Late Fees?

A couple of days after arriving at York, I went with Brad and John to the public library. The only necessity of our trip was to procure a library card for local discounts and such, but of course we also managed to pick up a truckload of books. Now, I'm pretty proud that I've managed to actually finish more than half of them, and have spent a little time with each and ever one. That's pretty good for me. But, the due date is already past and thus I am forced to return them before I would like. Here's a record of their life with me, though, before they're returned to the shelves. Who knows if anyone else will spend time with them or love them ever again?

C.K. Stead - "The New Poetic"
- an analysis of British poetry from early Yeats through the Georgians and War Poets up to Eliot's "Four Quartets," this influential book/essay uses a very potent model for tracking the relationships between poet, audience, and subject matter and ends up arriving at the central discussion of what poetry is and does

Czeslaw Milosz - "Facing the River"
- I finally found an actual collection of Milosz's poems and was greatly rewarded; I would highly recommend this dark but fertile revelation of Milosz's mind and life, one of his last

Billy Collins - "Nine Horses" and "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"
- more clever, quirky, occasionally moving, but above all casual poetry from this laid-back master of easy-going poems

Samuel Beckett - "For To End Yet Again and Other Fizzles"
- inciting mind/word-play akin to James Joyce; an intriguing experimental form (or poetry?) but not sustainable beyond the few pages of each individual fizzle

Seamus Heaney - "District and Circle"
- I enjoyed his direct engagement with other writers and his impressive lexicon--an expansive mix of local-feeling Anglo-Saxon words littered like rocks or peat amongst international landscape of bamboo and Italian architecture--but overall, I had trouble engaging the poems

Ezra Pound - "Poems selected by Thom Gunn"
- I read Gunn's brief introduction and a few excerpts--I'm still not sure what I think of Pound, beyond the obligatory nod for his midwifery role in Modernist poetry

Luigi Pirandello - "Collected Plays"
- again, the introduction was informative, but I didn't have time to actually read any of the actual plays

Deitrich Bonhoffer - "Ethics"
- I glanced over the section on Vocation and on Government, only to be slightly disappointed. maybe someday I'll be able to engage the whole book, since he himself considered it such an important undertaking

a diverse, manic array

Well, I have just returned from that most dangerous of places, the library. I only intended to do some homework there for a few hours, but I was soon lured into its dark recesses in search of incredibly interesting books that I can check out but will never have the time to read. Tonight, I returned with 11 such masterpieces, as follows:

- "Joan Miro: Selected Paintings" - Smithsonian Institution (this one is mostly legit, as I'm supposed to write a poem about a piece of art for my creative writing class)
- "Leisure and Culture" - Chris Rojek (completely unnecessary, but how could I resist a chapter entitled "The Abnormal Forms of Leisure"?)
- "The Philosophy of Sustainable Design" - Jason F. McLennan (I'm hoping this will be one of those books that has an introduction or first chapter that explains all the issues and thus allow me to feel intelligent about something of which I know nothing)
- "Dwellings: The House across the World" - Paul Oliver (there are a lot more possibilities than just the suburbs)
- "Diagrams: A Visual Survey of Graphs, Maps, Charts, and Diagrams for the Graphic Designer" - Arthur Lockwood (these are bizarre, hilarious, interesting, profound, quirky, etc. etc.; there are so many ways to convey information and to tell stories)

four books in preparation for the independent publishing house John and I are going to start while in York, don't you know it:
- "Simple Printmaking with Childern" - Daniels/Turner (okay, starting off modestly)
- "Exploring Printmaking for Young People" - Daniels/Turner (working our way up)
- "Hand Printmaking" - Hargreaves
- "The Alternative Printing Handbook" - Chris Treweek and Jonathan Zeitlyn with the Islington Bus Co.

I guess I'd better get reading...

Tanka, Renga, Jesei

Last week, I did some reading online on the Japanese poetic forms/traditions of Renga (collaborative poems) and Jesei (death poems). Then, in my Creative Writing lecture that same week, we had an unannounced special presentation by someone who works here at YSJ and who writes (see below) and is involved with Tanka (Japanese for "short poem") poetry. It was an interesting and inspiring introduction to Tanka poetry and has in the week or so since kept up my interest in learning about this 1300-year-old tradition. I hope to be able to experiment some myself with these forms for my class's final portfolio project.

Anyways, right after class, I went over to the library and checked out a few anthologies: one of specifically modern Tanka poetry, one a collection of the more popular Haiku form, and one more historically-focused anthology by Penguin Books. I would especially recommend the first of these, "Modern Japanese Tanka" edited and translated by Makoto Ueda, especially its easy-to-read and highly-informative Introduction.

More enjoyable than these anthologies, though, was "The Floating Bridge," the new collection of Tanka poems published by the instructor that presented to my class last week, Hisashi Nakamura. Its a relatively quick read, as the book is a standard 70ish-page collection and each only contains one 31-syllable poem. However, as is appropriate to the highly-concentrated meditative quality of Tanka, a lot more time could be spent engaging with each poem. One thing I found especially interesting about Mr. Nakamura's work is the way that the traditional and ancient poetic sensibility of Tanka, which fundamentally involves what the Japanese call "mono no aware," or a sort of melancholy awareness to the fleeting nature of life and reality that celebrates this transience as uniquely beautiful, interacts with the Western/European and modern world in which the actual poems are located. The presence of strange landscapes (such as the Yorkshire Moors) or at times the choice of a certain striking word represent the intriguing disparity which I see at work in these poems, as in the following poem:

Hanging from the bows
Of an old rusty vessel
Tied to the pier,
The black shadow of a cross
falls on the neon red sea.

I've since talked a little more to Mr. Nakamura (he very kindly gave me a free copy of his book) in order to write a short piece on it and Tanka poetry in general, perhaps for "Chimes" or something like that. It was very encouraging to discover this unique resource and opportunity amidst the new, sometimes stifled-seeming academic atmosphere here at YSJ. I would point anyone that might be interested in Tanka poetry to the homepage of the society Mr. Nakamura heads up: Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society.