Author: Christopher Patton

I write curate teach & blog in & from Toronto, Canada.

“Now the base of old hills”

Sorry so long away folks — having fun at writing camp. Here’s another I wrote on Pound for Don Revell back in the day.

Dear Don,

You suggested I look in Cathay for traces of ethics. So reading these poems once more I found myself listening for hints of Confucius, filial duty, harmonious social relations, ranks and hierarchies, each thing in its right place. But Li Po is Confucian in about the way I’m Christian, that’s the soil he took root in, not the light or air that nourish him nor the way his spirit leans.

There is a sense of each thing in its right place, but it has more the flavour of Chuang-tse, heaven and earth and the myriad things whirl about (willow leaves, girls dancing) or stand in place (terraces, hilltops) exactly according to their natures, and if the heart is out of joint, it’s so because it holds too hard, as those of generals do, to what it loves. And the play of the mind through the poems is light and quick in the way of Chuang-tse’s prose despite their ground note of sorrow.

It’s that ground note that most draws me though. The Buddhist Li Po — Ezra Pound proclaiming the dharma — unheard from the beginning of time until now! Well, unheard by scholars, but Snyder heard it, or at least to my ear his

the train down in the city
was once a snowy hill

rhymes sweetly & sadly with Pound’s

The bright cloths and bright caps of Shin
Are now the base of old hills.

I suppose every reader of Pound finds the Pound he needs. I find in these poems, as nowhere else in his work, that the place each thing is in is its right place.

Gotta break in here. I wasn’t dim to the protest Cathay also is obliquely to the senseless shed blood of WWI. But for whatever reason the day I wrote this I didn’t go there.

As some Ch’an teacher said, maybe during Li Po’s lifetime, this was the golden age of Chinese Zen, nothing ever fails to cover the ground on which it sits. But the heart holds on to what it feels has made it whole, and when that goes, cuz go it all does, the heart’s hollowed out by a sorrow it’s too clear-eyed to turn away from.

And out of sympathy the poems open hollows in themselves into and through which time rushes:

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

Time circles and then without warning leaps across a year or an aeon. Sometimes narrative time —

The phoenix are at play on their terrace.
The phoenix are gone, the river flows on alone.

— sometimes time as it feels its way through mind and memory:

What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.

Now and then time reverses direction as it coils to leap to the centre of things:

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.

In Pound’s Imagist work there is a vast space around the poem in which it may resonate. Often too a space within the poem across which the mind leaps; the semicolon in the Metro station By allowing time a deeper admission to those spaces in Cathay, Pound has avoided the Imagist hell, to be forever an aesthete of plucked moments.

Subtle musical structures are at work holding those spaces open. “Song of the Bowmen of Shu” is almost fugal in its repetitions of “fern-shoots,” “sorrow,” “return,” “horses,” “tired.” “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” as it begins, stands in place through the repetition of its first verb

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

so that childhood feels like an eternity, one whose end begins a whole record of endings, endings in the face of which only two responses are possible, despair and ordinary affection. Such affection bars such despair as hangs round the margins from entering.

☚ teaching portfolio

Exercise: Eavesdropping

Last writing exercise of the quarter. In earlier carnations of this course I’ve given it early on and it’s never gone as well as I thought it maybe should. Was ready to give up on it as a pedagogical near miss.

This time though, with some tweaking, a different timing, and some reminders of what else we’ve talked about, something new has kept happening. I get to get glad all over again seeing what they’ve done. I’ll ask one last time for their okays to post some.

Go somewhere people talk. Listen in on their conversations. Try to spend at least an hour there, scavenging for interesting bits of speech or interaction. Do your best to write them down just as you hear them. Don’t use a tape recorder — mis-hearings are as interesting as hearings.

At home, look through the material you’ve gathered. Underline the bits that excite your interest or curiosity (listen to those antennae). Write them out on a new page. You might choose only a single phrase, or a single exchange, or bits and pieces from all through your notes, depending on the material, and what in it moves you.

