review in Kyoto Journal #99, December 2020 by Alan Botsford

 

a few favorite books

In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams

Fictive Certainties, by Robert Duncan

Nine Gates, by Jane Hirshfield

A New Theory for American Poetry, by Angus Fletcher

Studies in Classic American Literature, by D.H. Lawrence
Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, by Walter Pater
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Democratic Vistas, by Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
Vita Nuova, by Dante Alighieri
The Odyssey, by Homer

Poetry as Survival, by Gregory Orr

Call Me Ishmael, by Charles Olson

On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky

Less Than One, by Joseph Brodsky

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, by Lewis Hyde

Trickster Makes this World, by Lewis Hyde

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Dark Wood to White Rose:Journey and Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy, by Helen M. Luke

The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams

"Conversation on Dante," by Osip Mandelstam

Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, by Norman O. Brown

Love's Body, by Norman O. Brown

Life against Death, by Norman O. Brown

Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, by Owen Barfield

The Rediscovery of Meaning, by Owen Barfield
The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
The Cosmological Eye, by Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart, by Henry Miller

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Selected Letters, by Emily Dickinson

Collected Poems, by Langston Hughes
Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas
Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot
The Book of Ephraim, by James Merrill
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters

In Praise of Shadows, by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, by Annie Dillard
Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
The Web and the Rock, by Thomas Wolfe
You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe
Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
My Side of the Mountain Trilogy, by Jean Craighead George

Madeline, by Ludwig Betelmans
The Adventures of Tintin, by Georges Remi
Curious George, by H.A. Rey, Margret Rey
The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf

CONNOTATION PRESS- Featured Guest Editor: Alan Botsford

June 2012  Connotation Press: An Online Artifact
https://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/fge-2012/1431-featured-guest-editor-alan-botsford-japanese-poems-in-translation

Featured Guest Editor: Alan Botsford - Japanese Poems in Translation

Alan Botsford has published two poetry collections, as well as the hybrid essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (2010). He is Associate Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University and serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, an annual bi-lingual journal concerned with the interplay of voices East, West, and beyond.

---------

Intro: A Snapshot

 

In contrast to the angst-ridden, gloomy post-war Japanese poetry as exemplified by the leading Arechi (Wasteland) poets Tamura Ryuichi, Ayukawa Nobuo and Kitamura Taro, Tanikawa Shuntaro’s poetry carved a new path and became known for its musicality, its pop culture references, its detachment and, not least, its buoyancy. (For a culture as group-oriented as Japan’s, it is noteworthy that his 2011 retrospective poetry collection in English is titled “The Art of Being Alone” (Cornell East Asian Series)). He writes a kind of ephemeral autobiographical verse with a rhythmic exploration of its sources in jazz music, comics, modern painting, etc. His is not an intellectual but a post-modern voice both shamelessly child-like and ruthlessly detached. There’s an androgyny to his voice seldom found to this extent in the West.

 

In the hyper-rational culture of the West there exists the mind-set where in order to speak one has to “break” the silence and where distinctions in language are made, it often seems, at the exclusion, even obliteration, of what lies beyond. In the more traditional East, on the other hand—as in the modern Japanese lyric-- the act of speaking preserves, or honors, silence as its root. Or in Sugimoto Maiko’s words, “Poetry is a thing that emerges upwards out of silence.”

 

What Japan’s modern lyric poets offer is more than a critique of modernity—they embody the effort to think outside modernity. If the ethics or essence of Japan is as “a non-accountability organism”, according to contemporary artist/blogger Hikosaka Naoyoshi, and if it is true, as he says, that “power structures of Japan have a sweetness and looseness, with roots in primitive cultures, not in civilization as in China or the West” [unofficial translation], then its poets and artists contemplate the root-world, the non-West world in such a way as to authenticate the reality of the tree in its wholeness, reminding us how, without its unseen roots, the tree falls.

 

The issue we are all facing-- what I would call ‘The West Issue’-- is critically a male and female issue. Artists and poets have the incredible capacity to cultivate the third eye, to see the symmetry of the underground or invisible world, not only History as linear ‘male’ narrative but Time as ‘female’ cycles with sources found in non-Western cultures, tales, songs, lullabies, nursery rhymes, prayers, chants, and so on. If the West is the upper world of the tree, the East is the lower world of the roots: reality and imagination; tangible and intangible; seen world and unseen world. To balance these forces in a give and take is what true and enduring art accomplishes.

