The Mulberry Tree

 This morning, having my tea and gazing out of my kitchen window towards a tree that towers over my neighbor's house, I caught a fleeting glimpse of this.

Autumn

 

Prayer

 

Shiraz

 

Chinese Painting

                                                     An essay by Maxwell Hearn.

Beyoglu

 

Afghanistan

 

Isfahan Mosque Detail

 

Jackson Pollock: Blue poles

Abstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollock

                                                    Composition with Pouring II

                                                                    Free form 1946

                                                                    Red Composition

Voices of Silence: Peru

 

A Little History of Poetry

  

This little history of poetry is Western-centric and overwhelmingly white: putting an image of Maya Angelou on the cover does not compensate for the clear bias of its contents.

Ezra Pound recognized the importance of Chinese poetry and Edward Fitzgerald, in a typically Victorian mode, the Persian. Translation remains perennially the problem, but I can recommend three books that will help to globalize your reach:

Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, tr. David Hinton.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, tr. Dick Davis.

Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English texts, tr. Bassam K. Frangieh. This collection features only a single poet, Nizar Kabbani, so it only gives a taste of the Arabic poetic tradition that stretches back into the pre-Islamic oral performances that left their imprint on the Qur’an and remain vital to this day. Even so, a taste is a taste.

I have had the great pleasure of meeting both Hinton and Davis who are superb translators; Frangieh is a well-known translator of modern Arabic poetry.

India is another great source of poetry (I guess Tagore made the cut because of Yeats?). It’s difficult to know where to begin there. Linda Hess’s translations of Kabir (a favorite of Robert Bly’s) wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Here’s a sample:

Three men went on pilgrimage,

jumpy minds and thieving hearts.

Not one sin was taken away;

they piled up nine tons more.

(#214 in The Bijak of Kabir).  

There’s a big world of poetry out there. It’s inexhaustible, but with some effort one can at least gild the darkness.

Renoir

 

On the Road Home

 It was when I said,
“There is no such thing as the truth,”
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.

You … You said,
“There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth.”
Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,
“Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye”;

It was when you said,
“The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth”;

It was at that time, that the silence was largest
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest.

~ Wallace Stevens

Build Your House of Cards

                                                                Over the Abyss.

                "Here error is all in the not done,/all in the diffidence that faltered..."

                                                        ~ Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI.

Walt Whitman

                            In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
                            Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
                            He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
                            The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
                            Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
                            His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

                                                                    ~ Wallace Stevens

 

 

Tea & Coffee