The Poets Corner
July is a good month to take a few books to the back yard, the beach, or to a mountain top. Maybe not even books we are fond of. Simply a few books we have not looked at for a while.
I picked out four. Haven’t looked at any of them for at least a few years. One I thought was a couple of years old came out in 2009! As it happened, two of the books I chose are by women and two by men. I liked that.
I’ll start with the 2009 publication, Judy Hardin Cheung’s Heritage Comes From The World. Here’s the start of Judy’s poem “Contemplating Realities.” Judy is a photographer as well as a poet — a “poetographer" as she styles herself. This poem is accompanied by the photo Judy took of a lotus in bloom in Guan Dong, China.
I am a poet covered with rose petals
writing of lotus blossoms
and love in exotic places.
In a half-tranced state of creativity
I drift in and out of roses and lotus,
around and into dreamwake.
Poems often invent words. There is a kind of freedom in poetry that seems to encourage invention. Translation also encourages invention, since what is easy to express in one language is not necessarily easy in another. Here is a poem by multilingual author and painter, Dr. Kenneth Kuanling Fan. It’s from his Poetic Painting Anthology, a pocket size book of poems in Chinese and English, each with a painting beside it. Dr. Fan’s painting for this poem shows a snowy peak and an unusual sky with wet brushstrokes that could be rising mist or the aurora borealis.
Clouds,
Where do you go?
The snowy top
Or the valley Fog
Owing much to what we generally call the haiku tradition, this poem of Dr. Fan’s benefits from reading or reciting several times, thinking of mountain scenery — winter or summer, Sierras, the coast range, local hills,
Bay Area Poet Avotcja (pronounced Ah-votcha) reads with jazz as well as reading her poetry a cappella. (I’m playing a bit fast and loose with the term “a cappella,” as meaning “solo,” because Avotcja’s breath pauses when she reads aloud suggest music by their beat.)
Here are some lines from Avotcja’s poem “Ancestral Reflections," which starts by calling in the spirits of thirty-five ancestors, people who have passed, two of whom I was fortunate enough to meet.
Can you feel them???
Ancestral suggestion trying to guide us
They’re everywhere
Walking through us, right beside us
Got the intensity of their legacy in everything
All over our stuff
They’re in us, with us
All the time
Our Ancestors never sleep
They want us to know all they’ve ever known
Been trying to show the way so we don’t have to fall
They need us to feel them
Won’t let us go til we let them know we need them
There’s still too much work that has to be done
They’ve got their busy fingers in all our business
Whether we want them there or not
. . . . .
Feel them . . . they’re here
July is a good month to take a few books to the back yard, the beach, or to a mountain top. Maybe not even books we are fond of. Simply a few books we have not looked at for a while.
I picked out four. Haven’t looked at any of them for at least a few years. One I thought was a couple of years old came out in 2009! As it happened, two of the books I chose are by women and two by men. I liked that.
I’ll start with the 2009 publication, Judy Hardin Cheung’s Heritage Comes From The World. Here’s the start of Judy’s poem “Contemplating Realities.” Judy is a photographer as well as a poet — a “poetographer" as she styles herself. This poem is accompanied by the photo Judy took of a lotus in bloom in Guan Dong, China.
I am a poet covered with rose petals
writing of lotus blossoms
and love in exotic places.
In a half-tranced state of creativity
I drift in and out of roses and lotus,
around and into dreamwake.
Poems often invent words. There is a kind of freedom in poetry that seems to encourage invention. Translation also encourages invention, since what is easy to express in one language is not necessarily easy in another. Here is a poem by multilingual author and painter, Dr. Kenneth Kuanling Fan. It’s from his Poetic Painting Anthology, a pocket size book of poems in Chinese and English, each with a painting beside it. Dr. Fan’s painting for this poem shows a snowy peak and an unusual sky with wet brushstrokes that could be rising mist or the aurora borealis.
Clouds,
Where do you go?
The snowy top
Or the valley Fog
Owing much to what we generally call the haiku tradition, this poem of Dr. Fan’s benefits from reading or reciting several times, thinking of mountain scenery — winter or summer, Sierras, the coast range, local hills,
Bay Area Poet Avotcja (pronounced Ah-votcha) reads with jazz as well as reading her poetry a cappella. (I’m playing a bit fast and loose with the term “a cappella,” as meaning “solo,” because Avotcja’s breath pauses when she reads aloud suggest music by their beat.)
Here are some lines from Avotcja’s poem “Ancestral Reflections," which starts by calling in the spirits of thirty-five ancestors, people who have passed, two of whom I was fortunate enough to meet.
Can you feel them???
Ancestral suggestion trying to guide us
They’re everywhere
Walking through us, right beside us
Got the intensity of their legacy in everything
All over our stuff
They’re in us, with us
All the time
Our Ancestors never sleep
They want us to know all they’ve ever known
Been trying to show the way so we don’t have to fall
They need us to feel them
Won’t let us go til we let them know we need them
There’s still too much work that has to be done
They’ve got their busy fingers in all our business
Whether we want them there or not
. . . . .
Feel them . . . they’re here
Another bilingual book, this one in Spanish and English, is by Benicia poet laureate, Joel Fallon. The title of the book is Death in a red Shirt. Here is Joel’s poem, "Steinhart Aquarium, Cathedral of Fishes.”
Past the sinister crocodile
slumbering in the skylit vestibule,
to the tile-floored twilight transept,
where fishes dart and laze in tanks,
where ghostly gliding shark [sic] swim,
swift and agile in luminous tanks,
and surf drums and thrashes
in glassed-in pools.
A woman holds a child up to the glass.
Blue eyes intent.
Small starfish hands flat
against the tank.
“Momma, can she see me?”
“Yes honey, she can see you.”
“She is beautiful, momma.”
“You’re both beautiful, honey.”
Unblinking child and fish
regard each other
through thick glass, feet of water
and millions of years.
I was surprised to discover — rediscover — these poems and more. Writing some new ones might follow!
Tanya Joyce
Painter, Poet, Pinole Artisan
www.tanyajoyce.com
[email protected]