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

review of mamaist: a different sort of light KYOTO JOURNAL

Kyoto Journal 95 Spring 2020

Reviews

Mamaist Heartbeat Otherwise: A Poetry Roundup


[.....]
       Alan Botsford avoids the two traps that often ensnare poets.The first trap is for a poet to become so smitten with a style that he or she starts to write all his or her poems in that style.The second trap occurs when poets write poems that leave one, after the last line is read, with nothing: nothing to think about, nothing memorable, not a belly laugh, a giggle, or a grimace. Botsford, in his most recent "mamaist" tome, writes in a variety of styles He calls some of his mamaist work "generic poems," by which he means poems that use "generic" language--everyday words and phrases--that he twists in a way that revivifies it. It's the creativity and wit in some of these poems that will stay with readers the longest. In a time when too much of what is offered as poetry is, in fact, chopped prose, it is a delight to find, in a poem called "a mamaist earth of heart":


Yes, you amigo of imago (no scold of clods)--
sing out your amens of names
with booms of bosom borne of boner,
and mania of anima under a cloud of could!
Armed of dream, takes your moods of dooms,
your swords  of words and befriend the devil of lived!


Language is central to what poems are. This is so obvious that one feels silly writing it, especially when one has just been reminded of what a poem can be by language play as lively as Botsford's. One is happy to be so reminded, and also to experience in books such as these the vibrancy and vigor of the English-language poetry scene in Japan.

- David Cozy

A review of mamaist: a different sort of light

http://www.decompmagazine.com/mamaist.htm

A Review of mamaist: a different sort of light
by Alan Botsford

Spencer Dew

“After all, doesn’t milk sound like a miracle?” Not dada, then, but something more nourishing, nudging the unfurl of a seed, “fern-like, out from under / every moment, a tongue, a feather, a flame lifting into the air,” a smell like fresh-baked bread and rich, tilled soil.

While there’s mention here of the notorious nobodaddies—“Uncle-Sam-I-Am” up in the sky—of patriarchal pasts and presents, the gift of this collection is to focus us elsewhere than the phallocentric “I.” Indeed, here, that “I” is surrendered to the wind of words, “a mamaist Daedalus” falling, equipped “with traits of artist and . . . rawness of answers” who nonetheless is confronted in due course with “the coming of gnomic as the cosmic of comics.”

From the hum and crackle of electrotherapy to the notion of light as love, a warm enveloping—from the dark that crows speak of, each to each, to dream horses that may be metaphors for everything but are also just precisely what they are in any given, shifting, moment—such sources are mined via a generous generative. One poem, for instance, is collaged out of titles of City Lights books. Others ask questions such as What if Dante had gotten distracted on his walk? and What if all true writing “is a translation from somewhere” unknown?

The mamaist stance or sensibility, then, is to submit to this, to open oneself, surrendering the self bit, and then

to be taking lessons from the cosmos, in pain and in joy . . . to learn how to walk the dizzying edge between two worlds—how, for instance, to enter a house shoeless like a ghost, how, whenever you read, to read from finish to start; how to eat words—still wriggling and writhing in your mouth—raw, and with a nod of your head to look for the next sentence to be complete...

Official Alan Botsford Web Site

Interview Alan Botsford- DIOGEN Tatjana Debeljacki

Iihttp://www.diogenpro.com/interview-alan-botsford.html

IIntAlan Botsford 

Can you tell us something about your hometown and growing up?

From one point of view, I was born in Sharon, Connecticut and grew up in the Maryland suburbs in relative freedom. (From another point of view, I was born in the state of Connect-I-Cut, raised in the state of Mary's Land, came of age by the healing waters of the pool of Bethesda, found illumination in Came-Bridge, Massachusetts... and left it not at all behind for the Land of the Rising Son.)

