Posts Tagged ‘ Don Wentworth ’
Don Wentworth, Pittsburgh’s and Our poet, editor, and publisher of the great, little literary journal, Lilliput Review, and the blog Issa’s Untidy Hut, has this new book of poems here. Praise Be and praise as well on the outside back cover, by Tom Clausen, poet and editor of Cornell University Mann Library’s Daily Haiku. Get ready to be lifted up, thrown around and tickled in the ribs with a cosmic elbow. – Donna Fleischer
Source: Mann Library’s Daily Haiku featured poet: Don Wentworth | Six Gallery Press
Image by Jetheriot via foter
whistling wind—
a small snow drift
by the still rabbit
– Michael Dylan Welch
Issa’s Untidy Hut: Michael Dylan Welch & DJ Garvey: Wednesday Haiku.
The epigraph to Don Wentworth’s poetic practice and to this, his second book of poems (Past All Traps came first), is a hokku by Bashō, translated by R. H. Blyth, which reads —
Yield to the willow
All the loathing, all the desire
Of your heart
Don Wentworth lives Bashō’s poetics. The small poems in Yield to the Willow, are those resilient, supple branches; they follow the snail’s glistening slime trail, begin off the page with Bashō’s hokku instruction, “go to the pine to learn about the pine . . .” They traverse this wilderness of being alive in the company of orchid, ant, robin, maple leaf, moon, and with their human manifestations Li Po, R. H. Blyth, Shiki, Blake, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Lydon, zazen, ass crack, sutra, cancer, desire. Midway, this stupa poem: ~ Donna Fleischer
that slow lope,
of nowhere to go,
been there, everywhere, before ¾
look, see, the willow
yields to you
– Don Wentworth
Yield to the Willow
The back cover sports three tributes to this astonishing collection and this is one:
As the willow’s long, slender branches sweep the wind, so the wind sweeps its branches; as the willow yields to you, so you yield to the willow. These playful, beautifully tuned wise poems touch briefly and go. – Donna Fleischer, word pond
http://www.amazon.com/Yield-Willow-Don-Wentworth/dp/1926616588/
A review of Wentworth’s first book can be found here:
Issa’s Untidy Hut: Poems from Dew on the Grass: Issa.
~ Makoto Ueda’s scholarship is both inspiring and impeccable, not to mention a writing style and imagination equal to the subject at hand. A friend, well-travelled in myriad translations of Issa, owns this expensive book so I have read random pages. Ueda’s translations are just as gloriously manifest as they are in his “Basho and His Interpreters” which I have twice studied to this date because Ueda and his subjects come alive on the page. ~ yours truly, df