A POEM BY CHINESE POET LU YU 1125-1210

lu yu

 

 

 

I had occasion to tell a visitor

       about an old trip I took through

       the gorges of the Yangtze

 

 

Long ago I made that journey, fall rain coming down lightly,

 

reached the east wall of Chien-p'ing just as gates were closing.

 

Host at the inn met me with greetings, words rambling on and on, 

        

his young wife grinding and cooking in her cheap white robe.

 

Old boatmen who work the river, some drunk, some sobered up,

 

merchants from Shu, peddlers of the gorges, clever at closing a deal;

 

soon lamps went dark, people getting ready for bed,

 

though outside we could still hear boats tying up, baggage being unloaded from horses.

 

Mountains steep, rivers treacherous, barbarian tribes close by;

 

often I saw their mallet-shaped hairdos mingling with city folk.

 

Now, counting on my fingers, I find it's been forty years!--

 

sad memories held in my heart, truly from another incarnation.

 

 

                                                   --Lu Yu, 1205

 

                                         tr by Burton Watson

      

lu yu

 

 

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READING CHINESE POET LU YU

Earlier today I was reading in a book I've had at least thirty years by 12th century Chinese Poet, Lu Yu. It is mostly his poems with a selection from his Diary of a Trip to Shu, in the book titled, The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases. The diary is kept along the ride with his family by commercial sailboat in the Grand Canal that connects Beijing with Nanking, then connects to the Yangtze river for a long ride inland. In the diary, which I'd not read until now, he describes sunrises, mountains, bridges, people, other boats. They stop at inns beside the river for the night. In this reading, I noticed that I am able to visualize the people, their clothes, the boat, the river, the inns, the pagodas, the landscape from years of seeing Chinese films, reading contemporary Chinese fiction and histories of China. There was a time I read a lot of Chinese poetry over several centuries, but I missed all subtleties. All I had to go by was words in translation. Therein lies the beauty of Chinese poetry, that just the words themselves, completely out of context can read as freshly as from inside the culture.

 

 

The first time around with Lu Yu, I had not seen the films or read the histories. It was poets like Lu Yu that inspired me to investigate Chinese writing, and through the writing, the culture, how people lived in the old days and how they live now. Reading Lu Yu brought up memory of a movie I almost took out of the drawer to watch before sitting down to write, The King of Masks, one of my favorites.  I've seen it so many times it's memorized, but still love to see the story unfold. A beautiful story and SO Chinese. I feel like I am in China seeing these people all around. I may watch it next time without subtitles to enjoy the music of the language without mental overlay. I saw another Chinese film, Ju Dou, without subtitles the first time. The film had such beauty as I've not seen since with subtitles. The only thing I missed without knowing the words was names and relationships, like uncle or aunt, mother, son, cousin. I found the story was told visually and the talk was an overlay.

 

 

Without understanding the language, I get the story, which, in films, is told visually. I will watch The King of Masks again soon without subtitles, and enjoy hearing the Chinese language spoken. I was reading in Lu Yu's Diary on the Trip to Shu and realized I was seeing him, his clothes, family's clothes, the boat, the people working the boat, the river, the landscapes, like I'd not seen in my Chinese readings before I had the help of films to give me visuals from the old ways in China and the new ways. I'd been waiting for China to open up and let us see what is happening there in the visual arts, in writing, film making. The film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, signaled to me there is something going on with Chinese film making worth investigating. I found some treasures. Director Zhang Yimou takes my breath in every film of his I've seen. He is one of many directors in mainland China who make extraordinary films. I find refreshing in mainland Chinese films that guns don't solve problems.

 

 

It surprised me to be seeing the scene while reading in Lu Yu's account of having tea with someone he knew, whose tea was not up to standard because of something to do with weather, something in the flavor that is so subtle only someone from China would notice. He is well thought of every stop along the way, known for his poetry. He has conversations about poetry with people in restaurants and inns along the river. I could see the people, like in a movie. I saw the buildings, the rooms, due to familiarity through seeing so many films from China, historical as well as contemporary. I read through several of the poems and noticed they had come to life for me. I could see the visuals. Before, they were words and the images associated with the words. Now I can see the visuals as in a slide-show in my head with a Chinese context I'm somewhat familiar with. I don't pay attention to present politics in China. I don't understand it at all. I prefer the history, before, during and after the Revolution, then after Mao. Writer Mo Yan received the Nobel Prize in 2012, and writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in 2000.  

