On a Monday I promised you words
but became an overcast dusk.
You found the gap in me and looked
beyond the oracular swirl
where another sky floats, small and azure,
a Tuesday telling
leaning like a distant friend, bright
blue even when blue, beside
gold light on a companionable cloud.
Re-education of a poetNote: A few weeks ago I was approached by Diana at Holistic Wayfarer to write something about childhood for her site. She was opening up her guest spots to a few poets (so brave, so brave). I misinterpreted her topic as writing about how my childhood prepared me to be a poet. This filled me with fear, because as it turns out I was entirely unprepared for my ultimate choice of vocation. So of course I wrote about it. The result, off-topic for the HW request, I have decided to publish here. If you’re not already a follower of the Wayfarer and her work, you might see some familiar faces among her readers… / JS
Being a poet was not at the top of my list as a child.
It had to get past spaceman (age 4), paleontologist (age 5), second baseman for the New York Yankees (ages 6-14) and then a few years of wanting to get into the advertising business after being a fan of the Tom Hanks TV series “Bosom Buddies” while I was in high school. It was actually a dust jacket of a book, accidentally encountered, which cemented my real intentions, but I’ll get to that in a bit. I wouldn’t want you to judge this book by that cover.
I may not have always wanted to be a poet, but I always wanted to be a writer. Before I knew a single letter of the alphabet I was making books of my own. Bat writing, I called it, long scribbles covering page after page I’d fold together into something resembling a book, and claim to be able to read. But it was real complex and personal stuff, you see, so you’d have to understand why I wouldn’t tell you exactly what it said if you asked. (Hmm. This behavior does start to sound a bit like that of a poet, doesn’t it?)
The paleontologist thing came because my first book, a Lippincott hardcover about dinosaurs, inspired me to want to write a book exactly like that one, even down to having J.B. Lippincott publish it. To write a great book about dinosaurs I’d clearly have to know my stuff, thus the desire to study monsters of the past. Not for the science, but so that I could write about it.
Many writers suffer early years of disappointment in the marketplace, and in this way my childhood prepared me for my life’s calling. In second grade I wrote and illustrated a story called “Sam the Shy Dinosaur.” My teacher Mrs. Gallagher sought out a publisher for it but could not find someone in all of suburban Rhode Island interested, apparently. In third grade, I wrote a long story called “Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula,” which obtained a modest level of success in that my teacher Mrs Sullivan had me read the entire narrative aloud to my class. Also striking was it was the only of my works written entirely in orange magic marker.
Then, a bit of silence as the uneven hum of the decade spun me about, sometimes sounding like Paul McCartney and Wings, other times sounding like my father calling Muhammad Ali a “dirty nigger” as he beat Gerry Quarry senseless on ABC’s Wild World of Sports one Saturday, the same year I remember writing a book report on a short biography of Ali I found in the school library. I was impressed with the story about the young Cassius Clay purposefully missing the school bus so he could race it to his elementary school and beat it. That hum of change and its discomforts and confusions made its way in and held.
So the ‘seventies slunk by. Watergate. Serpico. The Osmond Brothers singing David Bowie’s “Fame” on the Donny & Marie show. (Can it get much more confusing than that?) The decade’s own borders were embattled, in that the ’60s didn’t apparently end until 1973 when we pulled out of Vietnam, and the ’80s started a few years early in 1977 with The Sex Pistols and The Clash and Elvis Costello and the punk movement in Great Britain. At least the Yankees won the World Series in 1977 and 1978, keeping my childhood afloat amidst the cultural wreckage of that wonderfully messy and realistic decade, sandwiched as it was between the two absolutely unrealistic decades of the ‘sixties and ‘eighties.
Somewhere in there, I still knew I wanted to write. I took a test for a creative writing correspondence school when I was 11 and received a letter back explaining that I was too young to apply. I remember tearing the letter up in an absolute fury and renouncing writing forever. My memory tells me my mother yelled at me for that, though my memory does not tell me why — was it that I was showing a lack of respect for the eminent mail-order education for which I was only a year too young to apply? or that I had never shown such negative emotion in my short lifetime and that the passion of my rejection of the rejection surprised her?
At any rate I did not think about writing again until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher Richard Lawrence re-introduced me to the potential of writing. Mr Lawrence, who for all I know is still teaching at Mt St Charles Academy in Woonsocket, RI, was a top-notch soccer coach and just as demanding with his honors English students as he was with his midfielders. His version of having us do laps would be to stop mid-sentence while talking about an inevitable Christ-figure symbol in any given 20th century novel and calmly say, eyes gleaming, “Take out a piece of paper.”
