In Avoidance of Things Present

A little something to keep me from going insane while editing an article due Saturday.

I caught her dispersing a rain of sparks
from a freight train passing overhead,
and I began to think, “there will never be
black and white photographs of my face,
at least none to make any sense of me,
who I am, where we are, how we came
to find ourselves beneath these tracks.”

she will be as much a romantic vision
as the warts crusting my dry, left foot.

as the sun melting the large, wax seals
Allah has placed on my eyes and ears.

as the bills of sale for cranky donkeys
in the rubbish piles of Oxyrhynchus.

as Love that reels the planetary bodies.

Tyranny of Intentions pt. 2: Hisses and Kisses

Sometimes, my cursive h's look remarkably like my cursive k's, both of which are not all that distinct from my cursive l's. This meant, in my childhood, that I spent several hours of "free time" writing out cursive k's and h's to the satisfaction of my 3rd and 4th grade teachers. This was not the origin of my ongoing distrust of the motives of elementary school teachers, though it was a significant contributing factor.

So I was writing today another insipid bit of verse, which contained the phrase "were [ ]isses," where the double bracket marks the aforementioned indeterminate l/h/k. Of course, I still know what I meant at the time of writing, but it occurred to me on a second read that 1) I often take for granted that one besides myself can determine whether I have written an h or k (or l) and that 2) the context (a snake nipping at one's heel), to my mind, does not favor one reading over another, be it "hisses" or "kisses." Certainly, "lisses" is out of the question; it isn't even a word (I don't think). But even the question of what word is secondary to an orthographic problem.

Both print and its bastard child markup would deal very inappropriately with my graphic "slip of the tongue." Neither typesets nor unicode contain a character that sort of looks like a k but also looks somewhat like an h or an l. This problem could be rectified, I suppose, by enlisting the services of any of a number of companies that transform samples of one's handwriting into a truetype font. They would only need to replicate my own similar characters for this graphic problem to be represented, right? Wrong, as, you see, only sometimes are my h's like my k's. Sometimes, they are quite clearly distinct. This difficulty could be dealt with by using a macro in any of the various text editors to use one character (the indistinct one) at times and another (more distinct) at other times. The irony, though, is that this seems to be a ridiculous amount of effort to go through just to represent digitally (or in print) what otherwise is very simply and obviously manifest in the handwritten document.

This gets at something that has been milling in my noodle for quite some time: it seems the intent of print (and markup), if it can be said to have intentions at all, is to regularize orthography in a way that handwriting does not and to restrict the degree by which one can actually subvert the goals of standardized print. Regularities in print exist to facilitate reading (i.e. make reading facile), to move interpretation from a primarily graphic to a primarily semantic level. This shift is largely an illusion, as anyone with an OCR scanner can show, because text still has to be read on a graphic level first. All standardized print (and markup) has done is invisibilize the visual interpretation of text and the fundamental role it plays in "higher" orders of semantic interpretation. It permits one to disregard the textuality of the document at hand and render it merely an information carrying medium. But in this case the medium is the message, part of it at least, in not only what it does say but also in what it leaves up in the air.

The Tyranny of Intentions

This afternoon I wrote a poem; not a good poem, not a bad poem, but a mediocre expression of a certain lyric impulse. It runs as follows.

this is what the world needs: an abscess to lance
on a hobby-horse dragon, the puss of which will
ooze along the thigh-meat, past the scaly knee
of cedar-wood shingles, upon the shaving talons.

to slay the boil, they say, is to slay the dragon;
to see the white blood erupt, to calm its wooden
breath, forged of fantasies of fire and poison
as thick as puss oozing on down the thigh-meat.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I had no real design in mind as I was writing this. Granted, that design was, at best, vague and ill thought out, but a particular intention did compel me to say particular things in particular ways. I can't honestly say what prompted the faux 6 beat alliterative line (with caesurae), but it led to a certain mock heroic style that did not in any way displease me.

Upon finishing the above, I read through the poem from the top and realized it could be read in a way I hadn't intended at all. Normally, the corrective impulse would intervene, reword certain lines so as to obscure the incipient reading, and thereby erase all knowledge that such a reading had ever existed. Instead, I decided the alternative reading wasn't so bad, if a bit creepy, and appended the following title in order better to hint at it.

drag‘nslayher

As I was composing those two verses, I had no title in mind, which isn't to say I had no particular title but rather intended not to title them at all. After all, they were merely an exercise, an attempt to filter out of my noodle a set of loosely connected lines that had, as Ray Stantz would say, "just popped in there." Now, my moment of submission to fancy didn't mean the wholesale destruction of Manhattan at the behest of a giant marshmallow man, but it did imply something I am still not entirely comfortable with: that the poetic force of my minor poem had very little to do with myself and my intentions and that it had a great deal to do with chance.

And it occurred to me, as I sat feeling very smug and self-satisfied about how I had anticipated what other people might think, that, in reality, all my title had done was obscure my original intentions. Try as I might, I could not recall what it was that I had been thinking or why it was so important it needed to be written down. I wasn't vexed for long, though, as the timer dinged, and I got up to retrieve my shredded beef tamales from the microwave.

feat. Mummy-D et al.

I was more than happy to see the return to my ken of Mummy-D lately of the hip hop trio Rhymester, due in no small part to our girl Ringo-han. J-hop or J-hip-hop or whatever you want to call it has always been something of a mystery to me, much like its American counterpart, if only because it seems the more groups I listen to the less I seem to know what's going on.

Rhymester often beg comparisons to Jurassic 5, a comparison that while sometimes apt fails to account for the fact that J5's style is much more a throwback to classic b-boy styling. Most of their tracks can be reduced to lyric flow over clever mixes. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but it isn't very much like the much more melodic and occasionally instrumentalized music Mummy-D and company put out. If hard pressed for a point of comparison, I'd say they mostly resemble the Roots, but even that isn't quite right.



A song like "The Great Amateurism" is indicative of what I find infinitely more difficult to grapple with in J-hop both visuallly and musically than in our homespun variety. The video doesn't seem to quite understand the aggressive dynamics of the underground freestyle battle it portrays, as Mummy (on the left) and Utamaru (on the right) move in and out of solo and unison flows with relative ease. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps subtly parody) the hyper-aggressive individualism the rap battle is meant to manifest; at one point Jin (the DJ) even breaks in with a few rhymes. Obviously, American hip hop is as much a culture as it is a(n extremely broad) musical genre, and that this culture wouldn't precisely translate is understandable. Japan doesn't have the semi-segregated, urban often poor communities where hip hop was born and certain doesn't have a history of competitive freestyle. It begs the question then whether this transplantation of hip hop is a corruption (a misunderstanding) or an adaptation (an understood-all-too-well). Are the unison choruses prior to each individual flow a beckon to J5 style group efforts or a play to homegrown trends in J-pop where unison singing (especially amongst all-boy/all-girl groups) is the norm and harmony all but nonexistent?

The obvious answer is J-hop is a hybrid, but to what extent and in what ways remains a mystery, as disparate elements of the lyric performance seem to hail to both sides of the pond. Maybe, just maybe, boys and girls, it's meant to.

Spenser, Taxed

My love of Edmund Spenser is somewhat obvious; I find him a much maligned poet (even though, because of his treatment of the Irish, much of that malignance is deserved), often read very poorly or against some arcane scheme (like the apposition of each of the Amoretti to a particular verse reading from the Book of Common Prayer) likely to make ones head spin. And it is well known that Spenser adapted his Italian models, as most English Renaissance poets did, but that word, "adapted," does a great deal to conceal how a poet like Torquato Tasso is adapted in Spenser's sonnets and whether "adapt" is even the proper characterization.

The Norton edition of the Amoretti has a note to sonnet 43 that reads as follows: "The first and third quatrains adapt Tasso's 'Se taccio, il duol s'avanza.'" What follows are those first and third quatrains along with their correspondences in Tasso's rima (#166 in Bruno Maier's edition) and my own somewhat more literal translation thereof. Note, I come to Italian mostly through Dante, through whose verse I generally have to puzzle for hours, so forgive any gross oddities in my own rendition.

Qu. 1 -

Shall I then silent be or shall I speake?
And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall:
And if I silent be, my hart will breake,
Or chokèd be with overflowing gall.

Se taccio, il duol s'avanza;
se parlo, accresco l'ira,
donna bella e crudel, che mi martira.

If I am silent, my grief advances;
If I speak, I increase her ire,
lady beautiful and cruel, who martyrs me.

Qu. 3 -

Yet I my hart with silence secretly
Will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
And eke mine eies with meeke humility,
Love-learnèd letters to her eyes to read.

E prego Amor che spieghi
nel mio doglioso aspetto
con lettre di pietà l'occulto affetto.

And I pray Love would show
in my painful aspect
with letters of piety the hidden affection.

Of course, a sonnet is more than just two quatrains, and it is in the second qu. of sonnet 43 that Spenser shows he is more in conversation with Tasso than merely adapting him.

What tyranny is this both my hart to thrall,
And eke my toung with proud restraint to tie;
That nether I may speake nor thinke at all,
But like a stupid stock in silence die?

