Of Goddesses and Fatherhood

This selection from my forthcoming little mess of little little poems, A Few Words on the Way, is from the final, winter section of the seasonal sequence that makes up about the first half of the collection. In each of the previous little bits I've released, I've tried to catch your interest by getting into some of the context underlying the genres and worldviews I'm exploring or through which I'm seeing the world in these pieces. Not sure whether that's the best promotional strategy or not, to be honest, as I've never been really gifted at putting myself forward and am, when not standing in front of a classroom or other audience, actually quite shy and socially awkward.

In terms of contextualizing today's selection, I think I'll just focus on a single piece, “a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali.” Strictly speaking, a tanka is a haiku in the standard 5-7-5 syllabic measure with a 7-7 couplet attached, there generally being some sort of thematic or narrative pivot in the juncture between haiku and couplet. It's a less common form, but one that I enjoy playing with from time to time. This particular piece also touches upon Hindu thought, something foreign to both the culture in which I live and the cultures from which the poetic forms and main influences on these poems arise, but one in which I was immersed when this poem was written, through teaching both the Bhagavad Gita and an abridgment of the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a small part). While this is hardly the place or a long discussion of the Hindu pantheon, I'll just say that one of the figures in that endlessly fascinating and ever-shifting collection of gods, demons, and beings for whom there is no English translations, has long been the goddess Kali, associated most closely with death and, more broadly, with the ever-repeating cycle of birth, life, and death that is not completely incompatible with the Taoist notion of arising and subsiding, which I discussed in a previous post and that is central to the thought world underlying the haiku tradition.

Kali's visual depiction is gorgeous. She often appears in her multi-armed form, long tongue snaking out of her open mouth, wearing a necklace of severed heads, her hands red with blood, feet not touching the earth but rather beating out the rhythm of her dance on the bodies and sometimes even on the heads of the slain, her hands bloody. Incidentally, the root kal- in Sanskrit signifies both death and time. A central facet of Hindu thought, as well, is that the divine in all its forms—and these can be both plural and singular simultaneously—is immanent in all things and all people, and in the Cosmos itself. That is, while you may worship the god(s), it/they is/are also you, were you only able to see beyond the illusion of your own alienation, your own isolated separateness from everything and everyone else: your own internalized binaries. But of course, from the perspective of a parent, this vision of a perennially immanent embodiment of divine time/death can lead down some interesting roads ...

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Winter'

failing sight—hillside

disassembles itself: stars

and snowflakes

 

broken beer bottle

reflected constellation

one dirty mitten

 

talking to myself

the blizzard's reply

melts on my tongue

 

cook fire hemmed in close

by knee-deep snow, naked birch—

thin light, long shadows

 

a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali:

 

from unseen cloud birth

white slow drift down to her tongue

pink dissolution—

snowplow chunks like faded skulls

don't quite burst beneath her feet

A Digression and an Invitation

In today's episode of Hey! Look at My Book!, I think I'd like to explore a small piece of one of the worldviews underlying the haiku tradition as a whole as well as my own approach to both language and lived experience. The worldview in question is Taoism (or if you prefer Pinyin romanization, Daoism), with a textual history dating to about the 6^th century BCE but an oral tradition that appears to reach into the neolithic and thus to be culturally prior to the mythologies and thought worlds emanating from agrarian societies. I've seen it convincingly argued, as I may get into in a future post, that Taoism has its roots in a broad web of shamanic traditions that predate, by a long margin, the Agricultural Revolution. The glimpse of mental experience we get, then, when we read the classics—the Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) and the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)—reflected and refracted with some distortion across the intervening millennia—is one of the immanent spiritual experience of nature with none of the dualities, such as self/other, mind/body, or natural/supernatural, that have informed and in my opinion plagued so much later thinking, particularly in the West. This is a worldview in which there is no separation of the human from the rest of nature, no transcendent divine and thus no alienation from the divine with its requisite attempts at reconciliation, no special creation, certainly no mythologically warranted human “dominion” over the world, and in which the models of both Cosmos and human nature (themselves the same model) celebrate what we might call the archetypal feminine with no sense of subordination to any patriarchal authority real or imagined. There are no no commandments, no abasements, and no sin.

