酷我-北美枫

The Collateral Damage of A.I.G. co-written by ericcoliu (Tanka Sequence)

I

the boss reads
i await
you've one day!
from his window
the CN Tower is upside down

II

my pastor smiles
and tells me
prayers are phone calls to God
i despair
i can’t pay my bills

III

I
a buzzing fly
in the living room:
we do nothing
but chase each other

Note:

The CN Tower is located in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a communications and observation tower standing 553.33 metres tall, the tallest free-standing structure in the Americas and the signature icon of Toronto's skyline.

The award-winning Dublin poet and novelist Christopher Nolan, also known as Christy Nolan, died on February 20 aged 43.

At the age of 15, he published his first book entitled Dam burst of Dreams, a critically acclaimed collection of poetry constantly compared with those of his eminent compatriots William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. At the age of 22, his first autobiographical novel entitled Under the Eye of the Clock won the 1988 Whitbread Book Award; in it, he describes his struggle with his disability and how the people around him, especially his family, help him to overcome the barriers set for the disabled, and get education and fulfill his seemingly impossible dream – a highly-acclaimed poet and novelist. Not only does the novel introduce the reader to the experience and social meaning of disability, but it also is the story of a “crippled boy” struggling to become a “fully-developed man,” an individual without restraints who makes the impossible dream realized.

For further information on his life and work, please read my piece entitled Under the Eye of the Clock: The Sparkling Soul of a Writer.

Under the Eye of the Clock: The Sparkling Creative Soul of a Writer (First Draft)

ggggggggggggI bet you never thought you would be hearing from me! To think that I would be able to write to you ggggggggggggwas beyond my wildest dreams.

gggggggggggg-- Christopher Nolan wrote in a letter to his aunt and uncle

The award-winning Dublin poet and novelist Christopher Nolan, also known as Christy Nolan, died on February 20 aged 43.

At the age of 15, he published his first book entitled Dam burst of Dreams, a critically acclaimed collection of poems constantly compared with those of his eminent compatriots William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. At the age of 22, his first autobiographical novel entitled Under the Eye of the Clock won the 1988 Whitbread Book Award; in it, he describes his struggle with his disability and how the people around him, especially his family, help him to overcome the barriers set for the disabled, and get education and fulfill his seemingly impossible dream – a highly-acclaimed poet and novelist. Throughout the book, he constantly asks himself one big question, “can I climb socially constructed barriers…what can a crippled speechless boy do?” Not only does it introduce the reader to the experience and social meaning of disability, but it also is the story of a “crippled boy” struggling to become a “fully developed man,” an individual without restraints who makes the impossible dream realized.

Born breech and deprived of oxygen for two hours, Christy’s body was rendered paralyzed, spastic, and incapable of speech; and he was eventually diagnosed with cerebral palsy. What he could do was only to move his head and eyes. Such unbearable a fact as it was, he didn’t give up his life, and more importantly, leaning. He had an unusually appetite for language and amassed a prodigious vocabulary that burst forth onto the computer screen at age of 11 when he was given access to Lioresal, a new drug which helped him gain control over his head and neck, allowing him to use a specially-made typing equipment. “Locked for years in the coffin of his body," paralyzed and forced to be silent, he finally found his means of communication to release himself from isolation and share with others the “insight and whimsy” of his inner world, the innermost thoughts in his once “imprisoned” mind that no one suspected.

He wrote by using a special typewriter with a rod, which he called “unicorn stick”, attached to his forehead. While his head was held by his mother, he painstakingly picked out each word, letter by letter, with his unicorn stick stabbing down at the keyboard through every syllable, word, sentence, plot, and the whole novel. Given that snail-walking pace of writing, he would think he was lucky if he could complete two or three pages a day.

Christy once explained this heart-wrenching and mind-boggling process of writing as follows: "My mind is just like a spin-dryer at full speed; my thoughts fly around my skull while millions of beautiful words cascade down into my lap. Images gunfire across my consciousness. Try, then, to imagine how frustrating it is to give expression to that avalanche in efforts of one great nod after another." As gruelling as it was, he never gave up realizing his “wildest dream.” "Sometimes he'd go at it from 11am to 8pm," she proudly recalled. "At other times he would start, then shake his head when the inspiration wasn't coming. He never really knows until he gets the headgear on. But when the mood takes him it is as if time stands still."

In his 1988 Whitbread Book Award acceptance speech read by his mother, he said it out loud, "I want to shout with joy. My heart is full of gratitude. … Imagine, if you will, what I would have missed if the doctors had not revived me. Can it be right for man to turn on his handicapped brother and silence him before he can ever draw breath? … History is now in the making. Tonight, crippled man is taking his place on the world's literary stage."

