Back home I dream of the water beyond the break and wake older angry at borders that keep me foreign and dry.
Did my wretched ancestors who walked inward abandoning shorelines and settling centered fear the power tides gift me?
And will my absence pull from both coasts to my landlocked city salt water so deep as to drown their evil guiding star?
— July, 2017, Toronto
Lake Ontario, 2024
Your Call Pulses Through Me With A Glorious Dynamism
I've felt this wave before, in Havana and Piles, too. You were with me, then, and the water senses your absence. I lay back and conspire with the tide. The sunlit Santa Monica sky turns black and star-pricked. I drift, whispering your name, until I feel your faint but unmistakable touch.
— December, 2017, Santa Monica
Sunset over Deb's pool. Paradise Cove, Vanuatu, 2019
lyrikline is an international website for poetry. They've got an excellent search engine for their growing list of poets in english and in translation (more than 1600 poets so far).
"lyrikline is an international website for experiencing the diversity of contemporary poetry. Here you can listen to the melodies, sounds, and rhythms of international poetry, recited by the authors themselves, and read the poems both in their original languages and various translations."
Perhaps you've read Ron Padgett's Love Poem. If not, it's below. Or you can listen to him reading it.
Love Poem
We have plenty of matches in our house. We keep them on hand always. Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip, though we used to prefer Diamond brand. That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches. They are excellently packaged, sturdy little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone, as if to say even louder to the world, “Here is the most beautiful match in the world, its one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem capped by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious and stubbornly ready to burst into flame, lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love, for the first time, and it was never really the same after that. All this will we give you.” That is what you gave me, I become the cigarette and you the match, or I the match and you the cigarette, blazing with kisses that smoulder toward heaven.
It's available in the Collected Poems of Ron Padgett, which unfortunately is out of print, and many people I'm sure are familiar with an early draft of it from the film Paterson:
But did you know that in the 60s, Saul Bass designed the packaging for the Ohio Match Co.?
I used to own a great many books. More books than is reasonable for a person to own. You can see some of them in the photo above. Just under 1900 titles. In 2022 and 2023, I sold the vast majority of them, keeping just a small shelf worth.
I thought it would be interesting to occasionally do a post about one of the keepers and write a bit about how it came to be mine and why I've kept it.
The first title is Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. I believe I purchased this copy from Iliad Books in North Hollywood, though it might have been The Last Bookstore in DTLA. Either way it was definitely in 2010, during my first trip to California.
I'd gone because a film director had read Chimera, a screenplay I wrote in 2008. He called and said he wanted to meet and talk about me writing a sequel to a hit film he'd made in 1990. (A film I'd seen in the theatre when it came out and that most people of my generation will have seen. Yes, I'm purposely being vague.) He told me he lived in Venice Beach and that I should head down.
I took the month of May off and flew down, staying in an AirBnB a few blocks from the director's house. To quickly answer the questions you're probably asking: nothing came of Chimera, my script that he'd read, and I never worked with him on a sequel to his film — or any other film for that matter. In short: he stiffed me. I spoke with him the day before I left Toronto — "Oh, yes, great, great. Looking forward to meeting you, Lincoln." — and then he avoided my calls for the entire month I was there.
I've been asked a number of times if I'm bitter about the experience, but the truth is that I'm thankful for him having called, as he motivated me to head to Los Angeles, something I probably should have done as a teenager or in my early 20s, instead of going to film school. I fell in love with the place and lived there for three and a half years spread out over the next ten. In all that time, I never did come face to face with that director, but I did make some great and lasting friendships.
As to the book of Japanese poetry:
For as long as I can remember, I've lived an unrequited life. This means I'm often thinking about someone from my past. I chanced upon the Rexroth book and opened to a random page:
In the empty mountains The leaves of the bamboo grass Rustle in the wind. I think of a girl Who is not there.
Nice. I flip again:
I wish I were close To you as the wet skirt of A salt girl to her body. I think of you always.
Very nice. Once more:
Others may forget you, but not I. I am haunted by your beautiful ghost.
Sold!
If memory serves, it costs me $8.
Though I have most of my favorites from the book memorized, the thin trade paperback often accompanies me when I travel. I had it with me in Spain in 2017 when I was sending my own poems out to my Burning the Days mailing list. All those miles means it's pretty beat. It was dog-eared when I got it. It's water-stained now. I'll replace it with a hardcover first edition if I ever find one in person. (They pop up all the time online but I hate paying for $30 shipping on a $20 item.)
There is a sequel with the inventive title One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, but I can't recommend it. Rexroth also did two volumes of poems translated from Chinese. Again, they don't strike the same chord as this original Japanese collection.
