ESSAY: Skunk Cabbage

Nouns, of course, are the names of things: the names of people and places, the names of animals and plants. Things. Originally an old English word, þing ( the odd ‘p’ is a thorn, a ‘th’ sound) meant an assembly or a discussion, but gradually moved from a general discussion to a particular object. The evolution of nouns, like a journey over hill and dale, like all journeys, offers insight to those perspicacious individuals who come to the game with the mind’s eye open wide.Take skunk cabbage, for instance. The plants taxonomic name, it genius and species, is Lysichiton americanus. The genus derives from two Greek words, lysis, meaning 'loose,' and chiton, meaning 'tunic.' This taxonomic descriptive refers to the yellow spathe, a broad leaf or bracht that wraps the stalk like a monk's cowl.

Spathe, in turn, comes from another Greek term. Spathe (σπάθη) refers to a ‘broad blade’ or a ‘wide blade of a sword.’ ‘Bracht’ does not come from Greek (just to confuse the issue), but from the Latin bractea, meaning a thin metal plate.

Were a spathe made from bractea being shaped by a man wearing a lysis chiton, a brawny fellow wielding a heavy hammer with each blow molding the bladeshaped billet, sweat rolling off his forehead, the ember glow of the forge lighting the smithy with a devilish glow, the steady clang of each repetitive blow smarting the ear, a sword would slowly emerge, a tool fit to slay beasts, beasts as big as bears.

Black bears, too, were perspicacious enough to recognize skunk cabbage as an excellent food source. Rather than a staple, however, the plant is considered a specific, and serves as a purgative to "unplug" bears after a winter of no defecation. They eat flower, stalk, and root, often wallowing through the entire bog in search of the most succulent plants. As they dig, these beasts happily grunt.

Indigenous people who once lived off the land also used this plant as a valuable food source. In early spring, when winter stocks were running low, the boiled tubers of Lysichiton americanus became a staple. Eaten raw, the roots have a hot, peppery taste, and a little goes a long way; but a lengthy boil and a thirty or forty minute bake renders a piquant, tasty, nutty snack. The women who harvested skunk cabbage went about their work chattering or singing their monophonic songs. tunes punctuated with sharp vocables such as 'hey' and 'yah,' these to keep the bears at bay.

Taxonomists are keen to fix just the right label on plants and, well, things generally. Often this involves a great deal of discussion. Besides the western skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), the topic of this essay (along with black bears and singing Chinooks), the eastern skunk cabbage ((Symplocarpus foetidus) provides more food for thought. Purple leaves mark this variant, and its ability to produce heat through thermogenesis allows the plant to melt its way through frozen ground in search of the sun of early spring.

POEMS: Poetic Prose

The prosepoem (or poetic prose: six of one, half dozen of another) that follows is from my book of prosepoetry Plum Blossoms, an account of Master Ko's peregrinations about Japan in 81 verses:

benri-ya---you say 'han-dee-mahn'---that's all ... leaning on a wooden handled broom with long reddish bristles, an old man wearing a patched and threadbare saffron robe, runs a knobby knuckled hand over the short grey stubble on his head, looking at mia, sucking his yellowed teeth, 'bout time you come, he said ... handyman? laughing, handyman ... when dry he swept clean the stone steps up haguro to the shrine; when wet he cleaned the temple, the lodgings, the pagoda, the bell tower or simply sat in his small hut ... how long? how long, he muses, how long: since before dirt, laughing, bobbing his head, a few swipes with the wooden handled broom, came after hiroshima, sucking his teeth, a-bomb ... bad comes from too many heads in soup, laughing, bobbing his head ... live here good place with myself

Prose such as 'benri-ya' creates ripples of indignation in the thoughts of many readers and writers. Fish or foul, they wonder. Cross-grinned stuff. Agathokakological as blessed. To add to the disgruntlement, I tend  to eliminate capitals and most punctuation marks. Heresy, no doubt. In my defense, I yield the floor to poet David Schumate who has written what seems to me the definitive word on prose poems, as he comments on William Stafford's estimate of the genre in an old journal called Double Room:

I am drawn to Stafford’s suggestion that the prose poem is an honest form which renounces using white space to “bamboozle” a reader and instead forces heavier reliance on other poetic conventions. I am also drawn to the relative homeliness of the prose poem. Its inelegance. A blob in the shape of the state of Kansas. A bulbous dirigible hovering there at the top of the page. Most of the assembled spectators would think it could never fly. But cut the tethers. And stand back. If it’s crafted well, it will hover out over the fields in defiance of all poetic gravity and leave the crowd in awe. But beware. It all pivots on the engineering. And the gases that lift it. The Hindenburg is in ashes.