Groans from the peanut gallery. It meant a test, a quiz, an unexpected essay. It also meant writing. In his class I did my first bit of creative writing in 7 years, and realized I really liked it. We wrote plays and performed them. We wrote poetry. We wrote short stories. I remember at one point showing Mr Lawrence some poems I had written outside of class, based on an inspired mangling of reading Vonnegut, Whitman and a classic 1938 short story by Carl Stephenson called “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” He held the paper aloft as he read. Only his piercing eyes moved, back and forth, as he read across and down the page. He looked at me over the paper before handing it back to me, his gaze sparkling with something I could not fathom, and said only, “There’s not a lot of money in poetry.” I took those words, and that look, as encouragement. It was the sound of the first door opening to my calling.
Spin ahead a year to Cornell University. I’m in the bookstore as a freshman, testing the limits of my CornellCard, a brilliant marketing idea by university administrators designed to enable you to buy all the books you want at the campus store and have your parents billed for it later. As I was carrying my text books to a register I noticed the poetry section close to the store’s entrance, and in it a large black tome of the complete poems of EE Cummings.
You have to know that Cummings’ Complete Poems is the archetypal complete poems collection–big, heavy, and looking exactly like a great poet’s life work packed into a single volume should look.
The front cover of the book had only the enigmatic mug of the poet himself, against a black background. Cummings’ face was more than the face of a poet to me; it was the face of The Poet. You could tell looking at him that at the time of the photograph he had already found himself beyond everyday life’s marauding ways. This was a face immune to spiritual erosion. Intense. Serene. All characteristics of being that, frankly, I had not been prepared to feel in my suburban Rhode Island childhood. I knew as soon as I saw that book that I was in for a re-education. And that Dick Lawrence was right, as he always was. And with that my path was set.
It will hurt. The empty
pages of a lost book
you can never read again:
Now you know what it is
to write. To take a walk.
The boxwoods whisper
only the prurient details,
the red maples an advocacy
of lifting secrets suddenly
light as squirrels. Everything
that comes close to the light
scatters its shadow farther from
the shape of what we felt,
the dark fret where footprints
filigree the sorrowful soil
of another rich season.
Almost-full moon over skidding vapor trail.
A cat on the carpeted stairs.
A street-sign day with no direction.
My 10 year old daughter Aurora won the Writer’s Ear prize at her elementary school. The contest, sponsored by the Staunton Music Festival, involves students listening to a musical selection and writing a poem or story based on their response. Aurora wrote the poem below. The prize-winning entries are read aloud by the authors at a free concert on April 6th. Go Aurora!
The music Aurora listened to can be found here and it’s Track 5.
I hear the distant shouts of trouble,
While the wind whispers my name,
I pause and look at the sky, a gray blanket of worry.
I need to help. My legs couldn’t have carried me faster,
And my heart couldn’t have created a faster beat.
The wind speaks again, but this time it yells.
“Hurry, hurry.” “Hurry, hurry”
Now the only enemy is time.
–Aurora Schwaner
Following is the Author’s Note to Moonlight & Shadow: An Imaginary Portrait of Mei Yao-ch’en, which collects the 38 poems about the time-traveling 11th-century Chinese poet Mei Yao-ch’en. Many of which appeared originally on this site, and it was the great response to the first handful of appearances by Mei that led to this book-length collection.
Moonlight & Shadow is being published as a limited edition of 20 copies, signed and numbered, in a large 11×14 format with hand-crafted covers bound in an ancient Chinese side-bound style by St Brigid Press. At the bottom of this post is a special ink to reserve a copy at a 35% discount. More information about the book and its design can be found on the Books page.
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MANY of the more intrepid readers of my site Translations from the English know that for most of 2014 I was at work on a sequence of poems about 11th century Chinese poet Mei Yao-ch’en, the premise of which includes me somehow transporting him in the midst of his forty-ninth year to that same moment in my life here in the 21st century; that as Sung dynasty poets tended to do, Mei and I thought time and distance less important than wine and friendship, and that he heroically and generously consented and contented himself with being a guest in my house (and millennium) for some undetermined duration, taking it upon himself to write home occasionally about his experiences, sometimes to his friend (and his brother in law’s son) Hsieh Shih-hou.
