Goat Rock Beach

Goat Rock Beach

I like to walk on the beach by the sea

Along the coast of Sonoma County

I enjoy feeling the give of the sand

Where the continent ends, gives up on land,

Watching the ebbing and flowing of waves,

Feeling the flow of the wind in my hand.

I can remember walking hand-in-hand

On a summer afternoon by the sea

As dreams of the future rolled in like waves

Along the coast of Sonoma County

The wind has carved strange-shaped cliffs from the land,

The wind steadily shifts the shore-side sand.

The wind slowly turns the cliffs into sand,

Like yesterdays dissolving in one’s hand,

Streams that change course from an earthquake on land,

Displaced landscapes from tsunami tossed seas,

Along the coast of Sonoma County

The lunar tides and the sound of the waves.

The last time I saw you I paused to wave

The way I sometimes will pause on the sand

Along the coast of Sonoma County

A friend of mine needed a helping hand

With the great catch he retrieved from the sea

A long way from the sight of steady land.

Some things feel firm, they feel like steady land;

We can’t see that mountains are tides and waves,

That granite cliffs ebb and flow like the sea,

That even a diamond will become sand,

Like the grains that flow through visitors’ hands

Along the coast of Sonoma County.

Along the coast of Sonoma County

Where sky, cliff, and stream, where ocean and land

Meet each other like two friends clasping hands,

The sound of the wind, the sound of the waves,

The shifting of clouds, the shifting of sand,

The grand full moon’s light brightens the vast sea.

By the seacoast of Sonoma County

The sand is all that is left of the land –

I wave at a whale with my raised right hand.

When an Angel Descends

When an Angel Descends

As I stand on the shore of the river,

Memories and recollections and dreams,
Snatches and patches of songs I once heard
Blend with the glow of the leaves that shimmer
In the wind-tossed fading light of sunset,
A moment I treasure and won’t forget.

As I get older I tend to forget,

My mind resembles a flowing river,
The shifting colors observed at sunset,
The sound of a voice heard in last night’s dream,
The way a desert in mid-day shimmers,
A single verse from a song I once heard.

On the tundra plain a caribou herd,

A scene from my past I will not forget,
Crosses a glacier-fed stream that shimmers,
Sunlight sparkling on the flowing river,
Transforming the tundra into a dream
As the sun slows down for a long sunset.

The musicians start to play a new set,

A striking new melody is now heard,
A melody that’s from the realm of dreams,
A melody not easy to forget,
A melody, a song, from the river,
A melody that makes silence shimmer.

Gabriel descends, wings all a-shimmer,

Many hours after the sun has set,
His wings move like the flow of a river,
The sound of a celestial harp is heard,
A sound, a sight, I will never forget,
A vision I’ll carry into my dreams.

What is the waking world?  What is a dream?

Between them’s a barrier that shimmers;
Something unseen, something I can’t quite get,
Something I can’t grasp, something like sunset,
Something like a melody I once heard
While canoeing on a placid river.

On the river of dreams I once heard
Shimmering choirs during a long sunset –
A gift freely given that I won’t forget.

For Cold Mountain

The Tang Dynasty poet Cold Mountain, Han Shan, is one of my favorite poets.  Cold Mountain has been a companion of mine for decades.  He has been a big influence on my own poetry and continues to be a nourishing presence.  Here is a sestina dedicated to Cold Mountain:

For Cold Mountain

On the river

Always flowing

Silver moonlight
Autumn glowing
In the distance
Mountain stillness

Mountain stillness

By the river
In the distance
Always flowing
Fall leaves glowing
Under moonlight

Under moonlight

Mountain stillness
Fall leaves glowing
By the river
Always flowing
In the distance

In the distance

Under moonlight
Always flowing
Mountain stillness
By the river
Fall leaves glowing

Fall leaves glowing

In the distance
By the river
Silver moonlight
In the stillness
Always flowing

Always flowing

Fall leaves glowing
In the stillness
In the distance
Silver moonlight
On the river

On the river

Always flowing
Silver moonlight
Ever glowing
In the distance
Mountain stillness

 

Feral

Feral

In the stream a moss-covered log
Can be seen through the morning fog
Deepening pervasive silence
I briefly see a feral dog.