Spenser has appropriated Tasso's double bind and applied it not only to his amorous situation but also to the problem of the poet adapting his contemporary. For Spenser's tounge is not only enthralled to his lady but to Tasso as well, and if this poem were to remain a simple translation or adaptation of "Se taccio," Spenser's poetic voice and subjectivity would be all but eviscerated. Thus, to maintain the presence of Spenser's voice and Tasso's, the sonnet engages in a kind of poetic correspondence whose mode happens partially to be translation. Of course, the presence of Tasso' "Se taccio" is not obvious in Spenser's poem; I never would have known if it weren't for the textual note. So, a third person is invited into this conversation, a figure whose silence in the poem is genuine and not a mere figure of discourse, i.e. the reader. The poem's concluding couplet casts the reader as the always absent yet ever present lady.

Which her deep wit, that true harts thought can spel,
Wil soone conceive, and learne to construe well.

Tasso's "l'occulto affetto" and Spenser's silent speech can only be revealed through the efforts of their absent Loves, the readers whose task it is decipher the "hidden affection" in pious letters, the speech in silence, and the presence of one poet in another. So while we readers are invited into the discourse of the poem, it expects us all the while to play its game: to be as crafty in reading as it is in writing.

Of Music Reviews

I suppose it's easy to bag on music reviewers; there are all sorts of horrible nasty things that could be said about how practically and, for my purposes, intellectually useless a music review really is. I get the sense that these things are written by people who don't even understand how a song works, how it's constructed, what notes are, what an arpeggio is, or how simply things like melodies and harmonies are composed. I'm not saying a marked lack of musical knowledge should disqualify you from ever writing about music, but at least be honest about what you can say. In the past three days I've come across ponderously vague phrases like "vocal caress," "minor synths," and "so moving it paralyzes." What exactly is "vocal caress?" The reviewer in question chose to use it in what appears to be an assumed way (i.e. "the vocal caress"), but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. The review certainly doesn't make it any clearer.

But I understand what these people go through. Despite years of writing about music, we still lack a critical vocabulary to describe it, and often the more highbrow the discussion becomes the more likely you are to be dismissed by the academes you talk up to and ignored by the four or five people who actually read reviews. Then there's the fact that what makes perfect sense in a song (or whose earnestness is taken for granted) sounds almost silly when you sit down to write about it. How exactly do you represent in writing what may simply be tonal variations on a single syllable? By way of example, the lyrics to the bridge of Regina Spektor's "Folding Chair" run as follows.

Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo
Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo

And in that form, a purely literal form, they are incomprehensible. It would be easy to write off such "nonsense" syllables as nothing but an empty form on which the important play is the note or tone. This speaks to me of the way we regularly invisibilize sound, even in songs. When there are "words," we ignore the sounds and talk about the language. But when there are no "words," what do we talk about? The simple answer is, we don't.

Hirate Masahide

masahide

there is a something in words, an unnecessary
overabundance of thoughts and afterthoughts,
such that, as you afterthink your way through
the thousands of delicate, diplomatic gestures;
kind words to fathers of adolescent daughters;
how he preps the hot water; whether he cares;
and every message tutored from wearily living
out the silences that say more than they ought—
you

take no solace in knowing that killing yourself
is the last thing he will neglect to comprehend.

A Portrait of St. Vincent

I.

While looking for a particular photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay on Google, I came across the following.


I was more than a little befuddled but also amused enough to find out why this photo has been associated with an early twentieth century, now relatively unknown poet like Millay. It appears that someone quoted the last six lines of "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" in her blog.

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon--his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Because we, in the academy, have largely conspired to decide that Modernism is what happened in literature in the first half of the twentieth century, Millay's sonnets nowadays go largely unread, even though I think their grappling with the unknown and intractable speaks to the somewhat more macabre tastes of contemporary readers. I suppose then (20s-40s) it was considered as silly to write sonnets as it is now. Fatal Interview 9:

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
No more as now their stormy lashes lift
To lance me through...as in the morning skies
One moment, plainly visible in a rift
Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear
And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,
What time the watcher in desire and fear
Leans from this chilly window in the dawn...
Shall I be free, shall I be once again
As others are, and count your loss no care?
Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain
Be powerless to evoke you out of air,
Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright
Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

II.

I fancy myself a rather sophisticated reader of poetry with sophisticated tastes in music and a sophisticated approach to the interpretation of both "kinds" of verse. I'd reaffirmed this fact with my recent discovery of St. Vincent (better known to her birth certificate as Annie Clark) and counted it a great triumph. This morning the New York Times stepped in to remind me how bourgeois my tastes really are.

Stink-foot, or A Statue of Philoctetes

This poem(s) and diatribe is dedicated to the still smoke-free Michael Andrew Kicey, who shares my name but only in the middle. It comes, of late, from an as yet unfinished sequence entitled, for the moment, "sonnets then." It's number 9:

9. stink-foot

his stinking foot, his festering wound—-ed pride
gets him into troubling shipwreck armies;
mythology and martyrdom he’s writ-
ing on his face and on his pedestal
of Doubtless-Carved-by-Good-Praxiteles
sometime in the second century B.C.

this statued Philoctetes’ tragedy
has one performance, never-ending, played
upon the harpies’ chord—-the harpsichord?
no: played on iridescent surfaces
of people’s eyes, like oil on puddles fract
among the sev’ral sequences of sun,
while all the eyes and noses mumble that
stink-foot reeks of antiseptic cleansers.

This poem has a companion piece, re: Diogenes of Sinope, that, given its clunkiness and persistent imperfection, I won't impose on you. But the poem that follows, a (very) loose adaptation of the Heart Sutra, I will. I have of late, as a means of avoiding "real" hermeneutic traditions like, say, the Christian one after Augustine or the philosophical one after dudes like Schleiermacher and Dilthey, become interested in various "esoteric" hermeneutic traditions: Mahayana, Waite's symbological method of tarot divination, Bacon's inductive "interpretationes," etc. What these less and more mystic traditions have in common is a certain faith in chance, that in the process of living with objects of interpretation in a disciplined but somewhat haphazard way, eventually something will "click" in the mind and lead one toward some general principle that unites disparate elements. The poem, "perficting," isn't really about that.

10. perficting

no wisdom, no attainment of—-because
no wisdom no attainment of, Guanyin
preferred perfiction’s total Wisdomness,
obstruction not of incidental Mind:

obstruction not, no fear of Mind—-because
obstruction not no fear of Mind, Guanyin
should pass imagination mystified
for misty Heart and heartier deceit:

this trap me in imagination conned
of self in solipsism, to arrogate
my ignorance as absolution of
my sinning error signs its namelessness

on pride, on beauty, on beatitude
so shallow it will long to kill itself.

There's something self-destructive about the allusive and the esoteric; it seems ill-defended against the ignorance (read "tendency to ignore") of others and their often persistent capability to see past what it is you want them to see. Perhaps that is the virtue of the esoteric and allusive: they don't have to be there if you don't want them to be.

Nicholaus Doctissimus

this day I would’ve preferred:
raindrops hazing a thin
mist on the surfaced grounds
beside the grass and cars,
so perfect to obscure
my clarity of vision.

preferred to this day: sun
and shine and studded lawns
of undergraduates
squinting in the daylight
unable to make out
when I become a doctor.

Homer, burlesqued

From the preface of the 1770 edition of Thomas Bridges' A Burlesque Translation of Homer, which came into existence, because "our author is of the opinion that the dignity of the Greek language has perverted the original design of Homer's Iliad." Having been privy of late to what passes for "scholarship" on Plato's Phaedrus, I couldn't agree more: the "dignity" of the Greek language generally seems to get in the way of people's reading it.

GOOD people, would you know the reason,
I write at this unlucky season,
When the whole nation is so poor,
That few can keep above one whore,
Except court-pimps and their employers,
With secretary's clerks and lawyers,
Whose d---d unconscionable fees
Maintain as many as they please;
Pope, we all know, to please the nation,
Publish'd an elegant translation,
But for all that, his lines mayn't please
The jocund tribe, so well as these;
For all capacities can't climb
To comprehend the true sublime;
And he that's reading now may be
Almost as dull a dog as me.

from a late Alexandrian

I don't really have much to say about today's entry beyond what follows being inspired in part by Cavafy's "Dareios" and a conversation I had with a moron (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent) about trans-Pacific influences in American poetry and pop culture. Cavafy is a-whole-nother can-o-worms, so I'll leave him be for now.


from a late Alexandrian scholiast in the Roman period, [Diogenes]


on the second burial of Polyneikes

we don’t like to admit that what Antigone was burying
was the ground. we’d rather call it something else:
her politics, her brother, the latter of which belies our faith
in the immortality of the human subject. Antigone believed
this too: it was her brother, was Kreon’s politics.
but the genuine tragedy of the human subject is that it was
neither, that its immortality has nothing to do with us.


on the argument of Oidipous and Kreon

Kreon does not know precisely what Oidipous
too knows not, and his willful failure to speak
about that which he does not know syncopates
Oidipous’ earnest and dire ramblings. Kreon
is the silence to perceive all melodic rhythms
nascent in the cacophony of the poetic line.


on a famous quotation from Emperor Shun in 文心雕龍

詩言志、poetry speaks not so much intention as
the will, the will to create and make, which is why
歌永言、the song composes the words, those words
by which lyric announces itself and not the poet.


of a line quoted by Zigong for sake of clarification

如切如磋、“as cut, as filed;” not belabored by numerous
strokes of anxious care, the beauty of the simple cutting
into living wood comes from unintended revelations;
如琢如磨、“as chiseled, as polished;” stone, then, too,
its surface not smeared with brushing powders, shines
easily having suffered the pain of but a single strike.

