Prayers
by Rae Armantrout
November 10, 2008
1.
We pray
and the resurrection happens.
Here are the young
again,
sniping and giggling,
tingly
as ringing phones.
2.
All we ask
is that our thinking
sustain momentum,
identify targets.
The pressure
in my lower back
rising to be recognized
as pain.
The blue triangles
on the rug
repeating.
Coming up,
a discussion
on the uses
of torture.
The fear
that all this
will end.
The fear
that it won’t.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Reunion a New Yorker Poem
I love this poem courtesy of The New Yorker
Reunion
by Jeffrey Skinner
September 1, 2008
Why do you keep returning,
alive, able to walk and gesture
as you could not at the end,
your movements sketchy, more holographic
than warm? Thanksgiving dinner
with all the relatives and I alone
with the suspicion I cannot speak:
You should be elsewhere.
Heavy drinking, as always. The newest baby
passed around like a contagious glow.
Same teasing of the strong,
same muffled terror of the uncertain.
All the while you, at the head of
the table like a signal carried by
a frayed wire—there, gone, there—
raising a glass to toast,
the rim never touching your lips.
Reunion
by Jeffrey Skinner
September 1, 2008
Why do you keep returning,
alive, able to walk and gesture
as you could not at the end,
your movements sketchy, more holographic
than warm? Thanksgiving dinner
with all the relatives and I alone
with the suspicion I cannot speak:
You should be elsewhere.
Heavy drinking, as always. The newest baby
passed around like a contagious glow.
Same teasing of the strong,
same muffled terror of the uncertain.
All the while you, at the head of
the table like a signal carried by
a frayed wire—there, gone, there—
raising a glass to toast,
the rim never touching your lips.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Lifted from the Harper's Weekly
I like the humour in the news, so I include it here:
HARPER'S WEEKLY
Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from adonor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use,and justified in this case only because the patient hadleukemia.
"Frankly," said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of theUniversity of Maryland School of Medicine, "I'd rather take the medicine."
A German shoplifter with no arms stolea 24-inch television. "It's hard to believe," said a police officer, "that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention."
A man in a motorized wheelchair robbed a Space Coast Credit Union branch in MerrittIsland, Florida, telling employees that he was rigged with explosives; police caught him ten minutes later and recovered the stolen money from his prosthetic leg.
Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the royalties from the movie "The Dark Knight." "There is,"said Kalkan, "only one Batman."
A sixth severed footwashed ashore in Canada, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin,who is expected to sign a $7 million book deal, was asked if she planned to run for president in 2012. "I'm like,okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, Don't let me miss theopen door," she said. "I'll plow through that door."
The Secret Service assigned official code names toPresident-elect Barack Obama ("Renegade"), First LadyMichelle Obama ("Renaissance"), and their daughters Malia("Radiance") and Sasha ("Rosebud").
In Chicago, are laxed-looking Obama, who gained 700,000 Facebook friends since his election, met with Senator John McCain, who has lost 1,000 Facebook friends, and astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.
The price of oil fell below $60 per barrel, a 20-monthlow, and it was announced that a portion of the government's $700 billion bailout package may be used to pay year-end bonuses on Wall Street.
Computer giant Sun Microsystems shed 6,000 jobs, and sales rose for HormelFoods Corporation, which produces SPAM.
"We are scheduled to work every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas," saidDarwin Sellers, a SPAM "formulator" who adds salt, sugar,and nitrates to rectangles of pork at a plant inMinnesota.
"The man upstairs [would like] to get us towork eight days a week." Barack Obama's chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, apologized to the Arab community for remarks made by his father, Benjamin Emanuel, who told an Israeli newspaper that his son would "obviously influence the president to be pro-Israel.
Why wouldn't he? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to be mopping floors at the WhiteHouse." Assailants sprayed acid in the faces of 15 schoolgirls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and an Indian highcourt dismissed arguments that homosexual intercourse should be banned for causing bodily injuries. India's space program landed a probe painted with the national flag on the surface of the moon.
Nigerian police discovered a massive baby farm in the cityof Enugu, and a grandmother in Ohio gave birth to herdaughter's triplets. Officials in Nebraska were scrambling to change a "safe haven" law, whereby children can be legally abandoned at hospitals, because it failed tospecify an age limit for the children.
"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," said Governor Dave Heineman, responding to a spate of abandoned out-of-stateteens. "Think of what you are saying. You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them." DonDollar, a City Hall employee in Vernon, Mississippi, said that anyone who was happy with Obama's victory should seek religious forgiveness.
"This is a community that's supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks. If they're not disappointed, they need to be at the altar."
Holocaust survivors demanded that the Mormon church stop posthumously baptizing Jews killed in concentration camps,and judges in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, were weighing a free-speech suit filed by adherents to the Summum church.
Members of the church claim that the city is discriminating against them by displaying a red granite plaque of the Ten Commandments in a public park but refusing to display a monument inscribed with their own faith's Seven Aphorisms, which were communicated via telepathy from divine beings to a man named Corky Ra. RonTemu and Su Menu, two Summum worshippers, argued that the Commandments were compatible with the Aphorisms, as both were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
"If you look at them side by side," said Su Menu of the two monuments while sitting in a metal pyramid and drinking an alcoholic sacramental nectar beside a mummified Doberman pinscher,"they really are saying similar things."-- Gemma Sieff
HARPER'S WEEKLY
Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from adonor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use,and justified in this case only because the patient hadleukemia.
"Frankly," said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of theUniversity of Maryland School of Medicine, "I'd rather take the medicine."
A German shoplifter with no arms stolea 24-inch television. "It's hard to believe," said a police officer, "that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention."
A man in a motorized wheelchair robbed a Space Coast Credit Union branch in MerrittIsland, Florida, telling employees that he was rigged with explosives; police caught him ten minutes later and recovered the stolen money from his prosthetic leg.
Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the royalties from the movie "The Dark Knight." "There is,"said Kalkan, "only one Batman."
A sixth severed footwashed ashore in Canada, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin,who is expected to sign a $7 million book deal, was asked if she planned to run for president in 2012. "I'm like,okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, Don't let me miss theopen door," she said. "I'll plow through that door."
The Secret Service assigned official code names toPresident-elect Barack Obama ("Renegade"), First LadyMichelle Obama ("Renaissance"), and their daughters Malia("Radiance") and Sasha ("Rosebud").
In Chicago, are laxed-looking Obama, who gained 700,000 Facebook friends since his election, met with Senator John McCain, who has lost 1,000 Facebook friends, and astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.
The price of oil fell below $60 per barrel, a 20-monthlow, and it was announced that a portion of the government's $700 billion bailout package may be used to pay year-end bonuses on Wall Street.
Computer giant Sun Microsystems shed 6,000 jobs, and sales rose for HormelFoods Corporation, which produces SPAM.
"We are scheduled to work every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas," saidDarwin Sellers, a SPAM "formulator" who adds salt, sugar,and nitrates to rectangles of pork at a plant inMinnesota.
"The man upstairs [would like] to get us towork eight days a week." Barack Obama's chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, apologized to the Arab community for remarks made by his father, Benjamin Emanuel, who told an Israeli newspaper that his son would "obviously influence the president to be pro-Israel.
Why wouldn't he? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to be mopping floors at the WhiteHouse." Assailants sprayed acid in the faces of 15 schoolgirls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and an Indian highcourt dismissed arguments that homosexual intercourse should be banned for causing bodily injuries. India's space program landed a probe painted with the national flag on the surface of the moon.
Nigerian police discovered a massive baby farm in the cityof Enugu, and a grandmother in Ohio gave birth to herdaughter's triplets. Officials in Nebraska were scrambling to change a "safe haven" law, whereby children can be legally abandoned at hospitals, because it failed tospecify an age limit for the children.
"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," said Governor Dave Heineman, responding to a spate of abandoned out-of-stateteens. "Think of what you are saying. You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them." DonDollar, a City Hall employee in Vernon, Mississippi, said that anyone who was happy with Obama's victory should seek religious forgiveness.
"This is a community that's supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks. If they're not disappointed, they need to be at the altar."
Holocaust survivors demanded that the Mormon church stop posthumously baptizing Jews killed in concentration camps,and judges in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, were weighing a free-speech suit filed by adherents to the Summum church.
Members of the church claim that the city is discriminating against them by displaying a red granite plaque of the Ten Commandments in a public park but refusing to display a monument inscribed with their own faith's Seven Aphorisms, which were communicated via telepathy from divine beings to a man named Corky Ra. RonTemu and Su Menu, two Summum worshippers, argued that the Commandments were compatible with the Aphorisms, as both were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
"If you look at them side by side," said Su Menu of the two monuments while sitting in a metal pyramid and drinking an alcoholic sacramental nectar beside a mummified Doberman pinscher,"they really are saying similar things."-- Gemma Sieff
Monday, November 17, 2008
Not in the Plan a poem
Not in the Plan
-------------------
two believers were talking about
God's plans for the human race
'If only we know what He has in
store for us..' man A said.
'And that is not in his plan, '
man B quipped.
'If only we know..' man A continued.
'Then we will miss all the fun of his plans.
Everything is kept secret so that we can live
him like a page turner.' man B answered.
john tiong chunghoo
Nov 17, 2008
Comments about this poem (Not in the Plan by john tiong chunghoo)
Richard Post (11/17/2008 2:56:00 AM) page turner. nice touch
-------------------
two believers were talking about
God's plans for the human race
'If only we know what He has in
store for us..' man A said.
'And that is not in his plan, '
man B quipped.
'If only we know..' man A continued.
'Then we will miss all the fun of his plans.
Everything is kept secret so that we can live
him like a page turner.' man B answered.
john tiong chunghoo
Nov 17, 2008
Comments about this poem (Not in the Plan by john tiong chunghoo)
Richard Post (11/17/2008 2:56:00 AM) page turner. nice touch
Thursday, November 13, 2008
A Haunted House a Poem
it stands on multiple wooden poles
and right between them a flight of stairs
that goes up to the back or kitchen so that
when somebody comes down you see his feet,
shins and thighs before you see him
the house faces a huge raintree that divides
two roads; car lights therefore shine directly
onto the poles of the house and cast shadows
that flash and lift themselves up over its compounds
everything seems to move then in the forboding
quiet and dark menacing atmosphere
the solitary house they say is haunted
you might be sleeping in the living room
but wake up to find yourself on the verandah
so nobody dares stay here
night buses ironically stops to leave their
passengers right outside the house
i once got down here, one last passenger
in the dead of night chilling and cold
gripping with a wild imagination that
threw shadows over every of my steps
the forlorn nooks and corners of the house
suddenly became eyes that bore
a jungle of fears through me;
my heart beat faster than my legs
could carry me
the house loomed in the moonlight night
every inch an epitome of evil out to harm
by john tiong chunghoo
November 13, 2008
Krista Churchill (11/13/2008 12:10:00 AM) I can picture this the whole time i was reading it... Great write...
and right between them a flight of stairs
that goes up to the back or kitchen so that
when somebody comes down you see his feet,
shins and thighs before you see him
the house faces a huge raintree that divides
two roads; car lights therefore shine directly
onto the poles of the house and cast shadows
that flash and lift themselves up over its compounds
everything seems to move then in the forboding
quiet and dark menacing atmosphere
the solitary house they say is haunted
you might be sleeping in the living room
but wake up to find yourself on the verandah
so nobody dares stay here
night buses ironically stops to leave their
passengers right outside the house
i once got down here, one last passenger
in the dead of night chilling and cold
gripping with a wild imagination that
threw shadows over every of my steps
the forlorn nooks and corners of the house
suddenly became eyes that bore
a jungle of fears through me;
my heart beat faster than my legs
could carry me
the house loomed in the moonlight night
every inch an epitome of evil out to harm
by john tiong chunghoo
November 13, 2008
Krista Churchill (11/13/2008 12:10:00 AM) I can picture this the whole time i was reading it... Great write...
