1 100 142 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/8f9e77926618546114b110bf855e8857.pdf 1bb4064b5184312801313169ae347655 PDF Text Text Midwest Zen Issue 3 | December 2022 A publication of Great Wind Zendo Danville, Indiana �Midwest Zen Issue 3 | December 2022 Published 2022 by Great Wind Zendo Editor: Kristin Roahrig Address all correspondence to: Midwest Zen Great Wind Zendo 52 W Broadway Street Danville, Indiana 46122-1718 MidwestZen@greatwindzendo.org The digital version of this publication can be downloaded at no cost from our website at greatwindzendo.org/MWZ. The works included and the opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors, who are solely responsible for their contents. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions and positions of Great Wind Zendo. Midwest Zen © 2022 by Great Wind Zendo. All rights revert to the author upon publication. Printed in U.S.A. Cover: detail from photograph by Jay Tuttle. �Contents Contents ESSAYS ART & PHOTOGRAPHY David Whyte Silence 3 Neil SchmitzerTorbert Do We Really Want to Sit? 7 Sally Hess Horses and Zebras 13 Gail Sher Beginner’s Mind 26 Zuiko Redding Practice and Enjoyment 33 Kyoku Lutz World Peace Ceremony at the Frühlingsmond Zendo, Hanover, Germany 35 Tonen O’Connor Gassho 45 David Whyte Sitting Zen Nakasendo Poems 1 39 Joshua St. Claire Free Form Haiku Yuan Changming A Puti Poem: Meditating 11 Daniel Thomas Practicing Two Voices What Evening Can’t Dispel 21 22 23 Darrell Petska In the Round Old Man Rocking 31 32 Tonen O’Connor Buddhist Peace Fellowship New Year’s Day Gathering 43 POETRY 6 Jay Tuttle Photographs Front cover, 49 Lisa Summers Photographs 2, 24, 25 Kristin Roahrig Photographs 5, 12 �Lisa Summers Gail Sher Beginner’s Mind "Beginner's Mind" is a term especially connected to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi because of his book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind . It's a term people casually use with the sense "everyone knows what that means." But I wonder. Let's take a moment to consider what you think "Beginner's Mind" means. Can you articulate your relationship with it? Is it a principle by which you live? Is it something you hardly think about? When Suzuki Roshi first saw the published copy of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, he said: "It looks good . . . I didn't write it but it looks nice." It's true he didn't actually write this famous book. Suzuki Roshi arrived in San Francisco in 1959 to serve as priest for the Japanese Soto Zen community in San Francisco. While living alone in their large temple on Buchanan Street, he started sitting zazen in the morning and evening. Gradually people, curious about anything “Zen” (word spread quickly through the local art-scene grapevine) joined him and the sittings became more frequent and more formal. A few satellite groups also sprang up—in Mill Valley, Berkeley and Los Altos. Roshi would go there once or twice a week for zazen and to give talks. Eventually the woman who hosted the group in Los Altos, Trudy Dixon, began, with Roshi's permission, recording the lectures. After an extremely lengthy period of transcribing and editing, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was published. People love it, but I'm not sure how many finish it because it is actually not so simple. “Beginner’s Mind”—the words—have become commonplace. Yet it’s the fresh new breath—the “mind” of this phrase—that Suzuki-roshi so emphasized. Staying with this—first finding it and then how to bring ourselves again and again back to it, is at the heart of his legacy. Page 25 Page 26 �Gail Sher But it isn’t easy. Not because IT isn’t easy but because the cultural values with which it contends make it extremely challenging. I refer to setting goals, to winning, to achievement, to progress—these are all de-emphasized because the mind behind their direction is at crosspurposes with a beginner's mind. Reb Anderson Roshi, a close disciple of Suzuki Roshi says that Roshi considered his main job as a Zen priest to encourage people to practice upright sitting. For him, Reb says, the most pure and direct way of sustaining the Buddha treasure was just to be fully himself in each moment. His way of protecting the Dharma treasure was to practice wholeheartedly with no gaining idea. And his way of protecting and sustaining the Sangha treasure (Buddha, Dharma & Sangha: the "Triple Treasures" of Buddhism) was what he called group practice—practicing together in harmony with others. When you consider that for Roshi, anyone being fully themselves means to be rooted in their fundamental Buddha-nature and that to do this one would have no gaining idea (because there is nothing to add to one's Buddha-nature)—THIS in itself would be Beginner's Mind. When Roshi says "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few," by "beginner" he means our fundamental selves, and from there being anything the situation requires. The phrase has a kind of innocence and lack of calculation or contrivance about it. It's ironic. Suzuki-roshi loved Americans because "they don't know anything about Zen so they're receptive to the teachings." Yet at the same time Americans are steeped in gaining ideas. If you talk about upright sitting, for many people their first thought is "I don't have time," by which they mean "I can't afford not to accomplish something Page 27 Gail Sher even for 15 minutes." Most of Roshi's first students were artists who were operating differently already. "At first the effort you make is quite rough and impure, but by the power of practice the effort will become purer and purer. When your effort becomes pure, your body and mind become pure. This is the way we practice Zen." Let me give an example. When I was seventy-five my husband gave me a banjo for Christmas. My back was weak. My hands were stiff. There were many obstacles, but I just thought, “Well, I have always wanted to play the banjo. If I practice every day, every day I will have the joy of the banjo. Even one tune will be amazing. Before I started playing, I could hardly believe that I, Gail, would ever be able to play the banjo. But day after day I just did the things from my lesson and now, a few years later, I actually can play a few tunes. And it doesn’t seem special. It is just me, nothing special. Day after day it’s just me figuring out how to get the strap over my head and the banjo so that it doesn’t slip. There are so many considerations, if I let them, they could get annoying. But I just say “Nevermind. This is what it takes.” In the end I get my tune, which at best doesn’t sound too bad. Deep inside I am very satisfied. Beginning at seventy-five has many advantages. I am not thinking, “Boy, if I practice really hard I could win a competition.” I’m not thinking, “Too bad I can’t play fast like her.” Instead I am thinking, “Every day I can try as hard as I can and since I can’t do better than that, I will have done my best.” In this way it becomes a “practice.” Every morning for half an hour. Practice is about HOW—how to simply stay with how—making sure I have the half hour, that I have what I Page 28 �Gail Sher need with me, that I know what to do during that time, that I’m alert. It’s easier to have a beginner’s mind at seventy-five than at fifteen. At fifteen one is full of fantasies, notions, looking around, trying things on. At seventy-five you can just be yourself. Anyway, playing the banjo is not really about playing the banjo. Playing the banjo is about sharpening the MindThat-Plays-the-Banjo. Correct Mind creates correct playing, whether that be awkward, faulty, kindergartenish. Correct Mind knows that there is nothing to know. This is important to understand. Knowledge (information) and Wisdom (spirit) are not the same. Playing the banjo is a Wisdom practice. You being YOU is the Wisdom practice of returning to the Source. Actually, when you think about it, it’s the Source that plays the banjo. Wisdom practice means NOT KNOWING. Suzuki Roshi calls it Beginner’s Mind. If you want to do something fully you need the real you. The real you lives inside (behind or underneath) all of your knowing—touching the spot of JUST YOU—first recognizing it, then touching it and then becoming it in your stillness. Gail Sher The word “practice”—you can turn anything into a practice—means turning it into a relationship. In the case of my banjo it is a Self-relationship, with the banjo being a mirror. “Oh I don’t really feel like practicing today,” I may think but because it’s a “practice” I get to see my mind when it is reluctant, but I practice anyway. If it were not a practice, I might just do what I feel like, risking the whole prospect which could easily fall away. “Tell me about 'There is nothing to know' when it comes time to change the strings” you could rightfully ask. Because, while for big mind there is nothing to know, small mind needs lots of information. It’s the way you hold the details, however, that makes the difference. The details are just details. Just as the waves of the sea are the “practice of the sea,” so are the information and skills required to play an instrument—or to sit zazen. "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the expert’s mind there are few" simply describes a way of holding these details. "Our ‘original mind’ includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself." Roshi means that we have everything that we need to begin and continue with our practice. "The goal of practice is always to show up and to keep a beginner’s mind." It means that endlessly we stay with that fresh effort because boredom (laziness of mind) is always remediable. Page 29 Page 30 �BIOGRAPHIES Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan at poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations, 15 chapbooks & appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and Poetry Daily. Sally Hess was introduced to Buddhism at the Zen Community of New York in 1984. She received lay ordination from Dai-En Bennage Roshi in 1994 with the Dharma name Daisen. Kyoku Lutz is a Dharma successor of Rev. Hoko Karnegis, Sanshinji, and leads the Frühlingsmond Zendo, in Hanover, Germany. She is a Doctor of Educational Science with training in Systemic Family Therapy and Counseling. Tonen O’Connor is the Resident Priest Emerita of the Milwaukee Zen Center. Her most recent literary adventure was editing and writing an introductory essay for Ryokan interpreted by Shohaku Okumura. Darrell Petska is a retired university editor and 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Buddhist Poetry Review, Verse Virtual, Soul-Lit and widely elsewhere. (conservancies.wordpress.com). Rev. Zuiko Redding is pastor of Cedar Rapids Zen Center, a Soto Zen temple in Iowa. She has two cats, Roy and Sam. You can see the Center at www.cedarrapidszencenter.org. Kristin Roahrig resides in Indiana where she engages in writing and photography. Neil Schmitzer-Torbert began his Zen practice in Minneapolis while studying neuroscience in graduate school. Today, he teaches psychology at Wabash College and shares reflections on practice and science at neuralbuddhist.com. Gail Sher received lay ordination from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1970. She is a poet, writer, teacher and psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay area. Her weekly talks on Zen practice are at gailsherdharmatalks.com.. Joshua St. Claire is a corporate controller from rural Pennsylvania. His haiku have appeared in several international journals and he believes that small poems can contain the universe. Lisa Summers lives in rural Indiana and teaches in a women's prison. She enjoys capturing the world she wanders with photographs and in writing. Daniel Thomas’s second poetry book, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn, was published in 2022. His first collection, Deep Pockets, won a 2018 Catholic Press Award. More info at danielthomaspoetry.com. Jay Tuttle finds the mix of art and science in photography very appealing. Making photographs that others enjoy are a great pleasure in his life. Enjoy more images at jaytuttlephotography.com. Poet David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. The author of eleven books of poetry and four books of prose, he holds a degree in Marine Zoology, and leads workshops and walking tours around the world.  � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beginner's Mind Description An account of the resource Midwest Zen 3, December 2022, pp. 26-30. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942-; Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Midwest Zen Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Date Available Date (often a range) that the resource became or will become available. 2023-01-23 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2023-01-23 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2022 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_170 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/a49e26f3077484183cdf68c6a4328045.pdf 35d2852d48ed1b17799440b8263a7804 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text PDF Text Text Gail Sher: Collected Poetry 1982-2007 A Review Essay by Andrew Schelling I first met Gail Sher in the early nineteen-eighties when we were both living in Berkeley. I’d already read her earliest published poetry and heard friends speak about her practice of both Buddhism and writing. In a modest way she was a legend among local poets & Zen students. When I actually met her, she was finishing up a book of bread recipes [From a Baker’s Kitchen, 1984/2004], an activity less surprising in those days than it might seem now. The story about Gail’s poetry was that she’d begun to write her tough, multilayered, flint-like poems, often in series, while a student at Zen Center’s Tassajara Mountain retreat. She had continued to write as a daily discipline after returning to the East Bay where she dwelt on the far fringes of the energetic language poetry crowd. The earliest events she and I appeared at together were conversations about poetry and Buddhist practice—once in San Francisco, once at Green Gulch Zen Center near Muir Beach. To my imagination though, she remained a figure of Tassajara. Tassajara lies in one of those cañados that in summer visiting season crackles with tough, aromatic brush—as well as manzanita & poison oak—deep in the mountains inland from Monterey. The site, along a boulder strewn creek, was first known to native peoples for its healing hot springs. You can only readily get there during the dry season, & only with a serviceable car, standard transmission, to take you seven miles uphill, then seven precipitous miles down a harrowing dirt road. The road twists along a valley wall held in place by the roots of dwarf oaks. When I’d visit in the seventies and eighties, I went in my big, square ’64 Pontiac, which burnt through its brakes the first time down. From then on the car stayed at China Camp, a hilltop site with primitive facilities. Seven miles down to Tassajara by foot—bathe in the creek, drink tea generously provided by the Zen Students, buy a loaf of Tassajara’s renowned bread, sit zazen in the zendo—then trudge seven miles back to the clatter of crickets. On one of those trips I heard of a poet who had taken to a daily practice of writing, and did it as a solitary discipline. So different from the gregarious poets I knew in the Bay Area! When I found Gail’s books, I imagined her having stepped from a Japanese Noh play. Her poems, sharpened by rigorous Buddhist discipline—& not to everybody’s taste—grabbed me instantly. They were tough, refreshingly hardedged, full of the natural world—constructed of bits and pieces of mineral, insect, bark, summer grass. They could cry out from the page in several languages at once, with English functioning (I thought) like a piece of steel to strike the spark. They felt classical. Despite their wild turns of phrasing, fox barks & cricket clicks, �under the surface they showed a sensibility that was refined, educated, attentive to natural detail, & enamored of the chipped, the asymmetric, the rustic. They put me in mind of the writers of Japan’s Heian court, the best of whom were women. I still hear echoes of Murasaki Shikibu or Ono no Komachi when I open Gail’s books. My ear had been tuned to Modernist rhythms & syntax by Pound’s Cantos and his haunting translation of Noh plays. I’d been schooled in the compressed poems of Lorine Niedecker and the Objectivists, had started to collect the crisp haiku-inflected translations of American Indian poems done by Frances Densmore, and gotten first-hand know-how of Asian poetry through the mustardcrackling syllables of Sanskrit. When I found Gail’s poems, they became instant companions. I knew she was up to something special. (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem was probably the book that first showed me how my own generation’s often extreme experiments with language—cracking words apart & recombining syllables or sentences in ways that carried ear & mind to completely new realms—could be more than politically radical. They could be ecologically radical, spiritually radical. I remember many poems by Philip Whalen & Diane di Prima also written at Tassajara, and maybe some by Norman Fischer or Pat Reed. Once on the twisty, uphill walk back to China Camp through burnt-over oaks—frightening wildfire had raced through in ’77 or ’78—ghost faces leapt out where the firefighter’s axes had slashed through scorched trunks and exposed bright inner wood. I composed a lengthy poem (thankfully lost long ago) to capture the California landscape with its Zen center, lizards, and rattlesnakes. Of all the writing Tassajara’s inspired, though, Gail Sher’s must be the most fully generated out of that canyon, its geothermal forces, its healing hot springs. Gail has worked with, & been instrumental in naturalizing to our North American continent, several Asian poetic traditions. This is something only a Left Coast or Pacific Rim poet could do with ease, and a direct if invisible lineage runs through her from the Far East. She has worked haiku and its linked-verse cousin renku. She has written an autobiographical account of her Buddhist training in haibun form. More recently, familiarity with yoga practice has drawn her to India’s musical tradition, and the outcome of this was the serial poem RAGA. In conversation with Tibetan Buddhism, she also wrote DOHA, a book modeled on Tibetan songs of devotion and instruction. Every plant, wild animal, watershed, well-crafted building, every poem or human being, holds a quality that is the root of its life and spirit. This quality is quite sharp, objective, wise. It is also creative and fluid so cannot be caught or described. Matsuo Basho found this spirit to animate haiku, lyric poems, the tea ceremony, archery. It runs through all of Gail Sher’s poetry—loose, alive, relaxed, content with imperfection, winding around an inward mystery. Her writing reveals the finely edged relationship between ourselves and our �surroundings. When I go to her poetry I do it the way I hike into the mountains or up a gorge, or for that matter step into a temple or meditation hall. I find things fully alive there. Not opinions, ideas, notions—just the wild spirit of living things. What is the natural habitat of North American poetry if not the great ecosystem of the Small Press? An ecosystem comprised of energy pathways, migration corridors, nutrient exchanges. It is alive with life & death chases, sweeping unpredictable weather patterns, and acts of breath-taking generosity. Gail’s poems saw light here: Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press, Matt & Sarah Correy’s Rodent Press, Joey Simas’s Moving Letters. But the world of publishing got rougher in the 1990’s (absorption of corporate publishing houses into media empires, overthrow of distributors who handle small presses). One response has been for poets to consolidate their resources. Gail’s poetry has moved to a new home, Night Crane Press. Small and micro presses serving the San Francisco Bay Area have taken totem animals for a long time. White Rabbit, Grey Fox, Coyote Books. Turtle Island fits in too. Now Night Crane, with its whiff of transient life, is collecting Gail Sher’s poetry into an online edition. This is a wonderful gathering. Much in these books will be rough going, though, even for seasoned readers. Tibetan words, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Japanese. Syllables cobbled into seed-like stanzas that don’t easily crack. Of course poetry has always been hard to crack. “Don’t follow in the steps of the old masters,” said one old master, “seek what they sought.” What a hard lesson. --Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado Note: This essay was written for a collected ediiton of Gail Sher's poetry that was never published as a print volume; instead it introduced the onlline edition of Gail's poetry on her website, gailsher.com. ----------------------------------- � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher: Collected Poetry 1982-2007 A Review Essay Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Andrew Schelling Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_163 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Andrew Schelling and used with permission. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Language A language of the resource eng https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/3a5bb45a50f37a5ce10478f367c5ebb1.jpg 392ea2327a4e15d8fca153f4597a50e4 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/8822a14cb969bdadf53f4b5a07096146.txt a0f8804ff2d8b0ba19afcc619bf57a67 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Talk 1: Beginner's Mind Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource September 13, 2020 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_162 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2021-04-29 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2020 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Andrew Schelling and used with permission. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_162 CAP Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/ecd0be8a675408092fc3cf121395a605.pdf 7d9b10a4f7fa91a49618d88e932ce173 PDF Text Text —james maynard Curator, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo When I go to Gail Sher’s poetry I do it the way I hike into the mountains or up a gorge, or for that matter step into a temple or meditation hall. I find things fully alive there. No opinions, ideas, notions—just the wild spirit of living things. — andrew schelling Naropa University 1980–2020 Night Crane Press in collaboration with The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries University at Buffalo Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics Bringing together four decades of her writing, Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics, 1980–2020 is an impressive testament to Gail Sher’s ongoing engagement with poetry as a practice of attention. It also emphatically reinforces her contributions to, on the one hand, a long tradition of American writing, especially from the West Coast, that is steeped in East Asian philosophy and poetic forms, and, on the other, an equally rich history of experimental writing by women. Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics 1980–2020 �Gail Sher Poetry and Poetics 1980-2020 �Also by Gail Sher PROSE One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious The Intuitive Writer From a Baker’s Kitchen POETRY Mary’s Eyes Pale Sky Sunny Day, Spring Mingling the Threefold Sky The Twelve Nidānas Figures in Blue The Bardo Books White Bird Mother’s Warm Breath The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries though actually it is the same earth East Wind Melts the Ice DOHAredwind daylong daylong Once There Was Grass RAGA Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms Moon of The Swaying Buds Marginalia la KUKLOS Cops Broke Aide Rouge to Beak Having Me (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics 1980–2020 NIGHT CRANE PRESS in collaboration with The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries University at Buffalo 2020 �Copyright © 2020 by The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Night Crane Press in collaboration with The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020901141 Author: Sher, Gail, 1942Title: Gail Sher Poetry and Poetics, 1980-2020 Includes bibliographic references. ISBN: 978-0-9978313-3-7 �For Brendan ��CONTENTS Preface by James Maynard xi poetics from Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 1 from The Way of the Poem 13 radical language experiments 1980-1997 Introduction 22 “She stood all divine in her lash” 23 from another point of view the woman seems to be resting 25 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem 36 Rouge to beak having me 43 KUKLOS 50 asian influenced work 2000-2008 Introduction 58 from The Moon of the Swaying Buds 59 from Look at that Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 89 from RAGA 102 �from DOHĀ 108 the wisdom mind collection 2008-2013 Introduction 114 The tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities. 115 though actually it is the same earth 184 Mother’s Warm Breath 253 White Bird 341 The Bardo Books 407 Figures in Blue 452 The Twelve Nidānas 501 Mingling the Threefold Sky 546 late work 2014-2018 Introduction 585 from Sunny Day, Spring 588 from Ezekiel 590 from Pale Sky 591 from Elm 599 from Mary’s Eyes 607 �new poems Introduction 613 from City of Sleep 614 chronologies A Personal Chronology of External Life Circumstances 622 An Internal History of My Relationship with Language 627 bibliography 632 resources 649 ��Preface “My biggest responsibility to myself as a poet is to remain in the realm of the unknown. I don’t write what I already know . . . My writing arises, and I am constantly surprised by it.” —Gail Sher, from Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious (2016) Bringing together four decades of her writing, Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics, 1980–2020 is an impressive testament to Gail Sher’s ongoing engagement with poetry as a practice of attention. It also emphatically reinforces her contributions to, on the one hand, a long tradition of American writing, especially from the West Coast, that is steeped in East Asian philosophy and poetic forms, and, on the other, an equally rich history of experimental writing by women. Central to Gail Sher’s life and work has been her training in Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Yoga. After gravitating towards music as a young girl and completing undergraduate and graduate study in English and Middle English, Sher began sitting zazen at the Berkeley Zendo in 1968. Two years later she was ordained as a lay disciple of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master who helped spread Soto Zen Buddhism in the United States through his founding of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and San Francisco Zen Center, monasteries where Sher practiced for eleven years. In 1980 she left Zen Preface xi �Center, having made the momentous decision to dedicate herself to writing, and shortly thereafter began publishing poems in little magazines in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Since then she has published forty-two books of poetry, three books on writing as a craft and a spiritual practice, and a book on bread making based on her years of experience at the San Francisco Zen Center’s bakery in San Francisco. Following a degree in Clinical Psychology, she has been a practicing psychotherapist since 1990. For readers who may be new to Sher’s work, this collection offers both an introductory selection of her writing and, through her statements on poetics and biographical notes, some useful contexts for approaching it for the first time. For those who may already be familiar with Sher’s individual publications and/or her appearances in magazines and anthologies, it provides the poet’s own narrative of her development as a writer, beginning with her radical language experiments of the 1980s and 90s and continuing through her Asian influenced work (2000–2008), the wisdom mind collection (2008–2013), late work (2014–2018), and most recently new poems. These categories first appeared in Sher’s Reading Gail Sher (2016), a collection of self-reflections and other resources mapping the evolution of her writing. While they indicate certain trajectories and patterns across the four decades of Sher’s work, they do so only retrospectively. For the poet, every poem and every book begins as a new adventure, especially for a writer like Sher who believes that one should never write what one already knows and that, instead, the meaning(s) of a poem emerge(s) only during xii Preface �the experimental activity of writing it. To write, then, is to read, just as to read Sher’s work is to take part in the action of writing (constructing) it, a process that she describes in “The Way of the Poem” as “co-creative.” Sher has stated that the books of her wisdom mind period are for her the culmination of her work as a writer in that they have been the most successful in terms of making possible certain kinds of attention for the reader. (Not coincidentally, while the other periods of her writing life are all represented with selections and in some cases excerpted texts, with some publications omitted, every title from the wisdom mind collection appears here in its entirety.) In the introduction to that section, she writes: “Between 2008 and 2013 I wrote a series of eight books … that are rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and dedicated to ‘stretching’ English in order to create gaps so that Wisdom Mind might flow through to the reader….As a poet, I feel that this body of work is my most important.” What is this wisdom to which the poem aspires? Drawing upon Buddhist and other Eastern notions of awareness, it is an experience beyond the limits of the self that includes overlapping linguistic, spiritual, psychological, and ecological dimensions—a non-conceptual mode of thinking that is only knowable from inside the performance of the poem. To access this state of perception, Sher follows language beyond its semantic qualities so that the poet/reader may discover what else is possible when our habitual activity of sense-making is interrupted. For the poet, the challenge Preface xiii �becomes how to inhabit the “tension” that is always present sonically in the word “attention,” which here finds its source in the ongoing play and deferral of meaning in Sher’s writing. Whether working with sequences of individual words in much of her early writing or later on with larger patterns of narrative coherence, her writing delights in the process of circling around but never settling into any determinate or conventional meaning. Instead, she offers us the gift of “using words to go beyond words.” For Gail Sher, writing is a necessary practice and discipline—a way of orienting one’s mind and body in the word and in the world—in order to experience the intervals and silences in which other forms of mindfulness are present. In celebration of her longstanding commitment to poetry, the Poetry Collection is pleased to co-sponsor this publication of her Poetry & Poetics, 1980–2020 by Night Crane, the press she founded in 1997 with her husband Brendan Collins. We hope this book—along with the resources of the Poetry Collection’s Gail Sher Collection and Gail Sher Digital Collection—will help pass along her significant body of work and its many forms of attention to new generations of readers for many years to come. james maynard Curator, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo xiv Preface �p oet i c s Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious As a girl I studied piano with a teacher whose idea of “playing with weight” intrigued me. I became aware not only of the heaviness or lightness of my stroke but to sounds (and overtones of sounds) thereby subtly modulated. Delicate gradations became a focus of control. Today, as a poet, it is not much of a stretch for me (regarding words) to be primarily concerned with their relative weight within, and as, a charged environment. In college I studied music, literature and linguistics. I won a Ford Foundation Fellowship to continue with linguistics, but found the subject too abstract. I craved immersion— plush Middle English—(The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Creseide, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Yes. Music of a different sort. Later, I entered a Zen community. Music wasn’t allowed. At first I experienced this as a deprivation. But as I settled in, I began to choose it. I followed the monastic schedule and didn’t think overly much about accomplishing anything. The spirit of “just doing”—just going along without attaching to ideas of gain or progress—became the foundation for my future work with words. Still later, I discovered I needed to write and that I needed to do this outside of the Zen community. To survive the Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 1 �tremendous anxiety of not knowing what I was doing, a spirit of “just doing” came in handy. I would have “writing periods” instead of zazen periods. My vow was to attend them. I couldn’t attach to accomplishing anything because I had nothing in mind to accomplish. The absence of striving radically opened my mind and heart. Gradually this approach morphed into using language in such a way that it functioned not symbolically but synchronistically (as Jung would say). The new “meanings” my language carried (and concerns that it addressed) derived from what I called the linguistic unconscious. A Linguistic Understanding Although Suzuki-roshi told John Cage that he had nothing to say about music or art, Cage still felt Suzuki had led him to see music ‘not as a communication from the artist to an audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves.’ Linguistics is the science of language—the study of the nature and structure of human speech. What I have discovered by entirely receiving what arises during my writing periods is that part of language based in 2 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �the collective human psyche. It is a universal aspect of language rooted in a substrata of experience that goes beyond the individual’s personal life. I have found that if I tap into this quality of a word, then anyone who listens to my work with the same acuity will be able to “understand” it. The understanding is not semantic. It is not aligned to the particular signification we somewhat automatically attach to words. I use a word stripped of its semantic implications in order to highlight its relationship to vast galaxies of expression often overlooked. Humans are so programmed to use words according to what they “mean” that when the slightest loophole for “meaning” emerges, the mind instantly lights on this and doesn’t see what else is there is. It is important to note that the kind of interaction with language to which I refer is not the same as free association (a psychoanalyst who attended a poetry reading of mine once praised me for my “free association”). Free association is one’s personal string of responses to an idea or image—a manifestation of one’s unique personality or pathology. Jung pointed out that we can free associate to anything, including this morning’s news, but the associations will invariably lead us to our personal complex of emotional/psychological issues. Like Freud, Jung uses the term unconscious both to describe mental contents which are inaccessible to ordinary awareness and to demarcate a psychic space with its own character, laws and functions. Jung regarded the Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 3 �unconscious as a locus of psychological activity which differed from and was more objective than personal experience since it related directly to the instinctual bases of the human race. The personal unconscious (Freud’s discovery) rests on the collective unconscious (Jung’s discovery, though at the end of his life Jung preferred the term “objective psyche”—the psyche as it is—to “collective unconscious”). The ground from which my work arises and the means by which it communicates is what I call the “linguistic unconscious,” and I think of it as a manifestation of the “objective psyche” Jung described. A Spiritual Understanding Dom Bede Griffiths, an Oxford-educated, English Benedictine monk who founded a monastery/ashram in India in 1955, writes: . . . a Buddhist saying has it: ‘We use words to go beyond words and reach the wordless essence.’ Human language derives from the physical nature of man. ‘It was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech.’ The word Brahman is said to derive from the root 4 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �brh, which means to swell or to grow. This seems to have signified originally the rising of the word from the depths of the unconscious, the growth into consciousness.1 In their critical introduction to the Poems of Wang Wei, Willis and Tony Barnstone say that the voices one hears in this eighth-century Chinese poet are those one hears in absolute silence. For Wang Wei, silence was both a personal discipline and the issue of his poetry. Indeed, in Wang Wei’s poems there are three levels of silence. The first is the descriptive silence of the outer world. This quiet world is a precondition for the second silence that is spiritual, the silence of the mind. Which mind, purged of distractions, gives rise to the third silence, the silence of deepest meditation. “When thought stops, words halt, and we move through light toward absolute stillness.”2 When words are filled with silence, our ordinary understanding of what is needed to convey meaning completely changes. Some years ago I wrote a prose poem called “The Intimacy Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1982) 62-63. 2 Tony Barnstone & Willis Barnstone, trans., Poems of Wang Wei (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991) xliv. 1 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 5 �of the Silence.” My subject was saturated language and how the writer uses silence to fill her words. She infuses them with her own kind of silence and this is what creates her “voice.” Examples of saturated language from writers I admire are in italics: The Intimacy of the Silence To saturate is to satisfy fully to load to capacity to fill completely with something that permeates an indistinct plentitude which is empty. To saturate language a writer must silence herself so that the word pure passivity of being is. She stiffened a little on the kerb waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass.3 Blanchot explains that 3 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. 6 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �tone is not the writer’s voice, but the intimacy of the silence she imposes upon the word. He was gazing earnestly at the little boy.4 The silence is still his. He preserves himself within the work. At night she would doze off with morphine and my mother and Grandpa each drank in their separate rooms.5 Silence is felt as concentration. There she was perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross very upright.6 Movement within something enclosed. A small action or detail with elaborate internal activity. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji Lucia Berlin, “Dr. H.A. Moynihan” from Phantom Pain. 6 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. 4 5 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 7 �Logic is tension and tension is transparent. He threw coffee on the fires, staining the plastic-soft floor a deep cave brown.7 Breakups in a contextual, denotative or linguistic sense do not affect the stream of concentration continuity which pushes the skin of a word so that saturated it will stand alone. Don’t you notice something rather different about his eyes?8 When silence is used to fill words, and the gaps between words, the ordinary understanding of what is needed to convey meaning entirely changes. Words stand alone. Sounds are (are allowed to be) themselves. Anything more weakens the message. 7 8 Lucia Berlin, “Dr. H.A. Moynihan” from Phantom Pain. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji 8 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �A Psychological Understanding Heinz Kohut, an innovative psychoanalyst who came to the United States from Vienna during the Second World War, founded a new school within psychoanalysis called Self Psychology. (Self Psychology attaches greater significance to the effect of relationships upon our development than the effect of so-called innate instincts like sex and aggression—Freud’s concerns). Kohut was keenly aware that the work of a great artist reflects the central psychological problems of his era. In the following passage from The Restoration of the Self, Kohut directly addresses the issue of fragmented language: . . . the emotional problems of modern man are shifting, and the great modern artists were the first to respond in depth to man’s new emotional task. Just as it is the understimulated child, the insufficiently responded-to child, the daughter deprived of an idealizable mother, the son deprived of an idealizable father . . . so it is the crumbling, decomposing, fragmenting, enfeebled self of this child and, later, the fragile, vulnerable, empty self of the adult that the great artists of the day describe Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 9 �. . . and that they try to heal. The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the breakup of the self and through the reassemblage and rearrangement of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness . . . 9 Kohut points out that while the art of Henry Moore, O’Neill, Picasso, Stravinsky, Pound, and Kafka would have been unintelligible even a hundred years ago, today, precisely because of their intricate and nonsymmetrical order, we admire them for articulating the quality of our suffering. An Ecological Understanding Art, beauty and craft have always drawn on the selforganizing ‘wild’ side of language and mind. —Gary Snyder Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977) 286. 9 10 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �Gary Snyder claims that the fundamental nature of language is wild because “wild” is a name for the way that phenomena continually actualize themselves. Our ability to tune into that wildness—with greater and greater accuracy rendering it alive by depicting it in our self-reflections—ironically bespeaks of that very measure of health and wholeness, the lack of which so deeply concerns us. Our ability to stay present with the chaos may in the end be our salvation. Although it might seem interesting to delve further into a theoretical exploration of my poetry, it would actually be unhelpful. My work is rarely intellectually based. In fact my biggest responsibility to myself as a poet is to remain in the realm of the unknown. I don’t write what I already know, therefore I don’t write from an idea or concept or from any other analytical place. My writing arises, and I am constantly surprised by it. Afterword This essay is based on a talk I gave at the School of Management and Strategic Studies at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California in 1989. Though the school no longer exists, it made a pioneering attempt to introduce its unusual audience (business executives, military officers, research administrators and scholarship participants from the public sector) to innovative ways of thinking and knowing. Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious 11 �Although I was not able to articulate then what I might say now about how I work as a poet, much of what I said remains true of my practice and understanding today: —�the Zen spirit of “just doing” (not knowing). —�daily writing periods instead of formal zazen. —�receiving what arises from levels of awareness that go beyond the personal. —�using words stripped of their conventional, semantic understanding. —�allowing the underlying “sound matrix,” the foundation of language, to manifest. —�using words to go beyond words. —�recognizing silence as both a personal discipline and the issue of poetry. —�saturating language with one’s own silence. —�fragmented language as an articulation of our psychological and social suffering, and an impulse toward its healing. —�chaos in language as a reflection of the wildness of nature itself. Today I would simply say that I create space by making room for the mind to go to levels of understanding that language itself can’t get to. My words just barely don’t make sense. That creates a gap, a pause, and in the space of “not understanding” a deeper realization can occur. My biggest responsibility as a poet hasn’t changed: it is still to remain in the silence of the unknown. 12 Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious �The Way of the Poem 1 When a poem of uncertain portent maintains its own isolation and integrity, like music, an independent language all its own will sing the place, inviting the reader. For music can perhaps be thought of as pure-logic divested of the bothersome friction of words. Along with the words we ingest the pure logic that is realized on its own, with its own wit, its own farinfrared dialectic. A handful of parentheses sets a mood for the optional and that’s all you have, like the flick of a conductor’s wand.2 geshé geshé you hook the word o Usnisavijaya (Shukden of despoil) to gull the sky sweet full of northwest flowers From Reading Gail Sher. Parentheses don’t contain. They shield. As Kathleen Fraser points out, they are also “a usuage which women continue to find useful in breaking out of a misleading sense of stability.” Poetics Journal, no. 4, May 1984, p. 100. 1 2 The Way of the Poem 13 �I am tall I am slow full walker 3 Memory A poem has its own memory. And the poem’s memory provides a feeling context to the private memory of each word. Their inter-change creates a field. “I SEE it,” says a reader who then sallies along smelling all the flowers. First seeing, then entering the poem’s field, in part authors the poem’s memory. Actually poetry is memory, endowing words with a kind of eternity. Allure While the poet’s oral rendering of her poem is a powerful venue for the poem, sometimes on the page a voice can be more “catchable.” Being drawn into its world, partaking of that world such that for the moment of the poem, you are the person, affected. 3 Who, a Licchavi, p. 43. 14 The Way of the Poem �Certain poems, like Paris, so completely BELIEVE in themselves that their world—even one word— becomes an entire creed. I see a photograph of her throat, which is not the actual throat. Where is her throat in the wake of that? (I’m guessing that means after her throat.)4 Repetition From here, one adds the element of repetition. (I almost said “passion.”) When a word repeats it seems more genuinely to be one’s feeling. Repetition soothes and instills desire. “Tell me again,” “read it again,” like a record one will play over and over and over, digging the groove inside the soul that played it over and over even before it was born. Counting, a “take-off ”—da-t’-da, da-t’-da, da-t’-da, da-t’-da—it’s in the human gene. The “hook” of the word creates the safety-ofenvironment. We need to feel safe to risk slipping through a gap. Poetry is dangerous, after all. 4 White Bird, p. 68. The Way of the Poem 15 �Gaps The marrow of the style is gaps. Hiatus and lucid gaps. Lurking behind would be a story verging on revealing itself were the gaps colored in. The reader gets an invite—“Please, dear reader, color me in”—such that the poem is co-creative, the revelation is co-creative, shaping itself to each individual’s paradigm. Mother’s warm breath, like a plate of breath. Yet it is old breath, having eaten many crackers. My breath is a wall, she whispers from real breath, instantly present to birds. The energy of the animal appears to be experienced internally, its breath (a shadow) withheld in its own stem. What’s left of mind as a squirrel leaps out? 5 Pacing a poem by breaths not only creates an intensity but also a sense of ongoingness. For what is language and what is breathing, the one propelling and originating the other? 5 Mother’s Warm Breath, p. 79. 16 The Way of the Poem �The words elude while the breaths make a philosophy. Syntax is the motion. Each word has it own syntax, Searching Energy Each word has a location so that when we hear a word, unconsciously we expect for it. Just naturally, by virtue of the human mind. We complete what is happening by listening it. (We HEAR the word into LIFE.) The mind, activated by a word, allows its affective nature to touch it. Sparrows seem used, uninvented. Scaly mud, dull sky, colorless birds, remind me of my mind. To see the autumn leaves scatter in my home. (The longing they arouse as they lie on the wood turning red.) Is it of my body that they partake?6 6 Watching Slow Flowers, p. 58. The Way of the Poem 17 �Searching Energy + Stumping Mind Using words to baffle the mind releases the brilliance of the mind. The language breaks. The mind is stopped. When, barring understanding, words must instead be grasped— thru Him marigold summertime summertime bluefish (pokeweed) WANTED kept cups7 we hear the silence objectified. Weight “Weight”—not of the poem (the matter of the poem) but the “hand” of the poet as she writes. Like a pianist, a poet can bear down, but her bearing down is internal. For language is an instrument that bears weight, dare one say, even more sensitively. 7 Marginalia, p. 94. 18 The Way of the Poem �Not is good also. Not is a mechanism, like picking on a banjo, that to weight, by its nature, is impervious. China bloodless boy people of mast here are some if we are dumb if we are dumb so puffed and slobbering to themselves * shouting it down the mountain lugging the beast back to his people * over hills, over fields the moon’s condition come to pass come home stars lay down your heads The Way of the Poem 19 �nailed to the earth across the pasture8 Rhythm: the internal rhythm of a word and the overall river of words Rhythm is the bedrock, the voice, the fundamental principle upon which a poem is built. Rhythm is the “what” of what’s being said because “how” is what’s being said. A continuous flow, for example, suggests that thoughts themselves are contiguous though not exactly causing one another. Rhythm keeps the music clean. It spells the pulse of cyclical existence. tiger tiger from Yarlung Valley head arising from the flower from the bath of ancient wood Tara of the neck help me through this birth 8 Calliope, p. 14. 20 The Way of the Poem �draw the word through its beauteous hole9 Linkage Renga (Japanese) are linked poems of varying length launched by a haiku. Often composed in a group setting, each poet jams off the previous poet’s offering, grounding by links what otherwise might seem lame.10 The best links are invisible. They register, but on a first hit, not as a thought, but a flow. Though renga are associated with haiku, the strategy, linkage, works just as well in other settings. (Note the current page and the one previous.) Saturation To saturate means to fill—to flood, glut, overload. To imbue or suffuse, to impregnate, permeate, steep. Each word carries its absolute full load so that there is little distraction or waste of time (leakage). The poet stuffs each word into a little canon. It socks the reader. Who a Licchavi, p. 27. For an example, see: Gail Sher and Andrew Schelling, “Hundred-Stanza Renga,” Simply Haiku, vol. 8, no. 2, Autumn 2010. 9 10 The Way of the Poem 21 �radical language experiments, 1980-1997 Introduction When I first began writing, everything was a test. I had no idea of writing “poetry.” I never read poetry. I avidly read prose. But my concerns, as I reluctantly learned, were all of them of a poet, not a novelist, short story writer or essayist. I came to understand that I am a poet because I think like a poet. And it was singularly poets and poeteditors who first saw and supported my work. An early underlying feature—that my writing simply arose— remains to this day. I don’t write what I already know, or perhaps, stated more exactly, since my writing stems primarily from the “linguistic unconscious” and not from everyday consciousness, I find it a continual surprise. 22 Introduction �She stood all divine in her lash. Grand her very presence look voice the mere contemporaneous fact of whom multiplied by sudden magical amounts the accuracy with which he heard what he had said just as she had heard it. Various. Fifty women. Her young eyes bred like linen for a wedding the effort of an age awaiting that ceremony. They unwrapped him. The infelicity and confusion of his arm now bent around her eagerness. Like a bride and always about her the breath almost of happy wonderful special. All this about-to-be wait-andsee she wore in her blonde hair and the lilt with which she tip-chinned shook it back behind her an asset the measure of her wealth taken thereby by what she took so displayingly for granted. Her pretty perfect teeth her very small too small nose deferring with count-onable ease a deference he most assuredly counted on counted more than he could say on its ready assignation. This quantity the crease of his lambswool jacket confident and loose hang of tie collected so completely that her teatable vitality pleasant public familiar served and radiantly settled over him an altogether different an altogether self affirmation. She stood all divine in her lash. 23 �He fancied them liked them and passing through them with her more slowly now. Her room was high and cool and bare and opened on another room bare to fullness with sun. Here leaning gently pressing her cheek against the side of the recess she saw flowers a miracle of cheapness an exposure kept in durance as an approach her primary furniture to what she can have thought a full and formal air. Producible. Amazing. Excerpt from: Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry & Poetics, Vol. 1, No. 1. Buffalo: The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, 1981. The final version of the complete poem is in Gail Sher, Early Work. See bibliography for details. 24 She stood all divine in her lash. �From another point of view the woman seems to be resting Naive or feelings of isolation and at the same time naive. The same woman only a feeling of sun now arrested on the floor near her chair. Rocking and making various gestures in concentrated posture. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. Perhaps this resting is what brings the fields into play. Figures appear. The sky and the woman each unsurrounded. The sound (of no concern to anyone else) into which she feels drawn suddenly This scene gives the impression of fields. Separated from fields by a porch. Settles in watchful gesture. Gradual ability. Settles in place for reading and life of reading as From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 25 �insisted internal thing. Speaks about it softly. Volition as a kind of thought. Attributes of body (sun) and muscles of body. (Also light in marked relationship.) Somewhat confused sense or some boastfulness coupled with something else. Time and also clouds. Texture of clouds and so forth in a continuous line or pattern. Landscape and trees. (Haze of trees.) Shoulders arms or occasional repetitive thought. Now reads. Imagines herself in the dark room. Something recognized as dark. Shouts for the little girl. 26 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Presses forward to some extent. Moments held clean and intact now appears as a wall. (Method and exposure to first thought.) The expression fixed. Points of softness absolutely seen by someone else. Seeing heavily or seeing effects of known sedentary person. (Inclusive of her in an early period.) Provides a certain luminosity of detail. At the same time balance. Suggestions in this vein. (Objects) existing in unheard sound. (Both color) and the boundaries of all objects hitherto mentioned. Trees but basically the house is the same. Reads with attention on trees shifts entering into From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 27 �balanced reading. Or woman lying reading. Paraphernalia of mind seen as objects coming to a complete rest. Also as a child she had wanted to eat Also as a child she had wanted to eat. Without particular motive (to be) on her own crossing the street on her own or going through the door making an effort to buy food. Always with amount of energy she could spend with that person (son) or even possibly some other people. Even simply listening. Not urged to but that that had already occurred. Seen by the other people (during) the day or sometime during the course of the 28 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �day (the driver) calls out something. To be phased by this. To appear calm but actually to imagine herself quarreling. Intense expression in striving for something (intake) of food (inheritance) of something. Having asked for something to eat (in) one process to eat one (particular) part. In bed for example (always) perpetuating (striving) in the midst of any room. Which (she) as a lonely person appreciated. Avenues and walking with such & such emotion (buses) where they seem needed. Reversing her terminology and tendency to want something from him. (To) From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 29 �supply food here. (Not) to move or feel like moving. With others like her in the same mood (hiding) something received from her. Delicate relation to her (discerned) (quarter) of mind. Children & events of the day enter her mind. Once while eating (in) quiet manner of saying something. Or being in a hurry to get somewhere. Arrangement of food at (moment) of giving it to her. 30 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Even the lady’s pressure next to her Powerful inner lapse or undivulged sense. (Also) him in the capacity of boy. Pictures of him. Related in way of terrific scene (bed) or warm with hand in book of him. Through caring charged tone. Age & body as well as also this caring. Days later in place of children (to) see in others the possibility of her body. Receptive position requiring this blessing. Short breaths of sun (minerals) in lap of her. Always eats (sings) walks near river humming & singing. Focused on point of milling crowd (assembly) of persons (windows) doors From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 31 �& many people in them looking away. (Conversation) of woman in curious posture. (One) face (eventual) eloquence of her. Which moves in her. This abstraction (which) this pain was. Even the lady’s pressure next to her. (Roughness) of feet also some cleaning of the room. Slender girl or (old) purpose of united her. With spread of her (sings) probing also words. Waits for bus. Borrows man’s capacity (what) lay behind in pastime of several minutes. Quantities of people among them (visualized) poised person (alert) posture of gratitude. 32 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Or in towards her. To utter it (to) please refurbish life compelling in this respect. Kneels before him (how) he felt alone. Fragrance of wood (nails) appealing to her. Travels in sphere of white or unhappy face. (Ignites) death response (her) in group of waking men. Defining it (or) reads about rapture to break this pattern. To be awake like this if not disappointment to be aware of them redeeming themselves. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 33 �Perhaps there is no content paint or sun Perhaps there is no content paint or sun. Wood or light. 