 

 

 

 

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A POEM BY TS'EN SHEN (715-770)

photo: john f hill

ON CLIMBING THE PAGODA OF THE TEMPLE OF GRACIOUS 

 BENEVOLENCE WITH KAO SHIH AND HSUEH CHU

The might of this pagoda seems to erupt upwards,

Rising alone until it brushes the halls of Heaven.

To climb it and to look down is to leave the world behind;

Its stone stairway winds around in the void.

Majestic and imposing, towering over this sacred land

So immense and lofty as to seem the work of gods.

Four corners block the bright sun;

Seven stories rub against the sky. 

We gaze down to point at the soaring birds,

We bend to hear the fearsome wind rumble below.

Ranges upon ranges are like ocean waves

Surging onward as though courtiers hastening eastward to attendance.

Dark green locusts line the broad post roads;

How lovely and bright the palaces and mansions there!

The beauty of autumn comes in from the west,

A wan aura filling the basin within the pass.

The five royal tombs of Han stand on the plain to the north,

Dim and misty green for a thousand ages.

At last I feel enlightened to the pure doctrine,

Though I have long revered the superior truth.

I am resolved to resign my official post,

Knowing this Way of enlightenment to be of eternal worth. 



                                                  tr by Daniel Bryant

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MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

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FAREWELL TO POETRY

jack

It's the middle of the day, the sun is out, temperature up to 50 with some wind that has a bitter edge. The calves are lying on the ground in the sunlight and the donkeys are standing quietly in the sun. I went to bed for a nap, but it didn't happen. Rather than fidget and wait, I got up. Don't have a will to do anything but sit and write to you. I'd like to sit with a book of Louise Gluck poems, but not enough. I saw recently that Robert Bly has a new book of selected poems published last year. I have his earlier books and some of the smaller books. Light Around the Body is the last book of his poems I have. He has published several since then. I put it on my wish list at amazon, a reminder for the future. There came a time I discovered Chinese poetry and Rilke. From then on, the Chinese poets were so totally satisfying I didn't care to read anything else when I wanted to see poetry. And Rilke was unlike anything else. In that time of my life I was interested in writing poetry, published some, came to the mountains with intent to write poems of the mountains. But when I came to the mountains everything changed. My desert island book is Sunflower Splendor, an anthology of Chinese poetry from beginning to mid 20th Century. With it, and the Tao te Ching, I could live minimally without need for other books. Titles start coming to mind I'd like to take along, the poems of John Berryman. Doesn't matter. It's not going to happen. I have my own private desert island library right here. I am curious now to see what Robert Bly has been doing over the last 40 or so years.

 

jack

 

Robert Bly, without knowing it, helped me make the decision to move to the mountains. He came to Charleston to give a reading and a talk, either late 1975 or early 76. I fell into the oppotunity to be his chauffer, pick him up before a reading and drive him to it, get him to where he needed to be on time. Between stops, we talked a good bit. I was wanting to get out of the city. I told him how I was so disappointed by American cities I wanted out. No cultural life, just television. I was thinking living rurally would be less wilderness than a city. Rural life has just television too, so it's the same cultural desert, just less objectionable than the smog of urban busyness. He affirmed my thinking. He agreed that the cities have little to nothing to offer the artist. Rural living has nothing to offer either, but it's a better way to live, not so crowded. I've liked Bly's boldness in his verse. I have appreciated his approach to the political poem. American poets were shy to go with the political poem for good reasons, like they are immediately dated. Bly's trick was to make them in such a way they have their place and time, are universal too. His poem about the Viet Nam war, The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, is quite a powerful piece of writing. Bly made a cassette tape of himself reading it. I played it for an old-time preacher friend, Millard Pruitt. He said, "Who is that? Buck Shaw?" Buck Shaw was a man we knew who preached from time to time, maybe what they call a lay preacher, meaning he's not "called" to preach, but feels it enough to stand in the pulpit now and again. I had not heard Bly's reading of the poem in that light. It cracked me up hearing Robert Bly in the pulpit. I cracked up too, because if I'd mentioned Bly was a liberal, preacher Pruitt could not have listened to it. He hated communist Jane Fonda. One afternoon I dropped in to visit, the tv was on, a movie. In the mountains, it is etiquette to leave the tv on when you have company, they might want to watch it too. I saw Jane Fonda in the movie. I said, "There's Jane Fonda." He turned it off.

