wiig reads from the oeuvre of Suzanne Somers.

The More Things Change...

A RADICAL-CONSERVATIVE

By Harriet Monroe

MAX EASTMAN speaks up again for exact metrics and against the freer forms which he once called "lazy verse." This time his argument—American Ideals of Poetry he calls it—forms the preface to his new book of delicately wrought "poems and songs and sonnets," entitled Colots of Life (Alfred A. Knopf). In this thirty-page article he sums up his case, the case of a man whose lingering conservatism, chased out of other departments of his mind, finds a last refuge in art.

 

Why not admit that Max Eastman is one of the most vivid and exuberant of human souls—an ardent creature who works, as he lives, with passion, convinced that he would not cringe before the white light of truth ? The truth—he finds it in the old pagan clarity, uniting, across the Christian centuries, with the pitiless searching breath of modern science to bear away speculative fogs and aristocratic snobberies and humilities of faith. Like Rupert Brooke, he gives his ardor, to a cause, and would die for it in glamorous ecstasy if need were. And, again like Brooke, he sees the figure of Beauty not quite lithe and nude, as Blake saw it, or—let us venture to say—as H. D. sees it today, but decorously draped in the sheerest and most softly colored of veils—silken chiffons that fall, almost with but effort, into rhythmic folds, into wistful modern reminders of the austere Greek line.

 

But, in presenting the fine brief sonnets and other lyrics which are the result of his prayerful communings with Beauty, he is not sure enough of them to offer them without preliminary theory, without a plea. His plea takes the form of a contrast between Whitman and Poe, and an indictment of free verse as necessarily unrespectful of the line and therefore unstructural and formless! He quotes from Whitman's proud invitation to the poets of the future—that assertion that "there is something inevitably comic in rhyme," and that "the truest and greatest poetry, while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic and distinguishable easily enough, can never again, in the English language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre;" and over against this he sets certain "icy" admonitions from Poe's Philosophy of Composition which he thinks assert that poet's "preoccupation with 'verbal melody' " and his point that "beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem." And Mr. Eastman adds: "The details of this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what will illumine the modern problems about poetry."

 

Well, in Mr. Eastman's generalization one gets indeed his point of view, the clever argument of a special pleader, but not much illumination. He says, "The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete;" when, in fact, however the personal characters of Poe and Whitman may be in contrast, their aesthetic principles are far from irreconcilable. Does Mr. Eastman seriously ascribe to Whitman "a grand contempt for beauty?" or think that Poe, in asserting, "beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem," means by beauty merely "verbal melody"—indeed, a metrically restricted verbal melody at that—and does not include spiritual motive? Does Mr. Eastman mean to imply that iambic metrics, rhyme, the pentameter line, or any other familiar instruments of English poetry, are anything but tools and aids, are in themselves structure? Does he find more "form" (much abused word!), more sheerly structural modelling, in The Raven than in that glorious elegy When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, even though the former poem is in the school, let us say, of Houdon and the latter in that of Rodin?

 

To come down to our own immediate moment, does Mr. Eastman find more form—a more severely modelled classic shape—in Witter Bynner's fine Celia lyrics, or his own purely carved love sonnets in this volume, than in Carl Sandburg's Lost or The Great Hunt, H. D.'s Oread or The Shrine, Aldington's Choricos, Amy Lowell's Venus Tran- siens, or Ezra Pound's Dance Figure and certain other lyrics? Mr. Eastman may prefer strictly measured iambics to free verse—no one will deny him a right to his preference; but when he tries to ascribe to these all the architectonics of the poetic art he is treading on shoals and quicksands.

 

Mr. Eastman complains that the line-divisions of free verse are arbitrary, that if they were once scrambled together in any poem even the author could hardly unscramble them. But may one ask him what that alleged fact has to do with the case? If this scrambling makes prose of any piece, then it was always prose—as indeed much verse is, both bond and free. Would Hamlet's soliloquy or Antony's death-speech be any the less poetry if written out as prose, or if scrambled into irregular lines ? Is Lincoln's Gettysburg speech any the less essentially poetry, in rhythm, structure, and spiritual motive, because it happens to be printed without line- divisions ?