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Poems taught to children in the United States
It is nice to have my poems used as reference for teaching particularly in schools in the United States. I love children and I really hope they can relate to my poems and enjoy them.. The followings are used by a science teacher at the Jefferson County Schools at the website
http://jc-schools.net/dynamic/science/teacher/SandSleuth.ppt
The best part about the school to me is this:
The Jefferson County School System does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age in its programs and activities.
The Poems:
-------------
breeze
i am the beach
at sea
my beach walk
little crabs run
light as breeze
sea waves
painter's brush dances
over the canvas
sea waves
from his palette
the beach appears
evening walk
evening walk at beach
the sea leaps and roars
as I make my wish
http://jc-schools.net/dynamic/science/teacher/SandSleuth.ppt
The best part about the school to me is this:
The Jefferson County School System does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age in its programs and activities.
The Poems:
-------------
breeze
i am the beach
at sea
my beach walk
little crabs run
light as breeze
sea waves
painter's brush dances
over the canvas
sea waves
from his palette
the beach appears
evening walk
evening walk at beach
the sea leaps and roars
as I make my wish
My Haiku featured in Bobbing Around
Austrialian writer Dr Bob Rich who was voted best book editor for 2007 at Preditors and Editors recently included one of my little haiku about Australia in the poetry section of his popular online magazine Bobbing Around
http://mooramoora.org.au/bobrich/mudsmith/bobbing7-8.html#
Poetry
Boomerang -- a Haiku by John Tiong Chunghoo
boomerang
memories of Australia
bounce back
Dr Rich gave this comment about the haiku -
When I read this, I was amazed at the depth of many-layered meaning so few words could hold.
Thanks very much for it Rich.
Being a health freak, I was also drawn by this feature in the magazine
about the goodness of brocolli
Brocolli could save your life
-----------------------------------
Farmers might be doing their bit to prevent bladder cancer. An international team of researchers discovered broccoli sprouts can lower the incidence of bladder cancer in rats by more than half.
This study builds on past evidence that vegetables from the cabbage family containing glucosinolates stimulate the body's defence mechanisms against cancer.
More than 300,000 people worldwide are annually diagnosed with what is the fourth most common cancer in men and the eighth most common in women.
Now scientists hope to look at ways of growing mature broccoli with high levels of glucosinolate compounds.
New Zealand scientists Carolyn Lister from Crop and Food Research and Rex Munday, from AgResearch collaborated with two United States researchers and another from New Zealand to arrive at these findings.
It was funded by Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) under its Vital Vegetables program.
"We were interested in the results of the study from the perspective of developing vegetables with elite characteristics," Dr Lister said.
"The fact that we've shown this extract can cut the development of bladder cancer in rats is great news for our broccoli and Vital Vegetables programs since the compounds, known as glucosinolates, are also present in the mature broccoli plant, and one of the aims of our research is to produce conventionally-bred broccoli with naturally high levels of them."
The researchers' latest experiment, the findings of which were recently published in the prestigious international journal Cancer Research showed that this is indeed the case.
http://mooramoora.org.au/bobrich/mudsmith/bobbing7-8.html#
Poetry
Boomerang -- a Haiku by John Tiong Chunghoo
boomerang
memories of Australia
bounce back
Dr Rich gave this comment about the haiku -
When I read this, I was amazed at the depth of many-layered meaning so few words could hold.
Thanks very much for it Rich.
Being a health freak, I was also drawn by this feature in the magazine
about the goodness of brocolli
Brocolli could save your life
-----------------------------------
Farmers might be doing their bit to prevent bladder cancer. An international team of researchers discovered broccoli sprouts can lower the incidence of bladder cancer in rats by more than half.
This study builds on past evidence that vegetables from the cabbage family containing glucosinolates stimulate the body's defence mechanisms against cancer.
More than 300,000 people worldwide are annually diagnosed with what is the fourth most common cancer in men and the eighth most common in women.
Now scientists hope to look at ways of growing mature broccoli with high levels of glucosinolate compounds.
New Zealand scientists Carolyn Lister from Crop and Food Research and Rex Munday, from AgResearch collaborated with two United States researchers and another from New Zealand to arrive at these findings.
It was funded by Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) under its Vital Vegetables program.
"We were interested in the results of the study from the perspective of developing vegetables with elite characteristics," Dr Lister said.
"The fact that we've shown this extract can cut the development of bladder cancer in rats is great news for our broccoli and Vital Vegetables programs since the compounds, known as glucosinolates, are also present in the mature broccoli plant, and one of the aims of our research is to produce conventionally-bred broccoli with naturally high levels of them."
The researchers' latest experiment, the findings of which were recently published in the prestigious international journal Cancer Research showed that this is indeed the case.
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Passing of another Literary Legend
by Sonnie Ekwowusi Lagos
"To Die to sleep,
No more, and by that sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousands natural shocks
That flesh is heir to
-SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) Hamlet, 111, ,i, 60
The stock of literary colossuses in the world got depleted once more with the death of Chief Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi, pharmacist, social critic, veteran novelist, excellent short story teller and children's books author, on November 4, at the age of 86.
You will recall that Roberto Bortoluzzi, famous Italian journalist and radio broadcaster also died at the age of 86 in November this year.
With the death of Ekwensi, another chapter has been closed in children's literature and short stories in the literary world.
Even though Ekwensi, who began his writing career as a pamphleteer, distinguished himself as a novelist, it was in the writing of short stories and children's books that the quintessential Ekwensi really blossomed.
I first met Cyprian Ekwensi in the 70s in his novel: The Drummer Boy which some confuse with Florence Nightingale's The Drummer Boy.
Our English literature teacher, I still have a vivid memory of him, was a lanky young man then completing his National Youth Service posting.
He would come to the class and try to explain The Drummer Boy to us. He would describe, in throbbing and unforgettable prose, Bisi's encounters with Akin, the blind drummer boy: how the compassionate and big-hearted Bisi brought Akin into her home to absorb him as a member of her family and how eventually Akin escaped and returned to where he thought he rightly belonged.
We listened with rapt attention occasionally disrupted by snoring and shuffling of the feet. Perhaps when Ekwensi was penning The Drummer Boy he was probably trying to illustrate the anonymity and identity crisis in the Lagos social life, but for many us in that class who probably had not been to Lagos , the novel was a first-hand information about the Lagos hassling life.
But it is in The Passport of Mallam Ilia that, for me, Ekwensi greatly succeeds in captivating the mind of young readers.
The Passport of Mallam Ilia may look small in size, but by the time you flip through its pages you, will discover that it is dense, concise without unnecessary determiners and modifiers.
The ideas, sentences and details in the novel perfectly fit together for readers to follow. In fact while we were studying The Passport of Mallam Ilia in school, we nicknamed one of our classmates, who was always looking dirty and unkempt, Mallam Ilia.
In anger, he would waylay us after school and chase us with stones and cudgels. Wherever he is now, I am sure he will be chuckling away with laughter upon reading this. Such is life.
Besides Akin the Drummer Boy and The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Ekwensi has authored many novels, short stories, radio and TV scripts which include People of the City (1950), Gone to Mecca (1991).
Under the pen name, C.O.D Ekwensi, he published many works for children like Ikolo the wrestler and other Ibo Tales(1947), Leopard's Claws (1950), African Night Entertainment (1962), The great elephant-bird (1965), Samamkwe and the Highway Robbers (1975), Masquerade-Time (1992). Ekwensi highly-read novel is Jagua Nana published in 1961.
As we pay tribute to Ekwensi today, let us remind ourselves that he is one of those literary giants who shaped the literary lives of many Nigerians with his writings.
When we were growing up we searched for heroes and heroines that could serve as our models, and we found them in the world of literary celebrities.
If my secondary school memory still serves me right, we prided ourselves in the number of novels, especially novels listed in the African Writing Series, which we had read.
Then it was a common sight seeing secondary students in the streets clutching their novels. In those days any student, whether a Science student or an art student, who has not read People of the City (Cyprian Ekwensi), The man Died (Wole Soyinka), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), Tell Freedom (James Ngugi), The African Child (Camara Laye), Weep Not Child (James Ngugi Wa Thiongo), Toad for Supper (Chukwuemeka Ike), Zambia Shall be Free (Kenneth Kaunda), Eze Goes to School (Onuora Nzekwu), Macbeth (Shakespeare), New broom of Amanzu (Anezi Okoro) etc, could not lay claim to being a brilliant student.
Avid readers of Onitsha Market Literature will not forget the bestseller: Veronica My Daughter. Remember those James Hadley Chase and Nicholas Huntington Carter (Nick Carter) novels? There were also books by Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Bronte for devouring.
We took part in different novel-reading competitions. Some students use to hide themselves in the school library for days reading and re-reading books.
At the closure of school every Friday, students will draw up their reading time-table for the weekend. Some will give themselves the target of finishing two or three novels.
After we left, one of my former classmates, who was a voracious reader, acted in Ken Saro Wiwa's Basi and Co.
Unfortunately, the reading culture has disappeared today. Most public libraries are now empty. Nowadays most students, if at all they still admit they are students, carry guns and knives, or at best, GSM handsets, DVDs and gadgets for listening to music.
The books are now considered as old-fashioned, they have been replaced by flash drives and PCs.
The watching culture has replaced the reading culture too. People now openly boast about the number of home-videos they watch in a day.
Instead of memorizing Mathematics formulae or classical quotations from Shakespeare, our secondary students have become adept at memorizing the names of all the footballers in the world and how much each of them earns in dollars.
Whenever Arsenal, Chelsea , Liverpool or Man U is playing a football match, Nigeria is closed. Any wonder standards are falling. When students have stopped reading, the best they could do to get along in life is to cheat in exams.
The passing on of Ekwensi challenges the Nigerian youth to start taking interest in works of literature. Reading , they say, maketh a man. If Ekwensi mainly wrote for young people, then he would have been a failure if the Nigerian youths do not read him.
2007 Orange Fiction prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a young Nigerian lady who sees Chinua Achebe as a model. With her novel, Half of Yellow Sun, she has won a big literary garland for herself.
Other Nigerian young should draw inspiration from her wonderful feat. The story of Adichie is the story of a creative talent. Initially she wanted to study Medicine, but later she changed her mind and went ahead to study social and political Sciences and later capped it up with a Master Degree in Creative Studies.
Ekwensi studied Pharmacy and even taught Pharmacy in Lagos , but it was in writing that he attained his fulfillment. Relevant Links
West Africa Arts, Culture and Entertainment Books Nigeria
Finally, literary giants like Ekwensi do not die: they continue to live in their works. If we want to immortalize the name, Cyprian Ekwensi, it is not by naming a street after him: the best way to immortalize his name is to preserve his literary works and make them available and affordable to all. Perhaps Ekwensi's works could be reproduced in films and drama or be included in the junior WAEC and NECO literature syllabi.
"To Die to sleep,
No more, and by that sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousands natural shocks
That flesh is heir to
-SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) Hamlet, 111, ,i, 60
The stock of literary colossuses in the world got depleted once more with the death of Chief Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi, pharmacist, social critic, veteran novelist, excellent short story teller and children's books author, on November 4, at the age of 86.
You will recall that Roberto Bortoluzzi, famous Italian journalist and radio broadcaster also died at the age of 86 in November this year.
With the death of Ekwensi, another chapter has been closed in children's literature and short stories in the literary world.
Even though Ekwensi, who began his writing career as a pamphleteer, distinguished himself as a novelist, it was in the writing of short stories and children's books that the quintessential Ekwensi really blossomed.
I first met Cyprian Ekwensi in the 70s in his novel: The Drummer Boy which some confuse with Florence Nightingale's The Drummer Boy.
Our English literature teacher, I still have a vivid memory of him, was a lanky young man then completing his National Youth Service posting.