jack says, got an eye on you

To get through my second winter in the mountains with a modicum of income, I found a job in the library at a "school" for the wayward kids of alcoholic suburban middle-class parents. It was a money hole for the Presbyterian church to throw money into. They put an old preacher they'd set out to pasture in charge of it, president. About thirty kids, a secretary and a kitchen staff, about ten teachers. They didn't give the kids any slack. Get in trouble, they kick you out. That way they got your non-refundable money and they don't have to fool with you. The energy of the place was in the dead zone. The library amounted to a room full of books people had given the school for the library rather than throw them away. Readers Digest condensed NY Times best-sellers, and popular novels from years past. Essentially, there was nothing useful about the library, but for a place for the kids to hang out. I had no actual work to do, so I busied myself making posters for the kids, individually, with a child's stamp set of alphabet and ink pad. The posters I made were poems by Chinese poet, Han Shan, from his book of one hundred poems, Cold Mountain. He was a Buddhist monk of a Taoist leaning. I picked poems that were fairly straight forward, yet had some mystery in them. I was giving them something to put on their dorm room walls that might inspire thinking about its meaning. The kids loved them. It took a little while, but eventually I made a poster for every one of them. They liked that they got it and it was still a little bit beyond their understanding, just enough to make them curious to search for it. One of the teachers, a YAP, Young American Poet, came into the library one day while I was making a poster. Having heard I was doing something quasi-educational with the kids that might need overseeing, he was sent by the other teachers to see what I was doing, something to do with poetry, something they didn't know anything about and didn't aim to. Ridiculously authoritative, he asked which translation I was using. I said, "Burton Watson." He said, "The Gary Snyder translation is better." I kept to myself, No it's not. I didn't want to argue about something so subjective.

jenny up close

I mention this guy, because he was the one whose influence put the brakes on my pursuit of poetry. He came to the school some weeks after I did. I thought, O Wow, somebody I can talk with about writing, feeling like he was a Godsend. Turned out he drew attention to himself as a beer drinker. He strutted and talked about himself in very impressive terms, his publications, etc. I'd seen his style so many times among other YAPs I'd met, it made me question my own motivations. I saw him chasing a style that was mainstream at the moment, new, the latest. I found him fake in every way. I found his writing fake. I looked at him and thought: this is what I want for myself? He was already a little bit into that world I was heading into. My peeps into that world showed me a lot of people with his particular self-conscious style. I told myself I would never write again until it needed writing so badly it wrote itself. I felt like making a farewell gesture to my own attempts at poetry I had begun to suspect as false in myself. I picked up a National Geographic and randomly cut out two paragraphs, cut out each word from the paragraphs, put the words from each paragraph in separate bowls. I picked up the words, one at a time, wetting the tip of my finger and touching the pile. I wrote down the words that came up in the order I picked them up. I typed each one into a poem form, very loose with words strewn about as if I felt they had meaning, and put them in YAP's mail slot with a note, "I wanted you to see my new poems." He never acknowledged seeing them and never spoke to me again. I don't know if he "made it" as a name in American poetry, because I forgot his name. I believe in retrospect he was indeed a Godsend. The gesture with nonsense poems was my statement to him that I took him for a fraud. It was kinda mean, especially since he got it. Though what he got only helped him see me a dumber asshole than he already thought. Like the nerd's tshirt said, Keeps Em Away.  

jack says, bye

 

 

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A POEM BY CHINESE POET TU FU

     romaire bearden

                Friendship


            A flick of the hand
            and it's rain or storm

            wherever I look
            change and fickleness

            the old ideal of friendship
            as loyalty and permanence

            has turned into dirt
            under our feet.



                                     ----Tu Fu  (712-770)
                          tr by David Young


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A POEM BY CHINESE POET CHIA TAO

      antoni tapies

      EVENING VIEW AS THE SNOW CLEARS


      I lean on my staff, gaze at the sunlit snow,

     Clouds and gullies in countless layers,

     The woodcutter returns to his plain hut,

     As the winter sun falls behind sheer peaks.

     A wildfire burns over the grass of the hills;

     Broken patches of mist rise from among the rocks and pines.

     Then, turning back on the mountain temple road,

     I hear the bells ring in the evening sky.


