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ancientreaderToday I bring Arthur Sze's "Pyrocumulus":
Peony shoots rise out of the earth;
at five a.m., walking up the ridge,
I mark how, in April, Orion’s left arm
was an apex in the sky, and, by May,
only Venus flickered above the ridge
against the blue edge of sunrise.
In daylight, a pear tree explodes
with white blossoms—no black-
footed ferret slips across my path,
no boreal owl stirs on a branch.
At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled
when a black bear snagged a shriveled
apple off a branch; and, waking out
of a black pool, I glimpsed how
fire creates its own weather
in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching
the ditch, I drop the gate: it’s time
for the downhill pipes to fill,
time for bamboo at the house
to suck up water, time to see sunlight
flare between leaves before
the scorching edge of afternoon.
---
Here's a bit of biography / resume, from the Poetry Foundation:
Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950, and educated at the University of California-Berkeley. Known for his difficult, meticulous poems, Sze’s work has been described as the “intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation” by the critic John Tritica. The poet Dana Levin described Sze as “a poet of what I would call Deep Noticing, a strong lineage in American poetry. Its most obvious and influential practitioner is William Carlos Williams; its iconic poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’ Dispassionate presentation of ‘the thing itself,’ ‘glazed with rain/water’ (or any particular) is its prevailing attribute… [yet] Sze’s attention is capacious; it’s attracted to paradox; it takes facing opponents and seats them side by side.”
Hoo boy. IDK, I don't find this poem, or any of the other few of Sze's I've read, especially "difficult." They're "not straightforward," I might say -- this one being more direct than most, maybe. And though I rather like the phrase "deep noticing" -- minus the self-important initial caps please* -- William Carlos Williams has annoyed me ever since it occurred to me to be annoyed by that poem about the plums in the icebox, upon which I grew extremely annoyed.
That word "yet" bothers me, too, because I don't see where the tension is supposed to lie between careful attention to a specific thing and capacious attention. If I'm copyediting this passage, I append a query to that effect. "Au: where is the tension or contradiction between the wings of this sentence?"
Well, this is what happens when you read author bios in an irritable frame of mind. I do really like poems in which the word "peony" appears. And this poem also makes me sad, because of all the beauty and life threatened by the fires that make the clouds so spectacular.
-----
*Which I dislike for much the same reasons as I dislike the BDSM convention that capitalizes "dom" and lowercases "sub." Ugh, that capital D grinds my gears -- like, really, you need to emphasize it in your fucking typography?
Goodness. I really am irritable today.
Peony shoots rise out of the earth;
at five a.m., walking up the ridge,
I mark how, in April, Orion’s left arm
was an apex in the sky, and, by May,
only Venus flickered above the ridge
against the blue edge of sunrise.
In daylight, a pear tree explodes
with white blossoms—no black-
footed ferret slips across my path,
no boreal owl stirs on a branch.
At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled
when a black bear snagged a shriveled
apple off a branch; and, waking out
of a black pool, I glimpsed how
fire creates its own weather
in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching
the ditch, I drop the gate: it’s time
for the downhill pipes to fill,
time for bamboo at the house
to suck up water, time to see sunlight
flare between leaves before
the scorching edge of afternoon.
---
Here's a bit of biography / resume, from the Poetry Foundation:
Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950, and educated at the University of California-Berkeley. Known for his difficult, meticulous poems, Sze’s work has been described as the “intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation” by the critic John Tritica. The poet Dana Levin described Sze as “a poet of what I would call Deep Noticing, a strong lineage in American poetry. Its most obvious and influential practitioner is William Carlos Williams; its iconic poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’ Dispassionate presentation of ‘the thing itself,’ ‘glazed with rain/water’ (or any particular) is its prevailing attribute… [yet] Sze’s attention is capacious; it’s attracted to paradox; it takes facing opponents and seats them side by side.”
Hoo boy. IDK, I don't find this poem, or any of the other few of Sze's I've read, especially "difficult." They're "not straightforward," I might say -- this one being more direct than most, maybe. And though I rather like the phrase "deep noticing" -- minus the self-important initial caps please* -- William Carlos Williams has annoyed me ever since it occurred to me to be annoyed by that poem about the plums in the icebox, upon which I grew extremely annoyed.
That word "yet" bothers me, too, because I don't see where the tension is supposed to lie between careful attention to a specific thing and capacious attention. If I'm copyediting this passage, I append a query to that effect. "Au: where is the tension or contradiction between the wings of this sentence?"
Well, this is what happens when you read author bios in an irritable frame of mind. I do really like poems in which the word "peony" appears. And this poem also makes me sad, because of all the beauty and life threatened by the fires that make the clouds so spectacular.
-----
*Which I dislike for much the same reasons as I dislike the BDSM convention that capitalizes "dom" and lowercases "sub." Ugh, that capital D grinds my gears -- like, really, you need to emphasize it in your fucking typography?
Goodness. I really am irritable today.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 11:15 pm (UTC)Do they really do that? Like Silas is a Dom and Dominic is a sub? Wow. That seems like sort of a douche thing to do.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-05 02:53 pm (UTC)*sigh* Some people do. I mean ... as a kinky person I'm not going to tell other people not to do what makes them happy; my problem is that there's a subset of BDSM people who think that unless you're doing high protocol (https://www.kinkly.com/definition/17087/high-protocol) you're not really doing BDSM, or you're doing it wrong, or whatever. In my limited experience of BDSM as practiced outside my own relationship, the people most invested in high protocol are either old gay dudes who were in the scene when it really was a secretive and closed space (by necessity!) or the kind of straight male dom who thinks that male dom/female sub just reflects The Natural Order of Things. I give the former a pass, but the latter are, yeah, douches.