But as this is hardly the place for an extended meditation on one of the world's great intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions, I think I'll confine myself to a single passage of the Tao Te Ching, in the wonderful words of my favourite translator, David Hinton. I chose this passage, Chapter 13 to be specific, because the ending touches upon something that haiku at its best can also evoke, calling into question our sense of what and where we are, and the costs and consequences of taking our mental constructions of ourselves to be anything more than words and images. Here's the chapter in full:

Honor is a contagion deep as fear,

renown a calamity profound as self.

Why do I call honor a contagion deep as fear?

Honor always dwindles away,

so earning it fills us with fear

and losing it fills us with fear.

And why do I call renown a calamity profound as self?

We only know calamity because we have these selves.

If we didn't have selves,

what calamity could touch us?

When all beneath heaven is yourself in renown

you trust yourself to all beneath heaven,

and when all beneath heaven is yourself in love

you dwell throughout all beneath heaven.

My goodness, I think I need to read that again …

… OK, I'm back.

And as I don't want to take up too much of your time, I'll just let this lovely passage stand without comment—it wouldn't do, after all, to cross the line between providing information and context, and telling you how to read. So for now, here are a few bits from the Fall section of the seasonal sequence that makes up the first half of A Few Words on the Way, which as I've said before, should be ready for release in early July. I hope you like them, and maybe that you see some of what's posted above in some of what's posted below. Questions or observations are more than welcome in the Comments. And if you feel like writing a haiku in response to one of these and posting it here as well, you are most warmly invited to do so.

Enjoy.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Fall'

a fallen apple

baked in afternoon sunlight

pulps against my tongue

 

yellow lily pads

whistle of a lone duck's wings

a silence of frogs

 

no sign of the guy:

workbench covered in beer cans

under yellow leaves

 

red leaf underfoot

crushed between soles and stones—

your back, receding

 

captured by twilight

the taste of burning leaves

whispers your ashes

(for Alanna)

 

sipping tea beige mugs

lost October afternoon

our words—you—gone

(for Alanna)

Pieces of Lost Conversations

Last post, I mentioned that the haiku genre is conversational both in practice and in its origins, emerging from a tradition, among the literati of Medieval Japan, of writing sequences of short poems over the course of hours or years. And I mentioned as well that this theme would be taken up in a future post, so this seems a good time to note that several of the pieces in this collection are simply my side of conversations held from 2015 and into 2016 with my dear friend Gisèle Lundrigan, emerging from a handful of mead soaked evenings during which the two of us traded words both spoken and written. I've lost the coloured cue cards on which the first versions were scribbled, and my record keeping sucks, but while I no longer recall the exact pieces for which this description holds, somewhere in this mess are echoes of those lost verbal jam sessions.

As for today's sample, these six pieces are from the Summer section of the seasonal sequence. While most are haiku, one is a haibun, a form developed by Basho, generally considered to be the greatest haiku poet in the tradition. The haibun is essentially a short prose piece with a haiku attached, and Basho wrote a number of haibun collections based on his travels around Japan. The form itself owes much to his close engagement with Chuang Tzu, the early Taoist thinker whose short philosophic tales and parables seem to constitute the beginning of Chinese literary prose.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Summer'

gap between old boots

long stare to rushing water

vertigo's soft pull

wild rose startled

pink a brain's response to light—

no one sees the rose

jack pine on a ledge

undercut by years of waves

appears motionless

three days and the wasp

has not moved from my window:

the cleaning can wait

A haibun for Captain Jack Gunn:

Uncle Jack navigated bombers over Germany for the RAF. At 30, he was the oldest one in his crew. The men called him Pops. He never talked about it in front of me. In fact, he rarely spoke, though I remember him smiling from the door as my cousin Kris and I played on the bench swing in his back yard. Mostly, I remember him sitting by a window, sipping rye and water:

Lancaster bomber

on a concrete pedestal—

bright hybrid roses

(Jackson Park, Windsor)

chimneys in tall grass

do not remember salt cod

or call for lost eyes

(abandoned village, Newfoundland)

Fumbling Forward

As I continue to fiddle with the final version of A Few Words on the Way, I think I'll post excerpts from each of the book's sections, so that anyone who may be curious can get a sample of whatever it is I'm up to. The first half of the book consists of a more or less traditional seasonal cycle, beginning of course with spring, so below are half a dozen bits from that part. I hope you like them.