自問自答 - Answering Your Own Questions

It's occurred to me that, in my rallying against the vast sea of craptasticness that is J-pop since the 80s, I have rallied many to my cause that do not fit this totalizing view of contemporary Japanese pop music, but never Mukai Shutoku 向井秀徳. Sure, if you step outside of the purview of Music Station, there are plenty of acts like Midori in the "hardcore" scenes that are worth paying attention to, but I focus on pop in my persistent belief that popular art doesn't have to necessarily equate with bad art.

I warn you in advance, the following is quite long, quite dense, and likely to incur a TLDR.



Mukai is not well-known outside of Japan but there is relatively infamous as the head of the now defunct band Number Girl (yeah, I know that looks like a penis on that dude's face, but it's actually a tengu mask), a prolific solo artist and producer, and currently as the "brains" behind the Zazen Boys. I bring jimon-jito to your attention in part because it poses an interesting problem. I know most of you don't understand the Japanese, and honestly it moves so fast I have a hard time keeping up. I don't really think comprehension is all that necessary to understand what Mukai is trying to do in this song. The way he seamlessly moves in and out of rhythm with what he's playing, between what I will call verse phrasing and prose phrasing, creates interesting tensions between the ease with which you can listen when his verse phrasing acquiesces to your rhythmic expectations and the ill-at-ease from having to experience his prosaic rambling over the top of a relatively straightforward chord structure on the guitar.

This song was once described to me as Japanese hip-hop to the extreme. I have to disagree; rap, freestyle or not, doesn't sound like this. There the primary concern is flow, the ease and deftness with which the mc moves from one phrase to another by constructing patterns of syncopated but related sounds and meanings. Mukai's song is about disrupting flow, the prosaic phrasings serving as a kind of vocal dissonance that actually intensifies the easy effect of the verse phrasing, the flow.

I think it's brilliant. It's rare you'd ever hear me openly praising someone, but there you have it. It's pop, and it's brilliant.

Hektor and Andromache

I think I'm just gonna let this one speak for itself, such as it is.

bold Hektor heckled her. within the walls.
her tears his baby beckoned forth.
within the hallowed walls. within and without.
the tempered fighters raged. with iron and
with bronze. between her tears the baby
wailed. what Hektor hurried on.
what Hektor. what spektor of doubt
haunted the hollow of the walls.
in the hollows of her wailing. hope.
she hopes to know despair. how Hektor
shocked. how wholly her dismissal.
of Hektor's valor. of baby's value.
how whole her resignation. wailing
within the walls. the wales within
her brow. without his helm. the babel-ing
displaced. from baby back to bride.
Andromache is bride. who wars
with men. in silence. men's cry
what tempers ironed bronze. what
Andromache. within the whollow walls.
would say. if she were war with men.
Andromache indifferent as the sunset
shone a pulsing star upon his helm.
the march of bold Andromache.
without the walls. from temples
to the waling men. he brow
enwrit with anger. know Andromache
to die complete. in else's arms.

Instruments

For my birthday, my brother got me an ocarina, which, despite having very little experience playing a flute, beyond the recorder, I have of late become quite adept at playing. Certainly, the Dorkmuffin probably didn't appreciate my atonal fumbling at all hours of the night, but that is neither here nor there.

I've had an idea of late, because the wbriting of my dissertation has led me to something of an intellectual impasse, of writing a narrative. I say "narrative" and not "novel" 1) because it seems to me there's nothing much new about novels anymore and 2) because I want to write a work of criticism that is neither straightforwardly historicist in the manner I know my committee wants but can't quite manage to say nor yet another masturbatory exercise in self discovery like so much of this PoMo lit-crit crap I read on a daily basis. This act of criticism/narrative is likely yet another in a long line of elaborate projects I will abandon the moment I realize it will require actual work and discipline, but even so, I like one of the fragments the idea has produced so far. Here it is, completely without context.

"The whole examination room was dark, a living history exhibit you see at one of those themed parks on the East Coast, except I have the sense no one visits this place much not even the sun. Everything is dusted, meaning there isn't much dust for such an old place, but nothing really looks clean: solid metal instruments of examination from an era somewhere between blood-letting and MRIs covered in discoloring blotches of tarnish and in some cases rust. Aunt's old koto leaned into the corner next to the medicine cabinet, and if I hadn't known better I'd assume it was like every other instrument in the room, outdated, without purpose, and without any use beyond anachronism and decoration. As I tiptoed around the room, a stray thread from the hem of my jacket got caught on a protruding nail head, and when Aunt saw it, she grabbed a forceps from a nearby desk, pulled the string taut, and severed it at the hemline with a pair of ancient snips. She grunt-sighed in her usual way, obviously put out for having to exert herself in any way whatsoever. So she went back into the parlor to listen to her programs, noiselessly shutting the door and leaving me to my own devices."

The whole thing is likely to be about music and poetry, but you may have guessed that already.

Ode of a Dying Winter

It's getting to that point where the temperature has risen high enough above zero that I feel guilty for taking the bus instead of my bike. The other day driving on the way to a movie I rolled down my window to happy couples and fattening nubiles thinning their fleshes with pounded pavement; I rolled it down cuz the car was getting hot. I thought it was the imminent spring. Turns out it was the heater left on from the night before.

I have pleasant memories of the winters I have left behind and great hopes for those to come. The awesome puddles that are day by day turning the plains of grass into midday marshes have rendered even my awesome steel-toed boots all but useless. The water gets into everything like a humid Japanese winter. I make my way through these dripping, thawing late winter days with thoughts of massive icicles,

six and a half boys tempted the four-foot icicles with rocks:
one proven immortal when it shattered in his head,
another mortal when it pinned him to the rotting earth

and with the books of poetry, philosophy, and comics I read on the toilet for which Colleen went out of her way to procure a wicker basket, because, let's be honest, I'm slowly but steadily moving every book I own into the bathroom. There, I recall, with a little help from Edna,

There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three--
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead.

Hunting Expedition

It worries me that the beast we hunt in a poem (whereby we hunt ourselves) once caught, and butchered, and roasted, will never seem as savory to the tongue as it did hissing on the spit, where, as the fat melted and fell into the coals it shot up solar flares--the slow turning of the hours were marked by the small transformations from red to grey to black. Once dressed, once sliced and arranged on a platter with a juicy apple stuffed in its face, everyone will say it's such a boar, it's all been done before, the guts and flesh and gore, everyone will make us believe we're boars, that we've all been done before (which we have), that similar feasts have been served in similar ways at different times and perhaps will be till the ends of time. And when the revelers have put away their desire for bitch and moan, they plant their faces in the trough, nibble as much at the tender as at the stringy bits, lick their fingers and retire.

It worries me not because it will happen but because it has: there is nothing to learn from. The past has already learned from the past and has concluded: there is nothing to learn.

there is no coincidence
that burning rhymes with learning
or lime with rime and time.
rime with time, thyme with rhyme:
therein the universe self-contained.

The Quoter's Privilege

Honestly, I don't remember much about Cao Xueqin's 18th century novel, Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢), beyond not liking it very much. I suppose that's not entirely true; I did like Jia Tanchun, but that probably has to do with the fact that she's an asshole like me. Anyway, I was sifting thru my crit. ed. of Yosano Akiko's Midaregami this afternoon, and I found a most conspicuous note on the back of a single page of a Yotsuba! tear-away daily calendar:

Cao Xueqin

"I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as will suit my purposes," said Tanchun. "If I told you how it went on, I should end up by contradicting myself!"

I can't really recall if that's what the quote actually said, or even if it's representative of Tanchun. However, it is the kind of thing I think Tanchun would say, even if she hadn't, in fact, done so. It's this principle that seems, to me at least (others as a rule tend not to share my view - others meaning "my committee members"), to underly the vast majority of textual criticism: to make an author say, if not what you want them to, what you think they should have said. Some have accused me of being unfair in pointing this out (again and again and again), either because it's somewhat obvious and really doesn't bear repeating or because it damns the earnestness on the part of critics who reconstruct texts that are incomprehensible absent emendation. I really don't think it's either of these. It's not obvious, because we still talk about such silly things as the text's "corruption" and its truth lying (note the pun, please - okay, move along) somewhere in the unknowable (yet grossly surmise-able) past, and it's not damning, because honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with making a text say what you want it to. Sure, taken to an extreme, an individual could do real violence to a text but never without risk. You see, it's just as likely that someone will be as wreck-less with what you say, so generally, I think, people will police their own opinions. An illustrative example (paraphrased) from a recent meeting about my third chapter:

He: I don't think you're being very fair to Thomson in quoting him the way you do.
Me: Well, Thomson isn't very fair to Catullus in quoting him the way he does.

I'm not trying to get "revenge" for one of my favorite poets; I merely want to remind the (five or six) people who will read my dissertation that these cycles of reading and re-reading (or in the odd jargon of my diss, "reding") are a kind of invigorating trap: invigorating, because they allow the critic certain poetic exuberances, and a trap, because they may very well undergo the same treatment to which they submit their object of study. This is the game a literary critic plays. Perhaps this is why students from a recent class of mine continue to refer to this grad school "ending" exercise in pointlessness, whenever I bump into them, as my "distortion."*


*Although the real reason is a not entirely insignificant slip of the tongue when I was introducing myself at the beginning of the semester.

