“A Sea Change of Words”
[The following collected notes originally appeared between 2005 and 2012 in the Editor’s Note of Poetry Kanto, Japan’s longest-running bilingual poetry magazine. The writings reflect a concern of the author with the imaginative, moral and social basis of poetic thought.] [This compilation appeared in Oliva, No. 19 2013 3.31, Kanto Gakuin University]
by Alan Botsford
Editor, Poetry Kanto
I. (2005)
Though the whole aim of existence may be to learn what it’s like to be Other, and to act accordingly; though harmonious growth is the aim, slow and beautiful; though we may love all with gravis and mirth—are we ever, the poet asks, free of the tyranny of interpretation?
Anyone today who loves ‘free verse’, in the truest sense of the word, will relish this offering. Of the thirteen poets here in the following pages, each one knows that establishing identity with a vision of freedom poses a risk to power that toys with democracy. You would want to know about me? he or she tells us. Save this tree. That is my story. And to thine own self also be true. That is my story too.
Indeed, if I adored way back into thought what each poem gathered here means to me, each poem, I would say, is a cat. For the poet reminds us that we are not here to accumulate things or experiences. Hers is the power and will, rather, of spending all one has for a lifetime goal, for one’s reason to live. Don’t listen to others, she would remind us. For when doing one’s ‘own thing’ (to borrow from Emerson), one knows that waste is not just waste, loss is not just loss, that pain is not merely destructive.
From our age-old woes, however, we think small, weighing our every move. We live apart and carefully avoid the weaving of ourselves in the everyday life of words. But suppose we resource language in a new way? (Once you let the bland and banal get your blood racing, small steps on earth will be as giant steps on the moon.)
To treasure the show of the world in each moment, in the flow of life and death, we close in on taking a step forward, toward that place of remembering who we really are, not thinking how far we’ll go. (Yes, in some areas of our lives we forge ahead, in others we dally.) (It’s not like you can say ‘I love you’ to a snake but when you reach the point where you can say to yourself, ‘Jesus, I can say this?’ then you’ll know you’re on the right track.) When we look down that path we may be able to say, when it’s all over, what a beautiful story we have created.
II. ( 2006)
A poem, it can be said, ambulates or moves from place to place on ‘metrical feet’, aspiring to exceed the limits or bounds of place. That place, for starters, is the page. If in the act of writing the poet inclines his or her ear towards the blank page hearing the voice within that says: “Now it’s your firecracker of a world to ignite, as all things get ready to dance!” and in the process feels a spark of language, a dynamic in words that hopefully, mysteriously will be set in motion in the reader as well, then indeed we may say the mental, emotional, or spiritual horizons a poem can open up are truly boundless. Such a poem’s ambit, its circuit, its compass— its ‘sphere of action, expression, or influence,’ to borrow from Webster’s definition of ‘ambition’—is evidence of how the personal can spark the political.
A poem’s sparks of verbal energy may cause us, then, to hear questions rising up within us, such as: How do we stop a poem bent on taking us to a new place, that tends toward the great unknown, that uses its fear and knows its power? How do we know when a poem’s not a message in a bottle but a ship carrying free men and free women to a free world? If the poet transacts his or her business in words, at times spending money like water (not blindly), how does he or she know replenishment is always at hand, knowing when to catch the wave when it crests? And, should a poem succeed in speaking to us from the depths of our aliveness, how may we learn to live beautifully from those depths, splashing like dolphins in the sea through the waves, swimming safely in and out of the currents?
Among the voices of the poems offered here in the following pages, you will not find Sirens lulling unsuspecting seafarers toward rocky shoals. Rather we hope you will find these poems to be more like lighthouses of a vast mental ocean. Maybe, with luck, sparks will fly from these pages. Gracious reader, get ready to dance.
III. (2007)
Where would they take us, these voices? Meaning, they say, is all here if only we could read it. Is this a play, these poems ask. A fight? A ritual representation? Can you dream? Going in over your head? What moves you? How much disclosure is enough? Taken about all you can take? You will want to talk about the universe of stars, but, these poems say, what about the universe of cells—the cells that live in us and the ones we live in? You will want to talk about the path imagination takes that leads us this far, but, these poems say, what about the path compassion takes for the secret-sharing that time, now or then, always tells?