This may also be a good place for a few words on haiku itself, and the approach I've taken to it in terms of form, content, and overall aesthetic. The genre as a whole is conversational, originating as it did in long verse exchanges between members of the Medieval Japanese literati, taking place sometimes over single evenings and sometimes over years—more on this facet in a later post. In terms of formal requirements, the most familiar is of course the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. Other elements include a season word and a turn, that is, a word that evokes a specific season without naming it, and a point that functions as a pivot in terms of theme or imagery and thus gives a sense of inner motion. The imagery, drawing on the long traditions of both Japanese and Chinese poetry, tends to be nature-based and concrete, and the language terse with minimal grammatical indicators. The poem does not paint a picture of what was in the composer's mind at the time of composition, so much as cause an image to arise and then subside in motions of the reader's consciousness.

These words may sound strange, but they're philosophically precise, anchored as they are in both Zen and Taoist thought not only on mind but also on cosmology. In both of these thought worlds, all presence—all phenomena (or if you prefer, all being)—arises from, and subsides back into absence (or if you prefer, into non-being). But non-being is not an absolute lack as it tends to be in Western thought; rather, it's the productive potential both preceding and following any given instance of presence: at once source and destination. This applies equally to specific concrete phenomena, and at one extreme to the entire Cosmos and at the other extreme to consciousness itself, all without the need or even the place for a transcendent agency (or if you prefer, for a prime mover or first cause): a position that incidentally aligns pretty well with the current best empirical understanding of both Cosmos and consciousness. The fleetingness of the experience of the poem thus also evokes, in the philosophically informed reader, the fleetingness of both the mind that experiences it and the world in which the experience occurs. In other words, there is an art to reading haiku that is almost as subtle as the art of writing them: these are short poems, but not necessarily easy ones.

I hope this line of thought isn't too pedantic, but the truth is, I'm neither a writer nor a scholar. If we are what we do—and both the ruthless clarity and the ephemerality of that definition appeal to me—then I am a teacher and a father, neither of which I ever intended to be until I found myself doing them (this, too, is arising and subsiding). And as I'm a teacher of literature on the one hand, and on the other (again quite by accident) of several worldviews that remain uncommon in Western classrooms but some of which are present in this genre and these poems, it's probably natural that I spend a little time in that mode.

Regarding the haiku in English, there are two broad schools of thought, which I suppose we can call traditional and freestyle. The traditional approach is exactly what it sounds like, with practitioners generally sticking close to the formal and thematic requirements of Japanese haiku. Variations are not unheard of, but always occur against a backdrop of those assumed norms. But the norms are, of course, both culturally and linguistically specific, and various writers to various degrees have found that they could approach the heart of the genre more effectively by jettisoning some or even most of its formal elements. So a freestyle haiku will always be a very short poem, probably but not necessarily consisting of three lines, which will themselves be short but not confined to the 5-7-5 structure (usually, the lines are shorter). It may lack a season word, and may or may not have a turn. An excellent exemplar of this approach was Jack Kerouac. As for the poems here, they fall mainly into the traditional school as I find that the metrical constraints stimulate my brain in productive and pleasurable ways, so while I don't follow the classical approach strictly, most of the pieces in this collection will at least look the way most readers expect haiku to look. Subject matter and tone, though, will vary.

Also, I say “fuck” a lot.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Spring'

another snow day:

first day of spring my hairy

Canadian ass

 

blue sky and slow wind—

snowmen slouch in the backyard

emaciated

grey snow dirty streets

not spring so much as winter

terminally ill

over-stuffed river

crammed with four months' snow recedes:

log, carved heart, a name

clearcut under rain

shattered limbs grey roots bare rock—

flash of a blue jay

 

crab apple blossoms

locked in hard buds: cardinal

startles red from air

Self-Promotion Is Awkward

I'm still surprised to find myself suddenly planning to release A Few Words on the Way, a long-abandoned project brought again to mind by a chance interaction at a time when I was finally becoming ready to ask myself what, if anything, I wanted to do about the many writing projects I'd begun and drifted from over the years. It happens that this collection of some 300 short poems composed mainly between 2014 and 2016 is the closest to completion, and maybe, at least I hope, the exorcising of it will clear my brain for other projects also long delayed and yet still haunting me.

