Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’
Trigger of Light
I live in the spare, high desert of the American Southwest, a land of apparent and often illusory emptiness, a blinding bowl of light that triggers one to write with an economy of words. The eye follows winding arroyos, mouse tracks, and blowing seed. The breath gathers momentum along ridges, faults, and prehistoric waterlines. Fossils scatter at the feet, clay shards glisten after a sudden rain.
Read MorePoetic Eyes
This anthology, VOU,presents striking visual-poetry (often called “vispo,” by practitioners). Visual-poetry combines visual art and poetic sensibility by manipulating images and letterforms. It’s sassy, cheeky, and sometimes three-dimensional. Vispo is fluid, non-semantic expression that’s beyond the poetic conventions of renga, tanka, waka, haiku, or chōka. The VOU anthology show-cases some of Japan’s finest avant-garde artists. Artists in this anthology have earned international reputations, showing and publishing their creations world-wide.
Read MoreThe Possibly Enlightened Aplomb of John Solt
Best known as a “Japanologist” (a term he might reject) for his critical study Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Life and Poetics of Kitasono Katue, John Solt is less known for his poetry. This collection, Poems for the Unborn, lovingly, methodically, assembled and presented here bilingually in hardcover, a coup of book design by Tetsuo Haketa, is drawn from the contributions Solt has made over 30 years to the private coterie organ, gui, an ongoing journal based in Tokyo.
Read MoreRequired Reading
Editor Barbara Summerhawk explains in her useful introduction to the “Gender / Queer / Here” issue of the Tokyo Poetry Journal that in selecting the poets whose work appears in this volume she was taking a big tent approach: “ . . . there are no divisions in this book between lesbian/gay/bi/trans/intersex/asexual/ally; some poets have chosen to identify themselves a certain way in their bios, others have not.”
Read MoreKyoto Dwelling
KYOTO DWELLING: A YEAR OF BRIEF POEMS by Edith Shiffert, Charles E. Tuttle Company 1987, 115 pages The poet Edith Schiffert resided in Kyoto from 1963 until her death, at the age of 101 in 2017. Her poems appeared often in KJ over the years. This review of her classic Kyoto Dwelling, from KJ7, Summer…
Read MoreCherry Blossom Epiphany: The Poetry and Philosophy of a Flowering Tree, by Robin D. Gill
“The Japanese have written thousands of poems about the cherry blossoms” is something I have said thousands and thousands of times over the years to my college classes in Japanese language…
Read MoreHaiku: Birth & Death of Each Moment
Haiku brings us the birth and death of each moment. Everything is stripped away to its naked state.
Read MoreInto the Hills
Up into the Northern Hills,
up the slender, winding road
to the last bus stop; get out, walk
the narrowing valley to the end,
climb steep stone stairs.
Pause there for a cup of tea.
Ostrich Defies Containment
Adventures and fates of seven birds freed in the town of Okuma, Japan, following the Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima, 11 March 2011.
Read MoreVietnam War Poetry
Teresa Mei Chuc reads her poetry from Remembering Viet Nam.
Read MoreBetter Would Be Ume
Come Spring I’ll choose a tree
to fill the emptiness
and celebrate the birds’ return with flowers.
Poetry and Prose, Mirrors and Distance
Poems of a Penisist by Mutsuo Takahashi. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Twelve Views from the Distance by Mutsuo Takahashi. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. [T]he University of Minnesota has recently published two remarkable volumes of Japanese literature in translation by one of Japan’s most significant contemporary poets, Mutsuo Takahashi: Poems of a Penisist, and the…
Read MoreMekong River
Today’s flowers let me inside
into their vase-shaped bodies
Today, I swim this river
with its fish and turtles
and crocodiles…
In Memorium: David Jenkins
David Jenkins, a longterm resident of Kyoto, translated medieval Japanese poetry (with his co-translator, Yasuhiko Moriguchi) — and made it timeless. He passed away on April 10th, 2000, surrounded by fully-blooming sakura; is still missed by friends and colleagues here at KJ.
Read MoreThe Pilgrim Journey: A Myth Of Buddha
In 1973 I went looking for a Buddha to come to my, and even maybe our, rescue. I wanted to actually meet the guy, hear his voice…Of course, I didn’t find him. I found me looking for him.
Read MoreJaplish Whiplash
Japlish Whiplash is a book that gleefully transgresses boundaries — the boundaries between the United States and Japan, between English and the Japanese language, between academic poets and slam poets, between “artistic” and “plebian,” between “high” and “low,” and between “avant-garde” and “urban.”
Read MoreResponding to Hiroshima
God’s Tears: Reflections on the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
REVIEW by George Jisho Robertson
The bare fact is that the national governments of the countries of many of the readers of David Krieger’s book still hold nuclear weapons, something that only makes sense if they are willing to use them.
Read MoreLanguage goes Two Ways
Language goes two ways: it enables us to have a small window onto an independently existing world, but it also shapes — via its very structures and vocabularies — how we see that world.
Read MoreOn Cid Corman
“(Art) confronts the livingdying going on. . . from within and letting the cry most compassionately come forth and move out – in all direction – wherever the human touches.”
Read MorePoetry, Love, Enlightenment
Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”
Read MoreRed Pine: Dancing With Words
When I first saw Red Pine’s translation of “The Poems of Cold Mountain,” I remember thinking, “This is something important — who’s this Red Pine?”
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