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

POETRY KANTO Editor's Note 2005-2012

                        “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’ 21^st 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.

Kaimana Review-- Adele Ne Jame's The South Wind

(from KAIMANA 2012, Paul Nelson, editor.

Hawai’i Literary Arts Council)

by Alan Botsford, editor of Poetry Kanto and author of Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore

In an evidence-based world, we are forever trying to solve the puzzle of the play of appearances and trying to fit the pieces into place. For the poet, however, the pieces won’t fit, the puzzle will never be solved. Out of depths Orpheus-like and at the borders Janus-faced, Adele Ne Jame travels as exile and maker in an exploratory trajectory between seen and unseen, alive to the always-changing pathways towards the sayable. In The South Wind, a new collection of graceful, exquisitely-wrought poems, she navigates her way through the winds of loss, violence, and the ravages of history–via lament and mourning–towards the possibilities of new life. Each poem marks a destination reached that is hard-won, hard-earned, composed of the poet’s alchemic power, emotional steadiness, and spiritual nimbleness. And each destination marks a recovery, however provisional, through poetic remembrance and verbal music, of what time and war have undone.

In the poem “The World is a Wedding,” for example, Ne Jame in three steely-eyed, deft stanzas captures the dynamics of her late parents’ domestic life in New Jersey. The scene she depicts, while evoking their Lebanese origins, is an extended family’s meal together as they recount stories of exotic travels. In the final stanza, with the visiting whirlwind of uncles and cousins now departed from the house, Ne Jame offers this glimpse:

When the house is empty

Mother sits alone

in front of the T.V. watching

an old movie, the hero smoking a cigarette.

Father’s already asleep in the small room

off the kitchen, having given himself up

to the next small loss, to King’s Display

where in a shabby darkroom on West 45th Street

he will develop more prints

for the movies, ten-foot blowups of stars,

heroes on the marquee, the crowd passing by.

In the poem, Ne Jame’s progenitors remain real and hauntingly present to her. Indeed the archetypal Father will be forever among the “ten-foot blowups of stars,/ heroes on the marquee.” Yet the poem’s coup de grace occurs with the implication that the poet herself joins “the crowd passing by” in order to escape the Father’s shadow (History by any other name), an escape which, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, is impossible. If, then, the poet meets the requirements of a historical reality all too ready and willing to assert its control over the poetic imagination, it is a trade-off the poet consciously makes. Being bound thus to memory also frees up energy available to her as poet and is a function of the way she chooses to relate to the world.

You could say she harnesses the elemental wind to her poetic craft, intending the energies of a poem to be felt for what they are—modes or nodes of realization, not only of representation. When bringing such awareness into language, the poet as maker almost has to step aside, for a very clear force is writing through her, one that would declare: I have mastered the art of leaving, I perceive the forms and change them. The hugeness of the heart and vision, in other words, is mindfulness in action. We can learn much from this poet. She touches the nerve of our humanity and looses a freedom our hearts cry out for. We can, her poems remind us, vitally wake up to the voice we hear at dawn.

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