He would come to the class and try to explain The Drummer Boy to us. He would describe, in throbbing and unforgettable prose, Bisi's encounters with Akin, the blind drummer boy: how the compassionate and big-hearted Bisi brought Akin into her home to absorb him as a member of her family and how eventually Akin escaped and returned to where he thought he rightly belonged.
We listened with rapt attention occasionally disrupted by snoring and shuffling of the feet. Perhaps when Ekwensi was penning The Drummer Boy he was probably trying to illustrate the anonymity and identity crisis in the Lagos social life, but for many us in that class who probably had not been to Lagos , the novel was a first-hand information about the Lagos hassling life.
But it is in The Passport of Mallam Ilia that, for me, Ekwensi greatly succeeds in captivating the mind of young readers.
The Passport of Mallam Ilia may look small in size, but by the time you flip through its pages you, will discover that it is dense, concise without unnecessary determiners and modifiers.
The ideas, sentences and details in the novel perfectly fit together for readers to follow. In fact while we were studying The Passport of Mallam Ilia in school, we nicknamed one of our classmates, who was always looking dirty and unkempt, Mallam Ilia.
In anger, he would waylay us after school and chase us with stones and cudgels. Wherever he is now, I am sure he will be chuckling away with laughter upon reading this. Such is life.
Besides Akin the Drummer Boy and The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Ekwensi has authored many novels, short stories, radio and TV scripts which include People of the City (1950), Gone to Mecca (1991).
Under the pen name, C.O.D Ekwensi, he published many works for children like Ikolo the wrestler and other Ibo Tales(1947), Leopard's Claws (1950), African Night Entertainment (1962), The great elephant-bird (1965), Samamkwe and the Highway Robbers (1975), Masquerade-Time (1992). Ekwensi highly-read novel is Jagua Nana published in 1961.
As we pay tribute to Ekwensi today, let us remind ourselves that he is one of those literary giants who shaped the literary lives of many Nigerians with his writings.
When we were growing up we searched for heroes and heroines that could serve as our models, and we found them in the world of literary celebrities.
If my secondary school memory still serves me right, we prided ourselves in the number of novels, especially novels listed in the African Writing Series, which we had read.
Then it was a common sight seeing secondary students in the streets clutching their novels. In those days any student, whether a Science student or an art student, who has not read People of the City (Cyprian Ekwensi), The man Died (Wole Soyinka), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), Tell Freedom (James Ngugi), The African Child (Camara Laye), Weep Not Child (James Ngugi Wa Thiongo), Toad for Supper (Chukwuemeka Ike), Zambia Shall be Free (Kenneth Kaunda), Eze Goes to School (Onuora Nzekwu), Macbeth (Shakespeare), New broom of Amanzu (Anezi Okoro) etc, could not lay claim to being a brilliant student.
Avid readers of Onitsha Market Literature will not forget the bestseller: Veronica My Daughter. Remember those James Hadley Chase and Nicholas Huntington Carter (Nick Carter) novels? There were also books by Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Bronte for devouring.
We took part in different novel-reading competitions. Some students use to hide themselves in the school library for days reading and re-reading books.
At the closure of school every Friday, students will draw up their reading time-table for the weekend. Some will give themselves the target of finishing two or three novels.
After we left, one of my former classmates, who was a voracious reader, acted in Ken Saro Wiwa's Basi and Co.
Unfortunately, the reading culture has disappeared today. Most public libraries are now empty. Nowadays most students, if at all they still admit they are students, carry guns and knives, or at best, GSM handsets, DVDs and gadgets for listening to music.
The books are now considered as old-fashioned, they have been replaced by flash drives and PCs.
The watching culture has replaced the reading culture too. People now openly boast about the number of home-videos they watch in a day.
Instead of memorizing Mathematics formulae or classical quotations from Shakespeare, our secondary students have become adept at memorizing the names of all the footballers in the world and how much each of them earns in dollars.
Whenever Arsenal, Chelsea , Liverpool or Man U is playing a football match, Nigeria is closed. Any wonder standards are falling. When students have stopped reading, the best they could do to get along in life is to cheat in exams.
The passing on of Ekwensi challenges the Nigerian youth to start taking interest in works of literature. Reading , they say, maketh a man. If Ekwensi mainly wrote for young people, then he would have been a failure if the Nigerian youths do not read him.
2007 Orange Fiction prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a young Nigerian lady who sees Chinua Achebe as a model. With her novel, Half of Yellow Sun, she has won a big literary garland for herself.
Other Nigerian young should draw inspiration from her wonderful feat. The story of Adichie is the story of a creative talent. Initially she wanted to study Medicine, but later she changed her mind and went ahead to study social and political Sciences and later capped it up with a Master Degree in Creative Studies.
Ekwensi studied Pharmacy and even taught Pharmacy in Lagos , but it was in writing that he attained his fulfillment. Relevant Links
West Africa Arts, Culture and Entertainment Books Nigeria
Finally, literary giants like Ekwensi do not die: they continue to live in their works. If we want to immortalize the name, Cyprian Ekwensi, it is not by naming a street after him: the best way to immortalize his name is to preserve his literary works and make them available and affordable to all. Perhaps Ekwensi's works could be reproduced in films and drama or be included in the junior WAEC and NECO literature syllabi.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Asian Gold - Sari, Cheongsam and Kimono. a poem
I really love this poem I wrote recently;
Asian Gold - Sari, Cheongsam and Kimono
--------------------------------------------------
Saris, they hold on to you lady, like ruby,
making you one bastion of womanhood
as you walk sultrily down the street, carrying
the weight of India's savoir-faire round your
belly and hip, your shawl my heart, cruising
and frolicking all the way to the temple
they are a wear inspired by the Gods, Shiva,
Krishna, Brahma, Laskmi and Saraswati
they flow with grace like angels and they hold
on to you like an altar fit for the abode of
the Divine and when you set your body to dance
the Sari is all heavenly grace swirling and
twirling the world
Cheongsam your hip that goes up and down
the street makes this wear shoulder to toe
a golden measure of womanhood and all
the assets that it carries with a fine balance
slit in between for the prime mover of the house
to comport with ease without sacrificing her poise,
her gait they are meant to hold your gaze,
soothe your heart and perhaps inspire your spirit
as she resolutely walks you down five thousand
years of the resilience of her civilisation like
the leverage of her wear united, torn, united, torn
victory, defeat, victory defeat at the hands of
near and afar yet taking all in her articulate stride
with just a slit at the helm of her gown
to keep her from falling over
Kimono - they say japanese carried this
back from Tang China but what a magnificent
adaptation it has made in the land of the rising Sun
the Obi that so meticulouslyand warmly
holds up a Japanese nubile at the back as
she celebrates her coming of age
a shroud so close to the mother's waist
it carries the warmest memory
every child could have of mother
how they have clung on to her from
behind as she asked 'Do you love mom?
Do you love mom? ' under the profuse
spring cherry blossom
by john tiong chunghoo
Debora Short (6/15/2008 7:49:00 AM) Wonderful write, John!
Asian Gold - Sari, Cheongsam and Kimono
--------------------------------------------------
Saris, they hold on to you lady, like ruby,
making you one bastion of womanhood
as you walk sultrily down the street, carrying
the weight of India's savoir-faire round your
belly and hip, your shawl my heart, cruising
and frolicking all the way to the temple
they are a wear inspired by the Gods, Shiva,
Krishna, Brahma, Laskmi and Saraswati
they flow with grace like angels and they hold
on to you like an altar fit for the abode of
the Divine and when you set your body to dance
the Sari is all heavenly grace swirling and
twirling the world
Cheongsam your hip that goes up and down
the street makes this wear shoulder to toe
a golden measure of womanhood and all
the assets that it carries with a fine balance
slit in between for the prime mover of the house
to comport with ease without sacrificing her poise,
her gait they are meant to hold your gaze,
soothe your heart and perhaps inspire your spirit
as she resolutely walks you down five thousand
years of the resilience of her civilisation like
the leverage of her wear united, torn, united, torn
victory, defeat, victory defeat at the hands of
near and afar yet taking all in her articulate stride
with just a slit at the helm of her gown
to keep her from falling over
Kimono - they say japanese carried this
back from Tang China but what a magnificent
adaptation it has made in the land of the rising Sun
the Obi that so meticulouslyand warmly
holds up a Japanese nubile at the back as
she celebrates her coming of age
a shroud so close to the mother's waist
it carries the warmest memory
every child could have of mother
how they have clung on to her from
behind as she asked 'Do you love mom?
Do you love mom? ' under the profuse
spring cherry blossom
by john tiong chunghoo
Debora Short (6/15/2008 7:49:00 AM) Wonderful write, John!
Introduction to Best American Poetry 1990
Lifted from Poets.org
Introduction to Best American Poetry 1990
----------------------------------------------------
by Jorie Graham
Part I
I went to a reading recently--fiction and poetry. It was a warm Indian summer night. The man introducing spoke first about the novelist--her meteoric rise to the top along the fast track. Book awards. Movie deals. The person in question stood up and read wonderful, funny stories. I laughed out loud; listened to the sentences flowing by--their aggressive overtaking of the space. There was no silence, there was the run run of story over it all. It sprayed forward over the unsaid until it was all plot. People changed or didn't. You felt at home.
Then our host introduced the poet--one of our very best. The introductory remarks referred to the "dark times poetry is in." People resettled in their chairs. The man in question stood up to read, looked out at us over his glasses, cleared his throat. He tried to say something funny to put us at our ease, but we weren't.
What was he going to do? Where did the wonderful warm sensation of story go? A poem began. Not a little story told in musical rhythms, but a poem. Oh, it had story. And it was music. But it seemed to begin out of nowhere. And it moved irrationally--by the standards the fiction had set. It leapt. It went too suddenly to the heart of the matter. Why was I feeling so uneasy? I didn't feel myself thinking anymore. I wasn't feeling lifted or entertained. My hands felt heavy. My body felt heavy. The air into which language had been pouring for almost an hour felt heavy.
Then I started to hear it: the silence; the words chipping into the silence. It felt loud. Every word stood out. No longer the rush of sentences free and unresisted into the air. Now it was words into an element that was crushing in its power and weight. I thought of Sartre's notion that prose writers tame language and that it's up to poetry to set it free again. I thought of the violence from within summoned up to counter the violence from without. I looked at the man and listened. His words cut into the unsaid and made me hear it: its depth and scope; its indifference, beauty, intractability.
Listening, I became aware of how much each poem resisted the very desires that the fiction, previously, had satisfied. Every word was clear, yes, every image clear--but the motion of the poem as a whole resisted my impulse to resolve it into "sense" of a rational kind. Listening to the poem, I could feel my irritable reaching after fact, my desire for resolution, graspable meaning, ownership. I wanted to narrow it. I wanted to make it into a shorter version of the other experience, the story. It resisted. It compelled me to let go. The frontal, grasping motion frustrated, my intuition was forced awake. I felt myself having to "listen" with other parts of my sensibility, felt my mind being forced back down into the soil of my senses. And I saw that it was the resistance of the poem--its occlusion, or difficulty--that was healing me, forcing me to privilege my heart, my intuition--parts of my sensibility infrequently called upon in my everyday experience in the marketplace of things and ideas.
I found myself feeling, as the poem ended, that some crucial muscle that might have otherwise atrophied from lack of use had been exercised. Something part body, part spirit. Something the species should never evolve away from. Something I shouldn't be living without. The poem must resist the intelligence / almost successfully, whispered Wallace Stevens.