The poems in this book, then, are in Mei Yao-ch’en’s voice. The titles are in mine — in the absence of the proper writing materials, Mei records his thoughts on walls, towels, shower curtains, poster board, on the underside of a Christmas tree skirt, whatever is at hand, much like his predecessor Han Shan was said to scrawl his poems on rocks, trees, and monastery walls — and I translate and record them, adding long explanatory titles which are themselves the type of titles that were very much part of the social transmission of poetry of the Northern Sung dynasty of Mei’s time.
I call these poems an “imaginary portrait” because, of course, the words are not Mei’s, and while I’m not sure they are entirely mine, either, there is no one else about to take credit or responsibility for them; so they are those of a Mei of my own making, and they do across their breadth begin to sketch out a portrait of that poet for twenty-first century readers. Also, in the first and only book I was able to find about Mei’s life and work, the cover and verso of the half-title page are adorned with an image of Mei that is described as an “imaginary portrait” painted roughly six hundred years after his death. Honestly, I thought if someone could take a shot at painting the guy’s likeness after six centuries, could I trespass any more on the truth by trying to throw him a thousand years into the future and read his mind?
I was moved to write about Mei after reading wonderful translations by David Hinton and Kenneth Rexroth. Seeking out additional information I found the book mentioned above, Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry, by Jonathan Chaves. Published in 1976, it is a gold mine of biographical information, critical perspective, and translations of dozens of Mei’s poems. I found it just after I had written the first one or two poems about Mei and decided I’d write more.
In the spring of 2014 I made contact with Professor Chaves, who teaches in Washington, DC at George Washington University, to thank him for a book he wrote forty years ago. To my surprise anddelight, Professor Chaves responded the next day, and added: “In Spring of 2011 I visited Mei Yao-ch’en’s hometown of Hsuancheng / Xuanchang in Anhui Province, where a new monumental statue has been erected in commemoration of him.” He included photos of the monument in its in-progress state, which may by now have been completed. It’s good to know my old friend’s work is getting the attention it deserves.
I found additional insight into Mei’s life as a poet by reading The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song, by Colin S.C. Hawes. It contains several translations of Mei poems I have not found in translation elsewhere, and even more of Mei’s good friend and fellow poet Ou-yang Hsiu.
The Afterword of this book contains a translation of Mei Yao-ch’en’s poem “Night”. This translation is my own, done with the great help of Chen Zhang, who at the time of this writing was serving as Literary Chinese Preceptor at Harvard University, and who provided insight into the Traditional Chinese characters of the Sung dynasty poets. The sum of what Ms Zhang provided me in my struggle to translate a single poem of Mei’s is far greater than what shows up in the merit of the translation. I made this attempt mostly to introduce to readers of contemporary English-language poetry a poem of Mei Yao-ch’en’s which had never been translated before; to absorb directly an appreciation of the actual work of translation; and to offer it as a token of appreciation and gratitude to Mei Yao-ch’en himself.
Much of the great classical Chinese poetry is written in a style called regulated verse. The regulations of this form do not translate into any English form of verse, any more than Traditional Chinese characters translate to single English words or syllabic counts translate from Chinese to English. But I did gain some appreciation for at least the translated effects of regulated verse in the course of reading and re-reading thousands of wonderful poems from the T’ang and Sung dynasty, through the insightful translations of David Hinton, Red Pine, J.P. Seaton, Kenneth Rexroth, Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, and others; and so the form that Mei Yao-ch’en ostensibily utilizes in this collection, called by me “unregulated verse,” does indeed have its characteristics, most of which pay homage, technically or thematically, to regulated verse and the themes and memes of that work, strained (much like the ancients strained their wine before writing their poems) through a sieve of centuries, and newly tainted with the road dust of the mere fifty years of this individual’s flawed vessel. The result of certain characteristics of this form may result in what looks like inconsistent punctuation and other anomalies. My only assurance is that there is a form, and for those seeming inconsistencies I’m willing to take full blame, knowing this is one of the perils of translating one’s own work. JS
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Ten of the 20 numbered and signed copies of Moonlight & Shadow are being offered for sale. For a limited time you can reserve a copy at 35% discounted price of $75 here.
Through a brick-lined alley where I read my life’s sentence
I step over a rivulet of snowmelt that flows behind me into the past
walking with an open cup of coffee in a soft cold rain
The moon’s not looking
out a window in
the house next door
to the west of bed.
Rising I talk the evening
down from its sorrows:
What begins as one thing
passes into another, I say,
sundown to dusk to night
for instance, night to
faintest light to dawn
to day. Then night says
in a voice so dark I can
not read its words
What begins as love
passes into love
and from the house next door
to the east of my steps
the moon rises
as from its black chimney
Translations from the English 