Working with those seed materials, and making up as little or as much as you want, create a scene half a page long. It should have a beginning, middle, and end, but it doesn’t need to be a complete short story — you can, and probably should, imagine it as a scene in a longer story.

All scene. No exposition. Objective point of view. Most of the words should be spoken by a character. Keep dialogue tags (“she said,” “he said”) to a minimum. Avoid ponderous verbs (“declared,” “stated,” “hinted,” etc.) and adverbs (“wittily,” “angrily,” etc.).

A few reminders advisements provocations —

  • Remember the iceberg. Ninety percent of the story is not in the words but in what the words suggest or imply. Tune those antennae to subtext.
  • Dialogue gets interesting when characters talk at cross-purposes (e.g., answering a question with another question, changing topic, ignoring the other person’s change of topic.) Also interesting are unusual expressions that reveal a personality, and leaps or gaps that hint at unspoken emotion. (These are all ways of creating subtext.)
  • Every phrase should contribute something new to the scene (e.g., developing character, establishing conflict, moving plot forward).
  • As writers we try to avoid clichés. But people often talk in clichés. For this exercise, avoid the clichés you hear, and stick to the curious, the strange, the interesting.
  • If you’re having trouble getting your scene to resonate, try writing it twice as long — a full page — and then make cuts to create interesting dynamics or juxtapositions.

Finally. Go somewhere unusual people have unusual conversations. Try to make it a place you’ve never been before. Try to listen in on people who are unlike you and the people you hang around with.

“Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase”

From some that I wrote for Donald Revell once, some years back, studying Pound and Williams and their ways with him.

Dear Don,

The dictum you asked me to mull: “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Well, sequence of the metronome, that would be the line chopped up into separate iambs, tick tick tick tick, a deadening monotony, each swing of the ticker identical in duration, parcelling out its energies with a robotic indifference to the moment at hand. The figure’s neither perfect (an iamb goes tick TOCK) nor entirely fair. With four or five discernible levels of speech stress to play among, the metrical schema can abstract itself from a wide array of stress profiles.

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!

and

My galley chargéd with forgetfulness

both perfect iamb pent, are not at all alike. But the point’s a crux just the same. Metrical patterns abstracted from speech stress, one way among many, had come to seem the one true way, and were by Pound’s day enervated, outworn, exhausted, and too few had noticed, he thunk.

An accentual-syllabic line, well made, lives in the unfolding tension between an abstract metrical scheme and the actual spoken rhythm it’s abstracted from. It requires, creates, and enforces a split between an unreal ideal and its flawed incarnation. Is it fanciful to find this split a musical instance — a rhythmic performance — of the mind/body dualism we inherit from Descartes and monotheism generally? Ideogram, pagan gods, and the musical phrase may all be for Pound an effort to throw us back into the body, sensuous actuality, to seek what truths may be found without recourse to abstraction.

A “musical phrase” is made up of notes and rests of varying durations. Elsewhere in Literary Essays he speaks at greater length about the musician’s work:

No one is so foolish as to suppose that a musician using ‘four-four’ time is compelled to use always four quarter notes in each bar, or in ‘seven-eighths’ time to use seven eighth notes uniformly in each bar. He may use one 1/2, one 1/4 and one 1/8 rest, or any such combination as he may happen to choose or find fitting.

To apply this musical truism to verse is to employ vers libre.

But how to apply it? Do we work with stresses the way a musician works with notes? Again, stress, an elusive and fluid amalgam of volume, pitch, and duration, is broadly variable. Two stresses of equal strength might reach that level by different paths, one by the length of a diphthong, say, the other by the rising pitch of the phrase-end. Stress is not accent — on, off, on, off — in the way Pound makes it out to be.

Or do we rather turn our attention to duration itself, working with syllables as half-notes and quarter-notes, with caesura as rest? Pound said around the same time this: “the desire for vers libre is due to the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation.” I suspect “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase” means a return to quantity, a sensual attention to the lengths of syllables.

Poets had always been attentive to quantity. But to make it focal, an arranging principle, that was something new. Or renewal by way of return to something very old—

You begin with the yeowl and the bark, and you develop into the dance and into music, and into music with words, and finally into words with music, and finally into words with a vague adumbration of music, words suggestive of music, words measured, or words in a rhythm that preserves some accurate trait of the emotive impression.

