More Haiku Offering by Jacqueline Gens

While looking through old notebooks and teaching materials I came across some Haiku and American sentences jotted down that I did in 2012.

On Leaving my Dentist's Office on High Street, Brattleboro, VT

Taunted by impermanence three strangers stand
By the side of the road contemplating the sadness of animals
Cat run over

American Sentence Version

Taunted by impermanence three strangers huddle around cat road kill

Dream

Furry animals shiver together while Buddha comforts us

American Sentences


My Mother's sad face returns to me in the soft snow I didn't notice

BREATHE the monk Philip said to me when two phones rang at the same moment

Haiku

The old poet sat with me on the cement stoop
Early morning coffee in Boulder
Yelling caw caw back to the crows above

Snow plows scrape  ground
Harsh words uttered grate tender
Phantom enemies

The red haired young man
Hates me like so many others
Forgive me, son





   

Spring is here and that means Garlands of Lilacs, Forsythia, and Daffodils

The Lilac Thief

This year I looked for lilacs
off the beaten track
in places no longer tended –

A different kind of boundary,
long rows where once houses stood,
lots now empty.

I love the deeper purple of old bushes,
their crushed bloomets falling into my hand
taken from gnarled bark bearing heavy plumage.

I am the local lilac thief,
that one who stops to follow
the scent of unseen blossoms.

Jacqueline Gens (many years ago)


Here is a fine essay by poet/dakini Annie Finch on Spring's arrival from the Poetry Foundation site.

Updates from Poetrymind for May 2016

• May 5 Lecture/workshop in Pittsfield MA  on the Poetics of Uncertainty 
• May 7 Next Meditation and Writing Group at the Shelburne Falls Shambhala Center
• May 15 at Khandroling Paper Cooperative we will have a workshop with Dara Juels 

The Morris Dancers are out in full force these days. Here's a classic May Day dance/song at dawn:

Then there is our own Packers Corner friends who have celebrated May Day for over forty years with poet Verandah Porche in a photo taken by Poetrymind writing group participant Terry Carter.

Forbidden Scribbles from a Vipassana Retreat

Forbidden Scribbles**

on a Vipassana Retreat

Lying in Buddha posture

Outside I hear geese

Like me flying home

*

First Buds of Spring

Bird rustles in the underbrush

Can you ask a poet not to sing?

*

Old lady nods off

Drooping head signals torpor

Lion awakes without fail

*

Are clouds sky--sky clouds?

Where are you mind?

I looked everywhere and can’t find you 

*

Cars rush, Ocean of Dharma***

Squeaky door, cat’s meow

What’s real?

**Generally one is discouraged from writing or reading on a traditional Vipassana retreat. These mosty composed in my head outdoors during retreat, then jotted down on scraps of paper
***Part of my Bodhisattva name

A Vajra Verse from Flight of the Garuda by Shabkar, Translated by Keith Dowman

On the parchment of diverse red and white phenomena
the bamboo quill of self-existent primal awareness 
and Knowledge inscribes baseless
unattached ciphers liberated from the beginning
creating images to be read in the space 
of co-emergent appearances and emptiness.

from Song 23
Flight of the Garuda

Some Poems by Participants in the Meditation and Writing Workshop

A Few Fibonacci Poems from Sarah Doyle

To read more about this fun poetic form visit the Poetry Foundation here. 

What is it?

Fibonacci poem (or Fib) is a multiple-line verse based on the Fibonacci sequence so that the number of syllables in each line equals the total number of syllables in the preceding two lines.

Charlie in the Corn: Darwin at Mike’s Maze

We

were

surprised

to see the

cladistics on the

handout at Mike’s Maze, the grand head

of old Darwin amazed in corn: myxinformes, dipnoi,

petromyzontiformes, crocodilia, testudines: What kind of farmer is this?

We tramped slick mud paths among cornstalks, following trails of thought from form to form, synapse to synapse, traced the fragile wire of Darwin’s glasses

where they bridged his nose past abrupt, dead-end paths that marked his forehead’s thoughtful furrows.

From the wavy trails of his beard, exotic rivers

flowed to Galapagos finches.

His beseeching eyes

sought Down House:

his own

soft

nest.

Bliss

Small

black

dog is

snoring gently on

the bed. Her trust is absolute.

We tell her, “I love you, Poochlie-Boodles. We love you,

Dog-Pie.” We give her treats, rub her belly. We engage in dog worship, stroking her warm,

hairy little belly. Unmitigated bliss. Sighs.

We envy her. We want bliss, too.

This is as close as

we’re ever

going

to

get.