But… for the record, I was raised with my three older siblings by my mother, Cynthia Schwartz Botsford, a divorcee who worked for the U.S. government. I often used to wander in nearby woods, play ‘war games’ and such with friends after school, but most of all when I wasn’t drawing pictures, which I loved to do, I was reading books, practically anything I could find, …and eventually, as is not uncommon, one wants to try one’s hand at writing. I had a favorite uncle, a former U.S. diplomat, poet and painter named James D. Hurd living in Washington, D.C. (my father, Richard Van der Zee Botsford whom I saw little of, lived and worked in Europe & Africa.)--this uncle I admired and loved dearly and it was he who inspired me to want to write poetry. 

When did you publish your first book and how did the success follow later?

I wrote the initial draft of ‘mamaist’ in New York in the year 1988, after I quit my then teaching job at Hunter College and my future wife—a Japanese illustrator-- and I had begun living together. Later I showed the first incarnation of ‘mamaist’ to people I knew, among them Derek Walcott who said: “I know what you’re trying to do.” Stanley Kunitz who said: “You seem to be going through some sort of a growth spurt.” Annie Dillard who said: “This is an odd bird.” Susan Sontag who said: “I wish you good luck!” Joseph Brodsky who said: “I’d put it in your drawer and leave it there.” And Allen Ginsberg who said: “Why did you give me these poems? [Me: I wanted to share my gift with you.] He: “KEEP YOUR GIFT!” 

It wasn’t until fourteen years later, in 2002 and now living in Japan, that I published the first ‘mamaist’ book, called “mamaist: learning a new language.” It received some good reviews in the U.S. and Japan. The next year, 2003, the second ‘mamaist’ book co-written with an older poet came out in the U.S., entitled A Book of Shadows (Katydid Press). The third ‘mamaist’ book morphed into Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, an essay-dialogue-poetry hybrid collection published in 2010 by Spokane, Washington’s Sage Hill Press. The book was a kind of ‘song of ourselves’ to/with/from Whitman, a poet I’d long had a complicated relationship with. (Anyone writing in the English language or, perhaps for that matter, in contemporary poetry, I believe has to come to terms with him.) I did a modest book tour that took me to points west, in California, Washington and Texas where I gave readings, talks, and radio interviews.

(For more: http://alanbotsford.com/ ) The dialogue on Walt Whitman is, of course, an ongoing one in the U.S., as he is considered, despite his shortcomings, essential to America’s view of itself. 

     

living more than twenty years in Japan, author of several books, including Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, and is editor of Poetry Kanto?

As I mentioned, I moved here with my wife and son from New York. During my early years living in Japan, I naturally was sending poems out for publication, mostly to journals in the U.S. But one established journal I knew of in Japan, Poetry Kanto, at the time was being co-edited by Shuntaro Tanikawa. I dared send him some early mamaist poems and was amazed to receive an encouraging reply from him. Needless to say I never dreamed I might one day, many years later, become part of Poetry Kanto’s editorial team. 

Magazine is dedicated to the poetry based on researching topics; you're an editor? Are you satisfied with the  Editorial team and the  members of Poetry Kanto?

When I became co-editor in 2004, I was working with Nishihara Katsumasa, who offered invaluable early support and guidance to me as co-editor. When he stepped down as co-editor to devote himself to his writing endeavors in 2012, I became sole editor of Poetry Kanto. In 2013 I was able to shepherd Poetry Kanto from a print journal to an online journal, where it can now be read by readers worldwide, and where fortunately the traffic is increasing year by year:  http://poetrykanto.com/

Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University and editor of Poetry Kanto?

Yes.

Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore will change the way we think not back where we?

I take the view that literature, like many of the arts, involves talking to the spirits. The host—in this instance Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass-- as ghostly, ghost-ridden, the haunting from beyond the grave, from beyond the pale, from the afterlife of the poet Walt Whitman that we, as readers, can continue to live in, and to live out of. To the extent that Whitman’s spirit lives long in his writings, is long-lived, to that extent I tried to bear him in my mind, my heart, and was touched by the body of work that he struggled over the course of his adult life to bear into the world. Similarly each of us can thus be moved in our encounters with the arts, poetry being one, in unique, unexpected, and sometimes profoundly reinvigorating ways.

Poetry. Distinguished poet-translator William I. Elliott and his colleague at Kanto Gakuin University, Alan Botsford Saitoh, both residents of Japan?  