From the raw animal yelp and howl, to the articulated body, to music, through music and words in different proportions, to musical wordings. But when the wording loses musicality, holds only to a lifeless and abstract on/off that has forgotten its origins in musical tempo, sez Ez, time to go back to the roots, the wellspring, the rhythmic ground, the moving and sounding body. That’s why the return to quantity mattered — not to give a poet something new to do, but to return him to origins, something vital.

Lines (this interposed as I prep this letter for posting) that have haunted dissociated me in the years since I came to them —

This body is my body.
This body is my body.

— though I’ve never found a home for them. Just to note that I have a personal stake in the reading I’ve laid out here. I think that might be the source of the a wee bit polemical moments.

And honest. As the ideogram is closer than phonetic charactery to pictorial art, which cannot lie, and duration is closer than stress to aural and rhythmic art, which cannot lie. Cannot because they make no claim to truth other than their own undeniable is.

In Pound’s work quantity is a form of attention but rarely a system. Which is as it should be, for syllable duration in English is a fuzzy math, a matter of subtle gradations. Rather than simple boxes, short and long, we have a continuum:

a – at – bat – bait – bought – brought – sprouts – strength – strengths

So quantity’s never been a basis for a metrical system in English. Besides which, any metrical system is or fast becomes an imposition, not a discovery, of order. Some such are gorgeous in their effects — masterful in their reach — but are impositions just the same, the mind of abstraction bearing down on the life from which it has abstracted its sleekly gleaming principles.

A discovered order may in comparison look at first like a welter, a chaos, formlessness. As you said last week, we might look at Pound’s career as a struggle between his rage for order and a gracious (grace-filled) surrender. One field on which that struggle is played out is melopoeia. And one patch of that field is quantity.

If quantity is no basis for a system, are there yet patterns to take part in? Mimetic moments? Meaningful recurrences? Before closing this horribly long digressive and disorderly note, I’ll offer a few noticings.

One is this: the length of the syllable is the pace of the mind. Long syllables, slow attention. Short syllables, quick attention. One pole is stillness, one motion. This is how quantity contributes to the “absolute rhythm” that “corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed.” Because one of the things that gives emotion (or thought) its particular shading is how and where one lingers and where and whether one zips through.

(Slowness and speed — stillness and motion — are just a part of it of course. Stress has a role — how gentle or hard the emphases are. Consonants have a role — liquids, stops, nasals, blurring or defining borders. Vowel timbre — the difference between a high sharp long i , which resonates just in the mouth and nose, and a low sonorous ou, which reaches into the gut. The interlacings of all these. And whether the emergent order is that of a cut diamond, or of an orchard, or a watershed.)

Another is this. As absolute rhythm, drawn inward, brings shade and precision to a thought or emotion, drawn outward, it gives heft and clarity to a sensation. An obvious example: the sequence of long syllables in “wide flat road” widens and flattens the road. Many subtler effects could be found.

A third is this. One element of speech stress is duration. So we generally expect heavily stressed syllables to be longer than lightly stressed ones. (Compare the length of “it” in “rabbit” and “omit.” That one’s courtesy of Robert Pinsky.) But sometimes that expectation is defied. In this passage I’ve boldfaced the syllables where stress and duration don’t coincide: they’re either long but lightly stressed, or short but heavily stressed:

Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,

And the blue-grey glass of the wave tents them,

Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.

This marking shows why there’s more unease in the first and third lines than in the second. The first and third, with their tensions between stress and duration, arouse physical tension, sympathetic alertness, concentration, a readiness to fight or to flee. In the second line, stress and duration are in good accord, and the attention is parasympathetic, a relaxed attentiveness, mindfulness, a readiness just to be.

