Fowler's New Anglo-Japanese Blues

James Fowler, Falling Ashes: Haibun, Haiku, Senryu, & Other Poems

Remember your high school instruction on writing haiku? Remember counting syllables, imagining happy splashing frogs, and crafting something so ethereal and useless that you despised your own words? (Or was that just me?) Tear all that up, it has nothing to do with real Japanese haiku. Instead, behold this glimmering, untitled gem:

a taxi arrives
my neighbor takes down
her yellow ribbon

US Navy veteran James Fowler served an extended hitch in Japan, learning the language and the people’s ways, and emerged with a distinct fondness for traditional Japanese verse. Like the haiku above, they generally don’t have titles, and concise imagery matters more than syllable count. As above, true haiku usually have no titles, and leave eager, attentive readers with more questions than answers.

Note, for instance, that Fowler’s neighbor has memorialized her absent husband (son? brother?) with a yellow ribbon. Yet she doesn’t greet him at the gate; he has to purchase a ride home. A yellow taxi for a yellow ribbon? The memorial goes away, but the memory of her soldier’s absence cannot vanish so easily. Fowler captures a moment in time, but doesn’t let us process it flippantly.

Fowler gracefully appropriates traditional Japanese verse for a modern setting, expunging generations of accumulated Western fake rules. Sure, Matsuo Bashō wrote about waving reeds and temple bells, but these were contemporary touchstones in feudal Japan. Like Bashō, Fowler uses older forms to describe the world he sees, in brief, uncluttered moments of surprising clarity.

Also, Fowler combines forms much like Bashō did, such as the haibun, a brief prose essay interrupted by snippets of verse. Some haibun run under fifty words, a quick dip into a moment, as poetically compact as the poetry around them. Take, for example, the fleeting, possibly hilarious moment captured in “Yokohama”:

In Chinatown I try to pass a pastry shop, but the scent of sweet-bean-curd and the sight of steam rising from the dumpling basket entice me to enter. I buy a dumpling and half-a-dozen fish-shaped cookies.

I eat a cookie
three uniformed schoolgirls
giggle and look down

Fowler trades primarily in themes of outsidership. First as the gaijin outsider discovering Japan, then as the veteran relearning his homeland after a twenty-year absence, he brings a worldview uncluttered by lifelong learned prejudices. This permits him to inject his verse and prose with unforced clarity, and as in the haibun above, moments of remarkable comedy.

Skirting the boundaries between Eastern and Western civilizations, Fowler manages to evade tedious “Inscrutable Orient” stereotypes that annoy cultural explorers and literary critics. He doesn’t use Japanese poetry as virtuoso performance or glib finger exercise. His focus on haiku’s intent rather than Westernized form frees him to write, essentially, about himself.

In that regard, Fowler resembles less Matsuo Bashō, more Sylvia Plath. Not in form, but in skillful, almost invisible use of his own questions, doubts, and aspirations as poetic inspiration. Having married late, for instance, he composes in a simultaneously loving and unromanticized tone when describing his wife. As veteran of two wars, he achieves plainspoken objectivity about combat.

Moreover Fowler serves to revitalize Western poetry with a shot of Japanese frankness. Later in the book, Fowler writes several typically contemporary non-rhyming English verses. Yet he imbues them with an essentially Japanese image-driven timbre, eschewing typical American linguistic ornament, as in “Poem Made in the Shape of a Burning Buddhist Monk”:

This poem is made to be read aloud
on a crowded street and dropped,
with a match, into a beggar’s bowl.

This poem will lift up in a cloud
of flames. High above, the fire
will burst and feather down upon
the shoulders of those passing by.

There will be many poems read
in the memory of burning monks.
Tears will streak the sooty faces
of the ghosts. Ash will fill their cups.

Read from an Anglo-American perspective, Fowler resembles Sylvia Plath, but rather than making himself the object of his verse, he conceals himself behind images. We glimpse not the poet himself, but his shadow, cast by the images he chooses to foreground. This near-Buddhist clarity communicates with readers, without ever lecturing them, or shanghaiing their insight.

