WHAT’S IN THREE LINES

Painting by Paul E. Marquart

Spring inspires most of us in various ways—perhaps the mild weather causes us to write poetry, paint, or plant flowers. The advent of spring inspires me to search my shelves for books about haiku, those three elegant lines of aesthetic verse written by the great Japanese poets. The major ones include Basho, Buson, and Issa, for whom haiku was a way of life, sometimes, as in Basho’s case, a wandering way of life that required focused attention to details of nature, primarily flowers, trees, mountains, lakes…

When I looked for books about this art form, I discovered Natalie Goldberg’s observations about three-line verses and her visits to Japan to study haiku further in a book entitled Three Simple Lines. However, Sam Hamill’s Pocket Haiku, published by Shambala Press in 1995, actually ended up in a pocket of my Covid-wear (slouch pants). The book satisfied my envee for haiku and sent me outdoors several times yesterday.

Those three lines of an art form in poems by the aforementioned Japanese poets—Basho, Buson, and Issa—peaked in the 1700s and spanned only 100 years of Japanese literature. This brief period brought listeners and readers poignant and lasting metaphors in three short lines of 200 poems in Hamill’s translation. The book is small enough to fit into a pocket of slouch pants, robes, or blue jeans, any casual wear that allows haiku readers to relax and think about images of beauty.

Most contemporary poets fail to compose poignant insights in three lines of verse, and Hamill cites Gary Snyder, Richard Wright, and Richard Wilbur as leading the enlightened few to produce memorable haiku.

 

Many wannabe poets attempt to write in this form but fail to explode the top of my head, metaphorically, as Emily Dickinson describes her feeling from reading good poetry. The work of a master does not reflect brief surface thoughts but records a single moment of deep spiritual contemplation.

When I look at my brother Paul’s painting above, I think of haiku and wish that I could write a “three-liner” that captures a single moment of appreciation for this lovely piece of art. I dare not! However, I allow Basho to say what I feel:

Come out to view

the truth of flowers blooming

in poverty.

Painting by Paul Emerson Marquart, photo by Lori Marquart

ENTERING THE DAY: POEMS BY MICHAEL MILLER. (Pinyon Publishing).

BACK TO BLOGGING BOOK REVIEWS…

Wars leave scars in the minds of those who serve in any military conflict, and survivors often share their experiences through journaling, drawing, writing poetry, and novels. In Michael Miller’s case, he records glimpses of several wars through his own experience and the engagements of his relatives in military conflict. Although he reflects on other experiences “entering the day,” his accounts of servicemen during several wars are the most arresting poems in this volume. 

In “A Different Time,” Miller reflects on the experience of  a Marine who landed on Okinawa during World War II during his walk across a meadow in Massachusetts, “far from the black sand of that island/Where he left his blood;/His Purple Heart remain[ing] in/the glove compartment of His Buick beside his pistol,…” this poem followed by  “Tide of Blood,” a powerful salute to those whose “lives deprived /Of their future, the letters/He was asked to mail, ‘In case,’/And with each whiskey and cigarette/Another comrade appears, his face/Still innocent across the table.” Although Miller, of course, did not serve in this conflict, he recounts the experience as if he had served alongside the narrator in a convincing unsentimental portrait of a WWII survivor.

Miller’s own experiences in war are encapsulated in Section V, Verse VII, a powerful retrospective poem familiar to many veterans of the Vietnam conflict: “Only once did we visit/The wall, move our fingers/Over the chiseled names,/The Marines we knew./Flowers, photographs,/Letters and crayon drawings/Rested before the wall./No one walked away with/Their head held high.” This poem invoked a poignant memory of an encounter with a Vietnam veteran when I attended The Sixth Day course in upper state New York. A survivor of the Vietnam War stood up among 300 participants at this event where we had been “processing” experiences all night, and as the sun came up, he confessed that he was deeply hurt because he had been maligned as a veteran of that conflict and never properly thanked for his service. The moderator told him to stand up and declared, “In the name of the president of the United States and all U.S. citizens, we thank you for your service and remember all who served in this conflict.” Two weeks later, after we had returned home, we read about the wall going up, and I’ve always believed we had something to do with this commemoration.

