New Posted Poem

I'm a huge fan of the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, but I really don't like the average modern translations, including the one by Robert Hass, a poet whose original work I really like. The slavish adherence to the 5-7-5 syllabic constraints from the Japanese actually harm my enjoyment of most haiku. I do, however, happen to have what I consider to be the best translation available. It's titled Classic Haiku: An Anthology of Poems by Basho and His Followers and was translated by Asataro Miyamori. I didn't seek out this translation and wasn't made aware of it in any classes or workshops. Rather, by happenstance I picked up the last copy of the book at a small bookstore on the Ocean City, New Jersey boardwalk.

Miyamori's introduction, which takes almost a quarter of the book, goes into detail about his feelings regarding interpretive translations, but suffice to say he doesn't like them. The majority of the poems in this book are two lines long and direct translations (or as near as possible considering the lack of articles and pronouns in the original Japanese). One last selling point of this particular book is that he also includes alternate translations from other sources, the original kanji lettering, and the transliterated Japanese (that is, Japanese sound sense using English letters).

Poem after the break.

Because of my exposure to Miyamori's translation, the first six lines of my poem were written in the same manner and at different times capturing different images. The first tercet is a true haiku of the 5-7-5 species, and the second is an inverted haiku--that is 7-5-7.

Poem Samples

Based on the recommendation of Paul Steven Stone, a fellow Bagel Bard and author of the book Or So It Seems, I'll be posting up a few poems here. The poems you'll read here will be excellent examples of my styles and topics. The first one is posted below. If you like it, please download and distribute it to your friends. Feedback is also appreciated.

Poem after the break.

Epiphany

Publish at Scribd

New review

I'm working on my review of Book of Beasts, a poetry collection of creatures set up much like the bestiaries of Dungeons and Dragons and ancient texts written by notables like Pliny and Herodotus. The collection contains 2 poems for each letter of the alphabet, each letter being assigned to a different creature. But the poems aren't about the creatures themselves, or are least only tangential to the beasts. That's not to say it's good or bad, but I'm having a tough time deciding whether I like the collection or not. It stands together well, and some of the poems are decent, but--I don't know. Something just feels--off.

Three more rejected poems

This time Blood Lotus has rejected them - "Engage," "Jealousy" and "Moving Loss."

More Rejections

More poetry rejections from Burnside Review. Three poems - "Bounty from the Sea," "Surfside Orchestra," and "Night."

Poetry Book Review - Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Link to Original publication

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda
Copyright 2008
sunnyoutside
PO Box 911
Buffalo, NY 14207
ISBN: 978-1-935613-12-5

Rebecca Schumejda’s titular poem is also the last one in the collection, set off by its own section heading and center justified. It’s a special poem that acts as a sort of afterword and comments, in a fairly direct manner, on the collection as a whole. The image one gets is of a prayer, but not just any prayer—a prayer of supplication in the face of adversity.

More after the break
Indeed, the collection as a whole works on that level. The section titles are all lines or images from the title poem, “The Truth Is Too Heavy,” “Folded Like Two Hands in Prayer,” “Overgrown with Weeds and Regrets,” and “Falling Forward.”

The first poem begins “This afternoon / I buried your cat / while you were at work.” It is economical language broken into clauses, but the enjambed first line lends a sense of tension, which is borne out through the rest of the poem. The narrator dreads the idea of relating this event when her significant other returns home from a day at work.

Other poems follow a similar theme—two characters with distance between them, avoiding topics that need to be addressed and fumbling through crumbling or crumbled relationships, all in an attempt to maintain grip on the ungrippable.

This tension between the things that ought to be said and things that are not said creates a space of broken relationships and cross-purpose discussions. It’s similar to a Pinter play in that the space between spoken thoughts is as much a character as the actual characters within the poems.

Ultimately, the reader is left with the last poem as an answer to all the problems within. “Falling Forward” is an apt description of the lives of Schumejda’s characters. They don’t so much move through time as stumble, trying to keep their feet in an uneven world. But “[w]hen the truth is too heavy…[t]here’s no way to avoid failure,” says the narrator. This is the very essence, the underlying motif of each poem, that the only thing you can do is “just lean forward / let your knees cushion your fall.”

Very much recommended.

The Adventures of Roger Ray, Relic Hunter

So my novel in the works just got a retitle, and an extra 1000 words last night after someone asked me about it. I sent what I had off to the person asking because they said something about publication possibilities, but that's as likely as a zombie crashing through my window to eat my brains.

Anyway, I'm back working at the book, at least for a bit. I'm going to aim for 500 words a day and see if I can't maintain it until I get to about 80,000. Only 71,000 left to get there, so maybe by the end of summer?

Second note - the Bagel Bards have opened the call for submissions to Bagels with the Bards #4 and I sent them "The Day I Met Eddie Murphy."