It’s a dynamic tension. (Tension as in what makes us tick. How muscles work, nerves fire, mountains rear up and wear down. Not the tension of silences short or long at the family table.) In other words, not the accentual-syllabic tension between abstract pattern and actual instance, mind getting in the way of being, imposing its perfections on perfection. A tension rather between two actual rhythms in our actual speech. Making no bad-faith leap out of real existence into airy abstraction, setting up no ideal against which the actual is found wanting, fully embedded in the lived sensual life, this melopoeia creates a bridge, as Pound says elsewhere, between consciousness and the insentient universe.

Whether there is such a thing — an insentient universe — that’s for another day.

C.

☚ teaching portfolio

Out of Sumer,

I tell my students to trust their boredom, it’s good guidance, better than any outside feedback or creative writing precept can be, when attended to rightly. When I found I was, at a recent reading I was part of, bored by parts of what I read, I practiced what I preached. And so, a new preface to Dumuzi.

Out of Sumer,

Dumuzi, god of the new, the new green, to be drawn down broken. Flees gazelle to his sis & she reads his dream. Bro she says don’t tell me that dream. Okay so well fire gone out in yr hearth’s desolation of yr green fields she says. The rushes thick round you galla says. The tall firs in terror round you galla says. Run says.

Sent by Inanna the demon galla hover an inch over the earth bright drought angels pursuant. Justice an in-law turns Dumuzi snake & hands & feet the hands & feet of snakes he runs.

Galla working undercover offer sis a water gift a grain gift a corner office gas & groceries for life to give him up nope. They strip her rape her pour in orifices hot pitch nope. When has a sister ever given up a brother they giggle little to large.

A friend upgives Dumuzi & galla fat & thin harvest him. Scale the perimeter barricades & throw down & perforate that face with nails & smush with shepherd crooks that skull. Shit, you’re not even sleeping, nuff faking say. Get the sweet bloody fuck up they say. Hands bound & iron round his neck with aspect of a warrior caught pressed in clay & proud downed head & spade beard okay says show the way.

Some later find his body in a roadside ditch outside the city. An holy fly tells them where. Son my son mother says as mothers must in wars of sons the face is yours the spirit’s gone from. Deal is, fly gets to hear any quarrel any bar diner bedroom anywhere. Come spring, comes Dumuzi, arrogant, wist­ful. Your broad hand lover Inanna says is manna & your sweet little wee toe’s nectar. I stroll with him sings among the standing trees & stand with him sings among the fallen trees.

& their life is orchard. & he wants to want nothing but take joy in her joy. & he’s to be milled packaged traded shipped bought & sold soiled broiled roasted baked & eaten.

At the king’s lap stands the rising cedar.
Plants grow high by their side.
Grains grow high by their side.

When they tire of riding the holy hard-on Inanna gathers her me together for an excursion. The me are powers won from her drunken father Sweetwater back in the day. Dagger & sword & descent to the kur & measuring rod and line & dark bright dress & unbinding her hair & cocksucking assfucking lovemaking weeping & consolement terror dismay & passing judgement conferring power animal husbandry plundering cities & running away & ascent from the kur & spear arrow quiver bow knife AK47 RPG ICBM crows eating eyes on village greens town squares redbrick college plazas faceless high glass offices & lamentation purification bare attention compassion smack acid crank & scribe & stylus & cylinder seal ironwork carpentry leatherwork star of morning star of evening sacred mountain caduceus rosette a fistful of river & bull sheep scorpion apple tree kindling fire extinguishing fire gathering family dispersing seed voice of the whirlwind broken to voices & crown of the grasslands & a black seducing eye-paint & a friend taken too with her partway.

She takes a road no one turns on to the kur underearth where names go to die & her way crosses his every moment at right angles. What says is this as the guard strips her down. Shut it dirt bitch says our ways are perfect immaculate metamorphosis. Shorn of her me. Crown of the grasslands. Double strand of small beads. Wedding gold. Lapis measuring rod & line.

Naked to throneroom where Queen Thing Mind kicks & slaps punches & cuts & hangs her dear sis up on a wall. Slab of rotting meat hung on a hook.

That sad friend calls 911 gets the dad-man on the line & not too sauced for once he flicks dirt from under his nails & beings of his fashioning, kurgarra (moth), galatur (bee), descend from on high to sprinkle pharmaceuticals on the corpse.