Miller does not leave readers suspended with dark reflections and redeems his experiences with a more hopeful poem entitled “On Nauset Beach,” where “beyond [his] limitations of old age…” “he strides through the surprise/Of an unswept morning/On a shoulder of Nauset Beach/Singing to the Atlantic,/The thrashing incoming tide,/the waves breaking onto the shore/Like sleeves of ruffled lace,/The gannets swooping/With black-tipped wings/Beating a welcome…” Here is Miller at his lyrical best, counteracting the darkness of war and old age with his insightful voice and an undaunted heart.

This poet is not without humor and is capable of a comfortable irony in “Morning Song in Amherst” (his home) where Miller encounters a street person, “In July, her hair a tangled nest/No bird would return to/Beside the Dickinson home/A cigarette between/Her dirty fingers…” He suggests that Emily Dickinson would have invited the woman into her home for “a bath and breakfast” and when the woman volunteers that she slept on a bench beside the home all night and no one bothered her, Miller writes that he offered her bath and breakfast, “almost hearing Emily say, ‘Yes, oh yes!’”

In Section IV of Entering the Day, Miller’s poem about Virginia Wolfe entitled “Virginia,” shows that he can achieve that which he believes Virginia was capable of: “…her words/Were meant to be elsewhere,/In perfect sentences she could control.” That capability is shown throughout this volume, Miller’s meditations emerging with crafted control over his phrasing. Here is a true voice devoid of mawkishness in the delivery of difficult experiences — poems without cloying lamentations about the ravages of war and an uncertain future —conditions with which we are confronted in the wake of  Coronavirus, “a language wait[ing] to be heard” that Miller seems to be game for, despite…

Michael Miller has published nine poetry collections, and his first book The Joyful Dark was the Editor’s Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, The New Republic, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, and many other literary journals. In 2014 he became the First Prize Winner of the W. B. Yeats Society Poetry Award and was anthologized in Yeats 150 (Lilliput Press, Dublin).

I am proud to add that Michael Miller is a good friend and supporter of my work. Salut, Michael! We eagerly look for more. And kudos to Susan Entsminger for the lovely artwork on the cover of Entering the Day: “Protea from the Upcountry Farmer’s Market, Maui.”

Order online or from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose CO 81403

THE OLD COASTLINE

Nobel prize winner, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, has said that in order to have understanding of and peace in the world, we must read each other’s literature. I’d add that the emissaries of that mission are translators: think of Coleman Barks translating the Persian poet Mowlavi (Rumi); Jane Kenyon translating the work of the Russian poet, Akhmatova, Stuart Friebert translating the German poet, Karl Krolow…Think also of the independent press, Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, which often publishes international poetry translations, such as its recent release: a volume of selected poetry by M. Vasalis (1909-1998), a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in treating children and whose work has been translated by Fred Lessing and David Young.

In the introduction to this volume, translators Lessing and Young emphasize that the poet Vasalis had little interest in promoting her work but that her poems “come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations, arising from the press of occasion and necessity rather than from an ambition to originality or greatness…” That description alone impressed me because I admire the qualities of humility and modesty that inhere in a writer’s life mission.

Vasalis’s immediacy and simplicity in “Spring,” a poem describing the spring season readers in the northern hemisphere are presently experiencing, resonated with me early in the volume and is perhaps the most whimsical one in The Old Coastline: “The light gusts across the land in spurts,/waking the hard, brief glitter/of the blue, wind-ruffled ditches and canals;/the grass lights up, dims down, goes dark./Two newborn lambs next to a grizzled sheep/stand white, printing youth’s picture against grass./I had forgotten how this was, and that/the spring is not a quiet blossoming,/dreaming softly but a violent growing,/a pure and passionate beginning,/jumping up out of a deep sleep,/and dancing away without a thought.” Although Vasalis has been likened to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson in this selection the translators included from her first book, Parks and Deserts (1940). 