If Western schoolteachers have trivialized haiku, James Fowler reclaims their original essence for curious readers. Audiences grown discouraged on today’s glut of Seventh-Grade open mike poetry will find his near-complete lack of intrusive narration refreshing. And his clear, brisk images free language from its gathered clutter. Here’s hoping more Western poets discover this clarity, and make it a trend.

Slippery Rhymes and Fleeting Poetic Truths

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Twelve
A.E. Stallings, Olives: Poems

The first trait new readers will discover when they crack her books is that A.E. Stallings rhymes. Though a handful of living poets like Dana Gioia and (to a lesser degree) Paul Muldoon use rhyme in their verse, the poetry establishment, readers and writers alike, substantially frown on direct end rhyme. Such aesthetic conservatism doesn’t sit well with the in-crowd these days.

But in reading, one gets the feeling Stallings doesn’t write for the in-crowd. Despite her use of conventional forms, especially sonnets, villanelles, and terza rima, her poetry is plainspoken, humble, and vernacular. Her blend of casual language and sophisticated form embodies what I think Wordsworth meant when he advocated a modern poetry in the language of the people.

Indeed, Stallings’ poems rely on such contradictions. She makes the timeless artifacts of her adopted homeland, Greece, vanish into the banal backdrop of a continuing memoir, while at the same time adding unexpected grandeur to ordinary events: making a phone call, a baby spitting up. Reading her verses, we feel the ground of our expectations shift violently under our feet.

In such an environment of unexpected paradox, her use of comprehensible rhyme gives us something firm to grasp. We follow her ideas’ volatile movement by the guideposts of her deceptively comforting language. This especially comes across when she talks about transcendent verities, as in this passage from her villanelle “Burned”:

You cannot unburn what is burned.
Although you scrape the ruined toast,
You can’t go back. It’s time you learned

The butter cannot be unchurned.
You can’t unmail the morning post,
You cannot unburn what is burned

Sometimes the rhyme is less obvious. Sometimes she’s oblique, rhyming “glass” with “vast,” a rhyme so fleeting that you miss it if you aren’t looking. Or in “Alice in the Looking Glass,” her rhymes are thematic rather than sonic: “pass” rhymes with “stay,” “bottom” with “top,” “here” with “there.” Only when you recognize the parallels do you spot the pseudo-rhyme.

We trained poets find it easy to mock readers who demand that poetry must rhyme, perhaps, because we think of words and verses as units of meaning. Because we write silently, expecting audiences to read silently, we lose sight of what I think rhyme’s layman advocates love: that language is comprised, not of the ideas we would convey, but at its most basic, of sound.

Stallings understands this. As a classicist rather than a trained poet, she handles the words of poets who wrote so that their work could be read aloud. Greek and Latin poetry was never read silently; poets were orators, and their verse was written for speech. We get a feeling for this when Stallings writes something that bridges the ages, like this from “Persephone to Psyche”:

Me and my man, we tried a spell,
A pharmacopoeia of charms,
And yet... When I am lonesome, well,
I rock the stillborns in my arms.

But Stallings does not merely recreate the splendors of the past. Poetry students have to be trained out of recreating their favorite highlights from Shakespeare or Browning, but Stallings accomplishes what students strive after. She shifts effortlessly between the linguistic panache of her poetic forebears, and her contemporary world. Consider this from “Sea Girls”:

“Not gulls, girls.” You frown, and you insist—
Between two languages, you work at words.
(R’s and L’s, it’s hard to get them right.)
We watch the heavens’ flotsam: garbage-white
Above the island dump (just out of sight),
Dirty, common, greedy—only birds.
OK, I acquiesce, too tired to banter.

This story starts out with Stallings attempting to teach her son to pronounce circumflex consonants correctly. But as it progresses, the similarity of words in a child’s mouth unlocks the essential similarity of concepts, the ways in which seagulls somehow resemble vibrant young women. Language proves slippery, not because of ideas, but because of sound.

This conversational tone makes poetry, a notoriously opaque literature beloved most often by those who create it, accessible to those outside the academy. Stallings creates verses that speak in regular language, without sacrificing the complexity that makes the best verse feel so substantive. Her work rewards casual reading or intense scrutiny.