Yes, here, being alive is a hard act to follow. The new call to lose tunnel vision and instill spirit to go the extra-mile works magic, enacting unfamiliar routines with real backbone. For experience lived by you and me, says the poet, dreams of transforming us somehow, glutted and singular not with pleasure but with an outcome looping from whatever the context is in our lives that has worked itself into the very thing we embody, all the way to the text complicit with the sinister, that we would devour in conspicuous form, words conjured out of the skeletal air to get closer to the sacred roar we hear in our ears, a hymn to the limits of wisdom that teaches everyone, regardless of who or where they are, that experience speaks in many voices, demanding no less than that we pluck its fruit and eat our fill of the shadows projected by the innocence we once would do anything to defend, but that now, in our letting it go, blesses us, who lay seemingly elsewhere at the bottom perhaps of our lives taken to heart, fitly spoken like apples of gold on the boughs we reach for in silence, in the piercing ambition of our days, the map put away, the long walk to be taken up, beyond age, beyond recall, as when the poet’s deepest allegiance is to creation as a whole, arising out of the feeling in the recesses of his or her being that no being on earth deserves to be unhappy.
Yes, the wild ecstasy has gone nowhere, and the pen perches in readiness. You are here too, it says. You and you and you. The upward glance, the throat choking on its own hunger, the voices of laughter faintly heard, like praise, like the strong embrace between this moment and the one that lasts.
IV. (2008)
What if it’s true-- that a life of poem-making… allowing one to go deeper and deeper into the mix…opening shared spaces-- can be a life risking all? That a life approaching the condition of poetry or music risks being alive to the divine, to those elusive gods within and without that --as primordial energies-- guide and give shape to human destiny (even while reminding us that a light touch about the seriousness of one’s work is always what’s most needed). For the poetic ambition may range--to cite contemporary, well-known examples--from converting one’s life into legend (i.e. Stanley Kunitz), to making a social place for the soul (i.e. Allen Ginsberg), to dying and being reborn more attuned to nature (i.e. Galway Kinnell), or simply to letting the voice of the soul be heard (i.e. Mary Oliver).
But beyond ambition lies responsibility. Poets are not only privileged by the gods, they are charged by them with certain responsibilities. Words, and the way we care for them, love them, honor them, are the responsibility of those of us who most need them (Words, words words--who needs words? I once heard a poet ask. Who doesn’t need words? came the reply--from another poet, naturally*). For out of our words come our dreams—those fragile, gossamer connections to our deepest selves that show us at the seams/seems of reality how to live a life of ever-shifting imaginative depth.
Japan has a rich poetic culture stretching back centuries, and it has a growing number of contemporary poets who are being actively translated into English and other languages. Poetry Kanto would like to help empower a new generation of Japanese poets. Let's translate them, internationalize them and hear their messages for the world and for the future. As Walt Whitman once wrote: 'I am enamored of growing out-doors.' It's time for countries like Japan to unleash, as it were, its 'soft' or cultural firepower, to unmuzzle those new and emerging voices who need to be heard ‘outdoors.’ For the future--and we don't necessarily advocate a ‘globalized’ future in economic terms—the future, we feel, is deeply connected to what the East has to teach us in the realm of culture, especially poetry. Poetry can offer unique insights into human thought and consciousness that no other human activity--save for music or meditation--can offer. The living legend that is Tanikawa Shuntaro who has, in his prolific and extraordinary career, raised the bar for the next generation (and well beyond) of poets of Japan, is currently unrivaled here in terms of cultural presence and poetic output. But naturally there are other presences on the contemporary scene, glimpses of whom readers of Poetry Kanto have over the years been able to catch.
So in the following pages catch the new poetry wave advancing the poetic culture East, West and beyond… For it is here, as we stand on the blood-soaked ground, eating the bitter-soaked bread of life, that our psyche-soaked words slowly come alive.
V. (2009)
This year Poetry Kanto celebrates its 25th year of publication. Its first 20 years, under the stewardship of founding editors William I. Elliott & Shuntaro Tanikawa, Poetry Kanto established itself as a vital part of Japan’s poetry scene, providing a showcase for internationally acclaimed poets from Japan and overseas. We hope readers would agree that the past five years has seen a maintaining of those standards not only by introducing poets from English-speaking nations such as Wales, New Zealand, South Africa and Hong Kong but also by broadening our venue to include emerging poets.
Meanwhile, the increase of the ranks of translators working to bring to light modern and contemporary Japanese poetries (beyond traditional verse-forms of haiku, tanka & renga) has continued apace. Contributing to recent issues of Poetry Kanto have been U.S.-based translators Sato Hiroaki, Takako Lento, Jeffrey Angles, and Marianne Tarcov, as well as Japan-based translators Kawamura Kazuo & William I. Elliott, Oketani Shogo & Leza Lowitz, Mitsuko Ohno & Beverly Curran, Tomiyama Hidetoshi & Michael Pronko, and Leith Morton, not to mention the newest U.S.-based contributor for this issue, Hosea Hirata, to all of whom we owe a debt of gratitude. Their efforts to express in English—as close to a ‘universal language’ as exists now—Japan’s unique modern and contemporary poetries play an important role, we believe, in finding creative new ways and artistic forms that explore what it means to meet the challenges of living humanely, non-violently, and responsibly in the ‘globalizing’ 21st century. The work of all Poetry Kanto’s contributors past, present and future can serve to remind readers of the world’s rich cultural patrimonies, together with how the poet’s vision is priceless, and how preserving acts of imagination is the trial of humanity.
