Category Archives: Poetry

The Paris Review and DRM

There are a number of historic interviews being posted online by the Paris Review. For example, you can read a 1960 discussion with Robert Frost:

So many talk, I wonder how falsely, about what it costs them, what agony it is to write. I’ve often been quoted: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.� But another distinction I made is: however sad, no grievance, grief without grievance. How could I, how could anyone have a good time with what cost me too much agony, how could they? What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it?

There are almost as many contradictory suggestions for writers as there are interviews in the collection. You know what they say about opinions…

I also noted this awesome start and abrupt end to the Graham Greene page:

GREENE: “No, one never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use, what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge: minor ones may be photographed.”

NOTE: We regret that we have been unable to obtain web rights to this interview. We have worked hard to make this archive as complete as possible, and hope you’ll forgive us the omission.

The Editors

Curious that the magazine does not have rights to its own interview.

NOAA Poetry

NOAA offers some interesting insights in their “Poetry Corner“:

What do poetry, engineers, and scientists have in common? The NOAA Poetry Corner, home of weather poems, survey poems, and ocean poems written by the men and women who served in NOAA or its ancestor agencies. […] All these poems help tell the story of the people and the ancestor agencies of NOAA, showing a love for the work and a love for the environment in which the men and women of NOAA’s ancestor agencies worked….

Here is my favorite so far:

Oceanography is dangerous

by Arch E. Benthic, a.k.a. Harris B. Stewart
“The Id of the Squid,� 1970

The Exec has spent two weeks in traction,
The Chief has a cut on his head,
The Doctor is missing in action
With a burn that has sent him to bed.
Various others have bruises
And legs and backs that are sore.
The dangerous parts of these cruises
Are the motorbikes ridden ashore.

In: AOML Keynotes, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 1-4.

I don’t follow the squid reference, but the punch-line is funny. Wonder if NOAA pays a bonus for poems?

Hiroshima Haiku

The review by N.K. Singh includes a haiku by Yasuhiko Shigemoto that seems dark and curious to me:

Mountains laugh.
Never say Hiroshima’s mountains
are laughing.

Yasuhiko has a self-introduction on his site that gives some background to this perspective:

When the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 in 1945, I was working at a factory about 2500 meters north of the A-bomb blast center as a student mobilizer. I was fifteen years old. Fortunately I did not have a burn, for I was in the shadow of a structure by chance.

An interview in the Belfast Telegraph fills in more details:

recalling the day he first saw the incinerated city of Hiroshima as a 15-year-old boy. “I walked across this bridge and even five days after the bomb, it was covered in charred bodies. I had to step over them, but there were so many I walked on someone. The river underneath was full of people too, floating like dead fish. There are no words to describe what I felt.”

No words but haiku. I couldn’t help but notice that he credits his interest in haiku to a chance meeting with an English school teacher imprisoned by the Japanese:

I met with HAIKU written by R. H. Blyth during the days of my Hiroshima University. I was surprised to know that he was absorbed in translating haiku into English at a concentration camp during the war. And at the same time, I felt much interested in his English translation of haiku and thought that I would like to write haiku in English or translate haiku into English as he he did. But for me, this was like a dream in those days.  About thirty years later since then, I remembered what I thought about R. H. Blyth and haiku in my young days and began to try to tackle the work like a dream.

Hills smile

Spring hills faintly melting seem to smile
Summer hills of pale green seem to trickle
Autumn hills bright and clean seem all dressed up
Winter hills faintly sad seem to sleep

The origin of haiku may be spontaneous but its craft depends on a lot of structural and exacting norms. This process, which is the essence of the haiku art, has no spontaneity. It is like a jeweller’s craft after “the feeling” has been caught. In fact haikus represent a delicate balance between spontaneous feeling like what Zen called “Satori” and subsequent craft.

— from a review by N.K. Singh