As for this book, by way of stirring up interest as self-published writers are also their own PR departments, maybe a few words on origins and a bit of a sampler might be a good idea. I've spent my whole adult life engaged with one or another worldview emanating from East or South-East Asia, and have long been a reader not just of the philosophic but also of the mythic and poetic literatures of the region. At the time these poems were composed, I was immersed in a long exploration of the haiku genre, both in its best classical exemplars and in the thought worlds that inform much of their work—particularly Ch'an/Zen Buddhism, and the contribution to that worldview by the classical Taoist thinker and all-around intellectual mischief maker Chuang-Tzu. Probably half of the poems in this collection originated as rough drafts sketched in the margins of Basho, Buson, Issa, and others, as well as in the works of earlier Chinese poets Li Po and Tu Fu, whose influence can't be exaggerated.

In terms of structure, the first half of the book (more or less) consists of a relatively traditional seasonal haiku cycle, of course with occasional bursts of playfulness because... well... Have we met? And honestly, this is, or can be, a genuinely playful form. The second half contains several shorter but thematically unified sequences, and of course a number of stand-alone pieces as well. Over the next little while, I'll be sharing random bits. For today's sample, I think I'll post the prologue: three pieces revolving around an encounter with a black bear many years ago and that is narrated more fully in my first book: Screefing: A Tree Planter's Reflection. I didn't know at the time that this encounter would turn out to be one of the defining moments in my understanding of myself and my place in the Cosmos, but such has it ended up being. The episode is now distant and thus looks different here than in Screefing, the bear and its offspring long deceased, and did I not have the account I jotted down in my tent moments after the fact, the whole thing would probably have expanded out of all reasonable proportion. But in this and everything else in these pages (can we still call them pages?), I've tried to address the subject matter as honestly as I could.

Prologue: Black Bear Haiku

i

bear's breath on skin

silhouette in cold moonlight

at last no questions

ii

bear's breath on forehead

wide eyes hungry for the dark:

singularity

iii

still night bear's breath warm

nose snuffle pressed to forehead

third eye open

Blame Kelsey

It's not my fault.

The other day, for the first time in about four years, someone—Kelsey, to be precise—interacted with a post I'd made advertising Screefing: A Tree Planter's Reflection for US$1 as a promotion for the pending release of A Few Words on the Way: Haiku and Short Poems, a collection that I subsequently got distracted from and never did release. The interaction got me thinking that maybe I should resurrect that intention after letting it go for reasons ranging from your garden variety ADD chaos through to self-consciousness, chronic depression, and a nervous breakdown, and including, if I am being uncompromisingly honest, a deep sense of personal failure when I measure my own achievements against those of friends and colleagues who have attained more measurable success creatively and academically, and whose achievements I admire and respect. I've been afraid, I suppose, of looking like a pretender or a poser and thus making myself appear pathetic. And honestly, I think this may be a common affliction among many so-called “part-time” academic faculty. But the truth is, while I no longer have even the vaguest aspiration toward worldly success—and have always had a dubious view of that notion anyway, which probably partially explains my not having attained it—I do believe I have something worthwhile to offer, and recognize as well that my capacity with words is not exactly minuscule, and that my reading and thinking are sufficiently broad and deep to put forward without embarrassment.

But if you disagree, don't blame me: blame Kelsey.

Of course, since the last time I logged into the site I'd been using as a writer's homepage, the entire system has changed, and I no longer have access to my controls to that material, so I have to set up a new page before doing anything else. Honestly, though, a clean start may not be a bad idea: certainly better than a visible four-year gap. And in any case, I am no longer the person I was. This was true even before the pandemic hit, in my case with a deep sense of relief as it made a communal necessity of the self-isolation I very much needed and let me retreat into a private world where I could clarify and unify the fragments of my thinking and being: a work still very much in progress, some of it publicly of late in the event that someone else might find it useful. But the world is about to open up again. And I think I might want to be a part of it. The part that I want to be involves both words and images. Here are a few or the words. You know where to find the images as I share them freely.

Regarding price, it will be US$3. While there are no production costs involved and part of me wants to just give it away for free as it makes me happy to share things, there are compelling reasons to charge a fee. Art is work, and work is worth something. Not just the product itself, but the many years it takes to become able to produce it, are worth something. Life and its endeavors are worth something. And if artists don't demand that their worth be acknowledged, no one will acknowledge it for free. In this case the collection contains roughly 300 short poems, which translates into about a penny a poem. Canada does not even mint pennies anymore as they cost more than they are worth, so you will rarely find a more generous artistic offer than this one, which I hope to have available no later than early July.

But if you don't like what you find here, seriously, don't blame me: blame Kelsey.