Archive for December, 2014

Berganza: Canções Típicas Brasileiras No. 7: Adeus Êma (Desafio)

Today’s Haiku (December 31, 2014) | Blue Willow Haiku World (by Fay Aoyagi)

数へ日の猪喰ふ旅へ夜行バス  相沢恵美子

kazoebi no shishi kuu tabi e yakô basu

            New Year’s eve

            a night bus for the trip

            to eat a wild boar

                                                Emiko Aizawa

from “Haiku Shiki” (“Haiku Four Seasons,” a monthly haiku magazine) ,  March 2013 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Translation by Fay Aoyagi

Today’s Haiku (December 31, 2014) | Blue Willow Haiku World (by Fay Aoyagi).

Two Wishes from word pond by way of Yakamochi ~

 

May the newest new
year of the beginning of
the spring just begun
today like the falling snow
the more heap up our blessings.

– Yakamochi

Love as saying says
is a most excellent name
in terms of saying
what otherwise won’t be grasped –
my body now become it.

– Yakamochi

My most loved tanka are by the Japanese poet of  The MAN’YŌSHŪ (万葉集),  or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, Yakamochi, who lived from 718 to 785.  It helps to know that the Japanese until recently followed the lunar calendar so the first day of the new year was also the first day of spring. Often, spring contained snow (like life, huh?).  

The MAN’YŌSHŪ (万葉集),  or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, is the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, having been compiled around 759 C.E. It consists mainly of 4,500 short poems or tanka, written and collected from every class of society,  many by women, over a period of 440 years. Tanka traditionally consist of 31 syllables in 5 lines of a
5-7-5-7-7 pattern — easy to count on the hand and so to memorize.  The MAN’YŌSHŪ poets experienced interconnection with all life forms, organic and inorganic, as an  inherent quality of their daily spiritual and cultural lives and expressed in Shintoism as well as poetry. When they spoke-wrote poetry it was experienced as naturally akin to a clap of thunder, a raindrop, the cry of the hototogisu, or an in- and out-breath. – Donna Fleischer

word pond

May the newest new

year of the beginning of

the spring just begun

today like the falling snow

the more heap up our blessings.

~ Yakamochi

[(4516) . . . dated on New Year’s Day 759 . . .

This is the final poem in the Manyoshu.

In the lunar calendar the first day of the year

inaugurates spring. Tanka translation &

annotation by Cid Corman, Peerless Mirror,

Firefly Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.]

View original post

Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man | Brain Pickings

Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man | Brain Pickings.

NSFW: Performance Artist Reenacts the Painting ‘The Origin Of The World’ | artFido’s Blog

artist Deborah de Robertis

“There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. . . . ” – Deborah de Robertis

NSFW: Performance Artist Reenacts the Painting ‘The Origin Of The World’ | artFido’s Blog.

no possess by Donna Fleischer | Charter Oak Poets ii

word pond

no possess

brutish light
serrates morning
in the body

fissures open
to dense loss
the shatter
of unknowable
knowing crouches
child-like
in the hard white house

eyes float
in their window ponds
endless
and forgotten

~ Donna Fleischer
from Charter Oak Poets ii


View original post

X Poetics: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

X Poetics: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.

An Interview With Claudia Rankine by David Naimon | Between the Covers

New books: Paul Celan | George Hunka

Paul_Celan_Breathturn_lowNew books: Paul Celan | George Hunka.

Tasmanian Tiger / Thylacine combined footage

Increasingly, I find that most scientific research as to the status of species’ existence is motivated by pharmaceutical farming and mining  interests: To locate enough active genetic information to scaffold grow anew an organism — that passed through the world too soon for complex reasons, involving human aggression and co-optation of habitat — sufficiently, to extract compounds that can be developed further, marketed, and sold as prescriptions to quell  or at least salve human suffering.

Are we humans so afraid of our own individual natural deaths over time that we kill off the life in us, among us, and without us? This is all on the level of the unconscious, where we stare into the Void and cannot bear to feel that g-d doesn’t love us, that we have failed because we haven’t been successful in the new world — where success is counted as full participation in the illusion that money will buy one’s ticket to paradise; that one is to achieve individual rapture at the cost of all else; that notions like moral complexity, freedom, integrity or wholeness, necessity of the wild, interdependence, justice  are just plain stupid, or useless.

We self-assign our careers supposedly willingly and go about our business of acquiring credentials, jobs, and money. It’s possible that in proportion to the extent we pursue, we acquire and accumulate, that we then begin to fill up with comfort, the illusion that things piling up at the behest of malnourished egos is the way to escape the gaping Void at our heels. Comfort is the life-numbing quest. It replaces the capacity for wild life, that is, the life from which and for which our genetic materiality exists. If one doesn’t use a muscle it will atrophy, as half dead from comfort, we chase down truly living things, kill them, rip them open, and look to see what life there is, what life is, we think this is the only kind of death. We are desperate behind our masks of calm. When we laugh it is not from the belly seized with delight, of language, of all and anything that lives fully. We begin to hate life itself, mistaking it for the enemy.

There is no enemy. There is darkness and we have always been afraid of the dark. Look into the eviscerated animal for as long as you may, you can not ever recover your own precious life unless you embrace the shadow dance. Let the dark in and let it twinkle. – short essay by Donna Fleischer

Also, watch the film with Willem Dafoe, The Hunter. ~ Donna Fleischer

BBC NEWS / Science/Nature / Tasmanian tiger DNA ‘resurrected’ | word pond.

BBC NEWS / Science/Nature / Tasmanian tiger DNA ‘resurrected’ | word pond

word pond

Increasingly, I find that most scientific research as to the status of species’ existence is motivated by pharmaceutical farming and mining  interests: To locate enough active genetic information to scaffold grow anew an organism — that passed through the world too soon for complex reasons, involving human aggression and co-optation of habitat — sufficiently, to extract compounds that can be developed further, marketed, and sold as prescriptions to quell  or at least salve human suffering.

Are we humans so afraid of our own individual natural deaths over time that we kill off the life in us, among us, and without us? This is all on the level of the unconscious, where we stare into the Void and cannot bear to feel that g-d doesn’t love us, that we have failed because we haven’t been successful in the new world — where success is counted as full participation in the illusion…

View original post 291 more words