1) Makes loving motion as of kissed one 2) Achieves resistance on a black surface. Private inner weight. Conceives reality of strokes placed on the paper carefully. Somewhat revised circumstance (temper) of hand. (Will) mesh in with only one passively assembled tone. 1) Elements of brown (tree) (justifiable) pitch 2) As a novelty or given content in the dress of a woman. Concentrates on pattern with (repetitious) conception of her eating. Conception of her addressing someone. Percentage of words (inward breathed words) along these lines. Joined by points though 34 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �propelled in free-floating something (which is) how color works. As within sleep something including him sleeping in the other room. Also the woman on the bed. Easily takes suggestion from the girl writing. 1) Whether from frightening circumstance 2) Short pause imposed from without 3) Repeats this constantly. Completes act of eating (alone) tired & depressed before eating. 1) Only certain portions of this 2) This and religion (certain) rosaries. A wedge or sound no one notices. Like a lot of red (in restful building) or drives up very solemn. Which turns into eating or ability of someone with talent. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting 35 �(As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem In who claim to hold (to) be form ( dearest) Or even some grabbing to brace (to) be sectional protecting jacket Saw (too) to cling here chessmen Red air chews yes This queer bare mouth Ignites the mother beak 36 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem �Or man on the dais as its mother stroked it Mime is first Part mint part internal march quantity No guy Nor flaps of voice to part this So tentacles or them Retreat itself Chant wrought side Is lewd or solicits lewd The grit or hear Which comes student Vows & pick (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem 37 �here Whereas derives stallion inside Exact were larvae also Eat line green on love The jut will hoarse Christ eventually Renunciant line excepts A dent from month Hand & mung born dark Dram nun To opens in a lower room Brittleness high love 38 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem �Bring the pull strains graced which vesicle Like hills leave to various hills This time the clasp food Or anniversary of a polite act Being a toy building from one kiln Hex these lake The crock the shepherd on her own children thankfully The woolly flesh Or part which stampedes even music basically And elegance its tenancy (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem 39 �Doer logs ferrying cells A rung or yelling underneath the honey Tensile lowing most young Joins others I the unguent I Tubers & iron even to prepare this This elliptical weaning or long spaying sound Wheels all right this dark math earth Or widow’s phone As hover from the elbows is something growing Bittenness as 40 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem �monk Pat on this Taking one ignite Girl and no Bond to gum Intense from now The hoist pin Dawns or parson Or go god To swill could These pear and sand year Must sipping thinks Opaque strains together to clap (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem 41 �Tries august Calf the inch Lady wife they fallen birds Crayons geese its unkind horse This alert dots 42 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem �Rouge to beak having me Rouge to beak having me Banner this could be During wane were along river Tribes or limb Swabs metal cattle Styes scanned Were considers total colony Sachels north spines still Adorable can That beads so death Rushes Yule say Rouge to beak having me 43 �family These sprig hare can scrapings father Whether ark girdles deer Graining said Constant would munch its body Low bud deers Chews cry momentarily deers Sets which elephant Receives said having rotation II. Spill to whose one 44 Rouge to beak having me �Be gasped mine drum samples Dry straps: no pureness No woo is Sole kinder What knob selves Whew (or) mass Dimmer & biers math No scour fur Mongers is stilling Or find accumulations (Bundt) lift to prize one Ones skim faultless Rouge to beak having me 45 �Mollusk foams so twist himself Grace (still) fruit Geer: pike to fruit Budges of: auks (why) shyster Fond out Maws as tone Wings licks as Tryst yet: dual Trees (the) kite tithe Freezes stud (to) garnish thee Behests peering 46 Rouge to beak having me �candies Twins (particles) aunt so Fey (to) band Wombs: ham (so) told dirigible III. Exemplifies sags (ma) I do Bowls cattle sacred girl If cereal were blueish nights Purges (bowl) (gloves) ugliness for her Peas one abdomen Piquant constructs (heals) what Rouge to beak having me 47 �queue Bleeds proms is (in) soul Briars ol’ bud Petals food (stripling) whose disciples graze could Sluts wept arm Gunny names Nibs prayer melodically Law snows (corn) as poverties at her Beads words: reeds etched yet Prolapsed heard (bull) stuffs Plentiful skins 48 Rouge to beak having me �men sounds Does mounds: (annuity) feels gowns on (Flies) either singer Stringent folds: throngs will Abound: abounds his Drinks afresh: studs neuter (moist) count Micro (winters) further Swallow has shrill (some) terribly dawn Peters (the) self jails undress The flee: (either) sides pulse Rouge to beak having me 49 �KUKLOS1 Tamrind Esau. & taps. Kadish. Clam St. Clare too faces. Jasper roach cans Mishna redwing. Betel has like dipso trough. Padma so bath. Criss par trinity. Hath Da. Peanut Hosanna. Wassail pied cum KUKLOS (Greek): circle, circular body; circular motion, ring, wheel, disc, eye, shield; town wall. 1 50 KUKLOS �brindle ergo. Horse o’ sphinx. America. Non dalmatian. * Turbo fra. Islet rebec daybed. I manna cossack. Bodhgaya. Soeur roe Padua. Milagro. Cunt un. Baptist ash. Meaty noh poi. Kurmos. New gorse. Pony sweetyard. Contessa bushes. KUKLOS 51 �Too feces. Gazetier. Angst ’cause paison. Tilsit. Lacre tarpaulin. Saguaro letterer. Pistol catalpa. Their shells. * Skater skater. Eighty cantina maypole. Pachinka capa moor. Yenta. Ne’er galina. Kapok roses. Tailor tailor. Mimosa a mitt. Charybdis in queen. Scyla. Swaha. 52 KUKLOS �Mahjung. Schnaps. Bris of Odessa rice laps. * Grazes Mu corona. Pied carrot. Telos Balaam nicolo. O-chai fete. Compline flushing raga hey seeds. Hibiscus. Non seraph. Spinaker. Agnus thru sayeth. Eros Dei caritas. Oxlips Gaias ga-te ga-te. Helix @ lane. KUKLOS 53 �Sannyas crow Janaki. Loden cloth. Bonny Dom catched. * Osiris co rider. Hanuman cup. Cam floatation shiksa. Okasa askari. Ganjha blouse Goth sydeco salaam. Piper fra Galilee. Ashkenazi traps. Well furze. Tapes pique trumpeter. Goby gnu assize. Lo cod. Sabine the reichstag. 54 KUKLOS �Tivoli wight. The atone sri. Joseph angus lassitude. * Savannah mejda. Flocks. Nu madonna sahib. Leechee simcha. Taj mesquite pease. Witch Mt. kyke. Bracken mate. O’ entire madden. Infested rouges shabrack. Yangtze Gretal. Corazon. Salon ex davin. Rivka Shaker they’ve sorti. KUKLOS 55 �Kachina fire. Sunyata bambino in names. Gelt. Fellatio tempest doña. Nicholas. Wotan garment. * To drumline geese. Satyr Gobi. Niños Carolina. Tunny mullet Bowbells. Kennedya jibon. Jheel roy vulpine persea. Padma frumenty. Lhasa to bade. Tulip Dachau. This Alps. Negrillo. Shaman asana fell 56 KUKLOS �jai. Sol du lavash. Esdras. Hum. Baruch. Rune. Tamadua. Cant Perpetua. Laid. The Gretal ta-ke. KUKLOS 57 �asian-influenced work 2000-2008 Introduction Taking writing as a practice followed eleven years of Zen training. Living a monastic life with its strict schedule of zazen (sitting meditation), assigned work, dharma talks, dokusan (interviews with one’s teacher), and the concentrated reading of Zen texts immersed my mind and body in an ancient Japanese culture. In addition to Japan, my Asian-influenced poetry derives from India, China, and Tibet and draws from Zen, Tibetan Buddhism and the yoga traditions of India, all of which I studied and practiced for many years after leaving the zendo. The autobiographical writing of The Moon of the Swaying Buds was written in the spirit of Japanese haibun (prose + haiku); Look at that Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms was influenced by the four-line Chinese kanshi; the foundation for RAGA was the Indian raga and for DOHĀ the Tibetan devotional song. 58 Introduction �from The Moon of the Swaying Buds book one: mountains There has always been a slight feeling of discomfort, a lack of gracefulness in my relationship with activities. During long summer afternoons, I’ll lie on a cot on our upstairs porch feeling astray, a foreigner to the porch. Or I’ll wander up the block to a field where I catch butterflies. There are monarchs and swallowtails as well as grasshoppers and other interesting bugs. I doze in the sun and capture one or two. The idea of catching butterflies sparks my imagination. I think, “I’ll go across the street and catch butterflies,” and then, while I do, I think, “It’s a beautiful sunny day and I am catching butterflies.” But there is a gap. I am disrupted in myself and cannot enter the activity, offer it enough of myself to make it come alive. up down tiny canyon butterfly The Moon of the Swaying Buds 59 �Our dining room is covered with thick black wallpaper. Embedded in its blackness are turquoise and pink birds. Since family rarely go there (it is saved for company), it acquires a mysterious largeness—like an empty chapel— where I love to stand and stare out the window. empty now my parakeet’s cage rattles in the wind 60 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �I like to bake cookies. I like to read in my green chair and be under the covers writing in my diary. I like to knit. These activities involve my hands. I have a lot of “hand energy” that must be expressed or I feel at loose ends. sudden squall— I wrap my hands around the teacup The Moon of the Swaying Buds 61 �I read Seventeen and imagine myself in control of my life, which to me means having a consistent and likable selfimage. “I have a cocoa brown skirt, soft-colored sweaters, and oxford shoes and that is what I wear.” Or “I have one or two navy blue skirts and many white blouses and that’s all.” Each plan appeals to me as a means of consolidation. As I stare at the girls in Seventeen and read the advice in its articles, I hang onto the words as if everything depends on getting this correct. so insistent— the buzz of the fly trapped in the unplugged fridge 62 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �Nancy Drew’s loner spirit mirrors my own yet-unformed one. Tracking herself assiduously from the perspective of the clues in her current “mystery,” she uncovers a deeper level of reality. When I recognize in George Eliot the same ability to implode the specific with the infinite, it dawns on me (not as a thought but as an impulse) to live my life this way. instar: ever-so-slowly through the tangled foliage The Moon of the Swaying Buds 63 �I like the pause of breakfast and certain fragments of my walk to school—a particular patch of sweet fresh air or a house set back from the street in an intriguing way. And of course Christ the King with its exotic parochial climate. I like the fact that there are bells at school, that time is clearly delineated, though the bells themselves are harsh, not subtly eliciting cosmic overtones like the Zen bells in my later life that deeply stir one’s primal lethargy. night jasmine: lighting my path your white blossoms 64 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �I subscribe to the magazine The Writer, the action in itself carrying a certain unfamiliar yet tingly sort of professionalism. But when The Writer arrives it feels off, wooden and impersonal. The tingly wool of my coverlet, the pregnancy of my guppy, the coziness of my green chair all seem oceans apart from “News,” “Deadlines,” and “Classifieds” thunderheads occlude the sky at dawn, at dusk . . . the moon’s absent face The Moon of the Swaying Buds 65 �The fateful words of my father, “Oh, everyone wants to be a writer at one time or another” insert themselves in my being like a violation. My budding “identity” collapses in the face of his savvy. Of course. I should have known. The wish to be a writer is plebeian, trivial, predictable. Everyone wants to be that. raising it shaking it then tucking it in its breast 66 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �book four: sky Rain warms the mountain air and feels soothing as it softly falls through the moonlight. Shallow drafts brush my face. Whereas minutes ago I felt reluctant, tired, mean, suddenly I am overcome with gratitude. In the zendo I sit bolt upright, supported by the gurgling creek. A chorus of birds are so ardently chirping that there seems to be a wall of raspy but sweet wet life surrounding me on all sides. drizzly day . . . darts and wiggles in the waterweed The Moon of the Swaying Buds 67 �Morning zazen ends. We leave our cushions and the primordial quiet that sinks in with the raindrops. The steady pound of rain, its persistent motion, makes our straight-backed cross-legged posture seem all the more still. By the end of second period we are nestled here forever. a train whistle blows . . . perched in a tree crow closes its eyes 68 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �Tassajara is about breathing, and by extension, the next level of care necessary for the body so that it can breathe— an allotted amount of sleep, three balanced meals, a bath, a period of study and rest from work every fifth day. Much attention is lavished on all aspects of these activities so that washing one’s clothes takes its rightful place as a primary concern. One needs clothes for breathing. Therefore one must be prepared to sew or buy them, mend them, wash them, store them so that they stay clean and available. fog rolls in fat gulls huddle over the water The Moon of the Swaying Buds 69 �Chop chop chop. The carrot is now a row of paper-thin, salad-ready (they are too skinny for soup or mixed vegetables) slices. I am momentarily in control. Chopping block, hocho (knife) and me standing, cutting the decisive widths. I feel exhausted, but the wafer-size carrot wheels are perfect. Bashō your rainproof paper hat made with your own hands the one imitating Saigyō’s . . . I too have felt desperately alone 70 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �At Tassajara it rains. I have told the tenken I am sick and to please bring me hot water in a thermos, later, after breakfast. From my bed I hear the rain softly falling and the sound lulls me back to sleep. A band of moonlight criss-crosses my otherwise darkened cabin. cooling the night with its plashing I doze . . . dream of its plashing The Moon of the Swaying Buds 71 �Sometimes the wake-up bell will ring, with its primitive and unmistakably firm ring, and I cannot get out of bed. I lay there in the dark, in the glorious warmth of my sleeping bag, feeling remote, reluctant to decide to be at this monastery. The desire to stay in bed, finally to sleep enough, to be warm, to reconsider my life is overwhelming. hatched but slow to uncoil in the mild rain 72 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �Through this “sickness” my life emerges. First I “get” that I am sick, the vast extent of it. Then I recognize the tremendous energy that I bestow on the things I choose to do. I can’t help but ask why I pour myself into sewing, for example, and sneak out of zazen, when it is zazen I have presumably come to Tassajara to practice. full moon—facing it knees braced beneath my robe The Moon of the Swaying Buds 73 �The answer is evident in my hands. My hands write and sew with immaculate, single-minded passion, passion that is sure of itself, pulsating and ecstatic. In the zendo my hands freeze. All the contraptions I can devise to insulate them beneath my robes cannot prevent their stiffening numbness. winds howl snow mounts the wintry thicket . . . lifeless 74 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �One holds out for so long then gives oneself over to a chain of events by which isolated segments of one’s life unravel. The contents scramble. The life force, renewed, released, slowly reconstructs itself, as if one’s karma metastasizes. autumn leaves lie quietly in the sun The Moon of the Swaying Buds 75 �One day I have the following thought: “I have spent eleven years as a Zen student resisting everything. What would happen if I take all the energy that I put into resisting and use it for something positive?” eaglet ripping the soldier free from the asphalt 76 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �From this seed I develop “yes practice.” “Yes practice” means doing only those things that I say “yes” to with my whole body and mind. I will not get out of bed until there is something I want that much. (I have to find out if there is.) If there isn’t, I will just die, but I am not going to pretend for another second. shrouded in fog a tiny dinosaur inches toward dawn The Moon of the Swaying Buds 77 �Soon it occurs to me that I want to write. Whereas formerly I felt I needed a specified subject, now I think: “If I want to write, I’m going to write. I’m going to write a certain number of hours a day just like I go to zazen a certain number of hours a day. I will not worry about what I write. I will concern myself solely with attending my writing periods.” high noon lime-green sulphurs mud-puddle in the canyon dust 78 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �I am through with Zen Center. I need to define my own regime. Zen Center has had it with me anyway. I am told privately that unless my attitude changes, I will not be accepted for Fall Practice Period. Indeed, my attitude has changed but not in the direction that would pique my interest in Fall Practice Period. after the storm over the hill . . . zigzagging The Moon of the Swaying Buds 79 �Saying “yes” finally was like a birth. And, like most other births, it came after a long period of gestation characterized by saying “no” only the “no” was unconscious. Immersed in the fog of my unconscious “no,” I failed to recognize my own authenticity. tadpoles! bug-eyed and squirmy in their bracken-shaded mud 80 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �A predominant feature of this inauthenticity was a sense of impending doom. Initially it hovered around the dreaded unnamed seemingly unavoidable crisis one could feel swelling in my childhood household. The atmosphere of this swelling—forces at work that I didn’t understand, the largeness of those forces (that they were way, way beyond me), my ensuing inertia and blankness, and the resulting compliance (compliance being a form of inertia)—infiltrated all my subsequent endeavors, until “yes practice” broke through the gridlock. warming earth— its scent in an early-spring breeze The Moon of the Swaying Buds 81 �Likewise in college, my inability to think and to write perpetuated the sense of being stalked—that at any moment something cataclysmic might happen. Because I couldn’t keep up. a falcon circles evermore narrowly down through the desolate sky 82 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �Determining to say “yes” . . . making that a conscious act—housing the bits of emptiness and despair that belonged to me and then offering them to the universe— “Yes practice” meant claiming my life. “Yes practice” was the beginning of living my life as opposed to an ersatz life. waving long legs dragging itself through the widening split in the pre-dawn light The Moon of the Swaying Buds 83 �Buddhism, also an attempt to heal the unpindownable sense of vacuousness that pervaded my life, turned out to be another trap. I began sitting zazen because I had come to the end of the way of life to which my parents had brought me up. I needed a deeper path—to access a larger part of myself. I didn’t know what this meant exactly. It wasn’t formulated mentally. I was drawn to zazen however at an important turning point. from broken shell to clump of bluestem . . . making a dash for it 84 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �I tried very hard to follow the schedule because I believed that I had finally found—consummate and unfathomable—a path that plumbed the core of my being. Despite the fact that it was difficult, I told myself that at least I was on the right track. If I could just exert a little more effort, a little more will, a little more self-discipline . . . flat pink sea: saffron wings flutter over the prawn boat The Moon of the Swaying Buds 85 �Ironically, the vehemence behind my determination hooked me irretrievably into another tailspin (I can’t do it and there’s no other choice). As I focused my energies on adjusting to the community (this, I was assured over and over, is Zen practice—“Just follow the schedule,” everyone said, “while you notice mentally the obstacles that arise for you”), I failed to notice my unmitigated sense of hollowness and despair. slipping on the scree her wings smeared my fingers powdery 86 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �The milieu of “yes practice” is movement. It includes everchanging me. Doing only those things that I say “yes” to with my whole body and mind releases me minute by minute to become who I am. from the prow of the ferry watching them spin ever faster over the bay The Moon of the Swaying Buds 87 �After I formally left Zen Center, I moved into a neighborhood apartment and for awhile continued to sit zazen. One day I had an interview with the Head Monk. He asked about my leave-taking and I carefully explained “yes practice.” He said to me: “Until you say yes, you cannot practice Buddhism.” an arctic basks— wings tilted toward the salmon pink sky 88 The Moon of the Swaying Buds �from Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms Snail breeze on a shaft of moon A dawn moon awakens me, softly softly, its waning light. Dew sparkles on the cobweb-veiled grass. Still in my nightgown, I carry my dream to the blue porch rail. Neither dew nor dewy cobwebs dull the song of birds. “Let’s go, babe!” says my dad a snapshot later Pale rain – daisies drink you sumptuously. Sun peaks out behind your silky curtain of beads. I wander through my garden, crocus and trillium asleep. Have you stopped? No. Yes. For a moment I thought so. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 89 �Asleep but easily startled Fishing along the quiet, unfrequented banks of the river. Cryptomeria grove dark, even as late as noon. A sudden rain, a breeze. A butterfly investigates my lunch. “Hello!” Like the poet I wonder, “How long will lovely days like these last?” “The sudden moon alarms mountain birds” After diving into red lotuses, a cormorant soars over clear water. Feathers sleek, fish in beak, it stands erect on an old drifting log. Poet, you describe the water bird with such accuracy and passion, yet isn’t it the log you have come to feel is yourself? 90 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms �In numinous light the river raptly tranquil My small room has an eastern exposure. Cool in summer. Warm at dawn. A pair of lovebirds purrs iridescence throughout the long quiet night. Creamy roses, richly fragrant, merge their scent with the throbbing mist. A friend cut some and presented them to me in a vase. Back from fishing Acrid yet fresh. Life fresh. (That certain not-yet putrid.) Boat, body, bay, all dressed in it. Can I wash it off? Herons can’t. The sea’s insignia, in blood till death. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 91 �Wild rose, wilder with the glow worm At a suq, was it you I thought I recognized? Not the meat, the fruit, nor fattened greens. Your fleeting face, or was it mine, behind a gauzy curtain, the bazaar deserted, it being after dark and about to close. I didn’t realize it was raining I ashore, you adrift. What are we doing? My gaze follows you, placidly. We’ve parted before. The stages of sorrow I’ve memorized. The expanse of blue waves is impossible to fathom, lifetimes later. 92 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms �What happened to the moon in the enamored monk’s moonlit waters? Red fish in the ice-cold lake (crystal clear yet crinkled like a shoe). A sand bar gleams beneath threatening clouds. I lie on my back watching them unravel the northern hill. Your voice, when you courted me, comes to mind. Frogs, the birds of night Snuggling in (“for the long haul” it feels) or at least the thought is delightful. I tug the sheet around my ears, sink my body into its shroud. Wind sweeps through the garden, a relief, will the heat break? I am still. Absolutely and entirely one-pointed in stillness. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 93 �“The dark moss already bears my print” One jay caws. The forest and my heart resound with memory. Not of jays, but of myself, not yet ready. Not yet not. White lily in her devil’s needle cloak Young shoots through an old fence. That’s me, the fence, trying to keep people away. I tell them I’m celibate. I say I’m a monk. Raindrops, dewdrops, the sodden leaves outside my gate. 94 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms �Peach-size in a peach field With ordinary monks I have nothing in common. Spines straight, legs crossed, sitting-robes fraying at the knees. Drowsy in the morning, I watch for awhile, yawn. Chores finished for the night, I brush my teeth and go to bed. At town’s end, the creaking flight of a grasshopper I stretch my ears. Perk up, listen hard to make sure. There it is. Nothing. No-sound. (I can relax.) Release with the thud of it. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 95 �“Two gray hairs appear in the lit mirror” The wind howls and becomes old wind, the wind of another city. Yester-wind that once I faced, knees to forehead, in my tattered chair. That was a dark time. I felt close to the snow, its unprovocable stillness. With snow, even in a flurry, there was me, consoled, unbending. Is it midnight yet? Quiet deepens. I walk in the moon. Hushed rays sadden. Their soft half-circle light. The thought of you emerges. Your woolen scarf. Your slender hands. A northerly wind swirls from the winter wood. 96 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms �“Stones are lean, mahogany and nanmu trees are strong” Bashō, as he lay dying, took his poems for worthless. This was not just posturing. Words, he felt, who cares? Yet each day I sweep my room, arrange my pencils carefully. Seeing them all lined up so simply . . . Dead birch tree, your fungus shelves the snow My mind grows freer with the passing years. No patience for the Three Obediences.1 But like a giant floating-heart, adrift between empty banks, a bowl of wild plants eaten, discarded . . . 1. �A Confucian dictum has it: “While not married yet a woman must obey her father; once married she must obey her husband; and, after her husband dies, she must obey her son.” Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 97 �“Knowing that friends are coming, I use my foot to clean around the wicker gate” Why complain of loneliness and seclusion when a hermit’s life is what you seek? Sparrows frolic, roosters crow, so what? To be one of a tribe of mountain birds floating by a cliff, you needn’t be a mountain bird. Pien Luan’s sparrows O my son. Do you really care about the wind of which you write with such passion? The river gulls, the south pond lotus, the north hill that sends up purple shoots? Why should I doubt you? (That would be your answer, of course.) I, who managed to lose the river’s poem. 98 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms �“Icy-skin-stony-bone” 2 O Saikō, no one could think that your senses have turned to ash. Your hakubyō3 bamboo take away my breath. A tree’s white ghost with its ostrich plumes. “We all regret that spring is not longer.” Woolly blue, undulant, stark Our bitter fight over, I go to my room. My philodendron, my lacquered chest – what was I thinking? How can I pretend to have my bearings? The pretty hill, with oncoming night, more and more blurry. 2. �Another name for the plum tree as well as a metaphor for a beautiful woman. 3. A painting technique Saikō occasionally used to paint bamboo. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms 99 �Please don’t sweep the autumn leaves that linger around the well “Wedgewood.” Yes! Finally, after hours of struggle. Deeper, deeper, excavating associations, yet the word itself escapes. Growing old, I marvel at the irrelevancies that flood my mind. Su, I am charmed. Your “three delights”4 move me to tears. A long and firm sweet flag comes from yesterday’s festivites Snow hisses down. My fire sputters. “Jonathan died last May. He was twenty-four,” you say. A shower of sleet bashes against the glass. A green moon slowly rises. Caw caw caw. One black crow dominates the northern river. 4. �Morning hair-combing, afternoon window-dozing and bedtime feetsoaking. 100 Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms ��from RAGA Punjabi bells. Awakening to alms handed through the trees. She was twelve. Sparrows of Lot. Bull-red and singing matter. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. Fretless neck. Wooden knobs thud. Trajectory of me (the king, the sage’s student). His chasuble from shell. 102 RAGA �The bowl of my sarod. A hollow vessel. Gushing dizzily of infinity. What’s me, I say. I stay steady. Or tabloid of Him (its shaft of hen sound). Sing a hymn of glory, fox. Prince throat. Young hair parted in the center. Father please (before the striped-cotton curtain). I want to dawdle amongst the piebald man. RAGA 103 �Cousin. Do not smirk. The beauty of laughter quietly through the flowers. Abba Abba comfort me. Let me rest by your feet. Cirrus minion (noxious hands) pulling truffles of gas Peacocks cry my daily riyaz. Bangles and silk jubilant by the fairy books. A gabled roof, a pane of sole, truce of my ear’s solace. Alone, terrified, aching for the bird. 104 RAGA �My little gourd plays da. Raising my chin from the rattan carpet. Them gigs of reprieve. (A public avowal.) Sons in triage . . . shishya. Disparate. Nib of intelligence scour the pier. I am fed. I grow. I dilate pretty. But the Ferris-wheel was getting to be uncomfortable. RAGA 105 �Banyan of sorrow. Will she cry? She went to the river (singing bad lands of youth). Autumn luv. We’ve had our words. Mandir of hearts. (Votive. Celestial.) O Ram. I (the Talmud). Maladies of children yarmulke or no. (Sari-clad) festooned with swags, hollering beneath the coverlets. “Panchamrita,” cried the deity, mahogany voice cascading from the poster. 106 RAGA �Allure. Her gentle huskiness. She’d moved, studied, wandered in the night. This gharana (dosha of the beaten man). Troubadour. Wild wind. Shivered the wireless (gherao). Facing silk flowers. Tides and multi-waters digress. The plait of her forehead, the small of her neck. I kiss its locks to freshen it. RAGA 107 �from DOHĀ1 See the underwater fountain-tree plump with fruit, supple and ripe. Whereby my lama smiles. He planted this ancient seed. Within each face he recognizes himself. Swish swish across his vajra throne, his immense white words spill silence. Singing, yes. A hundred-thousand verses. They curl like jewels (amulets of thorn). Sifting through clouds, clear-mind of enlightened existence. The Aum of creation (through which we continually �regenerate) arises from his astonishing way of knowing. 1Dohā (Tibetan): devotional song of experience and realization from the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition of Tibet. Dohās are meant to “reveal the inner nature of the singer and express her insights and devotion in an uninhibited and unique fashion.” 108 DOHĀ �Shivering reeds. You have been my mothers, exceedingly kind, protective of me always. Glistening flower, butterfly, bee, waxy petals that fall. A bushy-tailed squirrel surpasses thousands of yojanas. I look out on the bluff. It is brown and quiet. Lama, hear me. Kind root lama. To excoriate the stars, I scream. To placate clouds, I wail. Clearing my throat, I chant a hundred thousand mantras. In this way my craving dissolves. DOHĀ 109 �I reach into my mind. My room of wood is lush and dark. (My home faces south on an embankment that slopes steeply.) From time to time mists wreath its imposing neck like a silver scarf. Today as I was chanting, rosary beads clicking, my voice became a bell from whose echo a strong remembrance arose. I am in a hall with monks and horns high in smoky mountainous air. Daffodils cover the ground. 110 DOHĀ �Thus I age and die and see the luminous white field. “Send me to Sukavati, please.” (I pray hard as the wise ones suggest.) A cycle of teachings is repeated by heart. I hold to my heart. The pulse of the hum. The tilt of the sky. Fragile fingers yawn, paper thin and shiny. Shavings from my gouge trail to the ground. Curlicues pile up. In thinness, absorbed in my ablutions. DOHĀ 111 �For it is written. (Our time will come.) Fire and flood will ease all. The gutted slope displays its roots, throbbing, twisting, dangling in air. I know that I am a mountain (that I will continue to be a mountain) for three incalculable eons. I’m beginning my evening prayers. The nectar of peace seeps into my thigh. I dissolve into my song. The cry of a bird, my primordial voice. It feels like a cave. A place of no flowers 112 DOHĀ �The sun, with a smell of coolness, sinks. A slow drizzle falls. A man dies. But it is not a breach (really). Jasmine and rose follow him everywhere. DOHĀ 113 �the wisdom mind collection 2008-2013 Introduction Between 2008 and 2013 I wrote a series of eight books, beginning with The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities, and culminating in The Twelve Nidānas and Mingling the Threefold Sky that are rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and dedicated to “stretching” English in order to create gaps so that Wisdom Mind might flow through to the reader. The idea in these poems is to notquite-make-sense. The beauty (hopefully) of the surface language plus the strategy of “approaching narrative” first intrigues, then holds a reader, allowing, in stillness, the dawning of a new kind of intelligence. As a poet, I feel that this body of work is my most important. The complete text of all eight books in the Wisdom Mind series follows. For more on the linguistic strategies which “baffle the mind in order to release the brilliance of the mind,” see “The Way of the Poem.” 114 Introduction �The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities contents New Year’s Day Swimmers 116 Barn Yard 134 Halloween 145 Dead 151 The Palliative of Mind 177 �new year’s day swimmers i In fir trees in sky, bathers on grass in no particular order. Towels strewn in no particular order. Swimmers mostly standing in water, in sunny pool though light is muted. Muted sounds from low benches at certain distances (air the color of crisp blue). 116 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Clouds, sky, day, in perfect symmetry of day. Image of boy now fading under water in shadow of darker blue water. Pale day occurring above cold pools. Day is there next to white water and waders’ bird heads. Is white completely calm (sober) water. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 117 �As token of figure bathing and what she feels about bathing without reference to motion and breath. Without reference, motion and breath are the composition. A photographer sees breath as blue shadows on the bottom of a pool. The pool has no sides, no bottom, so it spills over. Motion is outside breath in language bonded by the requisite of death in the picture. Swimmers tread water waiting in waveless drift, as if volition (or feeling) is the karma of water. 118 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Death is blue waterless waves in moments of preparing the picture (loose clear bodies of boys in cold swim water; bland postures of bodies wading at water’s edge). Bodies wade inside the water without reference to themselves in the water. Only the language of themselves wading. In time before as if wading in advance. Years pass in the person wading before the water. Proportions occur in composition of boys, water, red-and-white ball and the pool’s various surfaces. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 119 �An image breaks in the internal place between two bodies. To place herself beneath the weighty water, being water and the brain of water, is being back ‘in’ water, as in ‘mother water.’ Being queer is not being the thought of oneself as that. Being queer is the same as if one is occurring. 120 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A field of sealed bodies limps mentally toward water. Is repeated but is thin (what occurs lapses). If she occurs is separate. The sealed bodies of waders drift off-shore submerged. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 121 �Which is not that occurring either as it exists, ceasing and occurring. A length of sea, down in her. Immersed in water—being time—suited or in the cold flesh of water. As if time around the water, which when occurring, is being ceasing there. An Oranda’s bulging eye perceives the pale flow of water as fingers of water, time around its head. Mere voice spins on its tail toward familiar sense of twisted water, eons of them wearing water. 122 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A syllable in the foreground is a serendipitous presence. (Others watching others in water somewhere else.) One’s hands shed sound (the intelligence of sound). Two swans in the twist of their necks. One’s hearing is the silent swans under them in the lake. One’s hearing is adjacent to the sound of them (now lit in slinky underlake, honks simmering in little shore peep-hole). The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 123 �ii A year ends below water. Several bodies appear surrounded by gray light. In portentful time of being in the time of that which is as yet unmanifested. The time of a wave, say, in the advent of sound before it is heard by those with hands in parkas. Gray dawn as sound is placed on faces treading near-motionless water and expressionless bodies standing in boots at the sea’s edge. 124 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Also the experience of facing water is her facing water whether herself inside incipient sense of water. Hearing is passed through the heads of those staring. Is an expression of sea—hearing form (entropy). Others say nothing but in their minds is the hearing of those watching. Which is indistinguishable from sea. And from time. Water hearing water in the windless waiting of cold day. Its internal sound is an object of water’s mind. The heads of those immersed in water is also sound. One’s hearing is also below water. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 125 �One is being hearing and at the same instant hearing. One’s interior sea is an object and at the same instant the mind that apprehends an object. There is no silence in one. Sea and words are sea hearing hearing. One imagines oneself facing hearing as aspect of hearing’s sound. 126 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �On a plain there is water. Somewhere far off I hear wind or sea shattering. A person sees direction and space without the intelligence of space (so that she is its mute face). Faces stare at water being primitive and without location vis-à-vis water’s actual boundary. Water is there, not for but being repeating. Staring repeats the aegis of a view inclusive of itself. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 127 �A body hangs from the topmost place of water. Inside a wave fades, e.g., there is no interior to the wave. Yet she resides in ‘no interior.’ Seeing inside the water’s legs which is hanging. Headless legs stand in seafoam. Others look out being on legs though the dripping in between is dry. New Year’s air is dry and solemn today bent near legs. A sheer leg. 128 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �iii Looking through grass toward young sea water. A structure holds sea in and out of green sea-water. Long slab of gray cold water, bodies lashed to themselves. Nothing occurs simultaneous to itself, in deep awareness of preciousmoment’s disappearance. In the barren waste of vast, thin water, a falcon wears sea wild at its edge. In slab of sea that is Dead Sea, kiosks are seen by one looking at the water. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 129 �Seen-through water, a shelf of water. The sense of sea pulled back. Mind is green, then alone. A girl’s mild body holds up like a slip. A man is thin where he grows without hearing. Thin bird, moving against falling. Like craziness repeating, a mind realizing hearing (the stakes of hearing) in the context of women asleep. 130 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �She glances at the sea, though she is its body. I move but day too moves along with its falling. The long day slides below low clouds. White lines cut the hill horizontally. Falling below falling, the falling of day clings, but it moves down the hill like a second pair of shoes. A slow dog moves slowly with the blossoms’ light, falling with day down to the cold sea. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 131 �A dog trots through sky, albino skin a beautiful borne white. It shimmers in a line though it is alone. Other dogs are its borders. As if she were day, a blind dog stops. At first it is sight, then low sight, then she is the sight. Islands of rock stand in dark blue water made to appear as distant person in yellow vest. 132 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Do you reside? Do you not reside? Energy, like the water, is low, seemingly bland, unruffled. Bather’s flesh is real. Mermaid’s flesh glows in creamy ground of water, frosty-blue tail, sharp flapper, pointy. Shadows on walls, like flesh, in passing moments, is each moment. A full moon hangs but it is separate from night and does not spread its light anywhere. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 133 �barn yard A woman sees cows from behind slated blinds. (One slow green-lit cow.) Luminous tiny birds in dark green columns are still-small, lowflying across the meadow. The sound of a bird is the girl’s feeling, not the empty bird. One’s hearing is in a mass of birds struggling (invisible scurrying touchable-but-outside the occurrence of their bodies). 134 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Nothing moves (being destitute of hill in ‘flat’ hill at the ravine’s bottom). Nothing moves. Cuds move in undercurrent of dark motionless stream. A photographer sees sky/hay/hill as composition of linear fields, muted colors divided by thin bars of black. A tree’s interior edge holds sky. A rooster crows in thick gray air that rises then falls away rhythmically. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 135 �If I can replace myself then, taking back something from before I appear ordinary. The shame of the familiar, like an ordinary barn. A slum in light has perfection of the afternoon. There are lines, she is told, of carefully wrapped people. People are dead in different colored shirts. In the sky’s translucent provenance, an elder piece of her, crooked in its arms like a waltz. 136 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �ii Trees are black in aslant nature of coming together as trees. (Dog in sweet complexion of light.) A woman eats cheese and says her bread, which is wood, wafts from the mouth of a young girl. Seeing imbues the loaf with food. A girl in birds, in black sea light, rides along a canal of light. I am their teacher so I am hurrying to get there. I begin to run. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 137 �A woman eats holding her mouth above her. Figures emerge in rock moving normally in awareness of shorn fields. Blackbirds rest on someone’s hands in cessation of being in a particular field of sight. (Is endurance of hands or the property of folding one’s fingers to make a perch for the bird’s claws.) A photograph of birds are the same birds omitted from their form so that the print is not of them but cut out from them and from the cessation of them. Form without the appendages of form is an image of pure sight (omitting that action). 138 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A red one, say, in skin narrower than herself. If she’s confined letting the skin loose. A girl is a chair sometimes in expanded position of slingback. If she’s washed herself. Where she would be fully sleeping next to it. Feeling its walls. An empty mouth like sun comes where she does it, though its layers and layers smell like the inside of her body. His pee in the gush of some riverless doorway there. A ‘we’ suspends out, being outside water peeing or inside to feel the warm drift of legs. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 139 �iii Mute in sun. Of bare air in day. Dog in sand spreading time through tall blue summer. A man sees time from before or during himself, days of himself in continuous parallel lines. A road veers off to unseeable distant landscape known by him once. 140 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Waiting is touching. Still-summer air inside seated person in blank moment of dog. A woman faces dog, though light becomes something modular. Emptiness and light compose the luminosity of her voice beyond the composition of any structure. Emptiness and light compose the luminosity of his face. He looks at the grass and this knowledge makes the grass warm. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 141 �Trees listen like grass, the other of myself, interior line of time endowing hearing with time. Trees soak through time. So she’s dead. There, in morning light. The other of time spanned over light. Not as in death but simply ceasing, though she continues to be alive. 142 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Day falls and if she thinks it is her mother, a bell rings in her skin. Light falls like a mask while she eats her bread. I am dizzy with bread, she acknowledges. What is the connection between resting as a place where light is a place and the immanence of the place like a dark (dissociative) fugue? What is the connection between her face in the sky and the nevernever land of her being my mother? The immanence of her face, flat as water, though I have never known her at all? Slowly she becomes my mother. Night falls on black branches of something generous. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 143 �halloween A child reads. Winter sun pours through the salon windows. Is that a skull? I mean on your big toe. Can I see your toe? Would you show my daughter your toe? she repeats to the girl applying peachy-orange polish on her child’s. That is cool! O my god. That is so cool. Would you like one? You can have one. I mean I’m just saying you can if you want. It’s up to you. Oneself as a child with those who frequent the salon being absorbed. Sun drains from the sky into the salon’s flattening skylight. People are not visible, barricaded off, so that she can be arriving there, slowly behind her mother. Her agency cut off. Her mother’s agency also cut off. 144 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A man alone gazes at sky. He is writing. Light pours through the window. Before dawn a man stands at his stove silently filling a thermos. Watching sky someone thinks of him writing. So that the day is expunged with the exception of his writing. A man writes looking at sky. The day is cold in mind of person imagining him writing. The gray lug of sky only appears interiorly. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 145 �Things ahead of one occurring. A dog seen from its side is not the dog’s profile but ‘as if ’ cut out from its side. The dog is itself, not overlaid on its side. Seeing the dream’s sound, being boisterous automaton of dog overlaid on its side. Hearing-behind-hearing is simultaneous occurrence of before and after hearing how hearing exists cut out from its own side. 146 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �The rose is from a former dream. It could be blue. Many windows open, exposed to the sun’s heat. I dreamed the dream before dreaming it, standing in sun imagining the rose alive. Imagining oneself abandoned in the sense of alone on a street with or without flowers. Its beauty outside the purview of one. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 147 �The wing of her foot in dream of blue-lit space where a peacock squanders herself. A nest of small birds also squander themselves. A child squatting before the nest stirs the nest with a stick. It comes to one there, the sequence of who she is. If eating there, being ahead of one’s thorough eating, her back to eating as in the dream before the tree. One’s dream is not later, e.g., tall wing of peacock squandering is whole (may not be crushed or heard outside itself later). 148 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �One remains behind, which is a direction of force. Staying in ‘behind’ as if one were exterior to oneself, in a ‘hole’ of oneself. Being ‘there’—in the imprint of seized—the thought seized. The smell of cold as minutes pass. To sleep or to sleep back where is is in sleep or dreaming he is allowed to sleep. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 149 �dead i In morning light reading. A woman sits informally, elbows on chair, in square of light from window to her left. Porosity of light holds resting in silent form. Day too is quiet like a river drifts, arcs over her hearing. A woman holds the color of herself, height of room and quiet, as if time and mind exist because their origins are fallow. 150 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A woman in light merges with light which is postureless. She is young inside her sitting spread in morning light. A woman in chair is necessarily alone. Shadows bend wood against its destination. Matter dissolves in undercurrent of herself drifting away from her harmless body. Is it flowers or my mind emptying of them, though they remain in sight? The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 151 �She may also be old. Her neck is old bent over a book. (Bathing cap and girl with octopus staring at sand, not moving.) So dying arises. A viewpoint uninscribed. A place utterly familiar dissolves inside you. Time dissolves, carved out of snow. Yellow is how, in the fury of night, while daylight on land is, like a woman in the morning. 152 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �ii In darkness behind something, can of something. A building glows as if it were teeth. Naming the mother out. Naming her outside beauty. Like the stillness of a flavor, finding it in an old can. I wind myself around the can’s sweet edge. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 153 �The synapse between light and light’s real life. I am real, she thinks. Like a gash in sky, a dune is not washed of lit dune night. From beyond light, the deep act of being in light. It rocks in a tree she fears may be stolen. 154 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �So it’s singular light, its own knothole of light that slips through the flower’s markings. A color is heard. (Net of warmth, through the grass to the tree’s edge.) Wilderness accrues in great spots of white. The dog is my mother rotating on earth white-skinned. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 155 �O she is dirty. Like the end of memory, some form on her body beyond her own grasp. A tourist at death impersonates someone trying to be her again and again. Another person keeps her. In latent light the rescinding memory of that boundary. Another person is a memory of sound retaining the physical latency of having once heard sound. 156 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �iii A woman is bare in bare bowl of wind. Lips green, pain the shape of day. She divides pain into sections. A man waits for death watching birds’ concoctions from their throat. Fresh wind blows waking birds in net of family bowls. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 157 �I draw wind in my mind. Your beard creates little steps for it to rest. Stepping over stones where rocking animals sleep. (She’d thought the leaf had them also.) A buzzard begins, swings its heavy, lazy body. It’s the leaf ’s death. Inside rocking’s skeleton. It is young-dead, waiting in the coverlet for birth to happen. 158 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A big bowl opens. A vulture easily in distant sky fills around my being. The placelessness of birth dawns in her mind. May you belong here. May you swing over from death’s outer edges. Crickets hearing death grow still. (And underneath, as if the chirps were water.) Like a fledgling’s open throat. A fledgling seeing a flower knows her throat after that day. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 159 �iv A word touches you after me and before me. Something appears blue, scrapes the backbones of this color, wishing that I am a blue person in the supreme daylight of blue. The shadow of your word falls against my home. Who you are in the dream of my mother whose tongue has touched a lighted field. Rushing sky she will touch other animals who face downward. 160 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �So I begin in words. Sitting down and emptying her, like a tourist latent in a guesthouse window. Will I recognize her face? (Because my mind preempts her face.) Once I forget. I race down the entire dream, imbricated, scales loosely dangling, like the mother-tongue of a stranger. Hearing forms a line (a column in the mountain whose groin is the mountain). The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 161 �My hearing is a sea of birds pressed inside their voices. My hearing is a world shed as a locale once qualified to constellate mind. Like a paper doll I lay flat. Her eyes follow my voice, seeing my hearing back to its loosened page. 162 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Who are you mother? Where, among myself, can you plan who I am? You are born inside my body, lusting after my thigh. A body parts from where it’s left off. An ace or queen, a paradigm which can be touchless. If you fake me, who will I be ? The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 163 �v If you appear my image of you shifts. (Not having readiness for a person shifts the mind in which the potential person exists.) Which shifts the language creating that person. I translate you to being in and out of your presence and the translation is like your presence within the boundary of a word. The thought of clean air is a foray toward a word, as if a word were a place for her to store herself. Inside the word’s claw. A woman shaves words picking up one at a time from a little bowl. 164 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �The word’s ‘other side’ exists prior to the word. There is no hearing outside being hearing, thinking one’s sound is that. A word’s sound is separate from its wordness. The ‘action’ (karma) of a word’s sound being also separate. Reading sound, recognizing a notation as conveying one’s interior sound simultaneous to hearing in one where ‘one’ is the same. Outside one is also the same. There is no same outside time. A sound repeats but it is not the same (though its label is the same). Time doesn’t repeat. A person doesn’t repeat. A crow caws, which may be interior at the same time as hearing in one. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 165 �Jays caw. Jays won’t eat plums though there are millions of fallow plums. A line spreads to the indefinite distance altering with every shift of light the millions of redwings on phone wires. Already her skin occurring in the phone wires, dark in dark night. The result? Sound hearing itself as sound or hearing itself as hearing with or without sound. 166 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A cello at dusk makes the blue sound of a river. A crow’s caw is itself throbbing. A woman bird struts across the green. A woman’s wooden bird is violet-colored (loud) in the smooth cream of a dream. Her craw is full (empty of sound) carried in her violet dress. She groks some sound strutting through leaves near the riverbed. In the pearls of her feathers is a head being her enjoyment. The young throb of her body is pure mahogany throb of young bird then (as if birds were, already occurring, in moment before now). Snow birds in exotic black flap then. Telling who telling who in mirrorlike shaft of moon. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 167 �vi One fox in late light empties like sun. (White head in snow spilling herself into us.) Suddenly swirling so that snow scrapes snow, continuously, like a tuba. Fingering these years of snow, fragments of snow, suddenly (where I am). I wash myself in thin night land, like night on a pony, skin scratched of light. A glint of fog makes them be together in a pile. 168 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A pile of horses neighs, stops in weatherless hill, eye-whites in mud. Stepping backwards into water, nostrils bleached in odd pattern of children. One horse empties into red Mongolian arrows. Washing herself like a black bead. Washing themselves into white sand. A meadow is where their thin black shawls dissolve into water. Wild birds dissolve into scaffolding of water. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 169 �Water glows flat. A brown girl enters a river in late light. Among her is a swamp. Now present in a dance as if she is waking (first) between herself. A girl enters her body first. Sisters occur. (I am borrowed together with my mother.) As if hearing the cry of her own future child imprinted in her femur. A fetus moves, birds, trees, former pets. 170 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Wool is made from parallel sheep in arbitrary cubicles in sky. He sings to them such that his voice is like a large mother’s palm. Here is a lamb from where it was once. (Because she saw him once. Sky on clean line of ceiling, rafters holding up ceiling.) Though her condition arises from touching, she cannot imagine herself as an object. He lays the bird aside so that his children may see it but not know it. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 171 �vii A proprietor is thin. Her arms are shaped like paper. Which she folds like a doll’s paper. Drawers full of paper are of different weights and textures like a man she knows that reminds her of a city. He plays horn. The gold in her cloak becomes the color of his skin waiting. The time of his voice seems separate from the steady sotto voice that could be a doll’s voice. 172 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �She takes place in his legs like the legs of her husband. (Legs fold in manner of his countrymen.) She thinks, Good. Now I can be like a line moving forward outside present time. The edge of her in her clothes is so thin it might break in her clothes. Not a fetish but still knowing that the fetus is buried. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 173 �A child breaks up. Is intensity not-yet-worked. (Repeatedly becoming an object of formed or shaped intensity.) A brass’s ethos retains. It places anywhere in a formerly-worked object. Hearing the stark name of a previous person. One may write the person. Entering memory (an object in her mouth), ladling it up, placing it slowly where it belongs. 174 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �Your willowness enters song. You delicately twist your hair to a feeling that’s like a country. The pain of sight together, now in a specific setting, where a person’s capacity for song (metonymy) fits tight. A dog gobbles flowers. Space retains his passing. A child waits, like weeds wait for flowers, retaining the passing of former names. