UNITED STATES POET LAUREATE ROBERT PINSKY FULL INTERVIEW

[BUKCOLLECTOR]

Enjoyed your poems. And your unique word choices enhanced the poems emotional impact and kept me engaged throughout.
I’m a poet specializing in Japanese forms: haiku, tanka, haibun, kyoka, senryu. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a tanka and my haiku, a tribute poem to Bashō’s frog with commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my Basho haiku among her top 10 haiku of all time. What an honor.
Here’s the Bashō poem and commentary:


Bashō’s frog
four hundred years
of ripples


At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA
forum.

The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so
numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this
method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing
about realism–ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of the
sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water

As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider–including us all. But his last word reminds us all that we are ripples and our lives ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain.

~~

And my tanka:


returning home
from a Jackson Pollock
exhibition
I smear my face with paint
and morph into art

~~

—All love in isolation
from Miami Beach,
Florida,
Al

[BUKCOLLECTOR]

I hope you don’t mind me sharing the following poem, one of my all time favorite meta poetic poems by a poet named “Howard Dull” titled “Suibhne Gheilt” that I recently chanced upon. When I read it, I became speechless. And most of my poetry friends consider this as one of their all time favorites.
It was published in a 1970s anthology titled “ Open Poetry” and proves that once Poetry hits you in your heart, you could be the worst nefarious scoundrel with kings at your bidding and Empires at your command but you will be transformed and never again return to your former Self.

~~

Suibhne Gheilt

1
He has haunted me now for over a year
that madman Suibhne Gheilt
who in the middle of a battle
looked up and saw something
that made him leap up and fly
over swords and trees
— a poet gifted above all others —
11

How could a proud loud mouth
who yelled KILL KILL KILL
as he plowed done the enemy
— heads rolling off of his sword —
be so lifted up
( or fly up
as those below saw it
— wings beating)
be so suddenly gifted
with poetry
and nest so high
in Ireland’s tall trees?
Is there a point
where all paths cross?
And why am I so drawn to him
that all my questions
seem shot in his direction?
“And they ran into the woods
and threw their lances
and shot their arrows
up through the branches”
What parallels could I ever hope to find —
my refusal to fight
( weaseling out on psychiatric grounds)?
my leaving my country behind?
my poetry?
“and my wife wept
on the path below. . .
Oh memory is sweet
but sweeter is the sorrel
in the pool in the path below”
I fly down every night
to eat
111

Sweeney like the rest of us would have been better off if he had never anything to do with women.
But the point of it lies hidden
in a pool of milk
in a pile of shit
for you to see
when a milkmaid smiles
Sweeney like the rest of us flies down
and when she pours the milk
into the hole her heel made in the cowdung
Sweeney like the rest of us kneels down and drinks
and dies on the horn the cowherd hid in it.
So before you have anything to do with women
remember Sweeney the bird of Ireland
lying on his back
in the middle of that path
in the moonlight.
1V

And on my way home
this morning
( my wife
waiting)
my shadow
racing up the path ahead of me
I saw something
( a black stone?)
thrown
at the back of its head
ducked
and spun around
so fast
I almost fell down
— it was a bird
flying up into a tree
V
No good could come out of this war
out of what burns in the heart of our highly disciplined
John Q. Killer as a whole village bursts into one flame —
the villagers streaming like tears
towards the forest
cover his helicopter’s blades
blow the leaves off and
and the flame towards. . .

as we sit in front of our bubbles watching our president
( whose bubbletalk no one can escape and he is a little bit
mad —calling the reporters in for an interview while he’s
sitting on the bubble having
a bubble movement) and first
lady climb into their big bubble bed an Lucy, born of
their own bubbles, crawls in between —
“ Mah daddy has so many
troubles
turning the world into a bubble
and sick of crossfire —
the cries of the women and
children flying over his head —
he stumbled down to the
riverbank and found,
the wreckage twisted around the tree
behind, his skull. . .

Noises, there are noises,
noises that can of themselves drive
a man mad —NOISES!

But last night the Stockhausen penetrated from the four
sides of the auditorium, stripping each layer of feeling
and thought until all that was left was something the size
of a nut — so tiny, so hard, so impenetrable it was alone
in the middle of an infinite space. . .

—Howard Dull

~~

ps: Howard Dull was such an obscure poet that he never published a book and ( to my knowledge) never published another poem. But OMG, this was so brilliant that in my opinion it should be read and studied at the college level.

All love in isolation from Miami Beach, Florida,
Al

[DeepInTheArena]

wow. i can listen to him talk all day.