You’re so witty and surprising in your off-the-cuff comments, and I love the shock of your self deprecations like “I wouldn’t take this crap from me.”

This poem would really fly if you got a little of that into it. As a start you could build on the image of the clue as a ball of thread as well, the one that was given to Theseus by the young girl while he was still himself inexperienced, untried, naive, In the end the clue served him better even than the sword, that hard, sharp thing he also got from her way back then. Of course most young men get a sword–few get a clue.

The clue brings you home to the girl–and then you betray her!

Oh dear, I’m a bit over the top now and writing another poem. Anyway, letting that one image drift a bit could get the poem kicking.

Christopher
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.
Wisdom

.
When once the changing world we understood,
whose laws we knew were permanent and clear,
when once distinct the shades of bad and good
and fear was all we thought we had to fear;

when once a narrow path before us lay,
straight and unobstructed by illusion,
when once our destination was clear as day
and we were never troubled by confusion,

it was then that we were young and then we knew
a simple world observed with simple eyes,
but as we lived and learned and older grew,
the less we understood and so grew wise.

For wisdom is no more than finding true
that, after all, we never had a clue.

.
Copyright 2005 – Evolving-Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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(He never read mine, though).

Don’t take things so seriously, JOS.
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I’m not THAT old.
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So thank you too.

Christopher
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And fuck you, too!
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You need to learn to read like Lao too tzu.
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Fear not. I move very slowly and am a poor target at that.

I have a copy of Gary Snyder’s book ‘Regarding Wave’ that I purchased in Albuquerque back in ’71 (Good God, has it been that long?). I have never bought another nor have I read ‘Myths and Texts’. I am remiss. But then, I haven’t bought a new poetry book for nearly twenty years. Besides, I’m more of a Lao tzu and Joseph Campbell kind of guy.

I keep Gary Snyder on my Heroes list, though. I’ve read many of his poems over the years plus numerous articles, reviews and interviews. I try to keep up. I like Snyder.

Please let me share with you a personal experience pertaining to Mr. Snyder. I have been writing poetry for over forty years but only published my first book in ’05. It’s a collection of my poems, in chronological order, from age 13 to 53. I had hoped, of course, that people would like it, but I also thought it might, at least, be of some pedagogic value. I called it ‘Evolving’. Get it?)

Now, my sixth book of poems will be out in September, but when the first one was published I was, naturally, excited…waiting for that NY Times poetry review, and all (live and learn). The only poet I even bothered to write to back then and ask to have a look at my book was Gary Snyder. I figured that he, as a Buddhist and an environmentalist, was probably the only one who might appreciate my Nature oriented Taoist perspective. He never wrote back.

But, still, I hold him among my heroes because I know that he loves what I love.

As did Robinson Jeffers.

GBF

P.S. John…”simpy gushing” was actually pretty mean, wasn’t it?
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Now and Zen I figure the moving target just ain’t worth the ammunition.

Jeffers was pretty far out there. Great poet honored with lip service. Worth following into the cold dark realm, if that’s your medicine.

What’s interesting is the rigorous muscular threads that connect your simpy gushes of loving the earth / and writing good poetry. My paragraph beginning with Troy strictly recapitulates where Snyder leads us in Myths and Texts, his book which most influenced me. His Native informants come by way of hard-handed work, same like his old Wobblies.

And thence many thousand hours of sitting in cold dark zendos, that’s for sure.
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It ain’t no fun if you don’t shoot back. I wouldn’t take this crap from me.

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“…that was Jeffers who’d rather have killed a man than a hawk.”

God bless Robinson Jeffers!

.
John Oliver Simon said:

“Snyder saw Troy burning and had the notion that the practice of the Wild (and aboriginal wisdoms, not as easily appreciated 50 years ago as they are today) might heal our ills, to begin to build the new society within the shell of the old.”

This is pure bullshit. Snyder’s been a Zen Buddhist for decades. Hardly “aboriginal” (by a few thousand years, I might add). He is not a Sioux shaman, a Taoist or even a Pantheist. Please let’s leave our philosophical suppositions out of this. He simply loves the Earth (as do we all) and writes very good poetry.
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Snyder built his own house in the woods anyway, and I was one of the star-struck kids who lent a hand. Full disclosure: Gary was certainly a kind of a mentor to me, I called him a kulak in a querulous poem 30 years ago, and he generously blurbed my book Caminante. As for family, his folks were poor, his mom was a peace activist into her nineties, and he built his own as well, out of the wreckage.

I thought Terreson’s put-down was facile, but I see her (him?) making sense in other threads. Let’s unpack this.
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Terreson
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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177985

An excerpt:

In last week’s mail,
still spread on the kitchen table,
the list of endangered species.
How plain the animals are,
quaint, domestic,
but the names lift from the page:
Woundfin. Whooping Crane. Squawfish.
Black-footed Ferret. California Least Tern.

– Ellen Bryant Voigt, “A Marriage Poem”
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And when I think about how close the nocturnal black-footed ferret came to extinction I cannot help but bastardize Dylan Thomas…”Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Cheers,
Travis Livieri
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Actually, I’m lying about that. I used the image of the chiseler because it’s so much like me, and I thought that at last I’d found an objective correlative that the whole Mayflower diaspora could share. I thought I’d wrote myself into American folklore at last.

Because I now write in Shangri-la, and most of the imagery I want to use I don’t even understand myself–indeed, my poems are weighted down with footnotes.

Like this story. My Norwegian friend is driving out of my gate at 10pm and turns right. Ooops, there’s a tree down across the road. Well, we’re used to that because the early Monsoon thunderstorms are so vicious, the rice-paddy soil so loose and moist, and the Thais so wanton with trees—the way they knock them down as often with their pickups as chainsaws!

But this tree is moving, says Trygve to me the next day, pulling out his digital as proof. Yes, there’s the tree alright, its tail a good 2 metres in the grass on one side of the road and its head a good 2 metres in the grass on the other. So we go out and look at the road with a tape measure–yes, 4 metres wide as I’d said.

25 feet.

So what did my wife say when I asked her if the villagers weren’t worried, because this python could have dealt with me even at 6’3″ if it were hungry, not to speak of the delicate brown children skipping over there in the dust? “Oh they know it will move on (pythons are solitary and nomadic) but for the visit they’re glad. Good fortune, they feel, a gift from the gods, well-being.

Which is the snake in the Orient, of course, and probably why we got Satan!

Oh, and the chiseler? Ask me and I’ll tell you.

Christopher
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Somewhere out there, those crows
won’t shut up. Maybe they can’t. And then
they do. Which is why the thrush—I think
it’s a thrush—comes out
from underneath with its weird
echoy thing, huge now but—plaintive,
my mother might have said.

***

But I was
or I wasn’t. Or I was small
but there is smaller. To my left, a door.
Some tree flowering at my right.
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