After mamaist came out, Bill Elliott asked me to publish a book of poems with him, which we called A Book of Shadows. Shortly afterwards, Bill retired as editor of Poetry Kanto and generously passed the baton as (co-)editor to me in 2004. For further info on Bill’s role as founder of Poetry Kanto, please read here: http://poetrykanto.com/

Mamaist for 2015's Best Books of the Year in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries?

(From the annals of "Object lessons"-- I once sent a former teacher of mine a 20-page letter with poems and I got a one-sentence reply. It took me a year to get over it. But I’ve never forgotten the sentence. It taught me, among other things, that humility and hell must go together, to preserve good humor, if not, at times, one’s very life.)

 “Poetry is a thing that emerges upwards out of silence.” ? 

The unconscious in its revealing aspect, is love; the unconscious in its concealing aspect, is love; the unconscious in all its manifesting aspects, is love. The hidden, invisible, innermost depths of the world, our world, reflecting our own unconscious depths, past all our fears or demons or monsters—as dangerously, painfully real as they are imagined, to be sure-- is love. This all true art shows us, as the true substance of emptiness, or silence, or death. 

What are your plans for the future creative work? 

Whatever the next incarnation of ‘mamaist’ brings, I hope to be up to the task.

Do you think you have outwitted the expectations?

Not wishing to tempt fate, I am happy to meet ‘expectations’, for now. 

How do you manage all that with so much work that you do? Do you have time for yourself?

As a college professor, the classroom is at best where renewal can take place, for all concerned. I am lucky to be able to teach language and literature, areas where I am continually seeking to learn new things, both with and from my students. 

Is there anything that you could pinpoint and tell us about yourself between dreams and reality?

There is a pool described in the Gospels called "the pool of Bethesda", which was said to become a healing water when stirred by an angel. Such stirrings may not be for everyone, for there will always be disbelief, if not outright rejection, of angelic stirrings from the otherworld. But as for myself, for my part, I HAVE made it my life's work -- for the sake of ongoing healing in my life and in the lives of others, that will always remain in some sense unfinished business -- to try to keep one ear attuned to THE ANGEL'S STIRRINGS.

Have you achieved everything you have ever wanted to and if you could live your life again would you be an artist again?

Whenever I hear this sort of question, what first comes to mind is my memory of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in his Morton Street apartment in Greenwich Village, smoking cigarettes and talking with us students. He insisted that if he could live his life over he would never become a poet. He would want, instead, to become an airplane pilot. I was stunned to hear him say that. Anyway, as for me I am happy to continue writing and publishing mamaist works, in this life or the next.

Is there anything you would like to say that you think is important and that I haven’t asked you ?

What’s it like living as a foreigner in Japan?  Living as a foreigner has reinforced my sense of self as the composite, the patchwork, the custom-made person that I am, and to be accepting of it, to be solely oneself or to be soully the other-- rupturing as well as healing…To live wholly in the world to see the Holy of the world, in which whatever appears before you, whatever enters your field of vision or consciousness-- is love at first sight, reminding us that we can't change the world but we can change the way we relate to the world.

Alan Botsford’s career in a few years? 

As well as a career, I see poetry as a pilgrimage, a calling where old realities die, new realities come into being, the pattern must be re-discovered, or, at the very least admitted, as energies flowing through the human being, and the poet is one who through nature and for culture channels, or better still, serves those energies.

For me poet William Blake said it beautifully: The poet’s task is “To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of man inwards into the worlds of thought.” To the extent that I am able, I hope to be playing my part, however small, in this, poetry’s task, and to have the opportunity to share it with others. Thank you, Tatjana.erview

Poetry Pacific: Interview with Alan Botsford

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Interview with Alan Botsford

Alan Botsford is author of mamaist: learning a new language (Minato No Hito, 2002);  A Book of Shadows (Katydid Books, 2003); and Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press, 2010) a hybrid collection which, as the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review wrote, “combines […] 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”. He was educated at Wesleyan University and Columbia University, and has lived the past quarter century in Japan. A featured guest-editor of Japanese Poems in Translation in June 2012 of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Botsford serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, Japan's longest running annual bi-lingual international poetry journal (poetrykanto.com). His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, River Styx, Yemassee Literary Journal, Mickle Street Review, Confrontation, and American Writing, among other places, and in poetry anthologies in the U.S. and Japan. He teaches English at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan and lives with his wife, the illustrator Minako Saitoh and their son in Kamakura.