 

If the eye-test shatters Mr. Eastman's arguments, the ear- test is similarly destructive. He says: if "two or three of the most free and subtle" of the vers-librists were "to read one of their favorite passages into the ear of an instrument, it is safe to assert that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than if the same two or three were reading a passage of highly wrought English prose." Possibly; but if these same two or three were to read Paradise Lost or the Ode to the West Wind, or any other poem of subtle or sweeping cadences, there would be still less identity. Such investigations as Dr. Patterson's (sensibly approved by Mr. Eastman and thoughtlessly disapproved, in a recent Dial, by John Gould Fletcher) will turn the pitiless light of science upon the empiricism of prosody, and upon the unrhythmic misinterpretations of poetry which most readers are guilty of. A life-time of theatre-going, including more Shakespeare and other poet-playwrights than may be found on the stage today, has convinced me that ninety-nine per-cent of actors deliberately hash poetic lines into prose so that even Mr. Eastman could hardly unscramble them. And few poets, whatever their rhythmic instinct, may be trusted to read their own poems.

 

In short, Mr. Eastman's argument will not hold water. It is a wistful effort to give the sanctity of unalterable law to merely individual theories and preferences. ( Mr. Eastman wants poetry as a refuge from life's passion and turmoil, and he uses the great name of Poe as his authority—Poe, to whom "a poem was an objective thing," Poe, who "would take sounds and melodies of words almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had formed a beautiful vessel." Ah, but Poe's passion was beauty, especially beauty as it is found in poetry, whereas Mr. Eastman's passion is life, and its enhancement through social revolution. In politics and social ethics he is a radical; but shocked conservatism must take refuge in some sacred corner of one's being, and in his case the muse presides there with draped and decorous dignity. ) H. M.

Our History and a Gem from Our Vaults - A Vrzhu Classic Reprint

Many of you know of VRZHU as a hip purveyor of poetic treasure and cutting edge "content" as evidenced from our splendid books and our frequent contributions on the internets.  We're proud of that.

But our history is more storied than this.  Indeed, VRZHU Press as it is known today is just the most recent incarnation of what began in the 1500s in the tiny German town of Bad Muskau on the Polish border.  Originally known as Veröffentlicher von Versionen die Schäferhund Eingeweiden (loosely translated as "Publishers of Versions of Sheepdog Entrails"), much of its early history was lost in a tragic fire in 1816.  Indeed what little we know about VRZHU's first three centuries are based on what was written down by the survivors based on their memory of the records destroyed in the fire and the oral history of earlier publishers still living at the time.  While we concede that these testimonies are suspect, they are sadly all we have to go by.

The story that has come down to us is that the founder, one Leopold Fuhrwerk, was an itinerant poet who carried his books by cart, selling and reading village to village through German Silesia (then part of the Habsburg Monarchy).  He seemed successful, but at some point Fuhrwerk's more satiric work caught the attention of the authorities who did not look kindly on his more pointed policial commentary.  His quatrains about the "poofiness" of Archduke Rudolf pantaloons not only proved the big hit poem of 1568, it also threatened Fuhrwerk's safety. Sadly the quatrains about the young future Holy Roman Emperor were lost in the fire of 1816, but they proved scandalous enough to lead to Fuhrwerk's banishment from Silesia.  

Fuhrwerk resettled in Geneva where he died in 1629 from a case of faulty leeching.  

The bitter irony of Fuhrwerk's death is not lost to us.  You see, in an attempt of broadening the press's offerings, Fuhrwerk had just published the German edition of William Harvey's groundbreaking treatise  Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus which disproved the practice of leeching and bloodletting.  His death reminds us of the importance of trusting what we publish.

His family continued publishing and took the operation in different directions.  The next two centuries saw the growth of what we now know as VRZHU Press -- the name was mercifully shortened from Veröffentlicher von Versionen die Schäferhund Eingeweiden upon Fuhrwerk's move to Geneva.  They specialized in devotional poetry and, most successfully, wartime pamphletry.  