Hopefully, Stallings represents a vanguard, a “new” breed of poet who writes for the audience, not the tenure committee. But even if she proves a minor oasis in the poetic desert, she has positioned her work amid her generation. Whether she produces a new verse movement or not, she has claimed a place in her audience’s spirit.

The Verse of a Fantastic Mind and Time

Ursula K. LeGuin, Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

Poets approaching their winter years have two choices. Like Walt Whitman, they can cast their eye to how scholars remember them after they die. Try reading later editions of Leaves of Grass, and note how opaque his work has become compared to earlier editions. Or they can keep the living audience in view, trusting that knowing readers will keep good writing alive. Ursula LeGuin has done the latter, and I love her for it.

Best known for her award-winning science fiction and fantasy, LeGuin has also kept many irons in the fire: she’s also an esteemed translator, critic, and essayist. Her poetry also proves a remarkable reward, offering glimpses into one of our time’s greatest minds. And considering the range of time covered in this collection, from 1960 to 2012, we get to see her evolution over the course of a productive, unconventional career.

The first half of this collection selects highlights from LeGuin’s prior collections. The table of contents cites thirteen collections, a remarkable number number for someone not known as a poet. Many respected poets have not been so prolific, perhaps because she writes full-time, and does not teach. Perhaps more important, because she writes for a paying audience and not for the tenure committee, her poetry is remarkably lucid:

So still so sunny and so Sunday
what’s done needs to be quiet:
a white butterfly
by the red fuses of the fuchsias.

(“Morning Service”)

Some of LeGuin’s earliest poetry utilizes the same fantastic imagery that informs her famed speculative fiction. Minstrels and maenads, nymphs and sun gods. But she does not linger on these tropes, and largely writes them out remarkably early. LeGuin writes poetry separately from her fiction. However, in some important ways, her writing spheres do overlap, particularly in her refusal to stand still and act predictably.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I particularly like her willingness to craft formal verse, which academic poetry decries, without resting on her forms. I can say, as I said about Aaron Poochigian, that LeGuin takes conventional forms and makes them her own. She writes sonnets, quatrains, and terza rima, but in ways that serve her, not in ways that conform. Some of her forms are surprising, like villanelles with four-syllable lines, or innovative ad hoc forms:

The mind is still. The gallant books of lies
are never quite enough.
Ideas are a whirl of mazy flies
     over the pigs’ trough.

Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone
for thirty years and still it is not done,
that image of the thing I cannot see.
I cannot finish it or set it free,
     transformed to energy.

(“The Mind Is Still”)

The second half of this collection pulls together previously uncollected poems, most of them quite short, like snapshots of a moment in the mind’s eye. She continues experimenting with tradition, taking the familiar and pushing its parameters to make it new, at once somehow comforting and unsettling. Italian octavos and ghazals and rare Indian forms jump out like old friends who have somehow reinvented themselves:

I never thought of a cold dragon
till I saw one dragging     its slow body
down the wide wadi     it had gouged
out of a mountain,     saw the bluish spatter
of icy water     from its mouth.

(“Mendenhall Glacier”)

This one uses Anglo-Saxon lacunae, emphasizing the line structure, pushing the rhyme from the line break into the middle in a way that seems accidental before you realize it’s there. She also pushes oblique rhyme about as far as I’ve ever seen anybody do so (“gouged/mountain”), forcing us to reconsider what makes words rhyme, and why we should consider such contrivances desirable.

Some of LeGuin’s new verses address the kind of topics we expect from poets at her age, particularly the difficulties of venerability: fleeting memory, flagging strength, the loss of friends. But she offers far less than we’ve grown accustomed to in a time when poetry increasingly resembles diary entries. The tenor of LeGuin’s new poetry is not one of loss, ending, and death; even in her age, her poetry still bespeaks continuation.

Good artists know the baker does not bake the bread he wants to eat. That’s why, say, Bruce Springsteen remains vital and innovative into his sixties. No one would blame Ursula LeGuin if she collected the musings of a great mind winding down; but no one would have felt much else, either. LeGuin cares enough to keep crafting at the peak of her skill, and that makes this collection great.

