The Letters of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and a 40-year Friendship

The letters of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti chart a 40-year friendship and two storied careers.

"The story now feels nearly inevitable. In 1955, Allen Ginsberg moved into an apartment in the San Francisco North Beach area, just a few blocks away from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Bookshop. Ginsberg showed the fledging publisher his work, and Ferlinghetti was intrigued. He attended an event at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, where Ginsberg recited part of “Howl” for the first time. A few days later, Ferlinghetti sent the poet a telegram: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he cabled, echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legendary note to Walt Whitman. “When do I get the manuscript of ‘Howl’?”

So began a decades-long relationship between the two men, as writer and publisher and as friends. From 1955 until Ginsberg’s death in 1997, they exchanged letters on matters large and small, from the 1957 obscenity charges that Ferlinghetti faced as the publisher of Howl to Ginsberg’s precarious finances (“I’m broke, dumb, writeless and nowhere. Send on royalties as soon as you can,” wrote Ginsberg in 1958). They sent each other thoughtful editorial notes and breezy accounts of their far-flung travels. In the early years, letters were their principal mode of communication, and their correspondence tracks not only the arc of their storied careers but also the palpable affection and respect the two men had for each other..."

continue reading at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250736

Prompt: Haibun Combines Prose and Haiku

This month we look at a short Japanese poetry form called the haibun.  The haibun (translated as "haikai writings" is a form that combines prose and haiku.

Haibun poems are used to write autobiographies, diaries, essays, prose poems, and very short stories. It was used as a kind of travel journal when it was first used by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō. It was a form he popularized. He wrote haibun as travel accounts. The most famous are in  Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior).

Haibun continued to be written by later haikai poets such as Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki. 

Not all of Bashō's haibun are devoted to travel. They are also character sketches, landscape scenes, and occasional poems to honor a specific patron or event. His "Hut of the Phantom Dwelling" is a quite long prose essay followed by the haiku:

Among these summer trees, 
a pasania- 
something to count on 

(A pasania is a tree species of Asia, sometimes called in English a "stone oak" because of its very hard acorn-like nuts.)

Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short, precise prose description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other events in the poet's life, followed by a related haiku.

Haibun is now written worldwide, and the form has been adapted into different variations. The basic rules for the haibun are simple.

1. Unlike haiku, haibun begins with a title. 
2. The prose portion is terse, descriptive, and written in the first person singular. 
3. It is in the present moment. Imagine the experience is occurring now, not in the past.
4. Although this is prose, it is poetic and understated, with all excessive words eliminated. 
5. The accompanying haiku follows the traditional rules of that form. 
6. The subject of the haiku does not repeat, quote, or explain the prose, but reflects some aspect of the prose with a detail that is more of a juxtaposition — different yet somehow connected. That connection can be a surprising revelation for the reader.

I was in a workshop this past year with the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil where we wrote haibun. Aimee has written several articles on haibun and gives a more detailed look at the rules of haibun - although she admits that she is "not one to stay close and straight to any particular poetry 'rules'."

She told us that although Bashō coined the word haibun for the form as it is used today, it already existed in Japan without that name as a kind of preface to poems and as mini-lyric essays. He wrote a guideline for the form and Aimee points out that he was quite concerned with aware (pronounced ah-WAR-ay), a term for the spirit of haiku or the "quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy."

In "Don’t Bring Me to the Fireworks, The Fox-Wife Asks," by Jeannine Hall Gailey, we have a modern-day haibun. I discovered Gailey's poetry in an article Nezhukumatathil wrote which includes another one of her fox-wife poems.

Don’t Bring Me to the Fireworks, The Fox-Wife Asks

They hurt my ears, make me run in circles. Under their chemical light you might see my non-human face, the tail I hide beneath skirts. In the city, under mercury vapor, you never see me clearly. I prefer the woods, the quiet howl of mosquitoes, of cicadas. Build me a hut of mud where we never see the stars, too bright. Bring me fans painted with cranes and peonies, poetry folded into birds. Don’t leave me in the crowd, my nose assaulted by too many scents. Let us stay far from others tonight, my love. Our celebrations will be fur and paw, hand to chest. Let the fireworks with their dizzy ghost spiders whine in the distance, keep me here, bring me silk kimonos the color of bark and dirt to nest in.

Keep the copper smoke
and saltpeter, the dim trails
of chrysanthemums in the sky.