It is this latter work which is of note, as the press seemed to go where the work was, and in some cases operated as a proto-Hearstian fomentor of conflict.  In 1673 VRZHU opened presses in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm and began publishing pamphlets that many historians credit for the start of hostilities that led to the bloody, and pointless, Scanian War of 1675.  The war lasted four years; during which VRZHU profited from the publication of humorous treatises attacking the intelligence and eating habits of the enemy.  What is of interest is that what VRZHU published in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm was all the same, except for the change in nationality: the Danish and Norwegian pamphlets were scurrulously anti-Swedish, while the Swedish pamphlets were fiercely anti-Danish and Norwegian.  Extant pamphlets from this period include the Swedish pamphlet "What Peril Lies in the Danish Lutefisk Brine!" and the Norwegian pamphlet, "The Crown Lies Crooked on Princess Ulrike Eleonora's Head."  Both published by VRZHU Press and going through multiple printings.

It was a regrettable chapter in the history of the press.   But this being a particularly contentious century in European warfare, it was also a very long chapter.  Historians believe the press responsible for egging on 1683's Franco-Spanish War of the Reunions, agitating both the Austrian and Ottoman empires into 1716's Austro-Turkish War, and bullying France disastrous entry into 1748's Second Carnatic War, and 1762's Spanish and Portuguese War. 

Such agitations could not go uncontested and reached a frenesí when VRZHU's Madrid director,Gustav Pohleur was sentenced to death for publishing a pamphlet on the zoological parentage of the Infanta Maria Josepha.  Her father, the Spanish King Charles III, was not amused and had Pohleur put in stocks, and then condemned to death after a thorough clinical entrail deciphering.

The press' century of war-related endeavors were put to an end by Fuhrwerk's great, great, great grandson, Michel Le Caretier (who Francified the family name open moving operations to Paris in 1753).  In the aftermath of their wartime publications, the company's fortunes were vast, but its political position precarious after Pohleur's public trial and execution. Having made a fortune of ridiculing the culinary customs, hygienic habits, and questionable ancestral roots of most of Europe's nations and their aristocratic houses, Le Caretier had the good sense to move operations to the American colonies, opening businesses in New York and Philadelphia.  Le Caretier (now operating as "Michael Carter") returned the press to its poetic roots and established itself as the home for the voices of American poetry.  This is the inheritance we look forward to sharing with you in future installments.  The earlier history is largely regrettable, although it allows us the shabby comforts of our architectural déshabillé.

We're lucky and proud, especially in these days of publishing industry contraction and meltdown, to benefit from such a long and storied past, albeit little known to the outside world.  As a limited release publisher of poetic disquisition and arcana approaching its fifth century of productivity, we're blessed with a remarkable archives of material from our publishing forebears. 

However in the hurly burly of our current projects we rarely have the opportunity to explore the lares and penates of our inheritance.  So, we build that time into every meeting we have.

Yesterday during a rainy day conclave at VRZHU's Southeastern Regional Headquarters, we took some time to go through our voluminous archives.  Now the VRZHU Archives archives are immense and due to the economic downturn we have had to lay off about three quarters of our staff.  That staff included three interns and a chihuahua.  So after feeding little Fallstaff, we settled into about two hours of cobweb clearing and were delighted to find this gem from VRZHU Press's 1886 publication Pastures of Poetic Anthems and Descants of Delectation.  The work was a huge success of the year and served as the requisite anthology for two generations (copies fetch a pretty sum online and in antiquarian bookstores).  Here is Horace Bowleshare's gripping Ode from this collection.

To A Plum-Pudding

Shall fumes of haggis fill Apollo’s nose?
    Of “country messes” shall the Muse be fain?
    And thou, consummate compoud, thou remain
But them (too rare) of culinary prose!
Spheroid oblate, whose microcosm shows
    Choice gifts of nature from her triple reign
For Art’s deft hands to mingle and constrain,
Till round thy “spotty globe” blue ether glows.
    Salt, sugar, suet, flour and eggs and spice,
Citron’s green masses, raisin’s sanguine crowd,
Milk, cognac, lime-juice; minor dainties which,
    Though not essential, are exceedingly nice—
Sweet may be other cates (sic), but thus endowed,
O well-yclept plum-pudding, thou art rich.