For our 25th issue, then, Poetry Kanto offers a dazzling and diverse array of voices. Every necessary poem ever written, it seems to us, begs the question, Why poetry? And every such poem as found, we believe, in the following pages, can in myriad ways hint at a perennial answer.
VI. (2010)
Who has not seen the darkening shadow moving across the face of our days, or heard the snarl and growl of the age resounding in our ears, the beast rearing up out of our forgetfulness and growing insatiable by our blindness, and the stories we tell ourselves but the innumerable, subtle variations of what we are capable of forgetting, that flies in the face of the present—whose simple grace of the mundane, like home, hardly knows where it is from? For the bad news is all there is sometimes—the collapse of this state, the death of that heart—that one wonders how to turn the page or to stop reading altogether and make for the stillness, the centering silence where a music reigns, clear and crystalline, a reed belt tied round the waist of the spirit that lifts it past the old pains, the present agonies, towards the deep blue waters of tears shed and gathered into a living stream, past all moaning and weeping, past all cursing and quarreling, past all human dilemmas, towards the latent and possible, the play of style, neither slow and calm nor quick and violent, merely simple, homelike, common in an artless, expressioned and textured turn, intending neither to arouse and provoke, nor put nature’s manifest booty on display per se, merely remaining, continuing (for a long time?) as psyche continues, fluttering into roles, particular and private, influential and public, oscillating in a circuit of you (‘Farewell’?) and me (‘Welcome!’) (‘Peace!’) in accord with our natures interchanging, weak to strong and back again, aviating and slipping separately through the air of our animal breath, divinely possessed of the smallest and the least, the last and the lost who do not look back nor sniff downwind for future portents, just excluding less and less and drawing deeper the draught of air taken into the lungs, and exhaling to where all is left undone, a blank account, a hidden surplus, an unspent inheritance, an unrecorded history, an uninhabited estate, yet all coming together and flowing out as a tendency, an interval, a trace, sleepy and languid, yet bright and lively, the lyric voice noting its concession to what’s next and ever so…
To hunt for traces of places and faces, then, storied deep down under the bed of thunder between whose lightning-ed sheets—crack!—we once to the sacred journey awoke, faith and doubt our companions ever since, read daily and throughout each night where we hear spoken to us the I that is essentially the you you thought you left behind but remains a gift to the we we are --O unbelievably still-- as the days wheeling the words back into mystic chords where begin acts of culture as facts in nature, out of words worlding us towards and away from each other, heavenly bodies orbiting in space, stars, planets, suns, galaxies spinning, wheeling fast holding motions in the depths of the earth, soil and magma and lava swirling underneath as molten masses hurling up these sounds, these words ample, impartial, spoken and heard in the heartbeat and bloodlines coursing through veins and arteries that keep us connected, dazzled, and in the wheel of time.
To remain at the surface of discourse telling us what we already know, however, is one thing. To go down and then come back up again telling us what we don’t know is another thing entirely. If tears flow sometimes, go with it. If fears glow at other times, walk beside them. Show your compassion and forgiveness, say how much you understand that your undoing is not their doing when, undone, you’re merely a shadow of yourself on the trail to a new body, loved into words, embraced as a phrase and stage at which we, from this intercourse, find we have everything in common, even our deaths, save one thing. Which is why, to be honest, the real in you tries to reel otherness in, that catch it’s time now to let go of, to throw back into the deeps before the swells, looming large as stories, swallow you whole.
Yes, being seen through is family work, is how we fulfill ourselves in distributing resources and energy that takes us roaring back to where we started, fresh --though the expanding union of yesterday (proud & defiant), today (important as ever), and tomorrow (just around the corner, hanging on a promise) is still far from over… But to be safe, let’s eye together (for now), those open spaces we can spy up ahead that no photo will capture, no sentence will enclose, that prime location resistant way way way down to a depth, dreams and all, of a lifetime.
VII. (2011)
We are in the midst…of what? Transition? Flux? Apocalypse? Hasn’t the world always been in flux? What is different about our present 3/11 reality, and what do poets have to offer our understanding—or our striving for it—as we meet the challenges ahead?