Inanna ascends behung with galla. Comes in turn on her faithful friend her grieving son her other grieving son. I shan’t give up who serviced me well says & with her galla walks on. In Uruk comes upon Dumuzi sitting under an old apple tree. Lost in a thought. Enthroned & he don’t bow. Anagram, enthorned. Take this one says. Whatevs he says & flees &c.

Ineluctably ariseth. Anagram, hastier, raiseth. I’m shaking why.

This all got broken up & put through 7 transforms.

Student work: 80 Flowers poems

The danger on all sides with this exercise was Staying On Topic. Some of the ones below manage to get gorgeously off-topic once and again. Others stick to a putative topic but the texture and resonance of the language exceeds all topicality. In several you can see a hesitant limbering-up in the first line or two then a far more confident soar. I’m really struck, once more, typing these up, how good they are at what they do.

POTATO

The dull dust-bowl craggy-exterior couch
rotten kitchen five-pound-bag wrinkly-skin grocery
Ireland-famine Idaho-farming scarecrow rolling dry
yellow dirt ground roots economy
thin-sliced thanksgiving mashed boring lazy
cook-it boil-it bake-it fry-it mash-it
vegetable grimes lumens old-man harvest
french-fries electrical-currents round brown gun
suds buds crud grudge spud

SIPS OF WHISKEY

Carefree ciaos binding sinners dawn
hairless in feature gruesome quenched
disease be sweet with June
a cloud full as cups
streaking glasses wiggled off noses
revenge useless teeth rotted sunflower
quick slandered years opium swander
easiness night wish us eve

PLUMB

Jump man castle princess save
brick gold life die pit
plant tube bite pants small
underground black greenness gone warp
spring cloud shell wing lift
ghost browning night gap stairs
air fish bridge leap straightaway
fire spin axe fall finish

TEA

Eyeballs until milky bubbling wave
Spiced wet sun sugar thumb
Porcelain Ukraine melts heated eve
Ancient opaque petals stir temple
Black steam with heavy blink
Soothed pinky stains marriage peel
Waking garden hearth quiet pour
Tea-leaf enjoys museum whisper sip

IF NOT, WINTER

white knife winter’s home again
green blade red between lips
ardor-arbor again wet as knife
shoots green movement legs-in-ground come
bouqueted breath mist kneads moon
like-I-scent foxlog winter breathing hoarfrost
tendrils fungi frankly disputing sparrows
youth-blood sapling lusts sorrows spring

Eat coffee grounds running morning
downwind wine orchards grapes making
beans process tea leaves scatter
summer flowers foating dirty water
fallen babes hotchocolate system milk
crash liquid brakes warm throat
stove appliances cats meow food
sleepy timer Nyquil roses out

HERMIT THRUSH

Winter parks ground cup nests
Forests breed westward rare vagrants
Stock speckled dark low wings
Underwing reddish releases nature song
Well known high melody altered
Unassuming harmonic ethereal modern media
Descending spiral pitches uniquely simple
Delicate earth tailed feathered hermit

SIREN

Pearls of wisdom sea salt
green blue glass sand shimmering
wet sting bare feet black-and-brown
aimless below thirty hot disappearing
sails tossed-up stones cuts grins
angel-kisses your game gulls aquamarine
ocean push-and-pull drops chilled out
in cycles shore between toes

WIND TURBINES

Pinwheel wheat fields spinning desert
hotel room hills slow hands
discovery channel children turning sun
energy lights dry crisp miles
telephone wires tattoo distance golden
white semis rise and fall
old highway birds spinning dusk
Columbia Gorge asphalt passengers flicker.