Here's an article by one of our roving VRB reporters.  From the South Jersey Desk a report on the state of ultramodern poetry:

A Vrzhu Research Bureau Report - Techno-Lyrical Backlash

(filed 30 Mar 08)

Mount Holly, New Jersey - Here in Burlington County the techno-lyrical poetry season has just come to a close. Orphic Fusion, that exuberant annual showcase that brings cutting-edge poets to the county seat of Mount Holly to muse on the state of contemporary poetonomy and show off their latest tricks, ended a month ago. Lingua Avantguardia,  its less well-known Medford Lakes counterpart, wrapped up on March 14. The program for each was pretty much what I've come to expect. In Mount Holly, Ian Delancy cooked up a fine sestina using irrational numbers as end words, and scribbled lines in white ink across white paper and called it "In Memory of My Ironic Winter." In Medford Lakes, Martin Robinson talked about something called "synergistic de-elaboration."

And so, I’m asking: Is everybody tired of this stuff by now, or what?

Nearly two years ago, Adrian Ferrino started a revolution with his journal Rien et/o Nada? that thoroughly transformed modern poetry here, not only propelling Burlington county poets to the pinnacle of southern New Jersey literary acclaim (displacing Gloucester county in the process), but spreading a manifesto of high-impact, scientifically informed Sur-Objectivism around the 7 counties of south Jersey. Villanelles "spherified" with hydrocolloids until they looked like the gelatinous eyes of giant squid, haiku frozen with liquid nitrogen until they form ingot-shaped "stanzas," Petrarchan  sonnets on shredded magnetic tape and spun into a beehive “hairdos,” and everything from binary pantoums to sprung rhythm acrostics exploded into free floating phonemes—it's all part of a poetry style that places a premium on material innovation. At its best, this version of "molecular poetonomy" stokes the emotions and shocks the senses. 

But, from the beginning, some critics have scorned a mode of writing that relies, in their opinion, too heavily on technology (as if typewriters, computers, and even pens, aren’t machines) and often chooses “foam” over substance. In a recent e-mail, Harold Stefanos, an expert on innovative poetry in the southeastern part of the Garden State, wrote, "I am getting a little weary of Burlington-driven techno-composition. Many of these 'experiments' would be better off if they didn't show up anywhere but at AWP conferences, preferably at about 2 AM. Really, they should have a stall at Pennsauken Mart, if it were still around." His words sum up recent critical attacks: It’s all getting your eye poked out until someone starts having fun. I'd like some real poems now, may I please?

So, is it over? It is true that Adrian and his fellow poets are no longer as avant-garde as they once were. In food, you know your haute cuisine is no longer haute when you see it on the Applebee’s menu. In poetry, there are different indignities, from indifference to (shudder!) acceptance.

The rest of the poetry universe has officially caught up to the Burlington revolutionaries: Ian’s journal has been replaced by a blog, and is no longer the source of the new new new thing. But poetry movements often survive in the valley of their PR long after the American Poetry Review has lost interest. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E craze passed years ago, but interest in the structures and codes of language, the application of process, and the recognition that language is political have become staples of our poetry praxis; new formalism is tragically  unhip, but I still find quatorzains and end rhymes in poetry journals. And though often used as a derogatory term, the confessional poets of the 50’s and 60’s altered the landscape of American poetry and broadened the horizon for poems to traffick in intimate and unflattering information, poems about illness, sexuality and depression.

All these  movements eventually show some signs of stagnation—clichéd tropes,  academic analysis, overexposure, and critics standing by to gleefully rejoice in the demise in whatever movement is in their sights.

But the poems themselves never really go away. The techniques are still there, in every de-stabilized persona that daubs a fragmented lyric, in every line made colorful by hard surrealism. We may laugh at the excesses of poetry manifestos, but we read them all the time.

The same is true of Burlingtonistas. It’s not the emblematic forms they use (or, as they say, “foams”) but their vigorous, often insouciant, search for the new. In an art where individual products take a hundred years or more to prove their staying power, every movement of the last 50 years is still very young indeed.