Gesang ist Dasein

Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind Wir?

Song, as you teach it, is not desire, not
a wooing of something that's finally attained;
song is existence. Easy for the god. But
when do we exist?

(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1.3.5-8, trans. David Young)

Rilke's consideration of Dasein ("existence") here is, implicitly, almost Heideggerean: I say "almost," because even though the two are roughly contemporary--Rilke was much older and aesthetically speaking from a different time, one from which, ironically, emerged one of Heidegger's poetic heroes, Georg Trakl--the two men had very little awareness of each other. That Rilke parses Dasein, just like Heidegger, as da and sein (common enough in German as the word is obviously a combination of "there" and "being") is revealed in the following line where he asks wann aber sind Wir? ("but when are we?") The verb sein ("to be") is separated out from "there," rendering it placeless and emphasizing that fact. Readers of Heidegger are certainly aware that being for him is not merely a locative matter (being some-where) but a historical (being some-when) and poetic (being some-how) matter as well. The Dasein that Rilke defines matter-of-factly as song (Gesang), a thing of ease for the god, is, in our case as human beings, somehow lacking. Deepak Chopra, metaphysician to the stars, is fond of formulating being as independent of history, action, even psychology, with gnomic statements like "I am a human being, not a human doing, nor a human thinking." I'm certain that someone like Rilke or Heidegger (meaning me) would find this naïve and philosophically backwards. Thus the great, and continuing, lack of fundamental communication between the East and West, whatever they are.

What Rilke implies here is that such an abstraction of being as song is easy enough for the divine, as it has very little, if any, attachment to physical (and historical) reality. But for humanity what does this reality mean? The early Buddhists theorized Nirvana, the state of great awakening or enlightenment, as an escape from the cycle of reincarnation that ultimately dooms us all to suffering. For them, breaking the cycle of reincarnation is synonymous with understanding the true nature of being, is synonymous with independent being. Independent being can only be attained when one eradicates the will and desire, as will and desire are symptomatic of attachment to the world. This line of thought seems somewhat in tandem with what Rilke says, but his own answer to the question of reality is a bit more perplexing.

In Wahreit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

In truth singing, is an other Breath.
A breath for nothing. A ripple in God. A Wind.

(ll. 13-14, trans. yours truly)

Man may seek after the divine, but, in the end, the divine is very little, if anything at all.

Chicken Soup for the Unsoul

woman butchering a half-frozen chicken


this pome accompanies a photograph still
in the negative, still lounging in the
wet paper bath all photos must undergo.

for thirty-six hours it sat outside the
freezer in the fridge it sat cold, still
frozen as it thawed to renewed hardness.

every crack it speaks ice fractured bone
rips the teletype din of her olding son
tapping out half-moons of celery & carrot

a vat of boiling water would bleed of
color, vapor and slowly rot out the slow
perfection of their halfly round shapes.

a photo accompanies this too et cetera

it freezes the vapor or will et cetera

everything comes into focus and out in
the steam that radiates, cools, waters
the hollow dome of the massive vat's lid.

while apple-tasting pie awaits in packages
of frozen dough, thawing berries, fresh
stalks of rhubarb growing out of control.

an appletasting of pie, because it does
not taste of apples: it represents what
thing it only fails to represent at all.

these things: pies, soups, photoned graphs,
and the several states of water (some three)
are all lost in the moment we find them.

for water is dense when it flows et cetera

& meaning is lost when it knows et cetera


For those of you who care about silly things like biography, this poem has its origins in a Saturday my mother and I spent preparing a chicken (this one "fresh" not frozen) for an early evening meal of chicken and noodle soup. I play sous chef in my mother's kitchen (and honestly that's the best anyone can hope for), so I am there, as much as I often am not, in this poem in the form of the olding son cutting up carrots and stalks of celery. Both of us are incidental, of course; butchering, cleaning, cooking, and dismantling a chicken is not the point. An initial draft of the above was typed on an old portable typewriter, a Smith Corona Silent if you must know, but maybe that isn't relevant either.

I was given a camera over the weekend, a redesign by Promaster of a standard Canon SLR body from the 80s. I wanted it 1) because I have a secret and weird love of photography and 2) because it's fully manual aside from the light reader. In other words, it is capable of taking photographs completely absent electricity. My affinity for this camera seems (tangentially) related in my mind to a conversation I was having with the savage last night: we were discussing the effects of living in the abject pollution of early 20th century Chicago on the poet's "voice," both figurative and literal. I, and most classical poetic theorists of all racial categories, tend to valorize the aesthetic possibilities of constraints, yet there is also something much more sinister at play. That more sinister side points to something I often don't consider: part of any poetic effect is what is held back, left unsaid, whatever, despite the poet's intention to do so. The poet struggles against the constraint but inevitably the constraint compels her not to say, not to do. And in so (not) doing, there is created in the poet's "voice" a kind of real genius of which she would otherwise not be capable. The irony, though, is in this process that "voice" becomes something wholly alien to her.

The Death of Apollo

thus far shining Phoebus Apollo standing
at the gates of death let out a shout, just as
a singer cuts the dull hum of a feast
with a single word whipped against the lyre,
the prized possession of some long forgotten
fabled king or of some poor hermit
living alone in a deep mountain hovel;
the Muse infects him, and the music stains
the bare walls of festive minds with dumb
horror, so Apollo met death and lived.

At times, avant-garde poetry more than makes my head spin: sometimes it comes off as downright tedious. Self-reflexivity is all well and good, but in the end so many of these new poetic experiments take lyricism even beyond the most wildly nihilistic tendencies of poetics. I'm willing to acknowledge that cutting up generated text and re-arranging it is interesting, but that doesn't mean I want to read it.

The Songs I Already Know

you write the songs I record
on a tape-deck as ancient as me:

its lovers and loves and loveliness
hiss and spit with the magnetic tape
spinning side to side like a chinese scroll.

hour love and the pithy songs thereof
fill a whole side; the other, a muddle
of the Beatles, of Buson, and Battus
mixed like bad wine to taste.

and as we listen to our love replay
we fail to notice how it degrades
and how one day, out of the blue,
the machine is about to eat it.

yet, I put it in to hear
the songs I already know.

This is not related (though with me you always have to question whether it really is related), but as I lay in the tub this morning soaking my skin and tortured sinuses with the liquid and vaporized states of hot water, I began to think about my first few days living in Mito, Japan that is; I remember having a conversation with the lady who ran the bakery near my apartment--the very same bakery to which I always ran whenever I was pressed for lunch--about "American-ness." I was new to the area (and white as the sun is hot), so she, being naturally curious, asked me where I was from, when I arrived... the usual lot of questions. She asked me what I thought was different between Japan and the US; I said, "not much," to which she insisted the two countries must be very different. I responded there are certain superficial differences but at their core, Japanese and Americans are just people, with all the wonderful and frustrating oddities being human entails. Needless to say, after three years and numerous examples of my behavior, she's convinced I'm dead wrong.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a novella about gaijin life in Japan but told, and here's the kicker, from the perspective of a Japanese, particularly one of a growing minority of Japanese who are singled out for their "foreign-ness." It's hard for a whiteys living in the 'Pan, who are generally unnecessarily praised for their exotic beauty, to have a good sense of what life is like for the vast majority of foreigners, who are overwhelmingly Brazilian, Korean, or Chinese. I think it would be interesting to delve into this feeling of foreign-ness from an outcast Japanese perspective (simultaneously inside and outside) to look at how some foreigners both perpetuate and exacerbate Japanese notions of exoticism. For a "Johnny teaches English in the countryside" his position of privilege is entirely predicated upon maintaining others' beliefs in his peculiarity. So oftentimes said Johnny will reinforce and embolden such notions even when a particular notion of cultural uniqueness is absolutely absurd. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes the number of nihonjinron books written by westerners for the consumption of westerners. Hell, Gregory Clark makes his living traveling around Japan telling them how special they are.

Of course, all of this will likely disappear beneath another thousand books on Catullus and Yosano Akiko I have yet to read, but it is nice to muse about wonderful projects that will never come to be.

Reading as Boredom and Paranoia

A new (academic) year, a new blog, a whole new slough of reasons to bitch about the [absolute nothings] that plague my daily intellectual existence. The Fall is a time at the American university where everyone is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and grossly overfed on grandiose notions of self-importance designed largely to distract students, graduate and under, from the reality that we train them to be perfect little cogs in the machine. Prelude to this new semester and epilogue to a summer that seemed to linger like the walking dead, two conversations:

Conversation 1

This weekend, the Dorkmuffin and I attended the wedding of a longtime friend of hers. We were seated, thankfully, with other twenty/thirty-somethings, that is people "our age," in my case specifically next to the DM and an oceanography Ph.D. candidate from LSU... I think. Honestly, it's difficult to pay attention to the usual grad student banter: what do you study, what's your program like, how far along are you, blah blah blah. This "conversation" was particularly nausea inducing due to oceanographer's nigh unwillingness to pay attention to a single thing I said. "What do you study again?" Comparative literature. "What's English like at Michigan?" Comparative literature. "A friend of mine was in English at [who gives a fuck] and she was always saying how great it was to feel like she was on equal terms with the faculty..." Comp--actually, my program often feels like an elaborate hazing ritual. "[Something about working in a lab]" . I was more fascinated by the silent man trinket she carried about with her. Le sigh.