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 175 �the palliative of mind i A rock drinks an animal’s life, easing it into the mountain. If a sentence goes on, it’s her mind stringing pieces of her eyes. Seeing the movement before the animal and hunt and hunt, as if its skin were alive. Before the air, that was the air of the people, lilies were private flowers, she was thinking. (A flower’s skin may be public skin yet lay beneath private air.) An eagle turns, repairing air, like a squirrel turns to face a flower, as if some band affixed him to the flower and he is sure it is that flower. 176 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �The gallop of a squirrel is mixed with air, carved air, yellow like cowslips. Throwing itself after air (but the cool flank of air). I know air already, you murmur. The way light hits a flower or stone at dawn. Night behind night, blood in sunlight rising. An animal, young in sky, washes back from sky. So I memorize sky, at the same time think of sky. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 177 �Wind becomes sky, light through distant tree trunks if sky were there, or, light with trees with no sky allowed. A bird hops on grass, weathering the grass, leaving little igloos of white. Lines of a bird grow down the bird. Will grass survive its wing’s blue tip? An old jay caws but its caw lacks the shrill, coarse modulations of a jay’s caw. 178 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A bird in flight brushes a flower’s head. Waiting rests as day passes in the flower’s knowledge. How the day as it rests admits further day. Like a flower is alive and its secondary life, encapsulated off, will not be allowed to overflow into it. When the day ceases to be day because, you say, it’s fixed, I know this. A quip of birds from the far river rise. A hill slides into the valley’s dark night while someone reads pressing himself open. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 179 �ii A gull circles a wedge of water, marking the water with her eye. The memory of her skin is limitless, like the memory of her cry, before a kill or later for the sake of others. Wind, too, gains qualities by its forcefulness with things, its hand, say (a piece of sun cut off). A crack in light, like a painting of light. The palette of wind is gold, she mutters, the boundary of a man playing chess in light being the dead person. 180 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A flower emits voices behind falling sun. A flower is soft and the pain of soft reminds her of a sea of heads. As if her life dreams its own violence. If a bird disappears, she may have asked for this to happen. She begins to think that mountains wash out mountains. That the sea of heads form a land on which to walk, which she calls the isthmus of larks. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 181 �So a bird flies flat and what is it about its sleek blue mind. Is a bird a bird or quality of place dawned by the bird? you mutter. You look at a chirp, though it could be surreal. A tree comes just at the point of sky. Phenomenology of the tree rides not so much on the stature of the tree but like the tap of a cane, where it goes after it is hidden. 182 The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities �A sycamore branch in late light sheds, as if sun splashes scattered shards of larks through needles of light-fall. Time is little drops like from a spout drip-dropping the bough. Its stem is underground, someone says, and I have a memory of a double stream flowing deep beneath the earth. You tap on the stream to awaken the stream so that the leaves stop shaking their light out of it. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities 183 �though actually it is the same earth order of dreams Rat 185 Cow 190 Tiger 197 Hare 202 Dragon 207 Snake 212 Horse 217 Sheep 223 Monkey 228 Bird 233 Dog 242 Pig 248 �Rat Dream An old woman is born. Her hair dries and her mother thinks, I have been her mother again. Might the woman’s nature leave? Rats scurry from baskets, which are old baskets, hexagonal fields. A night bird sleeps. Its dreams are down to its feet. Which you say is the bird’s body before the skill of the bird’s body. Its wings lay flat in the smell of new grass. though actually it is the same earth 185 �Commentary A quality of him, home words say, is the same as the man speaking. I already have that person, I think because his blood is smooth also. My blood is smooth also. A person moves, effortfully or effortlessly, and she thinks, Is this a waste or not? She thinks it is bliss but thinks it is her feeling bliss. 186 though actually it is the same earth �Is filigree air, like in the rats’ playpen? What can hold between a feeling and a queer girl child whose boots tips curl in shame? I am really talking about rifts, what holds between her fear and the rats’ miserable-life fragility. There would be an object connected to my playing, like saying playing, as though words are desire. The likelihood of death browsing itself into my death could occur and I think, O yes. It is death! though actually it is the same earth 187 �Each word has a flower. The times of the flowers converge so that she conflates words and flowers, speaking flowers. Pansies in sun beneath the red breast of a robin, here and there, merge with the robin’s legs. A duck in scattered ripples darkens. snow falls, resting in a petal’s shell. An infant puts a flower in its mouth. The muscles of its mouth move by the flower’s warmth. 188 though actually it is the same earth �Rats kneel to her and in her mind become true rats. The weight of the snow is heavier than words, heavier than stone, she marvels. Is the Christ child born of air, through holes in the air? For the blood on snow is real transferred blood, alive in the mind of the boy. The beauty of a rat depends from its limbs. Snow folds and the boy becomes its eyes. though actually it is the same earth 189 �Cow Dream A double flower begins in the folds of an infant’s hands. If you see its face, which is the fruition of your knowing, it may be a small, infinitesimal aspect of knowing. The fetus is standing, someone says. She imagines her hands under its armpits. She spreads it on leaves, which look like artist’s hands. Wrapping purple leafy fingers around its bits of unborn life, she climbs a person inside the lark’s mouth. 190 though actually it is the same earth �The fetus shines and she takes it to school. The forest is ill, she says. Anything tall makes my blood quiet. A series of events moves in one direction only, like trees taller than sky. A woman sees a bird and thinks something about its eyes. A clean, fresh feeling becomes that feeling regardless of her initial sense of affection for the bird. Roots are veins ripening in her body though still hot as coal. This is why a bird’s cool blood is the most delightful fowl quality. though actually it is the same earth 191 �Commentary In the ether of white my baby fumigates. The flavor of her skin holding a flower to her nose. each particle is a bud and inside the bud’s head. Flower and water are protectors, with the net feeling of white, as if a lotus absolves its entire color into her. I made my baby backwards, I say. I am trying to remember if the long lowered arm vibrates. 192 though actually it is the same earth �Trying to recall time, my baby, offing of morning fields. Young rocks sit like cows in sovereign pasture squares. Or you may instantly be the baby’s wisdom mother, the stronghold of you and your baby going somewhere pretty. A spider’s thin web zigzags into sky, whereupon the sky’s dimensions shift. though actually it is the same earth 193 �If you appear, my image of you shifts. Not having readiness for a person shifts the mind in which the potential person exists. Which shifts the language creating that person. I translate you to being in and out of your presence and the translation is like your presence within the boundary of a word. When you appear, the interior land shifts making sounds like stones. A spider’s thin web zigzags into sky, whereupon the sky’s dimensions shift. 194 though actually it is the same earth �Later you say, a spider drowned, juxtaposing your seeing with what you recall. But one imagines tall black trees or a cow that hangs in privy to the cow. If I see the cow with you, but if I see the cow alone, we have to know where it exists. If a cow eats air, the air still exists. though actually it is the same earth 195 �Each and every cow jumps over the moon properly. Meaning is the experience of one cow, before dawn, slowly traversing the earth. A falling star holds up the whole earth, so that its drop is a pin-prick against water or color. It is my mother born from my body, I’m thinking, while at the same time seeing faces of other relatives. 196 though actually it is the same earth �Tiger Dream Sun from behind the mountain falling on the threshers and reflecting from the lake gains depth from the sound of falling. The sound of water over stones at the lake’s edge is like a darting bird. If she wakes, she couldn’t say the bird disappears, but its breath dissolves, like an undertow at sea. How igneous (fiery) and lucid are the bodies of tigers, she muses. though actually it is the same earth 197 �Commentary Each day the sun slips over the crest of the hill and lights the yellow grass. A cat climbs the hill as though dawn were in its head, entwining pieces (petals in branches). A day-moon slides below low tide. Fall-out from one’s skin protects it from further harm. Tide emits tide as she wanders down the coast, empty as a battered jug. 198 though actually it is the same earth �A woman carries a jug dexterously embroidered on silk. The woman’s skin shines like the interior pink of a river. The dimensions of the jug’s magenta is implicit yet exacting. Out is not a direction but an aspect of conference around the jug’s battered aggregates. Bringing yellow out, where out is a structure of color and light, intensifies out, as if its DNA changes. though actually it is the same earth 199 �There is an hour in which her memory will be there, where light falls in rain on a tiger’s flickering head. A stone woman prays, hearing sun in sun. (She dreams its precise nest.) A magenta flower glows so that I feel free at last. A magenta flower glows, disappearing in its skin. Light jumps back as if she has that person again. 200 though actually it is the same earth �Death is color-added-to-color. Color learns color by touch, like the feel of rain from one’s bed. What if the occurrence of harm refers to the difficulties of offering the harm? In the broad space of an animal, a wound in a woman’s thumb feels like embroidery of jasmine and honeysuckle. The necessity of something and its form is the tiger sleeping, tail to tail, in tandem with something. though actually it is the same earth 201 �Hare Dream An angel glides silently through air to where the child Christ sleeps. He sees her as a crow, wings folded, watching. A blue flower in the wing of a bird hovering near the birth, is not in the bird, since it fluctuates in light, while the bird remains unchanged. In my mind there is a bed where I drop off. Christ and hare both slip through my mind and land where a hare might or where someone needs something. 202 though actually it is the same earth �Commentary The bird whose markings fluctuate remains unchanged independent of its visibility. Yet her girlishness has continuity. Limbs jumbled in the corner are still free limbs, I’m thinking. All the animals are resting. I know them from the inside as if they have said, and their word is a death-rattle. A golden crow or laughter is said to be a paradigm of activity then. though actually it is the same earth 203 �So there are words, then under-words. Black words like a river so that her thoughts, pummeled, are the hard thoughts of stone people. They burn a branch of all their people, then turn to ash. Am I the person? I am the person. I decide I must be the person. 204 though actually it is the same earth �While a glistening star holds night within its skin, a twinkling star has no interior where night can sit. So she lays with the animals whose foreheads quiver. So many ducks and goats being causes, songs where voices are tongues. Sweet air sweeps the ragged flowers. sweet air sweeps her hair. (Winnowing its hair is also an object.) though actually it is the same earth 205 �The beauty of the straw in the wake of a bird flown away. As if the whole world encased in shadowbrought-to-bear-upon-a-field stops the straw in time. I’m thinking time occurs separate from the straw, beside the straw, and in its looseness is neither created nor destroyed. Seeing something against time, as if time were oldfashioned. A shoe, for example, is eligible to loss. To be dead again, in the simplicity of its skin. I hear a leaf and think it is in the well, so we are together. 206 though actually it is the same earth �Dragon Dream It is just beyond her body to sleep with him. It is just beyond her body not to sleep with him. This is the moral of a little play. There is a lodge. A young girl is invited into the main room. She is black with very bushy hair, dressed in a silver princess costume, carrying a wand. She comes in and behaves very sweetly to a guest but her parents think she is faking her sweetness and really being sassy so they ask her to leave and come in again, this time being genuinely sweet. So she comes in again behaving slightly differently. Each of the two times signifies a different moral. though actually it is the same earth 207 �Commentary A doll talks and if she’s a tall doll, in dependence on a listener, her presence will not disperse far. Her body covers her life as if it were a cast. Mop-like braids fall to her waist. If I were a Cyclops forging thunderbolts, I too would be being born she posits. A man binds his mind so that it doesn’t scatter.He tucks it between his breasts. How have you left your mind before? someone asks, speaking politely. 208 though actually it is the same earth �After long rain a man leans on a gate. Hair-thin legs race along the rim. A disappearing chirp has appearance, like its body is young yet forever carried in its old mother’s womb. For her presence gives also. Her feet and ears also. She grabs her limb dangling in the breeze like a cocoon. though actually it is the same earth 209 �Cobwebs in sun are strings of pure time dangling in a breeze. Cobwebs in shade land, decrepit before time, cave into time. Part goes up. so that time feels like war. Another portion rolls into air—holding air, lighting day back. 210 though actually it is the same earth �A whoosh of wings feels like an effigy, some sort of charcoal beast fluffing its feathers, eating sky with upturned beak. If what is visible close by is remote, vast visibility, I inhabit my thoughts more fully. Inside is a stage whereas outside is somatic. A great slaughter of beings is contained within their death. As if a holocaust is found, as if future beings trip. Sky washes sky as I watch a dragon fade, wings rubbed by sky’s shadows. though actually it is the same earth 211 �Snake Dream A woman seeing an animal sees it belly-to-earth raised above the earth so that it floats on a small peninsula. A python, like a bladder, coagulates the sludge, eating so much sludge. Light from its eyes shoot out little tails of fire and she wonders why its death seems so friendly. It dies on the highway ’cause it’s slow, someone says, thinking of sand. It vanishes in squares, as if striations of sunlight are old. 212 though actually it is the same earth �Commentary My mother is dead. How could she have forgotten her shoe? (A hazy memory of a dream where I’m a colorful bird’s tail.) She sees the bird hop and its hop disappears into the tail of the bird, into the tails of her children. Here is a whole bird, she thinks, its tail discrete like a discrete word. If one dies, among birds, a red-winged bird is heavier in its body then. though actually it is the same earth 213 �Caught in her own heirloom of light, a woman sleeps in distension of moments that appear to be there. Old birds swarm. Quadrilles of people (fitting the crate around the edges of her body). Immersing herself in a log. Some say she is that thing, as if she hops inside it. Mother, I am blind, I say. Your pink toes reveal nothing any more. 214 though actually it is the same earth �A yellow fowl touches logs contingent with animals who knew the logs as sky. Of previous people drawn on the backs of stooped women. She felt she was that woman. That her yellow earth bloomed in the night oil. Afterwards there are leap years then. Like fields of potatoes. A child hops, square to square, with her own convergent yellowness. though actually it is the same earth 215 �The emotion of yellow, say in meat or chirps. The same level of color in the blank place of sky is like borders in sky mirroring the bottom of her eyes. Is it painted? a child asks. Her sewn face has alterity and depth. Pink is here and you are sure of the color. Before being born, grass is this color. To bring back sky, it pulls the sky so that sky folds comfortably over everybody. 216 though actually it is the same earth �Horse Dream Where is day? someone asks, and I see the twin nature of black, oil of black, mountains stark and wet. Pearls seem brown like the bottom of the sea. I whisper something and the animal’s ear flicks. So she lets her leg give this impression, a pearl in the dark, in the blue of its stomach’s shell. The mare’s perch is illuminated because blood and ecstasy are to birth like an underlying river. though actually it is the same earth 217 �Air rushes in, steadying my mind. Your words are my mother, I’m thinking. Long legs curl around a shriveled coil of knees. An insect wanders off. It’s a baby I see and my heart breaks for its infinite slow old non-knowing of direction. Just get through the line. Get to the yellow snow. To the bridge where you can puke. There. To cut yourself out. 218 though actually it is the same earth �Commentary The sky frames your face and all the different skies. You’re the crow against the sky or quadrants of an insect’s shell from the perspective of sky. The place of you is like the essence of your eyes. So you’re blind, sort of, and another person sees the tension of that space, the acoustic opacity in that space. though actually it is the same earth 219 �She may know a sound but if she turns, it becomes a measure of far and near distance. I wear sound, someone says. (The slimy pearls are the physical sensation of womb.) The woman’s space, lighted by sagebrush, transcends the confines of a life, though it can pull life toward it without abrading its transcendence. She wants it to be white, like space in a word’s world. 220 though actually it is the same earth �Pearls are steam. The lug of its knee or inside the beast’s thigh. She may see blossoms, a sprig, or she may see pearls as old mothers marching. The blue horseman is blue light, though we’re, through it, seeing death. On a bodice is a pony, which drips into me, until things become small, but they still die. though actually it is the same earth 221 �Watching-minds twist to a cumulative suicide. A windhorse flies but it is still still, asking me. My daughter is young. I see her climb inside the windhorse, her long fore-fingernail painted with geese. I determine to seek them, over the hedge, inside the parts where it hurts the most. They only read lips in the blinding darkness, cries a priest from behind a screen. 222 though actually it is the same earth �Sheep Dream I have a memory of green, in a hole, in a moon’s crater called the bottom of the pitcher. A woman fills the hole with crenellated wings. I admire the wings so she cuts off a piece and hands it to me. A man’s voice held anterior to its space makes his presence real. I’m not cold, someone says. Is cold an image like young sea blossoms, purple flowers just above eye level? though actually it is the same earth 223 �Commentary I recall seeing myself in a dream with the sensation of something touching my toe-bottoms. The dream includes a variety of skin sizes. Certain shapes whose edges contain sky, I clearly remember in my hand. The skin of a lamb is irreducible, like the skin of day bound by fleshy rock and sand. A day may not be prior to itself, happening alongside each and every event of breath. 224 though actually it is the same earth �Shells on the cowboy’s coral hat are new surprising shells, shiny, polished, with no sea showing. I forget the boundary of possible seashells while holding the thought of their appearing in my spine. An appearance occurs against an old barn door. All stags as they are burnished beat their heads dry against some tree or other. The parity of their body is the parity of voicelessness. though actually it is the same earth 225 �Flinging off his gossamer, hanging it up to dry, dancing about the pan, drinking the pan. The memory of the color green is tinged with repeated time like little beats with a glove. So I learn green. Whose solemnity is sky (view as, say, sky). I look at green and become an old woman. 226 though actually it is the same earth �I chew green and the rich saliva gifted by him. Is a tenet of color, a primer once left off. As if the person were a taste congealing inside her very own wisdom. I drift within its skin, an opaque membrane of light, allowing pale color to metastasize. though actually it is the same earth 227 �Monkey Dream A flesh-colored pear is with the heaviness of birth. I look into its head wanting an immaculate black stick. The pear tree has birds arranged in its branches artistically. Here are flowering birds, whose trees spin into air, her feeling for the blossoms, sharp as thaw. Monkeys race, seemingly, though it could be bones rolling and disappearing. 228 though actually it is the same earth �Commentary How the weight of a bird hopping along a fence, a tiny bird new to appearing, not yet carrying the birdness of its mother. The more anchored the mind, the more an appearance weighs nothing. Light is bone. think recumbent, dead-seeming, like an animal playing but really guarding beings. Fossilized wings show the giant wingspan of an early species. though actually it is the same earth 229 �If a bird eats a worm or if it turns its head, an animal sniffs age, sees age in the pattern of its feathers’ colors. Cells of color leak, wandering over the wing’s rough neck. The flesh of the bird appears in its hop, its last place of hop, what’s possible before lifting off. An animal gauges the belly of the hop trying to determine the feasibility of killing its hop’s dark past. 230 though actually it is the same earth �A young bird stares and something birdlike travels upwards. A mud-colored bird blurs into mud throbbing there in her mind asleep. You could say she wears feathers and the feathers unfold like a resplendent bird catching its reflection in sky. You could say there are rivers, battalions of orange light. A child spears light, ravishing light laid out as in death. though actually it is the same earth 231 �Seeing the feather of the bird through a branch in noon sun, one remains in the bird and is swung, like through an opening in sky. So that there is both the bird, belly like an urn, and the bird so saturated with birdness that it is unseen against its own background. A group of feathers on the same bird, for example, are separate and distinct yet we think of them as the bird’s feathers. The arm of the bird is crooked. In skinniness in sky. Distance is its face in the resting sky. 232 though actually it is the same earth �Bird Dream Three birds move in air as blue as water in a dream. Three branch-colored birds land on a branch in the borderland of the bird’s robe. Behind the songs of birds he fingers a chip. Is it thin? Without the chip’s color? Seeing its form as a bird, first eagerly then angrily, the way beauty through a gap in sky breaks into two whole containers of sky. though actually it is the same earth 233 �Commentary i An ebony feather shines, its blackness steely, like the hard black knuckle of a bird. A discarded feather, arched like a fish, rests on the earth, its magnificent bow gleaming. Sun-black birds hover over sea, so that black is both inside and the holder of itself. Or like sea repairs to sea, wraps bird and sea into something apocryphal. 234 though actually it is the same earth �The time of the bird is ideal, you say, by which you mean supremely excellent time and I think, Are time’s qualities measurable? If it were touchable, the parts of a person might organize around it, like one’s senses congeal around a smell. Bird clouds drift. Sky too seems to be drifting but it is still, I assure myself. I am comforted thinking the sky is still. though actually it is the same earth 235 �Time enters the wing of a bird where the colors break between blue and very dark blue. An animal waits allowing time to sway between its belly and inhabited spot on earth. It limps, she thinks, though it is a genuine limp, with each and every particle of limp belonging to it specifically. In a certain angle of sun she is able to see the limp passing to a future animal at a similar spot on the hill. 236 though actually it is the same earth �Are the birds girls? The impact of sound makes slowness material while its direction is immaterial. Saying it is less like looking than a cloven foot with little clea’s or talons. And maybe she is that or maybe her body is simply the thought of a bird-filled body. Later I dream the three birds are crying. Fingers of hair blow with the wind, my mind observes, referring of course to the talons. though actually it is the same earth 237 �Commentary ii Three bird’s bodies whose bones are like a forest. you know its color from the pure knowledge of color, without seeing its precise color. Lines of light catch the bird. The motility of light critiques the contours of the bird’s beak. Part of the air surrounds a branch where three birds rest. Rays of light touch your back, which, if I touch you then, evaporate. As if the boundary of your back were hidden by your back, but nonetheless yellow, like light in a dream person. 238 though actually it is the same earth �The profile of a bird, in a gold ball rising, shapes a mountain called bird mountain. A crow erupts, turning gold turning curves. I cannot tell a crow from the image of gold feathers somersaulting. The bird’s dream arises from the ground of its own birdness. First moonlight on rushing water, then pink stars like angels, then tree tips in a treacle bar of sky, threading itself through the birds’ raised mouths, beaks pressed apart like lips. A thin sun crawls to earth and is maintained by strong earth, though actually it is the same earth. though actually it is the same earth 239 �How a beaver floats under sky-words. He hears the birds as if gathered together verbally. An end-bird leaves its formation over water. Its blue bowl leaves, rising in sky. Which somehow was known, the way a line is known as beginning here, though, as you say, lines are concepts. How many meanings flow from the bowl into heads that look away? 240 though actually it is the same earth �The robin’s breast is red, you think, yet you are unsure and think maybe it’s a color that contains red but is not red. Caring is present though you cannot find it in the bird’s body. An insect the bird eats enters the bird’s blood. Is its time the same? Likely not, she thinks, since an insect eats and the food slips away. A dragonfly on cloth (conspicuously beautiful)devolves into your eyebrows. though actually it is the same earth 241 �Dog Dream I walk into a meadow and all the dogs’ mouths open. Presences are out who remain unseen and may instantly slip inside. A witch flies out but it is just a stick. Mommy, it’s just a stick! a child cries. A woman tells about her smelling, it being equal to a dog’s when she was pregnant. Crickets chirp in a field of rabid ones. Their intervals are pure, like the pure white flaps that poke from a new bird’s tail. 242 though actually it is the same earth �If a dog is my interior ash force, it romps the hills with butterflies sitting there placidly. If it yawns, behind its tongue are beings sucking flowers, looking like black ghosts. Behind its tongue a world of beings cook. Its unconscious is preserving food, you say, but I think it’s making speech, readying itself for a life. A string of dogs hangs in sky. Daughters of sky gather cobs. Hussies also wear cobs. though actually it is the same earth 243 �Commentary A dog in grass hears a young bird chirp and inches towards it. Hearing, but not seeing, one bird, then a group, early, as if the sky were nothing. Or as if the sky were intelligence, like a presence that the birds knew about, but if you looked there’d be nothing. Another offers food, but I am offering something more gentle, she says. The dog’s belly is in the grass but its ears are inside the hill. 244 though actually it is the same earth �Each day a dog returns to its spot on the hill. Its body rests but its eyes are vagrant. (By vagrant I mean slim—the eyes of a crow on a wire in rain staring at wet grass.) Rain gathers above low hills, like rain in a painting stays mixed here. Like the footprint of the doll, once left in a storm, has neither situation nor destination. Five children laughing pull grass to the river. The air around it blurs, emerging from weather. though actually it is the same earth 245 �A bird and dog move, appropriate to pleatless rivers of air. A bird and dog sit, appropriate to the posture of all birds and dogs, which is genuinely sweet, she guesses. The time of the bird is not the dog’s minute-to- minute watching, though the bird hunts from the sides of its eyes. A dog has parts, which each have times, so that a melody of time pervades its movements and posture. 246 though actually it is the same earth �Posture, too, is a way the idea of an act is projected. If it is blue there is a door so you enter the posture, though the light in blue might leave you suddenly. The dimensions of a star are not of a star’s body but are fixed in her, displaced by her movements. She moves and the star achieves its posture. though actually it is the same earth 247 �Pig Dream A longshoreman sees night. He looks at his hand. As if night or water or distance were simply depths for the color blue. As if night were still night only very far away. The appearance of the color and its instant of apprehension is nothing more than an action. Before the action the color doesn’t exist. Where does aqua go? she wonders hearing flowers falling, falling where they adhere, into a world of tea. 248 though actually it is the same earth �Commentary I am today again. I fall within time, tall time in a frame of tall pieces of color. A bird’s red wing releases the inside of its color. I look inside. If blue were there, its wing wouldn’t exist. A teapot’s rhythms are cascades of water falling and I imagine that I too am falling, in strands, like a geisha’s hair. Is it the lines or the openings where things recede, emptying themselves out? though actually it is the same earth 249 �Being moved she falls and I’m thinking it’s a young, fluid sort of fall. But air is internal, she thinks. O mother of sky lugging me forward. You break off but I catch you. A voice through fog portends the precise ominous chartreuse where your eyes look out. 250 though actually it is the same earth �When you see blossoms causing a two or three dimensional image to form in space, your eye opens to that space. Space, she thinks, exists, crosses back from where the person was alive. A bloody bird from the beak of a hawk clicks the nature of night. Its cry is her face clothed as a human bird. The blue of a cross pinned to the mountain. though actually it is the same earth 251 �Thoughts divide into lineages of translucency, sun-dazzling corruscancy. I define grow passively. I point to a flower and say, That is a growing flower, unlike its shadow spidering sideways. Now she belongs to an infantry of animals. Packs of pigs form cover near the kraals. For example, a girl thinks the hog, but tells her mother to draw the hog. 252 though actually it is the same earth �Mother’s Warm Breath contents book i: Birds 254 book ii: Sky 292 book iii: Mother’s Warm Breath 307 �BOOK I Birds �Once I saw a bird still and pink standing in a grove of trees. At twilight, on one leg, growing thin like a very young girl. Might it catch a bird, swallowing its bones? Its vessel holds sky carrying sky to a different place where it is fresh. When the birds blew further away, she felt the sky with her hand. The gray corolla of old ones, on a washed-out hill, colors broken off. How old is she? I ask, but they are sobbing. A woman watches, remembering herself through the bird. Mother’s Warm Breath 255 �Rare beauty is begun, he thinks, seeing into the hill the limitation of my seeing where the dead person lingers. It is myself, looking at the grass, seeing its kindness suddenly. Food is offered, though a throat could disappear. Every given moment that you perceive is the same thing, you say and I’m thinking, It’s the bardo. It just arises and you see. 256 Mother’s Warm Breath �You throw a piece of cloth on the hill. To see if the hill has green in it. Then you rub the cloth, gently touching your fingers. Sometimes the cloth is wrapped in sky and when you touch it to your face, it moves jerkily. The hill is seen from the belfry, its transparency of light merging with the green motion of air. Light crosses light on the edge of their fur. The latitude of fur as a place for light to rest, each hair being a support. Mother’s Warm Breath 257 �Husky wings in low night. In low fur. Blue is blue, I’m thinking, separate from mirroring, blue or a mountain or a person’s face. This face is my own face. The slight sound of a bird fluttering in a bush could be bells or roots like cascades of long fragrant hair. A vulture scatters flowers and I saw that she saw that the wings of birds are light-fields. 258 Mother’s Warm Breath �And now it is night. Seabirds play in frothy chips of glitter coiling like an aroma that is not one aroma because fading light gathers packs, fish, flies. Bone-buttons in a bowl, like lotuses in lakes, drift behind her mind. A rabble of dogs snarl. Whose limbs are dogs stiffened in their tracks or crooked trees dwarfed like a witch. There is fear and the notion of drifting across, as if a button is a raft pulled by sky, little awakenings by little awakenings. Mother’s Warm Breath 259 �And the fire-pink, its ontogeny, how it came to be, as you say, erupted. An Avalokitesvara appeared on the bone of my foot when I took birth as a dog, a monk says. The time of his bones or sweet hair falling on the muscles of his shirt collar. You wander around from dream system to dream system, listening for yourself being handed to you by someone. Is like air being handed to me by someone. 260 Mother’s Warm Breath �The time of sky has no direction, no containment, is and is not a vast field. She looks at the hill but sees the logic of the grass, a memory of death in a bird’s harsh call. What is behind the grass erupts from the grass. Is in her, as is in flesh. A bird purrs and its heart drips as the color of night thaws. Mother’s Warm Breath 261 �The flesh of the bird was broken that day. Which wouldn’t hold its feathers, as the flesh was keen. (Old ones said provoked.) I see you on the edge, a fissure or cleft where a breach has been made and I think, Am I the breach? The gestation of wrongness is not carried by wings nor the deep drop of cliff overhanging the swollen stream. 262 Mother’s Warm Breath �Being in the dark with so many mountains, so many startled animals. Please don’t try to tell me there are animals in the sky, someone says as she dozes. To affix a buzzard’s beauty. To stay born and follow the animal’s trail. A huge white edifice from afar looks like sky. Why is the sky white, she thinks, not realizing. Mother’s Warm Breath 263 �An animal rests, luring her and stroked by her softly. Were I white, she thinks, recalling the knockered door of a nunnery, whose square of light crawls over sand. In the distance other people are stroking animals, pouring them in a jar or vacuuming them up in a little tube. I suspect that their voice still blends with the night’s stream, like the trees and like the real body of the people. 264 Mother’s Warm Breath �Or like an old nest simply left. In things said back in the voice of a stranger. A woodpecker’s peck may be connected or not depending on her emotional needs. The boundary of a bowl leaves its edge, its age in lines around the bowl’s broad hips. A word in time creeps through its own wet structure, sentiment (throwback) or some anachronistic nest that slips away from its structure. Mother’s Warm Breath 265 �All this time studying the dunes that crack around the sea. An animal is dead and breathes dead breath. Is still as a cross at the edge of a white field. I dress and wait for death though I am already in death. Through the wall a delphinium wears light, carrying it to the people. 266 Mother’s Warm Breath �An animal eats, rubbing skin against sky, so that there is a larger sense of being in sky. As if it’d been alive for that moment of passing. Wind pools hills, luffing, and at the same moment, passing. Sky holds the animal up. What holds up the sky? she thinks, watching the animal’s hands resting on its stomach. The animal moves. Leaves move, and grass, like blowing hair, settles closer to the earth. Mother’s Warm Breath 267 �A squirrel flies through air and the angle of light through its hair is like the ribs of night. Dawn in a squirrel is a raindrop’s fresh earthiness. A squirrel breathes in covenant with something. A fizzy motion of air blurs her vision of its claws. Whether or not it is from the sweet squirrel’s hair, her trouble of hair, inside its shell of hair. 268 Mother’s Warm Breath �His experience of his hair versus her experience of his hair in the moment of his jump, though she is further from his hair. The non-location of the feeling later reifies in a dream of rainbow-feathers on a stick and a man waves the stick, touching her forehead. You almost know who she is, yet you do not know her. So you cannot forget her. Mother’s Warm Breath 269 �Rubbing the bird, stroking its hair so that it is soothed. The old ones receive until they realize I’m dead now. I am half ghost. I eat all of their hair, always. Someone belongs here, she thinks, having the memory of her mother’s hands. A bouquet of birds contains her mother’s feeling for color. The hair on a fly, motionless, contains the memory’s breath clinging to the hair before it disappears. 270 Mother’s Warm Breath �The hair is not an image of sky though it has sky qualities and has come from the sky. A gallery of eyes has the willowy look of lost people. A shadow from the sky holds the hills apart, like a tuft of hair emptied of sea. The beauty of a fox, its pink quick speed. Wisps of hair, air-brushed. Mother’s Warm Breath 271 �Each night the sun slides out below the clouds, behind the sun leaning. One color leans and the other leans, so that there is a clean surface for the air to move. The rim of her body moves like the rim of an animal twitching in sleep. Now I regret my voice in the trees of them. 272 Mother’s Warm Breath �A woman lives in her neck, settles in her neck. A cloud on its side is a vague motion in her heart. Night lashed on its braid folds around her back like a shell. A bird’s neck is infused with life, but later, after its song, she does not see the neck and thinks it is inside the bird. Geese prefer milk in this extreme world. Mother’s Warm Breath 273 �Ah, geranio! someone exclaims at an osmanthus. It is November. The rareness of sky, wind, birds, in the month, in the sorrel and clay rocks of the past. Two doves nest high in an oak. One sits on a branch. Engorged with sun the horns of its center relax. I see death spread sun around your arm. Empty snow-light like a glassy puddle of melt. The nipple of the bird, its sound in the dark and thud of its fall through the cliffs. 274 Mother’s Warm Breath �A butterfly lands so that her face pauses. Hearing the bird she follows her mind into the tail of the bird, into the tail of its children. Hearing the bird the occasion of its air and complete symphony of chromatic features. The delicacy of its wings as the deity pours flowers. Mother’s Warm Breath 275 �Awakening in snow you hear birds. Their call is deep, rising from the riverbed. I hear your face in the echoing of trees. Bare branches on bare ground like quills in cold night. Each emitted word in the compost of earth fluctuates. 276 Mother’s Warm Breath �Seeing the stark barren word flicker like grass covering the bird or place in the meadow where the bird grew. Your words are mixed with flowers. Mermaid words, half letter, half calyx, drawls the mind down. Like a word may be breached, or defoliated, she says. Its skin waxes blue across the chain-fenced field. Sometimes it slips from under itself so that virtuous, non-virtuous, neutral maintain in the word after it is broken also. Mother’s Warm Breath 277 �Then her words are the only true words. (My own experience were also her words.) Awareness deepens to a pool. If I feel each letter, the heart of the word will be calmed. The impasto of color, of her face and of stone. The course of her face being before the face, so that someone else, seeing the light, could arrive at her face. Her approaching her, before her, its existence as an ache rising over the top of the hill. 278 Mother’s Warm Breath �Ultimately birdness is a very primary, bottom-line, open-ended sense of awareness. Experience is what arises in awareness, the way light, say, accretes across a frozen pond at dawn. Through the wires it is done as when a thing has progressed beyond being erased, beyond a point where it can be forgotten. You are marked and for how long in this sky, reposing on a col on the summit-line. Mother’s Warm Breath 279 �A hummingbird in air, whose qualities, imbued with dahlia, sits in air independent of the dahlia’s redness. Simply seeing the flower’s shape, discovering its motility, qi, or, as if wandering about, its intrinsic comfortableness. I’m lucky, you say. The brand of the child is mine to keep. (You can see the furry flower hugging its own passionate surface.) An insect’s leg outside the flower’s horn dissolves in cold winter fire. 280 Mother’s Warm Breath �We are one sky in ourselves and in sky, she thinks. Sky is air changing into shapes of sleep, but it dies into sky, gentling itself out. Air is thin then, feeling through it to her breath. Is there a place, like sky or inside a flower’s head? She knows the town of sky, slow ice of all sky. A parallel sky, like a mountain park. Mother’s Warm Breath 281 �Your face holds sky and when I look I see a particular old sky. Gestures are like sleep. The pathos of trees stroking the lake with their leaves. A woman wears red in the tall lean elegance of a bottle, as if her shape were identical with the bottle and also an old bottle. A drowsy man walks, carrying logs, so that in sleep the sound of their falling enters. 282 Mother’s Warm Breath �Red leaves cover death, the substratum of death, the materiality of blood thought of as her blood or her past. You are started. You begin in my mind before you are you. Sometimes rabbits and prairie-dogs scamper among the grasses, but hers, now dead, would be found among the leaves. An image—a chameleon’s green in earth— comes before or after the image, as if you could peer through leaves to the war in the leaves. Mother’s Warm Breath 283 �Being thin, I see mountains. Shade within shade is where a horse sits, but internally, like shade crosses a person’s eyes. I live you in my body. Is not ahead of her body, as a woman lags in her body. Wandering around ahead of her large body, a woman reads and the words take place in her ribs. 284 Mother’s Warm Breath �Teepees line the land where she sets up her drums, in eggshell light, thin with beautiful pale colors. A jeweled pheasant drags the wind and fog is smeared through the pebbles. Her crimson wing (still in the limb) lays on wind, relaxing the wind. Sun floods a leaf battered by weight. Swirls slowly down. Mother’s Warm Breath 285 �Sun mows down into a bone of air. A person notices and moves with a slight ‘reflect’ motion. That circumstances repel. That there’s resilience in a ‘reflect repelling instant,’ the gambol of repelling now in a cloud on the clearing’s north ridge. Each time you climb a piece of sky, you are imagining it is sky. Vespers are said in a chapel on a lane and the words reach the road but do not stay in its memory. A body lingers on the road, then seeps through the road draining through the aquifers. 286 Mother’s Warm Breath �A child climbs a pole, beside a string of birds, beside the waves hanging there. His ladder to the sky has no reference point. Come sky he writes but spells it cum. The cum of sky, the sound of birds scuffling song through evening weeds. Rainbows, sometimes regarded as dragons, appear together as double rainbows. They soar into the sky, mani jewels threading from a string. Cold lake, for thousands of yards, soaks up the sky color. Mother’s Warm Breath 287 �Once there were birds damaged in the flowers. If you look at the horizon after the bird, the memory of the bird or red, where the river flowers leaf out. A bird sings strong and her will to sing is strong, though it frightens her. Her will to sing becomes a branch where she sits. Thus singing loses singing. Subsiding. 288 Mother’s Warm Breath �How dusk fills the tree is how the child’s weight is borne in her. Its feelings are a bowl whose qualities come from the base of itself and is how it truly feels about itself. A bird sings and as I look beyond you to the bird, my mind follows my eyes. But if I gaze and my mind wanders somewhere else, something shifts in the figure of a pigeon I remember touching. As if a pigeon were a natural replica of itself so that seeing it is seeing dark. Mother’s Warm Breath 289 �Holding the bird, sheltering it in my pocket, its warm life drains into the fabric of my sleeve. Seeing the flower in a mirror and the emotion that caused her to see it that way, a little death. Whose attribution is not an appearance, is not opaque, but fluid like a wall or statue made of butter in the still mind of a soldier. 290 Mother’s Warm Breath �Flower is flower and time in her mind out of darkness. The end of sight is clear dogwood, he says, where clear means empty and dogwood the clear light of space. A lama moves and I see his quiet ribs. My grave is made from logs so that night will be left there, he says. When the dogwood becomes earth we say the flower dies, but a child leaves a meadow not its life in the meadow. Mother’s Warm Breath 291 �BOOK II Sky �A woman rests. She is lying on a bed back-to-back with a seated man. Touching is there but its time is not there. A woman rests between time. Like time in special settings and she is the setting whereby time vanishes. So he paints her body, being invisible and also seated on the bed juxtaposed and contiguous with the other person. He paints space though it looks like figures on a bed. The woman’s experience stretches toward the man but is unknowing of the man. Mother’s Warm Breath 293 �I see light in the interstices of her body contracted around their crash in her body. As if shadows cover the hide of sky’s body, the concept of sky’s body being a short cut in time back to the experience, opposing the experience. How sun against the grass continues to the sky, the enclosure of sky, like seeing encloses sky, sky-before-sky, and the hour of sky’s midst. A sapling touches sky or exact moment of sky as philosophy of this sky, beholden to no other sky. 294 Mother’s Warm Breath �So there’s sky and my experience of being sky, opening my hand, letting time be one of sky’s animals. A woman at dusk is green because the animals in sky are the color of the trees. As if there were sun in young green sky so that green may grow wild. A pool of birds on the bayside rill, the knowledge of which, the absolute utter familiarity, not of birds but of birdness drifting south along her orchid’s lips. Mother’s Warm Breath 295 �A feeling begins. She might have been asked to teach this feeling, as if birds learn feelings once they wander from home. Like the sleeve of feeling relating to the sleeve of skin. If she notices, if she sees the bird seeing the feeling arising in her, transparency for transparency. The relation of a sentence to a bird or words to things (a word exposed in the skin of a woman cooking, knowing something not depositable in the room). A bird is light, being light-in-light, or air, in light, in water or air-inair, like a line around air. 296 Mother’s Warm Breath �Shape slips to shape. Slips is for life. Sun rests along with the woman and her chair, the fluidity of time crawling over wood. How light against wood pulls the woman, wing of chair affected by the pitch of the wood’s fire. As if war were there crossing a line of hunger. Mother’s Warm Breath 297 �A bird begins, darkly flying out. Someone sees the bird and thinks of Icarus falling as if falling is time and a boy falling is a measure of falling’s resonance in the person. A woman hears the self of herself falling, from the inside of falling, outside any limits of time. Passing it off as the performance of her falling, her experience of falling outside her experience of feeling falling. Angling its falling and the scattered tits of its breath’s loose scabs. 298 Mother’s Warm Breath �A boy falls in neutrality. Between the feeling of death and death. I have the person, I say, instead of when he was the person, as if the person were its birth, and also, the experience of its birth. Being hey in the spread of a corpse’s tail. We strain events through time as if age is a place jilting her to there. Mother’s Warm Breath 299 �A cricket squeaks, objectifying air, seemingly. The mystery of its disappearance in the dominance of a breeze, as if breeze intrinsically contains squeaking. Yet an eminence rubs off. Light alternately occluded and revealed. A cricket faces east though it is unseen and comes into east slowly. 300 Mother’s Warm Breath �Even my mother disappears in the red carriage. She waits at the side of a snowfield in her hat, which is an elegant hat, beyond her capacity for a hat. A hawk skirts sky along the places where sky stops. As if place were not the hawk but all things touched by the hawk. A caw is like space, gluing space where caws are space. Mother’s Warm Breath 301 �My mother is a cloud like day across a hill. Hill is an agreement. A being’s short life, without the affection of life stirs a memory of experience exterior to what is beheld. Like an offering thrown opposite the sign where a negative force originates. The lines of my hands sink with the sun. Who may you be crawling where I am, dangling from the riverbed? 302 Mother’s Warm Breath �Sometimes I think that my spirit sleeps in water flowers. I sink into the land spreading like a shadow. Violence exudes from the flower’s previous color as in her mind she cannot find the color. Something sad, say, may look to you like a color, like fate is a color. Seeing is conveyed like a boat conveys seeing, seeing death and then its color. Seeing’s inside is color. Mother’s Warm Breath 303 �A woman begins, though her face is absorbed, dark in a dark room. As if dressless, a woman reclines at the bottom of a space, perfectly alone. So a body grows down into itself, which is how a painter can paint himself and not be himself. Seeing the inside of time, the constraint of time, like a flower in a cornfield blossoms into a puzzle. 304 Mother’s Warm Breath �The beauty of air, moist, and her experience of moist as she breathes night, in and out heavily. As if a shell forms inside both of us. The shells of her are lines turning light into a quality of time. Density holds time like water in a lily congeals (sets) so that a cause happens and the result looks like a lily. The pinkness of time whose insides are flowers is in things, shells smelling this way. Mother’s Warm Breath 305 �A bird begins slowly, is risen slowly. A vague line of mind annuls the feeling in a word which is replaced with lines of time tracing the word’s beauty. Time appears but it is color not time. A bird’s loveliness is time. Slow is the horizon itself. 306 Mother’s Warm Breath �BOOK III Mother’s Warm Breath �DOG My old mother barks. I hear her over death. Wake up, someone says. A letter dissolves into the being’s feathers. All the little animals timed to her, playing we, playing the arms and legs, so that there isn’t anything left. The portrait of a dog, its perpetual yank of teeth is a portrait of dissolve, where dissolve too is liberated from what’s false. 308 Mother’s Warm Breath �The brain of the sound loosens into color. I, a dog, claw myself out of solidity. Her toenails are claws and she gets to choose which kind of dog. As the brain descends, darkness descends, in the no-house where the dead assemble. Mother’s Warm Breath 309 �Is the claw a bone? It seems to weigh more than the bone. Like the weight of a bone being suddenly too heavy, as if her body were the wrong body though the bone is okay. I’m trying to remember. Wings are divvied up. The track of one hovered in a spoon. I dedicate something, which sounds like a word but I am dead. 310 Mother’s Warm Breath �Fades in a distant dog. There is a waterfall. Dogs fall into her body. Fades to sea (kerfluffle of brook) the mountains and rivers of that tidepool. The wingspan of a dog has white speckled markings and there are heavenly dogs which she painted. The jiffy of her dog, o my god, in its quick march toward its drumbeat. Mother’s Warm Breath 311 �Someone whispers black, which is enclosed in black like in a wedding of black and me. Since its aggregates are black, I call myself black and sit in it like a dish. The sound of day stops. The wooden dog stops. My hand is me now. So you can’t tell. No one can tell. 312 Mother’s Warm Breath �HAIR Her mind is hair, white, earthy, cropped, like total hair. Give me your hair, someone says, which I think is my mother asking for my hair. Offering hair on a platter, the sound of a plum sits in its color, as if the stomach had her name etched on its flesh. Ripe and dark, like the rind of her being scraped and tossed away. Mother’s Warm Breath 313 �It is the bed inside her mother. Mommy! But the bed is a plum in which the mother insists she sleep. A thin bed, fragrant from practice. As if her skin were too shallow. Which could be food from the settlement of her father. 314 Mother’s Warm Breath �A hair is fed. An offering of hair yielded to the mountain. A youngster bird grey in the mountain. In its plum, spooned up and being. The bird of hair speaks and it is a warm bird, as if air could be a bird, the wait of their tongues having never before been brothered. My voice and your hair thrive on a metronome of waltz time. Mother’s Warm Breath 315 �One fixed to hair. For example nuns, in the white folds of wandering hair. Which the nun hides in a shell, so it is there, with her as she washes, and she knows her hair thoroughly. I, the voyeur, do not perceive her hidden hair. I may not and do not grasp this internal shield. I, the voyeur, am outside the circle that her yellow hair makes there. 316 Mother’s Warm Breath �I intend hair, I say, and begin to practice those qualities that support it. I mean from its depths, like the nondiscursive mystique in the drape of a nun’s habit. You are allowed to be hair, bottomless hair, through drapes whose folds hold the depths of hair’s feeling. I lay upon a rock, ministering to them, to the empty linearity of her mind exposed on a hot day. Mother’s Warm Breath 317 �SKY I make a connection between my mother’s towel as an object and towel as the nature of my old mother in morning sun. She grooms light in the endless cleaning of herself. She bends over sky. I draw sky like a lesson of myself. From outside through a window, an image of her in split-second segments. 318 Mother’s Warm Breath �What a filthy piece of sky, I say, brushing the air with a spoon. You feed sky to the person. A leaf through her skull blows down the valley. She recalls something, the dead child’s face, or more liminally, think of a still-born’s face. So sky is subjective, like a private game of cards, shuffling, dealing, from the bell of each card. Mother’s Warm Breath 319 �Sky is an ability. As if there were a zoo of sky, a rib of sky inside the bird. At large in death inside her own emaciated wingspan. I hug sky, the limbs of sky, mimicking fruition as in starships. 320 Mother’s Warm Breath �Being an angel then, in my own hole of sky. Now I am gone but we still talk, don’t we? Now I am not. The bone-cake of me gone. My old mother’s bones are quarter-moon bones. (Whose butter bones suspends from the sharp essence of her breast.) Sky stops for a moment. Or tree of sky which I experience as a cuff of sky. Mother’s Warm Breath 321 �Eagles rest on it. Are forms projected outside, as if they exist very private and wrapped up. To ascertain the rhythms of sky your fingers tap to that. As if the mind of one were a baby. On the shore of herself, as though time itself, as though time were there running alongside time. Time is color then. A capability from the old river. 322 Mother’s Warm Breath �PIGEON A girl steps out of her tall black dolly. The mother of one, like a doll plopped in the corner. Where is her prettiness? A certain prettiness that you know, that you can even touch. Soft breath from her eyes, but the eyes themselves are rocks. A songbird peers, caws. A fish caws to the harmony as if it knows who it really is. Mother’s Warm Breath 323 �You are the person that you have forgotten. As if the real you fades into air, indistinct from the particles drifting across your face. Where waking sees ground and you are the ground, not dead wood. Being privy to ground (king of ground). A young bald bird sits parallel to the window. The hill inside the bird. (Knowing the hill from seeing the bird’s shadow.) 324 Mother’s Warm Breath �A bird bell tolls by the river of her father. Wrapped in a dress she tucks her wings. So she is just a dress. If you look you see a dress plunked on a step, asleep. Tucked in her dress, tucked like a bird. The spectrum of her inside a chilly bag. But her feet are young. Mother’s Warm Breath 325 �The pigeon is immovable. She rests inside me, looking through me to my daughter. A bracelet at her feet is like a rock carved with her tongue. So I wrap my tongue in bandages. Is the hawk’s wrist in mountainless dead-lands. In the feet of our voices, the feet of the birds are calm. 326 Mother’s Warm Breath �Inexorable coo, are you bleeding? The harp of you, though the monk swore you’d be spared. Seated in its knowing, its face in shadow is alive. So I forget who I am. As if the need stopped. Mother’s Warm Breath 327 �MOTHER’S WARM BREATH i Mother’s warm breath, like a plate of breath. Yet it is old breath, having eaten many crackers. My breath is a wall, she whispers from real breath, instantly present to birds. The energy of the animal appears to be experienced internally, its breath (a shadow) withheld in its own stem. What’s left of mind as a squirrel leaps out? 328 Mother’s Warm Breath �If she pulls air out, in a tantrum say, or superior air, parceling it out to descendents. I feel the sweet journey of your air, she muses. Swift and stark, its transmission in a jar. A harem of air bustling down the hallway, a trance of air parting through itself. I am cleaning my air, she’s saying, as if the air were inside her stomach. Mother’s Warm Breath 329 �As if the air were blood and she is poured into a glass. Air is definitely blood, someone says. Warm green blood from the mittens around her legs because there’d be a war of dogs, afterwards, in the bushes. To accrue war she saves up the noble green color because pure view is always seen through the light of the five colors. My nails are on fire, she says, seeing her hands in a later version of hands (like being friends with her hands when they are dog’s hands). 