Part II
Yet surely the most frequent accusation leveled against contemporary poetry is its difficulty or inaccessibility. It is accused of speaking only to itself, or becoming an irrelevant and elitist art form with a dwindling audience. And indeed, contemporary poetry's real or apparent difficulty has made it seem somewhat like an intransigent outsider--or perhaps a high-minded purist--in the vast hungry field of American art. And this, in turn, affects how many poets conceive of their enterprise. For how often can we hear that "no one reads it," or that "no one understands it," without experiencing a failure of confidence, however inchoate? And how easily that failure of confidence converts to self-hatred, causing some of us to write articles about the death of poetry, or the horrors of creative writing programs, and others to turn on our own poems, prescribing rules, announcing remedies, saying narrative is all there is or should be, saying self should be ostracized, saying free verse is fatal, or all rhyme and meter reactionary, talking about elitism, about how poetry has failed to communicate to the common reader, until finally we cease to trust the power of poetry. We "accept the limitations" of the medium. We start believing that it is essentially anachronistic. We become anecdotal. We want to entertain. We believe we should "communicate" . . .
One problem might stem from the fact that poetry implicitly undertakes a critique of materialist values. It rests on the assumption that material values need to be seen through--or at least complicated sufficiently--in earnest or truer, or more resonant, more supple values. No doubt many of the attacks against poetry come from those of us who, uncomfortable with our slippery marriage to American materialism and its astounding arrogant excess, wish, however unconsciously, that poetry would avert its scrutiny. Or from those of us who turned to poetry at a more idealistic time in our lives and who now rage against it as we lose the capacity for idealism--dreamers turned insomniacs, accusing the dream of having failed them.
But, these basic issues aside, the difficulty of poetry, even for its most sympathetic readers, is a real one. Or rather it is both real and imagined. Much of it dissipates as one opens up to the experience of poetry. To comprehend poetry one must, after all, practice by reading it. As to "see" modern dance, one must at least know its vocabulary, its texture, what the choreographer chose not to do. As to understand good carpentry one must be able to grasp what the maker's options were, what the tradition is, what the nature of wood is, what the structural necessities were: what is underpinning, what flourish and passion, what decor. Of course, with woodworking or ballet, one can still enjoy what one barely grasps. And such pleasure would also be possible with poetry if intimidation didn't set in: intimidation created by its apparently close relation to the normal language of discourse; fear that one is missing the point or, worse, that one is stupid, blind.
Poetry can also be difficult, though, because much of it attempts to render aspects of experience that occur outside the provinces of logic and reason, outside the realm of narrative realism. The ways in which dreams proceed, or magic, or mystical vision, or memory, are often models for poetry's methods: what we remember upon waking, what we remember at birth--all the brilliant Irrational in the human sensibility. Poetry describes, enacts, is compelled by those moments of supreme passion, insight or knowledge that are physical yet intuitive, that render us whole, inspired. Among verbal events--which by their nature move horizontally, through time, along the lines of cause and effect--poetry tends to leap, to try to move more vertically: astonishment, rapture, vertigo--the seduction of the infinite and the abyss--what so much of it is after. "Ever more ancient and naked states" (Octavio Paz).
In fact, one could argue that poetry's difficulty for some readers stems from the very source of its incredible power: the merging of its irrational procedures with the rational nature of language. So that one mistake we often make is as simple as expecting poetry to be apprehended by the same reading methods and habits that "grasp" prose. While instead--mere practice and exposure to the art form aside--it's probably more a matter of avoiding the interference of fear in reading; more a matter of reading with one's most natural instincts and senses.
That's what is perhaps wrongheaded about the arguments often mounted today against poetry's alleged lack of accessibility to "ordinary" Americans. Aren't such accusations of elitism rather condescending to the people on whose behalf they are made? As if the non-literary men and women of America somehow didn't dream? As if associational logic were restricted to the educated? As if a portion of American readers were only able to read poems of narrative simplicity, having somehow--because of their work experience or background--lost all intuition and sensory intelligence? Isn't this line of thinking, in effect, another sympton of the distrust many of us feel regarding the very core of poetry, its inherent way of proceeding, its nature? I think of Umberto Eco in a recent radio interview: How do you explain that your books, so difficult, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies in America? "Well," he replied, as if surprised by the question, "in my experience, people, ordinary people, like difficulty. They are tired of being treated like they can't get it. They want it. I give them what they want."
There is, however, another difficulty connected to the poetry of this historical (or posthistorical?) moment. It might be best understood as the result of poetry's confrontation with certain aspects of the culture--particularly its distrust of speech and of what is perceived as the terminal "slowness" of speech in relation to the speedier verbal image as a medium for sales (of objects, people, ideas, of verisimilitude, of desire).
As visual imagery largely supplants speech as the language of choice for most cultural transactions (since most constitute a form of sales), it brings with it, in its shadow, new (fin-de-siècle?) attitudes for poets to contend with: a pervasive distrust of thinking people; a distrust of rhetorical power (of articulate speech in general); a disrespect for all nonlucrative activities; a general impatience with depth, and a shortened attention span.
Sound bites, shortcuts, clips, trailers, minimalist fragmented "dialogue," the Reagan-era one-liner on the way to the helicopter: the speed with which an idea must be "put across" is said to be determined not just by monetary considerations, but by the speeded-up, almost decimated attention span of the bored, overstimulated viewer who must be caught, bought, on the wing, as he or she is clicking past, "grazing" the channels, wanting to be stopped, but only momentarily.
As a collective emotion this distrust of language is, of course, one that each of us is free to subvert, override. But precisely because it is a collective emotion, it is one that much poetry inevitably incorporates, explores or enacts as not only an anxiety concerning its very reason to exist, but also as an anxiety concerning the nature and function of language, its capacity for seizing and transmitting. . .truth? Even that word seems tinged with regret, nostalgia, in such an atmosphere.
For isn't the essential characteristic of speech, and the particular virtue of its slowness, that it permits the whole fabric to be received by a listener--idea, emotion, fact, product, plot detail, motive--the listener having enough time to make up his or her mind?
Isn't to describe, to articulate an argument, to use language at the speed where the complexity and sonorousness of syntax and cadence reach the listener, to use it so that the free will of the listener is addressed--free will it is the very purpose of salesmanship to bypass? The genius of syntax consists in its permitting paradoxical, "unsolvable" ideas to be explored, not merely nailed down, stored, and owned; in its permitting the soul-forging pleasures of thinking to prevail over the acquisition of information called knowing.
That this is an essential aspect of the activity of poetry as we know it seems obvious, yet in an atmosphere in which the very notion that a reader might grasp or "receive" the poem written by the writer is questioned, on the one hand, and in which the much of the audience wants to be zapped, fast, as it clicks down the dial on the other, the whole enterprise becomes, in many cases, fraught with anxiety.
And though these concerns have been present, to some extent, in the poetry of the English language for some time, it is the vehemence (and in some instances the desperation) with which they creep into the formal, aesthetic and thematic concerns of our poems (and into the very writing process)--the incredible tension between the desire to return to "slower" uses of language and the historical values they still transmit, and an equally strong desire to rebel against the very nature of language--its slowness, its referentiality--that most vividly characterizes American poetry as I encountered it in 1989.
Part III
Sometimes the distrust of language results in the refusal to use words denotatively. There are "language-events," for example, that imply a need to rely on other media in order to restore to language the depth or wholeness it seems to lack. As they can't be reproduced in an anthology such as this one, some examples might be of use. A recent work by Leslie Scalapino, for example, whose "instructions" read: "done by four or five people as movements as if the words were music." Or the language-work done for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company by a number of poets which is used as "music": a long liquid verbal text stretched out electronically, sometimes shattered, to make it suitable as a backdrop to dance. The newest "works" by Jenny Holzer consist of phrases and words (and it seems clear that almost any words will do) carved into granite, projected in neon.
Looking at other temperaments--and, more specifically, at some of the work represented in this anthology--we find a renewed fascination with very high diction, surfaces that call attention to themselves as unnatural in relation to ordinary human speech. This highly self-conscious use of language points fiercely to our distrust of the natural, the spoken--as if to insist that for us, now, the beautiful (the true?) is not in nature but in artifice. It points as well, to the problem of subjectivity and the active struggle with Romantic and Modernist notions of reality and the self that so many of these poems enact.
Our so-called Language Poets take a different tack. In their work we often see the dismantling of articulate speech in an effort to recover a prior version of self, a cleaner one, free of cultural association--a language free of its user! In this volume numerous poems work toward the forcible undoing of the sentence, but they also explore for us the notion of right choice in diction, and the whole relationship of choice of word to choice in its broadest sense. In some of the more radical work, the word is privileged over the phrase and the sentence. One can see this as a corrective measure against the political and cultural excesses the sentence is a metaphor for; one can see it, too, as an attempt to redefine the nature of sense itself. In fact in such poems meaning itself is often questioned as a cultural value, and chance and the inner laws of language are asked to reign as tutelary deities. In them, too, the silence is argued with most excitingly: a silence at times loud and deeply empowered, at times violently reduced to mere white space on a page.
Then there are those who fall, perhaps, under the heading of narrative poets. In them we see a passionate determination to reclaim the power of articulate speech via its more "traditional" methods: plot, cause and effect, the spun web of storytelling. These poems often refuse the swift association, deep economy, leaping of mind, and structural use of analogy which many of the "pure" lyric poets favor. It is as if these more strictly lyric methods were seen as being, in some manner, partially responsible for the breakdown of speech's powers: the holes they allow in the fabric of telling seen as having finally gotten too big, the net no longer able to hold the mystery, the swift prey.
The ambition to reclaim ground for eloquence and rhetoric is perhaps even more starkly visible in the sharp, urgent poems of sheer argument--the lyric-essay, which seems to be flourishing, stark offspring of the more classic meditation, also in vogue.
One important formal development is the recent popularity of prose poems. We might think of them as, perhaps, the frontal approach; they are certainly--in many cases--the most extreme in their attempt to use the strategies of "normal" articulate speech to reach the reader. Their number, variety and sheer quality (and the extraordinarily different uses to which the form is put) caused me to think of this volume as, in part, a subterranean exploration of the form.
Yet another battle fought over the power and nature of articulate speech predates our current anxieties. For when we get to the work of some of our so-called minimalists, we are faced with a more historical (and American) distrust of articulateness: "inarticulateness" as stoicism, perhaps--the terseness we recognize in our Western folk heroes--as if to speak a full sentence, to yield to easeful speech, were a sensual activity one cannot, or should not, afford to indulge.
This is verbal reticence of a vastly different order from that caused by the fear or distrust described above. Rather, it is better seen as a metaphysical condition in which language is fully mastered but withheld. It dovetails, in some instances, with the symbolist sense of the alchemical power of each word, or Zen notions of restraint, or the objectivist desire to honor the resistance of the material world and attempt a suppression of ego--(George Oppen: "It is necessary to be afraid of words, it is necessary to be afraid of each word, every word").
In most instances this distrust of eloquence is sinewed by the desire for sincerity. The longing for the "pure clear word," to use James Wright's phrase, expresses a deeply-held American belief that the simpler the utterance--the closer to the bone of the feeling--the better the chance of getting the self through uncontaminated by language: speech a vehicle that can "betray" honest feeling when it becomes too ornate or "articulate"; the self imagined as existing in some form prior to speech, inside, forced to translate itself out (a passage that can betray the "pure" self, can misshape, lie).
If we look at the Puritan conviction (still alive as a "law" among the Amish) that to use more words than required--more than the absolute minimum to get the thing said--is sinful, we can feel the dimensions of this belief. The Amish to this day can be shunned for such garrulousness--it being relegated to the level of promiscuity.
There is, however, another version of selfhood: Elizabethan, dramatic, created in performance, created precisely by acts of speech. It involves a whole other set of assumptions about the location and nature of selfhood--assumptions both more "primitive" (as in many native ritualistic dramatic ceremonies by which the self is "invented" or "invoked") and more "sophisticated" (the Language Poets, for example, share the notion of a constructed self--although they tend to regard it with suspicion).
At any rate the notion of a mask or mythic persona created by language competes with the tradition of "honest" speech on American soil, and there are many poets (this reader would argue that it is all the significant ones) who attempt to merge the two impulses: in most instances they marry, apparently happily, and the struggle goes underground; in some the tension between the two is carried out on the surface of the poem.