The genre does have a long history. Many Biblical stories are cited as early examples of the style. Generally, the origin of the form is attributed to French and German poets of the 19th century who rebelled against the strictures of formal poetics ( the Alexandrine, for example).

While researching John Donne's 'No Man Is An Island' (1624) I was surprised to find that many commentators have labeled his Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions as poetic prose. Devotions were a common 17th century genre that focused on mortality and repentance often turning to the immediacy of poetic prose and personal prayer to examine the nature of human suffering and divine mercy.

Mr Donne, lying ill in his bed, scribbled off his Devotions in one sitting, and sent them off willy-nilly to the printers. The last word will be his. Poetry? Prose? Or? 'Meditation I' begins with something of a thunderclap:

O miserable condition of man! which was not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness: we are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! we die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes.

STORY: Excerpt from After The Death Of Robert Francis Kennedy

SYNOPSIS:

After The Death of Robert Francis Kennedy is a short novel that follows the intellectual and emotional development of Thomas Malleus. The story is structured like a classic five paragraph essay; but its style is more that of free verse. Malleus, something of an outcast, is faced with the common challenges of all young men in that contentious decade, the 1960s. Set in San Francisco in the fall of 1968, he seeks to cast off the personal. religious, and social shibboleths that mark the American way of life.

ONE

The outcome of the debate that night turned on the poetry of Robert Frost. Richard Apperley and the young woman from Stanford had assumed their intellectual en gardes. The young woman opened with the opinion that if form and function were one, then truth and beauty must out. She argued that craft did not need art, that freedom was an illusion, a mere adjunct of function and form. She was on the debate team. Her propositions were self-evident, she said, and her a priori argument was unimpeachable.

“Frost had not a jot of interest in beauty or truth. Frost’s poems function simply to capture what he himself described as a ‘sense of sound.’ Form was less important to Frost, sometimes classic, sometimes not. His words, his phrases, chosen with care, hung like ornaments on some noble fir and thereby proved their value, his worth. But never mind beauty, never mind truth. Or, rather, truth and beauty were incidental. A word that worked was the thing. And all his poems had and did function; he was a craftsman.”

A toothsome wench was Richard’s descriptive phrase. With hips neither narrow nor wide, but just so, and begging for maternity. Her a posteriori was rather charming as well, and his eyebrows went up and down, up and down.

“If you write with just form and function in mind, sweetie,” he said to her, “your words and phrases become mechanical, brutish things; they go clumping about, ugly noisome things. You ever read law? Function is uppermost. Clarity and precision rule the day: And the party of the first part renders unto the party of the second part who herewith and henceforth becomes the party of the third part therefore and so forth and so on. Law is about function; art is not.”

“The craftsman as artist uses and then transcends form and function.”

“Transcends, is it?”

“Transcends.”

Richard Apperley looked to his friend for support.

“Help me out here, Tom,” he said.

Thomas Malleus sat in the bay of the front window watching the crosseyed cat pad carefully about the opening of the alley between the buildings across the street.

“You’re the writer,” Richard added. “Got some imput?”

Supercilious, thought Thomas Malleus. Arrogance shapes the face with disdain in mind. She could be beautiful. Should be.

“He writes?” she asked.

“He writes,” Richard replied.

“What does he write?”

“Prose and poetry.”

“Published?”

“Nope. He doesn’t bother to submit.” And Richard had shrugged. “An apostate. He doesn’t subscribe to that faith. He writes for himself alone.”

“Can he write?”

