Sangha of Poets
Dear Friends, As we are reading Nhat Hanh’s poems for our June session, I thought I’d share a few poems by other Zen poets in the weeks ahead. Here is one by Han-Shan, who lived…
Category: World Literature
Tolstoy Summer
✓ A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin) ✓ The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus (Harper Perennial) ✓ Hadji Murat (translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky) ✓ The Kingdom of God Is within You…
Walt, Various
1. I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.–Walt Whitman 2. In 1968 Susan Sontag visited Hanoi for two weeks. In her account of her experiences, she seemed a bit surprised the…
Su Tung P’o, Traveling at Night and Looking at the Stars (NPM, 4.25.22)
Heaven high above, the night air chill,ranged stars crowd the sky, all in proper places,big stars darting rays back and forth little stars busy as boiling water.Heaven and humans don’t meddle with one another —what does…
Brecht 101 (NPM, 4.15.22)
Dear Ruthie, Have you ever read Brecht? He was one of my influences —I stole a couple of lines from “A Worker Reads History” and used them at the end of “A Mindful Rant for…
Love Theme (NPM, 4.8.22)
Elizabeth I, When I Was Fair and Young When I was fair and young, then favor graced me. Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all and answered them…
Szym and Rez (NPM, 4.6.22)
Wislawa SzymborskaABC I’ll never find out nowWhat A. thought of me.If B. ever forgave me in the end.Why C. pretended everything was fine.What part D. played in E.’s silence.What F. had been expecting, if anything.Why…
4.4.22, National Poetry Month
Contemporary war is a bureaucratic and capitalistic enterprise that requires its bored clerks, soulless administrators, ignorant taxpayers, contradictory priests, and encouraging families. If we understood that a war machine is a pervasive system of complicity…
Styron/Kerouac
Recently, I read Jack Kerouac’s novel, Tristessa, which didn’t take long but it was an unpleasant experience. Not long after, I came across the following prediction in James West’s Conversations with William Styron from 1962: …