Friday Night Poetry Slam

Hi All,

Big Sky here - who is taking the helm of the slam for September. It's newly Spring here in Southern Australia. We get to see the cirrus spin up again above the cumulus, and the days become longer, brighter and warmer. Big drops of rain come down, dams fill, creeks run, the green grass sheet that Winter threw over everything slowly tinges brown, and mosquitoes come through the crack-opened windows.

I thought that I'd share a snippet of a great introduction from the book Awakened Cosmos - The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry edited and translated by David Hinton. Good book because it includes the Chinese & a simple translation of each character.

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“POETRY IS THE COSMOS AWAKENED TO ITSELF. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities—for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.”

Sounds like a fair rallying cry. Here's what Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother:

"In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball."

Here's a Zen poem by Tu Fu.

Spring Landscape

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains

continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these

separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now

a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white

confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

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COME AND GET IT!

It's not hard - everything is at hand

Even without picking up a pen it is complete,

All that's left to do is participate!

From all corners - each jewel shines unique,

What better invitation can you possibly receive?

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So, chuck one down, join in!

What is it to open to silence?

Submitted September 03, 2022 at 04:13AM by bigSky001 https://ift.tt/uxq1CoV