 

Offered here, then, by the kind graces of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, is a sampling from the wide spectrum of voices in contemporary Japanese poetry, including Tanikawa Shuntaro, Abe Hinako, Nomura Kiwao,  Tanaka Yosuke, Takahashi Mutsuo, Toshiko Hirata, and Yotsumoto Yasuhiro, along with younger female poets who have come into prominence such as Minashita Kiriu, Hachikai Mimi and Sugimoto Maiko. Allow me to thank all the poets for their permission to feature their poems in this column, as well as to acknowledge the generous efforts of the translators whose contributions (poetry translations, essay, interview and commentary) have been assembled here--they each cannot be thanked enough.

review of WALT WHITMAN OF COSMIC FOLKLORE-- WWQR

WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Volume 29, Number 3 (2012)
Special Double Issue: Whitman and the South

Numbers Two/Three Fall 2011/Winter 2012

by Michael Sowder

Alan Botsford.  Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore. (Sage Hill Press, 2010)

As Emerson famously said Leaves of Grass resembled a mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald, so Alan Botsford, one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” combines in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore poetry, criticism, dialogues, myths and folktales, hip-hop rhymes and postmodern surfaces interwoven with the wit and wisdom of Whitman’s visionary embrace of the reader.  Botsford is an American poet living in Japan, the author of two poetry collections, A Book of Shadows (2003) and mamaist: learning a new language (2002), and an Associate Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, where he co-edits Poetry Kanto, Japan’s leading bilingual poetry journal. 

Books about Whitman written by contemporary poets often make for satisfying reading, and Botsford’s book is no exception, for Walt Whitman as poetic progenitor stands as the great exception to Harold Bloom’s thesis on the “anxiety of influence.”  From the late Eliot, to Langston Hughes, Alan Ginsberg, and C.K. Williams, poets are enabled rather than intimidated by Whitman’s looming presence.  Spencer may have sought to “over-go Oriosto,” and Blake wrestled famously with Milton’s angel, but what would it mean to “overgo” Walt Whitman?  What would such a poetry even look like?  

Befitting its precursor, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore is a unique book.  In many ways it recalls the Whitman imagined by the early disciples, such as Richard Maurice Bucke and Edward Carpenter.  Here, Whitman speaks as a spiritual teacher, poet, and guide, aligned less with the newly-minted spiritual movements of the nineteenth century, than with those popular today in the West, such as Zen Buddhism and Jungian-inflected anthropology and psychology popularized by mythologists like Joseph Campbell and psychologists like James Hillman.  This spiritual focus offers a refreshing read, for, as I have argued elsewhere, Whitman saw himself first and foremost a spiritual and religious poet.    

In “Part One: The Vision of the Dance,” Botsford presents three dialogues between the book’s author-persona and Uncle Walt, inter-leaved with retellings of Japanese folktales.   The dialogues, lively, humorous, and often ecstatic, present a convincing, modern-day Whitman speaking.   In the first dialogue, Whitman invites a hesitant author-persona onto the open road of spiritual journeying and transformation.  Whitman speaks in italicized lines:  “I guess what I’m more concerned about is losing the integrity of my margins, and therefore the organization of my self.  / Everybody, of course, has got to find their own way of getting a grip on themselves and keeping themselves together.  But as anybody can tell you, being both ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody’ at the same time is what being ‘somebody’ is about.” / “Sounds like a lot of suffering is involved” (18).   

Puns, allusions, and wordplay, provide much of the humor of these pieces.  After some extensive coaxing and encouragement, Whitman begins to reveal the nature of the journey: “Yes, there may be nothing in the world more serious than play, but make no mistake—this body is a means the world has of coming into meaning.  And that is your story . . .” (21).  In the last of the dialogues, “Odysseying,” we come to the crux of the matter.  As befits a twenty-first century Walt channeled by an American living in Japan, the dialogue takes on markedly Buddhist tones.  

The struggle to be remade out of this pregnant emptiness will seem endless, for the way’s circuitous.  But be not afraid of your aloneness, your uniqueness, your ‘I am’ ness.  It’s the cost of doing business.