330 Mother’s Warm Breath �How many hands are in the dog’s hooves, she wonders, because paws are everywhere. As if all the hands were grabbing her tits greening everywhere. A birdhouse of tits so that the feeder-birds chew green blood from the mother. I am ordained in blood, the samaya “blood” whose liturgy I’ve accomplished. Mother’s Warm Breath 331 �ii My mother is a place. And a being from there having qualities, as if she is also from there. From the inside of her being her, gradually becoming her in the same taste as russet-pink. Russet-pink is a field carrying one’s pure essence, like a whiff, oh! that’s her! Maybe some pawmarks. Totems of her gaining belly from herself. 332 Mother’s Warm Breath �A place is by chance (like pain is a guess). Like a lid with its definite jar, she’s attached to this, thinking maybe there’s no other jar. The lid has a slogan, which she wears and thinks it’s not right if her family does not. Like a birth word, say. Every person has one word. Mother’s Warm Breath 333 �Held adrift by old old hearing. Don’t touch you! says her own face. (For she recognizes the previous resentment and its marks on her old face.) As if spring follows summer and we are already at the beginning. If my father is murdered, does that mean I am dead or (like one’s face in sound) about to be dead? 334 Mother’s Warm Breath �A legacy of light is separate from reflection, like a legacy of dog only sees itself. So there is mourning but not knowing. She could be a dog thinking she’s a dog. Her formless growl cracks like a flower, like shards of voice but one hears only the thinnest outermost skin. I harbor myself in the familiarity of something, air, leaves, peacocks running across a field. Mother’s Warm Breath 335 �People coming in like the last second of her knowing. As if she’d snapped her teeth. Stealing knowing, she becomes simple. In the interstices of a plan, like knowing skips to what’s there anyway. The value of her in the real actual sitting down, till she rests. 336 Mother’s Warm Breath �iii It’s a disclaimer, the notion of a dog on the outskirts of her own dog. Her groin is young. Her pointy nose brings out the animals. Her voice has tongues and the tongues also have some. The muscles in her tongue carving my name fast. That’s why I die, sipping myself away. Mother’s Warm Breath 337 �Being old and cold, living in a box. I pull on her tongue so that the air can be colorful. Can you fit into a word? I ask politely. (It is a long thin tongue.) A droplet of rain ripens. Where is the daughter of this body? Are boxes of tongues, postures of tongues, juxtaposed and contiguous with one’s internal experience of tongues? 338 Mother’s Warm Breath �Her name begins in the back of my throat, bubbles in throats, like a cliff of throats. In the fro of the dream, as if beauty were beyond it. I look closely at her throat whose little hairs wrinkle. I saw them be calm. A stream of heads are throatless and I begin to think, SHE STOLE THE THROATS. Mother’s Warm Breath 339 �I, mother of a word, am also mother of its flesh. I, mother of a throat, cannot know its container. The ebb of a word still in her mouth. Whaaat? Whaaat did you say? she’d say, as if lugging the word up. Her whaaat is space, each letter jettisoned from crayola. 340 Mother’s Warm Breath �White Bird contents First Grandchild 342 The Elements 367 The Fourth Part of Air 384 White Bird 393 �First Grandchild �1 The Jambu continent is called the Jambu continent because a fruit of the great Jambupriksha tree fell into a lake, making the sound “jam.” As one thousand buddhas will come and the teachings flourish, this Jambu continent is considered supreme and is called “The Victorious Southern Jambudvipa.” This continent contains twenty-four great lands, ninety-nine small lands, three hundred and sixty different clans, one hundred and eight remote areas and one thousand and two extremely remote places. The Land of Snows is one of them. So hovering in a row, the breath of the row in its high peak of rows. White Bird 343 �Squares of light are cool settling night in a row. The hill air is cool, like a tower of air carrying through to nothing. Each night the sun yields its bit of darkness to the child. The darkness squats and plays dark but the child knows that it is dark. The child counts the pieces of dark unsullied by subdued and broken darknesses. 344 White Bird �Dark is solid but is also its own lamp. That’s why the sun is dark. Each night the sun gathers its arm. Each night the sun electrifies the sky as if sun is sky’s fathomlessness. Like being awake in your blood before it is your blood in the subtle state of not being at war with sky, you mutter. Clouds of crows carry sky back. Should I, quick, whisper in one’s ear? White Bird 345 �Each time one dies, one’s breath, like the moon, hangs from a hook of sky. Like a leaf crosses a twig and he waves the twig. The twig had already been waved though. To sleep in oneself, as if one is alive, but not really, only until something happens. As if the clarity, the full-on bindu, amortizes itself, emptying itself, as if the leaf too, wheeling from sky, drops from the throat of sky. 346 White Bird �2 Then her speaking image of a person catches fire. In my dream a man is wearing birds and my speaking image of the birds . . . she clearly sees the long stream of qualities pouring themselves all over his body. A woman eats holding her mouth above her. You are tall, and your mouth, too, is a tall, lean mouth. She longs to be near what she’s sure she remembers knowing, as if an image has an ear and it is your own ear so you want to be near it. Like the sound of her birth in the far-flung distance of birds. White Bird 347 �Because the air is there whether you’re awake (or you could be awake beforehand). Whether before, occurring as in the darkness of something. I mean before the crows, but the dakinis have already taken them. If one’s mind clearly holds what is previously, to recall how in the past such things exist anyway. (Like the woman washes her hair in a lake and the lake nearly dies.) It knows me in its eye. If I part from me, the rape is left, but the eye stays inside my belly. 348 White Bird �So much water making her a person, like a bone in water is the slain inside her. Instead of her own, she is their hair, the skin of her hair being mother-hair. A portrait of hair tucked in one’s mother, as-if it is her hair not having quite left her mother. A woman locks her hair. It falls inward and she feels the falling inside the hair’s cud. White Bird 349 �The her of her hair is not in my fingertips. The her of her mind lacks the valence of my sorrow. Lung and tail, I consist. I am, I say. I am in the boat of me. 350 White Bird �3 I am her. I am her. I think it is my mother saying something in a dream. She sleeps in her now, but it is the memory of her, not the person being her. Thus people see a form’s endless slipping, like a tour of herself drifting along her bloodstream. At the foot of air (like a bloodspot in air) or is it the real air. White Bird 351 �Is that death, you ask, because the straightest line is death. So much down deep as a spring morning. When she wakes it is still down, so close to her face, further and further. I’m trying to remember that particular mustard-color, like a bloodbath of down, stand-in for all downs. 352 White Bird �Birds grow down. Each harp of down, each plucking twining chord of down’s interior pause, so that I am (in the pause). A hummingbird dissolves into its own pure form. One thumb moves as if venturing towards it slowly. Oh! the mother dolly begins, but it is a pretend mother. (However there was a possible mother, I mean a mother exists who could be her mother.) The real mother, whom she’d not yet met, would not have said Oh! White Bird 353 �The beauty of sky relates to birds flying out of sky. At dusk the hill withdraws into its form. (Through birds, quiet has a mode.) First grandchild is extreme, I think, as a mode’s emptiness accrues. I am that, I’m thinking. A tree lashes night to quiet, then falls away leaving the quiet naked. 354 White Bird �4 Being the person dreaming and now, saying hello to the person who, in the dream thinks, I am also the dream! Dreams implode inward and multiply, like a virus, sort of. The belly of the dream sits in its plate as if the mind of someone were growing from the plate. I am eating for my plate, the mind says. I am my own faller, being in my mind my own kind of falling. Death is in the center. White Bird 355 �Being the person dreaming, though dead again. A mind thinks but is dead. A young bird falls as if from the sky but it’s from the water where sky was. You hear the drops of a being, then each piercing droplet of being’s time. I feel her sky in the mass of me today. She smells the inside of me today. 356 White Bird �Empty becomes empty-in-the-mass-of-me-today, like a bone gets loose and falls away in the rain. A stream of fish crosses her heart. One drinks her milk and is appeased in its fish-ness, like a baby fish would be coming out of its shell. The baby is frozen. Not many war people come here, she’s thinking. Blue is raw, the ocean like teeth. (Inside the teeth are the color of the teeth.) White Bird 357 �If a dream implodes and then its bits of dreams (I’m thinking hounds of sky-hawks flaring their wings, tooting their wings almost.) Even without the wings there can be an experience of wings, but she prefers the sound of her mother’s skirt is to sun like the breast of the sea buried in it. Because the things that we are turn about and become who we are. I am definitely your mother, someone whispers softly, but it is just my voice as if far away. 358 White Bird �5 A bird’s song fills the morning. Between song and morning there is space. Like she could draw an ideal of the little bird’s voice. So tenderly green, so now-green. A bird doesn’t speak but its motion is stored in its body. How will I know, she says, watching the bird see its own face. Seeing itself there, nipping at air, the traces of itself still in air, like a grike, say, pushing the bird inside its air. White Bird 359 �Seeing the brain of the face. So much medley tearing up the face. Each person must unwrap her face, memorize her face, someone hollers. It’s like a belfry, you comment. A ring of bay and little sips of sky knocking about the water. It’s hard to say if the air falls away, the lure of away, behind the fog (what’s actually taking place). A bowl of green water may be placid tight water, but it’s me being tight, accomplishing green, you whisper. 360 White Bird �Air leaks from her bones. The last moment of air is the thinnest air, she’s thinking. I take my thinness seriously, he says, placing his mother in a bowl. (As if an animal blows away and is found on its back in a bowl.) Air gets tired, you say, but if you clutch air, mauling a poor, tired section of air. A dull green bowl holds the water of my air, because the mind of the person is a trilogy of air told through mother-air and father-air. White Bird 361 �You in my air on my birthday cake sighing. (Though I did not. I was only sighing for her.) You in the village of people-less thought searching for that connection. The gist of a bird is the animal of its relatives. (She could see its ochre bill and the young tooth of another new child.) A symbol of one’s animal seems to slip down her fingers, crawling over them also (and has its own animal also). 362 White Bird �6 Each night the trees slip into sky becoming themselves. Does the grandmother exist? She sees the sky weakening back. Her creamy eyes bulge, slipping back to themselves. She imagines the trees rocking. Trees light passing tips of sound. You watch them disappear, like a man walks back to nothing. White Bird 363 �The lips and teeth of wood hang quietly in grandmother’s face. I am wintering in me, she says. She doesn’t want someone speaking out loud. Time is exposed. Grandmother! I gasp, but it’s a heart gasp, like her death. Within the death are letters. If you harm the death, someone begins, because a letter is flesh, beautiful as a peacock. Her breath too might swallow itself. So many rings lapping waves of sorrow on her broken dress-buttons. 364 White Bird �See an eating turkey seeing, the pebbles of its eyes weighing down the sky. It’s because grandmother’s skin looks tight. Her eyeballs are too poppy like she sees through time, whereas I don’t. Seeing the ignorance in her skin, its reticulations hanging. The crevice in her mind, its wrinkles hanging. Seeing her shape press itself there, like the mud of a bed of a river. White Bird 365 �Her heart, too, imprints into her skin, pressing its shape into the room. I may find sky, she continues, forgetting. To me her mind feels brushed. I am fine, she says, creating a support. I am fine, she repeats, her wooden gaze lasted to her. (Fine is space so her mind is protected.) Grandmother’s body’s space seems heavy. Sometimes she leaks out. I say leak because, later, if she moves, aspects of her do not move. 366 White Bird �The Elements �E A RT H A tulip’s knowing is from before knowing, you say mildly. I’m thinking, That’s time. Like when Khyungpo Naljor displayed the five Tantric deities present in his five chakras saying ‘From now on, never see me as ordinary, not even for a moment.’ Time is your own mind, you repeat, and I have a memory of myself disappearing, not in death but somehow being me another way. Like I’m me without a precedent, as if your body is you in the name of a foreign person. A spring of dark lingers in time. It was time before but now the boy draws time. The clear beauty of one whose color is the great color. 368 White Bird �To hear the evening sung in night’s dim peace. I am me and then the person who is really me. The traces of her (or bowl of her) like she could be that and grow into someone saying hello to someone. The collapse of yellow altogether unnerves me. Like the sheer end of yellow. Time seems to be more like that, or the feeling of time sticks on you, you add. It’s just whatever you see the world, like a childless person sees, actually, what is being passed over. White Bird 369 �One imagines time folding back into the cliff. Death, as a figure, turns into a rock, though its flesh is soft, pinchable like a human’s. Behavior takes place after its occurrence. I move and am aware that I have already done this. One imagines time dripping over the hill. She hides inside, feeling hill into its space, so that all her lifetimes happen together. Only when you are completely through it can the ink of “hill,” the swift calligraphy in its soft Western snowfield, become a roaring geshé-like blessing. 370 White Bird �WAT E R A junket of fish is in the crook of a man’s mind, so circular in his mind, as if the world, as if his mind and the world become the dawn of fishlessness. Far and near, like the junket is as-if versus the smell inside his head. So many fry wandering around, as-if eternity, the transvestite, is just more precise fish-hood. As-if one transmutes the fish’s consciousness to a Pure Land, which is just an aspect of my consciousness seeming as-if far away. White Bird 371 �The man bites off its head, mumbles, then throws the fish toward similar headless fishes. As-if its distance wakes me, like the throes of a cloud pressing space into its shape. The memory has shape and the shape time. Distant and close merge in the fish, which has duration. I mean an imprint of time settles in its skin, as-if its skin had been that. 372 White Bird �The fish is ME! (The afflicted mind is an inwardbearing motion.) Nevertheless, as the fish recedes, the ilk, all the ilks share the same essence. My raspy throat converges with the cut throats of that fish pile. Rakshsas wandering through sky enter into people’s throats, she recalls. A residue of fish coats the skin of my throat and sometimes I feel I am not my throat. White Bird 373 �I am longevity instead. Because someone prayed. Someone saw the pile of fish’s bodies and prayed for their long lives anyway. Mercy lasts, you say flatly. The fish enter the divine is all. The man who cut their throats knew the precise consequences of his action, therefore his assiduous practice of slicing, tossing, eating, as-if his belly were a globe. His belly WAS a globe, you say. 374 White Bird �FIRE An island backs toward night. Thin slabs of shore and soft eyes heaving toward these. Am I dead? (I am nine birds.) A quarry of birds drifts in fragile evening sky. A lion mounts a yak washing back through sky. Sky is a floor and the two animals are flying but they are really on the floor. When lambs are in the sky meowing, each lamb is, a cross passing over the water. White Bird 375 �A bird is poised. She rocks her space gently. She offers her tongue to taste what is held off. Because she speaks in such pure stream, her gaze of tongue. Each and every blade of a zinnia is me, she sighs. Swarms of arms lay at her side. It could be death. I am the stomach of my death fallen to the earth. Embers of me are held in sky’s arm, but which, which arm actually slides over the horizon? 376 White Bird �A bird or fish toned by where it flies, slips into its landmark. A graceful bird, its lip chewed by its mother. She reaches to its lip, chewing passionately. I try to chew passionately. (That is how she instructs her infant birdlings.) I want to be kind is said by the mother. The mother of my lip, I lay awake wondering if she is happy. White Bird 377 �AIR The razed town is part of a wall now, I’m reading, and I know that really the bones and eyes are me only the book doesn’t reveal that. The skin of the town is injured, which I carry. When something touches my skin I feel both the present and the past, the way it feels, taken by itself, without anything added. Animals are there. They recall their skin. Some animals scratch, as if they could scratch the knowing away. I see a being and know that it’s me being that being in someone’s time that’s simply slower than knowing. 378 White Bird �I am always dreaming time, you say, as if tenderly knowing the color of your grave-clothes. One forgets that it’s knowing. A thought presses through the ridgelines of one’s hand (the silence inside one’s hand). Like a monk knows something, which could be light or snow or lilies but it doesn’t matter because his teacher sees it also. When I press on light there is a thought inside, just beneath the skin, like subcutaneous knowing. White Bird 379 �Sometimes I hear a sound closer than my skin (the distinction between me and the skin). I definitely have never heard this sound, I’m thinking, all the while knowing absolutely that my skin has. If you look at a flower then close your eyes, you definitely know the inside of the flower because your citta has assumed the flower’s pattern. So if you forget the flower you can still have it, like you can crawl inside the flower. If your citta is alive, like a rooster in a field. Each dawn the freefall of wings. 380 White Bird �SPAC E Now it is summer and cherries are hard, nubile on-the-tongue. Now (as in India) I climb a shed of sky. A bird eats a worm near a tree, but it is space, their host, the nucleus being the passion of one. Walking westward in sky, where home is a plate of sky. Howsoever I walk, the stride of space is one. White Bird 381 �A woman in my dream walks briskly down a hill and I, a cornucopia of space, am overflowing with little horizons of spaciousness. The space that she wanted was the space inside her, that she would see say in a tree, the way a branch gives way to sky. A bed is spread beneath the tree, wider and deeper into the tree. Each night she looks out on the hill and if the lines of sky land quietly on the hill, in integrity with its grass, she feels she is dreaming grass, maybe being inside the grass. 382 White Bird �Huckleberry Finn also. Floating down the river he feels inside the river and when he is wholly inside, his breath stops. If you envision light at the point of the trikuti, the small light there that enlarges more and more, as long as you visualize that amplified light, the breath stays stopped. The gross perception of breath leaves me now. Farls of nothing leave me starved. Death is a place and someone goes to death, as if going is the non-going of an echo. White Bird 383 �The Fourth Part of Air �You look at the sky through the tusk of a hill and a cloud disbands of scattered ones. A songbird chirps. The cry of a dog turns to sky. As if a nerve from sky measures her appearance within a context of light settings. A leaf unfurls, then fades into sky. Space is not sky, even though she’s dead. A bone of sky (one, two, three line up as skies), a wheeze of sky as if gotten out of the desert. White Bird 385 �A bird touches sky. It seems so sure. Sure displaces sky just at my ear-tip. The space of my dead mother is a content of mind, a shock of rest fallen from sky. Birds click sky toward the perfection sky. In their space are flowers falling. And after rain the full bare sky, deep black, like a sea of shells. 386 White Bird �I see a woman in a brace and the brace holds her up, but the brace is just breath. I am definitely what comes out of a trumpet, she’s saying. Its echo is like her whole mouth. Movement inhabits her whole mouth. It slowly slips down, though the girl in the death house, she’s too thin. Her death is too there. Very tangible air (cloth air) arrives in her there, in the fourth part of air, breathing her back to air’s non-air. White Bird 387 �A woman sits alone. The lines of her life spread. Her body waits for air to tip. The branching off of age grips a person’s face. A certain opaque color inhabits it like a lake. There is a hat-bearing person. What I hear is the hat swinging from side to side. The flesh of such greens. Like crushed paper in a branch sweeping ground-cover into green. 388 White Bird �My mother is a color (she could grow her color), like if a bird constellates in the blue of its color. As if her face were on me, a faint breeze or burr in the side of the dead one. In other rooms, under-rooms, a glimpse of her death in lieu of knowing the deep accord of her own death. The candles of a shade breathe the word without the illusion and the breath of us exchanging ourselves. White Bird 389 �So I laugh and compliment a person on her color. What’s that shade? I say and she says marigold, which is SO beautiful. She is wanting to tell the color, but is it the real color? Real could be a color. A woman sees me, an impression that doesn’t erase her image of me. Now I am real, I’m thinking, as if now contains the moment that that can occur. 390 White Bird �Am I alive? Maybe I’m just space. I am an interior walking through the door. The time of light may pass, you say. Light may fall outside its space. A lattice of light, a pod of light, gobbling space, or not space, light’s taste. You locate the light in the undergrowth of darker ones, a pale glow as if I am being buried. White Bird 391 �Food is light. Teeth are light. Her teeth grind back. Its Use is her presence. Her teeth are like a sling of teeth hitting you in the air. So there are mother teeth and father teeth beginning from the beginningless white and red bindu. Now, in the age of teeth, I mean hers are swollen and I am left with something I cannot piece together. 392 White Bird �White Bird �1 A man wearing birds, sitting in birds, inside the birds’ flow. Together they’re called White Bird. White Bird grows tall. White Bird hugs his own legs back. The meditation of sky streams into his heart so there’s a passage of heart into which he may relax. White Bird relaxes back into his heart, breathing white, like the beauty of a seed or wind in a bird’s hair. A man sits in wind wearing few clothes, but the birds come and sit on him like clothes. 394 White Bird �White Bird stops. Summer light swarms his shell and the blue shell breaks. The beauty of his wing fills with sky. A gull too drags its sky. As if it were an ear gathering in sky. Beauty is sky. Beauty is rain in sky’s past sky. White Bird 395 �My mother’s arm is pure, its curve of sky seeping into structures. Then later someone says, That person is a dead person. So then I think, The beauty of sky’s color flows from her arm reminding me of her arm. I want to wear sky, I holler. (I am in tune with degrees of my mother hanging from death like a soft shoe.) Her yellow armpit sags, like old newspapers would be lying fallow as they do on distant fields. 396 White Bird �A man buys socks but it is really death lurking in sky. I want to dust sky out so that my limbs swallow themselves. He looks, passing by death, as if he is new, in sky now, as he puts it. O look at the birds! They’re combing each other’s hair! (He’s watching a bird gather its gorgeousness.) My mother is a line. Within the death-lines she is one. But a node on her blackens and then she is not my mother. White Bird 397 �I know a bird whose color is sky before the sky admits itself. Like the brain of a color if sky admits the bird. A mountain is visible inside the bird then. Its color dies then. A queen bird releases into sky. There’s the sky! someone says, as if there is sky, the location sky. That bird knows me well, I’m thinking, because the bird is mostly dead. 398 White Bird �Here is a corner of sky, mother says, fondling a dead bird wrapped up in her pocket. (The bird had lost sky. That’s why it died.) I am the oscillations of a flower, inside, like a flower’s brevity, she whispers. A tall bird tumbles through sky. The touch of its voice is like a raw egg folded into zero. My mother feeds me air, the tablature of air, doubling air, forcing it to become air to something. White Bird 399 �I dream of air (a box of air) because I conflate air with my dead mother. She could taste the flavor of the box and in her mind suck out the box. (Secretly she criticized people who didn’t suck.) Her feet swell in air. The ascending foot, like you could crawl inside the foot. Who is the end of my mother? Who is the end of my death? (I am organizing myself backwards.) Flowers fall, but mountains blossom in air. Born in air, I’m in air already, like a broken piece of air. 400 White Bird �2 Sometimes a tree lies flat against sky and its outline in sky makes a sound. The sound has a color that is not something I know. The sound of a flower goes anywhere, you say. The water of its breast dribbles down the grass, which is old grass, with old sound, barely any. So then I think, My mother is dead but when I sleep with her, I’m old. White Bird 401 �A woman stands alone. She swings her eyes out past nothing. If you look at a squirrel and see it very clearly, its feeling pulls back, pulls its loyalty back. Squirrels are always alone. May the squirrel never be alone, she continues, as if time were a bottle of water. As if a young calf molts or a snake coils around a flower and then is the flower. 402 White Bird �Is it true or false, a child demands, hearing that petunia-lands exist. For sound doesn’t die, though its lineage may, like Buddha Shakyamuni’s dharma. Sharsin, Muni Sharsin, they say. Muni Sharsin means Buddha Shakyamuni’s dharma, which the Buddha said, without the lineage will die. Thus the longevity of a sound’s hand dissolves into its legacy of repertoire. Which is not acquisitive, does not form a habit of being. It’s the loin of the habit of the sound. White Bird 403 �3 Can sand laugh? You see sand and then sand’s throat. I mean the lax throat of her death-rattle. Is it a whole throat? Be aware of the whole throat. Take the climate of her throat. Like she could set it on the sill and it would still be her throat. Because things exist, and then exist, and their detritus is left in the mouth of the person. 404 White Bird �I see a photograph of her throat, which is not the actual throat. Where is her throat in the wake of that? (I’m guessing that means after her throat.) Does it learn? you ask. (I’m trying to remember if her throat learned during its lifetime as my mother.) Someone is the location of what once was my mother. (There are pigs, dogs and someone is riding the dog.) It’s the still core of an eye, thus my mother almost. She begins in her heart, like a step ladder of hearts all within one heart. White Bird 405 �A little dog trapes across the edges of a carcass, its spots blowing toward birth. The weight of its space creeps under space. (This is called ‘opening the space gate.’) Her parakeet that died can release itself in space. (She pictures her mother in an agony of space, beyond what she can imagine as being, as if her mother is, somehow, without being.) Take a maximum bird. One feather fills the canyon and its children eat plentifully. BECAUSE FROM TODAY SHE IS NOT DEAD. 406 White Bird �The Bardo Books contents Death 408 Bathing Suit 420 Black 430 Cow 437 Hunt 443 Birth 448 �Death �A man breaks fish. The man mentally smoothes its fins so that they don’t stick out. I’m waiting to be black, he’s saying, but it is food he’s uttering. I can see the food grow in his eyes. Though the black diffusion of fish swims away from the horizon, the fish continue endlessly. I see the fish who is my brother. Its time is pink like mine. We flow in the same yard. The Bardo Books 409 �Maybe my mother is a former fish whose throat was broken by the man. I offer her a word. I lift the word to the level of my forehead. Where’s my death? she is asking. But I think it’s the clairvoyance of my mother, the instant in her dream wandering around her body parts. Once she saw sun draining down a mountain path, like the ridges of a shell, the beauty of a hump on death. 410 The Bardo Books �Before my mother is dead, I begin, but you say, No. ‘before’ is a word. Words are time. Of is its existence. The time of the word, dead (the word), hanging from sky, is an activity that she knows from already having been dead. Time is not skin in which body parts are wrapped, but of ineffable pink flamingo fluff, later, back in the hotel room. The Bardo Books 411 �So there is this dream of a mother somewhere in death. Actually she isn’t dead, but merely spaces I shuffle around. As if a cold steel point is inserted in her with the sense that this is correct, this is good to insert this inside you. It’s the dead person, she thinks. Like a Harlem of her lying on either side of me, but someone says, No! Go to school, as if wherever she is is center but not the center of anything. Then I go, Oh, she’s dead! seeing as before, heavy rice-tassels ripening in the fields. 412 The Bardo Books �* Low sun from above you on lilies, blue flags. She walks a hill and the cool sun is prescient she feels. Like a garden of animals, caribou, birds, rhinoceros soaking, so that the sun emerges in them darkly. Dusk is like a hen absorbing herself into her chickens, she murmurs. The wrinkles of the sun swell on your back and I’m thinking, There’s the sun, but it’s just one of the five poisons. The Bardo Books 413 �A man stands on a hill. Light and birds and leaves dribble from his fingers. Unnnnn, he utters. I am without rivers. I am without a sound that can be replicated. As how light passes through death, like the skin of a bird peeled from its wing. A young bird honks, honk-honk-honk, as if its feathers are a territory, too excavated, almost the whole weather. 414 The Bardo Books �A body melts in sun. A herd melts. A melted herd is called downward directness. Because what is isolated is stopped. Air’s inside is caught. Upward directness stopped is like movement’s absolute inside. A hat might exist, in this sun, like snow in sun or a flower pressing sun. The beauty of the hat is because our world is situated at the heart level of Buddha Immense Ocean Vairochana, a person remarks. The Bardo Books 415 �Sun slips to sea as if air were sea so that within slipping there is existence. Sea is fact. And each sea avuncular like a family structure. I look out to sea and the green ripples wave and a little boat drifts like a concept I can forget about. The splendor of water admits a line of morning light, which could be light repelling its own limit or light irrespective of her sense of limit. 416 The Bardo Books �Somehow a bird slips away from its limits, therefore it exists, like a rainbow or a raindrop. The fusion of a shell touches a current of shells, or like the inside of a wave, if I died, it would be the same as seeing the wave in a mirror. If I look at the sun, slowly, imagining it’s a meadowlark, something is solidified in the tense mind of my hand. A mirror appears to take my hand inside, but I want my hand to be its own inside. The Bardo Books 417 �Which is of time, like being fed time. Taste is in her neck, the city of her body. A dead boy leaves a trail in a house toward the bottom of its body. Like if a peach dies and becomes decipherable, like the inside of my food. Daylight in a voice or the skin of sea is a separate gesture cordoned off as if for that you would have to stand in line. 418 The Bardo Books �I am now a person touched by sea, the motion of sea inside the horse, harvesting the horse. Maybe the artist drew the horse’s shell after it was a horse. The beauty of a horse is forever, you mutter. The scale of a horse inside a man or a man possessed by a dzo pulling a blazing cart of fire—the lines of thought cannot, like a ‘shippei,’ be grasped tightly in one’s fist. If a horse eats sea, it’s sea’s endless rocking land, the climax of one becoming one again, recycling what has never left. The Bardo Books 419 �Bathing Suit �A woman begins, is the value of space, like a child in a pool, shuffling air in which hard wood is air. She breathes through wood, taking sharp quick breaths. I want the soft cloth of children, she’s saying. Her breath has height and the texture of children swimming, new swim, out and out, yet clearly touching the bottom. The mind of wood may rest itself to completion, she murmurs. Wood and air is swimming there, in the space of air filtered through a dark forgotten memory. The Bardo Books 421 �She is complete air. She tucks herself in air, as in the taste of breath, the babysteps of breath. She is anterior to her air and tries to tie air like a ball. Someone gives me a ball and I tie up the ball. I feel certain that I want to tie the ball. She calls it air because it’s there like air, but actually it’s a kind of stupidity. 422 The Bardo Books �Swimming is like a captivity in its body. Every minute in a row I am swimming everywhere and wanting to spend my time swimming swimming swimming. Because death, too, is an integer. I say ‘grass’ and it follows me into longevity. The absence of time, like grass without time, or a lizard in its skin but outside time so that its purity lay in its body. The brain of the sky snaps an instant to its purity because everything perceived is Buddha Vairochana. The Bardo Books 423 �My mind vanishes then. Inside its skin it has its male and female aspects. A pool of mind is a passage of light, raw light, the membrane between the watery part of light. A person flows through wood and is the breath of a swimmer, like two dead people in love. Air in a heart is the same air resting there. 424 The Bardo Books �* A woman walks but she is dead. Her red dress is dead. She is pasted on a page like a paper doll. There is a handbag and hat that can be separately attached, which is how clothing exists if the person is not living. She longs for herself in the stray black bonnet, alone, by the sea, soft as a wave. She takes in sky like a flower sky. If I see you, then see you as if you were an outline, it’s like seeing an avoidance. The Bardo Books 425 �An image of a body has the sweet porous colors of body + ideal body, like the image of a bather standing under sky where sky, a haze of pink, traces itself onto the person’s body. Piercing a bather snuggly wrapped in towel, piercing straight through her body. To be a small body on the underside of the color. A housekeeper of color, someone remarks. (A bird swims in time that has already escaped.) I see the bather’s legs, long and clipped, its posture of mind rooting repetitious shadows. 426 The Bardo Books �The body is a uniform wearing the person. Color leaks out. A painted bather’s body is how light looks like this color. A bather’s cap and suit mark that person. Blue is the form of the feeling of her standing within boards shaped like a skeleton of sky. Boards in sky have a plethora of sky as if it’s sky that’s being constructed. The mark is interior, like the film of an angel disengaging from its body, wrapping itself around a life, saying I am my own angel. The Bardo Books 427 �Opaque light under a bather’s knee, reflecting from its knee, because we’re through the knee, seeing a miasma of lustrous color. As if sky is knee because of the bather and sky’s proximity. A bardo of knee makes time that is a color. (The interval of a knee where red skips to a color.) So a painter paints a shape that is an appearance of time’s color, like a word appears as object and can be the object even in darkened space. 428 The Bardo Books �Sky sheds words. The language of its space harkens toward direction, as if each object has its indigenous essential direction and the painter paints that. The interest in a knee wells up from light, like time plucked from myriad pools of time that whisper, I am that time. Roses are pure gold, their presence sartorial, upright. Scent is cast by their shadow. I sleep myself back to a set point of sky, like a ration of sky, raising the mass of doubt. The Bardo Books 429 �Black �A black bird’s hair flows in the wind as if instinct pursues forward but forward is inside its body. Because ordinary birds cannot implant as an animating principle the non-direction of breath. A black bird lifts. Direction, not sensed, but being in the time of the bird’s body which the is-ness of its nest matches. I know your breath. The vibration now channels through the black part because black-on-black is how its breath is sheltered. The Bardo Books 431 �Sweet water on the bird (the bounteous color of black as a form) dissolves back into its body. High black, like butterflies leaving imprints, in deference to that, which, after disappearance, is what is left. The allure is time, direction underneath itself, falling through wind, gushing through a mountain stream. She stares into a lake. A butterfly drifts on the surface of the water. Its wing is torn and she imagines its life rising briefly above its death before drifting off. 432 The Bardo Books �A body dissolves and there is no memory of its having been undissolving. Like a bird whose hair got swallowed of its color. It is sizeless, jigsawing red, as if red is the surrogate of all possible places. A man taps a bird on the window of its head. He can dissolve without passing away, someone says. Then I am in my body but not captive in my body, because the reflection of my body as a “high” black bird got swallowed up. The Bardo Books 433 �I describe an ideal of bird, a content of mind, like the sharpening of her hair so that she has little vajras of hair. Don’t suck your hair, her mother yells. An ideal of something ripening, a child’s bird near a nobleman’s. I want to put my bird near his so it will learn to sing with the same beautiful voice, the child explains. Her body has a sound and each limb I trace around my leg. Its breath-imprints paint the space of breath-swept thought. Like crammed flowers in a barrel hold together the heart of the person. 434 The Bardo Books �Vajra is extent, no hair the space of being so happy. A mother abides and is in favor of her (as at a baseball game sort of). A wind-stroke of abiding, like the earth on its axis, which as we find out, doesn’t make any difference. To cultivate the awkward eye, the bird’s back eye, under its shoulder sleeping (in the bottom way of a being’s shrill sleep). The circumference of her sleep makes a limit in her body so that she cannot move beyond the elusive space of her body. The Bardo Books 435 �The no-hair of her is exact her, so the mother thinks, I am not her. Then the mother fights. I am her also. Somewhere, like the bird, is why I keep one near me also. Slow words are on its belly. If you crawl under the bird, you see script you can decipher. A lexicon of hair (like a ballet of hair) so that repeatedly we converge on the edge of earth. 436 The Bardo Books �Cow �A woman paints cows in the passionate arena of some easiness in her. She relaxes into cow and paints a full and complete rectangle of color from her own memory. Like a wheelbarrow of cow (red squares may faintly vary according to the grass, which the woman doesn’t paint). The woman paints cows but she is actually painting her mind waving a khata for three seconds at death. 438 The Bardo Books �Of course there is the painting of a blue girl as if the artist’s mother were dead. I too am in deadland. That quickening sense, as if she were a hall. The animals of a person come out. Once I was pure. Now the casing of kittens unfolds on my bed and my mother’s ignorance spills out. If she cooks I am afraid. If she hears I’m in the dynasty. The Bardo Books 439 �Then a bird swoops down, soaring like a vulture. The tail of the bird shines its domino white/red/black. No-cow is cow, cow-time, or the fun of its calf, who is ticklish and laughs. So there’s a double cow, my dead mother’s mind, instead of her having her own. A woman plans her mind but quickly pastes something over it so it is lost. 440 The Bardo Books �The milk-white bird lands on a cow’s head. The coils of the bird are like the value of wind suddenly. The cow sits without breath, skin colored like a tree. The moon could be a boat and the cow jumps over the boat only it is sitting and breathless and there is no water. An old cow moos from below itself upwards. In the gaps of the cow, because the light of the moon makes the cow REAL. The Bardo Books 441 �A brown and white cow grazes on a hill. A common cow merging with the hill, as if it were a shelf holding all of the hill’s karma. The speed of the hill slows. Its eyes are just beginning, you proffer. A dead person becomes permeable. I’m that buttercup! I’m golden in the cow, a clear gold buttercup blossoming in the cow’s stomach. The tenderness of rushes and sweet voice of birds, a broom and bell till all sounds fluff them out. 442 The Bardo Books �Hunt �A songbird steps through sky, absorbs the moor into its shadows. Its woolly bottom carries the number of nights it has been alive. The habit of sky moves in its bones. As how a verb, energetically transcends its sphere of meaning. The chore of it is the meaning. The movement of the land, wet and cold, rubs the man’s limbs. His gun is slack like an intelligence he can’t quite muster. A game bird’s flesh in air absorbs the brother air of his body. As if the bird is hunting his body and knows the use of his body. 444 The Bardo Books �The head of a bird glows. Is it day or the bird? (The motility of its edges seeps through day like water.) Pieces of day. A pigeon moves in its body. If you leave air, there is no air, someone says. Sky bathes air like lineage brought from air. I have a pearl between my tail which can’t cross over the threshold. The wing of the bird drains of its flight as if one’s life is sped up so one can die. The Bardo Books 445 �The beauty of a kill hangs in fog, which is what the man is seeking. He is married to kill still living there. He is in and out of color. Like he could pet the color, whose correlate is nativity. My stumps have knees but my legs cannot hold them. (Plum light weaves through my idea of the sky’s body.) A bird is brush, its gaze a throb. Its blueblack wings dip and slip. 446 The Bardo Books �It feels like decomposition, flesh, rare-pink, a nick in the bird’s wing. The hair of the bird, digested by its mind in the mind of its karmic murderer. Whose bardo may be shot up. I eat sky, then the outcome of its body. (The belly of the bird waddles through flowers.) As if he eats his former mind thus twice-killing the bird and the potential of the bird. A moor fowl in the tentative sense of locale. The Bardo Books 447 �Birth �You are pock-marked like my birth. The wrongdoing of one in a long stream of Indian nobles. As if calamity rode in and no one was there. A war of one or no war being so violent. Like the Church or war-torn hearts afterwards in the alley, the animal’s eyes, dust to what is feral. The press of them, like cups, which is the smell of my birth in them. The Bardo Books 449 �You come like a gust and intimately, where intimate is my finger. Touching you, inside a stone, in the hearth of a house there. Your mind is alluvial. If you roam I see the stubble of water pierce through you like an arrow. A bird hums inside its beauty like the inside of a sound heard only by its bird. 450 The Bardo Books �If a bird arises from time and then the quick shape of something yellow, its gorgeousness is there. A tin of snow is your gift. The idea of immanence, a decoy of a time. The idea moves into other bodies. Cage-birds chirp in the bedroom of a sick person, making their singing esoteric. I count snow as if one, two, three live in the snow, are part of the snow’s paradisical logic. The Bardo Books 451 �Figures in Blue contents Daffodils 453 Eagle 457 Spring 461 Juke Box 465 Fuzz 469 Sprig of Laurel 473 Tulip 477 Tree 481 Thumb 485 Black 489 Cow 493 Meadow 497 �DAFFODILS A woman alone at a large open window gazes at the sky. The soft flesh of her arm folds around a basket. If she is dead, the colors may be alive. Her soft flesh holds a premonition of her, calls its form within the form of its space in sky. She is miming sky with her body. Taming its color, like a double her of color. There is a sense of intense activity in the buildings and neighborhood, so familiar, yet her skin is not that. Figures in Blue 453 �Angst from the street, but what prevails is the face of a person waiting. An agony of light chugs through her body. If she could roll out her body, like make a road of her body, there is the sense of that being all there is. As if her flesh were a habit, a woman stands in sky, catching it in the drape of her dress. 454 Figures in Blue �As she rests in the bare window she is dead. I (am dead) she says. It stands like a point of view. A strip of death is on the woman’s arm. She wants the death eagerly, like time tucked in her arm. On the crest you can just touch death, she feels. She sees an arm (the boundless ordinary nature of her arm) in a gown, in the sky, wrapped in a column of the unsaid. Figures in Blue 455 �Sky like sea, around a woman hugged by sea. A man is a response (like sky and a sea wall). The float of him sinks, then appears on the horizon. I am exempt from sky if I empty myself toward it. The flaccid man’s ribs absorb the thick musculature of her arm. Daffodils range, placated by time, but it is the habit of deep slumber. 456 Figures in Blue �EAGLE An old man sits, quiet like a log. His knees are crossed. Somehow he is stalling, unplaced, like the woods of his head. If he sees age, it is good age he feels. As if time happens twice in the crux of his body. But it waits. The spine of an animal coils in air as it dangles from a limb, sun stroking it nervously. Figures in Blue 457 �The man sees blue in a bulbous core of light. His outline bobs just outside his body. There are animals in his body (the knowing of what locomotes the folds of a man’s body). Sun spalls time. Something is heard but he is dead. Giddy describes the animal climbing out of his eyes. As the animal creeps away, a rising eagle empties (gathers slowly) into his body. 458 Figures in Blue �The eventual empty sky or incremental bardos of sky, as if sky is one continuous living membrane. The ridge of the eagle’s motility in my mind dwarfs its vanishing in clouds. I think I see the contour of its movement (the bird’s flying outside the possibilities of its body). It leans into the land, then drains into sky. As if a boundary included in its disappearance also imprints the bird, sky and the part of sky that’s thought. Figures in Blue 459 �I dream myself to being the majesty of a body, a sphere with an eye as in the self-view of a mental body. I dream myself to a shape that looks like a fresh smell. The sloppiness of birth, if I seek its tail in the crack of myself, whose poison, excrescence, great gelatinous spookiness hang like an old breast on the person. The androgynous bearing of a breast, sagging in day like a normal breast, the normal day of no-day, as if she were a fog leaning over and asking a question. 460 Figures in Blue �SPRING A child peers from the spines of a sapling, tender like soft eyes. A knuckle propping her cheek seems stiff, awkwardly awake in a dark rivet of sun. Now is between joining what is present to one. Light on the blue wall is making the child public, though she is alone, miscible, her feet are alone. To replay time, like a child’s favorite story, has the same soothing sense (her being a rabbit) again. Figures in Blue 461 �The foreclosure of a life being locked into this sky, this orb of seasons and death, such as the spring of sky. If a baby walks in sky, she too is an example of how containers simply amplify karmic structure. Pink flesh makes a covenant. An eye is silk and slips out. The play of a person’s face, in perfect precision with her, drifts in sky like a boat. 462 Figures in Blue �Like she might trip over her body wandering through a scarlet field. If the container formulates from inside, slippage becomes hostile. Spring touches the nonlocation of her ground, the pace of her mind as a shield. There is a string around a mind still situated in her body though no longer biologically seated in her body. Many insects collect there. It is a grieving ground. Figures in Blue 463 �Sometimes the sky looks like ducks and I remember floating on an arrow toward a city. Like time in a foot where sky is the foot. A thinking person’s thoughts die in little clumps. So the impact of the arrow, the brain of the arrow. When it dies its bones and tongue smell of spring as if spring were something made in its body and later revealed by its body. 464 Figures in Blue �JUKE BOX A woman in her doorway looks up. She raises her hand to her hat as her head tilts back. Summer is high. The image of sun fusing with her body such that she becomes the sun, its place in sky resting back toward herself watching. Her feet are bare in high-heeled shoes. Soft folds of her dress stir in a slight breeze. The description is a protection, a barrier placed as a scene. There is tension between herself and the scene. The brim of her hat dips. Its motion is time. There is tension between the time of her hat’s dipping and the time of the sun streaming through sky, creating decrepitation in her body. Figures in Blue 465 �The woman is loose. Her bones move as she rests back on her lungs. The woman breathes in conjunction with her lungs as if everything in her world were contained within a bagpipe. Her body no longer shields her, she feels. She lowers her arm and brushes its skin to remove the tension that has resulted. It is a thick body, like tea leaves or lamb. A body like sweet fruit. She leans against a piano. Her body is not a pianist’s though. 466 Figures in Blue �A woman hungering for her body moves along the edges of her body. She moves it to her heart, toward the belly of its hair. The chaos in a hair, a flank of hair, but the true flank refuses to spread farther than its own body. Sound cuts space bleeding in her bones, tourniquets of sound in her hemline. Being the grandmother of her sound, the great great grandmother of her highest lightest sound, like an unsound, sound with a backbone. Figures in Blue 467 �A moth spreads funerary wings across a fragment of sky. I see her skin (the sound in skin) hovering in its body. Dusk over grass lights a spot on the moth’s wing. There is a dance in her, but she will not know it. She looks away because she sees this. A juke box dissolves, calms into a shuffle, a slow dance of days in which she can be ready. 468 Figures in Blue �FUZZ If you look you see a little fuzz of hair above the head and neck of a blonde woman. She appears to be standing, waiting in a stall, reading a magazine. Her headband clears a space that she inhabits if I think of her. What is the real face? The photograph of someone living, but it is a paper face, double non-living. Is how we wait for our mind to know what we are, the fragrance of a number gone. Figures in Blue 469 �I want to cry when I see her hair, stiff with an idea of a place she might take up. Her skirt is loosely feral. Gravity is a lesion on her. Her laugh I infer from the hair. I live in my hair, she says to you casually, like a caucus of hair opprobriously abusing its own hair. She will relax and be her hair, the spine of each hair. Little hairs on your forearm. 470 Figures in Blue �Sky gathers around her hair. She lifts her hand. Sky crawls under her hand as if it recognizes its mother. Her hand is and always will be the life inside a hand. The belly of the hand is in the woman’s eyes. Time is umbilical, as if her hand suddenly defines my amount, more accurately than my amount. A cop’s black leather hand pushes back night because he knows he can. (He is a shepherd of fire.) Figures in Blue 471 �She passes herself (and her periphery) walking down as if down were handcuffing her. All arrows point down. Night abides making space for its light because night recognizes its same light family. There is a robbery. The lapse of a person (the mulling of its eye) whirring in air a few centimeters off. Night rubs night so that death can carry the sky to the people. 472 Figures in Blue �SPRIG OF LAUREL A woman’s full body in the folds of her soft full body may be a portrait of death. She is looking at sky, loosely alive. The painter paints light so that its breath is exposed in the folds of her t-shirt against her shoulder. Her hair is loose, pushed back behind her hand. It bends in like a child. May I loosely let go of her emaciated hand, like a turkey in flight hangs in sky, loosely falling away from its flying. Figures in Blue 473 �That the painter requires a sprig confuses her. He sticks the sprig into her hand. The gnarled causes of a hand are beginningless, she’s thinking. Air seeks the awareness of her, making a thin film between life. Soft desolation keeps churning against a wall. If I carry my shell up, the image of a bird. Hell is a bird which flickers in and out of being married like that. The room exists partially to mimic a bird flowing, but it leaves a bad color. 474 Figures in Blue �The wait of a woman at the edge of air, sweetly like a wing, swift and awake, so as to sweep the air close in. An image of her heart is showing on its face, which turns inside out so that the heart is holding the face. She smiles the smile of the face as it has appeared both during its growing and later during its samadhi. Even angels have faces in her, she feels. Until is the memory of one—until-when grasses—or how-long grasses is her own memory of one. Figures in Blue 475 �Is there, without the girl, a girl holding a sprig? (I’m wondering if she is simply an old longing.) Like if you die but you don’t, does your feeling for the girl disappear? If air dies but the girl is living, what happens to my feeling if she is Vajrapani? I offer light and smoke to an unassailable space, an aphasia of space, like a belt of space. 476 Figures in Blue �TULIP A woman sits facing light. Sun hits her hands resting on a flowered dress. A long row of windows stand in the dawn quietly. So that we too (that’s our mind). She is not existing in sitting’s aspect. We don’t see her eyes. We infer that she is reading from the texture of her skin. As if her skin is reading. To which her body, she feels, is surrogate. The space is there but not available, which the act of reading addresses. Figures in Blue 477 �The resonance of a reader’s mind coagulates in her earth sign. Earth is time, then making a little bowl of it for her head. As if time were skin, like a family of her body, I want the boy erect, she says. I want him like a card as its colors fold around it. She sees the color of the dead one so that she could be dead again. Autumn is the frame. Red leaves, violet sky, like a chop signing him off. 478 Figures in Blue �Sometimes I hear her death, like lip from behind a word. Words are a prick, prick, prick, thin as air, but some say. No! She’s round like a ball. The word is alive. I speak it by touch. My eyes bulge and my mouth puckers, but I am dead first, she is saying. The lip moves sleepily. In sticky summer like a heavy foot. See, it’s wandering through a vibrant field of flowers! No one arrives, which has the pleasant feeling of continuous sky. Figures in Blue 479 �A moth breaks off sky. It spins around then lands on a blue wall. A marking on its wing trails through its fur. Wind through a hill because of the hill holding a place for it, is how it can be that. Its feathers are broken. Whose long arc of pastness, like the wings of a crane fanning out in space. Death is imposed on blowing branches against a wall, like nearness and life, beauty and wilting tulips. 480 Figures in Blue �TREE A girl lolls on grass in a tutu. The blue ruffle of a violet is the same as sky, she’s thinking. (Blue is not a location but a warmth of pressure around an object.) Gathering rain presses against sky, then falls in squares mirroring the farmland. Tonally it is dark. The musicality of a land (almost neon in the palm) plays a doubly dark magnetic field. The thought of sky, dispersing itself to its own full origin, may be death in its still quiet flush. Figures in Blue 481 �I am older from sky, such as a waltz dovetailing sky. A guardian of sky sprinkles saffron across her body. Appearance quells in patterns against light, the curve of her hip, then flaring and draping over something we can’t see. If she could rest in sky, but she is aggravated. A tuft of cotton sticks out from an ear. A fundament of time is exactly a cigarette, the vagaries of a thumb suddenly weak and drifting. 482 Figures in Blue �The dissepiment may be a tree. Roots are bones, bone to bone in strange woolly clusters. The corpse is alive though. Its tongue is its mind as soon as it wakes up. Mountains of sad trees but one tree lays its limbs out wide, direction carpeled to a simple fruit. A caravan of heads, rolls and rolls of swaddled heads, fades into a bluebird’s call. Figures in Blue 483 �Rain through sky, through the greenery of sky. Fire and rain create a pocket. You are dead. Something in the pocket reaches for you. The spirit just sticks its hand into your body. Then he gives it back. A golden carp of golden bones escapes you, it says. The ache of a tree, like an arabesque of bones, sheds its trace imperceptibly. 484 Figures in Blue �THUMB A woman partially hidden by a wall stands in midday light. She is a rounded person with soft brown skin. A curl falls on her forehead. The fullness of the setting demands a potential connected object so that the image of her doesn’t fragment. A second woman seated facing away eludes space by an unseen motion, the peep of her hat, the beauty of thin leaves layering sky onto the woman standing. Wings of sky make flowers that look like birds, a spire of delicacy inside the person. Figures in Blue 485 �The view of a partially hidden woman is absolutely alive. Someone is jealous. A man shuffles by if he is alone. How light hits air is how the weight of her appearance, a tulip feathering out, a painter paints that, the feather-weight of appearance carried by a woman’s body. A town of women grow in light. If she’s free. (A dab of blue is not freedom though.) The man wears blue but he has not achieved the purity of blue. What is not blue’s purity is like another person. 