CARTOONS

blue plum slits skin ink
clotted pulled clocks push death
tidy pray box shine we
kneel love spin wheeled wilt
eggs crumble each star reels
breaks brew dolls plotted temples
glum lots drew sticks mud
castes loamed castle knots giggle

Finally some individual lines I really admired:

bone saw reek red cross

stub cylinder opiate lounge chair

Large not purple fat water

treasure wild paper golden by

Lives green in room mountainside

roof yellow circle entrance tree

Spring-bent sprung-scent love

Split-infinity slips toes tips

☜ teaching portfolio

Exercise: Zukofsky’s word-flowers

This one came in three parts — a reading assignment, a journal assignment, a writing assignment. The first two meant as robust prep for the third. And I was right they would find it a hard exercise! Maybe the hardest of the quarter. It did ask them to set aside things they’d spent years learning to do well, e.g., staying on topic, making proper sentences.

The exercise (with some of their work to follow) —

1. Reading

A few pages from Louis Zukofsky’s late word-flower sequence 80 Flowers. Like that one and this one:

STARGLOW

Starglow dwarf china rose shrubthorn
lantern fashion-fare airing car-tire crushed
young’s churning old rambler’s flown
to sky can cut back
a crown transplanted patient of
drought sun’s gold firerimmed branched
greeting thyme’s autumn sprig head
happier winter sculpt white rose

MOUNTAIN LAUREL

Known color grown mountain laurel
broadleaf of acid earth margin
entire green winter years hoarfrost
mooned pod honesty open unvoiced
May-grown acute 5-petal calicoflower cluster
10-slender rods spring seed sway
trefoil birds throat Not thyme’s
spur-flower calico clusters laurelled well

2. Journal exercise

Metonymy is calling one thing to mind by naming another that’s habitually associated with it. For instance, the phrase “red wheel barrow” calls to mind a barnyard, and perhaps a pile of dirt, or hay bales. Pick two individual words in 80 Flowers and describe the metonymic resonance of each — the things it calls to mind by habitual association. NOTE: Some metonymic associations are personal and idiosyncratic — associat­ing a red wheelbarrow with Indians, say, because there’s a mural with the poem on Indian Street. Try to steer away from those associations, and towards associations you can trust would be shared by a typical reader.

(In a class soon after we looked at how context, a word’s neighbour words, draw some metonymic associations into the foreground, and let others recede into the background.)

3. Writing exercise

Each of Zukofsky’s poems consists of eight five-word lines. Instead of coming together into sentences, the words make a sort of kaleidoscopic image of the flower — fragmentary, unparaphraseable. In fact, you might say that the relationship between any two adjacent words is not syntactic but metonymic, interested not in making a statement, but in drawing out habitual associations. Write a poem that uses the same form: eight five-word lines, compound words as you please, words next to each other not to make sentence sense, but to make richly textured juxtapositions.

☜ teaching portfolio

Student work: 101 word short story

I was struck by how well many of these came out. Their work with formal or procedural constraints in verse (anagram poem, phone number poem, found poem) seems to be paying off in their work in prose. Or that’s one way anyway of accounting for the leanness of these.

A lot of work to comment on tonight so I’ll post just a couple here. Two I find especially attentive to the shapes of their sentences. And while they are stories — they propose event — they also draw many of their flavours from the prose poem and the flash essay.

GREEN ON YELLOW

The yellow coat is missing a button — it has been for a while now. It just hangs on the rack over muddy rain boots.

Her father sews a new button back on but it doesn’t match the others. He pricks his finger; she plays doctor and dresses the wound in a pink Band-aid.

Arms slide into sleeves and she spins around in the coat like it’s brand new, save for the green button that breaks the yellow. (She picked the button out herself.)

Tugging on boots, she dashes into the rain. He’s in her footsteps, chasing her shadow.

MY NEW HOME

In the woods, around a creek, down a gravel road. I walk in to music, vibrations, occupied air.

I live with four boys. They throw apples at deer.

One is king of the trash fires. He stays up late with the trees.

One is a recluse gamer. With the deepest mind.

Another just shaved his beard and dreads. What a shame.

And then there is one that plays with his hair, while he smiles at me. Such a dangerous combination.

I think of how close I want to get, tension thickens the room. I spend my nights cold.

Exercise: 101 word short story

Read the short short story “Frontiers” by John Daniel, and write a story that has exactly 101 words — including the title. The story:

Frontiers

I’ve never been this far from home. I’ve never stayed up this late. I’m out west.