Conversation 2

I'm sitting in the lobby at the reception reading, because I was bored, and an eleven year old autistic girl sits don't next to me and starts to blather about books. Note: this is the beginning of a classic "Nicholas says something inappropriate and ends up offending a little girl, her parents, and at least three bystanders" scenario, so pay attention to how it actually turns out. Autistic girl asks me what kind of fantasy books I like (she had been blabbing about some teen fantasy series), I say: um, I like Don Quixote, do you know it? "What's it about?" It's about this old guy who's been reading fantasy books all his life, and as a result he goes crazy. He thinks he's a famous wandering knight, sets off on all sorts of funny and strange adventures, is eventually cured of his insanity, and dies. She pauses for a moment, a rarity with this girl, and responds, "reading really makes you crazy."

Reading really makes you crazy.

I was honestly phased; I was expecting the classic "offend a little girl" scenario. But, I manage to fire back: sure, he's crazy, but in the novel it's clear his madness was the only thing keeping him alive. Autistic girl didn't say anything else. She merely stood up and walked away lost in thought.

Epic Diction

I said to the man with his tongue stuck to a post-it-note that
when the world ends and all the Alexandrians and Alexandrines
measure up to little more than a chapbook no one wanted to buy,
people will continue to sing the songs they knew before language
was a word, songs that say what speech cannot and should not,
how the world is made of us and us of it like a geometric
figure with two sides but only one surface: we’ll be the worse
off for only having songs, repetitive and catchy, moody,
as fickle as the passions that order our regimented brains.

It occurs to me, sometimes, while running or engaged in some other relatively mindless activity that certain languages have nothing really comparable to epic, even some whose literary history is quite extensive. English has two epic traditions: one homebrew (think Beowulf) and one adaptation (think Faerie Queene), neither of which sound even remotely like the other. Old English epic is jerky, with regular stops and starts, verbal turns reminiscent of modern day freestyle, whereas the rump-dee-rump, or whatever Chaucer called it, has a tendency to flow on and on for several lines with little to break up the thought into manageable units. I don't think there is a modern corollary for this, and if there is one, I'm not sure I'd want to put it on my Meizu. But some languages, Japanese is one of them, don't have this "seven lines before you encounter and independent verb" style of speech or composition one generally uses to make language seem, well, epic.

So what would you do, if, say, you wanted to translate Homer into Japanese? It has been done (I'm not looking to be another greater Westernizer of the Orient [such things need capital letters, don't you think?]) but always in prose. The Japanese, for whatever reason, are loath to translate poetry into verse, perhaps "because Japanese culture is, like, so super special and unique." Yet, even this has been done. I'm currently writing about a poet whose revolutionary move, apparently, was to translate a Japanese poet into modern Japanese verse. Gasp! Be still my beating heart. However, Tawara Machi's efforts were of lyric to lyric. The form she was translating is largely unchanged in its modern incarnation; only the "meanings" needed updating.

So, to translate "epic" into "epic Japanese" one would have to invent a wholly new diction, one which the Japanese language hasn't managed to produce on its own. To use Homer as a test case, one could easily use a 5-7-5 syllabic line (which is, strangely, a haiku/hokku) for heavily dactyllic lines and a 7-7 for the ponderously spondaic. Metrically, I think that would work; it's akin to how the early Meiji writers created a 5-7 line to mimic the English pentameter. In fact it's not uncommon to see quatrains or stichic poems using this 5-7 line. I wonder whether it would "sound" right, though. The 5 and 7 syllable units that basically make up the totality of traditional Japanese poetry carry with them a lot of lyric baggage. Inevitably, I'm left with the question, "can you sound 'epic' in Japanese?"

The Axe Hitting the Koto

The following comes from what currently amounts to the very end of my second chapter on Yosano Akiko and Tawara Machi; I say "currently," because shortly I will append a brief discussion of Shiina Ringo's "Kono yo no kagiri," about which I've had a few things to say in the past. Those of you who have read my first chapter (or heard me go on about it ad nauseam) will recognize some striking similarities to the way that ends. At first, this was not intentional, but after realizing what I had done, I'm now going back to make the parallel more clear.

kami no sadame inochi no hibiki tsui no wayo (?)
koto ni ono utsu oto ni kikitamae

the gods decree, life takes its toll at the end of our world--
listen to the sound of the axe hitting the koto

"the axe hitting the koto" (a kind of long, plucked zither played on the floor) is even more gruesome in the Japanese than my translation allows. The verb utsu here is written without a chinese character to indicate which of three homophonic verbs it might be. Given the presence of an axe (ono), it is most likely "to hit" but "to take revenge" is equally plausible. "To hit" utsu and "to take revenge" utsu are, though they are written differently in modern Japanese (打つ and 討つ respectively), historically the same verb. Satake [super famous Japanese literary critic] is unwilling to take this doubled meaning into account, so I find his rendering of the final command, "listen with disconcern" (heinetsu toshite okiki ni natte kudasai), wholly unsatisfactory. He would have the poem be an act of consolation, as if to say, "everything has its ends, so this too will have its end," yet this approach fails to accept the violence inherent in the destruction of the koto. Machi's translation is as disturbing as I assume Akiko's poem to be, but for a different reason.

koi ga owaru inochi ga owaru ware ga owaru
koto ni ono utsu hibiki nokoshite

love ends, life ends, I end--
peals of the axe hitting the koto remain

You can take "remain" nokoshite two ways, I think, either as a simple present indicative or as a command. As an indicative, Machi's translation is an expression of melancholy that does not eviscerate the violence of the destruction of song--dare I say--as Satake would have it, but retains his sense of acceptance. As a command, it becomes something more than melancholy; it is an attempt on the part of the poet to remind herself by means of this unusually striking image not to take herself and her poetry too seriously. If anything it is a precursor to joy not melancholy, and it opens up a space for humor in the poem(s) that follows.

hito futari busai no niji o uta ni eminu
koi niman-nen nagaki-mijikaki

the two of us smile at the word "inept" in the poem;
twenty thousand years of love--so long, so short

"futari tomo sainou nai ne" to warai ori
uta yori omoki koi to iu mono no

I smile saying, "neither of us has any talent"--
deeper than song, this thing called love

This is how the first section of Akiko's, and thus Machi's [this chapter is about Machi's translation of Akiko into modern Japanese], Midaregami ends, likewise the world and likewise lyric itself, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a smile.

Ebb and Flow

m.c.

I see you’ve opened your eyes
to see a white bitch playing white witch
playing your tune, so soon she tickles
your pickle and you wake up
to wonder bread and shake-n-bake
fake as press-on nails she wails
you bail, you playa, you gangsta, you hard
you fat fuck tub-o-lard, what makes you think
she want you? she haunt you, bitch,
she switches up your rhymes and times
3/4 to 6/8 she bait you and you bite
each night she rides you. imagine
all the people you drop with skills
and pornographic metrical thrills,
how they laugh
ha-ha-ha
how they laugh

I have yet to find a lyrical voice I can't imitate; even hip-hop (be it freestyle or written), when you consider that I am a fundamentally arhythmic human being in many ways, was a quick study. I wish I could say I was happy about this, but I've found recently that I've been imitating the voice of other writers even unconsciously: when I was inside Anne Carson's head, I sounded like Anne Carson (and my first dissertation chapter is an embarrassing testament to that fact); when listening to The Streets (props to Mike for recommending), I started mumbling to myself in that awkwardly syncopated flow; and now that I'm immersed in Heidegger's language games (which, as was pointed out to me at a recent manuscript workshop, were invented by Derrida), I can't help but play versus.

What Disturbs Me

to find the music in poetry
i put my ear to the page
and waited

waited

the buzzer let me know
my wife wanted in,
so I let her in and waited

waited

while wisps of air walking
thru the window whipped
away the page I was on;
I waited

waited

too long for poetry to sing,
so I whistled some cheap tune
with words the radio
couldn't remember.

Normally, I blather on about the meaningless minutiae of pop culture before dropping some completely unrelated poem like a bomb on my ersatz dissertation. The Gimlet has even gone so far as to name this turn the "typical Nicholas move," but to be honest, I likely learned it, or at least the appeal of the sudden turn in a text, from Montaigne or Anne Carson. I honestly can't remember which.

I was reading Glass, Irony and God just now not paying particular attention to what was being said but more to something that became clear to me at a recent workshop (guess whose!): the idolization of Anne Carson goes beyond your average wide-eyed student and extends well into the ranks of seasoned academics, many of whom I have a deep respect for. I find myself questioning whether that respect was rationally given, because I just don't get it. Generally, I'm not one to dismiss even the poets I don't like, but I have to say, I find her poetry thoroughly soulless. It's like staring into a kaleidoscope: I'm dazzled by the deftness she wields in moving from one image to the next with near surgical precision, but I just don't feel anything. When ODB says, "ooh baby I like it raw; ooh baby I like it RAW!" I feel something, even if that something is mingled with more than a little disgust. Hell, I get more out of "Papa Don't Preach" than I get out of

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.

It doesn't help that as I read I can hear Anne crooning in that nigh monotone of hers that strikes me as the lyric equivalent of Dean Martin. Even if I couldn't, there's no lust in this poetry, not even something like Emily Dickinson's brutally restrained desire. Anne Carson doesn't know how to wield the brutality of words, and her poetry is the only thing that suffers for it. I may be the only one who sees it this way, but I don't care. This poetry is worse than the fluffiest pop music--at least pop songs seem to genuinely value their banalities. This is just banal:

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

And the Poem is but a Fragment...