* * *

Go ahead—now peer into the heart of your darkness. . . . Do you see the 10,000 corpses with your likeness? 

* * *

You must give assent and say yes, in utter nakedness.

* * *

Sing, O sing your heart out, Orpheus!  Grieve and mourn your losses.  (46-47).  

A prose narrative, “Thinking Outside the Cave,” retells the myth of the Japanese sun-goddess, Amaterasu as a Whitmanian myth for our times.   Amaterasu retreats to a cave after her brother has violated her and her temple.  Darkness covers the land and the crops are ruined.  Finally, the other gods devise a means of bringing her out.  The bawdy Goddess of Myrth, Uzume, stages a dance before the cave and a mirror is placed before it.   Amaterasu comes out, like a newborn Whitman, or Eve in the morning, enticed by her own naked beauty and retakes her proper place in the heavens.   Botsford envisions her as “Mother Earth,” abused by modern civilization and capable of healing only by a new vision of the body, by our “experienc[ing] Earth once again as lover” (25).   

Part Two: Filled by the Spirit” presents nine essays on Leaves of Grass.  The essays are more impressionistic than argumentative and and like the work of a poet reading Whitman in the open air rather than that of a scholar in the library.  The subject is the spiritual/corporeal terrain that opens up between Whitman and his sympathetic readers.     In "Whitman and Us," my favorite of the essays, Botsford says this: 

Indeed, in its generosity of spirit, its abundance of love, its depth of wisdom, Whitman's Leaves of Grass' offers readers an order of experience different from what we would expect from modern works of art, for Whitman returns the work of art to its original and primary function: a vehicle of awakening, of enlightenment (78).  

Two essays pick up the folkloric theme, reading Whitman within the context of the tale of the “King with Donkey Ears,” as a means to explore the tension between Whitman’s openness and secretiveness.  The king in the tale must acknowledge the (open) secret of his donkey ears, just as Whitman learns to acknowledge the secret of his forbidden desires, which can then become the seed from which his poetry springs.  

The essays maintain that poetry matters, especially Whitman’s, and that poetry makes things happen.  They see Whitman’s work as one of healing, enabling the reader to discover the self “where boundaries dissolve and re-coagulate in constant flux,” to encounter an “otherness” within that paradoxically is the key to a reconstructed and redeemed identity (80). 

After these essays, “Part III: The Cosmic Flow,” offers Botsford's own poetry in sympathetic response to Whitman.  The first section of Part III unfolds in thirty three prose poems or cantos.  Here is XXXIII: 

Diving head first into nature, this hot pursuit of the right to know (colorful world in all its varied hues) starting over again, at the bottom (a vulnerable labor of love) where the tale catches the rock in a hard place come in from the cold but feeling the heat in a hole so deep that no amount of tender loving care can fill its shoes . . .  (209).

A collection of Blake-like aphorisms follows in “Notes Toward a Cosmic Poetics,” which orient us toward the kind of poetry at stake.  It calls for “Poems like a samurai preparing for a beheading at any moment . . . Poems like Emily Dickinson’s honoring the ‘daily crucifixion” (210).   After these preparations, the final work of the book exfoliates into an eighty-three part poem, entitled “Singing With the Dead.”  The poem opens with an invocation of Whitman as forefather and muse:  “There in your sky, Walt, in your celestial garb / Come down, come down to earth for us . . . Be a taker, Walt, take us into you, take us where/ We can give back to you . . . “ (214).  Individual sections appear like holograms or leaves of grass, each with an image of Uncle Walt, bearing titles inviting us in: “Lazarus of Walt,” “Wound of Walt,” “Walt Reading Emily,” “Daedalus of Walt,” “Crazy Blues of Walt,” “PR of Walt’s I(magi)nation.”  This long poem is a pastiche homage, a hip-hop, postmodern celebration, a spiritual canticle courting and cohabiting with a loved cosmic Other.  

Alan Botsford in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, steps forward as one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” part of a “new brood, native, athletic, continental”—and intercontinental.  Along this spiritual-corporeal road Whitman invites us to travel, Botsford has come out to pull down fences, repair bridges, and loaf with us and our uncle, observing spears of grass, journey work of the stars. 