We rode the train. I slept upstairs. You put your clothes in a hammock. They have Dixie cups.

The world has mountains on the edge, where the sun sets, big black things, and that’s where we’re going.

I’m in the front seat with my mother. I’m five. We’re going to a dude ranch. There will be cowboys.

There’s a soft green glow on the dash board. My mother wears perfume.

I’m traveling. I’ve never been this old.

“The stars are ablaze,” I tell my mother.

Student work: Fall haiku

I propose to students, in this exercise, that haiku as form (three lines of 5 7 5 syllables) is less helpful to us than haiku as genre (quick bright trace of an instant of perception), and invite them to let their poems be absolutely simple.

They work gamely at it but often the temptation of complication maintains its hold. So when their haiku come in, I pick one by each student and pare it back to the bare bones of perception I sense in it. Not to edit their poems but to model a process.

Then I ask them to do likewise with the other four. Doubled up on a verb? Pick the one right one. Added texture with an adjective or an adverb? Try getting rid of it. Straining somewhere for effect? Lighten your touch. Be absolutely simple. Tap into everything a word is and does.

Here are some of the results, which I think are quite lovely, with their edits retained, when they made some.

          An apple
rots from rain,
          never picked.

          This field —
six feet high, dizzy
          dried and dead.

Gray fur coats
the carpet, as the cat
sheds away the summer.

BIRCH LEAF

black dirt speckles
cell blocks in knotted veins
an alligator‘s skin

          Wind eats silence
with whistle and whimper
          debris takes flight.

          Dew crowns blades of grass —
Regal autumn mornings rise,
          No one is awake.

One hour,
stowed away,
for what?

Crop burning fills
lungs with harvest air.
I am displaced.

Rain, rain,
go away —
or don’t.

In the old, blue, houses
          the moisture pleads,
“Can I borrow your coat?”

Even on the sea
leaves of fall
          find me

Black pavement
littered with gold,
trees shed their skin.

Downtown,
moon at its fullest,
leaves float.

          squirrel cracks open
an acorn on the floor
          Basho’s head rolls out

          Rich gravy runs
over white mountains
          on to burnt tongues.

A crow
from the rotting pumpkin
raises a cry.

          Golds litter wet ground,
The bronze moment of the year
          For which I was named.

The day the dead rise,
one night of freedom.
They want candy.

One pumpkin
half dead from of frost
earth eager for earth.

          Inside the bus —
under boots,
          the painful heat wrenches my skin.

          The bus stop —
wet leaves
          on toes.

scents of green
hollowed out skies
rain is falling

The leaves recorded
Eyes are video cameras
switched to on standby

The wind
pushes against the walls
house creaks

Raindrops onto
A red bridge over
Blue waves.

Gravity pulls
Leaves succumb
Trees bare all

Dried roots
Rotten Memories
Snaps of ginger

Uprising mushrooms
Puddles gathering round
Fall mornings

The crunch of leaves
gives way to the coming rain
and soak filled groans.

Crunching
leaves the rain
soaks.

Plants
block my view
of plants.

Exercise: Fall haiku

First . . .

Read the haiku by Bash­ō (here are some). Notice that

  • most have a seasonal reference — something that tells you what season it is;all are three lines, but most do not obey the Japanese formal stricture (5-7-5 syllable count) — haiku tend to work better in English if they’re shorter;
  • they rely on image rather than on statement — they’re vivid to the senses;
  • they often juxtapose two experiences or impressions — sort of the way Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” does—though there need not be any metaphor;
  • they are completely simple.

. . . and next . . .

Write five fall haiku for next class. Your seasonal reference, a traditional part of the Japanese haiku, should be to fall. Be on guard for clichés!

Draw each haiku from the world you see (and hear, taste, touch, and smell) around you. Rely on image rather than statement. In other words, let the image speak for itself.

Don’t pile on effects. Be completely simple. In the spirit of which — no more than one adjective or one adverb in each.

. . .  and soon to come.

Some of their fall haiku, after a round of rounding them down.