Through the field trots a feral dog
Past the shadow of a huge log,
A door shuts, otherwise silence --
In the distance the coastal fog.

Sometimes my mind is thick with fog
Or distracted, a feral dog,
That's when I return to silence,
Silence like a moss-covered log.

A tree has now become a log
Wrapped in the gentle, swirling fog
Surrounded by fields of silence
Where soundly sleeps a feral dog.

 

Syllabic Sonnet Day for 2014

Greetings!  Today is Syllabic Sonnet Day; a good day to appreciate the sonnet tradition and how a syllabic approach subtly changes the parameters of the sonnet.

The poet who applied syllabics to the sonnet form in English is Elizabeth Daryush.  I think her work on the sonnet is exemplary. 

It is a matter of interest to me that the original Italian sonnet was a syllabic form because Italian poetry is syllabic.  When the sonnet passed to England the sonnet took on metrical shape.  The metrical shape of the sonnet, particularly iambic pentameter, has been an almost defining characteristic of the sonnet in English since then.  Some would argue that a sonnet not written in iambics is not a sonnet.  Historically, there is some justification for this.

On the other hand, if you cast your historical glance back to the Italian model, then a syllabic approach might not be seen as a radical departure from the tradition of English sonnets.  Rather it could be understood as a return to the first procedures of its construction.

Personally, I have found taking a syllabic approach to the sonnet to be congenial.  I like the way the beat of the line can shift as one moves through the sonnet.  The pulse is maintained by the syllabic count, but above the syllabic count there is an ebb and flow of accented and unaccented syllables.  There is a kind of counterpoint between the two.

Here is one of Elizabeth Daryush’s sonnets; it is from Collected Poems:

Here, where the larks sing, and the sun’s so warm

That gorse-pods click each minute, and the grass
Rustles, as through dry bents the breezes pass,
And butterflies over the heather swarm,
Here I, an ardent lover of all these,
Would build our home – I’d take but the small crest
Of the long hill, and leave untouched the rest,
The coney-shaven turf, the scanty trees.

Here, having marked and worked our cottage-claim,

We’d meet the first shy rays, on summer dawns,
Approaching to unveil our dewy lawns
Of wild-flowers; and when winter evenings came,

We’d watch from our bright room the stealthy dark

Muffling the stunt thorns of our snowy park.

 

Kaleidoscope: A Few Thoughts about the Sestina

Kaleidoscope: A Few Thoughts about the Sestina

1.

I have been writing a lot of sestinas lately.  I find the form attractive.  The form is a balance between rigor and freedom; I mean that the primary requirement of the form is a pre-determined placement of the endwords as the stanzas unfold.  At the same time, everything else is open to the poet’s creativity.

2.

Part of my attraction to the sestina is that the form occupies a unique place in contemporary poetry.  It is the one place where both formalists and free versers meet.  It is intriguing to me that poets such as Ezra Pound and John Ashberry can write sestinas, while at the same time Auden and Donald Justice can also write sestinas.  In other words, the form of the sestina is open enough to allow for multiple approaches to poetic construction.  If you are a formalist, you can compose a sestina using metrical lines and rhyme.  If you prefer free verse, you can compose a sestina with lines of irregular count and without the use of rhyme.  And both approaches produce sestinas that are recognizable examples of the form.

Since I am attracted to a syllabic approach, I apply syllabics to the sestina form.  Principally, I do this by maintaining a consistent syllable count for all of the lines.  At times I will change count for a particular stanza; but within the stanza all lines have the same count.  And I have found that the sestina is welcoming to a syllabic approach.

3.

I think of the sestina as a kaleidoscope of words.  The endwords cycling through the stanzas resembles, to my mind, the way that elements in a kaleidoscope will shift and cycle through various configurations as one turns the scope.  To my mind the visual effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the sonic effect of the way the endwords in a sestina shift and change position in relationship to each other.

4.