For others, minimalism of phrasing--or more precisely, decimated, sputtered phrasing--is not a question of reticence or stoicism. Rather, it is a mixture of inward abbreviation and the kind of speediness imposed on the language of someone who wishes to be heard (or to hear himself) above an assembly line. Phrasing fragmented as much by competition with the machine (whose purpose it is to silence the spirit?) as by mental exhaustion. There is an element in it, too, of the coding covert political activity requires.
In yet others, the fragmentation of phrasing would seem to be occasioned by the speaker's encounter with something in the silence that is spiritually overwhelming. One is reminded of Emily Dickinson's "I know that He exists / Somewhere--in silence."
Ultimately, how one extends outward into the silence--narratively, metrically, in fragments, in prose--involves the nature of how that silence is perceived. For it is the desire to engage the silence, and the resistance of that silence, that tugs at speech; silence the field into which the voice, the mind, the heart play out their drama. One cannot run out to play when the field has been replaced by a void. One stays away or walks back and forth at the edge of that void. Sometimes imagining where the field had been works for a while. But more likely one will give up, go home. As the field of genuine silence thins or vanishes for many of us--or is replaced with noise--an interesting thing starts to happen. We hear it most dramatically in the work of many of our youngest poets: the voice is raised; anger, rage, parodic manic energy, irony, violence, push back at the noise to create a space to live in, to think and feel in, the violence from within more violent than ever before perhaps because the violence from without, against which it pushes, is so great.
For some poets the poem is a critique of the powers of representation, so they seem more concerned with the possibility of saying something than with what is said. Such poems present themselves as investigations rather than as conclusions. Words--or the gaps between them--are used to recompose a world, as if these poets were looking for a method by which to experience the world once again. We might find ourselves being asked implicitly where the poem actually is: In the world? In the language? In the reader's interpretation or in the poet's intention? Or does it float somewhere between--and is that somewhere between chance or fate? The only thing we are left with, perhaps, the only bedrock, is the writer's commitment to writing. Notes, letters, journals, findings, memory patches, neo-impressionist accumulations, a distrust of direct statement and direct apprehension; the moral issue becomes, Can anyone trust the world enough to write it down?
When we experience a loosening of setting or point of view, and a breakdown of syntax's dependence on closure, we witness an opening up of the present-tense terrain of the poem, a privileging of delay and digression over progress.
This opening up of the present moment as a terrain outside time--this foregrounding of the field of the "act of the poem"--can be explained in many ways. We might consider the way in which the idea of perfection in art seems to be called into question by many of our poets. On the one hand, some might argue today, the notion of perfection serves ultimately to make an object not so much ideal as available to a marketplace, available for ownership--something to be acquired by the act of understanding.
Perhaps more important, the notion of "conjuring up a form with words that resists the action of time" (to use Zbigniew Herbert's phrase) is put into question by the poetics of many of these poets (most radically by the "language" poets, but also by many others--the writers of prose poems, the poets who break their lines forcibly against syntax, the increasingly elliptical lyric poets) because the figures for a timeless, or eternal, realm we can summon up most readily are the nuclear winter, the half-life of radioactive waste, and extinctions of various kinds. Not "eternities" we would, or could, want our poems to exist in. Not the kind we would want to transcend time to inhabit.
A number of the poems in this book--and many others I admired but couldn't include--are longer than average. Perhaps in order to make themselves felt as the field of action, in order to bring to life, via digression and delay, a realm outside the linear and ending-dependent motions of history, narrative, progress, manifest destiny, upward mobility. Their length insures that the motion toward closure will be itself part of the subject. Will it be fought? Will it be earned? Much of the work here that uses of serial (i.e., constantly re-beginning) structures is looking for a sense of form that is not so ending-dependent. It asks, in other words, if perhaps we can no longer afford for Death to be the only mother of Beauty. . .
Finally, many of these works use devices that break the fluid progress of the poem, that destabilize the reader's relationship to the illusion of the poem as text spoken by a single speaker in deep thought, aroused contemplation, or recollection. These interferences force the reader out of a passive role and back into the poem as an active participant. I do not, by any means, intend that the reader become what is sometimes called the "co-creator" of the text. Rather, what I admire in these poems is the controlled way each poet has found to coax the reader into a new--shall we say awakened?--state without handing over the reins of the poem either to pure chance or to that embodiment of chance, the bored, barely willing, barely attentive, overstimulated (i.e., shut down) reader.
Indeed, one could argue that the poems in this collection that do not let us become comfortable with plot, point of view, setting, eventually force us to read in a different way; force us to let music take the place of narrative flow; force us to let our senses do some of the work we would "normally" be letting our conscious minds do. We discover, in the process, that we can trust a deeper current of our sensibility, something other than the lust-for-forwardness, with all its attendant desires for closure, shapeliness, and the sense that we are headed somewhere and that we are in the hands of something. We are forced to suspend these desires, to let the longing stay alive unsatisfied; forced to accord power to a portion of ourselves and a portion of the world we normally deem powerless or feminine or "merely" intuitive.
And then, lastly, throughout this volume, you'll find the undiminished, or unintimidated, eloquence of our classical believers--perhaps only apparently unperturbed by the desperate fray; poets in whom the repose of counted language is perhaps the highest form, today, of bravery.
From The Best American Poetry 1990, introduction by Jorie Graham published by Collier Books. Copyright © 1990 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Introduction to Best American Poetry 1990
----------------------------------------------------
by Jorie Graham
Part I
I went to a reading recently--fiction and poetry. It was a warm Indian summer night. The man introducing spoke first about the novelist--her meteoric rise to the top along the fast track. Book awards. Movie deals. The person in question stood up and read wonderful, funny stories. I laughed out loud; listened to the sentences flowing by--their aggressive overtaking of the space. There was no silence, there was the run run of story over it all. It sprayed forward over the unsaid until it was all plot. People changed or didn't. You felt at home.
Then our host introduced the poet--one of our very best. The introductory remarks referred to the "dark times poetry is in." People resettled in their chairs. The man in question stood up to read, looked out at us over his glasses, cleared his throat. He tried to say something funny to put us at our ease, but we weren't.
What was he going to do? Where did the wonderful warm sensation of story go? A poem began. Not a little story told in musical rhythms, but a poem. Oh, it had story. And it was music. But it seemed to begin out of nowhere. And it moved irrationally--by the standards the fiction had set. It leapt. It went too suddenly to the heart of the matter. Why was I feeling so uneasy? I didn't feel myself thinking anymore. I wasn't feeling lifted or entertained. My hands felt heavy. My body felt heavy. The air into which language had been pouring for almost an hour felt heavy.
Then I started to hear it: the silence; the words chipping into the silence. It felt loud. Every word stood out. No longer the rush of sentences free and unresisted into the air. Now it was words into an element that was crushing in its power and weight. I thought of Sartre's notion that prose writers tame language and that it's up to poetry to set it free again. I thought of the violence from within summoned up to counter the violence from without. I looked at the man and listened. His words cut into the unsaid and made me hear it: its depth and scope; its indifference, beauty, intractability.
Listening, I became aware of how much each poem resisted the very desires that the fiction, previously, had satisfied. Every word was clear, yes, every image clear--but the motion of the poem as a whole resisted my impulse to resolve it into "sense" of a rational kind. Listening to the poem, I could feel my irritable reaching after fact, my desire for resolution, graspable meaning, ownership. I wanted to narrow it. I wanted to make it into a shorter version of the other experience, the story. It resisted. It compelled me to let go. The frontal, grasping motion frustrated, my intuition was forced awake. I felt myself having to "listen" with other parts of my sensibility, felt my mind being forced back down into the soil of my senses. And I saw that it was the resistance of the poem--its occlusion, or difficulty--that was healing me, forcing me to privilege my heart, my intuition--parts of my sensibility infrequently called upon in my everyday experience in the marketplace of things and ideas.
I found myself feeling, as the poem ended, that some crucial muscle that might have otherwise atrophied from lack of use had been exercised. Something part body, part spirit. Something the species should never evolve away from. Something I shouldn't be living without. The poem must resist the intelligence / almost successfully, whispered Wallace Stevens.
Part II
Yet surely the most frequent accusation leveled against contemporary poetry is its difficulty or inaccessibility. It is accused of speaking only to itself, or becoming an irrelevant and elitist art form with a dwindling audience. And indeed, contemporary poetry's real or apparent difficulty has made it seem somewhat like an intransigent outsider--or perhaps a high-minded purist--in the vast hungry field of American art. And this, in turn, affects how many poets conceive of their enterprise. For how often can we hear that "no one reads it," or that "no one understands it," without experiencing a failure of confidence, however inchoate? And how easily that failure of confidence converts to self-hatred, causing some of us to write articles about the death of poetry, or the horrors of creative writing programs, and others to turn on our own poems, prescribing rules, announcing remedies, saying narrative is all there is or should be, saying self should be ostracized, saying free verse is fatal, or all rhyme and meter reactionary, talking about elitism, about how poetry has failed to communicate to the common reader, until finally we cease to trust the power of poetry. We "accept the limitations" of the medium. We start believing that it is essentially anachronistic. We become anecdotal. We want to entertain. We believe we should "communicate" . . .
One problem might stem from the fact that poetry implicitly undertakes a critique of materialist values. It rests on the assumption that material values need to be seen through--or at least complicated sufficiently--in earnest or truer, or more resonant, more supple values. No doubt many of the attacks against poetry come from those of us who, uncomfortable with our slippery marriage to American materialism and its astounding arrogant excess, wish, however unconsciously, that poetry would avert its scrutiny. Or from those of us who turned to poetry at a more idealistic time in our lives and who now rage against it as we lose the capacity for idealism--dreamers turned insomniacs, accusing the dream of having failed them.
But, these basic issues aside, the difficulty of poetry, even for its most sympathetic readers, is a real one. Or rather it is both real and imagined. Much of it dissipates as one opens up to the experience of poetry. To comprehend poetry one must, after all, practice by reading it. As to "see" modern dance, one must at least know its vocabulary, its texture, what the choreographer chose not to do. As to understand good carpentry one must be able to grasp what the maker's options were, what the tradition is, what the nature of wood is, what the structural necessities were: what is underpinning, what flourish and passion, what decor. Of course, with woodworking or ballet, one can still enjoy what one barely grasps. And such pleasure would also be possible with poetry if intimidation didn't set in: intimidation created by its apparently close relation to the normal language of discourse; fear that one is missing the point or, worse, that one is stupid, blind.
Poetry can also be difficult, though, because much of it attempts to render aspects of experience that occur outside the provinces of logic and reason, outside the realm of narrative realism. The ways in which dreams proceed, or magic, or mystical vision, or memory, are often models for poetry's methods: what we remember upon waking, what we remember at birth--all the brilliant Irrational in the human sensibility. Poetry describes, enacts, is compelled by those moments of supreme passion, insight or knowledge that are physical yet intuitive, that render us whole, inspired. Among verbal events--which by their nature move horizontally, through time, along the lines of cause and effect--poetry tends to leap, to try to move more vertically: astonishment, rapture, vertigo--the seduction of the infinite and the abyss--what so much of it is after. "Ever more ancient and naked states" (Octavio Paz).
In fact, one could argue that poetry's difficulty for some readers stems from the very source of its incredible power: the merging of its irrational procedures with the rational nature of language. So that one mistake we often make is as simple as expecting poetry to be apprehended by the same reading methods and habits that "grasp" prose. While instead--mere practice and exposure to the art form aside--it's probably more a matter of avoiding the interference of fear in reading; more a matter of reading with one's most natural instincts and senses.