486 Figures in Blue �I am watching sky and a dark man watching sky. The time of this sky is the non-time of looking. A vast amount of sky may take place inside his belly. If he sneezes it is there like his own twin body. Part of sky is a clear line of intensity but part scatters like sun over a pool. In the lordosis of sky the pulse of his blazing white undershirt refracts such that light stops behind itself inside his belly button. Figures in Blue 487 �A person waits. A brown bare body holds the tension of waiting. Nothing moves except (slightly) his thumb resting on the waist of his jeans. The excursion is in the neck, like sky along his neck. As how the eyes of a bird to a person from a distance form an intimacy one can’t touch. I make pleasant. If he waits for the portion he will ultimately be, like shine in a deep pool or wind in a rabbit’s eyes. I place my heart in some wishbone there. The wishbone pops like time in the dead man. 488 Figures in Blue �BLACK A humpback wearing red fishes in black water. He leans against a tree if it is angled in a cloudless morning. A bird flies out. Pierced hair slithers onto its wing. I am startled by the parity of a simple action by a simple person relatively relaxed, covered by time. The size of time works through day, like fish breathing mud, squirming against day’s barriers. Figures in Blue 489 �Perhaps the artist, as an effigy of death, makes the bird to avoid or ward death off. The bird could be suicide (or way of performing a natural process). Since the wakening of the bird, correlates (empty of the bird) may look like a higher stage of bird. Mountains and rivers are faces with hollow eyes. Stilettos in air hang prettily from blue satin. Clouds are like a string of pearls where one pearl is black and that’s why they’re all there. 490 Figures in Blue �A cloud in the shape of a bird hangs low in evening sky. Its shadow forms a hump. The cloud could be a door swiveling in space, a spark of lavender in grass, only it is black. If black peers from the death of me, I may lose track of its trajectory, confusing it with life, thinking it is my life. A nerve of sky pierces my side so I walk with a limp, which reminds me of a mountain’s breast. Figures in Blue 491 �A painter paints a mountain, shedding the mountain. (Black replaces black in the subtle crevice between himself and what he discards.) If he is where someone lives then. We place ribbons on our mountain and let its water fall out. You can kill a mountain by shutting your eyes or looking at the mountain thinking of your dead mother. No color rises. Orange turns to sand in a country without flowers. 492 Figures in Blue �COW If you throw some earth on a table, the figures in the earth, what is there to be derived, from air, from a spell, like a flavor. There is a geomancy there, taken from the harbor. Immanence in eating, what stands in front of it, so that when something happens, it has already happened also. Also is time. An eater places that against a numerology of color, like the brown wall of the room, which is neither earth nor his dark hand. Figures in Blue 493 �The thought in a wrist and each bare lobe of hand. Yellow is crucial in the gentle unfolding of its earth element. Hunger is the border, divination the table, a context clean of all past expression. I am born each minute that the man eats bread. I place a palm against his brow. My mind is what he digests. If I think of the person, yellow almost becomes the person because my mind and the thing don’t separate. 494 Figures in Blue �An eating man’s neck, free of all justification in him, is a portrait of time swallowing a neck. Electrical swallowing speaks the ache of time in his chewing. I’m reminded of a dog, knocking over cans, scarfing. A neck is a mental neck and the throat swallowing death thinks that it is still lunching. A petunia taking birth near a cow means that the teller (time) will definitely complete the yugas, it rambles. Figures in Blue 495 �A cow wearing red is gliding toward rebirth. Its mind is a plum that it sucks while they tear up its body. He draws the cow down into his body so it can rest and finally sleep within his body. Like if snow were food, the sense of miles and miles of snow. Still, the person’s throat has not even a particle of snow in it. If snow were crafted in earth with it in mind instead of sourcing it from sky (like the pair of lovers floating in sky with death in mind). 496 Figures in Blue �MEADOW A face in the light of you, which is dusk or early morning. Wind in hay and the tall anchoring of a blanket, as if her hair were the blanket. A cat bays in the moon whose face appears in the light of you. Dew is thick. The loosening of its weight holds an even placement of view. Arms and hair curve like grass in the exact amount of their sleeves. Figures in Blue 497 �Acres of red born in the same sky. A man watches light stretch and thin across the hay bundles. To comb a flame, his face against her hair. Aghast is what abides beyond the scope of shape. Shape is space in its aspect of brilliance, her face through shifting breeze brushing hair over shadows. The waist of a scene expands beyond its boundaries so that meadow convexes anterior to sky, like a bulge in sky, as if it were dead. 498 Figures in Blue �The eye of the painter focusing on a meadow is how my mind wants the space of its real dead body. They want it to be kinship, we two together, but in fact it is a splurge of shape (the potential shape of sky). Someone paints night, space consecutive with darkness, as if one space is more dead. Death is space whose appearance results from space, unbridled in the soft of low, emergent face on stone. Figures in Blue 499 �Night releases to I as an object. A winterland of limbs. (The winter of her body is this very body dead.) As if sky were alone a century beforehand. The sound, heavy through night, retains its weight in light. I locate you back to the outreaches of sky. Low slow land is a transparency in her body. Prehistoric quiet covers up day like a sheet. 500 Figures in Blue �The Twelve Nidānas note Nidāna (Pali/Sanskrit): “cause, foundation, source, origin.” The twelve nidānas are an application of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination. They identify the origin of suffering to be ignorance. �I A man’s hand in the midst of him, a simple expression of earth, the junction of red earth in lieu of something indeterminable in the person. The anthem of his hand, the flesh of his dark hand, as in the blood of someone you know. The attention of a leaf presses itself outwards. How many lights pierce through the clouds achieving themselves in its bit of space. A tattoo of leaves touches his head lightly, like an angel’s hand anointing his crown, passing on the light of him. 502 The Twelve Nidānas �A man may be carrying the images of an angel’s body, the division of light being the tilt of an angel’s body. He is wanting the complete light, the sense of arising trapped in the angel’s body. A concentration toward okay between what is presented to one, some subtlety coming to one. Like an absence that one carries, light vanishes light, innocuous space beyond what one recalls. The Twelve Nidānas 503 �The shadows of two people make a darkness in a field indistinguishable from the two people. As how a silhouette of space, imaging the angel’s dark form, as if his hand in pledge behind the eyesocket were internalized. His image of him, whether his angel is dark, a dark dark angel as a transparency on his desire. A filigree of space tips alluringly upwards as if it were imaging his own guts and belly. 504 The Twelve Nidānas �Maybe he were a queen then. Maybe so many queens in a reality that is fed queens. The city is an outbreath, a dark fabric of sky, as if sky were the angel’s eyes. A cat gets up, walks slowly over to sky, intuiting a sky that simply dissolves into a cat’s body. In the congregate of moving, dawn dissolves to sky, what holds between his feeling and a cityscape of sky. The Twelve Nidānas 505 �II The sky bleeds dark and lucent from its writing. A calf is clearly struggling. The absorption of a star, a linguistic signal, allows the sky to dangle there. Elements are like memory and function as a support. Earth is easy, though it moves to the ground and vanishes. Her mind pours light on a stalk-still bird and it stays still, then moves to the ground and vanishes. 506 The Twelve Nidānas �Something in the calf holds hostage as a fight, like war in its family that has descended in its body. She sees calf, the procession of a body. It is a baby engrossed in a footprint so its head is down. Leaving one guessing. Is this real? Is this a fact? Repetition is and is part of the calf. (I am feeling its feeling deep in my armpit.) Repetitive, not an irreducible spacing, is easily closed off, like dreaming or forgetting that in fact you are a calf. The Twelve Nidānas 507 �If she promises to be her eyes, the extension into space, not the calf but the contiguous motion of its body. Because the partial mind of seeing (the invisibleinclusive eye) binds what’s unavailable to what you see. Touch without touch, action without action. a feather-light eye touches the world back, like her death or above zero (if she were a lamb climbing out of her eyes). I seal space, closing my eyes lightly, touching things lightly, because my eyes touch and are touched and this has become onerous. 508 The Twelve Nidānas �What if seeing and touching were not simultaneous, that having seen, the product of your seeing does not come back to you? If time boycotts time and falls to clear seeing, its ersatz life exposed? Pairs of eyes peer through the dark, not seeing something but just the consciousness, knowing knowing seeing. Like you could skip seeing and just be seeing because the past of an eye comes from everywhere. The Twelve Nidānas 509 �III I walk through trees, a series of squat willows, and see the space between the willows as time. Because it’s not the space, it’s the emptiness of mind (whose energy is grounded to its darkest possible color). Taking birth beneath a tree, I want to feel my longing for the tree, my deep thought of you in its disentangled precision of stillness. One bends, taking its time, a full earth of time. How do I wander into its leaf? 510 The Twelve Nidānas �Merely touching earth, gently touching the awareness of earth, like the beginning of day in earth. Leaves stretch to sun, the full breath of sun, but I am left gasping. My reference point is fading. The underleaf is blank. But blank itself catches me in a kind of double-take. A gap exists but she refuses to see it, which is a third sort of fuging, like the darkly yellow on the leaf ’s bottom. The Twelve Nidānas 511 �That yellow cala lily, earth and earth-consecutivewith-darkness, a coincidence of blood and dark and color, such a yellow, heavy and unknown. Indexed to light, this card of light folds around the sleeve of your body. We take shelter in abyss, which looks like a color, magenta calligraphed in a cala lily’s cup, deep in the cup, its fire. Color filters light is not the net color that the cala lily tells by way of its earth sign. 512 The Twelve Nidānas �IV Night is her skin, its pleats the quiet fold of her. Background and foreground are the memory of a skin wearing dynasties of her. A bird touches night and her skin moves as if it were tied to this. As if a mass accumulates in a narrative of space. Now preserves as a robin opening out of its capacity in me. I want to pet it. I want to cry. The intimacy of a word before it is a word, so that it’s now, in the interval, wears its own full body. The Twelve Nidānas 513 �How many tiers live in a word and the hues of the tiers in the space of the word’s awareness. I, the word, in the space of my form, imaging my form, like a lion in its death throes. I swallow you and emergence in a word. (The word’s shape is how death looks like this image.) A cold press of wind through a word’s tired body could be hell or a word separate from its word. 514 The Twelve Nidānas �To feel into a word, which may be neutral, but may be like an animal who gets the word, as if the word were a lesion in its body. The lesion could be freedom because a word has no location, like a break in the hills. (Mostly our words are skeletons of themselves.) One senses the transparent quality of its body, an unchangeable power that runs alongside its body. I am a word. I am the ultimate fearless word, beauty or sky so that there is nothing in the way. The Twelve Nidānas 515 �A word lands on her cheeks. Unspeakable is the word. Unspeakable is the crutch, the cane of the word, the transparency of the word that relates to her as a body. As how several letters cast a sense of time, like a painting casts depth, which is the image of death in a room. Then the dream of the word amalgamates. First there’s sky, then the full comportment of a body. Sky-swaddled words catch the light of death. I want to believe each word, like pray to the word, because you want to believe in its denial, forgiveness, everything. 516 The Twelve Nidānas �A word lay in snow. If you lift the snow and suspend your idea of the possible, it’s like space linking space to all constellations of that word. The sheer resplendence of a word, as how the daughter of a word, a whole lineage pouring out from its god-father. A child picks up a word. It’s the enjoyment of the word, the shape of all commodious expressions that the mind living in that word carries. In a tapestry of texts, I am in the moment of one, as if I had gone to sleep. The Twelve Nidānas 517 �V I juxtapose pink with weather, seeing color emerge from shape. Pink constellates to a pig’s body. Pink’s trajectory, inclusive of pig, breeds pink into a legacy, but the real pink transmits its pinkness to the pig. The pig looks pink because it’s lost track of the possibility of being made vivid. (A rose is a rose is a rose brilliantly demonstrates the part of a rose that’s impossible.) It burns a background to itself. A tenderness comes out. That’s the leap, the already-known, like a rose seed. 518 The Twelve Nidānas �Yes is a style. I grow an extra bone. Here is my bone, which makes me happy. Its yes is and always has existed. But if I misuse it, if now, seeing my bone, I make use of it in a negative sense, which is vivid, even shocking because I carry my own style in them. You are involved with a style of being, relating your experience with a perception of your experience, e.g., crazy-shell pink, but pink reduces itself to nothing. The Twelve Nidānas 519 �I am a limb braced on a trapeze, but I am an ostrich dreaming with my eyes shut. If the pink is “swimmy” (it almost makes me cry—I could dwell on something that could happen). The forefather of a dream may be jealous and hoard the dream. (I am again that bird, rosy plumage taut, ribs holding my scrawny body, which is an extremely crowded situation.) What swims around the dream comes back. Me and my projections are put into a bag and I push as hard as I can. 520 The Twelve Nidānas �I am trying to fit into one particular bag, which becomes my limbs, a confabulation of infinity. Essence doesn’t flee. Essence stays with being. Time puffs itself into a thing, like saturation, which can resemble a pink color. As how the consumption of time will alleviate time’s stoppage to the degree that the person feels time’s stoppage. How is style, toggling illusory and dream, instead of coming across the material of a dream, offering it space because terror needs space. The Twelve Nidānas 521 �VI A teller’s face recedes. Silver bars entrap his shoulder, tie and shirt collar. If you search for his face, but it’s the no-search that finds his face. How much does it cost to find his face? (Now I am a slim finder of his face.) He passes me money. His hand does not touch the bills that I receive because relinquishing receiving, I just take the money. The transaction questions presence. If I arrive on both sides of receiving, everything disappears. 522 The Twelve Nidānas �One face of no face moving casually like a normal face. (Though the man is naked, his face seems even more naked.) Because energy needs a context of definite, specific events. If you are handless, there is still the environment of hands, like a throat of hands about to swallow your body. His shirtsleeve is hiked exposing a man’s wrist, vulnerable, droopy, as if the man’s energy floods into his hand, skipping the wrist, which could be the wrist of a different man. The flesh is white. Cold light yields a sting of hours, time defined, no long upright. The Twelve Nidānas 523 �The essence of its white is like a king wearing a hand. (That the king is wearing a hand depends on the viewpoint of the person.) A symbol of white spreads across the palm, a legacy of wind, like air that is yours. Something begins, is loosely held in one’s body, casting a sense of depth (as if its symbol is one’s body). A glove on my cupped hand cradles my lung, anchoring to the extreme, up and up to the hand that is so extreme. 524 The Twelve Nidānas �It’s how image and matter falter. Mother and child meet but the mother’s mind does not meet. You can see this in her hand, ring finger lax, then the laxing itself takes on existence. First sky, the fatty mound of a thumb, then figures topped by shapes inferred to have existence because sky undeniably has existence. A person’s hand is how sky looks like this body, which is so sad but is not her hand. The Twelve Nidānas 525 �VII A woman’s mind is young. It kneels like a child at bedtime. At the breathline of her wash she makes a path. As if a host is sketching the scene in white, the choicelessness of white, which is why it is so alive. One two three childs-of-her-skin hang from the edges, yes, and in them is the color yes. In her skin there is washing and the taste of white as in the climax of living now. 526 The Twelve Nidānas �About the logic of white, as soon as you say white, whose living experience can only come from space, she adds passively. The painter paints white as a form of disappearance sourced from the white that is her. So that nothing is derived, like the five kinds of eyes or a woman’s clothes that can only be cleaned by fire. The washerwoman looks down. Down is a color as she sits with her body because how many of us sit, actually sit down in our own body. The Twelve Nidānas 527 �Someone leaves. A panel of white looks like a cap and she is confused. It could be a bird with a beach plastered on it, the only spot the deepest bottom of her pupil. If I throw whiteness on the bird, like a piece of paper can be a bird. I touch white out but its geometry blurs, without guile (in its own nature) between what is so fervent. 528 The Twelve Nidānas �VIII I wake before dawn and feel the emptiness of blue in my body. The country smells blue and little sprouts push from the earth. Blue light through hills absorbs into space, dismantling wind, coloring distant swallows. Blue may be light but boiled down to the earth of light so that even its image rides on a tiger. The Twelve Nidānas 529 �The quivering of earth vanishes with night. Blue is a response in its flimsy filmy costume. Such sweet blue, the nalo of blueness, I mimic. As if a cloud, like Dombipa, in a practicum of itself, throws the skull of itself to the place of its future self. The ground where it lands becomes frozen in the wake of how much blue is possible. A lizard-imitating-a-stone, a flower in natural connate sky, as if blue, sprung with the blue of sky, confabulates through beings to the absolute blue of sky. 530 The Twelve Nidānas �As if sound were blue and what sound touches also (inevitably) releases the sound of blue’s body. I live in this ground, a person says, who keeps the mountain close. Release is not into. His body along with a dimple in the meadow, in plentitude of them and what follows from blue’s generosity. I hear its song in the flakes falling downward but its echo is up and the time of the song even higher up. The Twelve Nidānas 531 �The sound of a mountain is soft, like a flock gathering inward. (The continual motion of the flock even down to its belly.) Each relaxed posture would be all the positive postures that the flock would be able to express. Sun kneads light into a sound of relating to light, tonsure-snow in sky as it washes over the vastness. I feel susceptible to snow as if I am snow, sun rising over snow, refusing to go to sleep now. 532 The Twelve Nidānas �IX A man has himself crafted in day, as if his monasticism lay into precise day. He stumbles upon himself, sniff sniff in day, which is not particularly intelligent, but which is following his body’s refusal. I won’t be day, he says. No! for him is moving ahead, as if a man is sculpted to the precise mind of who he will turn out to be. As if his man precedes his infant and the sound of that cry is so very stunning. The Twelve Nidānas 533 �The man in the shape of a bird, his perch against sky, is a large space inside me. Like a bean grows and there is sky (the imprimatur of sky) leaving only the action. If he weren’t sky, ’cause the elements are really deities, if he weren’t a rim of sky hungering for a space to be. Seeing beyond the man, flashing back but still beyond the man, seeing a bird whose profile appears to be part of the sky. 534 The Twelve Nidānas �When a man is a bird, the left of him shutters and he hides a little. Then the conviction of no, its dead-on precision of place. No is accurate, its discipline is accurate, the precision of reverent so solid and solemn. No-sky shatters the upaya of mortality, what forms in one’s mind, like lace on a tree. Will the man topple? He hovers on a ledge. A thick sinuous rope hugs the caliber of who he will be there. The Twelve Nidānas 535 �X Devotees mingle among bolts and bolts of fabric as if in this course they are studying water as all elements, but not sex. Ears are exclusive of sex. She lays in a room worrying if her water is enough. Exclusive looks like branches of a tree. She becomes the fabric wildly and coils and how many bolts will fill the bottom of her underworld. Joy abides in the flooding of the fields, in the bones of her voice (having metabolized her voice). 536 The Twelve Nidānas �The person says no, he doesn’t want sex with her, which she feels in her ears, water on people’s doorsteps. Seeing the water hearing, as if that’s the that of the first stage. A ritual vase holds the cup of your essential water, which is your dead poured slowly but sounding like a roar because you’re dead. As if one’s mind, replete with death’s form, like when can an animal convene if everything violet embodies a just-broken crucifix. The Twelve Nidānas 537 �A consort of energy maps intelligence onto place, like death is a place and she dances on the place. The place is dead yet searches in itself for a feeling. Dancing on a corpse, holding the mace of a baby’s body (what prevails between dead and the clean air of its body). Jumpstarting dead, regarding oneself as dead. Watching myself leap right into her. 538 The Twelve Nidānas �XI A carousel of birds raises a curtain with its beak and I pop out. (It’s a charm on my mother’s charm bracelet.) Rhinestones on her sweater are flecks of light shaped like birds whose fingers touch the bottom of the sea. An imprint of the bird remains in the sea. All animals and beings are the size of the sea, she is telling me. Lightly, lightly, like froth on sea, we lay our footprints out over the land. The Twelve Nidānas 539 �As if a bird becomes a bird first inside its own belly. The ease of its float, so hospitable and safe. Such nakedness stalks the nothingness of space. The flight exists and then the bird. First, if he is perched, as if a wrong thing will be completed in him. (The grip is what’s completed, that it has already happened.) Like the gait of a bird whose shape scatters. I see the songs instead of hearing them suddenly. One sings. One sings. Thus he is above himself, explicating what may slip away. 540 The Twelve Nidānas �The logic of a bird is the same as winter sky. Look straight into its eyes and it becomes invisible. What’s this math that makes a double bird but the bird is there anyway pecking at the icicles. I live in a cave and you can’t inherit it. Birds make my cave legible. Its snow runs wild (which is how the bird can remain quite healthy). The Twelve Nidānas 541 �Were it a bird or cloud in the shape of a bird, a place in sky repelling its illusion in space. Were I snow falling on birds’ wings, am I in its song, esoteric. Aloneness is there despite the bird trembling. You can feel it in its space, what he cannot sing to you. The bird and I are brothers. Our song is the same. Throw a spearhead and it’s the same. It will always become a flower. 542 The Twelve Nidānas �XII A tendency to real occurrence turns into space. A person is space. He is white, having been consumed by fire ravenously. His eyes lay on his face, like the words of his face (what would be taken from me manually in abutment to my suicide). The awareness is itself but also the source. Its seriality in space follows death along the trail of its body. That space between I and willing to die, that streak of I, like the nature of the real person habituated to I, but not definite, slightly fishy. The Twelve Nidānas 543 �If she thinks about the man or remembers thinking him into experience, a shift occurs, invisible yet definitive, who she is, which is so real. Because his skin is night now. A skin of wanting peering at a body, a locale. He separates from time as his swishy body folds, not physically (he is still groping) but the grope looks like a river. He gropes like a person in the slow motion of a dream, more and more till it is no longer slow, but some preternatural sub-slow, a mirror image of slow’s interior. 544 The Twelve Nidānas �The man’s death appears violent because the man himself is violent, but it is just death. Being a natural pause between death and its appearance. I no longer wish for omission, a map of space swallowed by some organic, mechanical process. The line between impression and breath, awareness and space, digs into space, mixing mind with space. The Twelve Nidānas 545 �Mingling the Threefold Sky contents White 547 Yellow 551 Red 560 Green 567 Blue 573 �WHITE A man in the dark is a dark man. He calls me from inside the dark water. That I recognize him in the night without waking is a growing urge of mind. And then the man appears. I gradually orient toward the man. The tremulous multiplicity of pause, as if dark is pause, an umbrella of veins puffing and dissolving. Mingling the Threefold Sky 547 �It senses her and stops. She orients towards the stopping like the possibility of a person who would be out of darkness. The stop repeals its form like a word repeals the sensation of something, the commission of a sound that holds the language of a word. Sound fills the cavity and she is there pressing. I am practicing the word through its darkest cubits of blackness. O sister word! Hold insouciance to any word and you have the word resolved even of the idea of word. 548 Mingling the Threefold Sky �The man holds the word in the space of himself, in a word made ready for itself. Such that time is rescued out of her, the long day of time. I am a thin bone of light, like a duck of light to nothing. The floor of the word, the long trouble of the word. (She feels from the word a certain mastery of negation.) I will live in the word. If its boundary is something produced by the word. Mingling the Threefold Sky 549 �She tries to feel her floor, but she is thinking about a cavity, something fluid like a worm and she wants to say the worm. A moan is a moan and where can it reside if not on her floor, the speech body of that word. She jerks it up but trips so that she is the floor and the glue and the shame. I have a habit of glue, she confesses. A flame of everything sears into shape, which is not the word, but the colorless basis of its Pure Land. 550 Mingling the Threefold Sky �Y E L L OW A vein of sun hits a woman’s cheek. What is her face, she wonders, a blush of cheek beneath the long hair of her goldenness. How sunlight fills the sky is how the mind myelenates appearances to her. Whose milt is on the edges. It stands in front of sky such that all she sees is sky. The absolute knowing of sky, weather and sky, like a prerogative that’s said against which she may stroke her child. Mingling the Threefold Sky 551 �Though she sits facing away, as if it is in her, one feels the age of this away as her. The painter paints time locked away from its material, like her own personal face exiled from her face. As if away without location is the real time, the real completion, a recrement of sky, the other loneliness of sky. Rangjung dorge’s face. Its light is not what is in me that way. 552 Mingling the Threefold Sky �As the moon releases into sky, shedding yellow back to sky, you see a person’s face deep in the heart of the eye of one. Day walks out of day losing track of its intelligence, the part of day held back from day or the end of his life which is so heartbreaking. Sound at a distance extends from in front of him. The arc of his face leaks into shape. The space between her face, the moon’s display of face. (The features of her belie her apparent face.) Mingling the Threefold Sky 553 �* The color of day, two figures in a plain, as if two were possible outside of itself as a number. As if day were a point dabbed like paint onto the brief cortex of togetherness. A pattern of her in yellow, such that she too, though he, the he of how they came to be here forever. Where clouds are yellow and birds are yellow, a double portrait of her, which is them as who she is. 554 Mingling the Threefold Sky �It’s like these two things, the way light throws itself over land, them as a pulse, a stream of apposite colors. The metaphysics of grey within a yellow space, or closeness, the duo of her body coming to be the grey. For this she’d received an empowerment. A doleful space of air. A prosody of air. The belly of the mind leaks the containment of them, as how the painter lifts the them of them and simply puts it on a piece of paper. Mingling the Threefold Sky 555 �Waiting is the movement. Waiting is not resting because the aspect of pair, a person’s hat of hair, the tip of the world at the edge of his hair. The man is not. He is thinking about something else. His hat facing light holds the tension of his being there. The skirl of light obscures to fading light. A vague sense of waiting hangs over his elbow. Now he is home listening to its softness as if inside me I have finally found my bedfellow. 556 Mingling the Threefold Sky �* The fold of a tree over light on a road, if she is in the road, the sense that she would be there anyway. An old live tree, like the life of someone screaming, is the language of the tree pushed outside its form. What colors grow untouched in her, her and her, what she sees on the Paris streets. Old registers hard even in a bit of shade. Mingling the Threefold Sky 557 �What is it in a tree that seems to be erased, as if emotion were space, and the subtlety that is part of the tree, the great washing over of space. The way time holds light on the inside of her which is how color organizes itself toward a person. It makes me question whether sky is the same since movement is not limited (I begin to see sky as limited). Fifty three skies settle in my backyard may simply be sky pouring out sky. 558 Mingling the Threefold Sky �The painter’s mind meets tree and recognizes where there should be a tree but it seems like a real tree. Tree is how time rests back on its own mind. Because trees need repeatability. Its eye is that prostration. I will catch my eye in the rigpa of her eye. Sacraments repeat in the full verse of eyes, the laying on of an eye, a closed eye or even an eye asleep. Mingling the Threefold Sky 559 �RED Someone paints a dream thinking it is the person, cuts out the dream and the dream becomes its word. Now the person will know and his word will have the letters of an eastern province. He is tied to this loosely as if beyond the chance of knowing, a bodice of time (angling loosely) down the crevice of his back, loosely. A man in a horn makes a home for himself in the horn such that the space in the horn opens to the vast expanse of his own mudra. 560 Mingling the Threefold Sky �Looking east into space as it pales into sky, he is hearing her painting her but not from the source of her hearing him hear her. A rattle, disassembled by his mind, appears at the flounce of her skirt-line. Can’t also. Can’t relates to time as an index. Can I fit? If I were who I am? The equation nags a memory. What is the equation for the mind outside the time, the Sugata of time, each tissue of time. Mingling the Threefold Sky 561 �The sound and the struggle to receive it in his body, like its bloodtype is wrong for a person with his body. It’s a situation of her blood becoming ready to be her blood, after the pogrom, after the sea. Actually red is Word. Shtetl is the adjective. Can’t is not east, nor made from the red of tongues. What translates from the sea (because her ankles hold the sea) now able to be a sea, steadying up the sea. 562 Mingling the Threefold Sky �The fib of the girl groping through herself, because real hearing is just itself, cheap like the wrong mother. I am swimming for ten minutes, cries the Ocean God’s one-eyed children. Though the habit of time makes red seem almost hollow, the dakinis say, no, please, our joy is red. Outside blessing there is no red. I tear up. I realize who she is in the sconce of her red body, like an offering to sky or how the dark sea holds up sky. Mingling the Threefold Sky 563 �The intimacy of red is like hearing the sound of your birth. Or the birth of red, like at Yale where red is a park. What pertains outside of what we think of as a color (if red were a smell and we put it in a jar, and someone opens the jar). If sound is red, coming to synthesis in a word, the word lifts off its word, the clarity of mind raised to the red of the word. 564 Mingling the Threefold Sky �Her body is red and her penis, also, is a thick red. Like you could vacuum red into your hand let’s say. Fucking red, sliding her hand up the thick course of all procreations of red fathers. HOW-at-large is how the mother dissolves. She clothes the bars that tie her land to red. Mingling the Threefold Sky 565 �Breaking back the skin of its tip, some say it’s the cut itself, the brave cut of red in the hollow of its mind. The mind of red cusses red, backwards toward the front of its tongue. The lungs of the sea are hollow of devotion. One keeps its body close like a vajra “dick” of red’s secret body. Tongue, mouth, body are as if painted red, but gushingly so that the green of red, the deep soft of green’s pure body becomes red’s Luscious Body. 566 Mingling the Threefold Sky �GREEN I look out on a hill. It is bald with exuberance of old decaying objects. A shallow hill and sense of day dissolving is a lateral memory of time. A shrub is alive, its decay is alive. The slope of the hill may not be selected into finitudes. In a cycle of empty light, no birds land. Mingling the Threefold Sky 567 �I see a house of rolling hills as if the hills had taken refuge but had not taken a vow of refuge. Hills and hills of bedding in light, the taking of light, the laying down of light. The observance of the vow is definitely green, though below the ground dark movement churns, as if the spirits of light are upset. A pretense of green, which is unfortunate, like the mistress of the beds whose greens purvey a chakra that can’t settle. 568 Mingling the Threefold Sky �The engine of green is continuous, she says. (You are sitting in a room watching a broadcast on a small screen near the ceiling.) Many people are there, like a corporation of there (the sense of there is inside them, which they now realize). Their ribcages have come ajar, but instantaneously and with conviction, like This ajar is final. As a woman teems into the room, what stands as her own body. Mind implodes its fulfillment body. Mingling the Threefold Sky 569 �* Windows play to light and glass and hair and pointing, but the heel of the point is old and its green is old. Sucking green, like at night when she sucks the hell out of her body. Her form stands inside the essence of her body, a symbol of space like a letter that stands for space. The dawning of an arm through a glass of green, a species of pirouette on the point of her final green. 570 Mingling the Threefold Sky �She feels stuck in the glass, both sensing its meaning, but like a dream, sensing a peripheral lurking falseness. In the wild of glass, how can I be born in so much glass? (The rectitude of her sash has long been known by the girl.) Anything formed loses nascence, someone cries. Crystal becomes a deity, rice a snake lashing about as a protector. Movement has stopped but the agony of time, a dancer stands in the glass of her toe shoe’s time, like an asana of time. Mingling the Threefold Sky 571 �The still of a dancer’s back, if it is of movement, is not an image of my feeling. Because there needs to be green. That’s the mandala inside my whole body. The nuance of the color will convene in me. Its word is laid in me. Quiet morning light brings a bowl of it to her forehead. Day is her support, the first position of mind, a turn-out of mind so that day may grow long. 572 Mingling the Threefold Sky �B LU E A paradigm of phrase, such as a woman bending, whether it be evening or fall, in the slow motion of bending toward something. The awareness is in her neck and gentle down of softness as if the profile of her face faces a separate direction from her face. As if her face stands beside its own absolute loveliness, revealed in down whose axis is not the axis of the intelligence of her body. Her body sits down in the weight of a person’s shell whose full curving masses become, some say, the racial quality of the shell. Mingling the Threefold Sky 573 �Race is blue as in the catching of a mind, a shallow remainder of mind deep in its inheritance. Whose dristi settles, both in herself, if her mind spreads to his through her body. That a dristi can be queen combines a long history of sewing, how her character can stop (though the motion of bending does not stop). As a painter paints the lack of occurrence of mind, she goes in which is instantly the real mind. 574 Mingling the Threefold Sky �Am is the assessment. (I am new, clean as sky.) Because boredom is open and joy is open, like if I am a bird and then tomorrow the intervening presence of myself. Whose scent is in the tukdam. The bird grows small but she is dead. The awareness is there and the vicinity, too, holds the bird. Mingling the Threefold Sky 575 �She’s a shot bird. (Shot is a value.) I am in the purview of tenderness, she’s crying. I am a broken bird. I am raped and then I am a bird again. Is heard through a clearing, but it is just the bird and she shines its light so prettily like the repeated sequence of a waterfall. 576 Mingling the Threefold Sky �* Here is night and death lies bleeding, the deepest black of light at the edge of a sparrow’s forehead. Its dark internal quest pushes toward what is exact in him, to say a state of dark at the bottom of his pillow. And there’s something else that I can’t remember, a holocaust of birds being the blackness of pale color. The space of black is the barren essence of a color, like pain or his mind that we can no longer say is a color. Mingling the Threefold Sky 577 �Blackness is alive, palpable in an accused person. A guard senses it trembling. The black of an iris makes black out of light. It’s the kingdom of black blowing black across the fields. What is this word, like a domino of air, which they cannot know, cannot take. Light enters through its scales. We welcome you into air, they say, but they have no idea of air, they are just saying air. 578 Mingling the Threefold Sky �The guard sees a scale and says this is the scale. Its stillness is black and its water is black. Like a bodice of death is effluvial and lightly striated colors. Said and its air that comes to him from somewhere. Saraha is the name of one, whose arrows have the thickness of one. Is pierced in my hair (or half of hair) excoriates the poverty of its word. Mingling the Threefold Sky 579 �He sees the mind in the word as a sudden realization, not just the vision but as a particular situation. Like time exists in time, but due to the power of infinity of ordinary errors stays fully dissolved in confusion. Past doesn’t exist, the guard repeats. (The struggle to extort a sense of how exist can be.) The blue motion of a star, the torture of the star. In the ash of it is a word, but not conceived, as in the slow fingernails of his father. 580 Mingling the Threefold Sky �* Blue land falls to dusk before dusk falls, like a taste that opens in your heart. A wind of blue settles with sky as it fades over the land. A gum-tree is quiet. Air absorbs its light. As if a penny were dead, slow in slow night. The slow vase and touch of winter. Mingling the Threefold Sky 581 �His view of mud in the full jelly of the land, blue or black as he calls to her primitively. Shadows of time pour out their place so as to not encounter anything. Shapes at a distance may be sky making arcs, a vagina aroused to sky and open to sky’s subtleties. Blue is space. Dusk is source. In a lapse of wind, the skin of rain hovering, a word that has departed. 582 Mingling the Threefold Sky �Lust in the wet land. (I fish into my mind.) Mud in particular stands beside each light particle differently. Night is light. Night is so light. If you touch it it turns into memory. He stares into blue as it softens into not blue, making distance from elaborations of blue-on-blue, blue-on-not-blue. Mingling the Threefold Sky 583 �Dusk in a hill dissolves into a cow, visible but indistinguishable, like consciousness. The cow has an umbrella. The dakinis are playing their drums, people say. A rainbow is the deities welcoming the cow back. The local wisdom deities are so happy to see the cow. The cow allows its happiness to be seen. 584 Mingling the Threefold Sky �late work 2014-2018 Introduction Late work (the poetry I began writing in 2014) addresses a different part of the brain than my earlier work. The element of space directs itself no longer to wisdom mind but to lesser-exalted areas of the self. That human beings are primarily relational takes on new significance. Formerly silence was in the word and was the word (introverted). Now it is also referential (extroverted). New Year’s Eve listen— snow is falling1 Sensation becomes memory. Pale Sky, p. 10, (page references to the original publication; see bibliography for details). 1 Introduction 585 �What erupts may be from the reptilian brain but may also stem from more highly evolved areas. Meaning extends beyond the word into clusters of words, sentences and remainders after the sentences have passed. The mind of the woman is warm, her sweaters and chickens and all the places on the boat . . . “Hello,” Unn offers. “What?” shouts the woman.2 Meaning finally is useful. Before, it not only was not useful, it obstructed what was useful. Before there was the boat. Now there’s the other shore. The device—thinking you know what it means— becomes authenticated by the text—you do know what it means. She wondered if the fact that things ceased to exist in her meant that they ceased to exist. Does time cease to exist or does it flow Sunny Day, Spring, p. 3. 2 586 Introduction �parallel to what looks like one’s existence? What is one’s existence? What is the relation between time and one’s existence?3 It means what it means to you, but meaning is intended whereas in the earlier work, the flow toward meaning was simply bait. Ezekiel, p. 78. 3 Introduction 587 �from Sunny Day, Spring Unn had been reading. Light from the dawning sky fell upon her book. “The days are such that I hardly need a lamp,” she was thinking when she heard a click. “That would be Töl.” Unn returned to her book and to the deep silence of the day. “Was that Töl?” Aware suddenly of how quiet the house seemed, she paused. “Was that today? Maybe it was yesterday.” Unn tried to remember precisely when she’d heard the lock on the door click, but she couldn’t be sure. She closed her eyes. Recently she’d read­—the article was in the New York Times—a war victim who’d been tortured was being treated for post traumatic stress. Though he’d suffered physical pain, his main symptom­—what was intolerable to him and wouldn’t leave him—was the loss of a sense of time. He simply had no idea of where he was in space, of how much time had passed or how long any activity 588 Sunny Day, Spring �would take. When the therapist slowly said, “Take your time, Sergio, we have plenty of time,” it was as if his sobbing would never stop. Sunny Day, Spring 589 �from Ezekiel “My eyes are watering it’s so cold.” Her cheeks were flushed. He thought he saw them flicker for a second. “It’s just my eyes. Everything else is fine,” she added, blinking rapidly as if the action itself would warm them. “We’re lucky it’s so clear.” Luciano didn’t feel like talking. He was looking at the sky and looking at Ezekiel. Silence filled the air as though the universe were voiceless now. As though a core, a point of reference, had irrevocably been torn away. When it fanned out spreading higher and higher and higher, it left Luciano and Ezekiel in darkness. 590 Ezekiel �from Pale Sky From the first moment I enter the zendo I am changed. The fragrance, the clarity stir a deadness in me that I’ve lugged around and lugged around. I recognize it with my teeth, behind my ears, between my toes, the bottoms of my feet. It is startling and immediate. Pale Sky 591 �The same sense—almost a nostalgia—filters through the air, the grounds, the trees. People talking, jays cawing. It’s just a caw but its rawness makes a point and repeats the point and repeats the point. I’m hearing the empty beginning, before the person or the jay get involved. Even the air rattles with its mind. 592 Pale Sky �The sound is fresh. It stays cool in the heat. Beyond immaculate, its cleanness is original. The wind in the trees is crisper. Leaves are more defined. Colors are subtler as if elsewhere, even elsewhere in the same range of mountains, this feeling is quelled by the lack of an inherited intelligence. The legacy of mind, big mind, Zen mind, establishes the legitimacy, even of the pansies. Pale Sky 593 �Traipsing in my getas down the rain-drenched path, my muscles know precisely the beyond-knowing of its importance. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. Chirps and caws sprinkle through the air as dawn hits the trees and pale sky colors the brick wall that I am staring at. It’s this path but it’s the sky and the eon’s sky and the yuga’s sky and all the yugas’ skies. 594 Pale Sky �“O n e . . .” she said mentally, listening to the soft stream of air through her nostrils. “T w o . . .” started at the top while the air was in her nose but the sound, slower now and more nasal, seemed to be coming from her throat. “T h r e e . . .” though the “three” came as an afterthought. The person to her right was leaning forward on his knees trying to fit a third zafu under his buttocks, but the second one kept slipping out making the third one lopsided. Eliza stayed still. Steadying her gaze she continued counting exhales, but her mind went to the day— she’d so wanted to make a personal connection. Pale Sky 595 �“Is there anything I should bring?” She twiddled a strand of hair too tightly around a finger. He yawned with his jaw, without opening his mouth. “You’ll be doing the personal lists.” It wasn’t really an answer. Then he’d simply stood absorbed in looking out. She wished he wouldn’t shift around on his pillows so much. 596 Pale Sky �“This morning early Roshi, peacefully, died. We continue our efforts along with all beings.” The words entered the hall toward the beginning of second period. Silence. More silence. Bristling silence. But it was soft. New Year’s Eve listen— snow is falling Pale Sky 597 �We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. To express our way along with all beings—we sit for this and it will always be the same. Whatever kind of bird, the sky doesn’t care. That is the mind transmitted from the Buddha to us. Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, practicing deeply Prajña Paramita . . . 598 Pale Sky �from Elm A nighthawk’s cry startled her. As if in response Machie moaned. Her hair, loose now, lay over one cheek and the palm of her hand over that. It was her right hand. The long middle finger reached her jaw. Her other hand fell toward the corner of the bed. It was a child’s hand. Elm 599 �“Take me to bed.” Machie had said it first. The warmth of her, undeveloped, a little skittish, had been unlike the smooth, clean-burning warmth of the woman she was now. Her dark places were warm. Sometimes even now . . . She could be sixteen any minute. 600 Elm �“Can I know you? Will you live?” Once she’d seen a picture of very young Machie in roller skates laughing, arm slung around a boy. But her eyes had looked old. Her laughter somehow stilted. Living old, a child lives out her oldness so that when she comes of age she has the knowledge to be young originally. Elm 601 �A scar on Machie’s shoulder took the shape of violets. Despite the scar the shoulder was young and fresh. Might it be that the scar, the result of her experience, richened the flavor of Machie’s innocence? The scent of a baby came to her. It had the close warm softness of sleep. A faint wild crying from the violets ebbed and rose, ebbed and rose. 602 Elm �The piquant odor of blood, Machie’s menstrual blood, rose from the depths of her slumber. The scent was full with the presence of Machie’s womanliness. “It’s like blood that wants a baby,” Naoko’d once observed, meaning only that it was a rich, good blood. “Don’t say that,” Machie’d smarted. Elm 603 �Along with the smell, pungent yet sweet, was the memory of the smell mixed as it was with their past. “How did you lose your virginity,” Machie’d teased, egging Naoko on with question after question. She looked so new. The undone braid fanned over her mouth. It wore an echo that carried time like the condensed feelings of sadness that made the air crack. 604 Elm �“How many women have you kissed?” Machie had asked and she had asked but they were just sounds to cover the amazement of their passion. Outside there’d been thrushes singing themselves crazy. “Let’s find a less-musical bird,” Machie had joked, rolling out of bed, pulling on her jeans. “Okay, let’s.” But the neighborhood was transfixed. “So how many women have you kissed?” insisted Machie in dazed sobriety. Elm 605 �Lying face up with her legs spread wide, bedding pushed down, Machie slept on. Her head had slid to the far left edge. Lips pursed, the usually broad mouth seemed almost to form a heart, puckered at the center and totally unlike her. Her bones were resting. Even her teeth seemed to be resting. 606 Elm �from Mary’s Eyes i cold and snow. the sound of snow falling. the young novice’s eyes it’s (the) forgiveness that she notices (an old noticing) she feels thinks about Christ. will she marry him. she has already married him (she feels) asks if she is sure [bells sound in the background] figures appear. the clink of plates, spoons, hush of nuns eating the rule of the meal (omitting) the meal the weight of the prioress’s eyes readings turn to time (the word Mary repeated) verse empty of her suddenly Mary’s Eyes 607 �ii a tall girl and her girl (their “astrology” of brotherhood) the eyes of one watching from a second-floor window what the watching girl is thinking versus the couple— walking, carrying books, talking loneliness and time. more loneliness and time “crippled time” she muses opening the sash for a better view as if time and her ribs—as if time stopped her ribs “see” she presses placing a hand on one 608 Mary’s Eyes �interlude alone in an open room water and wind (their) hardness in time wearing out time replaced she feels with time the freshness of wet blows around her lightly [her sense of the sea (awareness) of time (her presence in the room) co-adjacent with time] her dog too on the rug below one eye opening then closing (seemingly) content the sand covering its body and what the sand says about its life the dog’s ear and what the dog is noticing (waiting) for something to end sees the waves of the sea melt into sea its song vanishing to nothing the rhythm of the vanishing repetitive (prayerful) the earth (too) which the sea hears Mary’s Eyes 609 �listens to sea (the sound of the sea breathing) the implacability of sea time its power and its blueness circling her like a tiger the tiger’s immaculate stealth 610 Mary’s Eyes �iv blue late-April sky, sound of waves lashing the girl’s jaw remembering something ungraspable the sea itself ungraspable thin (soft) time which she dreads the coming of harm, ripening and then, moonlit coming to know (coming being its own naked color) “soon” she thinks but it’s vague the upshot of vague like a portion of a color notices sky, a shadow of a tree, the mind of the tree transferred to a form what the form may imply and whether or not she generalizes its significance reads the clothes for clues Mary’s Eyes 611 �sees Jesus in his robes rising a little (bowing) toward her (slightly) sees herself seeing the vivid reality of his form the body of Christ (touching) it with sight (its) aperture and tone with regard to so much happening the event—Jesus rising—and then again rising— “toward her” had been there the first time (she is realizing) as if his life took place (in her mind a lion yawns) [but it’s clapping. someone is bowing to an act seemingly ended the impossibility of blue (since it stands for itself) ending] authority of blue (standing for itself) attentive (to) what we call color which may have taken place previous to time or even in some other time “what is my color before there was color” ransacks blue as if it were light instead 612 Mary’s Eyes �new poems Introduction These poems are written as tanka (Japanese: “short song”). In terms of treatment of subject, tanka resemble the sonnet. Like a sonnet they employ a turn which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of a personal response. Instead of a haiku-like flash of insight, tanka quietly recognize things as they are. Introduction 613 �from City of Sleep It’s quiet outside during the night it rained but it’s quiet I’m alone no one knows my thoughts. 614 City of Sleep �Black clouds through gray pre-dawn sky move forebodingly toward the hills sounds of night linger I want to stay awhile, listen what prevents me I wonder? City of Sleep 615 �Old now, I live in the city: A temple bell wakes me it’s not your bell—you don’t have to move I tell myself as I’m turning over it’s dawn, the sky is pink thank God. 616 City of Sleep �I hear you cough from the other room while you are having breakfast and I think how it could be that you are no longer in the other room— what will I listen to then? City of Sleep 617 �It will die soon anyway I think, snapping it off before anyone sees—thus, because of my rashness . . . o the damage done by my rashness. 618 City of Sleep �Inside me is a ghost of me I saw it yesterday— cold, unwell it had blue eyes. City of Sleep 619 �You and I, sweet bird hang together in this spot you stare out I stare out please don’t forget to return. 620 City of Sleep �Responding to a tanka by Saigyō (1118-1190) Ten Poems for the Lady-in-Waiting of the Second Rank Adding one more to the graves at the foot of Boat Hill, we make you “someone of the past” Your “someone of the past” speaks with such sorrow, Saigyō as for me it won’t be long . . . pray for me in my life to come! City of Sleep 621 �Chronologies A Personal Chronology of External Life Circumstances 1942: Born in St. Louis, Missouri’s Jewish Hospital. 1947-53: Elementary school in University City, a suburb of St. Louis. 1954-57: Hanley Junior High School in University City. 1958-60: University City Senior High School (avid reader, diary writer and aspiring pianist studying with Harold Zabrach). 1960-61: University of Florida, Gainesville (study piano, music history, composition, theory). 1961-62: Hebrew University, Jerusalem (study Hebrew, Torah and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music). 1962-64: BA in English at Northwestern University. Receive Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. 622 Chronologies �1964: Choose instead to study Middle English at the University of California, Berkeley; meet Arthur Weiner, fellow graduate student in English and reader for the poet Thom Gunn. 1965: Arthur and I marry. 1966: Receive a secondary teaching credential from U.C. Berkeley. 1966-68: Enjoy teaching high school English at Ygnacio Valley High and Pleasant Hill High; win ”Teacher of the Year” Award from three education faculties (Stanford, Berkeley, San Francisco State). Have a harpsichord built and begin studying harpsichord with a very gifted teacher, Jean Nandi, a student of Gustav Leonhardt. November 1968: Arthur and I separate; I begin sitting zazen at the Berkeley Zendo (part of the San Francisco Zen Center). Summer 1969: Attend Summer Practice Period at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center with Suzuki-roshi. Fall 1969: Move into the Berkeley Zendo; and, encouraged by Jean Nandi, begin a second BA, in music, at UC Berkeley. Chronologies 623 �1971: Move to San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in order to practice Zen full-time; ordained a lay disciple of Suzuki-roshi. 1980: Leave Zen Center after eleven years, realizing that my practice needs to be writing.1 I had already abandoned the formal practice of music, consciously dedicating my musical ability to writing, selling my harpsichord and donating the proceeds to purchase a great temple bell, crafted in Japan, for Zen Center. 1980: I move to an apartment on Haight Street and begin writing daily, publishing poems in small literary journals. Become friends with Beau Beausoleil, Leslie Scalapino and Merry Benezra. 1Moon of the Swaying Buds describes how I came to this decision. Through Zen I discover “Yes Practice”: only doing those things I can say Yes to with my whole body and mind. By then, however, “I am through with Zen Center. I need to define my own regime. Zen Center has had it with me anyway. I am told privately that unless my attitude changes, I will not be accepted for Fall Practice Period. Indeed, my attitude has changed but not in the direction that would pique my interest in Fall Practice Period” (Moon of the Swaying Buds, 2017, p.392). 624 Chronologies �1980: At my first poetry reading at Beau Beausoleil’s San Francisco bookstore, Robert Duncan is in attendance and asks, “Would you read that again?” He encourages me to send what I had just read to a new poetry journal, Credences, published by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo. My work appears in the inaugural issue along with poetry by Duncan himself. 1982-1986: Leslie Scalapino arranges for me to move into the apartment next to hers in Berkeley and we give joint poetry readings and visit other poets, including a memorable trip to Albuquerque in 1986 for a reading at the Living Batch Bookstore and to visit one of my favorite poets, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. I work as a personal assistant for Billy and Alice Shapiro and begin publishing books of poetry with small, independent presses. 1982-1993: Yoga-based meditation practice with Self Realization Fellowship. I am attracted to this heart-based practice, which complements the mindbased Zen I knew; I especially appreciate that this community, founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in the 1920s, is led by women. Chronologies 625 �1985-1990 Complete MA in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University; meet Brendan Collins, former Benedictine monk, photographer, teacher and psychologist. 