Poets who work in the spaces between past and present, between imagination and reality, between history and eternity, between original and translation are bridge-builders. …In the poem that is a bridge between, then, where composites of new composures rise out of old composts for the breaking of bread between old and new, let the 108 kinds of sins or desires in Buddhist thought meet the 108 suitors of Homer’s Penelope. In the poem that is a bridge between, where out of our coming together and coming apart are a death throes and a birth cry, let us settle for the irrepressible and the undeniable lying down with a loneliness and a flawed, wounded happiness. In the poem that is a bridge between where what’s felt by the body matters to the mind and speaks to the heart one green thought at time, let us make for the body of our first great love, and remember—humility and hell go together to preserve good humor.
For the journey’s end to an old storyline has come here, to a land of secrets (don’t worry, misunderstandings understand you) where waiting for the ‘happily ever after’ confirms the absurdity of falling in love—the ‘You love me, I love you’ bottom line. Put in perspective, it’s a vocation and a risk we’re talking about, along with promises kept, past the distractions and diversions, in a drama whose casting seems heaven-sent and whose players tap into the moment that, gone but not forgotten, gives birth to a debt nobody frets over—over which one sleeps easy (for a price).
See? ….No longer counting the coast oceans apart but charting one’s own course deep in a dream, payol-ing on the wild side for a sea-change of words close up and personal, that undarkens outlook and opens doors to answering the question not of how to live (who says enough is enough?) but of what it takes to keep dreaming.
For words are ash unless dreams be real, and made flesh. Every word, if heart-centered, is a myth to live by; wherever you are, horizons not lost. History holds us all accountable. For that, we should be grateful. You can’t discard it. Events like 3/11, the temporal epicenter of this issue of Poetry Kanto, lasts beyond our past. Time is not only linear, it’s cyclcical, which puts, and keeps, certain otherwise unavailable energies in play. The poet lowers the arrowhead of his vision to aim at targets he’s already embedded himself in. Once hit, the heart either contracts or expands.
After certain events—including The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011—a new energy from the universe churns what is collective into what is individual to produce the mix Jung called “collective unconscious” which we all share. The history we carry is not just our own. What worries and gnaws at us, like a dog a bone, is all of ours, as shown by the soul’s call to compassion.
To leave, then, one’s stamp on the language, to leave one’s mark or footprint on the vast terrain of the dead?
No. …Better to leave the language undisturbed, as wild and as alive as the day when you first reveled in its glories.
VIII. (2012)
The secret of poetry is cruelty, kindness, suffering, redemption, transcendence, sperm, egg. But when the boat comes ashore, at which mooring will you anchor? You may find many paths or metaphors conducive to the search that puts more body into your mind. (Though words, I have heard, have silent modes mysterious as vibrations felt across space.) Yes, you tell me what this means, I’ll tell you what this dreams—for the dream-making apparatus wants meaning out of the way in order for images to play and word energy healthily to enter your body.
When you open a book, the world is like that. Forests of all-you-see shapes that, squinting, you slowly make out the names for, and pronounce, word by word, line by line, page by page, each sound a menagerie of relations you never knew was there and is not, no not, bound by covers front and back.
The incoming messes—the choice is always yours—that must be dealt with, dispatched willy-nilly, and other messes kept from spilling over, gods willing, struggles for sex, power, love, you name it—creatively transformed by artists and poets to the tune of outgoing messages to the culture, this universally the case, always is and has been, for as long as culture has been wrought, and wars been fought, and love been sought…
If the truth of poetry is not the truth of history, as poet Philip Levine has said, the dark bruise of history painful to the touch--living more fully in the wake of that ache?—like the wound’s line between fatal and vital still must be walked in order to say what we can, in order to be what we can, in order to write what we can, in order to love what we cannot bear not to, as the moon looks in through the open blinds to give comfort, and more than that, to reorient the sleepers’ dreams--for to be starry-eyed is to be unblinking in whatever you face, but not unmoved by what you see.
So stay tuned for the world, from the bottom up. In dreams, as with everything else, there’s wheat & chafe. Not everything speaks to you. But when it does, it speaks out loud & clear of the nature-named world once inhabited by an antenna-ed (not attenuated) race of human beings below the roof-topped skies heard across multi-channels, spectrums late and early of makings from tree-bark, stardust, vital signs under the breathings, the containments, numbers felt not amassed, facts searching not accumulated, music re-grounding not recorded.
Poetry accomplishes its work thus. It knows all about sparrowdynamics in the jet stream, high and low, of imagination. The moral web of the universe is spun by poets after all.
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