In the meantime, Ian is has been working on using nanosyllables to achieve more precise line measurement and, in collaboration with his father’s waste disposal business, Adrian is developing a poetry medium made from compressed inorganics. Adrian says: "Hey, there are guys who say, 'it’s over, let's put it behind us,' but that's just marketing BS. I can tell you from my own experience that there is more research going on, more energy, than ever before. At least on the weekends."

And there it is.  Poetry keeps changing even as it remains the same.  Some techniques will perhaps, mercifully, not withstand the test of time. And Ian has the third degree burns to prove it.  But others, whether it’s the ghazal or the new sentence, will seep into the poetry vernacular, enhancing the range of possibilities poets have at their disposal. It’s all part of the crazy candy-colored carousel that is Poetry.

Poem Infestation - a Vrzhu Reprint

We here in the research arm of Vrzhu Press are working [tirelessly] to improve the lot of poets, and consumers of poetry alike.

However.  Bethatasitmay. We also recognize that sometimes poetic efforts, effluvia and extravasations are not wanted or desired.

As such, one of the R&D efforts here in the warrens and catacombs of the VRB is to assist those for whom poetry is not an occasion, but a nuisance.  Here is a short summary of our initial research and a peek at one of our many products in continuous development.

Poem Infestation

Poems are among the most difficult household pests to control. Except for submission periods when they may migrate from place to place,  poems spend their entire life inside buildings. Usually they are found in libraries, bathrooms and bedrooms. They can be carried into homes in shopping bags, backpacks, furniture and pet foods.

Poems are one of the most disagreeable literary genres that may invade homes. While it is not true that an unkept home will cause a poem infestation, there is indeed a strong correlation between sanitation and poems once an infestation gets started.  The presence of poems often causes serious mental anguish for some homeowners. Poems often associate themselves with teenagers and are known to be involved in the spread of negative emotions which cause mild depression, self-absorption, herbal tea drinking, and more serious melodramatic behavior. Some people appear to be allergic to poems.

The exact origin of our domestic poems is disputed, but many are European, South American and Eastern in origin and now are widely distributed throughout the country. In most areas, homeowners are commonly bothered by five different categories of poems: confessional, experimental, accessible, surreal (which has a subcategory, deepimage), and nature poems, which are more at home outdoors but can also get into the house.

Species

The American poem may grow from one to several hundred pages. It can be identified by its normal markings: ragged, sloppy right margins and, frequently, a body segmented into “stanzas.”  There is not much reliable information about any one poem’s lifespan, which nonetheless seems to be highly variable: from a few minutes to many years or stretching cycles of years.

Oriental poems, or haiku, are uniform and small in appearance, no more than seventeen syllables long when full-grown and are easily recognized by their short lines, though mutations are possible. The haiku seems to be equally at home inside human habitation and outdoors, where they can be found near ponds or blossoms or other similar areas.

The European poem is larger, usually darker, but vary greatly in appearance and pronunciation. The European poem is quite active and can easily migrate throughout communities thus becoming a major pest, however, it seems to only truly thrive in the presence of American poems, a symbiotic relationship our poentomologists have termed “translation.”  Even so, a troublesome infestation can develop rapidly after the chance introduction of just a few individual poems. It is an unsettled question whether the South American poem, whose habits and behavior are almost identical to the European, is a subspecies, or is an entirely different species.

Another poem sometimes found invading the home is the Woodsy poem. This species lives outdoors and is not as fast nor as wary as its house-dwelling relatives. They may wander into buildings in wooded areas, or may be brought into the house under false pretenses. The males of this species (garysnyderus) are long-lived and have a rough appearance. The females (maryoliveria) are much more reclusive but probably more widespread.

Integrated Poem Management

It is easier (and less costly) to prevent poems from entering a structure than it is to get rid of them.  They can be discouraged from invading buildings by sealing cracks and crevices in foundations and outside walls. Careful inspection of all anthologies and omnibus selections is essential, as poems have been known to hide within large tracts of prose.

Carefully inspect all incoming books, magazines, and junk mail for the presence of poems or references to them.

Control

Unfortunately no method for controlling poems has proven universally successful. We here in the Vrzhu Research Bureau are working on a safe, convenient method of eliminating poem infestations when they occur.