“Sure. Got notebooks full. Prima facie.”

“But can he write?”

The face of the young woman from Stanford became all angles, straight line of mouth, arched eyebrow, hand swiping lank blonde hair straight back.

Thomas turned away, thinking, I am invisible.

The cat leaped nimbly atop a garbage can and sat to lick a forepaw. She sat up and stared across at the light.

Ears gnawed, the old bitch. Yellow eyed. Thomas gave a curt nod of the head to the cat. And there it is in fur and flesh: Form and function, truth and beauty. Gulls and cats and all things that have dodged Pythagoras. Function and form becoming one thing, free, and with beauty, and a simple truth. Which comes first is the chicken and the egg. He turned back to the room.

They sat on the sofa, turned awkwardly towards each other. Their debate had moved from Frost to Segovia. And Thomas heard Richard say, “Yeah, but could Andres play the blues?”

Freeing the function from the form, the 12 bar blues.

“Yo, Tom, what do you think?”

The young woman from Stanford thought it was getting late, and that she had better get back down the peninsula. And, of course, she did not want to be there when Richard’s mother returned.

Putting on her jacket, she said, “He hasn’t said a word all evening.”

“Enigmatic,” said Richard. “I’ll call you.”

And then doors opened and closed and the young woman from Stanford appeared on the sidewalk below him, shadow long and oblique from the lamp light up the street. The cat bellied down, alert, with a tense, tight loop, a twitch, of her tail, leaping suddenly away as the young woman stepped from the curb to cross the street. The cat leaped away in the darkness, disappearing.

ESSAY: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO JAPANESE POETRY

From Comfort & Despair, poetry of Gary Simoni

INTRODUCTION

R.D. Laing wrote The Politics of Experience in 1967. In that work, the Scottish psychiatrist turned psychiatry on its ear when he penned his harsh and hyperbolic condemnation of the human race: "We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be."

While not the first to make such a point—Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, and others had embellished the theme each as they saw fit—-Laing became the standard bearer for this notion within the psychiatric community. To remain sane under the weight of modern civilization was by his definition insanity. Bach was out; it was all just rock and roll.

History, it seems, supports such a dire conclusion. Even when read, history provides no panacea for the repetition of murder and mayhem. People are bought and sold. Citizens become so much collateral damage. A truism to wrap around this dim sentiment, be it true or tripe, is that you cannot control other people; you can only control yourself. And controlling one’s self, minding one’s own business, is a complicated, multifarious enterprise at best; a practice that should keep a person fully occupied and, with enough judicious application, that might even provide some relief from the worst of society’s ills. It is the anarchist’s anthem: if everyone behaved ethically and morally, there would be no need to legislate ethics and morality. This then becomes a good way to beat Laing’s rap. We are all murderers and prostitures; but we need not meekly acquiesce.

The world of arts and letters is replete with attempts to mollify or develop this conceit of Laing’s. Classicism, beyond the strict aesthetic definition of craftsmanship and control, might well serve as a means to contain human foibles, a means of containing rowdy randomness with precise form (a bucket, says Hulme, not a well). It is replete with rules and requisites, seeking order within harmony. Romanticism, on the other hand, is prone to flights of fancy, to chaos. Classicism is about restraint; romanticism is about freedom. Rarely is one sufficient. The two conjoined, blended like a good sauce, seem to suggest the path to be taken.

SKELETONS

Japanese poetry consists of many distinct forms and variations of these forms. They are all exceptionally prescriptive. Of these, haiku, a relatively newcomer, might be the most well known type. Many of the forms are over a thousand years old. The poetic explorations that trundle along in the pages of this book (Comfort & Despair) addressing themes that Laing might well recognize use three of these ancient Japanese poetic forms—chōka, tanka, and shichigon-zekku—as classic skeletons on which to hang some romantic modern flesh. The Japanese used these forms to write epics of war, erotic odes to love, and paeans to nature. The chaos of their life and times was contained in these relatively short clips in an attempt to understand the chaos.They were good enough for a few obvious truths then; and will serve equally well today.