That's what is perhaps wrongheaded about the arguments often mounted today against poetry's alleged lack of accessibility to "ordinary" Americans. Aren't such accusations of elitism rather condescending to the people on whose behalf they are made? As if the non-literary men and women of America somehow didn't dream? As if associational logic were restricted to the educated? As if a portion of American readers were only able to read poems of narrative simplicity, having somehow--because of their work experience or background--lost all intuition and sensory intelligence? Isn't this line of thinking, in effect, another sympton of the distrust many of us feel regarding the very core of poetry, its inherent way of proceeding, its nature? I think of Umberto Eco in a recent radio interview: How do you explain that your books, so difficult, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies in America? "Well," he replied, as if surprised by the question, "in my experience, people, ordinary people, like difficulty. They are tired of being treated like they can't get it. They want it. I give them what they want."
There is, however, another difficulty connected to the poetry of this historical (or posthistorical?) moment. It might be best understood as the result of poetry's confrontation with certain aspects of the culture--particularly its distrust of speech and of what is perceived as the terminal "slowness" of speech in relation to the speedier verbal image as a medium for sales (of objects, people, ideas, of verisimilitude, of desire).
As visual imagery largely supplants speech as the language of choice for most cultural transactions (since most constitute a form of sales), it brings with it, in its shadow, new (fin-de-siècle?) attitudes for poets to contend with: a pervasive distrust of thinking people; a distrust of rhetorical power (of articulate speech in general); a disrespect for all nonlucrative activities; a general impatience with depth, and a shortened attention span.
Sound bites, shortcuts, clips, trailers, minimalist fragmented "dialogue," the Reagan-era one-liner on the way to the helicopter: the speed with which an idea must be "put across" is said to be determined not just by monetary considerations, but by the speeded-up, almost decimated attention span of the bored, overstimulated viewer who must be caught, bought, on the wing, as he or she is clicking past, "grazing" the channels, wanting to be stopped, but only momentarily.
As a collective emotion this distrust of language is, of course, one that each of us is free to subvert, override. But precisely because it is a collective emotion, it is one that much poetry inevitably incorporates, explores or enacts as not only an anxiety concerning its very reason to exist, but also as an anxiety concerning the nature and function of language, its capacity for seizing and transmitting. . .truth? Even that word seems tinged with regret, nostalgia, in such an atmosphere.
For isn't the essential characteristic of speech, and the particular virtue of its slowness, that it permits the whole fabric to be received by a listener--idea, emotion, fact, product, plot detail, motive--the listener having enough time to make up his or her mind?
Isn't to describe, to articulate an argument, to use language at the speed where the complexity and sonorousness of syntax and cadence reach the listener, to use it so that the free will of the listener is addressed--free will it is the very purpose of salesmanship to bypass? The genius of syntax consists in its permitting paradoxical, "unsolvable" ideas to be explored, not merely nailed down, stored, and owned; in its permitting the soul-forging pleasures of thinking to prevail over the acquisition of information called knowing.
That this is an essential aspect of the activity of poetry as we know it seems obvious, yet in an atmosphere in which the very notion that a reader might grasp or "receive" the poem written by the writer is questioned, on the one hand, and in which the much of the audience wants to be zapped, fast, as it clicks down the dial on the other, the whole enterprise becomes, in many cases, fraught with anxiety.
And though these concerns have been present, to some extent, in the poetry of the English language for some time, it is the vehemence (and in some instances the desperation) with which they creep into the formal, aesthetic and thematic concerns of our poems (and into the very writing process)--the incredible tension between the desire to return to "slower" uses of language and the historical values they still transmit, and an equally strong desire to rebel against the very nature of language--its slowness, its referentiality--that most vividly characterizes American poetry as I encountered it in 1989.
Part III
Sometimes the distrust of language results in the refusal to use words denotatively. There are "language-events," for example, that imply a need to rely on other media in order to restore to language the depth or wholeness it seems to lack. As they can't be reproduced in an anthology such as this one, some examples might be of use. A recent work by Leslie Scalapino, for example, whose "instructions" read: "done by four or five people as movements as if the words were music." Or the language-work done for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company by a number of poets which is used as "music": a long liquid verbal text stretched out electronically, sometimes shattered, to make it suitable as a backdrop to dance. The newest "works" by Jenny Holzer consist of phrases and words (and it seems clear that almost any words will do) carved into granite, projected in neon.
Looking at other temperaments--and, more specifically, at some of the work represented in this anthology--we find a renewed fascination with very high diction, surfaces that call attention to themselves as unnatural in relation to ordinary human speech. This highly self-conscious use of language points fiercely to our distrust of the natural, the spoken--as if to insist that for us, now, the beautiful (the true?) is not in nature but in artifice. It points as well, to the problem of subjectivity and the active struggle with Romantic and Modernist notions of reality and the self that so many of these poems enact.
Our so-called Language Poets take a different tack. In their work we often see the dismantling of articulate speech in an effort to recover a prior version of self, a cleaner one, free of cultural association--a language free of its user! In this volume numerous poems work toward the forcible undoing of the sentence, but they also explore for us the notion of right choice in diction, and the whole relationship of choice of word to choice in its broadest sense. In some of the more radical work, the word is privileged over the phrase and the sentence. One can see this as a corrective measure against the political and cultural excesses the sentence is a metaphor for; one can see it, too, as an attempt to redefine the nature of sense itself. In fact in such poems meaning itself is often questioned as a cultural value, and chance and the inner laws of language are asked to reign as tutelary deities. In them, too, the silence is argued with most excitingly: a silence at times loud and deeply empowered, at times violently reduced to mere white space on a page.
Then there are those who fall, perhaps, under the heading of narrative poets. In them we see a passionate determination to reclaim the power of articulate speech via its more "traditional" methods: plot, cause and effect, the spun web of storytelling. These poems often refuse the swift association, deep economy, leaping of mind, and structural use of analogy which many of the "pure" lyric poets favor. It is as if these more strictly lyric methods were seen as being, in some manner, partially responsible for the breakdown of speech's powers: the holes they allow in the fabric of telling seen as having finally gotten too big, the net no longer able to hold the mystery, the swift prey.
The ambition to reclaim ground for eloquence and rhetoric is perhaps even more starkly visible in the sharp, urgent poems of sheer argument--the lyric-essay, which seems to be flourishing, stark offspring of the more classic meditation, also in vogue.
One important formal development is the recent popularity of prose poems. We might think of them as, perhaps, the frontal approach; they are certainly--in many cases--the most extreme in their attempt to use the strategies of "normal" articulate speech to reach the reader. Their number, variety and sheer quality (and the extraordinarily different uses to which the form is put) caused me to think of this volume as, in part, a subterranean exploration of the form.
Yet another battle fought over the power and nature of articulate speech predates our current anxieties. For when we get to the work of some of our so-called minimalists, we are faced with a more historical (and American) distrust of articulateness: "inarticulateness" as stoicism, perhaps--the terseness we recognize in our Western folk heroes--as if to speak a full sentence, to yield to easeful speech, were a sensual activity one cannot, or should not, afford to indulge.
This is verbal reticence of a vastly different order from that caused by the fear or distrust described above. Rather, it is better seen as a metaphysical condition in which language is fully mastered but withheld. It dovetails, in some instances, with the symbolist sense of the alchemical power of each word, or Zen notions of restraint, or the objectivist desire to honor the resistance of the material world and attempt a suppression of ego--(George Oppen: "It is necessary to be afraid of words, it is necessary to be afraid of each word, every word").
In most instances this distrust of eloquence is sinewed by the desire for sincerity. The longing for the "pure clear word," to use James Wright's phrase, expresses a deeply-held American belief that the simpler the utterance--the closer to the bone of the feeling--the better the chance of getting the self through uncontaminated by language: speech a vehicle that can "betray" honest feeling when it becomes too ornate or "articulate"; the self imagined as existing in some form prior to speech, inside, forced to translate itself out (a passage that can betray the "pure" self, can misshape, lie).
If we look at the Puritan conviction (still alive as a "law" among the Amish) that to use more words than required--more than the absolute minimum to get the thing said--is sinful, we can feel the dimensions of this belief. The Amish to this day can be shunned for such garrulousness--it being relegated to the level of promiscuity.
There is, however, another version of selfhood: Elizabethan, dramatic, created in performance, created precisely by acts of speech. It involves a whole other set of assumptions about the location and nature of selfhood--assumptions both more "primitive" (as in many native ritualistic dramatic ceremonies by which the self is "invented" or "invoked") and more "sophisticated" (the Language Poets, for example, share the notion of a constructed self--although they tend to regard it with suspicion).
At any rate the notion of a mask or mythic persona created by language competes with the tradition of "honest" speech on American soil, and there are many poets (this reader would argue that it is all the significant ones) who attempt to merge the two impulses: in most instances they marry, apparently happily, and the struggle goes underground; in some the tension between the two is carried out on the surface of the poem.
For others, minimalism of phrasing--or more precisely, decimated, sputtered phrasing--is not a question of reticence or stoicism. Rather, it is a mixture of inward abbreviation and the kind of speediness imposed on the language of someone who wishes to be heard (or to hear himself) above an assembly line. Phrasing fragmented as much by competition with the machine (whose purpose it is to silence the spirit?) as by mental exhaustion. There is an element in it, too, of the coding covert political activity requires.
In yet others, the fragmentation of phrasing would seem to be occasioned by the speaker's encounter with something in the silence that is spiritually overwhelming. One is reminded of Emily Dickinson's "I know that He exists / Somewhere--in silence."
Ultimately, how one extends outward into the silence--narratively, metrically, in fragments, in prose--involves the nature of how that silence is perceived. For it is the desire to engage the silence, and the resistance of that silence, that tugs at speech; silence the field into which the voice, the mind, the heart play out their drama. One cannot run out to play when the field has been replaced by a void. One stays away or walks back and forth at the edge of that void. Sometimes imagining where the field had been works for a while. But more likely one will give up, go home. As the field of genuine silence thins or vanishes for many of us--or is replaced with noise--an interesting thing starts to happen. We hear it most dramatically in the work of many of our youngest poets: the voice is raised; anger, rage, parodic manic energy, irony, violence, push back at the noise to create a space to live in, to think and feel in, the violence from within more violent than ever before perhaps because the violence from without, against which it pushes, is so great.
For some poets the poem is a critique of the powers of representation, so they seem more concerned with the possibility of saying something than with what is said. Such poems present themselves as investigations rather than as conclusions. Words--or the gaps between them--are used to recompose a world, as if these poets were looking for a method by which to experience the world once again. We might find ourselves being asked implicitly where the poem actually is: In the world? In the language? In the reader's interpretation or in the poet's intention? Or does it float somewhere between--and is that somewhere between chance or fate? The only thing we are left with, perhaps, the only bedrock, is the writer's commitment to writing. Notes, letters, journals, findings, memory patches, neo-impressionist accumulations, a distrust of direct statement and direct apprehension; the moral issue becomes, Can anyone trust the world enough to write it down?
When we experience a loosening of setting or point of view, and a breakdown of syntax's dependence on closure, we witness an opening up of the present-tense terrain of the poem, a privileging of delay and digression over progress.
This opening up of the present moment as a terrain outside time--this foregrounding of the field of the "act of the poem"--can be explained in many ways. We might consider the way in which the idea of perfection in art seems to be called into question by many of our poets. On the one hand, some might argue today, the notion of perfection serves ultimately to make an object not so much ideal as available to a marketplace, available for ownership--something to be acquired by the act of understanding.
Perhaps more important, the notion of "conjuring up a form with words that resists the action of time" (to use Zbigniew Herbert's phrase) is put into question by the poetics of many of these poets (most radically by the "language" poets, but also by many others--the writers of prose poems, the poets who break their lines forcibly against syntax, the increasingly elliptical lyric poets) because the figures for a timeless, or eternal, realm we can summon up most readily are the nuclear winter, the half-life of radioactive waste, and extinctions of various kinds. Not "eternities" we would, or could, want our poems to exist in. Not the kind we would want to transcend time to inhabit.