SOME NOTES

Notes On Some Haikus About Cicadas for the Beginning of Summer

 

(I am indebted to R.H. Blyth’s 4 volume collection of haiku and commentary for providing these haiku and for the direction in how to approach them. The haiku in these notes are based on Blyth’s translations, although I’ve mostly jiggered them to suit my taste.)

 

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?"

                                                Chapter 26 of The Zhuangzi: External Things

 

Cicadas are a traditional subject for Japanese haiku. They herald summer, and are representative of many of haiku’s larger concerns.  Haiku are lovely but I often find it is not easy to see where their depth lies.  Part of this is because they avoid many of the tools and scaffolding of western poetry: metaphors, rhythm, even, in a way, the “poetical” and the verbal itself.  So these notes are an attempt to sound the depths of some haiku with cicadas in them. The plumb line of these soundings is myself.

 

Bashō writes:  no birds           the only water far away          a cicada’s voice

 

When everything is quiet, no birds, no sound of flowing water, nothing is moving, then the sound of cicadas does not feel like it is breaking the silence but somehow deepening it. It is as if I wake up for just a moment to what silence is, it abidingness, how it dwells as part of the world.

 

There’s a quote from the Tsaikentan, or the Book of Tending the Roots of Wisdom, a book which compounds Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. It mirrors this:

 

“When all things are hushed, the suddenness of a single bird’s call arouses a deep sense of stillness. When all the flowers have departed, a solitary bloom is seen, and we feel the infinity of life.”

 

Thoreau describes a moment like this and says that a single sound after complete quiet makes him aware of a “deeper and more conscious” silence.

 

"At intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl; but after each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious…" -Henry D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

 

Five years before Thoreau, Alexander Kinglake wrote about this in his travel book Eothen as he moves through an ancient Serbian forest:

 

“One strived, with a listening ear, to catch some tidings of that Forest world within—some stirring of beasts, some night bird’s scream; but all was quite hushed, except for the voice of the cicadas that peopled every bough, and filled the depths of the forest through and through with one same hum everlasting—more stilling than very silence.”

 

Larry Levis describes this same phenomenon as it occurs in ripples on water instead of sounds waves, which are ripples in the air, at the beginning of the poem Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It:

 

Two black swans paddling the brown canals of Sheffield Park

 

Are still together. The chains of their days, the bright ripples

Linked by sunlight in their passing wake,

 

Leave them unchanged:

 

Still so aloof & out of reach they shy away from the outstretched

Hands of tourists,

 

And weave a stillness onto the water as they pass.

The motion of their wake is a stillness.

 

 

Bashō writes:              silence             the cicada’s voice         pervading the rocks

 

Thoreau’s “deeper and more conscious” is an odd choice of words. It might be something like this—that silence is itself a kind of life, or an awareness of life, or a kind of mindfulness (John Cage says that “silence is not acoustic”), so that a cicada’s call—so loud and insistent that it seems to penetrate even the rocks—describes not only the peculiar droning, drilling sound the insect makes but also how that deeper, more living silence can enter and enliven even my own stony and guarded consciousness.

 

What I glimpse here is not the busyness of life, not its multifarious, noisy multiplicity, but how it is also infinite.                       

 

Onitsura writes: 

 

flowing water    a cicada’s cry from the bamboos          the

Temple

at Soko-kuji

 

Cicadas are not every day occurrences. They are so out of the ordinary, out of the regular day-to-day ordering of my life. They give me a chance to pay attention, and to pay closer attention than I’m usually able to.  So it might be that disparate things like the sound of water, bamboo, and a temple in a forest can be brought together in a new relation, or that the Temple could be seen as part of the natural world instead of having that world merely surround it, that the water and bamboo could be part of who I am, or be integral to my consciousness.

 

The world, a place I am always in, so large and always at arm’s length, might be able to become my intimate, and that intimacy would not be a place I am in, but a place I am of.

 

Bashō writes: nothing                        in the cicada’s voice                of how soon it will die.

