Category Archives: Poetry

A Little Poem

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February

In the burnished light of winter
the different greens reveal themselves –
pulse of spruce, metallic sheen of pine
& the glow of the cedar’s golden green:
Bright neon of moss where the wind
has kicked the snow away.
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Hmm . . . looking at this now, I don’t like it as much as I did at first. Not crazy about those three uses of of in the middle part. And clearly, the poem is really just an excuse for the verb kicked, weakened, I see now, by has. (I had a hard time deciding between kicked & scuffed.) The problem is that the language doesn’t successfully embody the perception, which is that there are subtle differences between the kinds of green one sees in a winter landscape.

Back to Vietnam

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Having put together a couple of little grants & my annual travel money from my department, I’ll be going to Vietnam this summer for around six weeks, spending most of my time in Hanoi doing some editing at Th? Gi?i and working on a project to collect information about a handful of early Buddhist poets. I’ll probably go to Hué for a week to visit Pagodas with my friend Mai, too. If I could collect enough texts & biographical materials for a little anthology, that would be great, but working from the US all I have are tantalizing hints. Here is a picture of Hàng Mã St. I took several years ago that suggested to me the idea of going places, but checking the  Vietnamese spelling of Hàng Mã just now, I discovered this amazing panoramic picture, which is the next best thing to being there. This will be my seventh trip to VN in fourteen years.

Ph? Hàng Mã

 

A Poem from The Book I’m Putting Together . . .

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. . . has won a prize from the American Literary Review.

Here is what Joanie Mackowski, who judged the poetry contest, thought of the winning poem, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds”:

“Stretching its keen observations and minutely choreographed sentences over the advancing paw prints of its lines, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds” makes language ductile and makes the reader recall the animal and chemical pleasures of reading. This poem finds an atomic pulse: ‘thing & song// in their wild fullness full’.” The poem will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of ALR.