Yosano Akiko continues to surprise me; it's a shame that her literary reputation was tarnished so thoroughly by the likes of Saito Mokichi (another poet whom I admire greatly) and the various Araragi circles in an attempt to further move poetic composition toward contemplation of the sublime. Something was lost, though, a glimmer of a new romanticism in Japanese verse that essentially died with Akiko, a romanticism coupled with a brief and (as far as the Taisho government was concerned) deeply subversive call for the rights of woman, and both her passing and her aesthetic ideal's went largely unnoticed due to Japan being completely embroiled in the Pacific War in 1942. I argue, somewhat over-simplistically, in my dissertation that Masaoka Shiki's (and his disciples' in Saito and the Araragi) poetry of the mind supplanted Akiko's sensual poetics, for better or for worse, but I think Akiko would argue, from the grave (mwahahaha!!), that her verse is sensual and intellectual, that the sensual is intellectual.

思（おもひ）は長し

思（おもひ）は長し、尽き難（がた）し、
歌は何（いづ）れも断章（フラグマン）。
たとひ万年生きばとて
飽くこと知らぬ我なれば、
恋の初めのここちせん。

Thoughts are long

Thoughts are long, hard to use up,
and the song is but a fragment.
But even if I were to live 10,000 years
and never to know losing interest,
I'd never feel that first love.

Funny story, when I was browsing through Akiko's free verse poetry, of which the above is a mere fragment, I thought the katakana after 断章 (tanshou), i.e. furaguman, was meant to read "flagman." After all, "fragment" would be transliterated as furagumento, so I wondered, "how is a poem a flagman? Is Akiko saying that the poem merely points the way? gives only a rough indication of the vastness of her thoughts?" It would be a strange statement to make and yet is perfectly in keeping with the tone of the poem. As it turns out, though, furaguman is just a transliteration of fragment... isn't it?

The omoi in line one, translated here as "thoughts," encompasses feelings as well. My difficulty in translating omoi in that line is echoed by equal difficulty in dealing with kokochi, here part of a verb meaning "think/feel," in the final line. These thought-emotions pervade classical Japanese poetry, making it difficult for a Westerner such as myself, whose language and world view are predicated on the distinction between thoughts and emotions, to render that poetry as elegantly as I would like. Akiko's poem is brilliant, because it plays off the preconception of the aforementioned distinction while refusing to let it play out in the poem's diction. The middle section is basically one long adversative, but I wonder, what exactly is being opposed here? Are thoughts long and hard to get rid of? Are feelings? Will she never think about first love again or never feel it?

Perhaps the irony of the poem is that its logic cannot be resolved. You can't just "think" the poem, you have to feel it too. I'm sure that sentiment wouldn't sit too well with the vast majority of my colleagues. Feel a poem?! Ha!

One Day You're In...

I'm a little ashamed of the fact that I follow a show like Project Runway so closely, though I like to think that my interest is almost entirely in commenting (largely to myself) on how utterly ridiculous the fashion industry is. I know the argument is out there (re: The Devil Wears Prada, the film, mind you; a book about the fashion world is a bit of an anachronism, don't you think?) that what goes on in the highest peaks of high fashion has a bearing on what you see in your local Kohl's or Target. This argument reeks suspiciously of trickle down economics. Taking the metaphor to its logical conclusion, would that make for trickle down style?

Academia has its fashions too, its trends that seem at times to dictate (for all literary scholars, I think, in the end wish they were a kind of autocrat) what one should not and should not talk about, what one should and should not be reading. For example, in my "field" (of poppies) it's very hip to know Baudelaire, Dickinson, [national poet of choice, preferably writing in a non-Roman orthography], Wordsworth, Blake, Sappho, Anne Carson, etc. It's not so cool to be into, say, Edmund Spenser, Edgar Allan Poe, Robbie Burns, [any Modernist], and so forth. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, as neglected poets will come into fashion as overworked corpses, i.e. corpora, fall into disfavor. But some things and some poets always seem to stay in the limelight while others persistently elude it. Lyric has its "little black dress" in a poet like Dickinson or Sappho, two poets about whom biographically we know quite little, so their unusual lyrics lend themselves to, let's say, creative interpretation often bordering on the absurd. I generally place myself in that category.

One topic that always seems to elude the academic is the sensual. Sure, you may have someone as prestigious as Susan Stewart tackle the senses, but even then the senses are generally little more than an intellectual construct. Sometimes, I feel like Hugh MacDiarmid, but being myself a bad descendant of the Gaels, it doesn't keep me up at night.

"The Sense of Smell"

Smell they say is a decaying sense
In civilized man,
And literature that pays much attention to it
As decadent comes under the ban.

So they say who not knowing even themselves
Think to know all else.
It’s a different story of smell altogether
That modern science tells.

Its monopoly of direct access to the cortex demands
From disparagers of this sense
Who yet rely on cortical knowledge good grounds
For their different preference.

Scandal to have no fit vocabulary even
For this mighty power,
—Empyreumatic, alliaceous, hircine;
Blind windows in a magic tower!

But reason unconcerned with what is of such
Overwhelming concern to the mind
Is only a false face the nature of consciousness
Continues to hide behind.

Like mo comrádaí Crìsdean ("my comrade Christian," the name not the religious orientation), I too have chafed at the inadequacy of our language to treat the non-visual senses with any degree of precision. With smell, in particular, we must generally resort to simile to get our point across: "it smells like a bag of farts in here." This is particularly trying when you have to try and write about a poet whose primary aesthetic modes are based in scent and taste.

La Canzone di "Bitches Ain't Shit"

I've been spending my off hours from dissertation writing (and there have been many) working on my "translation" of Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" into an Italian canzone; well, it's not in Italian, but the principles underlying the metric structure are the same. The canzone is derived from a troubadour song form representative of the elaborate games they were fond of playing in their lyric compositions. It's five verses of twelve lines all of which must end in one of five words and finishes in a five line envoi that uses each of the words once. If you compare my lyric to Dre's, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how faithful the translation is given the absolutely absurd constraints. Bon Apetit!

Canzone di “Bitches Ain’t Shit”

one Eric Wright, a well-known whetted tart,
a boon companion who’d with ladies play,
made turns of verse the lubricant of tarts’
weak thighs—oh how we loved to taste that tart
and wicked fame! so long my purse was fat,
I cared not where proceeded she, the tart
who with the paler ladies dined—that tart!—
on sausages she’d tickle off to trick
them of their coin. no profit her the trick,
so suing me she’d have her due, the tart,
because she cannot bide the cruel streets:
this truer tale for you, ye friendly streets.

seducing girls too coy to leave the street
be, needing minted dough for juicy tarts
we slip in and sloppily out the streets
(I, Dre, And Eastwood traveling the streets)
in games of slapping jack the boys will play
but loving not the ladies of the street.
the whores who like it wandering the streets
will give it up with coin to spare your fat
belly; your wick wet and wallet fat,
you leave her to the malice of the streets
and entertain companions with the tricks
you satisfied yourselves to have and trick.

have got my tipple—Snoop Dogg summons—tricks
that means—to Longplage head I down the street
to meet a wet and fête-for-fondling trick;
so here I am and ready for the trick
with naught but sausages to stuff the tart
and strumpets on my loins like coats, thus tricks—
I, kennel bred and loving not those tricks,
how could I trust a lady for to play?
(wherefore a trick’s a whore) I seldom play
with my own heart on ladies touted tricks
(wherefore a whore is mean); my sausage fat
she’ll gobble up and bolt, her clam now fat.

one Mandy May, whose belly I stuffed fat
each day, her kitty playing purring tricks
on my weak lap such that the cat went fat—
my fellows said for anyone would fat
the lap. I never would have thought the streets
to claim her—six months gone, the bailiff fat
with me, Herr D.O.C. and Dre in fat-
ted carriage hail me, “Snoop, your furry tart’s
been bobbing gents blue while you went tart
and soured;” I seize my sword to trim the fat,
beat down the door to find on the floor at play
my kindred Daz, who with my tart would play!

with wined-up tarts I wouldn’t even play:
both they and I do know the jellied fat
won’t flow through Death Row; the fellows play
on swings and ring-ting-tings, the bellows play
out loud unruly things, the truest tricks
we sing in tongues whet numb with dinner plays.
when fiddling with the sausages, I play
quite mean, I scrub my shrub on washboard streets,
I comb fur coats with tender boys the street
grinds down—I wouldn’t say that I would play
with any ring-ding-dong, but any tart
with tongue out long would make a man go tart.


Envoi:

amounting to but naught the saucy tart
on meat would suckle and with balls would play
until with satisfaction I’d be fat:
she’d find her way to yet another trick,
and I’d find fresh conveyance thru the streets.

The (Not Quite) New into the Old

My first encounter with Dr. Dre's 1992 effort The Chronic was in my brother's car, back in the days when "your first car" generally meant no air conditioning, in the middle of summer, windows rolled down, an old school Sony Discman slightly larger than my Wii connected to a cigarette lighter for power and an odd tape adapter designed to interface the digital with the hopelessly analog. A melancholic bit of verse I wrote while watching the wonderfully awful Dead Poets Society (whose only useful truth is that A Midsummer Night's Dream leads to suicide) reminded me of how sweaty I felt.