 

When I hear cicadas singing they seem intently alive and present, all of what they are is in their song, no hidden motives, agendas, no second thoughts, no distractions. They seem imbedded in the here and now, their song inseparable from their being alive. Of course I know just how ephemeral their lives are, so their sound is completely different and contains for me an intent the cicadas themselves don’t intend.

 

But it is just this difference that awakens me.  There is no clue to be found in the cicada’s song itself of how fleeting that life will be.  The transitory exists not in the cicada or its song but in me.  Cicadas sing unaffected by their purpose or the larger world around them. A cicada’s call is pure song.

 

Haikus themselves might have some this same quality.  When I read one I may be lost in it for just a moment, because there is in it life, its own and mine.  One of Keats’ final poems also has this peculiar quality of being alive on the page:

 

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

 

Keats’s poem is a living hand—the very living hand the poem mentions—he holds it out to the reader, to me, a poem as living being. The poem grasps me, and when I read it aloud red life flows through its lines. This is part of the strangeness of poetry, to read a poem is to enact the same breathing, shaping of the mouth, movement into the air as the original poet, no matter how long gone.  To hear cicadas thrumming I could be hearing the previous generation singing 17 years ago, or the generation before that, or before that, 34, 51, 68, 170 years ago.

 

Bashō writes:              a cicada’s shell:            it sang itself                utterly away.

 

The reason cicadas are so loud is that their bodies are mostly hollow, like a drum or a bell—and they have a drum-like apparatus inside them that generates their call. Cicadas resonate.

 

I could say that being mostly empty, a cicada’s body is mostly its song, just as its adult life is mostly song, or listening to song.

 

When I speak, a column of air in me vibrates, so a part of me is my words, and I have something in common with the cicadas.  A cicada departs into its song, and leaves it emptied body as a shell behind it.  So both the cicada’s call and my words are for each of us part of our being, a part of the world.

 

Shiki writes:  the cicada          only seen when it stops crying           and flies

 

Clumsy, slow flyers, cicadas are easy to spot as they stagger through the air.  But when they are singing, hidden in the tops of trees, they sound completely confident. They almost have two existences, their awkward flight and, separate from this, their sound. In this Heisenberg principle of cicadas—you can either see it or hear it but not both at the same time—there is something moving, a poignancy I can’t pinpoint. Maybe it is the incompleteness of my knowing the world, or any other person, or even poem.  There is always something that eludes me in any encounter.

 

It does seem to be the case that even at my best moments, when I’m really paying attention, really in tune, getting it, my “take” on the world is still partial, and my being here is itself perspectival and limited. I can never not have a point of view, there’s another level to reach for, a better and more intense focus to attain. Maybe what I find sad about cicada’s duality is my own duality, which is the same as the world’s duality, at once obstacle and home.

 

I learn to pay attention, a little at a time, and I hope that each time I do a little better.  Every poem, western or eastern is surrounded by silence.  In western poetry the right margin is, besides indicating meter and rhyme, a reminder of the silence that enters as if from the right hand side of the page.  In honor of this, I will say that these haiku celebrating the attention paid to a summer insect are notes sent to me from the Archives of Silence.

 

Finally I can read these haiku not as words, but as a way of paying attention, to the world and myself, a place where the mundane and divine are not separate, but one, and wherein I will let my thoughts travel through them silently:

 

Issa writes:

 

a cicada’s cry               it is precisely               a red paper windmill

 

Ya-yu writes, at the end of summer:

 

autumn cicadas           may one           live on—

NaPoWriMo: Day 3

Reflex  by Dan Vera

They will all return with the bones
that produced them.
But for a little time
a testament remains.

Miklós, they could not silence
you in an earthen grave.
We found you and the tiny book
inside the lining of your coat.

I think of you on days like this
when the light is gray
and my mind is jumbled
with what matters least.

You are standing there exhausted
stealing moments in the dark
to write the most important things
all in the face of approaching death.

Perhaps it is the reflex of our state
to know what comes and still insist
on recording what must be found.

Small Nations Poetry Reading, Part Two

That the reading was themed made me think that we do tend to have only a few models—here in the US—for what a poetry reading is.  And this leaves out a lot of kinds of readings that don’t or could happen much, if at all, hereabouts.

