Who am I to review the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu? One of the most popular poetry anthologies in Japanese literature. Rather, I want to just sit at its feet and learn. If I even can.

Here’s my favorite, by Fujiwara no Akisuke:

In this autumn wind
That flings its tent roof of clouds
Across the evening
A tattered rent lets escape
The full, bright disk of the moon.

(I have the Tom Galt translation.)

Crazy beautiful.

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These haiku are very beautiful. Many of them piercingly so. A few are deeply strange. Let me quote:

Passing high above
our village, migrating birds cry,
“Nobody needs you!”

This is by somebody named Hakuhi. I haven’t been able to find out any more about him or her.

This may be one of my favorite haiku ever.

What I’m saying is, if you’re in it for sublime melancholy — straight, uncut wabi-sabi — then get on the Kobayashi Issa train.

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Digest by Gregory Pardlo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I suppose I would call this collection of poems ‘panoramic’. There are views of everything, from everywhere. Very interesting.



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Hello, the Roses by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There are lots of plants and different kinds of light in these poems.

I don’t feel qualified to evaluate poems like this. Let me try. There are two kinds of words. With one kind, like ‘crickets’ or ‘heartbeat’, there’s a thing that is definitely there, whether we like it or not, and so we attach a word to it so we can talk abut it. We don’t really know what crickets are, but we need to talk about them, so we made up this word ‘crickets’. The word is attaching itself to a real thing, and its failure (most words fail) comes from the fact that the true nature of the thing isn’t very available to us.

With the other kind of word, there’s a formal concept that exists in relation to other formal concepts, like ‘subtract’ or ‘saturation’ or ‘presence’. These aren’t real things; they’re ways of manipulating other concepts. We have some very well-defined formal models, and they’re built out of systems of words, and these are those words. They fail in that those formal models don’t actually exist. But because they don’t exist, a word like ‘saturation’ can be used in photography or cooking or physics.

With ‘saturation’ we build the system of words first and then try to shoehorn the things into them. With ‘crickets’ we see the things first and then try to cement a system of words to them.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s game (or one of them), unless I’m mistaken, is to treat the second kind of words as though they were the first. To talk about saturation or subtraction as though they were things we stumbled into and needed a word for.



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Holodeck One by Jessica Baer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am not competent to respond to poetry of this caliber. Here’s the best I can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEcI9…



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