Exploring what other people have done with the sestina, I discovered that some poets have applied to the process of endword rotation to verses with different numbers of lines.  The classic sestina has six line verses, concluding with a three-line envoi.  There are six of these six-line stanzas, and when one adds the closing three lines, that makes for a 39-line poem.

Some poets have adopted the process of the sestina to three-line poems, calling these shorter poems ‘tritina’.  A five-line version will be called a pentina, etc.

I discovered that the founder of the sestina, the troubadour Arnaud Daniel, called the form a ‘cledisat’, in the French dialect of his time.  ‘Cledisat’ means something like ‘interlock’.  The term ‘sestina’ came after the form was adopted by the Italians; the term ‘sestina’ refers to the six-line stanzas.

I like the term ‘interlock’; I think it describes well the way the endwords of the form are interwoven, or ‘locked’ into each other as they turn around each other.  So I began to think of the form as defined by the rotational scheme of the endwords and that this rotational scheme could be applied to a poem of any number of lines.  From this perspective a sestina is a six-line interlock.

5.

Each of the interlocks has unique features.  For example, I discovered that with the four-line interlock the endword for line three retains its position through all of the rotations.  Here is how it works:

1        4        2        1 (envoi)

2        1        4        2
3        3        3        3
4        2        1        4

This gives the endword for line three special significance as the other endwords rotate around it.  I found this particular type of interlock especially attractive.

6.

I wonder if the place that the sestina interlock holds in the world of poetry today tells us something about our poetic culture at this time.  Normally we think of the different approaches to poetry as combative and distinct.  Yet here we have a form that seems to be a common ground.  This indicates that there does exist a place where the conflicting views of how poetry works, and how it should be constructed, do not create a barrier to accessing this particular form.

It is intriguing to me, for example, that many free verse poets are willing to accept the restrictions of the sestina.  Does this tell us something about free verse that, perhaps, we have overlooked?  And the modern revival of the sestina among formalists, and their willingness to engage with this form that also attracts those who compose in a free verse manner, may tell us something about formal verse at this time as well.  It is not clear to me exactly what that is; but perhaps that will become clearer in time.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the exploration of this common ground.

 

Ordinary Poetry

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s Blog, ‘The Dish’, he recently posted an excerpt from an article by Adam Kirsch that appeared in the New York Times.  I don’t have a subscription to the NYT, so I can’t access Kirsch’s full article; so I’m just going to respond to Sullivan’s excerpt which you can find here:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/11/22/the-words-that-wont-change-the-world/

This is a topic that poets, and some cultural commentators, make fairly frequently.  It is the observation that the place that poetry occupies in our world has changed, that poetry and poets used to occupy a central place both in popular culture and in high culture but that at this time and in our contemporary culture poetry is now marginalized.  As Kirsch notes, poets today, if they are not delusional, realize that what they write will not be widely read and will have almost no impact on the social sphere. 

The last poet I know of who was prominent in popular culture was Edna Saint Vincent Millay.  She had a huge following, considerable sales, and was an object of press adoration and attention.  But she was the last poet to occupy such a position.  And, as far as I know, Millay did not use her position to advocate for political causes. 

My own feelings about this are complex.  First, I think modern poets have a tendency to aggrandize their vocation.  This sense of self-importance is a kind of nostalgia for a past where the poet and poetry were elevated to an almost apotheosized status.  Works like Homer’s ‘Illiad’, or the Confucian ‘Book of Songs/Odes’ had huge and lasting cultural impact.  And in some countries, like Japan, there are actual temples devoted to some poets.  It is easy to see why modern poets would want to retain some of this aura of exalted status.  At times I share this desire for the special place that poetry used to occupy at the center of cultures.

However, I think it is, overall, a good thing that poets now occupy a place at the margins.  First, it offers the opportunity to cultivate humility.  I love poetry; I write it, read it, study it, and do what I can to keep up with trends (a nearly impossible task, by the way).  But I recognize that my love of poetry does not differ from the love that a gardener has for gardening, or the love of a baker for baking, or the love of a quilter for quilting, a knitter for knitting, or the love of baseball, soccer, tennis or chess for those who are devoted to those activities.