Charlie in the Corn: Darwin at Mike’s Maze

We

were

surprised

to see the

cladistics on the

handout at Mike’s Maze, the grand head

of old Darwin amazed in corn: myxinformes, dipnoi,

petromyzontiformes, crocodilia, testudines: What kind of farmer is this?

We tramped slick mud paths among cornstalks, following trails of thought from form to form, synapse to synapse, traced the fragile wire of Darwin’s glasses

where they bridged his nose past abrupt, dead-end paths that marked his forehead’s thoughtful furrows.

From the wavy trails of his beard, exotic rivers

flowed to Galapagos finches.

His beseeching eyes

sought Down House:

his own

soft

nest.


Sarah grew up in Cleveland and lived for many years in Boston/Cambridge, where she worked in college publishing and then freelanced as an editor, proofreader, and book promo writer. In the1990s, she developed an interest in the history of science pursuing it ever since, particularly through the phenomena of posture photographs and the dinosaur footprints of the CT River Valley, which end up having surprising crosscurrents. Presently, she works at Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (Deerfield) creating events and a website dedicated to the discovery of dinosaur footprints, and at Independent Living Resources (ILR), a nonprofit working on accessibility for people with disabilities. Her poems are steeped in the local history of Deerfield and her historical interests. 

In Memorium: April 5, 2016

VISITATION

for Allen (1926-1997)

A few days later I saw you

seated at a dusty crossroad

looking toward a vista of waterways

reminiscent of a cranberry bog or salt water marsh, 

maybe the River Styx.

A geography of immensity without habitation

where you sat on an old wooden stool

with books and papers focused intently.

One familiarity--your Calvin Klein

Goodwill navy blazer, my favorite;

your  pens poking out from the pocket.

I stood quietly to your side waiting to assist you

yet not disturb your concentration. 

Finished, you handed me a sheaf of papers

Here, these are for you --for translation.

Then, you got up and walked slowly down the left had road.

I followed but you turned to me and said,

This is as far as you are allowed to go, I don't have the water rights

                for your passage--

A hitch of sadness in your voice, 

your face mostly impassive, Bell's Palsy,

one eye bigger, your face a bit cock-eyed,

but looking straight on

as we finished our business once again

in clarity and respect, our natural elegance

hanging there a second

             as we stared at one another.

I watched you walk off and knew you were finally gone.

--Jacqueline Gens

[Published in Primo Penseiro, Shivastan Publishing,Woodstock and Kathmandu, 2008.

Reprinted from Mercy of Tides, edited by Margot Wizansky, Salt Marsh Press, 2003]

[Photo by Myles Aronowitz]

Next Meditation and Writing Meeting on Saturday, April 2, 2016

The next meditation and writing workshop will take place at the Shambhala Meditation Center in Shelburne Falls, MA on Saturday, April 2, 2016 11:00 AM-2:00 PM. 

The main topic will be our continued explorations of the poetics of uncertainty and Keats' Negative Capability that is to say:


NEGATIVE CAPABILITY – defined by Keats

Negative capability is a theory of the poet John Keats. Keats' theory of "negative capability" was expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 28 December 1817.

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence.”

Keats expressed this idea in several of his poems:
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819)
Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)

Negative capability is a state of intentional open-mindedness paralleled in the literary and philosophic stances of other writers. Much has been written about this. Walter Jackson Bate, Keats's authoritative biographer, wrote an entire book on the topic. The footnote to the negative capability letter in the 1958 Harvard UP edition of the Letters of John Keats references the work of Woodhouse, Bate, C. L. Finney, Barbara Hardy, G. B. Harrison, and George Watson, all prior to the edition’s printing in 1958. In the 1930s, the American philosopher John Dewey cited Keatsian negative capability as having influenced his own philosophical pragmatism, and said of Keats' letter that it "contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises." [2] [3] Additionally, Nathan Scott (author of a book titled Negative Capability), notes that negative capability has been compared to philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit, “the spirit of disponibilité before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery."

Walt Whitman---from Leaves of Grass
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” 

Bring a poem (with copies) to share. 