Christy Nolan’s physical life ended after 43 winters, but his life on the page will definitely last more than 43 springs. “Can you credit all of the fuss that was made of a cripple?” goes the opening of Under the Eye of the Clock. Well, we surely can because his sparkling creative soul revealed through his poetic language shows us that his several physical disability is "a positive factor rather than a modifying condition in his impressive achievement.”

Bukowski, so you want to be a writer?

Poetry Discussion of the Week: Purdyian Answer to Bukowski’s so you want to be a writer?

Poems rise not so much in response to present time, as even Rilke thought, but in response to other poems.

-- The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom

On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems by Al Purdy

I am ashamed of you
my poems
you owe me something more
than you've given recently
my poems
you have forgotten your duty
which is to make me important
your function in this life
to march ahead of me
with fife and drum and skirling pipes
to encourage my own halting steps
my poems
your obligation is to cause people
to look at you and glimpse between your lines
indistinct and ambiguous my own face
enigmatic almost majestic certainly wise
my poems
your responsibility to lie about me and exaggerate me
allow me to bask in the esteem of a million readers
or a million in one
and so to shine under their focused intense regard
that my fossilized flesh will precede my dying
preclude my loving and replacing my actual living

......

my poems
you have betrayed your creator
i would discard you deny you condemn you
and since the life I have given you is not requited
the love I poured forth on you has not brought children
I will abandon you in some gutter blown by the wind
until the long rains beat on you and snow shall blur your meaning

......

my poems you have failed
but when I recovered from
this treachery to myself
I shall walk among the hills chanting
and celebrate my own failure
transformed to something else

in response to so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

So, what are your answers, would-be writers, writers-to-be, aspiring writers, published writers, or so-called writers-on-site?

Duly Commissioned Reports

Commission reports published in years past

on violence, justice, education,
poverty, racism, or what have you ...

were duly commissioned, researched, printed,
delivered, debated, or what have you ...

now filed away, ignored.

Note:

Commission Reports is my “rewrite” of an article published by The Toronto Star on the report concerning the roots of youth violence delivered last week by Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling.

Krino

Bailout --
watching the Dow crawl upward

Or buildup --
repairing the broken moral balance

My Confession co-authored with ericcoliu

There is a time for anything, and everything is under His watch:
times when I am indifferent to God's existence,
times when I am questioned about God's existence,
times when I interrogate God's existence,
times when I believe in God's existence,
times when I pray to God,
times when I ache for God,
times when I cast doubt on God,
times when I have anger toward God.

There are times when I call out to God in the dark,
but no one seems to be there.
Will he be here, standing by me?
I don’t know. Is there a God?

My Interpretation of Wang Wei’s Poem: The Twentieth Way of Looking at Wang Wei’s Poem co-written by ericcoliu

(A reply to ericcoliu’s Thematic Review of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated Written by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz)

Chinese Text of Poem, 鹿柴 by 王維

空山不見人，但聞人語響。
返景入深林，復照青苔上。

English Translation of Poem, Deer Fence by Hahaview and Ericcoliu

Empty mountains, no one in sight,
only human echoes are heard;
reflected sunlight enters the deep forest,
and shines upon the green moss again.

Poem Review

Wang Wei (699-761) was one of the major poets of the Tang Dynasty, the period of greatest poetic florescence in China, and a man of outstanding talents -- courtier, administrator, poet, calligrapher, musician and painter. Translations of his poetry outnumber those of any other Chinese poet. According to Chinese poetry scholar Pauline Yu, there are several possible reasons for the popularity of his poetry among the Western readers: “the quietude of many of his nature poems, appealing to subcultures of the late sixties in the West; his reliance on concrete imagery, which translates rather well; the infrequency of obscure allusions in much of his work; his comparatively straightforward diction and syntax; and the quite manageable size of his corpus – approximately 400 poems.”

However, there have been few extensive critical studies of his poetry. On the surface, we can find that his work possesses a deceptive simplicity in its language, a tranquil intimacy with nature, and a precise description of imagery, all of which seem to leave little room for the reader to interpret. However, upon a closer reading of his poetry, we discover that his work “reveals disturbingly elusive philosophical underpinnings, grounded in Buddhist metaphysics, and the difficulty of grappling with these concepts.” How to relate these Buddhism-influenced and philosophically inclined concepts to his poetry may have discouraged critical analysis. My review of his poem entitled Deer Fence is my personal response to this intellectually and aesthetically challenging task, an attempt to fill the critical gap and also to provide one more way, the twentieth way in terms of Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, of looking at Wang Wei’s poem.

