Heaney on Haiku
When Uncle Seamus speaks, connecting haiku poets to those Irish, we should all listen. To quote:
"Another quality which the Old Irish poet shares with his Japanese counterpart is a quality we might call "this worldness" - both are as alert as hunters to their physical surroundings - and yet there is also a strong sense of another world within this "this worldness", one to which poetic expression promises access. In each case, it's as if the poet is caught between the delights of the contingent and the invitations of the transcendent, yet by registering as precisely and poignantly as possible his consciousness of this middle state he manages to effect what Matthew Arnold would have called "a criticism of life".
In this talk, he also brings to my attention Paul Muldoon's wickedly sharp "Hopewell Haiku"; it is well worth a close reading. I will be posting Muldoon's "Quoof" (a damn subtle sonnet!) separately in a bit.
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Epiphany
If the heart is like Don Quixote in its belief in fictions as verities, its companion, the soul, surely must be like the hopeful squire, Sancho Panza, as it sallies forth like a true believer on a donkey, not doubting that it will be bestowed the governorship of an insula. And if nothing tangible is gained after such ardors, it too can say this:
"I'll just tell you this, in passing: there's nothing nicer in the world for a man than being the honored squire of a knight errant seeking adventures. Even though it is true most don't turn out well as the man would like, because out of a hundred that you find, ninety-nine tend to turn out wrong and twisted. I know this from experience, because in some I've been tossed in a blanket, and in others I've been beaten, but even so, it's a fine thing to be out looking for things to happen, crossing the mountains, searching forests, climbing peaks, visiting castles, and staying in inns whenever you please and not paying a devil's maravedi for anything."1
[1] Sancho Panza to his wife Juana, from First Part, Chapter LII of Edith Grossman's translation of "Don Quixote"
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Denis Johnson On Graffiti
"Except I spent a couple of days in the city and was stuck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And graffiti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda - is that the word I want? - not include me. I don't want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all."
The above passage comes from Johnson's novella "The Name of The World", which I finished reading last night. I was unaware of Johnson's body of work until few weeks ago, the NYT Book Review came out with this gushing, effusive review of Johnson's latest novel "Tree of Smoke" - the reviewer even called him "the revelator" - for shining a strange new light on the Vietnam War. In other words for delineating in wonderful new ways - to employ an Orwellian turn of phrase employed by a prominent member of the current US executive - the current shadows of the future, i.e., Iraq War's backward shadows. And the rest of what I could find on Johnson - this novelist whom I had never heard of before - online1 was as fulsome with praise as that book review.
So when I wandered into the Strand Bookstore this past week - to smell, and not buy any - I fell for the lines which end the novella (I have this strange habit of reading endings2 before I read the beginnings of books), in which the narrator describes his career change from an academic - historian - to a war correspondent covering Gulf War-I:
"I have taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one that ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convolutions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky."
Now I am waiting to go and buy me some "Tree of Smoke"
[1] A recording of Jonhson reading from "Tree of Smoke", and another recording at the Lannan Foundation[2] A habit I suppose I picked up after reading the ending of Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music":
"Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music--not too much, or the soul could not sustain it--from time to time."
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