That poem is from Gailey's collection, She Returns to the Floating World, which explores motifs in Japanese folk tales:, persona poems spoken by characters from animé and manga, mythology, and fairy tales. The story of the kitsune, or fox-woman, is one that occurs throughout the book.

This month's prompt is a haibun following the simplified and traditional six rules stated above.

The submission deadline is the night of the New Moon, August 14, 2015.

Further Reading On Haibun

• haibuntoday.com has a good selection of contemporary haibun. Two you might look at are "Night Fishing" and "Frozen."
  
• naturewriting.com has a good article on writing haibun

James Tate

James Tate died this week at age 71. His death came just before the publication of his new book, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems.

One of the most popular poets of his generation, his work was often seen as a more accessible and entertaining version of poetry.

The new book is his 17th full-length collection.

An NPR piece on him by poet Craig Morgan Teicher describes his poetry this way:

"A Tate poem often features a hapless protagonist (usually a well-meaning man) who stumbles into a set of ridiculous circumstances that nonetheless don't seem particularly ridiculous to him. The tone is airy, bemused — "Some things don't deserve to be contemplated" — hiding profundity beneath a relaxed surface. This man might meet a few townsfolk, each of whom will make some remark on the circumstance, which will get weirder with each remark, and then the poem then ends with a clever zinger. Usually, the action turns on increasing communication difficulties. Tate may be the only poet whose main subject is the benefit of misunderstanding."

His poem "Like A Scarf," opens this way:

The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing,
more likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.

This is his short poem "Goodtime Jesus":

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

In Teicher's tribute to Tate, he wishes that "what follows for him be as odd and pleasant as the scene in his new poem, "The Afterlife," in which a dead man — a ghost — falls into the speaker's backyard."

I just float
around," he said. "Well, I've never met a dead man. I'm
pleased to meet you," I said. "I think you're supposed to
scream or something," he said. "Oh no, I'm really pleased,"
I said. "It's really kind of you to drop by." "I didn't
drop by. It was the wind," he said. "And then the wind stopped
and I fell into the tree." "How lucky for me," I said. "You'll
be going with me, of course, when I leave. You'll never be
coming back," he said.

Prompt: His Master's Voice

We love our pets. Writers love their pets, and they often write about them. I see more and more books about dogs and cats, and that includes poetry.

I recently went to a reading with Billy Collins who has a good number of dog poems. In two of those, he  introduces us to dogs "whom have taken the command 'speak' quite literally."

One of those which has the dog contemplating his relationship to his owner, is titled "A Dog on His Master" - a title that makes me recall an old advertising slogan from the RCA Victor company used for early phonographs.

A DOG ON HIS MASTER

As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

(from Ballistics: Poems)

Beau & Arden on the UK edition of Dog Years

In Dog Years: A Memoir, poet Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner. Beau is a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of love. He joins Arden, their black retriever. These two companions accompany them on the sad journey and teach lessons about love and loss.

I loved Doty's poem (or is it Beau's poem?) "Golden Retrievals" the first time I heard him read it. Like many of Collins' poems it hits you as light and funny, especially in his reading of it. But, also like Collin's poems, there is something more serious going on in the poem.

The dog starts off with his joy in his dog world, rejecting the people world of:

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

He is far more interested in:

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing.

But his poor owner is:

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it?

The dog knows that his work here is part Zen master and part physicist trying:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you.


Mark Doty's “Golden Retrievals” (from Sweet Machine: Poems) is this month's model poem for our writing prompt. And who would have guessed that Beau was a formalist, writing a kind of sonnet.

Your assignment this month is a poem that comes from the mind, heart or mouth of a pet or animal. Let your dog or cat at the keyboard or have them channel the poem to you in that sixth or seventh sense that we know they possess.

Submission deadline: June 30, 2015

I also recommend that you give a look and listen (below) to Billy Collins reading "A Dog on His Master" and one of my favorites, "The Revenant." The revenant (one who has returned, especially from the dead) dog speaking the latter poem is not in love with his master - the person who put him "to sleep" - in fact, "I never liked you - not one bit."

Garth Stein credits "The Revenant" for being the inspiration for his novel The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel, written in the voice of a dog.

Like Beau, Collins' former pet also loves those outdoor smells encountered on walks, "but only because it meant I was about / to smell things you had never touched."

This dog's only somewhat kind remark is to confirm something about the afterlife that the poet had hopefully assumed: "that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose."

bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow




Mark Doty's website is markdoty.org   He blogs at markdoty.blogspot.com