There’s the stadium filling readings given by Yevtushenko, readings where the poet is a cultural hero, or not just a cultural hero but THE cultural hero (more on this below). At the other end, there are the samizdat-ish readings held privately that are de facto treason.  And many different kinds in between.

In these parts, readings are mostly monocultural, like corn or soybeans, with not very various varietals.  There’s the nationally-known-poet poetry reading where one or maybe two poets (with substantial credentials and chops) read, followed sometimes by a Q&A session. There’s the local poetry reading: one or more local but known poets reading, usually followed by an open mic which helps to assure that there will be an audience.  And then there are slams, performance poetry events, poetry read with music. But that’s about it.

Seven out of nine of the poems had the original text as well as the translation.  The readers read the translations and then the last stanza or two in the original. It was this last bit that made me think about what does and doesn’t get translated when we translate poetry.

No big surprises or revelations or thoughts there.  Hearing bits of each poem in its original language brought the sound, the patterning, rhyme when present, rhythm to the foreground. As you would expect. The Arabic of “Hoora” was just—I can think of no other word—beautiful. It was the combination of sounds—from guttural to open, fricatives and labials—with sounds not that common in English—organized but not in a metronome-like way—just very melodic, fluid, but not hammy—as if the music of the poem were inherent in the language and rose from within it, not imposed from some schema from outside.

Which is what poetry is supposed to be like, eh?

Here are some selections (in translation) from the reading:

Liechtenstein
Foliage I and II by Evi Kliemand
Read by Her Excellency Ambassador Claudia Fritsche

From Foliage I and Foliage II – Sequences

I
It had become calm. The surfaces, she said – the surfaces.
She pressed her hand on it. Her palms were chalices.
They closed, opened – the surfaces began to vibrate, the grounds,
she said, the ground.

II
There was nothing to see. The stages of language were empty.
She had cleared away the images. There shoe was for moments
in the mirror. Really. So ill-natured, so much evil? Nothing more.

III
Outdoors, the wind
tidies up, clears away.
The raven
gives instructions.

IV
The trees seemed light-weighted
It was as if they took off, floated away.
The raven disagreed.
So they remained.
Yet space took hold of them.

V
The scent of rain filtered through the worlds and she
knew of the many times she’d felt the same. The
scent of rain arriving on earth.
Somehow, it was as if she held the earth in her hands
for the duration of a sentence. Images will, she
said, these.

Evi Kliemand (aus Blatterwerk, | edition Howeg, Surich 2008)

***

Austria
“Again Still Once” by Michael Donhauser
Read by Mr. Andreas Riecken, Charge d’Affaires of Austria

Word I asked would be the first
here or smoking looked and
along the main street where no
person was only flowers in
the gravel swayed troubled from

Afar by knowing bricks lost land
it was I belonged to the lost land the
morning fringing with grasses the
beds which lay there broken up
grown over with vetch wreathed
trans. Iain Galbraith

Michael Dunhauser
Wieder Noch Einmal (Again Still Once)
from Sarganser Land (1998)

***

Slovenia
“Great Black Bull” by Dane Zajc
Read by Ms Miriam Mozgan, Charge d’Affaires of Slovenia

Great Black Bull

The great black bull bellows in the morning.
Great black bull, who are you calling?
The pastures are empty.
The mountains are empty.
The gorges are empty.
Empty like the echo of your call.

The great black bull bellows in the morning.
As if spraying dark black blood
over the crowns of dark pines.
As if the bull’s bleeding eye
had spilled open that morning
over eastern forests.
Great black bull, who are you calling?
Do you take pleasure in hearing
how your hollow scream
returns as echo?

Great black bull, the morning is bloodless.
Your voice falls into gorges
like a tattered swarm
of black ravens.
No one hears your solitude.
You quench no one’s thirst
with you black and bloodied voice.

Be silent, great black bull.
The great black bull bellows in the morning.
The eastern sun sharpens
its glistening hatchet.

Dane Zajc

UP NEXT: Part Three - our concluding post on the 2009 SMPR, translation, the status of poetry, greatness, littleness, etc.