A reading of selections from her third book, Vistas and Visages, published posthumously in 1954, reveals more serious poetic treatments as Vasalis probes the deeper subjects of suffering and loss arising from Vasalis’s own tragic loss of a child who lived only a year and a half. The imagery in “Star” carries this message of loss in a departure from any formalism and pivots on the figure of her lost child, then concludes in a pastoral scene featuring a cow, a powerful entry into the natural world. “Tonight I saw a star for the first time./He stood alone, he did not quiver./Instantly, he pierced me through./I saw a star, he stood alone, belief/made out of light: so young and from a time/before there was such a thing as grief./The meadows lie unspoken in the light./The cows, so often painted,/restrain, with a young wet eye,/any account of their warm mystery.” That one verse , so much akin to Japanese haiku, underlines the beautiful simplicity of Vasalis’s oeuvre.

In the same volume, Vistas and Visages, Vasalis reveals her love and appreciation of children and her journey as a psychiatrist dealing with youth. “Children Coming Home” evokes strong emotions in those of us who parented young offspring and welcomed them as they returned home from an all-day absence. Her description of them as “big flowers” coming out of the gathering dark, “the chilly evening air/that lightly drapes their cheeks and hair/they are so warm!” is neither Elizabeth Bishop nor Emily Dickinson but simply a mother experiencing intimacy with her young in an intense immediacy. Further, she writes: “Clasped/in the strong clamp of their soft arms/I glimpse the love, shadowless and full./ [not yet exposed to Jungian psychology about shadows that will beset them later] that lives at the bottom of their penetrating eyes,/It is not mixed with pity, which comes later,/and has its reasons — and its boundaries.” It is Vasalis who has the penetrating eyes and appears watchful about the boundaries of innocent children.

In The Old Coastline (2002), readers will enjoy some of Vasalis’s poems about older relationships; i.e., a poignant characterization of her grandmother, a cherished member of the poet’s family constellation in “Old Age”: “Grandmother/snow-white-lace on/her calm sweet, white-satin head/carried when she was in Holland, at home,/the smallest muff in the whole world:/inside a tiny bottle, no bigger/than an ampule./ There was just room/for her hands. Plus one child's hand,/oh, what a delicious nest of fur and/the very softest satin lining/…Her eyes were a constantly changing blue;/you could look into them as long as you liked:/as if you were seeing, through two small openings,/the calm sea on a summer day.” That intimate tribute is both exacting and graceful, two recurring components of the selections chosen by Vasalis’s translators.

Vasalis also gives readers a glimpse of her own ideas about mortality, one with which most of us in our eighties can identify: “I practice like a young bird on the edge/of the nest I must soon forsake/in little faltering flights/and open my beak.”

This translated work by Vasalis is a powerful addition to the canon of international expression and vision.Translator Fred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and retired professor of philosophy, retained his native Dutch language after moving to America at age 12. His fellow translator, David Young, is a poet (Field of Light and Shadow, 2010) an editor of Field magazine, Oberlin College Press, and a translator who enjoys collaborative work with his long-time friend, Fred Lessing.

Thank you Gary and Susan for contributing to the mission of sharing international literature through expert translations! The Old Coastline is another occasion for celebration. 

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

IN THE MIRROR

When I read Michael Miller’s work, an image appears in my mind of a poet sitting on a bench near Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts where Miller walks daily and receives the Muse — perhaps even Emily’s Muse. In fact, Miller’s latest book of poetry, In the Mirror, includes a poem entitled “Visiting Emily,” in which he expresses the desire to ask the famous New England poet “…about living, dying, /About the veins of a leaf/As thin as my white hair…” In this poem, he imagines how Emily nods to a 200-year old oak, saying “in a barely audible voice/That the finches will not/Be in mourning on the branches/ Once all the leaves have fallen.” The poem is a salute to the bard of Amherst and to an ancient oak whose branches point upward toward the Pelham hills.  

