open (door & book) [boomerang]
I open the door of speaking words to you
& there you sit within the room of words
the window has a green & vernal view
one notices a sense of trees & birds
your presence & your absence keep a table
it's set with china & a glass of dew
beside the glass? a book perchance of fable
I open the book it's speaking words to you
within the book of speaking words to you
rest many a tale difficult to parse
a woodblock picture is the picture new?
the river flows with images though sparce
perchance a boat? perhaps a folkish flute
a horizontal happenstance of blue?
a sky for hints of cloud a bough for fruit
amid the book of speaking words to you
posted by david raphael israel at 2:20 AM
2 Comments:
This has a rather nice beat to it and very pretty images.
I'll have to go back and look up your notes on the boomerang.
To me, it borrows the beat of classical Chinese shi -- the very basic form of a poem with 8 lines and 5 characters per line -- a form that was the most pervasive in poetry for many, many centuries, and is generally thought to have been "perfected" in the Tang dynasty [618-906 AD] (although it went on being used expressively & creatively up into the 20th [and who knows? perhaps 21st] century. Mao Tse-Tung of course wrote in this form (as well as other forms). But not the boomerang version of it (far as I've seen); that's much more rarely seen.
The division of the 5 syllables = 5 words in Chinese [which, in the English becomes 5 beats = generally 5 double-syllable- or occasionally triple-syllable beats] into sections of 2/3 is the most comon division in Chinese shi; just as, for a 7-character line [the 2nd most common classical form], it's divided 4/3.
These 2 poems [in Chinese terms they would be considered a series of 2 linked poems] keep to the 2/3 division in every line except the penultimate "a sky for hints of cloud," which has a 3/2 division instead.
In the antecedent Chinese poetry, 2/3 is definitely the norm, but I'm not sure it's an absolute rule (though it might be so in more strictly "regulated verse"; but the latter also had more rigorous rules regarding things we have no equivalent for in English -- involving what "tone"-category word could be placed in each position. The results of that regulation would be a musically [in terms of actual tone = directionality of a spoken syllable, as rising or falling etc.] that seems hard to imagine; the pronunciations changed between Tang & modern times . . . but I digress ;-)
This last arcane [& highly tangential] thing involves midaeval Chinese poetics, regarding which only experts are aware. One such expert was my late professor at UC Berkeley, the late Edward Schafer. His book The Divine Woman: Dragon Laides and Rain Maidens in Tang Literature (1973) suddenly springs to mind. I'd not thought of this book in so many years. But thanks to this tangent & musing, I've just now ordered a used copy (via Amazon.com). This spurl of a footnote is wandering like the wind.
The poet Gary Snyder wrote a preface to that book. He had studied with Shafer in the 1950s; I studied with the prof. inthe '70s. At the time, Snyder seemed like an ancient figure from another time; but now he and I (both alive) remember this now bygone, eccentric professor; neither of us really became scholars in that line. Still, we both enjoyed some nutrition from the well of olden Chinese poetry.
/ / /
I think dividing the lines visually with the caesura [space] helps bring forth the inherent rhythm of the lines, no? I'm maybe going to work with this [the caesura] a bit more. I've not really brought out (exemplified), in thess 2 little linked poems, some other beautiful formalisms of Chinese 5-beat poetry that it would be fun to show. Perhaps in another blogo-whimsy another day.
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