I have mentioned before on this blog, but I think it is worth repeating, and it is relevant to Kirsch’s observations, that my own view about poetry is that poetry is the craft of shaping words.  Pottery is the craft of shaping clay.  Composing music is the craft of shaping sound.  Gardening is the craft of shaping plants.  Carpentry is the craft of shaping wood.  Quilting is the craft of shaping cloth.  And so forth.

I don’t think poets are particularly insightful nor do they have some kind of special access to a broader understanding than ordinary people do.  Look at it this way: if gardeners asserted that they had special understanding and that this understanding applied to political and social spheres, I doubt people would go along with this.  A particular gardener, like the agriculturalist Wendell Berry, might have insightful things to say; but as a class, just because someone is a gardener, or cultivator of plants, does not in itself generate insights that are broad in scope.  This is true for pottery, carpentry, and quilting as well.  The thing is, you rarely hear of carpenters or quilters making a claim that their craft gives them a claim on how society should be ordered, or what political and social reforms should be undertaken.  Carpenters and quilters have opinions about these topics, and they might be insightful opinions worth considering; but if they are of worth there is no obvious connection between having these opinions and the specifics of their craft.  In contrast, poets tend to think of themselves as peculiarly insightful, especially visionary, and deeply aware beyond that of ordinary people.  I don’t think that is psychologically healthy for poets; it leads to an overestimation of one’s significance.  It tends to lead the poet to think that their thoughts about social issues are more insightful than those of the carpenter down the street, or the quilter next door, or the baker at the local bread shop.  My own experience is that my own political and social commitments (and like everyone, I have them) are about as well thought out as anyone else’s thoughts on these topics.  Poetry does not give me a means for being more profound in these arenas.

The sense of self-importance that poets often have of themselves and of their craft, to my way of thinking, as I mentioned above, can be unhealthy.  There are extreme and famous examples of this.  The most notorious example I know of is Ezra Pound whose preoccupation with his own significance took him to very dark places.  It is a tragic story; one that most poets are aware of.  But even though poets in general are aware of it, they don’t seem to draw the obvious lesson from this legacy.  And that lesson is that poets are not peculiarly gifted when it comes to insights beyond their vocation of poetry itself (and they might not be insightful about even that).  I realize that this is a tough lesson.  It is simply human to want to think of ourselves as above average and special.  And our culture asserts the significance of our uniqueness in countless ways (New Age teachers are especially adept at this).  I believe the antidote to this is to comprehend poetry as a craft that is like other crafts.

As a craft, poetry can lead to exalted experiences; both for the poet and for the reader of poetry.  But that is also true of carpentry, baking, quilting, and gardening.  The beauty of a well crafted poem, to my mind, resembles the beauty of a well crafted cup by a dedicated potter, or the beauty of a well baked scone offered at the local bakery, or the beauty of a quilt done at the latest quilting bee, or the beauty of a song I just heard someone sing.  To my way of thinking, beauty is a door to the transcendental; it takes us out of ourselves and, in a way, out of this world.  This can happen.  And when it does happen it is a profound and transforming experience.  But poets do not have a monopoly on this; it is, in my opinion, part of the meaning of all the crafts that people engage in.  It is an experience, and a result, that poets share with the baker, the quilter, and the candlestick maker.

Personally, I am content with placing poetry at the level of a craft.  I like thinking of shaping words as the same as shaping clay or shaping sound or shaping wood.  Looking at poetry in this way connects me with the rest of humanity whereas thinking of poetry as peculiarly exalted severs these connections, turning my craft of shaping words into some kind of oracular avocation.  I am not an oracle.  Like everyone else, I am doing the best I can in difficult circumstances.  And when I compose poetry as a craft, I find myself connected with the very human ordinariness of the baker, the gardener, the carpenter, and the quilter.  I find that a good place to be.

 

 

Fibonacci Day for 2014!