(Two conventions that I prefer when dealing with Japanese and Chinese terms is to italicize the initial appearance of the term, and subsequently remove the italics. The second is to accept the lack of plurals in both Japanese and Chinese, and use the appropriate English form given the context.)

Waka

和歌, Japanese poem

During the Heian Period of Japanese history (784 - 1185), poets began to write idiomatic poetry in Japanese rather than classic Chinese. Initially, Japanese wrote exclusively in Chinese. Gradually, they developed their own distinctive syllabaries. The subject matter of the Heian verse was somewhat prescribed, but broad enough to introduce many new concepts to the old classic list.

In its largest sense, waka is the umbrella term that covers the entirety of Japanese poetry. More specifically, waka is the term used for those poetic forms that predate the emergence of renga or linked verse and its products, primarily sedōka and tanka. For example, the earliest classical compilation of Japanese poetry, the Man’yōshū (‘Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves.’ ca. 760), is a collection of waka. Originally labeled Yamato uta, waka began to appear in the early 7th and 8th centuries to differentiate native poetry written in nascent Japanese from kanshi, poems written in classical Chinese.

Chōka

長歌, long poem

Chōka are, arguably, the oldest form of Japanese poetry. Most historians studying ancient poetic forms date the chōka as far back as the 1st century. The word itself—長歌 in Japanese— means long (長, なが, naga) poem (歌, うた, uta); although uta also carries the meaning of ‘song’ and thus marries the recitation of poetry with chanting or singing. A contrasting form is the tanka (短歌) which translates literally to short poem or song.

The long poems were considered by most who evaluated the forms to be the most intricate and variable. They consisted of a series of katuata (片歌, half-poem; a traditional 3-line Japanese poem coupled with a 5-7-5 or 5-7-7 onji (syllable structure) which were combined to give a 5-7-5-7-7 or 5-7-7-5-7 structure. The number of lines of these poems varied, but often stretched to dozens of lines, sometimes exceeding 100 lines. Chōka can be of any length, but the most common structure is a series of three or four couplets, with each pair of lines forming a complete thought.

In addition to the alternating syllable pattern, chōka incorporated wordplay, alliteration, and other poetic devices to enhance their beauty and meaning. The form’s simplicity and flexibility allowed for creative expression while adhering to a structured framework.

The ability to write as many lines as needed within this form, made chōka ideal for the early epics from the 1st to the 13th century. Storytelling per se was rare in the Japanese language during the Waka period. Most often the Japanese poet would write epics in classical Chinese. Still, the occasional poet with a story to tell would tackle the chōka, the earliest of which can be traced back to the 1st century. It describes a battle and is 149 lines long. This lengthy verse was probably sung with the words intoned in a high pitch.

Tanka

短歌, short poem

The tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line either vertically or horizontally. A derivation of waka, these short songs are better known in English by their five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. In the late Heian, tanka quickly became the preferred verse form not only in the Japanese Imperial Court, where nobles competed in tanka contests, but for women and men engaged in affairs both licit and otherwise. The tanka provided a brief yet prescribed form with a relatively free choice of subject matter so that it made for ideal ‘notes’ that could be dashed off and exchanged after a nightly tryst.

There is a superficial resemblance between the tanka and the sonnet, a longer poem that is written in fourteen lines. A theme is expressed over the first nine or ten couplets, then there comes a ‘turn’ of thought and the poem is resolved. Many sonnets take love and emotions as their subject as did the tanka. And the tanka also used a turn, known as a pivotal image, that marked the transition from a descriptive phrase of some image to some form of personal response to that image. This turn comes within the third line of the upper poem (kami-no-ku), with the resolution then in the lower poem (shimo-no-ku).

The brevity of the poem and the turn from the upper to the lower lines, which often signals a shift or expansion of subject matter, is one of the reasons the tanka has been compared to the sonnet. There are a range of words, or engo (verbal associations), that traditionally associate or bridge the sections. Like the sonnet, the tanka is also conducive to sequences, such as the hyakushuta, which consists of one hundred tankas.

