"Don't get me wrong, this is not a song about love / it's just that sometimes I still think of you"

[larryhammer]

It seems that "At Death's Door" from the June issue of Ideomancer has been nominated for the Rhysling Award. My second time on the ballot -- maybe it'll be more popular than "Her First Affair".

Which seems like a good excuse to natter about two poetry collections I've read recently.

I have stillnotbored to thank for this copy of B Is for Bad Poetry by Pamela August Russell, and with it such delights as "Inappropriately Touched by an Angel", "Epitaph on a Hair", "More Fun at the Gertrude Stein Home for Wayward Girls", and "The Perfect Love Poem":

Every time
I see your face
it reminds me
of you.

Or if you prefer, "How I Made Sense of You", with its masterful use of the comma:

Trying to make
sense of you
was like flogging
a dead horse,
with a dead horse.

My favorite is probably "Letters to a Young Poet":

I would stick with R and M
and your choice of a decent vowel
preferably A.

To be honest, though, this collection is a little disappointing. The poems are bad in the way Bulwer-Lytton Contest entries are bad: a sort of manufactured awful that misses some of the depths delved by craptastic verse found in the wild -- in slush piles, self-published collections, vanity websites. I suspect this is related to how it's hard for highly educated people to mimic writing by someone who's barely literate: they often misspell the easier words but get the harder ones correct. As such, B Is for Bad Poetry has nothing on the truly egregious stuff. There's lots of funny here, but for connoisseurs of very bad poetry, it's a bit thin.

Especially when compared to the Kokinshu.

The Collection of Old and New Poems was compiled by imperial order some time around 905,* to propagandize for poetry in Japanese after over a century's vogue for writing literary works in Chinese. Which is not to say Japanese poetry wasn't written in during the 9th century -- women were not generally taught Chinese and so not only wrote but expected to receive poems in Japanese. But those were generally considered social verse, not the medium of serious literature. Never mind that some of the best poets in Japanese, Narihira and Komachi, were writing during this time -- Chinese had the caché. Until, that is, this collection, which set the tone, tenor, themes, and diction of Japanese poetry for the next thousand years (give or take a couple decades).

    though I know my
tomorrows are uncertain--
    while still I enjoy
my todays   how I grieve for
one whose twilight has darkened

—#838, Ki no Tsurayuki

There are things to be learned here about how to arrange collections of, well, just about anything. It is very readable -- one poem flows on to the next by way of continuation and contrast, agreement and argument, incremental variations cycleing through a topic, be it the passage of the seasons, of a love affair, or of grieving. The variety is bounded -- the range of subjects and tones is limited, especially compared to what was being written two centuries before in the Man'yoshu -- but within those bounds and its conception of poetic decorum, there is a richness that's hard to put in words.

    the colors of the
blossoms have faded and passed
    as   heedlessly   I
squandered my days in pensive
gazing   and the long rains fell

—#113, Ono no Komachi

This edition is by Laurel Rasplica Rodd with Mary Catherine Henkenius, one of the two complete translations in to English. I find the deliberate ignoring of the effect of line breaks a bit jarring, though that can be somewhat justified, and dropping punctuation for extended spaces gives it a more modernist feel than I really prefer. But as for the translation job itself, I have few beefs -- when I've tried translating verses myself, when I differ from this it's a matter of choice more than disagreement. The annotations are quite helpful, if erratic. And while some of the more courtlier poems can come across as a little plain, as poetry it's quite serviceable.

    if this world had never
known the ephemeral charms
    of cherry blossoms
then our hearts in spring might match
nature's deep tranquility

—#53, Ariwara no Narihira

In conclusion, I offer this quote by Brower and Miner from Japanese Court Poetry (p.213):

In certain respects it is not so much Narihira's richness of meaning as his aural, syntactic perfection that makes him by far the most difficult of the Court poets to render without feeling one has the words right and everything else wrong.

Oh, yes. Oh so very yes.


* The prefaces** seem to say it was presented to the emperor in 905, but it can also be read as the date of the order, and given some poems can be dated to the next couple years, the latter is probably correct. Scholars continue to debate this.

** There's two, one each in Japanese and Chinese.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

those poetry anthologies are, in a way, like giant renga. It's fascinating which poems sit next to which other poems.

[larryhammer]

One can see the aesthetic that becomes what connects renga links, yes.

---L.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_twilight_/]

Congrats are in order. :)

[larryhammer]

Thankee.

---L.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

YAY nomination!!!

[larryhammer]

Yay!

---L<.

[hieran.livejournal.com]

Congrats on your Rhysling nomination, and let me just add that I loved "Her First Affair." I still think it was a winner. :-)

Robin

[larryhammer]

Thankee. :-)

---L.