Fibonacci Day – 2014

Guess what?  It’s Fibonacci Day.  I like to give a toast to Fibonacci poetry on this day because it is November 23^rd.  Numerically that is 11/23, and 1-1-2-3 is the syllable count for the first four lines of a Fibonacci poem.  Kind of neat how that works out.

The Fibonacci form has an exuberant feeling to me.  With its irregular count it communicates a kind of spontaneity.  The overall shape of the poem is to open up as each line become longer and longer.  It is a playful form.

Here is a Fibonacci I wrote recently:

Piercing the Veil

Warmth

Fall
No mist
October
Yet summer lingers
An old song on the radio
While I am having a scone and a cup of coffee
Slowly I wade into the stream of time to visit someone I danced with long ago.

Take a moment to compose a Fibonacci.  Here is the line count: 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34, etc.  Most Fibonacci poems I have seen are six or seven lines; but a few have gone into the longer count lines. 

 

I like to use the opening very short lines, the first four lines with the count 1-1-2-3, to give the seasonal and/or temporal setting.  You can use words of time and words that mark the seasons; many of these are very short.  Months, for example, like ‘March’, ‘May’, and ‘June’, are good.  Some months are two syllables; April, July, and August.  Some are three count words; September through December.  You can also use terms like ‘First Month’, instead of ‘January’, so that you can set the time in the opening lines if the time is January. 

Other simple markers are things like ‘cold’, ‘hot’, ‘warm’.  Time of day is also a good topic for the opening lines; like ‘dusk’, ‘dawn’, ‘afternoon’, ‘mid-day’, ‘night’, etc.

You get the idea, which is basically to use the opening lines as seasonal and temporal designators.  With the longer lines you can then move into the more specific topic and specific focus of the poem you are writing.  In this way the poem’s focus moves from broad general strokes to the more specific.  I like the flow that such a Fibonacci produces.

Of course this is only one approach to the Fibonacci and it is in some ways linked to the esthetic I have imbibed from the Japanese poetic tradition where seasonal designation plays such a significant role.  The Fibonacci is a new form and has no weight of history behind it; there is no official Fibonacci Poetry Society or designated keeper of the Fibonacci true esthetic.  This means that when we write in the Fibonacci form we can take it whatever direction we like without feeling like we have violated an inherited tradition.  Personally, I enjoy applying some of the esthetic principles from other traditions to the Fibonacci, including the use of rhyme and seasonal or temporal placement.  Transferring these approaches from a form like haiku and tanka to the Fibonacci seem to me a viable strategy; at least it works for me.  Perhaps you might also find it efficacious. 

Just a few thoughts to share on Fibonacci Day.  

 

 

 

 

 

Beak Open, Feet Relaxed, by Patricia Lignori -- A Review

Beak Open, Feet Relaxed – 108 Haiku

By Priscilla Lignori

A Review

I was not familiar with the haiku of Priscilla Lignori until coming across this collection of her haiku.  It is a small book at 100 pages, with about 80 pages of haiku.  In the back of the book are ‘Credits’ for many of the haiku which were previously printed in numerous haiku publications.  And doing a google search for her came up with a lot of references.  Somehow, though, I missed her presence in the haiku world.  It is a pleasure to make her acquaintance through this book.

The book is divided into 7 short haiku sequences.  The sequences are not titled, only numbered; one through seven, using roman numerals.  The number of haiku in each sequence varies from the shortest, sequence II, which has 11 haiku; to the longest, sequence V, which has 22 haiku.

The haiku in each sequence are seasonally arranged; that is to say the sequence of the haiku follow the flow of the seasons.  However, each sequence has a slightly different arrangement of the seasons as follows:

I        Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter

II       Spring, Summer, Fall

III      Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter

IV      Spring, Summer, Fall

V       Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring

VI      Summer, Fall, Winter

VII    Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter

The seasonal element is central to Lignori’s haiku and this emphasis is traditional.  Also traditional is Lignori’s adherence to the 5-7-5 syllabic count.  I’m not sure, but I suspect that Lignori uses a Saijiki, or is attuned to the basic idea of a Saijiki.  Most of the seasonal haiku use key words to indicate the season, including the names of various flowers and plants, natural phenomena like icicles, and holiday references.