Deer Fence is by far probably the most famous and translated of the most well-known group of twenty poems entitled Wang River Collection written at the time when Wang Wei and his friend, Pei Di were at leisure and took walks along Wang River. The title of the poem is the name of one of the places along Wang River they had visited, and it was written from various sights near the river.

In the first two lines, Wang doesn’t specify the subject. This is characteristic of Chinese poetry, and it raises the paradoxically confusing question – how can no one is seen and yet human echoes are heard -- for Western readers because of how it is translated into English. The phrase “empty mountain,” a key phrase in his work, has even been employed in some of his poems where there are human characters, emphasizing the Buddhist concept of a calm solitude amid nature. Viewed from this perspective, the first couplet possesses no contradiction between two sensory messages, visual and auditory, and it sets the tranquil tone for the poem.

In the last two lines, Wang moves from the spacious mountain scene to focus on a small mossy glade upon which the returning sunlight shines. He gets a glimpse of the last rays of sunlight, entering the deep forest and casting a final glow. According to Octavio Pas, for Wang Wei, the light of the setting sun has a very precise meaning. It is an allusion to the Amida Buddha: at the end of the afternoon, the adept meditates and, like the moss in the forest, receives illumination.” The allusion aside, the phrases “reflected sunlight” and “human echoes,” stressing the immateriality of what is being heard and a reflection of what is already intangible, also characterize his poetic sentiments: reliance on ambiguity and avoidance of distinctiveness.

Deer Fence is a poem impregnated with gem-like characteristics: concrete objects on the hand and murmuring voices and reflected light on the other; the physical world interacting with the metaphysical thoughts. It is written in a deceptively simple language with a tranquil tone, giving the reader the concrete imagery grounded on Buddhist metaphysics, and focusing on the objectivity, passivity and impersonality of man-nature encounters.

Poem Text of A One-line Poem by John Hollander

The universe

Chinese Translation

一行詩

詩道於一

Day and Night

It’s just a short day
Rushing into a long night
It doesn’t matter what you've done
For everything remains the same

Version I:gggggggggggggggggggggVersion II:
Yet another short daygggggggggggPlease, no more short days
Vanishing into a long nightgggggggEnding with long nights
Time keeps pushing yougggggggggDoes it matter to anyone
To sleep six feet underggggggggggIf you stay napping in the dirt

Poem Lyrics of Deathbed Song by Taego Bowoo

A man’s life? Empty water bubbles.
Eighty years passed in a dream.
Now I throw away my leather sack,
The wheel of the red sun sinks in the West.

Thematic Review

Taego Bowoo, the founder of the Taego Order and who ushered in a new era for Buddhism in his country, is a prominent Korean Zen poet of deathbed songs. Such a song, one of Korean Zen literary traditions, is composed by Zen masters on their deathbeds: a summa for a life and one final teaching lesson. What Deathbed Song offers is the distillation of Taego Bowoo’s life wisdom, revealing the essence of Zen Buddhism and the insight of his illumination.

The ideas about nothingness and transience of life, as observed and taught by the Buddha, are characteristics of Zen poetry: the impermanent nature of form means that nothing possesses essential, enduring identity. These Zen ideas are fully expressed in the poem in general and explicitly in the first two lines in particular. Nothingness and the transience of life are illustrated in the Zen-influenced metaphors as water bubbles and a dream. The boundary between life and death is transcended in the image of flesh as a leather sack, and the grand wheel of nirvana and transmigration is figured as the sinking sun. The images employed here are good reminders of the Buddhist text, Diamond Sutra 32:

By detachment from appearances, abide in Real Truth. So I tell you, Thus
shall you think of all this fleeting world,
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, a dream.

In Deathbed Song, Taego Bowoo shows his Zen-influenced poetic understanding of the phenomenal world through religious-rooted images, observations of nature, and insights into human life. Definitely, Deathbed Song is his summa for his life and one final lesson for his readers.

Nightlife co-authored with ericcoliu

Looking out the car window,
You gaze across the glittering cityscape;
Someone is watching you drive by
From a dark street corner.

Neon lights flash by your window;
Your realm is someone else’s dream.

Winter in Washington, DC

I am a stranger during the winter in Washington, DC (YOU, a smart reader, can replace it with whatever city you now live in). Arguments, excuses, and explanations are widespread here and meet with enthusiastic approval and harsh criticism. It is time-consuming and mind-exhausting to tell the difference between facts, lies, and simple boasting. Words confuse, and wound or plunge the soul into conflict. The city, ruled by a chill sun and blinding whiteout, produces only coarse language. Words, like the sports fans in cheap bars, don't bring relief. They are mere high-pitched noises and tire me out.