The kami-no-ku (upper three lines) of the tanka became over time the haiku. The transition passed through the renga (also known as haikai no renga, or, commonly, as simply haikai) which was a collaborative poem with the first poet writing the initial three lines and a second poet writing the following couplet, then the first (or a third) adding a second three line poem that complimented or embellished the notions of the couplet. It was the first three lines (technically, just the first 17 onji, now known as haku—sound syllable) that were first labeled hokka; and it was not until the late 19th century that a writer named Masaoka Shiki renamed such poems ‘haiku.’

Many of the great tanka poets were women, among them Lady Akazone Emon, Yosano Akiko, and Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji, a lengthy Japanese prose text that includes over four hundred tanka. Many excellent anthologies of Japanese poetry, most of which feature lengthy selections of tanka, also are available. Kenneth Rexroth is considered the preeminent translator of Japanese verse, and his One Hundred Poems from the Japanese is rightly considered a classic. 

Shichigon-zekku

七言絶句

Shichigon-zekku are classical four-line poems consisting of seven kanji characters per line, commonly used in Japanese shigin (chanted poetry). They follow a strict structure of introduction, development, turn, and conclusion, typically depicting nature, emotion, or historical scenes with as much elegance as the poet can manage. 

This Japanese verse form, often used by Buddhist monks, owes a certain debt to the classic Chinese qiyan jueju (七言絕句,) a form that represents ‘modern style’ poetry from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), and one that emphasized strict tonal patterns, rhyme, and concise imagery. The jueju's key characteristics are its four lines (a quatrain) with seven logograms per line with a rhyme scheme that found lines one, two, and four rhyming or, often just lines two and four. The tonality of the poem involves the emotional timbre of one’s voice  as well as its pitch, volume, and pace—all the elements that communicate intent beyond words.

Only a slight difference in emphasis exists between the Japanese form and the Chinese. The Japanese poem was often chanted or sung and so were more concerned with rhyme and meter. Chinese poets used  the form specifically to set a certain mood, so word choice and allusion became their critical elements. By the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279), it had become commonplace for poets to join three jueje together thematically and link them with pivot phrases. As seen in the work of Zen master Ikkyu Sōjun (1394 - 1481), the three quatrain verse had become, by the 15th century, a fixed commodity for the Japanese as well. The ‘pivots’ implied that they would turn one’s thought around and break the customary pattern of thinking, a key tenet, of course, of Zen Buddhism.

Climbing Stork Tower

登鸛雀樓 

by Wang Zhihuan (688-742)

Wang Zhihuan was a Chinese poet during the Tang Dynasty. He is best known for his jueju “Climbing Stork Tower.” Only six of his poems survive, all of which have become classic.

The sun sets over mountains,

 the Yellow River flows to sea.

To see 1000 li?
Climb the tower higher.

白日依山盡 (Bái rì yī shān jìn)

黃河入海流 (Huáng hé rù hǎi liú)

欲窮千里目 (Yù qióng qiān lǐ mù)

更上一層樓 (Gèng shàng yī céng lóu) 

POEMS: Waka

KALEIDOSCOPE

A waka (和歌) for Vivi

Winds of fall plucking

sere leaves from elms, thinning needles

from fir and cedar.

Her shade stares out, rain falling,

the chipped cup her hands entwine.

Rain and sleet pestering

the snow laden pines, hemlocks

drooped, puddles rimed.

Windows fogged with mist and time,

She kneels to kindle wood to flame.

Spring winds, ferns just green,

scudding clouds sprouting onions,

the flower’s laughter.

A ripple of river song,

perched content on warm flat stone.

Warm pillow of wind,

trickle of turbid water,

the egret’s short leg.

Boughs above her, swaddled in

bird song and murmuration.

NOTES:
和 wa: is a character for Yamato, the oldest name for Japan; its meaning, literally, is 'Great Harmony.'
歌 uta: means both 'song' and 'poem.'
和歌 waka: the meaning of the combined characters, then, is: classic Japanese poem.

Waka (and later tanka) were formed with 31 onji, which are Japanese phonetic syllables (wa, ka, u, ta, for example). In English, 31 syllables are used , and they are then arranged in five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.