By a frozen lake –

I sit on a bench wearing

the afternoon sun 

On the other hand, Lignori is willing also to simply name the season:

Shaking their rattles

cicada calls come and go

with the summer breeze

Not all of Lignori’s haiku are seasonal:

They can’t be erased –

the past and my father’s name

engraved in hard stone

This haiku is placed both after and before fall haiku and it has the feeling, or tone, of fall.  This placement gives the reader a sense of seasonal continuity even in haiku where the seasonal element is not explicit. 

Lignori uses two methods for the overall construction of her haiku.  Many of her haiku are of the single sentence type.  A significant number are also in the two-part style.  The list method does not seem to be an approach Lignori finds congenial.

There is a free use of the repertoire of common poetic techniques.  Here is an example of shaping her line through a common sonic ending:

Chapped palms in winter –

a roadmap that leads nowhere

in particular

This is a nicely done two-part haiku.  The opening image of the chapped palms is juxtaposed to a ‘roadmap’, but then the image of the roadmap is undermined when its function of leading or guiding is put aside.  The overall impact is a kind of static stillness. 

Notice how the last words of each line (winter, nowhere, particular) all end in an ‘r’ sound.  Lines 1 and 3 close with prepositional phrases (in winter, in particular) and there is an understated rhyme between ‘winter’ and ‘particular’.  The overall sonic resonance adds a dimension of beauty to this haiku which I find attractive.

Here is another haiku that uses juxtaposition effectively:

The pink rose petal

placed in a sealed envelope –

a cloud in the sky

I find this haiku offers me a lot of space; I am wondering why the petal is placed in an envelope (to mark an occasion?, for a botanical study?, etc.).  The shift to the skyscape is effective; there is a movement from a sharp, detailed focus, to a much wider context.  It is also possible to interpret the cloud in the sky as resembling the petal in the envelope.  I think this is beautifully crafted.

Lignori takes advantage of metaphor and simile:

Falling icicle

shatters like a crystal glass

dropped by a waiter

This single sentence haiku is striking in its weaving together the natural and human dimensions.  The reader gets to feel the precise sound the author is referring to.

Lignori has a way of highlighting moments and beautifully shaping them for the reader:

At home in the dark –

the pale moon and the horned owl

watching from the tree

This two-part haiku has a unity of mood.  It begins inside, but in the dark.  It then moves outside, giving us a landscape rich with psychic energy.  The moon is personified in this haiku as ‘watching’ in the same way that the horned owl is watching.  This, incidentally, is a winter haiku; at least I read it that way even though the moon is traditionally fall.  I get the winter feeling when I read it in sequence with the previous haiku:

Chanting a sutra –

from the corner of my eye

the silence of snow

At home in the dark –

the pale moon and the horned owl

watching from the tree

In other words, I think the seven sequences are genuine sequences and the full meaning of each haiku, as previously noted, becomes apparent by their placement in the haiku that surround a particular haiku.  Each haiku can stand on its own, but the meaning of any particular haiku is enhanced, clarified, and enriched by its placement in the sequence.  This is skillfully done and I found it a pleasing and enriching experience.

The book contains an informative ‘Introduction’ by Clark Strand who has been Lignori’s mentor and guide for both the art of haiku composition and for spiritual practice from the Zen tradition.  (As an aside, I found the print size of the ‘Introduction’ to be a little small; it is significantly smaller than the haiku.  Not a big deal, but it would have been helpful to me to have had a type size more agreeable to the eye.)  Strand has been an advocate for syllabic haiku for a long time.  Strand is the author of the haiku manual Seeds from a Birch Tree, a book that I have found rewarding and helpful for my own haiku practice.

Lignori has gone on to found her own haiku group, ‘The Hudson Valley Haiku-kai’.  Lignori’s view about haiku is presented in a brief ‘Afterword’.  It is gratifying to see this approach to haiku being passed on to another generation.

These are classical, traditional, haiku; seasonal, syllabic, lyrical, thoughtful and insightful.  I look forward to further publications by Lignori, hopeuflly in the near future.