I wanted to rid my happiness of hap
and happenstance – what sweeps me
into piles of dirt and wasted skin –
I was made of what others had left
behind. I knew and tried to be hip,
but the hipper I felt the more I saw
dust and ash the substance of myself:
ash, for I was burned and sooted well,
to dust,

That's all the further I got. My most recent encounter with The Chronic, where Ben Folds actually got a bunch of folk-loving Ann Arborites to chant "bitches can't hang with the streets," led to a quizzical moment with the Gimlet before a snooze of a job talk, where we hypothesized Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" as a 14th century canzone. Our initial efforts were giggle worthy (as are most of our earnest efforts), so I decided to take up the task. The work is still in progress, but my first offerings (the first stanza and envoi) show promise, I think.

Canzone di “Bitches Ain’t Shit”

one Eric Wright, a well-known whetted tart,
a boon companion who’d with ladies play,
made turns of verse the lubricant of tarts’
weak thighs—oh how he loved to taste that tart
and wicked fame! so long my purse was fat,
I cared not where proceeded she, the tart
who with the paler ladies dined—that tart!—
on sausages she’d tickle off to trick
them of their coin. no profit her the trick,
so suing me she’d have her due, the tart,
because she cannot bide the cruel streets:
this truer tale for you, ye friendly streets.

Envoi:

amounting to but naught the saucy tart
on meat would suckle and with balls would play
until with satisfaction I’d be fat:
she’d find her way to yet another trick,
and I’d find fresh conveyance thru the streets.

I wonder how a song of Dre's would measure on the infamous J. Evans Pritchard scale. What would its total area be?

Getting Where You Want to Go

Mozart's birthday approaches, so I'm in full on personal funk mode; it doesn't help that I just spent a ton of cash on a veritable mound of 78's and have nothing really to play them on. I had to settle for humming "Collegiate, collegiate, yes we are collegiate" while holding the record in my hand. It didn't help.

A couple of weeks ago, I just barely missed the bus. Normally, this wouldn't be much of an event: I'd wander into the basement of the Union (cuz it's too fucking cold to be standing outside for a half hour) and pick at the crusty necrotic skin on the tip of my slowing healing finger as I sit gazing at the legions of sweaties not studying a god damn thing. But I got it in my mind to walk home. Mind you, this is not a decision to be made lightly, as I live more than a half hours walk from campus. I'd get back to my apartment just as the next bus would be pulling up nearby.

the bus stop

it has escaped me that I must walk
several blocks in the wrong direction
in order to get where I want to go

I was trying to explain to my students the weird circular logic Plato employs in the Symposium to make the simple point that to a certain extent eros is philia. They couldn't fathom why he'd need to pile hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay just to say that A is B. Well, when A and B are generally thought to be opposed, thus more A and Z, you've gotta do a bit of leg work in order to equate one with the other. You've gotta walk people through step by step, so that when you realize that you're at Z, it seems perfectly natural that you got there. The rhetorical landscape changes ever so slowly that you hardly realize you've gone anywhere at all. Of course, once you wake up from your sycophantic stupor (yes, Socrates - of course, Socrates - sure is, Socrates), you might realize that everything you've been fed is a load of crap.

It's amazing how by merely changing the mode of transportation, you enter an altered state of consciousness. You begin to notice things, generally little things, that in speeding past to your destination, you'd never give a second thought. I'm not trying to propound something as trite as "the road less traveled by" Cavafy's notion that the journey's the thing, but rather that how you get to what you want to know is just as important in producing meaning as the things you discover along the way. Socrates helps us get to know eros: in deconstructing eros bit by bit we become intimate with it in the way philia would demand, i.e. slowly getting closer and closer. By enacting the demands of philia rather than simply stating them and performing some pate comparison, we come to eros without ever quite blowing our load in the way we would if we simply lept to conclusions. The irony of the Symposium is that Plato would have us assume a philic (is that even a word?) relationship with eros and deny the opposition. That brings a whole new meaning to "getting to know" someone.

Two Nouns

It was a bit of an experiment to occupy my mind as it refused to sleep: a pair of quatrains in iambic pentameter (not strictly so, obviously - I'd rather say what I have to say than be a slave to meter) on a pair of images I'd had floating around in my brain during the car ride from my parents' house to Colleen's mother's; one a fantasy (an Alexandrian library abuzz with men reading [aloud] and as such performing books) and the other a familiar reality. I'd written [sic] two perfect quatrains (as perfect goes) in my head, rehearsed them for a few hours (or so it seemed), and eventually went to sleep.

The next day, Christmas, I spent the last leg of a twelve hour car ride with Colleen and her mother to North Dakota tossing about the two quatrains, or at least what I could remember of them.

two nouns

a finest tomb for books and brains on the verge
of calling each other minds in the clear light
of a quiet beam lying still against
[

the old, Alexandrian chatterbox
kicking up dusty clouds of noisome bodies
sweating out[
]silent tongues.

The square bracket thing I stole from Anne Carson (who stole it from editors of classical texts) to represent a lack, specifically what I couldn't remember despite repeating it back to myself off and on for a few hours. Once I finally gave up, I noticed something about the flow of these two quatrains - rather their new flow, the happy result of artifice and chance. I hadn't intended it, but the accidental result of "lying still against... the old, Alexandrian chatterbox" both cements the juxtaposition of these two visions of libraries and elides them. This is how flow is supposed to work, I think it says something about the machinations of my brain that I only stumbled upon it. A more studied example of how I would approach flow came to me as Colleen's Aunt Tracy's cat was busy shedding all over me, and her Uncle Bob waited in the backyard for a buck to come along so he could shoot it in the head.

in minds
entombed
in books
encrypted--
in books
entombed
in bricks
envisioned--
in minds
enslaved
to books
imprinted--
two books
enslaved
to brains
implanted--

I intended this as a round or a series of lines whose "end" could flow grammatically back into the beginning like a verbal Möebius strip. This isn't quite how flow generally works in hip-hop, but it was at least an attempt at a kind of poetry whose embedded sound patterns are a bit more comprehensible than the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets'.

shiawase na goro ni kiiteta ongaku o
pokke ni irete
chikatetsu ni noru

the music I listened to when I was happy
I put in my pocket
and get on the subway

In the past, I've referred to Sato Mayumi's poetry as, well, shallow, perhaps because I didn't exactly get it at first. Unlike, say, Tawara Machi, oft praised for revolutionizing waka diction, who largely adheres to the conventions of classical versification, Mayumi has found a place for lines in a poetic form that has been by and large line-less. More than that, her language is thoroughly mundane, whose lack of profundity I originally took for banality, and seeks to find in the mundane something sublime. By breaking up the single line form she manages to effect a series of semantic turns not unlike what I remember Mike mentioning in relation to the choruses of the Oedipus Tyrannos.

shinu koto no
kimatta hito no
sewa o suru you ni
waratte bakari ita
koi

a love
where you can but smile
as if caring for
someone who's decided
to die

The problem inherent in translating this poem is a matter of the diametrically opposed syntaxes of Japanese and English. Where my translation moves from love to death, Mayumi's moves from death to love: shinu koto no (to die) kimatta hito no (person who's decided) sewa o suru you ni (as if caring for) waratte bakari ita (do nothing but smile) koi (love). Thus the semantic progression becomes, according to the sequence of lines, "to die - a person who's decided to die - as if caring for someone who's decided to die - doing nothing but laugh as if caring for someone who's decided to die" and all that ends up modifying the simple word "love." The move from death to love is synonymous with, in my mind, the emergence of hope, making my move from love to death synonymous with despair. I'd get pretty down about translation, then, if I didn't occasionally remind myself--accidentally--that something is gained, even in loss.

Two Short Essays on Nausea

the best songs are dyspeptic, you see,
or do not, should you be blinded
by afterthoughts of nausea the lyric
posits in your stomach's brain;
the best songs are the worst you feel
dripping into your weak bowel--
the best you can do with songing it
is, in feeding your throat soundthoughts,
fail to say what you mean and let
them chew on the uncooked notion that
the best songs survive the acids
and the squeeze and find themselves
embedded in the warm, brown folds
of wet, discarded nutriment.

***

Upon examining the constitution of my diarrhetic leavings in the toilet, before sending them on their way to flushland, I was able to make out a few kernels of corn and a roasted mushroom: my stomach flu must have made them pass through my system too quickly. That was when I remembered reading - maybe in high school - how the prisoners at Auschwitz, Dachau, and those other German horrors would be so starved at times they would pick through their own feces in order to find any undigested bits of food. I can't imagine what kind of happiness there is in finding a golden kernel of corn wrapped in a warm, brown turd. And happiness it is, or at least joy, a kind of joy we'd never entertain outside of a purely intellectual exercise; we might try to simulate such happiness but inevitably fail due to our unwillingness to admit that profound joy demands profound suffering. In this unwillingness we (pace our savage friends) are quintessentially American.

Of saying something (or nothing)

It struck me, sitting among a smallish group of poetry nerds, whose workshops I regularly attend, though I bitch about it endlessly, up to my ears in "organic" pizza, that (you were probably wondering when I'd get to the point and stop blathering on about pointless mood setting) poets and those of us who condescend to write about them, these days at least, are terrified of saying anything about music, especially if it happens to be particularly germane to some metrical or phrasal concern in a poem. It's not that they lack the education to speak of such things in at least a rudimentary fashion: most edumacated types know how time works in music, the difference between measure and phrase, the effect of certain rhythms and intervals, etc. But any obvious analogy between poem and song, perhaps as a result of our resentment of Victorian and Modernist obsessions with music and verse--after all, we write about Victorians and Modernists these days; we'd never emulate them--or our innate fear of true interdisciplinarity, is demurred or ignored or outright dismissed. Of course, by we I mean we nervous hand-wringing whitey types; our savage friends need not apply.