I have enjoyed a sporadic correspondence with Michael Miller during the last five years, and through readings of his e-mails and the poems that reflect his rich inner life, I think that he represents the best of the group of poets published by Pinyon Publishing, his books appearing almost yearly now through the nurturing of Pinyon and its editor Gary Entsminger.

Like Miller’s publisher I was especially moved by a long poem entitled “A Woman Alone,” about the imagined life of a woman in her ninetieth summer who is traveling on a bus to Barstow, California through the barren Mojave Desert, “basking in the silence/Of miles, of cacti, of rocks embedded/In sand. Only listen, she repeats…” I can easily visualize the scene Miller paints in which the lonely woman misses her garden as I’ve spent many hours in the Mohave and a week one summer near Barstow, comforted only by the sight of Joshua trees. In the succinct verses of sometimes only six lines, this long poem probes mortality with a combined high quality of insight and clarity, exploring the remembrances and poignant laments of the aging:

“This time her daughter arrives

To help her move.

She dreads the open boxes,

What to put in, what to leave out,

Worries she is packing her life away

Never to be opened again.”

In V. of this long poem, Miller evokes his poetic powers with force and brevity, recording the regrets of an old woman: “In the light of the window, /With her still steady hands, /She is sewing a hole in her life, The needle and thread/A companion from childhood/A contrast to the losses/Accumulated through time …” This is a poem about resilience and hope, conveyed through the surprising voice of an elderly person who has transcended loss and suffering.

At every turn, the reader joins in an exploration of undisguised reality, revealing Miller’s sensitivity and awareness of the human condition. However, we are treated to a bit of magic in poems like “Magician,” in which the poet finds within himself a shared rapture with his grandson at his first magic show where Miller “disappears inside him, /leaving [his] death behind.”

In some of our e-mails, Miller has been kind enough to offer evaluations of poems that I’ve published in The Pinyon Review, alongside his creations, but I’m quick to acknowledge his fine, inspired work as profound artistic creations. The end poem, “The Clock’s Hands,” is a lovely tribute to his wife whom he says he would regret leaving, “…leaving the loveliness that has not grown old/But only deepened/With each wrinkle, each gesture:/Spreading the marmalade, /Walking in the garden/To peruse your blossoms,/Placing your pink blouse/On the chair’s straight back/And coming to bed/With a smile beginning./I cannot imagine/Another paradise.”

This is a splendid collection of poems, honest and original, and as I said in the opening paragraph of this blog, Miller represents the best of Pinyon’s poets who have looked at the world and have clearly come to recognize the magnitude of life.

Michael Miller’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and other publications. He won First Prize for his poem, “The Different War,” awarded by the W.B. Yeats Society and anthologized in Yeats 150. In the Mirror is his seventh book of poetry. Miller lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, along with the same Muse who inspired Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and other outstanding New England poets. Salud, Michael!

PARTING

Last night, a dear friend of mine who lives in Georgetown, or Washington, D.C., died. I dreamed of her departure before I received word that she had passed, and this morning when I opened two e-mails, I was not surprised by the news… just saddened.

Jane F. Bonin was an old friend who lived in New Iberia, Louisiana for many years, and we became acquainted during the time she taught English at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana. She was an early encourager of my poetry writing and once co-authored a graded reading list for Iberia Parish Schools with me. During the early seventies, we also co-authored a house journal entitled Epiphany Tidings, an Episcopal church newsletter, and served on the board of a kindergarten sponsored by The Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia.

Jane’s contributions to Drama at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were formidable ones — she wrote three books in this genre: Prize Winning Drama, Maria Fratti, and Major Themes in Prizewinning American Drama. She also received The Distinguished Professor Award, and when she retired from ULL and migrated to Washington, D.C. she distinguished herself on the staff of the Foreign Institute in the U.S. State Department.