A few notes for walking meditation exercise from notes taken in a workshop with Anne Waldman in Patzcuaro, Mexico (If the weather is great we will take our meditation for the day outdoors) :

1) Act of Observation/Attention – Compassionate engagement with other

2) Act of Observation/Notation –Entre into sacred world as pure perception

(3) Act of Notation/Articulation –Generosity of spirit

4) Poetic Notation– a dot in the continuity of poets past and present

For further information contact Jacqueline at 413-522-1125

RESCHEDULED Lecture May 5, 2016 on The Poetics of Uncertainty with Jacqueline Gens

The Poetics of Uncertainty and Journey to Wisdom

RESCHEDULED for May 5, 2016 in Pittsfield, MA with Jacqueline Gens

Unitarian Church
175 Wendell Ave, Pittsfield, MA

6:00 PM For further information call:  413-358-2626 or 508-237-4252

pittsfieldsangha@hotmail.com

Poetrymind universally has a long tradition of ‘unknowing’ in the sense of thriving within the ground of uncertainty or what poet Fannie Howe calls, “Bewilderment”. The aim here is to write from a non-conceptual and non-judgemental point of view trusting in the authenticity of one’s pure perception leading to an elegant syntax in poetry. The late poet Allen Ginsberg called this "First Thought, Best Thought". In this discussion and Lecture we will examine how such an approach furthers our writing as an act of discovery through looking at noted poems and simple exercises. Open to both beginners and advanced writers.

Jacqueline Gens worked with poets for over thirty years. She was a co-founder of the New England College MFA program in Creative Writing and its co-director for over a decade. For many years she worked for the late poet Allen Ginsberg in NYC and the Naropa Institute. Currently she lives in Shelburne Falls, MA where she is retired and spends time at the Khandroling Paper Cooperative she founded to recycle sacred texts in the Buddhist tradition into calligraphy papers and other uses. To read more about her writing groups and work, visit her blog Poetrymind at www.tsetso.blogspot.

Spring Poem

Gould’s Sugar House

I wait for Kate my former therapist
Now long-time friend
To join me for brunch
At Gould’s Sugar House
This peculiar cusp of no-winter

Early spring day when hardly any sap
Will flo for you see it takes freezing nights
And warm days to make the sap flow
There in the rustic barn above the
Sugar house for a contemplative moment
I see all the people before me move
To the music of the din of restaurant
Noises, sips of coffee,
Contentment in the house--
Pancakes, waffles, corn fritters
Their faces brimming with joy
Each in their own vision of reality
Not touching yet together seeking
The taste of that sap
With its sugar of indescribable
Sweetness

4:00 AM
March 13, 2016

March 5, 2016 Meditation and Writing Group

[Ink wash by Erin Reirdon]

Last month for our February meditation and writing group we continued our exploration of haibun/haiku/ and American Sentences.

I introduced Denise Levertov's fine essay on the line from Poet in the World which served as an excellent study for an E.E. Cummings poem Vince brought in. 

Thus far, we have looked at the condensed line found in haiku or lyric. The alternative would be the long line expressed as "projective verse" in Charles Olson's 1950  famous essay which I have mentioned several times in relation to Whitman and Ginsberg.

Here are a few hybrid prose/poem works to look into. 

About Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko

Excerpt from Book of Jon by Eleni Siklianos

With a seamless weave of letters, reminiscences, poems and journal entries, Sikelianos creates a loving portrait-and an unblinking indictment-of her father. Jon, a multitalented, eccentric visionary, emerges as a brilliant, charming, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic hero.

Complete Text of Patterson--classic  long poem by William Carlos Williams in the objectivist tradition of "no ideas but in things" 

Anne Waldman's Jovis Trilogy is probably the longest epic poem ever written in the English language

These hybrid forms seem especially useful for memoir and large themes. Sometimes it is useful to create clusters of shorter poems in a sequence as a means to  explore new ground. Poet Gary Snyder spent decades working on his long poem, "Mountains and Rivers without End." a perspective drawn from a classical Chinese painting dipicting a journey. 

I am now into my 5th year of working on Dragon's Crease (a line from Emily Dickinson) which explores the theme of women and power from a multi-cultural pount of view. 



Two Poem drafts from Dragons' Crease - a work in progress

Women of Ashes

Females born in the year of the Fire Horse

Known for boldness, disobedience, lively minds

Too outspoken for marriage---

Most often beautiful and cunning

Another way of saying intelligent.

In 1966, the Year of the Fire Horse,

Japanese census reported millions

Less in their annual statistics.

The method in imperial China was two buckets

Next to the birthing pallet—

One with water for washing the son

The other for ashes to bury the daughter.

Osama’s Third Wife

She was the spinster wife

Nine years older, unattractive but highly educated

The papers say,

A university professor past her prime

It's also said she had a regal bearing and direct line to the prophet.

They had only one child.

 How amazing  he wanted her

Gave her a son that Soft spoken man

with  elegant speech that thrilled

millions of school girls

Who would then name their first born—Osama.