A winter sunset –

the day’s unanswered questions

simply disappear

Beak Open, Feet Relaxed

108 Haiku
Priscilla Lignori

$12.95

ISBN: 9781493549597

The Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Father Neal Henry Lawrence

Good Morning:

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Father Neal Henry Lawrence.  He passed away on November 3, 2004.

I have a great admiration for Father Lawrence and his books of tanka.  As far as I have been able to determine, Father Lawrence was the first English speaker to compose tanka syllabically.  I think of Father Lawrence as breaking new ground for syllabic verse in English.  And in a way, I think of Father Lawrence as the Patron Saint of those composing syllabic tanka in English.

I believe Father Lawrence published four books.  The first is The Soul’s Inner Sparkle, published in 1978 in Japan by Eichosa Publishing.  This first book was reissued in a bilingual edition, Japanese and English, but I am not sure of the date as I cannot find a publisher’s page for this reissue.  The used copy I was able to purchase has the signature of Father Lawrence; the writing says ‘To Brother Benedict’, and is dated April 8, 1999.  The volume looks to me like it was done for some kind of festival or anniversary, or perhaps as a volume to be made available at Father Lawrence’s Abby in Japan; I’m not sure.  But this reissue contains an additional essay by Father Lawrence, ‘Why I Write English Tanka!’ which gives us insight into the poetic world of Father Lawrence and his motivations for adhering to a syllabic count of 5-7-5-7-7.

The second book of Father Lawrence is Rushing Amid Tears, published in 1983, again by Eichosa.

The third is Shining Moments, published by Jane Reichhold’s Aha Books in 1993.

The fourth is Blossoms in Time, published by Suemori in Japan, in 2000.  Blossoms is an anthology of the tanka of Father Lawrence, containing selections from his three previous books, plus new tanka that he wrote between 1991 and 1998.  The book has an introduction, About the Poet, by Edward G. Seidensticker, the great translator and scholar of Japanese literature.  The book is bilingual; all the tanka, as well as the prefatory material, are translated into Japanese.  I believe that Father Lawrence was the first English language tanka poet to have his tanka translated into Japanese; both in the reissue of Soul’s Inner Sparkle and for Blossoms of Time.

There is a muted, or rather, quiet quality to the tanka of Father Lawrence.  It is rare to find a tanka in his output that uses juxtaposition; most of his tanka follow the single sentence format.  And his observations tend to be unspectacular.  For this reason, it takes awhile to perceive the lucidity and care that Father Lawrence used in shaping his tanka.  We tend to be immediately attracted to the brilliant flash of a surprising metaphor or juxtaposition.  So if you are looking for this kind of flash, you will only rarely find it in the output of Father Lawrence.

I believe that behind the tanka Father Lawrence wrote are, primarily, the steady rhythm of the Psalter, the Book of Psalms, which as a Benedictine, Father Lawrence would have recited daily.  I sense in his phrasing some of the same usages that appear in the Psalms.  Juxtaposition is not a primary tool for the Psalms, but things like parallelism are.  It is this kind of shaping that one finds in his tanka.  Father Lawrence speaks to this point in his essay, ‘Why I Write English Tanka!’, published in the re-issue of Soul’s Inner Sparkle, “I think another reason why I write tanka in English is that members of the Order of St. Benedict, which is over 1,500 years old and worldwide, are often poets and all living in a poetic atmosphere.  Every day, four times a day at prayers, we chant the psalms of the Bible and also hear them at every Mass.”  In other words, the tanka of Father Lawrence are embedded in that most influential collection of western poetry, the Book of Psalms and their esthetic is shaped primarily by that collection.

Over the years my appreciation for the tanka of Father Lawrence has increased.  They have a way of quietly growing in one’s heart and mind.   Seidensticker wrote of these tanka, “His language is graceful and imaginative . . .”  I have found this to be true.  Most of his books are available as used books online.  If you have a chance, and particularly if you are interested in syllabic tanka in English, spend some time with these contemplative gems.