poetry notebook

After reading in Red Pine’s translation of Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse while smoking blackberry shisha in a hookah in my gazebo.

A tightly choreographed sequence of images, selected
for propriety and semblance to a ruling sensibility
within a culture where feet were vehicles, pictures
step by step encountered place and then place.
On a house-lined street internal-combustion engines accelerate.
Recorded music thumps and slaps above the crickets
from a block away.  An ocean of pistons crests and recedes.
Overhead a chopper and a jet vie for the microphone.
Individual machines that move faster than any known animal
can be picked out when the sea pauses like silence and voices
seeming to articulate words speak in the yard next door.
Small town. Nothing happening. A quiet night. 2009.

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The Rule of Five: A Formal Idea

I don’t know Chinese. Sure, I’ve read Pound’s Fenellosa and dabbled ever so superficially. Am not seeking Chinese effects. But a line of five Chinese characters — what might that mean in English? Surely not syllables.  For now I’m going to say 5 “substantives,” loosely defined. Not seeking, yet, to be strict —but “I” and “you” and “is” and “and” and “in” and “for” and “he” and “or” and “the one” and so forth…. These don’t count in the Rule of Five.

We’re not counting syllables, but rather mark time, the line, according to a rule so abstract that the line becomes something other than what a line has ever been anywhere. The period is completely arbitrary. That is, according to the rule.

But will the poet allow a Rule of Five to control the length of the line?

The Rule of Five must be hard and fast.

Within this Rule of Five the poet’s task is to create a music that threads its way through the words line by line.