What did she think with an advanced degree in child psychology

When this father forbid a plastic nipple for his child

Dying of  dehydration as a violation to his principles

That man who would pose  in position favored by the prophet

In mountain caves with his Kleshnikov 

The next meditation and writing group will meet Saturday, March 5th 11:00 AM-2:00 PM at the Shambhala Center in Sheburne Falls, MA. Please RSVP jacqueline.gens@gmail.com

STARLIGHT

After Milarepa

I do not mean to read myself into paralysis with the NY Times
about child sex slaves    with unspeakable techniques
or those thousands of infected chickens
buried alive in China, a heap of plastic
bags beneath loose earth bulldozed into containment.
I mean instead to practice moments of awareness--
walk, sit, sleep and,  yes, read.
Today, I contemplate the meaning of sangha
how we gather together, wake each other
by mishap, and the great benefit
of that instead of this.

I don't mean to look the other way
while I indulge
in household dreams
as if this sand castle isn't already
dissolving in centrifuge.

What I mean to do is break
myself on rocks, taste dirt,
breathe out starlight into the cold dark.

Jacqueline Gens


   

In the Spirit of St Valentine

AFTER SAPPHO

Eros the loosener of limbs troubles me

Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind
falling on green shoots
                                not oaks of antiquity
        but wild bamboo
        taken 
root by railroad tracks
their sound awakening me 
to the slow arrow

--Jacqueline Gens

To My Mother Olga on Her Birthday

Today is my mother Olga's birthday. My brother Mike posted this lovely photo of her on his Facebook page taken around the time she first arrived in the US in 1948. She was so happy to come to America after the deprivations of living through WWII  in Shanghai, China where she was born to Russian emigre parents. 

I wrote this poem for her one day after picking ramps near Packers Corner Farm in Guilford, VT where I lived at various times.


WILD LEEKS

For Olga Paccidova Shriner (1930-1987)

You don’t see them at first
until you stop and look slowly
at loose leaves of winter debris
scattered across the forest floor.
After awhile, tufts of greenery emerge,
thousands of tender shoots
still too early to pick.
This is the method I learned from Yettie,
a Sephardic Jew from Salonika--
once my neighbor on Packer Corners Road,
To gather morels one year, we sat
on the ground until we noticed our field of vision
shifting to nascent specks of white.
She’s here because of her grandfather’s second sight--
reading in tea leaves that things
were not as they seemed.
They left the dinner table, food half-eaten,
for distant Aegean isles, surviving the war
because of his divinations.

The real miracle year after year
the leeks grow only in this one place.
Each spring, I try to remember
their irony taste drawn from deep soil humus,
decayed pine, juniper, crushed maple leaves,
moss, and rotted wood--
Often, I forget the wild leeks of Keats Brook Road.
I can’t remember how we ended up
in this New England neighborhood—
my mother, Olga (like Yettie), worlds away from her native Shanghai
where bombs fell, first from Japanese then American planes
as she rode her bicycle through the city
to collect bread rations from the Jewish ghetto.
Her heroic stories our dinner table conversation for decades—
We knew that daily ride through fear: sounds, smells,
her chronic hunger, the blown up bits of pregnant women and children.
It’s the shrapnel that kills you, you know, not the bombs.
We allowed her the telling over and over
surrounded by her beloved collection of Americana.
She’s here in the woods now
buried over the hill on Carpenter Road
an early death from cancer at age fifty-eight.
Some years, I do remember the harvest
of wild leeks, their bitter vitality,
my mind a continuity of pungent smells and thoughts
of family, friends, survival, the old world still here
growing up on a hillside in Vermont each year---
regardless if we live or die,
holding forth as though eternal
in a wild assembly of tenderness.

In the Shadow of Cold Mountain Published in Levekunst: The Art of Living

Erik Pema Kunsang and Tara Trinley Wangmo new Ezine Levekunst: The Art of Life published my sequence of poems inspired by Han Shan (Cold Mountain).

Windhorse is the energy of the present moment, which contains this force because it is the only time we can feel basic goodness. —Sakyong Mipham.

When I read these profound words by my first teacher Chögyam Trungpa’s son while in the midst of a winter depression, like a key opening my mind, the following poems poured forth and the fog was lifted. This work is inspired by Hánshān; literally: “Cold Mountain”, fl. 9th century, who was a legendary figure associated with a collection of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty in the Taoist and Chan tradition. A thousand years later his poems are as fresh and relevant as though written yesterday. Cold Mountain is neither here nor there but everywhere.

To read more, visit the link above