Analogous to this fear of music, rather of saying something about music, as if music were porn and, even though we all listen to it, no one really wants to admit owning any, is a fear of media; scholars of poetry (well, the more ancient the poetry the more unavoidable this concern is) are generally not held to account for failing to interrogate the materiality of their texts, and those who do attempt to hold them accountable are typically dismissed or treated in an excruciatingly condescending manner. The danger is that we as scholars will become ever increasingly alienated from poetry. Poetry isn't just also aural anymore, it's visual as well. Images, not just descriptions of them, in motion are now just as germane to the study of poetry as music always was.

I'm a whisper in water
a secret for you to hear
you're the one who grows distant
when I beckon you near

No one could ever accuse Bjork of being banal, occasionally incomprehensible and hard to listen to, but never banal. At the moment she sings this verse, if you were merely listening to the song, say, on a bus on your way to teach yet another class on the Antigone to a group of fresh-persons who barely understand the plot much less the complexities of the imagery, you might think this yet another in the series of perplexing existential statements Bjork lays before you. But in the context of the video, it is precisely at this moment that the staged version of "My Story" has arrived at the point where "My Story" is staged. Not only does the play alienate "My Story" from its audience by adding this extra medial layer, it becomes alienated from itself. As the lyric says, "you're the one who grows distant / when I beckon you near." Any attempt to to create greater intimacy through art (thru artifice?) is futile or merely perhaps complicated by the manner in which it reinforces the distinction between "you" and "me." The very act of beckoning, calling one towards yourself, a kind of desperate invocation, implies distance and reminds us of the separation that is almost synonymous with the manner in which numerous iterations of a message, a poem, a song, will ultimately call attention to their respective medium.

I'm a fountain of blood
in the shape of a girl
you're the bird on the brim
hypnotized by the whirl

It is possible, isn't it, that our media are so new (not all that new, though) that we have yet to form the vocabulary that will eventually alienate us from them, so that we may discuss them and dissertate as we do with those Victorians and Modernists. There is a moment now in which our silence permits us to enjoy music and the lyric cinema that accompanies them, just like porn. For the moment, perhaps it is okay for us to say nothing.

Equus

I'll start at the end, I suppose. Tonight I watched "Equus," the film of the play starring Richard Burton. I've seen and read the play; I hadn't seen the movie. What struck me, and Colleen as well, is how what is a mere undercurrent in the play, the boy's substitution of horse worship for an eviscerated Christianity, is made almost egregiously explicit. Now, I'm not one to throw out platitudes about how I like things to be left to the imagination, but the movie said too much. In being explicit it really took away from the psychiatrist's desire to know. In the play, Dysart's drive to probe this boy in session is spurred by the enigmatic nature of what he has to say. He is accustomed to being so far removed from the kind of passion the boy has, he is entirely ignorant of the stirring his own fervor when it comes upon him.

This morning, entirely coincidentally, I penciled the following, much to the chagrin of a neighboring student who genuinely thought I should be paying attention to a lecture I was hearing for the fourth time.

achilles

at least your horses were immortal, boy,
enough to eat the grass whose generations’
coming and leaving you would never see,
whose forgetting winter reminds you that
you are the undead caught somewhere
between the choices of life and the unchoices
of death, arching your neck to catch a glimpse
of uncorpses whinnying and shaking
their hoarse-hair plumes, that brush against the sun
and clear away the dust of prior sunsets,
the dust disguised among the talling weeds
whose shallow roots barely scratch the earth;
your neck a crane, an insufficient bird

At the time, I couldn't come up with a final line. I had in my mind the image I wanted, a neck craning up in a futile attempt to see past to the sun beyond. Even now I can visualize it so perfectly. I threw so many words at it to plumb its depths. None of them stuck. It wasn't until I gave up that image that I was able to pen a final final line.

to overcome the mounds of tombing dirt.

Sometimes in order to speak, to at least say something, we must bury what we can truly only see or feel. That's not necessarily in the movie, but there were horses.

Ad hominem

It is a shame that one of the greatest works of contemporary Western literature, partially because it is a comic and partially because its author is a raving egomaniac, may simply disappear from the radar and merge with nothingness. It is a shame, because comics struggle so hard to be taken seriously by our lot, most of whom are in fact at their least tolerant when it comes to judging the relative merits of a work of literary art, and fail largely due to the gleaming appeal of commercial viability. A comic, for the most part, is quite expensive to produce on the same scale as a 10,000 run new novel. Thus, the economic concern is ever more pressing, and even slight financial loss considered the death knell of a burgeoning career.

Let's not mince words: Dave Sim is an asshole. So, it should come as no surprise that his character, Cerebus, whose whole life Sim chronicled in the 300 issue eponymous opus that recently found its permanent end (Cerebus dies in the final issue) in March 2004, is also an asshole. Sim has managed to alienate most of his friends in comics, many of whose careers he practically made, due in no small part to his well-articulated but not always logically grounded anti-feminism. I refrain from saying misogyny, like so many do, in part because that word conjures the image of a liquor pickled troglodyte who assumes women ought to be in a position of subjection for no real good reason. Sim, however, is a celibate, who openly deplores the materialism of modern society, intends to let his work go into the public domain upon his death, has engaged productively if indirectly with prominent feminist and psychoanalytic critics, and mostly avoids women entirely, seeing "them" as beyond hope. Sim's "problem," which interestingly always seems to be Cerebus's problem as well, is a complete idiosyncrasy mixed with harsh iconoclasm. He is a bridge-burner par excellence, whose overreaction to an argument usually ends up finding him more alone than before.

Cerebus is a compelling character not simply because he has been thoroughly fleshed out--6,000 pages dedicated to one character will tend to do that--but also because his nigh pure selfishness permits him to slip into any social role. He begins his literary life as a barbarian mercenary, later becomes prime minister of a wealthy city state, later pope, later a transcendent mystic, later an introspective bohemian, later an adventuresome nomad, later a sports hero, later a rabid comic book (which in the Cerebus universe are called "reads") fan, later a textual critic, later the ruler of the known world, but always a complete drunk. Cerebus's life view is brutally consistent, which is perhaps what made him initially so compelling and later wholly repulsive to any but the most ardent fan.

Cerebus demands precisely the kind of critical work I abhor: the unified monograph. It's hard to approach the work at this point, for there is no shared critical vocabulary upon which a community of scholars could build. It doesn't help that the work itself says so much and invites the reader to say so much more, rendering it a veritable hermeneutic black hole. A monograph could do for Cerebus what Kaufmann did for Nietzsche in the U.S.; it could provide both the imprimatur literary texts unfortunately need in this cacophonous critical environment and the groundwork later critics both wittingly and unwittingly trope.

Oh, and did I mention Cerebus is an aardvark?

Puns

I thought I'd take a different tack this time, as I've been becoming increasingly unwilling to explain myself in English, I figure if I throw out something in Japanese, I have no choice but give some account of it.

All poetry for me is occasional, I rarely, if ever sit down with a prescribed idea to work through it and edit it until it shines. This is why so many of my recent sonnets have something of an unpolished feel: they're all off the top of my head. Even the "pet epic" I wrote as an undergrad was a surprisingly coherent mish-mash. Anyway, I was bored with Sappho and Catullus one day, so I penciled the following in one of my tiny notebooks:

神の苦に天の白花を見に行って
　霜の句がよめなくなると馬鹿

kami no ku ni ama no shirobana o mi ni itte
shimo no ku ga yomenaku naru to baka

it's so stupid that I see the white flower of heaven
in the gods' sorrow while failing to read the frost's verse.

Of course, it's not that simple. The two halves of this tanka turn on the paired phrases kami no ku and shimo no ku, "gods' sorrow" and "frost's verse" respectively. Those phrases are homophonous with the technical terms for the "upper verse" and "lower verse" of a traditional Japanese poem, due to the fact that the two halves of a tanka were generally written as a single vertical line. So, alternatively,

it's stupid that I watch the white flower of an upper verse
while failing to read the verse below.

The "upper verse" of a tanka is what was historically called a hokku, what we and our Japanese contemporaries would probably call a haiku. Part of the conceit of the poem is not only the failure of considering the divine absent its worldly counterpart but also the failure to see in a derived form, that so often is mistaken by we Anglo types as complete and perfect, its historical companion. Part of what authorized poets like Masaoka Shiki and the Americans who idolized him to say such superbly wacky things about the composition of haiku was the erasure of its historical condition as one of a pair in linked verses.

Which brings me to the verb yomu, inflected here as yomenaku ("unable to yomu"), which generally means to read, but often in the context of poetry means "to compose" or "to recite," because etymologically they share a common origin in an 8th century verb, also yomu, which meant to count aloud rhythmically in much the same way we as children recite the alphabet. What I mean to say with this cascade of odd puns, which I can only do prosaically, is "it's stupid to look for some kind of divine pathos in the seemingly lotus/haiku, all the while ignoring the rich tradition of suffering and sensation here on earth." It's not one over the other, just as the tanka contains both.