But her sojourn in Malawi and Niger, Africa became her greatest life challenge, and she later wrote of it in The Color of a Lion’s Eye as a “six year drugless high with no social or legal consequences and no hangover. Nothing in my life has been as intense or as exciting as my time there…it was an overwhelming time from which I have not recovered and perhaps I don’t want to…” In Malawi she held the position of Associate Peace Corps Director; in Niger, she was appointed Peace Corps Country Director. Nineteen years passed before Jane produced a book about her experiences (2015): “…disparate threads of my six years serving those who serve in that place of astonishing and terrible beauty…”

This morning I hear her voice clearly in the words: “If I were in Africa we would sit on a mat under a tree and tell our stories one to the other. I hope this remembrance will be the next best thing.” Jane was a consummate raconteur, and the voice in the stories about Africa was at times witty; at others, poignant with sadness over “rotting flesh, maggoty wounds, glittering feverish eyes, grotesquely twisted limbs, cleft palates, and amputations,” but strong as she followed a leitmotif she lived by: “Serve those who serve.” During her darker moments in Africa she wrote that “‘the force that drives the green fuse,’ as Dylan Thomas called the life force, drives harder in Africa and creates both life and death with ever more velocity.”

Her book of twenty-four vignettes has circulated around Georgetown and Washington, D.C. and has found an attentive and appreciative audience — only a few months before her death, she read excerpts to members of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, hoping to inspire them with the desire to serve some charitable mission. Two months before her death, Jane made a last trek to France, which she loved, and in her spare time, she kept up her French lessons. At times, she sang in a large chorale in Washington. She loved music, language, art (Jane was once a docent in an art gallery), theatre – all cultural pursuits. She could also tell a bawdy joke, lift a glass, and prepare a gourmet meal for her friends.

Jane’s “tribe” of friends was large and diverse, and she was among those who advocate “nothing human is alien to me.” She embraced the disenfranchised, as well as those who moved in the circles of advanced culture. Back in the 70’s and 80’s I had the privilege of working with her in the Hunger Project. Our job was to raise both money and the consciousness of people about the seriousness of hunger in the world. At that time I was an executive director of a Girl Scout Council, and we staged a large event in Lafayette, Louisiana, using all we had learned in an old self-actualization organization, EST, about “intention” to end hunger. We spoke to a packed crowd. Jane went on to utilize her experiences in her role as a Peace Corps Director, and I later became an ordained deacon and Director of an outreach mission.

Through the years I never lost touch with this charming woman who, like most humans, had many faces and many talents. I last saw her this past year when she visited her daughter, Knowles Harper, at Sewanee, Tennessee. Somehow I knew it was a farewell visit because she seemed to be slipping away, although she hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer at that time. I told her we would visit again, and she said to me, “Any time you want me to meet you in some vacation place, I’m game.” She was always game for an adventure, but I didn’t follow through. I wish I had, and we could have gone to a prize place on my bucket list – the isle of Iona, a thin place where miracles happen. The next best thing I could do for her was to put her on the prayer list in another thin place, St. Mary’s Convent here at Sewanee – and, actually, the Order of St. Mary here has a sister Order in Malawi.

Of farewells, Emily Dickinson said it best: “Parting is all we know of heaven…and all we need of hell.” I’ll miss you, chere amie, but I also know you’re going to help them “pass a good time” and keep to their good intentions in the other world. As I once said in a homily for another old friend, and I don’t remember the source (readers of this tribute should know that the lines below aren’t original with me). The thoughts were taken from an article that describes spiritual movement in our lives: “the good and the affection we share with one another is eternal. They don’t start with us, and they don’t end with us. They come from and point toward God, toward love. No love we ever bestow on those who we care about is ever lost. It goes with them to God’s home and it stays with us. The love that goes deeper and reaches beyond material existence into the realms of spirit is the love that overcomes death because it comes from God, divine love.”