Seven Important Questions for Poetry Editor Alan Botsford

1.Given the ways contemporary authors have been trying to compose all kinds of poetry, how would you define ‘poetry’?

.   What is poetry? Unresponsive dust, or Life: you choose. Or it’s the gift predecessors have given you, and that you would pass on to all those in need of reading it. Or it’s one of those gifts you don’t look for, it finds you.

  Yet why you, you wonder? Prayerfully inside outside, hopefully over under, actually 

  there here, definitely before after, is all you’ll get by way of an answer. (Yes, down the 

  path of its pulverization, the dust sings…but as bad as it gets, it gets better when the best 

  of you, as poet, is at play.)

2. Many people say poetry is dying. Do you agree or disagree with this statement, and why?

  Poetry—it’s true, there’s no future in it. Annihilating the self is dangerous. Poetry knows

  this. But when it’s your destiny, it’s what makes the present worth living. That’s why you 

  keep the perception of the real and the imagined separate. Poetry won’t cerebrate what it

  celebrates.

3. What defining features do you think ‘best’ poetry should possess? In other words, what is your personal or working definition of ‘best’ poetry? 

   Before a real poet, living or dead, I’d bow and say: Your potential is paralyzing to someone like me! Your promise is perpetual and perceptual! And O I’ve never seen how one sees the world like you, let alone imagined feeling how it feels if in your shoes I’ve stepped (I’d be the universe and who could mistake it?). Climbing aboard such trains of associations as yours leaves me dizzied. Unto me I receive the dazzle mercifully unfinished. You’re like a god of the beautiful whose fragrances make me swoon! O beautiful expression! You’re the boon without the mooning! You’re as deep a commerce at a sale that I can set sail for, and as mystical a cellar as a cosmic cell locked by the key that energizes every door one walks through, as ever I’ve known! O thank you for your view, for all the things that you see, that you offer and proffer profiting you not, but for free.

4. What are the most important makings of a ‘great’ poet? – please name 3 greatest poets the world has produced thus far.

  A poet who comes to poetry not to chase fame but to make a purchase of the world’s 

  newest names understands that when we sleep, the earth embeds us in its nocturnal arms

  and rhythms, its underworld music. Here a poet can make a stand in the yawning earth

  where poems originate from utterances ancestral as kin. and where what he dives into,

  divides him like knives flaying the skin from the bones. Here, nobody knows who you

  are save by your true voice, summoning you back into your life where spiritual

  revolution-inducing poetry is poetry taking you back to the source to bathe and be reborn

  in.

  Dante, Dante, Dante.

5. Who are the 3 most important or noteworthy contemporary poets according to your personal/working criteria?

  Among lyric poets I’m familiar with I’d include Michael S. Collins, William Heyen,

  Mari L’Esperance, and Rigoberto Gonzalez.

6. Considering the contemporary poetry writing/publishing reality, what are the most important changes that you think should be made to promote poetry as a worthy cause?

  Poetry as energy work, as spiritual journey, is something that can be better understood

  and promoted in the future.

7. What are the most important or interesting things that you have learned about poetry writing/publishing as a poetry editor?

  Writing poetry is not for the faint of heart. You do it only if you have to. Poem-writing

  offers a way of integrating and balancing those irrational energies of darkness with the

  daytime, rational mind of light. Indeed, poems are as necessary to waking, as dreams are

  to sleep. But the poet beholding the boundaries toes no line, betrothes himself to none

  but the line he’s sentenced to writing To the un-belonged he or she would belong-- the

  poet, the dreamer, the flash artist.. We are all here, the poet would remind us, as native

  speakers of Poetry, our first language.

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.