A number of the poems in this book--and many others I admired but couldn't include--are longer than average. Perhaps in order to make themselves felt as the field of action, in order to bring to life, via digression and delay, a realm outside the linear and ending-dependent motions of history, narrative, progress, manifest destiny, upward mobility. Their length insures that the motion toward closure will be itself part of the subject. Will it be fought? Will it be earned? Much of the work here that uses of serial (i.e., constantly re-beginning) structures is looking for a sense of form that is not so ending-dependent. It asks, in other words, if perhaps we can no longer afford for Death to be the only mother of Beauty. . .
Finally, many of these works use devices that break the fluid progress of the poem, that destabilize the reader's relationship to the illusion of the poem as text spoken by a single speaker in deep thought, aroused contemplation, or recollection. These interferences force the reader out of a passive role and back into the poem as an active participant. I do not, by any means, intend that the reader become what is sometimes called the "co-creator" of the text. Rather, what I admire in these poems is the controlled way each poet has found to coax the reader into a new--shall we say awakened?--state without handing over the reins of the poem either to pure chance or to that embodiment of chance, the bored, barely willing, barely attentive, overstimulated (i.e., shut down) reader.
Indeed, one could argue that the poems in this collection that do not let us become comfortable with plot, point of view, setting, eventually force us to read in a different way; force us to let music take the place of narrative flow; force us to let our senses do some of the work we would "normally" be letting our conscious minds do. We discover, in the process, that we can trust a deeper current of our sensibility, something other than the lust-for-forwardness, with all its attendant desires for closure, shapeliness, and the sense that we are headed somewhere and that we are in the hands of something. We are forced to suspend these desires, to let the longing stay alive unsatisfied; forced to accord power to a portion of ourselves and a portion of the world we normally deem powerless or feminine or "merely" intuitive.
And then, lastly, throughout this volume, you'll find the undiminished, or unintimidated, eloquence of our classical believers--perhaps only apparently unperturbed by the desperate fray; poets in whom the repose of counted language is perhaps the highest form, today, of bravery.
From The Best American Poetry 1990, introduction by Jorie Graham published by Collier Books. Copyright © 1990 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Autumn Sonata - A Celebration of Love a Poem
love was the lake in your two eyes
which you afforded me to swim in
taking me whole into your cherish
our joy jumped like fishes in spring waters
love is the road we have both vowed
to take hand in hand, heart to heart
spring, summer, autumn and winter
breathing in each other's breath
surviving on each other's strengths
and weaknesses taking challenges
like roses that bow and dance in the winds
love will be the maple each autumn
paints to celebrate a love tale in
red blood passion before they trail
into divinity hands whispering
and sighing for an eternal blessing
the joy of two fishes jumping in spring waters
A response taken from the Mike Writing Workshop
Yahoo group:
I don't post here very often but I thought this poem deserved somerecognition. Lol, I've been on this list a while and its so easy toget lost in the shuffle of all the different topics that everyonecomments on...which is a good thing,for an online group,its alwaysactive.:)I liked this, the flow was unusual yet beautiful in a haunting wayand the imagery was superb...the line "love will be the maple thateach autumn paints.." is, quite simply,perfect.I love finding small submissions like this among all the discussionthat goes on....don't get me wrong,I like all the issues and pros andcons that are brought up....but every now and then something likethis pops up amidst it all....and reminds me,this is why we write.Excellent job, John.Tyler
which you afforded me to swim in
taking me whole into your cherish
our joy jumped like fishes in spring waters
love is the road we have both vowed
to take hand in hand, heart to heart
spring, summer, autumn and winter
breathing in each other's breath
surviving on each other's strengths
and weaknesses taking challenges
like roses that bow and dance in the winds
love will be the maple each autumn
paints to celebrate a love tale in
red blood passion before they trail
into divinity hands whispering
and sighing for an eternal blessing
the joy of two fishes jumping in spring waters
A response taken from the Mike Writing Workshop
Yahoo group:
I don't post here very often but I thought this poem deserved somerecognition. Lol, I've been on this list a while and its so easy toget lost in the shuffle of all the different topics that everyonecomments on...which is a good thing,for an online group,its alwaysactive.:)I liked this, the flow was unusual yet beautiful in a haunting wayand the imagery was superb...the line "love will be the maple thateach autumn paints.." is, quite simply,perfect.I love finding small submissions like this among all the discussionthat goes on....don't get me wrong,I like all the issues and pros andcons that are brought up....but every now and then something likethis pops up amidst it all....and reminds me,this is why we write.Excellent job, John.Tyler
Monday, November 3, 2008
Wedding Night Candles, a favourite poem of mine
Sometime ago, I wrote this poem, I really love it especially the magical flow.
Wedding Night Candles
-------------------------------
my language, i wish it flows
a dawn glass of whisky so
light and gently gold as
the morning sun on
the heart and sight
my vocabulary, i wish each
comes away a shade of a
priceless gemstone that keeps
my passion for life burning
like wedding night candles
john tiong chunghoo
Alexander Keli Mutua (10/10/2007 7:32:00 AM) A perfect blend of a love poem. Good work!
Wedding Night Candles
-------------------------------
my language, i wish it flows
a dawn glass of whisky so
light and gently gold as
the morning sun on
the heart and sight
my vocabulary, i wish each
comes away a shade of a
priceless gemstone that keeps
my passion for life burning
like wedding night candles
john tiong chunghoo
Alexander Keli Mutua (10/10/2007 7:32:00 AM) A perfect blend of a love poem. Good work!
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Famous Movie Poem - Singing in the Rain
I wrote this after watching the hugely entertaining Gene Kelly Movie
you are young, your skin is taut
my heart reels like a guitar tight
and plucked for the first time
you are young and your crown billows and
crests cascading like a great waterfall i
am pleasantly entangled in the
shiny resplendent tresses
your enchanting intelligence fueled eyes darting
over the silver screen are shangrila's spring
lakes of passion, appetisers for love i cant
take mine off
you charge up the morning like a
thousand birds bursting in their enthusiasm,
all ready to fly away with their present
of the new day, giving life to a solitary tree now
waving and whistling its cheers to
the pulsating birth of the new dawn
your stilettos rain steps as you dance,
raindrops beating down a tranquil lane,
an orgy of song and kettle drums
a flamenco for a fiesta of irresitible romantic charms
raindrops tipping tappings on us
waking us up to the warmth we have
in us, and our propensity for love,
for a fulfilling life worthy of singing in the rain
tip tap, tip tap, tip tap,
we let down our hair
we run up and down the lane
the sound of rain is a million ovations,
a million dancers joining us upping, downing
twisting turning a spiralling lane of fun
by john tiong chunghoo
you are young, your skin is taut
my heart reels like a guitar tight
and plucked for the first time
you are young and your crown billows and
crests cascading like a great waterfall i
am pleasantly entangled in the
shiny resplendent tresses
your enchanting intelligence fueled eyes darting
over the silver screen are shangrila's spring
lakes of passion, appetisers for love i cant
take mine off
you charge up the morning like a
thousand birds bursting in their enthusiasm,
all ready to fly away with their present
of the new day, giving life to a solitary tree now
waving and whistling its cheers to
the pulsating birth of the new dawn
your stilettos rain steps as you dance,
raindrops beating down a tranquil lane,
an orgy of song and kettle drums
a flamenco for a fiesta of irresitible romantic charms
raindrops tipping tappings on us
waking us up to the warmth we have
in us, and our propensity for love,
for a fulfilling life worthy of singing in the rain
tip tap, tip tap, tip tap,
we let down our hair
we run up and down the lane
the sound of rain is a million ovations,
a million dancers joining us upping, downing
twisting turning a spiralling lane of fun
by john tiong chunghoo
Top 10 Japanese actors
These are 10 Japanese actors to watch out for if you wish to watch Japanese movies. The following is lifted from an internet site about movies.
Shigeki Hosokawa
Modeling is the stepping stone for many famous actors around the world. Same thing happened with Shigeki Hosokawa. He first started as a model and then went into acting. Shigeki attended Ogaki Municipal North Elementary School and Ogaki Municipal North Junior High School. In 1994, he made his acting debut in a TBS J-Drama followed by a brief appearance in Japanese game show. From 1995-2000, he worked as a professional model. In 2002, he took time out and studied acting thoroughly. From 1995 to 2002, he did not appear in many films. During this time his major work was playing the character of “Takeda-sensei” adaptation of popular manga, “Great Teacher Onizuka.”
Joe Odagiri
Born on February 16, 1976 at Tsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, Odagiri is a popular Japanese actor. Known for his unusual hairstyle and dress-up and his work and personality, Odagiri is the symbol of ‘Cool Japan.’ Odagiri was accepted by Kochi University but he refused the offer and went to the United States to study movie directing at the California University. Unfortunately, for a mistake in his application process, he ended up in acting class. This was a ‘blessing in disguise’ for Odagiri. He then studied in the USA for two years. He did few stage performances in Japan and finally got his big break in Kamen-Rider series. Odagiri played the central character, Godai Yusuke. It turned him into a big star overnight. His other major movies include Mushishi, Shinobi-Heart Under Blade.
Ken Takakura
I saw this talented actor for the first time in Black Rain. He played the role of a Japanese police officer Masahiro, who helps Nick (Michael Douglas), an American police officer, avenge his partner’s death. Known as the Clint Eastwood of Japanese Cinema, Ken Takakura is famous for his dark characters such as Yakuza boss, lone fighter, and gangster. His rough and tough acting style made him an icon in Japanese cinema. Takakura’s real name is Oda Goichi. A graduate from Meiji University, Takakura is a very disciplined person and a teetotaler. A resident of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka, Takakura grew up watching the under world, black market, and racketeering. This helped him a lot playing his on screen characters. Takakura started his acting career in 1955 at the Toei Company at the age of 24. In 1976, he left Toei and by this time he appeared in more than 180 movies and many of them were popular Yakuza movie series.
Koichi Sato
Koichi Sato is the son of legendary Japanese actor, Rentaro Mikuni. Born in 1960, Koichi Sato made his first television appearance in 1980 in a NHK television drama titled, Zoku Zoku Jiken. At that time, he was a student at the film department of Tama Art School. That same year, he got his first break in movie Seishun no Mon (The Gate of Youth ’81). For his performance in the movie, Koichi received Blue Ribbon New Talent Prize award. Koichi worked with his father Rentaro and they were the first father-son duo to win both Japan Academy and Blue Ribbon Awards. In 1994, he won the Japan Academy Best Actor award for Crest of Betrayal. In 2003, Koichi won the Japan Academy Award Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Mibu Gishi Den (When the First Sword is Drawn).
Hiroshi Abe
Like Shigeki Hosokawa, Hiroshi Abe started his career as a model. Born on June 22, 1964, Hiroshi made successful transition from modeling to film. Currently, he is one of the regular faces in Japanese media. A graduate of Chuo University, Hiroshi is well known for his above average height. Hiroshi started as a model in 1985 winning Shueisha`s "3rd Nonno Boyfriend Champion." Nonno was one of the popular teen magazines. For his great sense of humor, he started to make regular television appearance on Fuji TV noontime variety show, “Waratte Iitomo.” He made his acting debut in 1988, during his senior years at the college. The movie titled Haikara-san Ga Touru (Trendy Girl Passes By) was not very successful but Hiroshi got movie makers’ attention for his performance. Since then, Hiroshi did numerous television shows, movies, commercials and stage dramas.
Seizo Fukumoto
Being a specialist of Japanese Samurai and Yakuza (based on the Edo Periods of Japanese history) movies, Seizo Fukumoto is one of the leading stars of Japanese film industry at this moment. The actor came under the limelight of international media with his 2003 Hollywood movie, The Last Samurai, in which he plays the role of the ‘The Silent Samurai’. Seizo Fukumoto is considered as one of the top ‘kirareyaku (the actor who brings box office success)’ actor in Japan. He has been acting in Japanese films for the last four decades, becoming an influential actor in the industry. Though he has been very popular in Japan for a long time now, his international success came in 2003 through the Tom Cruise starrer The Last Samurai. Seizo Fukumoto was born on February 3, 1943 in Hyogo, Japan and started acting since he was 15 years old. The veteran actor is also a familiar face in television and theater in the country. In dramas, he often plays the role of police and evil man. In the movies, he plays the role of ‘ronin,’ a Samurai who have no master or lord to serve. Appearing in hundreds of Japanese movies, Seizo Fukumoto has already become a legend in the Japanese film industry.
Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune is one of the legendary figures of Japanese film industry. He acted in almost 170 films in his illustrious career and most of the successful movies of his career came under the well-known film maker Akira Kurosawa. Some of his best known films in collaboration with Akira Kurosawa are Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo. Toshiro Mifune’s performance in portraying Miyamoto Musashi in Samurai Trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki is one of his masterpieces. Born in Qinghai, China on 1st April 1920, to Japanese parents, the actor spent the first 19 years of his life in China and had experience of working in his father’s photography shop in his youth. This later helped him get a job in the Imperial Japanese Air Force. He worked in the Aerial Photography (Ko-type) unit during World War II. His entrance in the film industry was a bit dramatic. He fist tried as an assistant cameraman in a production house. Suddenly, he found himself as one of contestants of a "new faces" contest organized by Toho Productions. Actually, Mifune’s friend working in Toho Production submitted the application for Mifune, even without his knowledge. That brought a breakthrough in his career and from then on there was no looking-back in his career. The popularity of Toshiro Mifune is not confined within Japan. Rather, he is perhaps one of the most famous Japanese film stars to the western audience. The actor was awarded Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1993 by the Japanese government.
Takeshi Kitano
Though he had an ambition to become an engineer, Takeshi Kitano ended up becoming one of the most famous comedian actors in Japan. With his versatile caliber, Takeshi Kitano marked his successful footstep in some other disciplines. He excelled his career in acting, presenting, writing novels, poets, designing video games, film editing, directing etc. Takeshi Kitano is now a professor at the Graduate School of Visual Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Most of his films are based on Yakuza gangsters, but involves humors. However, moral questions are deeply implied in his movies. Zatōichi, Kikujiro, Brother, Sonatine are some of his best known movies. With his acting skill and talent, he is well known to the foreign audiences as well. A popular television game show, Takeshi's Castle, was hosted by Takeshi Kitano. To tell the truth, he is one of the most popular figures of Japanese film industry at present.
Ken Watanabe
Have you seen the movie The Last Samurai? This movie is famous for Tom Cruise but some people including me feel that Ken Watanabe acted better than Tom Cruise. Ken Watanabe has acted in a number of good movies including The Last Samurai. Ken got Oscar nomination for his role in the movie. Ken Watanabe was born on October 21, 1959 in a cultured family in Japan. He is more than 48 years now. In his life, he has struggled a lot. He fought against disease. His first marriage ended in divorce. At one stage in his life, Ken suffered from huge debt. Thus, his personal life is like that of his role in The Last Samurai- an eventful life. Ken Watanabe also acted in Television and Stage. In the last few years, he is working hard to make a mark in Hollywood. I have already talked about The Last Samurai. Letters from Iwo Jima is another good movie of Ken Watanabe and he was superb in that movie. In fact, Ken is good as a tragic character. Ken Watanabe has won a number of prestigious awards in Japan. I feel that sooner or later, he will grab an Oscar.
Nagase Masatoshi
In America, Nagase Masatoshi may not so successful, but in Japan, he is a popular actor. Nagase Masatoshi was born in July 15, 1966 in Japan. He has been acting for quite some time. Mystery Train is the movie that made Masatoshi Nagase famous in the West. Another English movie that he acted is Cold Fever. He also acted some in TV commercials and he became very famous with a commercial in Japan. He has acted around 20 movies and critics most of the time, had positive view of Nagase Masatoshi.
Shigeki Hosokawa
Modeling is the stepping stone for many famous actors around the world. Same thing happened with Shigeki Hosokawa. He first started as a model and then went into acting. Shigeki attended Ogaki Municipal North Elementary School and Ogaki Municipal North Junior High School. In 1994, he made his acting debut in a TBS J-Drama followed by a brief appearance in Japanese game show. From 1995-2000, he worked as a professional model. In 2002, he took time out and studied acting thoroughly. From 1995 to 2002, he did not appear in many films. During this time his major work was playing the character of “Takeda-sensei” adaptation of popular manga, “Great Teacher Onizuka.”
Joe Odagiri
Born on February 16, 1976 at Tsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, Odagiri is a popular Japanese actor. Known for his unusual hairstyle and dress-up and his work and personality, Odagiri is the symbol of ‘Cool Japan.’ Odagiri was accepted by Kochi University but he refused the offer and went to the United States to study movie directing at the California University. Unfortunately, for a mistake in his application process, he ended up in acting class. This was a ‘blessing in disguise’ for Odagiri. He then studied in the USA for two years. He did few stage performances in Japan and finally got his big break in Kamen-Rider series. Odagiri played the central character, Godai Yusuke. It turned him into a big star overnight. His other major movies include Mushishi, Shinobi-Heart Under Blade.
Ken Takakura
I saw this talented actor for the first time in Black Rain. He played the role of a Japanese police officer Masahiro, who helps Nick (Michael Douglas), an American police officer, avenge his partner’s death. Known as the Clint Eastwood of Japanese Cinema, Ken Takakura is famous for his dark characters such as Yakuza boss, lone fighter, and gangster. His rough and tough acting style made him an icon in Japanese cinema. Takakura’s real name is Oda Goichi. A graduate from Meiji University, Takakura is a very disciplined person and a teetotaler. A resident of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka, Takakura grew up watching the under world, black market, and racketeering. This helped him a lot playing his on screen characters. Takakura started his acting career in 1955 at the Toei Company at the age of 24. In 1976, he left Toei and by this time he appeared in more than 180 movies and many of them were popular Yakuza movie series.
Koichi Sato
Koichi Sato is the son of legendary Japanese actor, Rentaro Mikuni. Born in 1960, Koichi Sato made his first television appearance in 1980 in a NHK television drama titled, Zoku Zoku Jiken. At that time, he was a student at the film department of Tama Art School. That same year, he got his first break in movie Seishun no Mon (The Gate of Youth ’81). For his performance in the movie, Koichi received Blue Ribbon New Talent Prize award. Koichi worked with his father Rentaro and they were the first father-son duo to win both Japan Academy and Blue Ribbon Awards. In 1994, he won the Japan Academy Best Actor award for Crest of Betrayal. In 2003, Koichi won the Japan Academy Award Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Mibu Gishi Den (When the First Sword is Drawn).
Hiroshi Abe
Like Shigeki Hosokawa, Hiroshi Abe started his career as a model. Born on June 22, 1964, Hiroshi made successful transition from modeling to film. Currently, he is one of the regular faces in Japanese media. A graduate of Chuo University, Hiroshi is well known for his above average height. Hiroshi started as a model in 1985 winning Shueisha`s "3rd Nonno Boyfriend Champion." Nonno was one of the popular teen magazines. For his great sense of humor, he started to make regular television appearance on Fuji TV noontime variety show, “Waratte Iitomo.” He made his acting debut in 1988, during his senior years at the college. The movie titled Haikara-san Ga Touru (Trendy Girl Passes By) was not very successful but Hiroshi got movie makers’ attention for his performance. Since then, Hiroshi did numerous television shows, movies, commercials and stage dramas.
Seizo Fukumoto
Being a specialist of Japanese Samurai and Yakuza (based on the Edo Periods of Japanese history) movies, Seizo Fukumoto is one of the leading stars of Japanese film industry at this moment. The actor came under the limelight of international media with his 2003 Hollywood movie, The Last Samurai, in which he plays the role of the ‘The Silent Samurai’. Seizo Fukumoto is considered as one of the top ‘kirareyaku (the actor who brings box office success)’ actor in Japan. He has been acting in Japanese films for the last four decades, becoming an influential actor in the industry. Though he has been very popular in Japan for a long time now, his international success came in 2003 through the Tom Cruise starrer The Last Samurai. Seizo Fukumoto was born on February 3, 1943 in Hyogo, Japan and started acting since he was 15 years old. The veteran actor is also a familiar face in television and theater in the country. In dramas, he often plays the role of police and evil man. In the movies, he plays the role of ‘ronin,’ a Samurai who have no master or lord to serve. Appearing in hundreds of Japanese movies, Seizo Fukumoto has already become a legend in the Japanese film industry.
Toshiro Mifune
Toshiro Mifune is one of the legendary figures of Japanese film industry. He acted in almost 170 films in his illustrious career and most of the successful movies of his career came under the well-known film maker Akira Kurosawa. Some of his best known films in collaboration with Akira Kurosawa are Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo. Toshiro Mifune’s performance in portraying Miyamoto Musashi in Samurai Trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki is one of his masterpieces. Born in Qinghai, China on 1st April 1920, to Japanese parents, the actor spent the first 19 years of his life in China and had experience of working in his father’s photography shop in his youth. This later helped him get a job in the Imperial Japanese Air Force. He worked in the Aerial Photography (Ko-type) unit during World War II. His entrance in the film industry was a bit dramatic. He fist tried as an assistant cameraman in a production house. Suddenly, he found himself as one of contestants of a "new faces" contest organized by Toho Productions. Actually, Mifune’s friend working in Toho Production submitted the application for Mifune, even without his knowledge. That brought a breakthrough in his career and from then on there was no looking-back in his career. The popularity of Toshiro Mifune is not confined within Japan. Rather, he is perhaps one of the most famous Japanese film stars to the western audience. The actor was awarded Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1993 by the Japanese government.
Takeshi Kitano
Though he had an ambition to become an engineer, Takeshi Kitano ended up becoming one of the most famous comedian actors in Japan. With his versatile caliber, Takeshi Kitano marked his successful footstep in some other disciplines. He excelled his career in acting, presenting, writing novels, poets, designing video games, film editing, directing etc. Takeshi Kitano is now a professor at the Graduate School of Visual Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Most of his films are based on Yakuza gangsters, but involves humors. However, moral questions are deeply implied in his movies. Zatōichi, Kikujiro, Brother, Sonatine are some of his best known movies. With his acting skill and talent, he is well known to the foreign audiences as well. A popular television game show, Takeshi's Castle, was hosted by Takeshi Kitano. To tell the truth, he is one of the most popular figures of Japanese film industry at present.
Ken Watanabe
Have you seen the movie The Last Samurai? This movie is famous for Tom Cruise but some people including me feel that Ken Watanabe acted better than Tom Cruise. Ken Watanabe has acted in a number of good movies including The Last Samurai. Ken got Oscar nomination for his role in the movie. Ken Watanabe was born on October 21, 1959 in a cultured family in Japan. He is more than 48 years now. In his life, he has struggled a lot. He fought against disease. His first marriage ended in divorce. At one stage in his life, Ken suffered from huge debt. Thus, his personal life is like that of his role in The Last Samurai- an eventful life. Ken Watanabe also acted in Television and Stage. In the last few years, he is working hard to make a mark in Hollywood. I have already talked about The Last Samurai. Letters from Iwo Jima is another good movie of Ken Watanabe and he was superb in that movie. In fact, Ken is good as a tragic character. Ken Watanabe has won a number of prestigious awards in Japan. I feel that sooner or later, he will grab an Oscar.
Nagase Masatoshi
In America, Nagase Masatoshi may not so successful, but in Japan, he is a popular actor. Nagase Masatoshi was born in July 15, 1966 in Japan. He has been acting for quite some time. Mystery Train is the movie that made Masatoshi Nagase famous in the West. Another English movie that he acted is Cold Fever. He also acted some in TV commercials and he became very famous with a commercial in Japan. He has acted around 20 movies and critics most of the time, had positive view of Nagase Masatoshi.
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