Year 2014

* oh, right – it’s spring!

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

What a pity! – Tu Fu

The flowers fly – why so fast?
As I grow old, I wish that spring would linger.
What a pity that scenes of joy
Came not all in my youth and prime!
To set free the mind there must be wine,
To set forth one’s feelings nothing is better than poetry.
This thought you, T’ao Ch’ien, would understand,
But my life has come after your time.

* hey *

* hey *

I can tell the semester’s over because I have begun going on walks in the mornings again. Doing so has allowed me to make the following observation which I will pose as a question: Did you know it’s Spring?

The semester ended last week and one telltale sign of how busy I’ve been is how I’ve neglected to look up (or around for that matter) and really take in what’s been happening. I mean, I haven’t been completely oblivious: I have found hyacinths sneaking into my daily writing. Ani’s good about pointing things out. There’s also been an increase of birds in our neighborhood. Cardinals and robins kinda point themselves out 🙂

This week, I share two poems from The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse which I read last summer when we first landed here in Cincinnati. I like to start each season by reading the work of early Chinese and Japanese poets for their poetry’s ability to encompass not only the universe but nature, and not only nature meaning the outside world, but the nature of the heart.

While I may have neglected the official start of Spring, I like to think I’m up to date with the change of season in my daily life.

Bees – Lo Yin

Down in the plain, and up on the mountain-top,
All nature’s boundless glory is their prey.
But when they have sipped from a hundred flowers and made honey,
For whom is this toil, for whom this nectar?

***

Happy toiling!

Jose

* a more passionate saying with joel oppenheimer

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

I don’t revise much these days…except in the interest of a more passionate syntax

(Yeats)

These words by Yeats were said later in his life to poet John Berryman on their one and only meeting. The idea in them is fascinating, the great poet having gotten to a point where the technical matters got down to phrasing, which is saying.

a more passionate saying

This is something I aspire to in my own writing, but also in my own reading. Weekly, I strive to find things that stop me for one reason or another.

In this week’s poem “Leave It To Me Blues” by Joel Oppenheimer, he goes about his particular saying through straightforward language and a lyric subtlety that disarms as much as surprises.

* blushing moon *

* this week’s round and round *

Leave It To Me Blues – Joel Oppenheimer

from the heart of a flower
a stalk emerges; in each fruit
there are seeds. we turn our
backs on each other so often,
we destroy any community of
interest. yet our hearts are
seeded with love and care sticks
out of our ears. but there is no
bridge unless it is the wind which
whistles our bare house, tearing
the slipcovers apart and constantly
removing the tablecloth covering
it (the table) like a shroud (the
shroud of what the table could mean,
if only we were hungry enough to
care), and we cut ourselves off
because we discovered each man is
an island, detached. man, the
mainland is flipped over the moon.
all i have to depend on is effort,
and the moon goes round and round
in the evening sky. my sons will
make it if they ever reach age,
but how to take care i dont know.
it doesn’t get better. on the other
hand, even with answers, where
would we be, out in the cold, with
an old torn blanket, and no one
around us to cry

***

Happy arounding!

Jose

*poem found in the anthology A Controversy of Poets.