                                 ----Chia Tao (779-849)
                                      tr Stephen Owen



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MOUNTAINS AND CHINESE POETS

maple leaves


It's been a happy day of seeing people I enjoy visiting with from 9 this morning to about 5:30 this evening. Even fed a good country dinner. The really good kind. Green beans out of a garden, corn from a garden, fried chicken leg, tomato and cornbread with butter. One of the joys of living in the mountains. The people seen today were from the entire span of time I've been in the mountains. Each one brought to mind a certain period of time, the people I knew at the time, memories of people long gone on, memories of good friends, good people, people I've learned from and am grateful to God for the opportunity to know them. I've been reviewing people special to me lately. It's like something that would be in a horoscope, the moon is such and such house going through such and such sign. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying these opportunities to see people I know and care about, but seldom see.



I was reminded of my initial purpose expatriating to the mountains and not looking back from the first day. Things came back like Wallace Stevens' poem, The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain. A poem by Chinese poet Han Yu, 768-824, called Southern Mountains I read several times. He's writing about the mountains of southern China. I translated it conceptually into my mountains of southern USA. Here are some lines from Han Yu's Southern Mountains. Indigo Field in the first line is the name of a town.

          I entered the mountains at Indigo Field
          Craning my head til the neck was stiff.

          Then Heaven darkened into a vast snowstorm---
          Tear-filled eyes blurred to blindness.

          The steepening road, straight up
          Like a waterfall, was stretched into ice.

          With robes tucked up I pushed my horse,
          Stumbling falling sliding back again.

I also read the poems of a Buddhist monk Han Shan of uncertain date, possibly late 7th century, early 8th, maybe. His book of poems is called Cold Mountain, which is also a translation of Han Shan. His name and the mountain are the same. Verse #61 from Cold Mountain by Han Shan:

          Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
          Here lies an idle man,
          In the daytime wandering over green mountains,
          At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
          Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
          But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion,
          How pleasant, to know I need nothing to lean on,
          To be still as the waters of the autumn river!



The Chinese poets that wrote about mountains I read like I couldn't get enough. A year before leaving the ways of the city, I found a new anthology of Chinese poetry called SUNFLOWER SPLENDOR. I don't know if it's still in print. It's dated 1975. I just now went to amazon and found they have 2 new copies for $25 ea. My copy is a hardcover. It's my desert island secular book. To my taste, there is no finer poetry in the world than Chinese. The anthology goes from the very beginning, back in Egyptian times by our western beginnings, to about the middle of the 20th century. Of poets I've read, Rilke is the closest of western poets to the artistry of the Chinese poets. I can read Rilke with complete satisfaction as I read Chinese poets with satisfaction. Tu Fu, Tao Chien, Po Chu-yi, Su Tung-po, Li Po leave me in awe. I don't know about them academically, or Chinese poetry academically. I only know them by the enjoyment of reading some verses I don't have to be high to get my mind blown by. I could happily spend a lifetime as a China scholar, the poetry, the art, the archaeology, the history.



Small books of Chinese poetry I'd take on walks into the woods in the first years in the mountains to find a place, a flat rock on or beside the water, where I could spend the day or several hours, inhaling the forest, hearing the birds, hearing the flowing water, seeing birds, crawdads, and native trout after sitting still for an hour. I'd take a bottle of wine or a thermos of hot tea and read, write or get up and walk around, whatever. Go out in the morning and come back when the clouds turn pink. I've only walked the trail int he woods after dark once. It was like the forest in Disney's Snow White. All the trees seemed animated and were watching me. That's not from being stoned either. It's creepy to walk among trees at night, even with a flashlight. That one night, I had to keep my eyes on the dog's tail which I could see a little bit, like the yellow center lines in a dense fog. I'd have been a long time finding the way home without the dog to lead me.



I came to the mountains what American poet James Dickey called a Rural Romantic. My romanticism had to do largely with a Chinese aesthetic appreciation for what we call the natural world. I even identified with the Richard Rogers tune Mountain Greenery. Quite a good jazz number. The Chinese poets gave my early years in the mountains a golden glow fueled by reverence. These poets helped me to see the mountains in a way I could appreciate them best. Without a television, Able to read all I wanted, I romanticized my own Southern Mountains. I don't mean like fantasy thinking. An aesthetic appreciation is what it was. My eyes were more sensitive to what they saw.



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