Contemporary Verse and the New Classic Tradition

Aaron Poochigian, The Cosmic Purr: Poems

Too much current poetry falls into two camps: singsong lyrics to soothe risk-averse masses, or image-rich free association evidently designed to alienate the audience. What happened to versifiers like William Blake and Walt Whitman, who saw their ability to reach and challenge readers as a duty and a privilege? Or holy poets like Sophocles and Shakespeare who crafted celebrations of the motivating spirit that makes us both human and divine?

Like his fellow classicist AE Stallings, Aaron Poochigian forms a bridge between the dead luminaries he translates, and today’s introspective verse. He makes use of the ancient, somber forms so many readers love, but he applies them to a muscular contemporary poetic ethos. And though his verse is very new, addressing current concerns for a living audience, it has a lyric texture of something much older, with a robust Greco-Roman spine.

When I say that Poochigian’s verse has an older tenor to it, I don’t mean he presents it like a museum piece. Poetry, for Poochigian, is no mere dead specimen for critics to parse and teachers to enforce on defenseless pupils. Consider these lines from his sonnet “Off the Clock”:

Co-conspirators for an afternoon,
we gathered, hush-hush, at the slow café.
Last week was debts and earthquakes but today
nothing is pressing. If a coffee spoon
is stirring, if the shadows lengthen there
beyond the awning, or the daily news,
catching the breeze, rustles around our shoes,
our minds are absent, and we just don’t care.

Notice that Poochigian uses the octet, the opening eight-line passage from the original Italian sonnets invented by Giacomo di Lentini. This form is much rarer than the Shakespearean quatrain, largely because it’s much harder to sustain. But Poochigian also contemporizes the line structure, with enjambed line endings, and very short clauses within longer lines. It has a disconcerting effect because it’s both ancient and, in some way, subtly new.

Traditional forms work well for Poochigian, as for the better known Stallings, because they see forms as tools they can use and adapt as needed. Many New Formalist poets treat forms as hidebound and inviolable, and would not create the tension between enjambed lines and mid-line commas. That would be just too troubling. Poochigian uses forms like a carpenter uses power tools, customizing them with ad hoc splices to make them suit his needs.

This same malleability applies to his subject matter. As a classicist, known until now primarily for his translations of Sappho, he has spent his professional life immersed in the Greco-Roman world. But he lives in Judeo-Christian America, and in some of his verses, he views Jerusalem (to pinch a metaphor from St. Anselm) through the lens of Athens. Consider the opening stanzas of “The Bad Tree”:

Why was the bad tree so appealing?
Why did the fruit perspire so much?
Its musk reached out, a red-light touch
tugging them toward a funny feeling.

Their friend the snake spoke like his glide.
Who could refute such breathiness?
God never talked to them like this.
They gobbled, giggled, ran to hide.

Poochigian continues in this manner, daring to ask: why is knowledge forbidden? If the truth will make us free, why does knowing comprise our Original Sin? Like Socrates twisting Euthyphro’s ear, Poochigian resists the desire for pat answers. To him, the question, not the answer, reigns supreme.

This give-and-take pervades Poochigian’s verse. The contemporary illuminates the ancient; the pagan illuminates the Christian; the life of action illuminates the life of the mind. Poochigian is not content to sit still, and his voracious mind roves over many topics, challenging us as readers to reevaluate what we think we take for granted.

Some of Poochigian’s topics will take nobody by surprise, yet his viewpoints certainly will. For instance, this book’s concluding twelve-poem cycle turns a modern eye to ancient and medieval topics. In poems like “Medusa” and “Helen’s Iliad,” he presents myths often told through pugilistic male eyes. But he forces us to see them through the vantage of the women who are so often passive, yet so instrumental, in these archetypal stories.

Aaron Poochigian comes from a firm foundation, which he builds onto with confidence and panache. For a generation that has come to associate poetry with open mic gloominess or lit class antiquity, he serves as a breath of fresh air. He writes for ordinary readers, and I believe ordinary readers, if given the chance, will embrace him as few of today’s poetic generation has been embraced by plain-spoken, literate masses.