![]() The poem is a rich description of the beauty of autumn that focuses on both its lush and sensual fruitfulness and the melancholy hint of shorter days. Earlier posts in the series, going back to 2008, may be found at Poems and Poetics.John Keats' 1820 ode to the fall season is one of the great classics of the poetic movement of Romanticism. The index below is organized chronoloigally, starting with a post from May 20, 2012, when Poems and Poetics first appeared in Jacket2. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.īooks available from the University of California PressĪmish Trivedi (amishdtrivedi gmail com) I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. The four poems presented above are from a more recent attempt at actual translation, but a part of my earlier poem-song can also appear here as a further homage:Īs the way we make love is tight like thatĪBOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. The poem marking that time, “At the Grave of Nakahara Chuya,” appeared a few years later in A Paradise of Poets and included a fake “translation” in what I took to be his style, or one of them, that brought some of his work into the domain of popular Japanese music. ![]() In 1997, as part of an annual poetry festival in his home prefecture of Yamaguchi, I came to his grave along with a group of Japanese poet-companions, to celebrate the 60th year of his death and the 90th of his birth. Over a short lifetime, Nakahara Chuya (1907-1937) was a major innovator along lines originally shaped by Dada and other, earlier forms of European, largely French, experimental poetry. Looking up at the sky, I saw a spider web, silver & shining. They spoke a language I didn’t understand & showed emotions I couldn’t unravel. In the woods was a very strange park, where women, children & men would stroll by smiling wildly. ![]() Something unspeakable would urge me on, & then my heart, although my life was purposeless, started pounding with a kind of hope. Women were lovely objects but not once did I try to go with one. Still I enjoyed the heft of it when I would hold it in my hands from time to time. True I still had a tooth brush, but the only book I owned had nothing but blank pages. I didn’t own a pillow, much less a futon mattress. And weirdly I could only smoke them out of doors.įor now my worldly goods consisted of a single towel. I was smoking cigarettes, but only to enjoy their fragrance. The taste of honey in the air, nothing substantial but enough to eat & live from. No one around who lived there, not a soul, no children playing there, & I with no one near or dear to me, no obligation but to watch the color of the sky above a weathervane. On a wooden bridge, the dust that morning silent, a mailbox red & shining all day long, a solitary baby carriage on the street, a lonely pinwheel. ![]() World’s end, the sunlight that fell down to earth was warm, a warm wind blowing through the flowers. Straight into my eyes, like he was getting mad, Then you know what? He kept on staring at me, Yesterday, I flipped a stone over that weighed Swore that the clogs that he was wearing weren’t his.” And that was just a while ago.Ī while ago. He would laugh and tell you that the stars became him He used to think of little things that didn’t matter.” Would cut his speech up into little pieces. His eyes like water in a pond the color when it clears, His smile that didn’t look like someone living. The weird smile that he wore, shiney like brass, He walked away, he walked out from that door, Translations from Japanese by Jerome Rothenberg & Yasuhiro Yotsumoto ![]()
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