-- Michael Sowder

Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore

SAGE HILL PRESS, Spokane, Washington: 2010
ISBN: 0-9773447-2-X

Available at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Whitman-Cosmic-Folklore-Botsford/dp/0977344738/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=


Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore will change the way we think not just about Whitman, but about our relationship to poetry. In the space of these inspired dialogues, lyric essays, and poems, Botsford takes us back and forth across oceans of the imagination, of time and space, to arrive finally back where we started: contemplating a body of literature, only now reinvigorated with deep spiritual energy and laden with the fullness of the enlightened soul. Reading this is unlike no other reading you will do. It transcends the borders of genre, time, imagination, and crosses over into the purely experiential. Alan Botsford, and Walt Whitman himself, dare you to stand on the precipice of true art, sway back and forth in awe, and to fall in.

*

"This boundary-crossing work of scholarship and poetic accomplishment offers a deeply felt homage to our original American Bard, a lyrical meditation on the transformative power of the poet's touch and a poetic dalliance with his twenty-first century genius. Not unlike Emerson's own figure for Leaves of Grass as a blend of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald, Alan Botsford's inspired performance merges the cosmic with the folkloric in an exuberant celebration of the transforming alchemy of Whitman's poetry."

- Michael Sowder, poet & author of Whitman's Ecstatic Union


"Alan Botsford's book doesn't need a blurb, but a broadside to be distributed in all the starstreams of the cosmic poet. By way of meditative essays, prodigiously innocent & inclusive poems of his own, & imagined dialogues, this son of Walt has his say just as Walt tells us that he had his say, & thus in the end could loafe in an ease of praise & acceptance. If we'll read this book as it was written, with Emerson's "flower of the mind," it will enlarge our lives."

- William Heyen, poet & critic


"This is an exhilarating book. Alan Botsford demonstrates, in words as direct as Whitman's own, insights into the poetry's spiritual nature and its relevance to the reader in this moment. His sharp language is often radically amusing, but always serious. The effect focuses ones attention on the erotic unity of body and soul as reflected in the language of everyday, as well as in the high art of poetry. The writing utilizes our most common expressions as well as our archetypal and folkloric heritage to confirm a way forward for the individual and for the society he or she affects. These insights heal and promote growth for the reader in moments of breathtaking clarity.

Clearly, Botsford's aim, like Whitman's, is transformative. In poems, essays, and dialogues, he reveals an understanding of the world anchored in a reading of "Leaves of Grass" that reconciles the seeming paradox of matter and spirit, life and death, and self and other. Not through argument but through art, through insight and sensitivity. In images, too, of transformation occurring through commerce between self and other, in crisis, and in confrontation with death.

This book deserves a place beside C. K. Williams' wonderful new book "On Whitman." What a banner year this is for Walt Whitman, and for the "United States of the Soul.""

- James Gurley


"About Walt Whitman, our most observed poet, it is easy to speak passionately but hard to speak clearly and originally. Alan Botsford does all three in the marvelous adventure of mystic assimilation that is this book."

- Vijay Seshardi, Pulitzer-prize winning poet & essayist


"In Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, Alan Botsford tackles the question: Where does poetry come from and what is it worth? His answer takes the form of allusive meditations upon, and poetic responses to, Walt Whitman's work. Throughout, Botsford seeks to reorient us toward what he calls Whitman's "United States of the Soul", and away from the present day's "rampant consumerism, unbridled corporate greed...over-consumption, debased human values, and global ecological devastation." In some remarkable, Whitman-inspired lines of his own--particularly those of the poem "The Doorway"--Botsford does the tradition Whitman started proud."

- Michael S. Collins, poet & author of Understanding Etheridge Knight


"Deeply felt and widely knowledgeable, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore explores the manifold ways in which Whitman's work may speak to us even in the high-tech twenty-first century. In this spirited compilation of essays, meditations, and poems, Ala Botsford offers much wisdom about the creative process, and about Whitman's power, as Botsford writes, "to get through to us and touch us, move us, connect us to the world at our own depths where everything is not subject to use and exploitation but where each separate thing is just what it is, treasures to be found right there on the surface of things..."

- Ann Fisher-Wirth, poet & anthologist