One Hundred Poems From the Japanese is still in print. It's published by the stellar New Directions and you can purchase it from Bookshop.org, Abe Books, or Amazon (Canada, US, UK), or maybe get your local book store to special order you a copy.
Landays (pronounced land-eyes) are 22 syllable, two-line poems composed primarily by Pashtun women who live on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are passed on orally and are anonymous, as these women are usually illiterate and poetry for women — not to mention education — is forbidden by the Taliban. The Harvard Review says, "The landay is a vibrant, clandestine, and ancient tradition."
Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, has translated many landays and collected them in a book published by FSG: I Am the Beggar of the World.
Here are a few landays from the book:
May God make you into a riverbank flower so I may smell you when I gather water.
You sold me to an old man, father. May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.
Leave your sword and fetch your gun. Away to the mountains, the Americans have come.
Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees. I can find no cure for their sting.
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers. When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.
Two years ago the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone. A woman then was worth her weight in stone.
You can read more on landays on the Poetry Foundation's page on the form, which was written by Griswold and is excellent.
Years ago, I had a small stroke that caused me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life and with my work. Invitations to my next birthday party went out with a photo and readings of two poems, one by James Wright and one by David Whyte.
In the years since, a number of the guests to that party have told me how much they enjoyed the poems. Here they are, along with the photo:
Robert Pattinson reads a poem by James Wright
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Everything Is Waiting for You written and read by David Whyte
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Photo of me bathing while Bailey the dog watches on. Beverly Glen, California, December, 2017.
I’d taken the photo post-stroke, while bathing in a client’s bathtub in Beverly Glen, her dog Bailey watching from the sidelines. For some reason, the framing of it reminded me of Alex Colville's work, so I later tinted it in his style.
Outside that bathroom, not far away, the Skirball Fire was having its way with Bel Air, the neighborhood that was literally across the street from where I was staying. I'd spent the morning feeding the chickens and cats and walking the dogs as ash fell from the sky. I'd become consumed by chaos and worry about when it would be our time to evacuate the neighborhood. (If everyone flees simultaneously, no one gets anywhere, so you wait until instructed.)
My client was incommunicado, so I'd taken it upon myself to load her SUV with what I assumed were her prized possessions, leaving just enough room for me and the pets. Thankfully, on the morning when the street's more experienced residents had predicted we'd have to leave, the wind changed and we were able to stay put. Though the fire continued to blaze, the flames never crossed that street; the ash never returned. I drew a bath to celebrate and re-center myself.
Unpredictably, with a glowing reference from that Beverly Glen client (neighbors conveyed my preparedness, which they witnessed through their windows), I started getting job offers from people living in danger zones with their pets. A year later I got calls from a couple in Malibu, and would have accepted the gig had I not already been booked in Santa Monica. While there, the Woolsey Fire scorched that beach-side town. I heard numerous horror stories from fleeing residents who'd moved into the Santa Monica Fairmont Miramar, where I'm a regular at the main bar. They literally had nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Then, I booked a 4+ month gig in Vanuatu during cyclone season which I completed without incident. Less than a month after I left, Cyclone Harold ripped through much of the South Pacific archipelago, including the property I'd been living on, sparing my clients and their staff and their buildings — which had been built to withstand cyclones — but laying waste to much of the greenery.
Today, I'm reminded of this bathroom photo and these poems and that birthday invitation, because someone shared The Poetry Atlas on Metafilter and used the Wright poem as an example. Want to know, exactly, where the hammock swings that the narrator is wasting their life in? The Poetry Atlas will tell you.
The second poem is by David Whyte, who's written and spoken many wonderful things. If you appreciated the line, "Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity," you will enjoy his book, Consolations, which has many such pieces of wisdom. One of my favourites is "Beauty is the harvest of presence."
(In my mind, I always link that line to one by Tom Stoppard: "Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late." Perhaps you also have lines or definitions that are forever-conflated? Do I digress? So be it. I digress.)
In What to Remember When Waking, Whyte tells the story of an ancient Irish tribe who no longer wish to fight — he describes them as "no longer wanting to have that conversation." So, when next they're confronted with battle, "they turn sideways into the light and disappear into the originality of it all."
Considering the "conversations" we're having, and reflecting on whether they're helping us be the person we want to be, living the life we want to live, can lead to some of life's great awakenings. Am I wasting my life in the right way?
After that stroke, I sold Good Music, my Toronto record shop, to a competitor, and made a promise to myself that I would no longer do things solely for money. I no longer wanted to have that conversation. Rather, I wanted to live a time-rich life. If that doesn't sound easy, I can assure you that it's absolutely harder than it sounds — for the most part, I've managed to do that while living in some interesting places, despite threats of fire, cyclone, or comfortable hammock.
Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) and his poems Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil).
The definitive online edition of this masterpiece of French literature, the site contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together with multiple English translations.