1990: Brendan and I marry; I begin private practice as psychotherapist; continue publishing with small presses. 1995: Meet Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, meditation master in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and begin a concentrated study of Tibetan Buddhism; complete the Longchen Nyingthig Ngondro under his direction and guidance. This form of Buddhism brings together the heart and mind practice I have long sought. 1997-continuing: After the closing of so many small independent presses, Brendan and I establish Night Crane Press; I continue writing early every morning, working as a psychotherapist, practicing Tibetan Buddhism, and enjoying living with Brendan. 626 Chronologies �An Internal History of My Relationship with Language “The literary persona who enacts the poet’s struggle can be glimpsed, always, in one early work that Ted Hughes calls the ‘first,’ which contains, in a single image, ‘a package of precisely folded, multiple meanings.’ The origin of this image is a trauma, usually hidden from the writer’s consciousness, that partakes in a wholly personal way of some destructive aspect of cultural life.”1 The dates are vague. We live on an army base in North Carolina where my father, Charles Sher, is stationed. While he is overseas, I live with my mother, her three volatile sisters, her absent father, nervousbreakdown-prone mother, and a slightly older, noisy and aggressive male cousin. In this household—I am two—I begin stuttering and am diagnosed with 1Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—A Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 245. Chronologies 627 �a “nervous breakdown.” The symptoms—stuttering, hypervigilance and nonadaptability to change—are consistent with recent research on pre-school children in traumatic, disruptive, unpredictable environments. I am removed to the apartment of my paternal grandmother who says to my mother, “You can live here but I’m not paying for her milk.” With his impressive purple heart my war veteran father returns. “Honey, that’s your father.” “No it’s not. This is my father,” I say, pointing to his photograph. I believe I am four. A primary memory is sitting on an outside step striving toward collecting all my words and feeling extremely frustrated that I do not know how to write. My hysterical mother and war-traumatized father fight constantly (about money and sexual transgressions on both parts). I act out in elementary school. Feel very very ugly. Take refuge in reading the interesting books provided by my mother. 628 Chronologies �I rock in bed, at my desk in school, in my rocking chair when I am reading. Begin to adjust socially in 9th grade, become a cheerleader and am liked by boys, but I cannot think analytically and only do average in my classes, which feels not only humiliating but somehow wrong (incorrect). In 10th grade an English teacher compliments what she calls a “parallel structure” that I use inadvertently. On the spot I decide to become a writer but am discouraged by my father who says, “Oh everyone wants to be that.” Thinking and writing analytically continue to be problems all the way through graduate school, though at Northwestern I devised a way to pass written exams, receive my B.A. and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics. Meanwhile in high school, in an outside study, I test at the 99th percentile in math and language, and have been in a longitudinal study for gifted children ever since. (I am now 77.) Chronologies 629 �Oddly (to me) I feel I “belong” in the gifted group yet consistently my drifting mind and grades do not back that up. Eventually I have the following thought: “I CAN’T see white like everyone else, but the black I see is not nothing. It is rich and full of music.” I begin to feature it in my stabs at writing (having still the sense that I do not know what I’m doing, but liking the result). The thought that it is something is a turning point. Based on recent research on the neurological effect of trauma, my frontal lobes probably were dysfunctional, but my implicit memories and awareness were not dysfunctional. Since this is all I have, I lavish my attention on THAT. I discover that I am hyper-aware of aspects about language that most people ignore. With years of disciplined Buddhist practice behind me, I force myself to write from the right side of my brain and discover a whole new relationship with words. 630 Chronologies �In retrospect I feel that were it not for the trauma— whose effect was at the forefront through my thirties, into my forties and to some extent is still present—I would not have seen, certainly not so clearly, the contents of the space brightened by a shut-down left frontal cortex. I feel grateful for the passion that insisted on a way, and eventually found a way, and made it my WAY. Chronologies 631 �Bibliography Poetry Books by Gail Sher organized by phase 1. radical language experiments, 1982-1997 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. San Francisco: Trike, 1982. (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem. San Francisco: Square Zero, 1982. Rouge to beak having me. Paris: Moving Letters Press, 1983. Broke Aide. Providence: Burning Deck, 1985. Cops. Berkeley: Little Dinosaur, 1988. KUKLOS. Providence: Paradigm Press, 1995. la. Boulder: Rodent Press, 1996. Marginalia. Chicago: Rodent Press, 1997. Early Work. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. 632 Bibliography �2 asian-influenced work, 2001-2017 Moon of the Swaying Buds. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001. Third Edition, 2017. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002. RAGA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. redwing daylong daylong. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Once There Was Grass. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. DOHA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2005. Watching Slow Flowers. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2006. The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. Five Haiku Narratives Emeryville, CA: Night Crane 1 Press. 2015. 1 Contains the following out-of-print chapbooks written between 1996-2002: Like a Crane at Night (1996); One Bug ... One Mouth ... Snap! (1997); Saffron Wings (1998); Fifty Jigsawed Bones (1999); Lines: The Life of a Laysan Albatross (2002). Bibliography 633 �3 the wisdom-mind collection, 2008-2013 though actually it is the same earth. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2009. Mother’s Warm Breath. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. White Bird. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. The Bardo Books. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2011. Figures in Blue. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. The Twelve Nidānas. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. Mingling the Threefold Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2013. 634 Bibliography �4 late work, 2014-present Sunny Day, Spring. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2014. Ezekiel. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Pale Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Elm. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Mary’s Eyes. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2018. City of Sleep (in press) Bibliography 635 �Publications by Gail Sher by date, 1980-2020 prose books Reading Gail Sher. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Writing the Fire: Yoga and the Art of Making Your Words Come Alive. New York: Random House/Bell Tower, 2006. The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice. New York: Penguin, 2002. One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. New York: Penguin, 1999. From a Baker’s Kitchen: Techniques and Recipes for Quality Baking in the Home Kitchen. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Marlow & Co., 2004. From a Baker’s Kitchen: Techniques and Recipes for Professional Quality Baking in the Home Kitchen. Berkeley: Aris Books, 1984. 636 Bibliography �poetry books City of Sleep (in press). Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics 1980-2020. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2020 Mary’s Eyes. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2018. Elm. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Early Work. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Ezekiel. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Pale Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Five Haiku Narratives. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press. 2015. Sunny Day, Spring. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2014. Mingling the Threefold Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2013. The Twelve Nidānas. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. Figures in Blue. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. Bibliography 637 �The Bardo Books. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2011. White Bird. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. Mother’s Warm Breath. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2009. though actually it is the same earth. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. Who, a Licchavi. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. Calliope. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. old dri’s lament. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. East Wind Melts the Ice. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. 638 Bibliography �Watching Slow Flowers. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2006. DOHĀ. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2005. RAGA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Once There Was Grass. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. redwing daylong daylong. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002. Lines: The Life of a Laysan Albatross. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. Moon of the Swaying Buds (Limited First Edition). Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001. Moon of the Swaying Buds. San Francisco: Edgework, 2002. Bibliography 639 �Moon of the Swaying Buds. Third Edition. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2017. Fifty Jigsawed Bones: A Sea Turtle’s Life. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. Saffron Wings. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1998 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. . One bug . . . one mouth . . . snap! A Year in the Life of a Turtle. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1997 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narrative]. Marginalia. Chicago: Rodent Press, 1997. la. Boulder: Rodent Press, 1996. Like a Crane at Night. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1996 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. KUKLOS. Providence: Paradigm Press, 1995. Cops. Berkeley: Little Dinosaur, 1988. Broke Aide. Providence: Burning Deck, 1985. Rouge to beak having me. Paris: Moving Letters Press, 1983. 640 Bibliography �(As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem. San Francisco: Square Zero, 1982. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. San Francisco: Trike, 1982. Bibliography 641 �periodicals & anthologies “Excerpt from Blue.” Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. Eds. Beau Beausoleil & Deema K. Shehabi. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. 71. Print. “Hundred-Stanza Renga” [with Andrew Schelling], Simply Haiku, 8.2, Autumn 2010. “can’t touch you” [with David Rice]. The Tanka Journal 14. Tokyo: Nihon Kajin Club [Japan Tanka Poets’ Club], 1999. 10. Print. “Lovers” [nine poems]. Generator 8.1: A Magazine of International Experimental Visual and Language Material. Cleveland, OH: Generator Press, 1998. n.p. Print. “Autumn” [includes Japanese translation]. Ashiya International Haiku Festa 1998. [Award]. Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan: 1998. 36. Print. “Against the longed-for clouds” [with David Rice]. Tanka Splendor 1997. [Award]. Gualala, CA: AHA Books, 1997. n.p. Print. “Fallout.” [Honorable Mention]. Hiroshima Haiku and Tanka Competition, 1997. n.p. Print. 642 Bibliography �“Silent snow.” One Breath: Haiku Society of America 1995 Members’ Anthology. New York: Haiku Society of America, 1996. 14. Print, “Basho.” Black Bough 8. Flemington, NJ: 1996. 5. Print. “The Paintings of Social Concern.” Juxta 4. Charlottesville, VA: 1996. n.p. Print. “Wipers steady,” “Home at last,” “Night Falls” [corrected version]. Frogpond 19.1. New York: Haiku Society of America, 1996. 8, 20, 52. Print. “Innocent Diversions” Chain 3. Special Topic: Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media. Buffalo: 1996. 183-188. Print. “Night falls,” Woodnotes 28. [Associate Editor: Gail Sher]. Foster City, CA, Spring 1996. 9. Print. “The boy dozes,” “Winter sun.” Woodnotes 29 [Associate Editor: Gail Sher]. Foster City, CA, Summer, 1996. 10, 22. Print. “George Tooker: Marginalia” [excerpt]. Big Allis 7. Brooklyn: 1996. 30-33. Print. “Autumn leaves.” Ant 3: A Periodical of Autochthonous Poetry & Other Conundrums. Oakland, CA, Summer 1996. n.p. Print. Bibliography 643 �“Resurrection,” “The Seven Sacraments.” Raddle Moon 15. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1996. 113-118. Print. “Noisy city.” Raw NerVZ 2.4. Aylmer, QC, Canada: Proof Press, Winter 1995-96. 29. Print. “Winds blow briskly this evening.” Five Lines Down: A Tanka Journal. Redwood City, CA: Winter 1995. 12. Print. “Even in his company,” “The wind blows stronger.” Woodnotes, 25. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Summer 1995. 8, 13. Print. “Cross-legged I sit.” Ant 2. Oakland, CA: Summer 1995. n.p. Print. “Home at last” [includes Japanese translation]. Basho Festival Dedicatory Anthology. [Award]. Ueno City, Mie Prefecture, Japan: Master Basho Museum, 1995. n.p. Print. “Night falls.” Woodnotes 26. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Autumn 1995. 24. Print. “Snow buries,” “A train whistle blows,” “Tassajara Summer 1969.” Woodnotes 27. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Winter 1995. 17, 31, 41. Print. 644 Bibliography �“Folding its wings.” Modern Haiku, 26.1. Madison, WI: 1995. 10. Print. “Sudden squall,” “Misty rain.” Frogpond 18.3. New York, NY: Haiku Society of America, Autumn 1995. 22, 37. Print. “Night Falls.” Frogpond 18.4. New York, NY: Haiku Society of America, Winter 1995. 21. Print. “Silent snow.” Woodnotes 23. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Winter 1994. 5. Print. “la” [excerpt]. Big Allis 5. New York, 1992. 34-41. Print. “Ex voto” [excerpt from Broke Aide (1985) translated into French by Pierre Alferi & Joseph Simas]. 49+1: Nouveaux Poètes Américains. Eds. Emmanuel Hocquard & Claude Royet-Journoud. Royaumont (France): 1991. 222-223. Print. “Osiris co rider” [from “Kuklos”]. Gallery Works 8. Aptos, CA: 1991. n.p. Print. “Tamarind Esau” [from “Kuklos”]. Big Allis 1. New York: 1989. Print. Bibliography 645 �“W/” Abacus 35. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press: 1988. n.p. Print. “The Fasting Spirit.” [review essay on anorexia nervosa, with excerpts from “Moon of the Swaying Buds”]. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 8:2. San Francisco: 1988. 61-80. Print. Starving passion: A Tribute to Anorexia. Thesis (M.A.), John F. Kennedy University, 1988, listed in: catalog.jfku.edu; print copy in the Gail Sher Collection, Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo. “Cops” [excerpt read by Gail Sher at UCSD November 24, 1987]. Archive Newsletter: The Archive of New Poetry. San Diego: University of California, 1987. 12-14. Print. “Cops” [excerpt]. Writing 18. Vancouver BC, Canada: 1987. Print. Ten poems. Gallery Works 7. Norwalk, CT: 1987. n.p. Print. “For Bart II.” Karamu, 10:2. Charleston, IL: Eastern Illinois University, 1987. 14-19. Print. “The Lanyard.” Notus: New Writing, 1:1. Ann Arbor: 1986. 13-21. Print. 646 Bibliography �“For Bart.” Tramen, 4. San Francisco: 1985. n.p. Print. “Which Collateral Bends the Sea,” “Deft and Resilient.” Gallery Works 6. Bronx, NY: 1984. n.p. Print. Poems. Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 3:1. Buffalo: State University of New York, 1984. 84-88. Print. “From Another Point of View the Woman Seems To Be Resting.” Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 2:1, Buffalo: State University of New York, 1982. 9-11. Print. “Suppose deeply offers up.” Hambone 2. Santa Cruz, CA, 1982. 18-22. Print. “River the Office My Own,” “Lord and Give the Necklace Child” Gallery Works 5. Bronx, NY: 1981.n.p. Print. Poems. Gnome Baker 7 & 8 (1981): n.p. [10 pages]. Print. Nine Pieces. Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 1:1, Buffalo: University at Buffalo, 1981. 16-20. Print. Bibliography 647 �“foal the water bush.” Hoots Who. San Francisco: Boiled Owl, 1980. n.p. Print. “An Exorcism of Representational Language”[review of Red Light with Blue Sky by Beau Beausoleil]. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 11. New York, January 1980. n.p. Print. 648 Bibliography �Resources The Gail Sher Digital Collection in the Poetry Collection of the Univeristy at Buffalo contains downloadable copies of almost all of Gail Sher’s poetry books and journal appearances as well as audio and video recordings of interviews, readings, and discussions. digital.lib.buffalo.edu/collection/LIB-PC011/ The Gail Sher Collection in the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo includes manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, artwork, documentation of her published work, and many of the journals in which her poetry appeared. findingaids.lib.buffalo.edu/repositories/3/resources/572 Resources 649 �Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics 1980-2020 is set in Minion, a digital typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in the spirit of the humanist typefaces of fifteenth-century Venice; it was released by Adobe Systems in 1990 Cover Design: Bryan Kring Cover Art: Gail Sher � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Poetry & Poetics, 1980-2020 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright the Poetry Collection. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_129 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2018 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Extent The size or duration of the resource. 665 p. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2021-02-08 Language A language of the resource eng SherPublications https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/f54e0c01a9fbc9f9707fde6635644243.pdf 93d851c9a5c7b6c1c7cd4e1600e6ae58 PDF Text Text Two Comments by Gail Sher 1. I’d like to thank Jim Hartz, Executive Director of the Poetry Center at SF State, who introduces this reading (and makes a brief announcement at the end). It was my good fortune to have his generous, thoughtful support at the beginning of my poetry career. 2. At the beginning of the reading, I mentioned how much I was influenced by “On Barnaby Jones” by Barrett Watten, which begins: A jeep pulls up to a house in the woods. A man gets out of the jeep. The man’s face and what the man is looking at: blank wall of trees.1 In 1981, when I first read “The man’s face and what the man is looking at,” my mind, opening, launched an experiment which became my first published book of poetry, From another point of view the woman seems to be resting (1982) that is now (in 2017) being developed in a new work2 as a series of “plays without the play”—think of stage directions for an improv (all the dialogue made up on the spot). That “opening of mind” from the bits & pieces of another artist (such that a whole new way of using language suddenly appears) reminds me of Diebenkorn—his response to Matisse for example. He felt, he said, that he could go on “endlessly exploring” a certain idea, and he did. He worked that way as I have throughout my career. So I’m very moved to realize that something that influenced my first book of poetry is still having an effect thirty-five years later. 22 April 2017 1 2 Watten, Barrett. Frame (1971-1990). Sun & Moon Press, 1997, p. 203. Mary’s Eyes (planned for publication in late 2017). � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Two comments by Gail Sher Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942-; Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-03-08 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_144 Date Available Date (often a range) that the resource became or will become available. 2018-03-08 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2019 Language A language of the resource eng SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/bbddceca27cb72ddc66a137fd2b8958f.pdf 5c0531a99194de71f00ec30d41e593ca PDF Text Text DAVID L. SHEIDLOWER Miming the Phrase Review of (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem by Gail Sher (San Francisco: Square Zero Editions, 1982). Gail Sher places an incredible weight in each phrase of this book. They are phrases mostly, the discreet & seemingly incomplete units which make up this short book. I find the weight in the phrases, not on them; they are not burdened, rather each has its own volume & density, can attract the phrases around them or be inert and integral. Take the phrase: “Tubers & iron/even to prepare/this.” From their natural state, both the vegetable & the mineral are prepared by heat, in that sense they’re even (or equal). Very dense consistencies also. Then the “this” which, locating only itself (i.e. not subordinate as in “this thing here”) pulls down on the three words above it & the question is not “even to prepare this what?,” but can the middle phrase double itself? Rather than one incomplete phrase, there are two phrases here, with “even” meaning “as well” and “equal” simultaneously. 70 �A line by itself reads: “Mime is first”; and yes the words are, at first reading, gestures of phrases. Like a mime (on a still, empty stage) pretending to be thrown forward by the short stop of a bus he’s not riding on, these phrases imitate the motion of phrases in a context, but are surrounded by white space & make their own sense: “Dawns or/parson.” The next line is “Or go god,” That’s a real choice in this poem which invites speculation on whether or not religious characters (specific & general): “monk”, “god”, “nun”, “Christ”, “the Moslem”), religious actions (vowing, chanting, renunciating, gracing) & religious imagery (“the/shepherd”, “The wooly flesh”) can maintain their religious meanings in such undevotional as well as non-moralistic phrases. And of course they can if you let them. The poem is not didactic, offers choices. Hence, the only pronunciation is a handful of parentheses at the beginning which sets the mood for the optional: “Saw (too) to/cling here”; take or leave either “to” or “too” or both. Some phrases end with “this” or begin with “As,” attracting surrounding phrases (but there is no syllogistic sense which definitely connects any 71 �two phrases and hence the connections are optional). The poem offers the choice between action and being: “A rung or yelling,” “The grit or/hear”; but wonderfully & conscientiously blurs the distinction between the two “As hover from the/elbows is something/growing.” And so the distinctions between mime and the actual are blurred. Berkeley, 1982 72 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Miming the phrase Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942-; Description An account of the resource Review of (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem by Gail Sher (San Francisco: Square Zero Editions, 1982) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shieldlower, David Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_142 Date Available Date (often a range) that the resource became or will become available. 2019-03-08 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1982 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Language A language of the resource eng SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c35c248ac43350fcbc394bb8a5f857ed.pdf fb5ee2cadb0f0af96a17d348e36039a0 PDF Text Text ������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Science of Cooking: The sponge method Description An account of the resource The Cook’s Magazine, vol. 6, no 1, Jan.-Feb. 1985, pp. 62-65. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942-; Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Cook's Magazine Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_142 Date Available Date (often a range) that the resource became or will become available. 2019-03-08 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2019-03-08 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/9105a3f8c94de1e988b93ce28ec75218.pdf c4688fe6446f35dc8a480fe0b868f545 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A question of origin Description An account of the resource With Merry White Benezra; Review of Lascaux by Beau Beausoleil. Poetry Flash, no. 124, July 1983 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942-; Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Poetry Flash Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_141 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2019-03-08; Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1983 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/59ac6dd50459b9ae0fb001d3d91ef9ae.pdf abbd734ed0d1d7d97727d1cdce0870e3 PDF Text Text HOW(ever) ------------~/\~--------------------Vol. I, No. 1, May 1983 Editor: Kathleen Fraser Associate Editors: Frances Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen Contributing Editors: Rachei Blau DuPlessis, Carolyn Burke WHY HOW(ever)? And what about the women poets who were writing experimentally? Oh, were there women poets writing experimentally? Yes there were, they were. They were there and they were writing differently and a few of them were chosen and did appear in the magazines for people writing in new forms. And then several women began to make their own experimentalist magazines. What about that? Well, they read each other. But we hardly ever heard about their poems where I was sitting listening. You mean in school? I mean where poems were being preserved and thought about seriously and carried forward as news. And the women poets, the ones you call experimentalist, were they reading Simone de Beauvoir? Firestone? Chodorow? Irigaray? Some were. They were reading and they were thinking backwards and forwards. They were writing to re-imagine how the language might describe the life of a woman thinking and changing. And the poetry they were writing wasn't fitting into anyone's anything because there wasn't a clear place made for it. They must have felt displaced. Yes, they must have. They must have felt unreal. Unrealized. Effaced. Did they know it? Yes, they knew it. Did they talk about it? Yes, they talked about it. We were sitting in a writing group two years ago and we talked ab<;>ut it. One year ago, we were sitting there talking about it. Last summer, I was walking around talking to myself about it and feeling displaced and I wrote to one of my scholar friends and asked her about it and she said you are right. There is this gap. But perhaps we don't know how to acknowledge something, how to think about something, unless it resembles what w~s already there. I thought of Dickinson. I thought of Stein. Woolf and Richardson. Slashes, anarchies, sentences, disruptions. I was listening and I said to her, but if we could somehow talk to you and tell you about us, would you be interested? Yes, she said, I would be interested. • HOW(ever) proposes to make a bridge between scholars thinking about women's language issues, vis-a-vis the making of poetry, and the women making those poems. HOW(ever) hopes to create a place in which poets can talk to scholars through poems and working notes on those poems, as well as through commentary on neglected women poets who were/are making textures and structures of poetry in the tentative region of the untried. -Kathleen Fraser A vehicle for experimentalist poetry-post-modern if you will, to be thought of seriously as an appropriate poetry for women and feminists. The poetry feminists usually eschew, believing that now is the time for women to write understandable poetry about their own lives, and with feeling, with the heretofore undeveloped self in prominent display. But the myths of a culture are embodied in its language, its lexicon, its very syntactical structure. To focus attention on language and to discover what can be written in other than traditional syntactical or prosodic ~tructures may give an important voice to authentic female experience. Certainly one should be read side-by-side with the other. Unhappily, most feminist publications have ignored the experimentalist work which women are writing now and have been writing since early in the century. And unhappily, most publications of "new" writing have had little interest in feminist language issues, although some of the women who appear in them have written brilliantly and movingly about their lives as women. We want to publish an excep.. tion, however. -Frances Jaffer �WORKING NOTES FROM GAIL SHER: Virginia Woolf said something about words having auras. Poets place them in sequence. I would say about the vibrations of a word that poets order them according to their similar intensities. Also interested in concentration as it releases energy in language. Addressing not the conscious understanding but the intelligence of contained experience. Also as a child she had wanted to eat Also as a child she had wanted to eat. Without particular motive (to be) on her own crossing the street on her own or going through the door making an effort to buy food. • Always with amount of energy she could spend with that person (son) or even possibly some other people. Even simply listening. Not to but that that had already occurred . urg~d • 5 �Seen by the other people (during) the day or sometime during the course of the day (the driver) calls out something. To be phased by this. To appear calm but actually to imagine herself quarreling . • Intense expression in striving for something (intake) of food (inheritance) of something. Having asked for something to eat (in) one process to eat one (particular) part. • In bed for example (always) perpetuating (striving) in the midst of any room. Which (she) as a lonely person appreciated. Avenues and walking with such & such emotion (buses) where they seem needed . • 6 �Reversing her terminology and tendency to want something from·him. (To) supply food here. (Not) to move or feel like moving. With others like her in the same mood (hiding) something received from her. Delicate relation to her (discerned) (quarter) of mind. • Children & events of the day enter her mind. Once while eating (in) quiet manner of saying something. Or being in a hurry to get somewhere. Arrangement of food at (moment) of giving it to her. By Gail Sher: As on things (which) headpiece touches the Moslem, Square Zero Editions, 1982. From another point of view the woman seems io be resfing, Trike Press, 1983. Available from Small Press Distribution, 1784 Shattuck Ave.; Berkeley, California 94709. 7 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Working notes from Gail Sher Description An account of the resource From HOW(ever). vol. 1, no. 1, May 1983, pp. 5-7. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_140 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2019-03-08 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/3e0dce2ec1aeb6e1a08685b4933e8709.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "The Four Noble Truths for Conscious & Creative Writers" Description An account of the resource Julia McCutchen, founder of the International Association of Conscious and Creative Writers interviews Gail Sher. "In this interview," writes Julia McCutchen, "Gail Sher will guide us through the framework of her Four Noble Truths for writers and lead us to understand how to: establish our writing environment, recognize our authentic writer's voice, troubleshoot obstacles that tend to trip us up, work with process as a key to unlocking our true potential, and cultivate and deepen our relationship with words, their inner silence and stillness." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_140 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_140.mp3 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/156a837e79e9ff84fdbac72a0394cbde.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/017018404d0a1f9983aedcea0c17a02c.txt 4151e966855ad99cf16ecd7037d74a33 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1999 interview with Connie Platt on KDTV about One continuous mistake Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1999 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_161 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_161 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/1ad045a1da14afd189cf05c60f1f770f.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/17545a39b81afce8b9a9ddbaeb5feffd.txt 5ce8d89cb10b689c8515b232a4a9dc96 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): Discussion 3 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_157 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_157 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/76e8630e0dc1c441b14eb301c3cd3f2e.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/995a3a3d69060a6af816aeea909d6324.txt 5ec8e8f4ebb5bdb06f76e3b91408850e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): Second reading of: : "(As) on thing which (headpiece) touches the Moslem Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_156 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_156 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c05a1152a89ac0803feccf3e56278047.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/6ae09cb65be49771f01bd6aa1294f136.txt 4f00674b86b74714f2ba4fb0a04024bd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): Discussion 2 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_155 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_155 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7ba806da636ba8e69d8ddccd90a8dcba.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c64df39321f5007d0209c21c37bd342f.txt 9bbddc26919c9c731a1048f53e0cc14d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): First reading of: : "(As) on thing which (headpiece) touches the Moslem Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_154 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_154 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/869016d59cb63c65379619dd77e1a9ad.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/ea902d4265aabbd0fb376aaeae16509d.txt 89894d01d4145f9c190846b0192e319b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): Discussion 1 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_153 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_153 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/a8a02bad9189d6576fdf0f42cfaa42bd.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/5babda61fafdd91db57238082884d5dd.txt 8494de51ae38e0ec4e018df56a930a74 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): Reading: "From another point of view the woman seems to be resting" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_152 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_152 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/6c35e30b76c731e591d9ea444dbb98cb.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/43baec5d7bfad263533c2442c07f0675.txt b56f8cc6fa636f22f0038eb484910ef0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher reading at Niagara County Community College (1985): introductory remarks Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_151 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_151 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/21854449c90436acf5b17f9e77eacbe3.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/38023f16503795e46ef6abcc974b4bc0.txt b387acb4d121b71d96477b076f2e33cb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1986 reading of "The Lanyard" at Living Batch Bookstore, Albuquerque, New Mexico Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1986 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_160 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_160.mp3 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/903f81ecf15506023787895a25e5a5b3.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7d2e6eaac88531237d0e1d46c78aafc3.txt e6620c2e6bc8d02db5fc035149b295e9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1986 reading of "For Bart" at Living Batch Bookstore, Albuquerque, New Mexico Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1986 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_159 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_159.mp3 SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/d5057be1186fa566d8b4ec1e9abc71d0.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/8395c307c594c949496b84a5c7dbf9fe.txt a42e9fd7029e00de422d54432fcac487 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1986 reading of "(As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem" at Living Batch Bookstore, Albuquerque, New Mexico Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1986 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/m4a Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_158 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_158.mp3 SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/5af154f18bd4c1c4a9d3b1a5ec6ecee9.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/a1375abbe5eb34813bdd01cfa9bec2e7.txt e644a321c8bcdecf32059af16aa92cc7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher interviewed by James Maynard, Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, Emeryville, California, March 19, 2018. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Maynard, James, 1974- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_150 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_150.mp3 SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c06bbcc1fa98634100af0c87fd619ecd.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c37cb912c348dd96680d2fe114066ea9.txt 301f133be07fb60b1c8a0d8bc9419d82 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Though actually it is the same earth Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2008 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_149 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_149.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e3c550a6d19b8484e601ab7e3a67ebf9.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/817647b965e65f82c6d0429bf8a6aa9f.txt 5a80efa6a342db0d325a8937988dd7e6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The tethering of mind to its five permanent qualities Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2009 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_148 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_148.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/30512fbc34ce2f0f81a3357a54cd1c6e.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/65d6e6aa29841cb67a6d0fd821a427c0.txt d48b337578867c23d6c59f70aa8ff6fb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mother's warm breath Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2010 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_147 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_147.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/44d2847d8755708243b5f46526a5a988.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/dff418bc61181014ce0f63d77e5bd08f.txt 5c91aaefb7d56d9b38353acb51982b18 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource White bird Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2010 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_146 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_146.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e6f40f24eacb5ab5a173b8a3dc8de2a9.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/5c23d39b0da56b67b1c34a108165d67b.txt d7537a562ac7528151290ad727e0b535 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Bardo books Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2011 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_145 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_145.mp3 LIB-PC011_145.mp3 LIB-PC011_145.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/bcbd6359d090f90f7fdaa1af0a74ba59.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/89aa5272a593687a0838b4d550a89f28.txt 7f0abd345d48e91243a373f557214b8d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Figures in blue Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2012 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_144 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_144.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/f5580e7447b07dd921b64e0c73cda531.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/eb3ef85d9c60c917519d67d103c5caa8.txt ea5e30808d6aecd482ea3852e77ac400 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Twelve Nidanas Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2012 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_143 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_143.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/3feb0b24701075e5921e65e7244baf15.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/6014cea0e5080c6c33af0f4c4126a1c9.txt 9847f502c4e5c637d5c93dc11e8459ad Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mingling the Threefold Sky Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2013 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_142 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_142.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7d1cc61c0a143912614c4015495f1f52.jpg 8fa9a78dab61ce65af4438e3a8e6d1e8 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/ab5a513395f8b89a7709bea708d10b61.txt c57d18e96a4e9c7b65f1fb783e083f5a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Selections from the Wisdom Mind Series : introduction Description An account of the resource Recorded May 11, 2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound recording Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_141 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_141.mp3 Audio/Video Recordings SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/eb03b185a4639dcbe8dcfb14b6916f65.pdf 095f4fa7d400af2efa8b597ddb078d46 PDF Text Text ����������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Broke aide [excerpt] Description An account of the resource From tramen 3, June 1985 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-11-16 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_139 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 11 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/27c5079dd6e1c2b6d1f73575b9c59d12.pdf 20c16df46ebf3881319a202dd51a85d9 PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chests in exact spiritual Description An account of the resource From tramen 2, 1984 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_138 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7f948441c5fd0257f3c2cbbc5555b944.pdf 13e2cdc25efba57662880c85b5ac946f PDF Text Text �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Foal the water bush Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_137 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b4cd1f4c7fb4ec0091cff083a9fdb43f.pdf 8eaf8cda7cd440c7cfaf9ecfbb963073 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Kuklos Description An account of the resource From Oblek: a journal of language arts, no. 6 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Garlic Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_136 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7d4c43c15fafc87ac410fcaff221a768.pdf 9e20ebe3780b8596d3479164fe82e4fb PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ocker marginalia Description An account of the resource From Jimmy and Lucy's House of "K", no. 6 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1986 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_135 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b250b524659a11352c09b1d99dd3792f.pdf 8020757fb9d06729f1250b50a6cca07b PDF Text Text ������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Review of "Jailbait" by Brad Gooch Description An account of the resource From Jimmy and Lucy's House of "K", no. 3 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_134 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 7 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/6c8f4731b52e4f37383f829c366a9241.pdf 1ef7cb09d74de9e9c88247e207f8a8d5 PDF Text Text ������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The poetics of emptiness Description An account of the resource From Jimmy and Lucy's House of "K", no. 9 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_133 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/7e9438949c69a35fa946579f6f92e45b.pdf 8b12884f5ce20fdddfa585fbb73737d1 PDF Text Text ��� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aware of this as a social act Description An account of the resource From tramen 2 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984-05 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_132 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/1ce4904792205c69f38fd6af0ac75968.pdf e64f4d34c645ae0d4900488a52d45a14 PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource An exorcism of representational language Description An account of the resource From the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, January 1980, no. 11 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1980-01 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1980 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_131 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c8068b1ae70a9a2cc37105c8bc41c7d6.pdf 978989a5dfec233c09e3634317feeae5 PDF Text Text Gail Sher interviewed by James Maynard, Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, Emeryville, California, March 19, 2018 JM: Well, to begin today, this is Jim Maynard, Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, home of the Gail Sher Collection, interviewing Gail Sher at her studio in Emeryville, California on Monday, March 19, 2018. Gail, we are having this conversation at what I think is a very interesting point in your writing career, in that you have recently been consciously reflecting on your development as a poet and reissuing some early work, while also, simultaneously, producing new writing, which I know you do on a daily basis. I think this provides us an excellent opportunity to talk about your poetry and poetics, as they may have changed over time to where you are today. After studying music for several years, followed by undergraduate and graduate work in English and Middle English, and then 11 years of practice between Tassajara and the San Francisco Zen Center, you made the conscious choice to focus your attention on writing. Your first published poems appeared in the magazine Credences in 1981, followed a year later by your first book, From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. Since then you have published a total of 37 books of poetry and several works of prose, including in 2016 Poetry, Zen, and the �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 2 Linguistic Unconscious and Reading Gail Sher. Both of these, and especially the latter, provide your readers with a remarkably useful set of contexts for exploring your work and its “habitats,” as you say. And my questions here today in many ways depart from these two texts. In Reading Gail Sher you describe your work in retrospect as taking shape in four phases: Radical Language Experiments, 1982 to 1997, Asian-Influenced Work, 1997 to 2008, the Wisdom-Mind Collection, 2009 to 2013, and Late Work, 2014 to present. When discussing the first, you write that early on you realized that your “concerns” as a writer were “of a poet, not a novelist, short story writer, or essayist.” And that you “came to understand that [you were] a poet because [you thought] like a poet.” What I wanted to ask you first is, what does it mean to think like a poet? GS: Poets care about language. That may sound simple, but it's a life's preoccupation. So when I hear anything, even you reading that introduction, I hear the particular choices of words, like you used “depart” in an interesting way a few sentences ago. And there will be rhythms that are particular to who you are as a person and onomatopoetic inflections that typify who you are and where you're coming from. And that's what I hear. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 3 And then later I'll go back to the import of what you are saying, which is what most everybody else would hear. It's like a giraffe is oriented in the world in a very different way from a lion. And I'm like a giraffe, in the sense that I just don't function, I don't receive my experience in the same way as other people. And it's a constant problem. JM: Well, the word that keeps coming up for me, and I think I'll come back to a couple of times in these questions, is attention, which I can't hear the word attention without also hearing the word tension inside of it. So based upon what you just said, then, how would you say poetry, then, differs from prose or fiction or nonfiction? GS: Well, I can't speak for poetry in general because I don't think all poets come from the same place. And I'm not saying this place is a better place to come from. I'm saying I can't help it. It's just like who I am. But it differs in the sense of a novelist is thinking about character development and ethics and who is going to fall in love with whom, and who is going to reject whom, and how subtly all of these things take place in society. None of those things are my concern. In fact, in my poetry I have to bend over backwards to leave the story out so that people will pay attention to the language. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 4 JM: That brings me to my next question in terms of thinking about language, in hearing it first before understanding, as all good giraffes do. GS: Right. JM: I know from early on you were very actively engaged with music, having played piano and harpsichord and having studied music theory and composition. How do you think these experiences may have shaped this thinking about poetry and, in particular, your own reimagining of Eastern literary and musical forms from your Asianinfluenced work? GS: I actually formally gave up music when I was a Zen student at Tassajara, so that I could use all of my musical ability for writing. And I believe that I do do that. And it's only been in the last few months that I've taken up a musical instrument, but it's also only in the last few months that I've consciously ended my career as a poet. And in order to emphatically do that—because I did that once before and it didn't work; I ended up writing yet another poetry book—so I decided to write a novel. I used to hate poetry. And, in fact, I distinctly hated poetry and all I read was novels and literature that wasn't poetry. And so when I took up writing, my idea was to be a novelist. And I only had to learn later by default that my interests just weren't that of a novelist. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 5 And so now you're probably wondering, "How can I write a novel then?" Well I hired a tutor and I'm taking lessons. JM: So have you found yourself, then, inverting what you just said? GS: No. What I'm actually finding is that the lessons are completely boring, and I can't do anything that they're really asking. And I've got it down to sort of the way they've got it organized. And so I just flip to the back page and I read what the assignment is, and I hand them not the assignment, but I hand them what I've written already in between when they read my work the last time until I'm going to turn in this batch. They really want my next chapter and I'm really sending them an array of pieces that sporadically cover, basically, what this story is going to be about. It is not really a story, actually. JM: So how do you feel having so long tried to suppress that narrative in your radical language, to now be jumping in that side of the pool? GS: Here's what I really think. I think that the best novels are actually poetry anyway, but they're not language-based poetry. They're more maybe rhythm-based poetry or meaning-based poetry, which I have never written. So in a way, you could say I'm just writing a different type of poetry. But this is not my passion. I better stop and say something else. And this may be because you haven't gotten to the Wisdom Mind part yet. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 6 JM: My next question. GS: Okay. Well, I'm going to answer that question right now. That's really important. It's why I can stop. It's why I can officially say I've done everything I set out to do as a poet and I don't need to do it anymore. What I set out later to do as a poet, when I realized that it was my job and it kind of fell to me to do, uniquely, because of my, not only Zen background, but even more particularly Tibetan Buddhist background, I became aware that other languages like Tibetan and Sanskrit have the ability to convey wisdom in such a way that English can’t. For example, in Tibetan there are 15 words for love, and in English there's like one. So I set for myself the poetic task of enlarging English. So I feel like what I've accomplished as a poet, primarily, is stretching the English language. And the way I've done that is by leaving meaning out, but using language so that it implies a meaning, that it makes you think there's going to be one there any second. So if you sit with a very open mind, almost like a meditative mind, and read my Wisdom-Mind poems, you will find yourself going beyond the language into some other place. And that other place could be a wisdom-based place which is beyond language; whatever it is that's beyond language. And that's what I've strived to do. And �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 7 by the time I got to The Twelve Nidanas, I felt like I had done that exponentially. The Twelve Nidanas takes place on about five different levels. And I felt like I was never going to do it any better than that. And there are a number of books leading up to The Twelve Nidanas, and there's one that follows it that's sort of a coda [Mingling the Threefold Sky]. I felt like I don't need to do this anymore. This is really, really hard. And the pitfalls are, since it doesn't quite make sense, it can also sound like nonsense, or it can sound silly or something like that. And that's not what I was after. So I had to toe this really careful line to neither be silly nor nonsensical, and also not quite make sense, so that the reader would make his own sense, but beyond language sense. JM: This always reminds me of, I think you find it in both Eastern and Western discourses that there is this long-time animosity between poetry and philosophy. That poetry makes a kind of experience possible. That philosophy wants to valorize and describe. GS: Yes, that's right. JM: But in describing it it cuts it off from its life force. GS: That's right. Because wisdom can't be described in language. Wisdom goes beyond language. So that's where my way of being a �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 8 poet can do that. If you were like a novelist you wouldn't be able to do that, or if you were a regular poet who talked about anything. Really, I'm not talking about anything. I'm making something happen for the reader by the way I use the language. So I'm distinctly not talking about anything. So when I stopped writing that kind of poetry, the first thing I wrote was Sunny Day, Spring, which is way more prose-like. But what I loved about that book is that I said to my friends, "So it's 113 pages and it doesn't say anything." And so I was very happy about that. But then later I was still determined not to write poetry. And then I wrote Mary's Eyes, which, actually, I'm very fond of that poem, and it is a poem. And it took a year-and-a-half to write those 22 measly pages. But it's unique in a completely different way from my other poetry. JM: Just hearing you speak now I'm reminded, too, of the great Cage line, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it." GS: Right, right. Yes. JM: This notion of interrupting the mind's habitual activities of sensemaking, that, for me, when I talk about that as a reader, both your attention and your use of tension, that's the tension. GS: That is the tension, right. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 9 JM: This demarcation between making sense, but deferring it, and kind of going back and forth. GS: Exactly. JM: So this space for wisdom that can be possible through language, do you think of it as a non-conceptual type of knowing? GS: Yes. JM: It's hard to talk about outside of its performance, but could you say a bit more about that space? GS: Well, that space, what got me started on that was the 12 years I spent, or 11 years or whatever it was at Zen Center sitting a lot of zazen and feeling at the end like, ugh, this is a total waste, basically. And then later I had a glimmer, actually. When I was at Zen Center I actually had a glimmer of, "Oh! I know what this is about. This is about the body. The body is what is understanding here. If there's anything to be understood you do it with your body." I had flickers of that when I was at Zen Center, but nothing like that was ever talked about, and so I never dwelt on it. But later I realized for absolute sure that it was the body that understood Zen practice, and that I actually had gotten everything. I actually had gotten everything. And I feel that was later confirmed, and I won't go into �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 10 that story. You asked me how Zen practice and Tibetan Buddhist practice informed . . . JM: Uh-huh, and just to hear you talk more about this, what I think of as kind of a non-conceptual or non . . . GS: It's not conceptual. My first glimmer into non-conceptual came with the understanding that it was the body that got this kind of knowledge. And then my second, not just glimmer, but in depth round of it came with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practice, which is very emphatically non-conceptual. And there's a huge portion of it that's just simply rote practice. Like to do the ngondro, which in Tibetan Buddhism you aren't even given your first anything until you complete what's called the ngondro. And each lineage has its own ngondro, so there are different ngondros. But the ngondro that I was given has five practices that you repeat 100,000 times. JM: Wow. GS: That's a lot. It took three-and-a-half years. These are called preliminary practices, before you even get to the first real practice. And so throughout all of that, and then also finally getting to the real practice, one gets a feel for where this wisdom lives. And it's that that I was working with in the Wisdom Mind series. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 11 JM: Do you think there is a connection in any way for yourself between writing and Buddhism and psychotherapy? Is that too much of a leap to make? GS: I would say the connection is there, but it goes from Buddhism to psychotherapy, and Buddhism to writing. I don't know that it goes full circle like that. Buddhism, definitely, informs my psychotherapy practice, absolutely 100 percent. More so than any theoretical model or this and that. It's informed me and I'm the tool for psychotherapy and that is how I work. And so not everybody likes me and so be it. But the people who do really do and their lives really change for the better, and I see it every day. And Buddhism informs writing in the way we've already talked about, like this whole Wisdom Mind thing. I don't know if there's like a circle there. JM: But it sounds like Buddhism is the key. GS: Buddhism is the key. But I've practiced Buddhism at least 40 years pretty intensely. So you can't be that intense about something and not have it be in your blood. It's the way I live, really. JM: That kind of study must re-hardwire your brain and your attention patterns. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 12 GS: It does, even to this day, when I'm not doing formal practice anymore. I made a conscious decision to just accept that writing was my way. And poetry is a Way with a capital W. And so I finally came to peace with that. JM: Thinking about poetry as a Way, I've heard many writers talk about their feelings, however sometimes vague, that all of their books, no matter how different they may be from one another, are somehow all part of an overall or overarching continuing project that they see taking shape through different parts or fragments. As we talk here today, do you have that sense of your own trajectory as a writer, or do you think of these four phases as distinctly separate periods of your work? GS: No. I definitely have the sense of them building, and then culminating with the Wisdom Mind series. And I feel like that book, The Twelve Nidanas, is the culmination of my writing practice, plus the one right after that [Mingling the Threefold Sky]. And from there, I decided to just have fun after that. The only book that I would put in a serious poetry category after that is Mary's Eyes. The others [“Late Work” 2014-2016] were just fun and I'm doing fun now. JM: I'm quite fond of Mary's Eyes. I think through the language there is a real construction of a space for contemplation in that book that I find quite powerful, actually. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 13 GS: Thank you. JM: Almost in an artistic sense, in that there is something almost dramatic about it. It's as if you're creating a stage for something to happen, for something to take place, a performance. GS: Yes, I was. That voice is different from all my previous work. And that's what I'm so pleased with, that it is distinct, and that I felt it was successful. But it took everything out of me, and so I'm writing a novel now. JM: And here's a question that I've actually wanted to ask you about for a long time. I've always been struck at how across your work these 37 years I keep coming back to use of parentheticals. And in Reading Gail Sher you say the “parentheses don't contain, they shield.” And then quote Kathleen Fraser on their ability to destabilize a text. Could you talk a little bit more about your use of these parentheticals in all of your work as both sheltering and disrupting something. GS: Correct. And, interestingly, for the very first time in my whole writing career, in my novel, I'm not using parentheticals at all. And every time I'm tempted to, I go, "No, no. It's not right." Isn't that interesting? It's interesting to me. I think parentheticals were right all the way from my very first work. I bet you, when we discover that first piece, whatever it is. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 14 JM: We'll track it down. GS: I bet you're going to find parentheticals there. JM: Well, I read them all so differently. Sometimes for me, as a reader, they give a multivoicedness to the text, as if there's a different voice speaking. Sometimes they have a tendency to shift the point of view from an interiority to an exteriority. GS: Yes, correct. JM: And sometimes they seem to shift things altogether in terms of register and tone and voice. GS: It does all of the above, yeah. I know. That's why I'm shocked it's not happening in this book that I'm writing now. It's not happening. JM: Well, I'll be curious to see how the novel ultimately ends up. In addition to always being interested in your use of parentheses, from the first time I read it my absolute favorite line of yours from Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious is the following: "My biggest responsibility to myself as a poet is to remain in the realm of the unknown." GS: Yes. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 15 JM: "I don't write from an idea or concept or from any other analytical place. My writing arises, and I am constantly surprised by it." Now, I have to admit as a long-time reader and enthusiast of Robert Duncan's, this seems where you and Duncan are almost sitting in the same chair together. And this, certainly, I think, has many indications for thinking about the Buddhist element you've been talking about, as well as the psychotherapeutic, but could you talk about writing as a process of discovery? GS: Oh, yes. That is what it is, which adds another dimension to everything I said about the Wisdom Mind series because it is about the unknown. And even in doing it, you're dealing with that every single day. I don't have this difficulty anymore because I've been doing it for so long, I think. But I know for my students the hardest thing is to keep them not knowing because they want to know. "We have to have a plan for this and we need an outline and we need dada-da-." And then I tell them, "No, no. Just stay where you are and just see what happens." And they'll say yes, and then the next time they come in they'll forget they said yes and they'll go back to, "Well, but you know, I can't figure out . . ." But it takes place on a whole lot of levels. There's that level of what's going to happen next, so to speak. But there's also the level of just the mystery of language and your psyche and “allowing” in silence and allowing space for anything to happen. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 16 Not to mention, a skillset that's developed over many years. And then you put all that together in a set period of time on a regular basis and something does happen. Mary's Eyes just happened though it took a long time. Something does happen. I almost can say that it's just impatience at this point that keeps me from—I'm sort of almost tired of sitting there. And I'm still sitting there--and more is happening. JM: Duncan has a great line for it. He calls it the intellectual adventure of not knowing. GS: That's right. That's good. JM: But it's difficult. GS: It's very difficult. It's like the artist's blank page. JM: Well, I think of Dickinson’s “I dwell in possibility,” or Keats’s “negative capability.” GS: Yes, negative capabilities, exactly. JM: This is something that poets and artists come back to quite a bit. GS: Right. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 17 JM: I'm hoping we've got time for just a few more. I know we've been talking a lot about more theoretical considerations and your approaches to poetry and language. And I wanted to take a minute or two to talk about what your practice might have looked like in the past or now. You've talked a bit about exercises and activities as a way of preparing oneself to write. But for yourself, how does a poem begin? GS: Oh. It doesn't begin. The whole thing is a process and you just start wherever it happens to come out. And then it keeps coming out dayafter-day as you're sitting in your writing practice. And then you go back at a certain point with a different state of mind, with an editing state of mind. And you start finding where the energy is in the language. And then you throw everything else away that's not those parts that are marked with energy. And then from there, you start building a piece. And it's actually the writing that does the writing. The writing puts together the piece. The writing tells you, if you listen, "Oh, I don't need to come last. I need to come first." Like, "Oh! Really? Well, let's see." And then it either works or it doesn't. But usually it does if the language is saying so. And that's completely how I -- I never know what the piece is until it's the piece. I actually am the last to find out. JM: That sounds very different to me than other Buddhists' approaches, which I think sometimes put the emphasis on first word, best word. As if that extemporaneous outpouring is somehow purer. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 18 GS: Yeah, no. No. I totally disagree with that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, unless it's crafted, it's not writing. Because who wants to read that kind of junk that just comes out? It's just junk that comes out. JM: My last question. I think we've been talking about this a couple of different ways, but I'll end with this. It's another line of yours that I really am quite fond of. You've written that poetry is dangerous. Do you want to say anything at the end here about the dangers of poetry for hapless readers like myself? GS: Well, I don't remember saying that. (I'm still back on the last thought, actually.) This idea of if it's not crafted it's not writing. The craft part of it is what identifies the voice. And so when I'm crafting, I don't even know when I first start what voice this poem is going to assume. And then as I'm crafting, the voice identifies itself, and then it takes over. And so then it tells you what's allowable to be in this piece and what isn't, and what's going to be first and last, and so forth. So the only danger would be forgetting to let the poem write itself. Then you could fall into the trap of thinking that you know what the poem is. And as soon as you do that, you fall into your mind. And regular mind is not as powerful as wisdom mind. This is my beef with academics. �Gail Sher-James Maynard Page 19 JM: Get in line. GS: Yeah, I'm sure. What's most important to know can't be known with the mind. And so it's all just chatter, really. So that's why I feel my poetry is so important, because I'm using language to get beyond language, which is where all the important stuff is. JM: The way I've interpreted that remark of yours, to go back to this notion of Wisdom Mind, and I think it's in Reading Gail Sher, you say, "Poetry is dangerous, after all.” It's our vulnerability before language. GS: Yes, exactly. JM: Language has the capacity to change us, or to become a transformative experience. It isn't premeditated; it can't be controlled. GS: It's raw, and it's really like being naked. And so that is vulnerable. JM: Well, Gail, thank you very much. This has been an absolute pleasure to speak with you today. And I can't thank you enough for your time and your generosity. GS: Well, thank you. It's been my pleasure, too. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher interviewed by James Maynard, Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, Emeryville, California, March 19, 2018. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Maynard, James, 1974- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_130 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 19 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/226f0cc85e4a7256ff5bcacf08714c94.pdf 50abf35af71a2bd58f9b0e6d942dde8c PDF Text Text Mary’s Eyes, a new voice in the radical language experiments Gail Sher has been exploring since 1981, joins the ancient passion of devotion to the cutting-edge linguistic so characteristic of her work. In addition to her poetry, Gail Sher is the author of One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers (Penguin), the first of a widely-praised series of books on the craft of writing, informed, as is all her work, by the practice of Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism and Yoga. Her poetry is archived in the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo, library.buffalo.edu/collections/gail-sher. For more information and to read her poetry online, go to gailsher.com. Gail Sher Mary’s Eyes �Mary’s Eyes �Also by Gail Sher PROSE Reading Gail Sher Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice Writing the Fire: Yoga and the Art of Making Your Words Come Alive From a Baker’s Kitchen POETRY Elm Early Work Pale Sky Five Haiku Narratives Ezekiel Sunny Day, Spring Mingling the Threefold Sky The Twelve Nidānas Figures in Blue The Bardo Books White Bird Mother’s Warm Breath The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries though actually it is the same earth East Wind Melts the Ice The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call old dri’s lament Calliope Who, a Licchavi Watching Slow Flowers DOHA Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse redwind daylong daylong Once There Was Grass RAGA Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms The Moon of The Swaying Buds Marginalia la KUKLOS Cops Broke Aide Rouge to Beak Having Me (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Mary’s Eyes Gail Sher night crane press 2018 �Copyright 2018, Gail Sher gailsher.com All rights reserved Night Crane Press 1500 Park Avenue, Suite 435 Emeryville, California 94608 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner and publisher. ISBN: 978-0-9978313-2-0 �For Brendan ��contents Mary’s Eyes 1 Sing 13 ��Mary’s Eyes ��i cold and snow. the sound of snow falling. the young novice’s eyes it’s (the) forgiveness that she notices (an old noticing) she feels thinks about Christ. will she marry him. she has already married him (she feels) asks if she is sure [bells sound in the background] figures appear. the clink of plates, spoons, hush of nuns eating the rule of the meal (omitting) the meal the weight of the prioress’s eyes readings turn to time (the word Mary repeated) verse empty of her suddenly 3 �ii a tall girl and her girl (their “astrology” of brotherhood) the eyes of one watching from a second-floor window what the watching girl is thinking versus the couple— walking, carrying books, talking loneliness and time. more loneliness and time “crippled time” she muses opening the sash for a better view as if time and her ribs—as if time stopped her ribs “see” she presses placing a hand on one a girl within the girl arrives behind the color orange “break it” she is yelling, throwing food at birds (she is always throwing food at birds) “grandpa fed the birds” she explains she says “the” as if the birds were his or always the same (or something) “the” (the article) making the thing “definite” pinning it down like a thumbtack 4 �orange and birds all curly like his hair mishmash of thoughts underneath grandpa’s car, intelligence, newspapers, noise the grinding of sound inside his head [inside her the smear of his aloneness or what must have been his aloneness] maybe he felt the birds would understand—if they would die or if HE would die “my feelings belong to sky they go up and are swallowed by sky” he would rail (being a person inside out or that his gravitational pull was wrong) as if words were too tight for his body or that he’d say, but instead of words there’d be sadness “the infant Jesus screams can’t you hear him screaming” he’d cry (actually I think I did hear) 5 �iii lines & squares, the enchantment of their honesty the certitude of straight untarnished by thought carves one on her thigh like a symbol of something important then forgets the thing that was important the mark (tattoo) is blue stands for Christ’s feet that eventually turned that color the turning of one color into a second color the brown of his feet still in Mary’s eyes the transmutation of space infected by what happens in it or the imbuing of a form with the means of a previous form touches a line forcing it to speak to say what she forgets (because she really can’t remember) the violence of gone (actually gone is impossible) what is its shape before it becomes its line or if the line is an amulet holding (probably-irrational) reverence beauty this thorough 6 �the image of his feet nailed to the sun its ball of red rising [here the landscape becomes an action that moves aggressively toward her] cups her ears so that it’s paused thinks of the letter F then E E and T summoning them to her so that she is not alone “with a letter I can be WHEREVER I want when I hold one in my mind I forget everything else” [the alchemy of WHERE versus the unawareness of a leg (for example) as if the leg were a mermaid’s rubbery tail (i.e.) a memory from the past trying to be from some other past] “maybe words are stars secretly” (she is thinking) turning one around (handling) it carefully because lightly let go a word suffers “words glitter and shine all by themselves in the middle of the night (seemingly) like a winter star all by itself (hanging by itself) seemingly” 7 �interlude alone in an open room water and wind (their) hardness in time wearing out time replaced she feels with time the freshness of wet blows around her lightly [her sense of the sea (awareness) of time (her presence in the room) co-adjacent with time] her dog too on the rug below one eye opening then closing (seemingly) content the sand covering its body and what the sand says about its life the dog’s ear and what the dog is noticing (waiting) for something to end sees the waves of the sea melt into sea its song vanishing to nothing the rhythm of the vanishing repetitive (prayerful) the earth (too) which the sea hears 8 �listens to sea (the sound of the sea breathing) the implacability of sea time its power and its blueness circling her like a tiger the tiger’s immaculate stealth 9 �iv blue late-April sky, sound of waves lashing the girl’s jaw remembering something ungraspable the sea itself ungraspable thin (soft) time which she dreads the coming of harm, ripening and then, moonlit coming to know (coming being its own naked color) “soon” she thinks but it’s vague the upshot of vague like a portion of a color notices sky, a shadow of a tree, the mind of the tree transferred to a form what the form may imply and whether or not she generalizes its significance reads the clothes for clues 10 �sees Jesus in his robes rising a little (bowing) toward her (slightly) sees herself seeing the vivid reality of his form the body of Christ (touching) it with sight (its) aperture and tone with regard to so much happening the event—Jesus rising—and then again rising— “toward her” had been there the first time (she is realizing) as if his life took place (in her mind a lion yawns) [but it’s clapping. someone is bowing to an act seemingly ended the impossibility of blue (since it stands for itself) ending] authority of blue (standing for itself) attentive (to) what we call color which may have taken place previous to time or even in some other time “what is my color before there was color” ransacks blue as if it were light instead 11 �she is what one is inside of drawn to what is known also sense of fallowness even her hair as if once it was some other color such that it’s cheap the slut factor of hips seeing the calling flammulated then, covered with feathers her name flying away away = coherence (as in food afterwards) the aura of a plate lingering there but in her mind it’s the girl’s blue-feathered shoulders “an owl at night, me the shrew” her shrew has no snout however 12 �Sing ��i a cow hangs toward the end of sky its green moo dead (a social cow) the archer thinks splotches of blood recede into sky his bow too recedes holds feelings of cow cordons off sky so that cow can rest “wipe the blood off ” someone says the cutting of time as if time comes in the slow tones of a woman the subterfuge of having it leans into seriousness (as if) time is a joke then “getting” the joke “what about eggs” someone says, pretending time is a koan 15 �“mind may eat without time mind may eat with neither food nor time” (as if food were time told by the throat making her have some) pleading YES as a motion citing this or that as others pass unnoticeable in her mind’s eye intends again, to eat (again) [a fool eats in slow-motion footage, reel continuous maybe something crawls out of tight dark space] the bag of her (she feels) socks in a silly pile burglars appear. what should she do is someone there. am I there police fence her yard barring her off, warning her probably. hoarding occurs probably + images of climbing—there’d be rain—without footholds, without grab-able bars 16 �reflected in (slight) convexity of ovary area (eating) off the knife, laughter off the knife the pregnancy of knives, cans wrapped in paper or things wrapped in whitish paper 17 �ii a bluebird’s song and then the sky afterwards propelled through time as if they were together blocked by shade, the shade carrying light anyway (its bullying white getting in anyway) its white versus ordinary white white releasing white such that the white of white is freed (white separate from “white”) releasing significance nonverbally white without releasing significance [having freed a color (separate from freeing) refers to alaya of existing like the black part of white such that snow exists for black also] scabs of snow on tree tip also the way it bunches on a branch, a bird in the branch if it moans (in the extreme heart of a woman) 18 �“the sound of snow could be air weeping” as if music were there but then it is over “over” as an idea turns into sky, the gray of mouths opening sings sky forward into treetops the method of sky, voice, snow in choral time no sound but sky the liturgy of sky (and before sky) mimes the One in a row silent canticles in a row 19 �iii moments of snow devolve into blue asleep to itself as if its brain were blue also slow (into the basket) slow into her (as if) trees are following her but the trees are narrowing up to her she will be a bird (she is saying) an ultra bird thought by one in pain one bird walks from shadow into shade tipping the balance slightly one bird versus no bird or if the bird doesn’t sing or fails to sing creates an absence of the bird loops of birds fight wears necklace of birds-in-a-row fighting wears necklace of birds-in-a-row dead 20 �an abstract bird clears in her mind [GEORGIE but her voice is slack] solemnly (solemnly) ice + the vague marrow of its bones “was there time” like a swan (leaves) its name in the air feathers & bones mute “lay dead, lay dead” snips time touching its feathers “poor Georgie” said (a bit bleak) sings in wind (adds it to the bird) 21 �iv [fades to black winter lake, swan (in it) swimming the midriff of the lake (its) hollowness in space] “look a crane” someone says taking out binoculars she turns to see the crane but SHE is the crane the hood of her head covered with snow offers condolences to her but SHE is the one offering condolences “cranes are always offering condolences” dancing in snow with their tracheas screeching bony rings rattling the emblem of her throat arched high in the full moon escutcheon of moon with medallion of her throat sings to moon which she feels is SO watching (hopes to hear the moon) 22 �the sound of a thumb presses back softly, the silence of a thumb in the pit of her stomach the sound moves to her throat its thumb speaks in her throat like a second throat aware of a thumb as a mouthpiece of pressure sees with her mind it being in a grave the lowering of the thumb (loaning color to earth) frill of snow covering it up [a drawing of the thumb: graphite on paper 1963 is written near the bottom the writing is cracked though] 23 �Mary’s Eyes is set in Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in the spirit of the humanist typefaces of fifteenth-century Venice. Minion was originally issued in digital form by Adobe Systems in 1989. In 1991, Slimbach received the Charles Peignot Award from the Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mary's eyes Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_129 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 33 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng SherPublications https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e352da3b0f0f091d6be77062c6e000cd.pdf 7d3dc78118ecca6bbdce57da32d9774a PDF Text Text though actually it is the same earth Gail Sher Q night crane press 2008 �Tiger Dream Sun from behind the mountain falling on the threshers and reflecting from the lake gains depth from the sound of falling. The sound of water over stones at the lake’s edge is like a darting bird. If she wakes, she couldn’t say the bird disappears, but its breath dissolves, like an undertow at sea. How igneous (fiery) and lucid are the bodies of tigers, she muses. 21 �Commentary Each day the sun slips over the crest of the hill and lights the yellow grass. A cat climbs the hill as though dawn were in its head, entwining pieces (petals in branches). A day-moon slides below low tide. Fall-out from one’s skin protects it from further harm. Tide emits tide as she wanders down the coast, empty as a battered jug. 22 �A woman carries a jug dexterously embroidered on silk. The woman’s skin shines like the interior pink of a river. The dimensions of the jug’s magenta is implicit yet exacting. Out is not a direction but an aspect of conference around the jug’s battered aggregates. Bringing yellow out, where out is a structure of color and light, intensifies out, as if its DNA changes. 23 �There is an hour in which her memory will be there, where light falls in rain on a tiger’s flickering head. A stone woman prays, hearing sun in sun. (She dreams its precise nest.) A magenta flower glows so that I feel free at last. A magenta flower glows, disappearing in its skin. Light jumps back as if she has that person again. 24 �Death is color-added-to-color. Color learns color by touch, like the feel of rain from one’s bed. What if the occurrence of harm refers to the difficulties of offering the harm? In the broad space of an animal, a wound in a woman’s thumb feels like embroidery of jasmine and honeysuckle. The necessity of something and its form is the tiger sleeping, tail to tail, in tandem with something. 25 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Though actually it is the same earth Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2008 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_128 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/4c50546673596aea46a95b58702bd20f.2 2d23e4ead1d55271decf07d1bc2cfb7e PDF Text Text The Tethering of Mind To Its Five Permanent Qualities Gail Sher Q night crane press 2009 �ii A gull circles a wedge of water, marking the water with her eye. The memory of her skin is limitless, like the memory of her cry, before a kill or later for the sake of others. Wind, too, gains qualities by its forcefulness with things, its hand, say (a piece of sun cut off). A crack in light, like a painting of light. The palette of wind is gold, she mutters, the boundary of a man playing chess in light being the dead person. 65 �A flower emits voices behind falling sun. A flower is soft and the pain of soft reminds her of a sea of heads. As if her life dreams its own violence. If a bird disappears, she may have asked for this to happen. She begins to think that mountains wash out mountains. That the sea of heads form a land on which to walk, which she calls the isthmus of larks. 66 �So a bird flies flat and what is it about its sleek blue mind. Is a bird a bird or quality of place dawned by the bird? you mutter. You look at a chirp, though it could be surreal. A tree comes just at the point of sky. Phenomenology of the tree rides not so much on the stature of the tree but like the tap of a cane, where it goes after it is hidden. 67 �A sycamore branch in late light sheds, as if sun splashes scattered shards of larks through needles of light-fall. Time is little drops like from a spout drip-dropping the bough. Its stem is underground, someone says, and I have a memory of a double stream flowing deep beneath the earth. You tap on the stream to awaken the stream so that the leaves stop shaking their light out of it. 68 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The tethering of mind to its five permanent qualities Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2009 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_127.2 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/67125cd41265b840e85b745acd74ea9b.pdf 3f50323259074a698850aff1c2263a62 PDF Text Text Mother’s Warm Breath Gail Sher Q night crane press 2010 �ii My mother is a place. And a being from there having qualities, as if she is also from there. From the inside of her being her, gradually becoming her in the same taste as russet-pink. Russet-pink is a field carrying one’s pure essence, like a whiff, oh! that’s her! Maybe some pawmarks. Totems of her gaining belly from herself. 83 �A place is by chance (like pain is a guess). Like a lid with its definite jar, she’s attached to this, thinking maybe there’s no other jar. The lid has a slogan, which she wears and thinks it’s not right if her family does not. Like a birth word, say. Every person has one word. 84 �Held adrift by old old hearing. Don’t touch you! says her own face. (For she recognizes the previous resentment and its marks on her old face.) As if spring follows summer and we are already at the beginning. If my father is murdered, does that mean I am dead or (like one’s face in sound) about to be dead? 85 �A legacy of light is separate from reflection, like a legacy of dog only sees itself. So there is mourning but not knowing. She could be a dog thinking she’s a dog. Her formless growl cracks like a flower, like shards of voice but one hears only the thinnest outermost skin. I harbor myself in the familiarity of something, air, leaves, peacocks running across a field. 86 �People coming in like the last second of her knowing. As if she’d snapped her teeth. Stealing knowing, she becomes simple. In the interstices of a plan, like knowing skips to what’s there anyway. The value of her in the real actual sitting down, till she rests. 87 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mother's warm breath Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2010 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_126 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/520af15a469240fbc4c25ff7ac9e7528.pdf e8c862c9b0558fbf6461a6da97af8005 PDF Text Text White Bird Gail Sher Q night crane press 2010 �1 A man wearing birds, sitting in birds, inside the birds’ flow. Together they’re called White Bird. White Bird grows tall. White Bird hugs his own legs back. The meditation of sky streams into his heart so there’s a passage of heart into which he may relax. White Bird relaxes back into his heart, breathing white, like the beauty of a seed or wind in a bird’s hair. A man sits in wind wearing few clothes, but the birds come and sit on him like clothes. 57 �White Bird stops. Summer light swarms his shell and the blue shell breaks. The beauty of his wing fills with sky. A gull too drags its sky. As if it were an ear gathering in sky. Beauty is sky. Beauty is rain in sky’s past sky. 58 �My mother’s arm is pure, its curve of sky seeping into structures. Then later someone says, That person is a dead person. So then I think, The beauty of sky’s color flows from her arm reminding me of her arm. I want to wear sky, I holler. (I am in tune with degrees of my mother hanging from death like a soft shoe.) Her yellow armpit sags, like old newspapers would be lying fallow as they do on distant fields. 59 �A man buys socks but it is really death lurking in sky. I want to dust sky out so that my limbs swallow themselves. He looks, passing by death, as if he is new, in sky now, as he puts it. O look at the birds! They’re combing each other’s hair! (He’s watching a bird gather its gorgeousness.) My mother is a line. Within the death-lines she is one. But a node on her blackens and then she is not my mother. 60 �I know a bird whose color is sky before the sky admits itself. Like the brain of a color if sky admits the bird. A mountain is visible inside the bird then. Its color dies then. A queen bird releases into sky. There’s the sky! someone says, as if there is sky, the location sky. That bird knows me well, I’m thinking, because the bird is mostly dead. 61 �Here is a corner of sky, mother says, fondling a dead bird wrapped up in her pocket. (The bird had lost sky. That’s why it died.) I am the oscillations of a flower, inside, like a flower’s brevity, she whispers. A tall bird tumbles through sky. The touch of its voice is like a raw egg folded into zero. My mother feeds me air, the tablature of air, doubling air, forcing it to become air to something. 62 �I dream of air (a box of air) because I conflate air with my dead mother. She could taste the flavor of the box and in her mind suck out the box. (Secretly she criticized people who didn’t suck.) Her feet swell in air. The ascending foot, like you could crawl inside the foot. Who is the end of my mother? Who is the end of my death? (I am organizing myself backwards.) Flowers fall, but mountains blossom in air. Born in air, I’m in air already, like a broken piece of air. 63 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource White bird Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2010 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_125 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 8 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/323a0537bfdf16a399f8bbd48e94c549.pdf fa4669ade19b0d7e0c88f0175920dbb3 PDF Text Text The Bardo Books Gail Sher night crane press 2011 �Bathing Suit �A woman begins, is the value of space, like a child in a pool, shuffling air in which hard wood is air. She breathes through wood, taking sharp quick breaths. I want the soft cloth of children, she’s saying. Her breath has height and the texture of children swimming, new swim, out and out, yet clearly touching the bottom. The mind of wood may rest itself to completion, she murmurs. Wood and air is swimming there, in the space of air filtered through a dark forgotten memory. 16 �She is complete air. She tucks herself in air, as in the taste of breath, the babysteps of breath. She is anterior to her air and tries to tie air like a ball. Someone gives me a ball and I tie up the ball. I feel certain that I want to tie the ball. She calls it air because it’s there like air, but actually it’s a kind of stupidity. 17 �Swimming is like a captivity in its body. Every minute in a row I am swimming everywhere and wanting to spend my time swimming swimming swimming. Because death, too, is an integer. I say ‘grass’ and it follows me into longevity. The absence of time, like grass without time, or a lizard in its skin but outside time so that its purity lay in its body. The brain of the sky snaps an instant to its purity because everything perceived is Buddha Vairochana. 18 �My mind vanishes then. Inside its skin it has its male and female aspects. A pool of mind is a passage of light, raw light, the membrane between the watery part of light. A person flows through wood and is the breath of a swimmer, like two dead people in love. Air in a heart is the same air resting there. 19 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Bardo books Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2011 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_124 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/f594c528e72f77d68f1245e3360857f1.pdf 638e846a857ad952c93309ac9fccd2f7 PDF Text Text Figures in Blue Gail Sher night crane press 2012 �DAFFODILS A woman alone at a large open window gazes at the sky. The soft flesh of her arm folds around a basket. If she is dead, the colors may be alive. Her soft flesh holds a premonition of her, calls its form within the form of its space in sky. She is miming sky with her body. Taming its color, like a double her of color. There is a sense of intense activity in the buildings and neighborhood, so familiar, yet her skin is not that. 1 �Angst from the street, but what prevails is the face of a person waiting. An agony of light chugs through her body. If she could roll out her body, like make a road of her body, there is the sense of that being all there is. As if her flesh were a habit, a woman stands in sky, catching it in the drape of her dress. 2 �As she rests in the bare window she is dead. I (am dead) she says. It stands like a point of view. A strip of death is on the woman’s arm. She wants the death eagerly, like time tucked in her arm. On the crest you can just touch death, she feels. She sees an arm (the boundless ordinary nature of her arm) in a gown, in the sky, wrapped in a column of the unsaid. 3 �Sky like sea, around a woman hugged by sea. A man is a response (like sky and a sea wall). The float of him sinks, then appears on the horizon. I am exempt from sky if I empty myself toward it. The flaccid man’s ribs absorb the thick musculature of her arm. Daffodils range, placated by time, but it is the habit of deep slumber. 4 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Figures in blue Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2012 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_123 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/72a7fd334c6fa7fc4a65a584b494d251.pdf 86d1ccd907607b31c9e237fa401d4c7d PDF Text Text The Twelve Nidānas Gail Sher night crane press 2012 �III I walk through trees, a series of squat willows, and see the space between the willows as time. Because it’s not the space, it’s the emptiness of mind (whose energy is grounded to its darkest possible color). Taking birth beneath a tree, I want to feel my longing for the tree, my deep thought of you in its disentangled precision of stillness. One bends, taking its time, a full earth of time. How do I wander into its leaf? 9 �Merely touching earth, gently touching the awareness of earth, like the beginning of day in earth. Leaves stretch to sun, the full breath of sun, but I am left gasping. My reference point is fading. The underleaf is blank. But blank itself catches me in a kind of double-take. A gap exists but she refuses to see it, which is a third sort of fuging, like the darkly yellow on the leaf ’s bottom. 10 �That yellow cala lily, earth and earth-consecutivewith-darkness, a coincidence of blood and dark and color, such a yellow, heavy and unknown. Indexed to light, this card of light folds around the sleeve of your body. We take shelter in abyss, which looks like a color, magenta calligraphed in a cala lily’s cup, deep in the cup, its fire. Color filters light is not the net color that the cala lily tells by way of its earth sign. 11 �IV Night is her skin, its pleats the quiet fold of her. Background and foreground are the memory of a skin wearing dynasties of her. A bird touches night and her skin moves as if it were tied to this. As if a mass accumulates in a narrative of space. Now preserves as a robin opening out of its capacity in me. I want to pet it. I want to cry. The intimacy of a word before it is a word, so that it’s now, in the interval, wears its own full body. 12 �How many tiers live in a word and the hues of the tiers in the space of the word’s awareness. I, the word, in the space of my form, imaging my form, like a lion in its death throes. I swallow you and emergence in a word. (The word’s shape is how death looks like this image.) A cold press of wind through a word’s tired body could be hell or a word separate from its word. 13 �To feel into a word, which may be neutral, but may be like an animal who gets the word, as if the word were a lesion in its body. The lesion could be freedom because a word has no location, like a break in the hills. (Mostly our words are skeletons of themselves.) One senses the transparent quality of its body, an unchangeable power that runs alongside its body. I am a word. I am the ultimate fearless word, beauty or sky so that there is nothing in the way. 14 �A word lands on her cheeks. Unspeakable is the word. Unspeakable is the crutch, the cane of the word, the transparency of the word that relates to her as a body. As how several letters cast a sense of time, like a painting casts depth, which is the image of death in a room. Then the dream of the word amalgamates. First there’s sky, then the full comportment of a body. Sky-swaddled words catch the light of death. I want to believe each word, like pray to the word, because you want to believe in its denial, forgiveness, everything. 15 �A word lay in snow. If you lift the snow and suspend your idea of the possible, it’s like space linking space to all constellations of that word. The sheer resplendence of a word, as how the daughter of a word, a whole lineage pouring out from its god-father. A child picks up a word. It’s the enjoyment of the word, the shape of all commodious expressions that the mind living in that word carries. In a tapestry of texts, I am in the moment of one, as if I had gone to sleep. 16 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Twelve Nidānas Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2012 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_122 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 9 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/5cb166e182aa8612b5995a9138c5b0e8.pdf dda7142c8aeb7233df8fd5aa437ef6ed PDF Text Text Mingling the Threefold Sky Gail Sher night crane press 2013 �Y E L L OW 7 �A vein of sun hits a woman’s cheek. What is her face, she wonders, a blush of cheek beneath the long hair of her goldenness. How sunlight fills the sky is how the mind myelenates appearances to her. Whose milt is on the edges. It stands in front of sky such that all she sees is sky. The absolute knowing of sky, weather and sky, like a prerogative that’s said against which she may stroke her child. 8 �Though she sits facing away, as if it is in her, one feels the age of this away as her. The painter paints time locked away from its material, like her own personal face exiled from her face. As if away without location is the real time, the real completion, a recrement of sky, the other loneliness of sky. Rangjung dorge’s face. Its light is not what is in me that way. 9 �As the moon releases into sky, shedding yellow back to sky, you see a person’s face deep in the heart of the eye of one. Day walks out of day losing track of its intelligence, the part of day held back from day or the end of his life which is so heartbreaking. Sound at a distance extends from in front of him. The arc of his face leaks into shape. The space between her face, the moon’s display of face. (The features of her belie her apparent face.) 10 �* The color of day, two figures in a plain, as if two were possible outside of itself as a number. As if day were a point dabbed like paint onto the brief cortex of togetherness. A pattern of her in yellow, such that she too, though he, the he of how they came to be here forever. Where clouds are yellow and birds are yellow, a double portrait of her, which is them as who she is. 11 �It’s like these two things, the way light throws itself over land, them as a pulse, a stream of apposite colors. The metaphysics of grey within a yellow space, or closeness, the duo of her body coming to be the grey. For this she’d received an empowerment. A doleful space of air. A prosody of air. The belly of the mind leaks the containment of them, as how the painter lifts the them of them and simply puts it on a piece of paper. 12 �Waiting is the movement. Waiting is not resting because the aspect of pair, a person’s hat of hair, the tip of the world at the edge of his hair. The man is not. He is thinking about something else. His hat facing light holds the tension of his being there. The skirl of light obscures to fading light. A vague sense of waiting hangs over his elbow. Now he is home listening to its softness as if inside me I have finally found my bedfellow. 13 �* The fold of a tree over light on a road, if she is in the road, the sense that she would be there anyway. An old live tree, like the life of someone screaming, is the language of the tree pushed outside its form. What colors grow untouched in her, her and her, what she sees on the Paris streets. Old registers hard even in a bit of shade. 14 �What is it in a tree that seems to be erased, as if emotion were space, and the subtlety that is part of the tree, the great washing over of space. The way time holds light on the inside of her which is how color organizes itself toward a person. It makes me question whether sky is the same since movement is not limited (I begin to see sky as limited). Fifty three skies settle in my backyard may simply be sky pouring out sky. 15 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mingling the Threefold Sky Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_121 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 15 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings poetry SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/309fd2b415ac66de1778e2cee3cea5a5.pdf 5d8f530f9e067b5b683c7541997a7ea2 PDF Text Text Selections from the Wisdom Mind Series Read by Gail Sher (recorded 11 May 2017) Introduction: “Between 2009 and 2013 I wrote a series of eight books, beginning with The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities, and culminating in The Twelve Nidanas and Mingling the Threefold Sky that are rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and dedicated to “stretching” English in order to create gaps so that Wisdom Mind might flow through to the reader. The idea in these poems is to not-quite-make-sense. The beauty (hopefully) of the surface language plus the strategy of “approaching narrative” first intrigues, then holds a reader, allowing, in stillness, the dawning of a new kind of intelligence. As a poet, I feel that this body of work is my most important.” Print source: Sher, Gail. Reading Gail Sher. Night Crane Press, 2016, pp. 3-4. File name: sher gail intro wisdom mind.mp3 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Selections from the Wisdom Mind Series : introduction Description An account of the resource Recorded May 11, 2017 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2018-10-30 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_120 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 1 p. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. LIB-PC011 Gail Sher Collection Language A language of the resource eng Audio/Video Recordings SherInterview https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/65dca10684e7907e0422b247611ef462.pdf fb0558f039c6dacfc27f8bf3fffa9c34 PDF Text Text frog pond one moment's fragrance ... petals in the wind Marianna Monaco Vol. XIX, No.1 May 1996 HAIKU SOCIETY OF AMERICA �cloudburst . . . drip-drying all the way home April showers umbrella blows its top: so do I ... shut tight against the spring rain windflowers Edith Mize Lewis first day of spring ... the colors of bright umbrellas reflect on the wet sidewalk Mary Fran Meer spring rain & pink slicker bobbing around its toddler Lois Gregory light rain the violets you left blooming again 50th anniversary we argue about planting the Peace Rose Marian Olson Carol Conti-Entin the puka-puka of rain on a tarpaper roofa child's muddy boots Carol Dagenhardt cold March morning ... dragging the trash to the curb . . . pausing for crocus Kathleen Hellen spring storm cat moves her kittens one by one by one Robert Gibson I stand in the rain, seeing my life's reflections pass before my clearing the garden: discovering the first rose and the first bee C. Stuart-Powles ring around the roses the toddler stamping each yellow crocus hummingbird canvassing the crocuses Elizabeth Howard Junaid Khan wipers steady ----- "no vacancy" again the storm passingover the painter's scaffold another rainbow l Gail Sher Ernest 1 Berry office window cannot open . . . outside a crocus sways Tears of homesickness a crocus bleeds onto snow in my inner land Jim Mullins Clarissa Stein Jack Lent in this field beyond the lawn wild daisies After spring showers children playing hopscotch leap rainbow to rainbow Robert Gibson Nancy A. Jensen across the river rainbow and swallow arc Cecily Stanton 8 Not quite hidden by the junk in the lilies-of-the-valley Mountain trail: two wild irises five miles apart . Dave Sutter 9 �my son asks casually what a tree costs John Stevenson a few snowflakes fall yet behind the dark-blue pines still the sun through the drizzle spruce growing bluer and bluer billboard: the black hole in her Colgate smile Chris Linn Elizabeth StJacques in the street a batch of red strawberries all smashed but one Sheila Hyland anniversary two acorns sprout two leaves in an old crosstie Awake all the night . . . I watch the green sun rise through my third glass of tea Rick Woods heat from the tug's stack in passing wavers the shaft of the Empire State Nina A. Wicker home at last not a single leaf on the crooked tre Paul 0. Williams Rain drops From the crack in the ceiling . . . -getting out the pot Gail Sher shadows of windblown trees on the rose rug we talk of travel late sunlight climbs the wall cigarette by cigarette Ruth Holter rushing across the rocks the felled tree's shadow Lisa Pretus Lany Kimmel waiting room the early evening sky threatens rain Susan Stanford at last the old oak has fallenthe sky it left Waiting ... we listen through electronic shadowshow cold this house tonight! Jeanne Emrich moonlit shore: only this leaning pine and the old fisher's silhouette spring night this newborn moon swaddled in haze George Ralph Elizabeth St Jacques night's garden sleepless petals tossing James Chessing silhouetted tenements cut the rising moon into slices Peggy Olafson full moonafter hospital curfew patients' shadows stirring Joseph DeLuise Yoko Ogino telescope's tight field surprise jetliner leaves Saturn awash Judith Liniado 20 21 David Nelson Blair �ing this, I can laugh at the chagrin of the jewel thief reaching for it until he realizes that all the glitter is in the name. Although I do not approve of theft or of the greed of he who covets, I feel an affection for these thieves. It may be because the thieves of the first haiku are humble and naive, and the thief of the second haiku has played the fool. But I think it goes beyond this. Both poets have written with total objectivity; they have passed no judgement, and in this way they have slyly slipped me into the roles of the thieves. I too have been enchanted by the falling star, and I too have laughed at myself for being hoodwinked by a name. Patricia Neubauer 1 2 "A Small Ceremony." From Here Press, 1988. © Dee Evetts. "The Cottage of the Wild Plum." Modern Haiku Press, 1991. ©Robert Spiess. ERRATA, Winter 1995 ·n Errors occurred in two sequences and in one haiku in the :1995 Winter issue. These works are printed correctly below. Furthermore, Helen K. Davie should have appeared as cojudge of the Nicholas A. Virgilio Memorial High School Haiku C'..ompetition. After surgery after surgery she feeds me ice chips with a plastic spoon visiting hours over she sneaks back with chocolate · her finger traces the line just above my incision one week post-op sign of recovery first erection wedding picture how thin I was two months after surgery John Sheirer ight Fans night fallsskin folds around my bones · slouching toward the toilet night wind sears me to the bone ·1 \ \ \ full moon-facing it knees braced beneath my robe I I these fifty years having accom.plished nothing I sail home \ · Gail Sher _... .-----·------·---·---· ····· ···-······-·· camera light news anchor's smile off off Lee R. Seidenberg 52 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wipers steady Home at last Night Falls [corrected version] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Society of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_119 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/2ce89eed4e71767ca6dafc90b31993f4.pdf e1537fd365a783310d15c5b5de9fc424 PDF Text Text 3ive Lines C"Down a tanka journal �Five Lines Down is a bi-annual journal devoted to the art of tanka, featuring poetry, essays and book reviews. Submissions must be previously unpublished and not under consideration by any other publication. All correspondence should be addressed to the editor: Kenneth Tanemura, 10 Wayne Court, Redwood City, CA 94063, or co-editor: Sanford Goldstein, Maison Dankuro #602, 11-28 Megumicho, Sekiya, Niigata-shi 951, Japan. Subscription: $10 USA and Canada; $16 overseas, by airmail only. Canadian and Overseas subscribers should use International Postal Money Orders in US funds. All subscriptions include two issues of Five Lines Down. All materials should be accompanied by a selfaddressed stamped envelope. Persons submitting from countries other than the United States of America should enclose two international reply coupons for airmail reply. Full rights revert to contributors upon publication. Five Lines Down assumes no responsibility for failure by contributors to give proper acknowledgement or for copyright infringements. Copyright© 1995 by Five Lines Down �CONTENTS TANKA .Suezan Aikins Nasira Alma C. M. Buckaway Tom Clausen Steven D. Conlon Marje A. Dyck Ellie Friedland Michael Ketchek James Kirkup (translations) Evelyn Lang Geraldine C. Little M. L. Harrison Mackie Sandra M. Martin Dorothy McLaughlin Lenard D. Moore Elizabeth Nichols Zane Parks Brent Partridge (translations) Robert Poulin George Ralph William M. Ramsey Edward J. Rielly CeRosenow Alexis Rotella Pat Shelley .......... J c<!ini Sber Michael Dylan Welch Jeff Witkin 10 2 14 14 13 11 11 13 9 13 8 13 14 14 4-5 13 12 8-9 3-4 12 8 14 7 10 1 12 S-6 7 �she knees me in the crotch oh so gently this comely topless table dancer on the verge of tearing my hair out I realize !haven't any to spare Zane Parks How long has it been since I've heard a cricket's chirp, as now, in the darkening before a summer's rain? D. W. Parry rwinds blow briskly this evening \ crickets are beginning to chirp tell me-blue Jesuswhy do you pick now ( to be silent? j \ I L Gail Sher S_eptember moon fades one more love leaves me behind at dawn George Ralph 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Winds blow briskly this evening Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_118 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/d919a0c9ca9206a664a2f111e124261d.pdf 0eb9c1fef763fbdd6ccc19b1a8b6a06c PDF Text Text \ GALLERY WORKS SIX \ �; . Peter Holland, Jeanne Lance and John Yurechko Edited by Address GALLERY WORKS 1465 Hammersley Avenue Bronx, New York 10469 Gallery Works appears yearly. Submissions should be accompanied by a stamped return envelope. Issues One to Five are available for $4 from the above address. Tl)is publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, CCLM, with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Copyright © 1984 by Poets' Commune Publications. All rights retained by authors. A part of "from A READING" was first published in "Potrero Hill Literary Supplement," San Francisco, Spring, 1982. \ \ �GAIL SHER WHICH COLLATERAL BENDS THE SEA Which collateral bends the sea as face co-ordinates time. Lovingly is (lovingly) holocaust though the fault lay somewhat peacefully. \ \ �GAIL SHEA \\ DEFT AND RESILIENT Deft and resilient hovered or pierced (as the pair was cold). For air often as a plan presses the associate. Can on not to loss spares off. Each one too far (as) though sand bent the vi II age. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Which Collateral Bends the Sea Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_117 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/0a14f24210b33b9411f89a074397ffd5.pdf 5eb1a8f6cb2a8b99da08515be163f042 PDF Text Text ISSUE NUMBER THIRTY- FIVE July 1, 1988 $2.50 or $17/year from Potes & Poets Press Inc, 181 Edgemont Avenue, Elmwood CT 06110, Peter Ganick, editor. GAIL SHER w/ Patten. slept. Cluck. The �Mina & khi. Gander. Fah oat. Cow imago • •. Twilight. �Parcheesi ••• Is rided day-bread. Have I dais. The backer. Dearie. �Said dray. Can cam Ass is. Well isotope. Mani gala am. �Frauline. Clocks. Frito an ochre. Sirius monk. Passing too breath. �Grosbeak till string. Font weir font taxiing. Was kid Shasta. Yemen birdie gosling. �Mien less jasmine. Nuestro uh-huh. Each dildo sannyasi. Hansel data greenleaf. �Lark I. Patter. Patter. Strut. Hush. Not bass cyclops. Dune Tuileries. Snap. �Take sailors• Booker islet. Yarrow mia tendril• Of brushes grasped. Bayou an taro. �Kraut• Radha. Char one. In lasts chartreuse. Angelica tho' daft. �Nihility frocks• Jackerel w/ Bo dead. Tiller. Are are rein. Soto. �Gail Sher's latest book is Cops (Little Dinosaur Press, Berkeley, 1988). She has published four other books and has appeared widely in journals. She lives in Berkeley California and is on the staff of the Mills College Counseling Center. :1 Potes & Poets Press Inc 181 Edgemont A venue Elmwood CT 06110 FIRST CLASS MAIL ISSN 0886- 4047 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource W/ Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Potes & Poets Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1988 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_116 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 12 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c6245c0a890711860da1a27a197a15cb.pdf 50489cbd7d950394fa52139197c180a2 PDF Text Text J .· .u X T # A 4 1996 T B A L E OF CONTENTS: Bruce Andrews, Sheila Murphy, Jake Berry, Tom Taylor, Jolm M. Bennett, Dale Jensen, Ivan Argi.ielles, Adam. Comford, Paul · .Weidenhoff, Merle Bachman, Celestine Frost; Bob Heman, David Hoefer I. Barry . Coiner I Robin Hoefer, John Nato, Jeffrey Little, Gail Tills, Fernando Aguiar, de Araujo, Ficus Strangulensis, b. thales, Daniel Barbiero, Clemente Padin, Larry Tomoyasu, ·spencer Selby, Pedro -Juan Gutierrez, John Byrum, Peter Ganick, Chris Daniels, John Crouse, M. Kettner, Jvfike Basinski, Stephen Ratcliffe, Paul Green, Cheryl Burket, Jim McCrary, Matt Hill, Chris Stroffolino, Brian Stefans '/Judith Goldman cover ·by - Rebecca Lasley EDITORS: Ken Harris, Jim Leftwich ADDRESS: JUXTA Jim Leftwich . 1512 Mountainside Ct Charlottesville, VA 22903-9707 E-MAIL: Juxta43781@aol.com All · rights. Single revert copies: $6 to authors upon publication. Subscriptions: · $1"2 per year or ..j' PeA tJv (4VL (_t>-(Vl. l, 1 �Gail Sher The Paintings of Social Concern nip atrium. tip or are The Subway 1950 femme wits "hoes-thief" (washes Bartholomew) Elle. till assay chitchat yes �Government Bureau 1956 a-tisket Wenceslaus urn plateful what/hoosier sackc6at �Supermarket 1973 oops! · redbreast Way or (slicker) Cheapside cowbell tell new wetlands teary-eyed �Highway 1953 Tudor. wry by plume Tibet tri do chrysalis aegis. @ Asia kill prescient Balkan fjord. Yeti senora wolfskin �Men and Women Fighting 1958 Yantra huntress: congas tzaddik go lashes �Teller 1967 Yam a Yama: chedis ojas Anschluss clackity clack. pin-the-tail Abednego �"ja ja" sou'wester. Waiting Room II 1982 "pulps" Shadrach (Meshach) rocking yes cowgirl Escene (deeper) gosling �Corporate Decision 1983 pins & once tomboy (shant) puzzlement jaggery the stargaze: �Terminal 1986 bohea (thew) · "endlessly rocking" bluebell (four mar Ophelia "the two of them" � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Paintings of Social Concern Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_115 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 10 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/c365bfc2cf57e2443d541ee575974e28.pdf 2d17647280a4014a36f2ca74f5098a04 PDF Text Text '!19: tL\§---------------- FALL, 1986 Edmond J abes: from The Book of Dialogue, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop ............................................... 3 Clark Coolidge: We Leave What We Knovv Behind Desire ................................................................................. 9 Figures ..................................................... ........................................................................... 10 Notebook . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . .. .. . . ... . . .. . . . . . . .. ... . .. . . . . . .. . ... . .. . . . .. .. . . .. .. .. . . . . .. . . ... .. .. . . . .. .. .... .. .. .... .. ... .. .. . 11 The Lady Is Interested In ..................................................................... 12 The Lanyard ......................................................................................................................... 13 Robert Creeley: Interior .............: .......................................................... ........................................................ 22 "Go Float the Boat" .............................................................................................................. 23 Not Much .............................................................................................................................. 24 Common ........................·.................................. ............................................................... .... 25 John Sinclair: "spirtual" after jol1n coltrane .................................................................................................. 26 from Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Blues Suite "Louisiana Blues" ............................................................................................ ................ 27 Gita Brown: Girl ......................................................................................................................... 30 Robert Kelly: Her Hair on Fire for Elizabeth Robinson ............................................................................... 36 Allemande for Mary Moore Goodlett ................................. .................................................... 38 Text Beginning With a Sequence From Imagines for Richard Marshall ................................. 40 Anne W aidman: · from IOVIS OMNIA PLENA ........................... :.................................................................. 41 John Yau: Double Feature ....................................................................................................................... 53 Double Feature (2) .................................................................................................................. 54 Faded Crossbow .................................................................................... ... .. ................ ... .•.. 55 For You- ................................................................................................................................. 56 No One Ever Kissed Anna May Wong ..................................................................................... 57 David C.D. Gansz: Animadversions (sections I & ll) ............................................................................................ 58 David Matlin: ·from . Udan .Adan ·(four .poems) ............................................................................................. 63 Keith Taylor: Landed Immigrants .............................................................................................................. 69 Laura Chester: In Regard to Him . .. . •. •. .. . •. ... ••. . . . •... . . .. .. •.. . . .. •. . •. . . ••.. . •. . •. . .. . . •.. . . .. .. . . •.. . . •. •. . .. . . •. ... •. . . •. . .. .. .. .• . .•. .. •.. • 7 0 Henri Michaux: d 'Endo1'91i from d'tveille, translated by James Wanless from ''The Curtain of Dreams" ........................ ........................................................... 72 from "Some Dreams" ''Some Remarks" ................................................................................................ 74 �cover by ANN MIKOL0"7SKI The cover of this issue was created by Ann using pen and ink. For years Ann has been known for her miniature oil portraits; however, more recently, she has also been working with large canvasses of rolling waves and turbulent skies. The idea for the cover of Notus ( otherwind) evolved quite naturally as it captures the power and essence of an unseen otherforce moving and molding the elements. Ann is currently teaching in the Michigan Council for the Arts funded "Artist in the Schools" program in Port Austin, Michigan near her home in Grindstone City, where she and Ken run The Alternative Press. Her work has been reviewed by John Y au in Art in America, and will be shown this fall by two galleries: the Allen Stone Gallery in New York City, and the Feigenson.,Gallery in Detroit. NOTUS new writing ISSN published semi-annually by OtherWind Press, Inc. Editor: Pat Smith Business Manager: Marla Huber Smith Art Director: Jan Detlefs Subscriptions: individuals $10/yr. (U.S. & Canada) $14/yr. (outside U.S. & Canada) institutions $20/yr. Enclose SASE with submissions. Address correspondence to: Marla & Pat Smith, 2420 Walter Dr., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48103 Calligraphy for this issue: Mary Maguire Printed at Partners Press Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan --&-- Copyright 1986 OtherWind Press, Inc. All rights revert to the authors. Edmond J Le Livre Du Dialogue, .Copyrigh.t 1 �GAILSHER The Lanyard To layer the bike. Slowly cracking mama's chestnut dynasty. Poised to ax in half a totem common to hisself. Tries winter. ·Here a hog crows.the · fugue. Pale courteous deaf. Fish sweat pee. These wheat high & brightly yellow backs. Daylights our homestead. Opens earth whose prone earth. Liver discs repeat can eat the gay door. - 13- �Such as rivers. The shore-raising nun. Feet to pedal farther bays. Herring bond agree to blade. Stroke one gramophone. papa. Mouth fuck sweet organic lye-powder. She sheeps whereas lunch per se bunches & hackneyed. Like watchwords. Goes chiseling wildwood horn. Try gaberdine bodies. - 14- �The wing deem which she said. Bees inhale dust. Browns the nipple. Birdies spay. Lilies checkers breaks often surfers tattle to her. My dlxie. My smell case. High-priced cobs play & play. -15- �Say tart. Moues equal to it.. Salmons link forests. Piracy mops what little has · gone. Pulls my crony jacking popes in an afternoon. · Keeling on him. Foreruns err. Rant errs a little card. - 16- �Fox cycles see. Pink birds rule the sweeter pole. Oral lads has potions horseshoes waiting with my long neck Grins pounding & pounding. Coils sound · caged with its partially prerequisite seductiveness . .Chicks beat chicks. Throats vend not to eat me•. Face child nor places to swim rigorously walking ahead. - 17- �The tulip throws its head strip back. She licks cars. Yellow mommy towns. I want floors to saturate my hate for her. Lawns snow sound. Succumb gnats press such as whirlpool ·gnats. Concubine yarns strap and yet a fool. Pigs croon see & its bastard repetition. - 18- �Insects cream preciously. Pidgeons swell. Bullion are hollow nesting somewhere peaked frittering. Boots tart in. Skirts have feathers each yielding something. The lubricant which they have races. - 19- �Drought that the bird has. One even foot passes away. His mouth deeply explosive cult spots. Or heron intrusion wandering at her. The only snout indefatigably. Wiggling apart. Smothering the mover. -20- �A clinging queen infra queen. My lot is small & dainty stucco graze at the edge. -21- � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Lanyard Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1986 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_114 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 11 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/8648d7d4b14b1b5759b9faff0308e4d8.pdf 99cc7db9d43df736c57aa7c944f137be PDF Text Text The Fasting Spirit Andersen, Arnold. "Fasting Saints and Medieval Asceticism: Forerunners of Anorexia Nervosa?" In Contemporary Psychology, vol. 32, no. 7, 1987. Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. Bromberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988. Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. Spignesi, Angelyn. "Starving for Salvation." In The Women-'s Review of Books, vol. 3, no. 12, 1986. Reviewed by Gail Sher I. In 1985 Rudolph Bell, a historian from Rutgers University, published Holy Anorexia. By examining autobiographical writings, letters, confessors' testimonies and canonization records of 261 Italian holy women (saints and others recognized by the Catholic Church as venerable) Bell posits a similiarity of unconscious motivation between contemporary anorexics and fasting medieval saints: both seek liberation from a patriarchal family and society. Bell's claim has met with sharp criticism. Arnold E. Andersen, Associate Professor of Psychiat.ty and Behavioral Sciences at Johns The San Francisco ]unglnstituteLibrary]ournal, Vol. 8,No.2, 1988 61 �Hopkins Hospital and Director of their well-known Eating and Weight Disorders Program, faults Bell for making unprofessional diagnoses. Angelyn Spignesi, a Jungian analyst who has explored the rich and paradoxical ways food can further women's accessibility to unseen worlds, criticizes Bell's methodology. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, historian and author of Fasting Girls) questions Bell's four underlying assumptions: 1) that there is certainty about the etiology of anorexia, 2) that there are complete, verifiable case histories available on historic subjects, 3) that a particular sequelae of symptoms automatically indicates anorexia, and 4) that the psychology of women is fixed in time, as if past and present cultural conditions were alike. Finally, Caroline Bynum, historian and author of Holy Feast and Holy Fast) says that medieval attitudes toward food are far more diverse than those that modern researchers have found in anoreXIcs. Nevertheless, Bell's instinct to compare anorexia mirabilis (miraculously inspired loss of appetite) with anorexia nervosa is understandable. Twice in the course ofWestem civilization noneating has loomed as an important motif in women's experience: during the predominantly Catholic 13th-16th centuries and throughout the present postindustrial age. There is of course a difference, as Bell's critics have been quick to point out: in the earlier era, control of appetite was linked with piety and faith. The medieval ascetic strove for perfection in the eyes of God and, on the whole, achieved it. Today's diet-conscious young woman emerges from patterns of class, gender and family relations established in the 19th century. The modem anorexic, while striving for perfection in the eyes of a glitzy youth-oriented culture, cannot, even when successful, overcome the suspicion that something essential is missing from her life. For her, there is much to be learned about anorexia from the religious issue that Bell has raised and forced his critics to examine. Even though the parties to this debate end up talking around the spiritual issue that I believe is at the heart of anorexia, they have come closer to this core of meaning than most have. In particular we can be glad this dialogue has raised the following crucial questions: ( 1) To what extent is the anorexic's hunger spiritual? (2) Can her healing be accomplished without including a spiritual component? ( 3) What is the difference between a spiritual path and a psychological path and what bearing does each have upon the anorexic's 62 Gail Sher reviews �healing process? Perhaps a fourth question could be, What is the nature of the anorexic's inner longing? I will try to provide an experiential base for a consideration of these questions in the following pages, before I offer my own evaluation of Bell's thesis. I am a recovering anorexic, and I am aware that most of the literature on anorexia (aside from the genre of goty self-confessionals) is not written by anorexics but by ''healers" of anorexics. Anorexics, however, do not always reveal themselves to their healers. Often an anorexic won't entirely trust her healer because she senses that being intent upon his own agenda, he will not see her. In the earliest cases, described by Bromberg in Fasting Girls, the healer is typically a male physician who consults the anorexic's mother for accurate information, suspicious of any input the girl herself might make. The logic is that anyone who will so craftily conceal her true motives can't be expected to be anything but crafty to the doctor. This failure to hear from the psyche of the sufferer is ironic because the diagnosis of anorexia "netvosa" by definition excluded a physical explanation. Yet, having determined upon the diagnosis of anorexia, the first doctors proceeded to treat the physical symptoms only. The anorexic's state of mind and underlying feelings about not eating were not of sufficient interest to warrant investigation. Even today, what is missing from the much more sophisticated psychodynamic literature, the quality that most eludes the reader waiting for it, is -the soul of the anorexic. By focusing on saints, noted for the greatness of their souls, Bell comes the closest of any modern writer to including this aspect, yet even Bell, I think, finally misses the point. Bell misses for the same reason that the 19th century doctors were blinded to the nature of the anorexic's pain: a superior stance and an inflexible agenda. In his efforts to explain what in fact is inexplicable (one can barely conceive much less explain a saint's experience) Bell positions himself against the saints as a wiser equal who with his modern knowledge will situate and codify them within the broader framework of their socio-political environment. By so doing he cuts himself off from the one venue available to him to truly understand-his heart. Interesting though they are, even the questions that Bell and his critics raise about anorexia come from perspectives outside the experience of the anorexic. "How much of her hunger is spiritual hunger?" "Does her healing need to include a spiritual compo- Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 63 �nent?" and "What is the difference between the psychological and the spiritual vis-a-vis the anorexic's healing process?" are questions one can mull over, explore, deliberate and conclude about, but they are finally thinking matters. The right question, "What is the nature of the inner longing of her soul?" is a of feeling. One is let in by it and if one's heart is open, one "gets" an answer. One may not be able to describe or even comprehend what he "got." But. without at least a sense of the anorexic's soul (or psyche) any discussion of anorexia is bound to miss the point because it is precisely her soul that is in need of healing. Physically anorexics are quite healthy. They rarely get sick. And, according to Andersen, the mortality rate from anorexia is "often as low as 1%." (Andersen, A., et al. "Inpatient treatment for anorexia netvosa" in D .M. Garner & P.E. Garfinkel (Eds. ), Handbook of Psychology for Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: Guilford, 1985, pp. 335-336). II It is in the spirit of offering a clearer view of anorexic's interior life ·that I present the following autobiographical material, taken from a partly theoretical, partly autobiographical work in progress. My purpose in presenting these excerpts of that work is to describe (rather than explain) the displacement, hollownesss and spiritual craving ravaging the anorexic's soul. Here, then, are some passages which describe my own spiritual hunger. AGES 7-12 There was always a slight feeling of discomfort, a lack of gracefulness in my relationship with activities. As a child, during long summer afternoons, I would lie on a cot on our upstairs porch feeling astray, a foreigner to the porch-that it didn't belong to me. Or I would go across the street and up the block always to a lot where I caught butterflies. There were Monarch butterflies and Yellow Tails and also grasshoppers and other interesting bugs. I lay in the sun and captured one or two with a little net I made, feeling out of place. The idea of catching butterflies sparked my imagination. I could think, "I'll go across the street and catch butterflies'' and then when I got there I could think,"It's a beautiful sunny day and I am catching butterflies" but there was a gap. I could belong to the idea which was lovely, with many provocative nuances, and I could belong to the feeling of containment in a specified 64 Gail Sher reviews �activity, but I was disrupted in myself and could not enter the activity, offer it enough of myself to make it come alive. Like everything else, it did not glow for me. I returned home dissatisfied and lonely, in reality trying to catch what would allow me to rest. * An image that recurs in my adult captures my earlier disheveled existential stance-that there is no room for me in my life, somehow I don't belong to it. I dream I have to go to the bathroom. I go into a public stall and there is urine all over the floor and on the toilet seat and I cannot find a clean place to stand. Usually I end up standing in the urine which soaks through my shoes. I hold myself poised above the wet seat, relieving myself physically but I come away feeling filthy, contaminated and wrong, just as I have always suspected I am. * We also had a downstairs porch. It was screened in on two sides and had brick walls on the other two. The bricks were painted pink and from them, in pots, hung artificial red geraniums. A couch and several chairs as well as a table with its dining chairs were black wrought-iron with pink upholstery. The table was glass and when you looked down another pot of red geraniums appeared below you in the center. Although this was a prettier world than my urine-soaked unconscious one, it was too precious and again didn't leave room for me. The furniture took up all the space. I felt I would trip over it or bump myself trying to get in and out. * I liked to bake cookies; I liked to read in my green chair and be in bed writing in my diary. I liked to knit. These activities involved my hands. I have a lot of "hand energy" which must · be expressed or I feel at loose ends. * As I was then, I am a very slow reader. The words need to capture my heart, be vitalized by my heart before my mind will accept them. For this to happen I must be relatively undistracted. Because I was already so distracted, I was vigilant to the possiblity of something more imperative coming along. * I rocked incessantly. I rocked in my desk at school, I rocked in bed at night. In my room I had a rocking chair and Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 65 �I rocked and rocked. My all time blissful childhood memocy happened in my room rocking to a record of the Uncle Wiggily Stories (Peter Rabbit and Brer Bear) and the theme from The Third Man. * I loved my grandma. We would sit on her glider and talk. She told me things about organizing my closet and my clothes and I began to think this was extremely important. Suddenly I had a picture ofmyselfbeing in control. I could choose the kind of clothes I wanted to wear and I could order my environment so that I knew where things were and what condition they were in. I fantasized a lot about my clothes and about my grandma who always wore black and white, usually black and white check, and how "together" it was to have things narrowed down like· that. I was in awe of her simplicity and selfknowledge, which is how I interpreted her modest wardrobe. She knew she didn't like jewelty. She was always neat and clean, which I believed was a kind of containment. I started wanting to restrict myself too, to have just a few things. My mother's outrageous clothes-buying sprees baffled and repulsed me. To a large extent my relationship to clothing has been shaped by combat against this-establishing precautions, so that my mother's influence is kept to a minimum. * I was in junior high, perhaps seventh grade. Each day I walked to school, which took about half an hour. In the winter it was bitterly cold. Bundled up so that I could hardly move, I left home numb in my being for lack oflove or enthusiasm for anything. On my block lived another girl who was in my grade. I went by for her and if she was ready we would walk together. One morning her front door opened just as I approached, so I waited on the sidewalk. As she and her mother were saying goodbye, her mother leaned over and whispered something in her ear. I froze. I thought, "Her mother just told her something bad about me." As I walked I was aware that she "covered up" with chatter her secret knowledge of my badness. * One day when I was about twelve, I came home from school and found my mother sitting dejected in her red chair. "What is it, Mother?" I asked, horrified that the crisis one could feel unremittingly swelling in our household had finally erupted. She was ccying and said what I understood to imply that 66 Gail Sher reyiews \• �evecyt:h.ing was meaningless to her, that she had missed all her chances to be something in life and was miserable. Eventually the idea of her returning to school came up. Here was a ray of hope. "Yes, Mother, why don't you do that? That would be wonderful!" I felt netvously excited, as if everything depended on this. She said, "I would, but you know I always get a headache when I have to read something. If it's assigned, I get a headache making mysdfread it." I stood there and racked my brains for an answer. At that moment I felt that it all rested with me. If only I could ... but I knew there was no chance. She'd get a headache. The only thing I could really do was join her in her deadness-or outdo her in her deadness, rendering her alive by comparison. For example, I could become ill (as I later "got" anorexia) so that she would have to care for me. Somehow I knew that if she projected care into the world, she could become alive in it. AGES 27-32 I decided to go to Tassajara. I allowed what I had heard about this magic place to camouflage its potential hardships. Everything I owned fit into a back pack. I arrived at summer practice period canying no extra weight. My first task was to sit tangaryo, a five-day period of practicing zazen continuously from early in the morning until late at night instead of the usual practice of walking meditation between designated fortyminute periods of zazen. This initiation stemmed from a tradition in Japan whereby a suppliant is asked to wait outside the monastery doors for an unspecified time before being allowed to request entry. The long wait is a test of the suppliant's sincerity. Then I was assigned to work in the kitchen. Our small group offour or five cooked, setved and cleaned up three meals a day. As soon as the zendo students finished their food, we ate, often in the zendo but sometimes informally. These meals were difficult. I was exhausted. The effort required to serve ourselves in the zendo was almost more than I, a new student, could bear on top of our excruciating work load. The majority of the kitchen staff, my exclusive eating partners, were rigid and somewhat puritanical macrobiotics, though they .disguised these qualities (i.e., made them harder to confront) by their conviviality. My eating practices, the quantities I accepted and so forth, were subject to much observation and If I took a little too much salad (usually made with tomatoes and dressing-very yin), or was lax about chewing every bite of rice Rudolph Bell's Anorexia and its critics 67 �fifty times, the wrongness of my behavior was conveyed to me. Eating was petrifying. Grains became the only food about which I felt fairly safe. Grains, however, did not fill me. Also there was a time factor. The "kitchen" ate together. We chanted at the time for chant, ate after the clackers indicated "begin," and washed our bowls in unison. I couldn't get enough. I grew thinner. At first I was glad. Some months earlier I had tried to lose weight. (When I arrived at Tassajara I weighed 92. When I left I weighed 78. I am 5'3" .) For a brief time my energy peaked. Then the incredible heat, flies, intense schedule, and, perhaps most important for me, the lack of a kindred spirit (soul mate) prevailed. I lost consciousness. On a mat on a porch high over gurgling Tassajara Creek, I lay in a coma. When I awoke, above me were the first red leaves of autumn. Suzuki Roshi was just there. He was joyful and simple like a boy, but his compassion was that of a great man. So long as he was present, I could not die. At the very end of summer during our Shosan Ceremony, a formal ceremony during which each student presents her understanding to the Master in the form of a public question, I asked, "When I awoke from my illness I saw the first red autumn leaves. Is that zazen?» Suzuki Roshi smiled warmly and approved. I felt cleansed. My whole being shined. * After my summer at Tassajara I moved to the Berkeley zendo. I was given my own box-shaped room with high walls lined in burlap. a tall narrow window facing an exquisite monkey tree, hard wood floors and my harpsichord. I felt contained but very unhappy. · The zendo was in the attic. Two other students lived below, like me, in single rooms. Mine was the middle in the line of three. Adjacent to our rooms in a parallel line was a living room, dining room and kitchen. It was a big old house with a huge rambling yard. I ate almost nothing. After zendo in the morning (often it was still dark) I went up to the U.C. cafeteria and had tea. I put many lemons in my tea and ate the lemons but that's all. I had more tea at noon, and at night I tried not to eat dinner. Sometimes I would read in my room instead, drinking thing warm and eating some small suckable thing. Other people were having dinner in the dining room right outside my 68 Gail Sher reviews �door, but I refused. When I did eat, I needed to be alone. People and noise disturbed me. Of course I was statVing. Around midnight when everyone was asleep, I would go to the refrigerator and scavenge through the leftovers. Or else I would stand in the pantry and dip raisins in peanut butter and eat them right there, compulsively, for a long time. A bout like this held me three or four days. * I awakened at 4:15 to a certain kind of quiet that only occurs in the early morning. No one stirred. I felt that the world-all parts of it that I needed and nothing more-was entirely available to me. I arranged a kettle ofwater to boil while I washed and put on something warm. Then I made the best coffee I knew how, hand-grinding the beans, and so on. When it was done I turned offthe lights and took my coffee into a large bare room. I could see above and into the quiet streets. It was this particular minute to which I felt I belonged. I was alone. I realized how utterly precarious was this one minute. How so many factors needed to come together and what tremendous energy this took. I knew definitely that I was alive. And I knew that I had to work hard (strain psychically) to stay alive. I listened intently to the silence, to the lack of anything stirring but the slight creak of the blades of my wooden rocker against the hardwood floor. * I moved to the San Francisco Zen Center. My room was tiny and spare. A gigantic rubber tree grew by my window, blessing my space. When I left it I felt assaulted by people's endless questions and greetings. During low periods I hinged, which brought me much lower. Binges are virulent and have their own life span, their own arising and falling. Mine would click on and I was utterly at their mercy. Efforts to control them were fruitless and took away the pleasure of mindlessly eating for hours and hours. It had to be mindless and it had to be "endless," otherwise it didn't really satisfy. Part of the joy was leaving one's consciousness and entering a sphere where one is uncondemned. There is also the iniquity, the barbaric and primitive · grasping with which one is shameless before the urge to fill one's mouth. And it is the mouth, not stomach, that is the highlighted region. Quantities of food are washed through the mouthoften food which in a different frame of mind would be unpalatable, crude or disgusting. Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 69 �Once in motion, the progression of my binge was absolutely regular. I ate mountains of whatever tipped it off. This was invariably followed by anything I could lay my hands on, first that was rich (with butter or cheese), second that was starchy, and lastly that was sweet. A typical finale might be a box of filled chocolates. Curiously, these stages were irreversible. It seems as if it would hardly matter, but once I had entered stage three, for example starchy foods, foods from the previous stages were unappealing. Afterwards I would sleep. I would sleep as if passed out sometimes till late in the afternoon of the following day. Waking from a binge one feels sluggish, toxic, putrid. I ofmy life too. That wanted to sleep more, to drown out the day I rarely ate anything. Two days later I would be fairly stable, though ashamed, humiliated, and aware that it was not over. It would happen again. I was not in control. I would see to itnay-look forward to and prepare for it again. The mere thought of it made me tingle with excitement. III Though anorexia existed before mass cultural preoccupation with dieting and slimness, today it is found predominantly in the middle and :upper social classes of developed countries. This suggests a relatively leisured class, leisured in the sense of not living on a survival level and therefore not constantly distracted from ultimate questions by survival concerns. Anorexics deliberately keep their life at a survival level, and though they act out of compulsion, it is a different kind of compulsion from that of being compelled to starve for lack of provisions. In her role as psychopomp the anorexic asks, "What is this life?" "Who am I?" If one really doesn't have enough to eat, such questions are too abstract. However, if one is surrounded by glitz, even choked by glitz, then these questions bring one back to reality. Starvation by choice traditionally has served a soul-regenerative function. In a passage about Jung' s attempt to understand the source of the healing process, Groesbeck refers to the writings of Mircea Eliade about Eskimo shamans, the earliest healers. Eliade noted that with some Eskimo shamans their initiation involved the making of a long effort of physical privation and mental contemplation directed to "gaining the 70 Gail Sher reviews �ability to see himself as a skeleton." By thus seeing himself naked he is "freed from the perishable and transient flesh and · blood and thus can consecrate himself to this sacred task." To reduce himself to the skeletal condition was equivalent to "reentering the womb of his primordial life to complete a mystical renewal and rebirth." (C. Jess Groesbeck. "The Analyst's Myth." Quadrant, vol. 13, 1980, p. 45) Bell's Holy Anorexia is the first book, however, to hit upon the idea of comparing fasting girls with fasting saints. Why did Bell choose saints and other highly developed religious women? Hunger strikers fast, even to the point of death, yet Bell wasn't called to draw them into comparison. There is a commonality, and it is spiritual in nature, but it isn't as obvious a one as Bell implies. Bell's critics, both when they are correct and incorrect, help elucidate the subtleties involved in the comparison. As for the female religious, Bromberg in Fasting Girls tells us that her capacity for survival without eating meant that she found other forms of food: prayer and the Eucharist. 17th and 18th century physicians called this anorexia mirahilis. Medical writers and some historians (Bell) claim that anorexia mirahilis and anorexia nerJJosa are the same. Bromberg's rebuttal is in four parts. 1) "Advocates of this view naively adopt and apply the biomedical and psychological models of anorexia nerJJosa as if there was absolute certainty about the etiology of the disease and as if there were complete, certifiable case histories available on historic subjects." (Fasting Girls, p. 42) Documentary evidence, she says, is extremely weak and often rests on interpretive acts of faith or on inconclusive clusters of symptoms like loss of appetite and ceasing to eat and menstruate. These, Bromberg says, need not necessarily indicate anorexia nervosa. 2) Proponents of the theory that anorexia mirabilis and anorexia newosa are the same ignore what Bromberg has so perceptively identified as the anorexic's two-stage process: the first, "recruitment," stage is that in which a girl may begin to restrict her eating because of aesthetic and social reasons related more or less normally to gender, class, age and sense of style. Many ofher friends may also be "dieting." Bromberg says an individual's dieting goes from normal to obsessive because of other factors: emotional, personality issues, personal physiology and body chemistry. If refusing food happens to serve these needs, she may continue to do Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 71 �so as an efficacious strategy. After weeks or months her mind and body are acclimated both to feeling hungcy and to nutritional deprivation. This marks the beginning of the second stage in which, Bromberg says, there is evidence to suggest that hunger pangs decrease and that the body adjusts to a state of semi-starvation. Statvation may even become satisfying or tension"relieving." At this point, anorexia becomes a "career" and includes physiological and psychological changes that condition the individual to exist on a subsistence level. This is the stage of concern to medical and mental health professionals because it is historically invariant. Only stage one involves the historian who can trace and name its particular evolving formative circumstances. 3) "In order to understand fully the long tradition of female food refusal, one must do more than merely 'lay-on' psychological constructs drawn from modern life or search out look-alike symptoms." (Fasting Girls, p. 43) Bromberg also points out that much of what is taken to be the true or hidden histocy of anorexia nervosa does not discriminate between primacy and secondacy loss of appetite. 4) The medieval woman's pattern of renunciation and austerity is not the whole stocy. "Some pious women did deny themselves ordinary food in order. to become receptacles for the food that was God, but power and setvice to others, through 'holy eating,' was the ultimate goal." (Fasting Girls, p. 45) Bromberg's attitude on the question of anorexia mirabilisvs. anorexia nervosa may be summed up as follows: Although Catherine of Siena and Karen Carpenter do have something in common-the use offood as a symbolic language-it is as inappropriate to call the former an anorectic as it is to cast the latter as a saint. To describe premodern women such as Catherine as anorexic is to flatten difference in female experience across time and discredit the special quality of eucharistic fervor and penitential asceticism as it was lived and perceived. To insist that medieval holy women had anorexia nervosa is, ultimately, a reductionist argument because it converts a complex human behavior into a simple biomedical mechanism. (It certainly does not respect important differences in the route to anorexia.) To conflate the two is to ignore the cultural context and the distinction between sainthood and patienthood. 72 Gail Sher reviews �Once we understand the special meaning and significance of anorexia mirabilis, we can assert the following: the modern anorectic is one of a long line ofwomen and girls who have used food and the body as a focus of their symbolic language. Although there are some important biomedical continui ties in female fasting behavior, anorexia mirabilisand anorexia nervosa are not literally the same. (Fasting Girls, pp. 46-47) Angelyn Spignesi's scathing review of Holy Anorexia entitled "Starving for Salvation'' criticizes Bell's stubborn and at times unconscious adherence to scientific methodology. Although she applauds Bell's venture into the subject of how food and fasting were integral to religious women's visionary experience and agrees with Bell that the behavior of these female ascetics has implications for modern anorexia, Spignesi shuns Bell's "two-part hypothesis ... that holy anorexia was caused by woman's quest for personal autonomy in a 'contest' to win freedom from the patriarchy and also by her desire to war against bodily urges." ("Starving for Salvation," p. 15) Spignesi raises the following questions: 1) Bell insists on using biosocial factors to explain "holy anorexic" behavior. This is reductionistic, and though Bell himself admits it he does it anyway. 2) Bell's approach commits him to determinism (patriarchal social structures cause holy anorexia), naturalism (spiritual phenomena are explained by functions of culture) and to overly generalized predictions (similar 20th century patriarchal structures provoke similar symptoms). 3) Bell is so intent on explaining self-starvation according to his power/mastery hypothesis that he selects material from the biographical texts explicitly to prove himself correct. He never mentions the saints' miracles, the social impact of their visions, or even the precise relation of food to their spiritual lives. He consistently refuses to see the saints' psychic forces as autonomous. 4) In the end .Bell presents the saints as sick instead of the modem anorexic as possibly visionary. 5) "Translating possession into self-mastery in order to argue that these women used their ascetic practices for personal or social power, reduces what is a very complicated phenomenon to the mere whim of a stubborn ego." ("Starving for Salvation," p.l7) At other times, contradicting himself, Bell admits that ascetic behavior lies beyond personal will. Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 73 �6) Bell's understanding is that holy women saw their bodies as an impediment to being Christ's bride whereas we know that no other period of Christian spirituality valued Christ's humanity as physicality so highly. Fasting was flight to physicality. (Bynum's work confirms this. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast, she writes "Into her body, as into the eucharistic bread on the altar, poured the inspiration of the spirit and the fullness humanity of Christ." (p. 20) 7) Bell ignores the saints' interior lives and thereby ignores the secret ofhow Catherine ofSiena, for example, could be "completely satiated" (Starving for Salvation, p. 17)-seeing a host or even a priest who had touched one. Her effort was not to suppress bodily urges. It was to. become one with God. Biosocial explanations lack the scope to include this kind of information. 8) The stories of these women call us to take more (as opposed to less) seriously our own interior lives. Spignesi asks What ifwe listened to the women who are still flagellating themselves in modem ways? We need to create a 'convent' rather than a· clinic, a protected place in which to listen. We need to help these women reach a better relation with those demons; but the demons themselves will not be eradicated, nor do I think they ought to be. ("Starving for Salvation," p. 17) 9) Bell neglects the works of in-depth psychology written by the psyche is naive and women. Spignesi says that his dualistic, making intuition, emotion and unseen forces inferior to mind, politics and men. 10) In fact Bell does not linger long enough at a descriptive level. Though his theses are on the surface somewhat feminist, actually they are removed from the women and their contexts. Instead he "uses his women as data." ("Starving for Salvation," p. 18) In his review ofBell, Arnold Andersen notes that "Fundamentally, asceticism as a spiritual goal differs in its very essence from selfinduced starvation in the pursuit ofthinness to accomplish purposes related to resolution ofcrisis in development." ("Fasting Saints," p. 663) Andersen, however, mistakes the issues involved on several counts. First, asceticism is not a spiritual goal. Asceticism is a spiritual means as is the so-called "pursuit of thinness." Second, the pursuit of thinness is a description of a symptom and cannot be understood psychodynamically as part of the origin of anorexia. Admittedly, the anorexic's symptoms are fascinating, but the more 74 Gail Sher reviews �we focus on her appearance, her persona, the less we see of(i.e., the more protected is) the motivating force of her core self, her fragile, incipient, "shameful" search for God. Third, the main difference between holy anorexics and modern anorexics is that holy anorexics were conscious of their deepest psychic self, i.e., the image of God within. The medieval church contained these elements and made them visible. Holy anorexics merely internalized what was evident to all. Modern anorexics are not conscious of their deepest psychic sel£ They are consumed in ceaseless effort, but their purpose, i.e., contacting the soul, remains unacknowledged. Indeed, their ceaseless effort is psychically and spiritually stagnant. It is the opposite of living in a state of trust and receptivity. Bynum tells us, "In the chapter on fasting in his Summa for preachers, Alan ofLille argued that abstinence must be inner and outer, that mere obedience to the law is not enough. Simply going without food, as the sick do, is morally indifferent." (Holy Feastp. 44) For an anorexic, who fantasizes about food constantly, the ability to have a spiritual practice, to manifest, in other words, "correct striving," is tantamount to cure. This is because a true spiritual practice would involve turning her tight control of externals into inwardly attuned responsiveness, accessing the image of God in her and releasing her life from there. According to the March, 1988, "Clinician's Research Digest," 61% of anorexics show a poor outcome in therapy regardless of treatment modality. We know this. Anorexics are notoriously hard to treat. They prove recalcitrant and try the patience of many an exasperated therapist. Jack Engler, however, clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, relates the following stoty of a non-recalcitrant anorexic: I once had the good fortune to overhear a fascinating discussion between a clinical psychologist and an Asian meditation teacher concerning their respective treatments of an anorectic patient ... The meditation teacher was visiting the U.S. for the first time and was very interested in Western psychotherapeutic approaches to mental illness. The clinical psychologist was describing a very difficult case of an anorectic woman who was proving refractory to treatment. The teacher quickly became engrossed in the case and asked many detailed questions about the illness and the treatment. When the psychologist finished, I asked him why he was so interested. He said a woman had once come to the meditation center in Burma Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 75 �where he was teaching with the same presenting problems. In addition she was suffering from chronic insomnia. She wanted to learn to meditate, presumably believing that might bring some relief. I asked him ifhe taught her. To my surprise, he said "No." For six weeks he merely let her come each day and pour out her complaints against her husband, her children, her· parents and the injustices of life in general. He mostly listened. He also talked with her but he did not describe precisely how. This first part of her "treatment" then was conducted in effect through the medium of a special kind ofinterpersonal relationship. He also encouraged her to sleep. Within a short time she began to sleep 4; 8, 1-:Z, 14, 16 and finally 18 hours a nightat which point she came to him and said "I have slept enough. I came here to learn meditation." "Oh," he replied, ''you want to learn meditation. Why didn't you say so?" I interrupted to ask if he taught her Vipassana, the type of insight meditation practiced in his Theravada lineage. "No," he said to my surprise again, "no Vipassana. Too much suffering." What she needed was to experience some happiness, some joy, some tranquility and relieffrom so much mental agitation first, before she would be able to tolerate the deeper insight that all her psychophysical states were characterized by change and were associated with suffering, not simply the obvious vicissitudes in her personal life histocy. Since concentration forms of meditation lead to one-pointedness, serenity and bliss, he instructed her in a simple concentration exercise offollowing the breath instead. She began to sleep 16 hours a night, then 14, 12, 8, 4 and finally two hours a night again, this time because two hours was all she needed. Only at this point did he switch her over to Vipassana and have her obseiVe the moment-to-moment flux of mental and physical events, experiencing directly their radical impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and the lack of any self or subject behind them. Within another three weeks her mind opened and she experienced the first stage of enlightenment (sotapatti). The anorectic symptoms disappeared. She has not been anorectic since. (Jack Engler. "Therapeutic Aims in Psychotherapy and Meditation: Developmental Stages in the Representation ofSelf." Journal ofTranspersonalPsychology, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 31-32) Several features of this woman's "treatment" are striking: l) The Burmese meditation master recognized her need for an empathic selfobject, i.e., "a special kind of interpersonal relation- 76 Gail Sher reviews �ship" and gave her this when he provided her with a safe place to talk and then "mostly listened." 2) The Burmese meditation master recognized that meditation was not enough. I am reminded of the following journal entty of a Zen student and compulsive overeater. Having attained a certain amount of control over her binges, she yet again found herself back in a pattern of having one a week: This week I wanted to avoid it. It's the week before a sesshin. For just this one week I thought I could avoid it. I did avoid it in my office all day. I was conscious and I made it. At dinner at Zen Center I was filled with a neiVous energy that made me very funny. I went on for an hour with several people being very funny and making them laugh and laugh. Then I realized I was very agitated. I didn't want to go home. I was afraid to be alone. I was about to sit down in Zen Center and read newspapers. But I did better than that-1 summoned up the control to go to the 8:30p.m. zazen, to which I felt much resistance because it seemed to call for most consciousness and calm, and I was so agitated. I went and sat 40 minutes. Good. I went home. Immediately I had a binge, a big one, with worse effects than my daytime ones because I threw myself into bed with the last of the food and slept with it/on it, with no break of consciousness and effort before bed as I've had in previous weeks when I had "office binges." I ate practically a quart of old ice cream, left over from a party last week, then toast and butter. Fell asleep. Now house a mess. I am weak, quivering, stumbling. Can hardly control pen. Body-mind wiped out. Meditation is not the answer for these crucial times. Expression and release are. Her discovery does not surprise me. The fact that the Burmese meditation master already knew it, does surprise me. Meditation goes a long way in calming and stilling the mind and body, but for significant healing to occur, an anorexic needs an attachment to another person. The divine comes to her via the divine in someone else, a loving person. 3) The meditation master recognized "too much suffering." He saw that the anorexic needed happiness, joy, tranquility and relief from mental stress first, before she would be able to tolerate Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 77 �deeper insight. He understood that without this relief, she would be likely to experience a serious meditation practice simply as more stress, instead of as a way of centering herself to prepare her mind for enlightenment. 4) The meditation master recognized and responded to what Jung calls the "most important of the fundamental instincts, the religious instinct for wholeness." (C. G. Jung. Civilization in Transition, Collected Works. Vol. 10, p. 344) Once he saw it, he mirrored it and fostered it nonintrusively. Unfortunately; in the treatment ofanorexia, the fundamental instincts that are focused on are usually sex and aggression. This of course follows the thinking ofFreud. Because Freud's thoughts are so influential to psychoanalytic literature, it is important to say that Freud was simply wrong about the nature of anorexia. He spoke of the anorexic's disgust for food instead ofher obsessive control ofher appetite. Although both lead to non-eating, disgust implies repulsion for food while obsessive control implies such a strong attraction to it that limits must be set to avoid total merger with the object of desire. Perhaps the greatest Freudian misunderstanding of anorexic experience is in the realm of sexuality. For a long time anorexics were considered asexual because of their adolescent/preadolescent figures. By today's standards ofbeauty, however, this figure increasingly represents the height of sex11ality. While our standard of beauty grows increasingly younger, the standard anorexic grows increasingly thinner. Movie stars, models and ballerinas, those who set our precedents ofbeauty, are sometimes strikingly anorexic. This being the case, it is not so easy, as in the Marilyn Monroe days, to accuse an anorexic of "fear of womanhoood." Women with less control over their eating envy, nay, imitate her. Indeed there is a whole new generation of "me-too" anorexics, those who copy the anorexic's "beautifying" tricks. IV A spiritual path has to do with union with God. A psychological path, at its best, might lead to individuation, the process of becoming whole. It is not surprising that the two are sometimes confused. Jung tells us that for those who experience God as dead, dead means unconscious. Thus, in order to awaken the transcendental self, which awakening must precede even a curiosity about a spiritual path, one must first get in touch with one's 78 Gail Sher reviews �But we must not lose track of the forest as we explore the trees. Finding God is the forest. In practice, getting a taste ofthe Godhead in oneself frequently leads one to take an interest in oneself psychologically. One is intrigued by the sense of one's higher self and motivated to explore the psyche. But such an exploration, no matter how exhaustive, ultimately is insufficient. One can be thoroughly analyzed and still not have transcended the cycles of birth and death. I have come to believe that the role of the spiritual in the anorexic's healing must be equal to that of the psychological. It is not enough, as Spignesi posits, to enter with an imagining eye the regions of the anorexic's persuasive demons. Entering these regions releases these images and unlocks the anorexic's tightly bound psyche, but her longing is more profound and more intense. In an epilogue to Holy Anorexia WJ.lliam N. Davis, M.D., Director of the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, describes the anorexic as expressing "a powerful urge to feel deeply, intensely, and consistently connected in a way that is beyond the abilities of most human relationships." (p. 18 3) When I first came across this sentence, I found it the most provocative and impelling statement I had ever read about anorexia. My own life story dramatically exemplifies it. I am constantly searching for a place to belong: my early idea of catching butterflies, my overly furnished childhood home, my compulsive hand activities, my rocking, my newly discovered sense of organization, my "illness," my spiritual community, in the end all left me feeling stranded. Eventually I found a spiritual practice that reflected my deepest needs. My heart became engaged and I began to open. Once I entered therapy, my efforts at connection became more conscious, but excruciatingly so because what I wanted so desperately seemed ever to evade me. Soon I realized that my therapist's caring for me was genuine and my heart opened even more. Only then could I enter into a loving and meaningful relationship outside of therapy. Part of an anorexic's healing is experiencing connectedness on more than one level. She has lost her way in the first place by being denied a primary connection (typically her parents were unavailable to her). Relationships of any kind become impossible so she creates a relationship, an incredibly intense one, with non-eating. Here is yet another difference between the anorexic and the saint: for fasting saints, the relationship was with God. They strove Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics 79 �for a distinctly physical identification with Christ in his humanity, with flesh in its suffering; and food, Eucharistic food as nourishment, was the medium of this connection. Their longing for God was expressed in pangs of hunger (holy eating), not in control of hunger (self-induced starvation). They sought to redeem their souls with and through the body, not to free their spirit from fleshly enclosure. For fasting girls, on the other hand, the primary relationship is with non-eating. To their bewildered and harassed spirit this relationship, more genuine and penetrating than any they have thus far achieved, becomes and end in itself. Jack Engler's solution, to position Buddhism and psychodynamic psychotherapy within an integrated model of therapeutic intervention seems at first glance an ideal program. But a word of caution is in order. Finding the right spiritual path is a long and personal process. There is no "formula" spiritual path. All my spiritual hunger couldn't be satisfied in the midst of a deeply serious Zen community. It took eleven years for me to accept that Zen Buddhism and I were a mismatch; but that admission was spiritually my most significant step forward. I learned that instead I had to find what was right for me, follow the path which was my own, and offer myself entirely to my chosen way, so that I am one with it in principle and carry it everywhere, endlessly in my heart. So Gail Sher reviews Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia and its critics � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Fasting Spirit Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1988 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_113 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 20 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/0e6a3b25de8ce7bd848b80c23cb443d7.pdf d1a95a2dc5a5a38ef8e6112b78c5ab57 PDF Text Text woodnotes summ•r 1996- NumiMr 29 Editor • Michael Dylan Welch 248 Beach Park Boulevard, Foster Cit · ia 94404 Associate Editor • Gail Sher IUtk--1../ 700 Heinz Avenue, Suite 310, Berkeley, California 94710 Tanka Editor • Pat Shelley 19223 Shubert Drive, Saratoga, California 95070 Art Editor • Cherie Hunter Day 15584 N.W. Trakehner Way, Portland, Oregon 97229 Copyright© 1996 Michael Dylan Welch lllusb'ations Copyright© 1996 Cherie Hunter Day ISSN 1050-4664 1bmissions of poems, haibun, news, and articles are encouraged. submissions to the appropriate editor (addresses above). Only ·ork accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) ill be considered (or SAE with two IRCs internationally). You may so submit poems, articles, or news items via electronic mail to felchM@aol.com. All work submitted must be the original, unpub;hed effort of the contributor unless otherwise noted. The· editors •sume no responsibility for contributors' views, for failure to give roper acknowledgment, or for copyright infringement. Copyright !Verts to authors upon publication. A one-year, four-issue subscription to Woodnotes is $16.00 postdd. International subscriptions are us$19.00 in Canada, us$22.00 sewhere. Single copies of Woodnotes are $5.00· in the United States, \d us$6.00 elsewhere. Please make all checks or money orders 1yable to "Michael D. Welch," and send them to the editor. ontributions also welcome. DeadUn• for nexc lssu• (In-hand) - Augusc 2, t 996 �hideaway covescribbling another haiku on the bread wrap H. F. Noyes striking the dust-covered globe summer sun Nika the boy dozes ... perched on his fly rod a red admiral Gail Sher Grimy store fa.;adethe clean silhouettes of absent letters Donna Claire Gallagher cabinetmaker's shop the dial scotch-taped toNPR Dee Evetts the retired gardenerhis balcony filled with plastic flowers Brian Tasker organizing the house for weeks suddenly nothing to do ]ames Tipton staff lounge chess gamea pawn on the verge of promotion Carlos Col6n To write a nature haiku I flip the pages of a flower guide FayAoyagi checking the driver as I pass a car just like mine fohn Stevenson waterfallthe man with the booming voice stops talking H. F. Noyes 10 • • 11 �first yellow tulip the click of cutting shears in the winter sun Lynne Leach snowmeltthe smell of a wooden door all day in the sun Jeff Witkin winter sunpale wings flutter about the woodpile L dove vanishes from my windowsill ... morning mist Jim Mullins grey morning drizzle falling softly into moss camellia blossom CeRosenow Merton's essays all afternoon the steady rain Cherie Hunter Day Gail Sher .. at my approach the sparrows fall quiet winter dusk Grant Savage winter thawsparrow at the spigot waits for its drip Nina A. Wicker late evening rainthe row of parked cars left sparkling GaryHotham storm windows stacked against the housespring sunset LeeGurga soon after the child the puppy goes to sleep Christopher Herold 22 • • 23 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The boy dozes Winter sun Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_112 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/10e526a90ee201ecddff60863016193f.pdf fdb4d590d1c55e37279127454ca67c4f PDF Text Text \ \ GALLERY WORKS SEVEN I �Peter. Holland and Jeanne Lance Editors Editor Emeritus Typesetting John Yurechko Diane Lubarsky Address GALLERY WORKS 25 Carlin Street Norwalk, 06851 Gallery Worl<s issues One to Seven are available for $5 from the above address. Please make checks payable to Jeanne Lance. Copyright © 1987 by Poets' Commune Publications. All rights retained by authors. \ \. �GAIL SHEA· Even can ·horses are dead inside me. I!I II II I •j t .! ! 1,1 Ii II! ll! li i[ ill IP II l \ \ �GAIL SHEA \\ Nor is it Mongolian downs that is castigation. Darkened green men onto whose mechanical window. �GAIL SHEA Unified dolls b_ing-bong freely & · discount spherical merchandise. . .Ii �GAIL SHEA \ Night becomes.. - a braid. Worn & .elaborate · coitus. \ �GAIL SHEA Or burst of grass her · mirroring fellowship. . : : I I �GAIL SHER \ Honey see the_m bake. Hard & sweet as you will see. A sire melts us. One two three us. \ �GAIL SHEA Be near somehow. Make the division · small. Regress inside where there is ; no memory of me. �GAIL SHER \ Each prune is a monument such as captivity is a monument. \ �GAIL SHEA Connubial mines such & such. Long salubrious · wait asking why the jillion emblems. \ \ �GAIL SHEA \ Its fleece repellent &.sadness. Like a hood 1eaps to me. \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ten poems Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_111 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 12 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/76c53e6e1bec63c358a368af2f0ddbf7.pdf 3e516649f9bdfbd207295e8f5685153e PDF Text Text BIG ALLIS Contemporary Writing Issue Number One 1989 �BIG ALLIS Issue Number One Copy!ight @ 1989 Big Allis All rights revert to authors upon publication ISSN 1043·9978 BIG ALLIS is published twice yearly Immense gratitude to Judith Zvonkin and Julie Mellby, without whom this magazine would not have been possible; thanks also to Jean Foos, Dirk Rowntree, Jeff Preiss, Claire Gabriel, and Michael Amnasan for their invaluable help. Cover design by Jean Foos Cover photo by Hope Sandrow Address all correspondence to: BIG ALLIS 139 Thompson St. #2 New York, NY 10012 Please enclose SASE with all submissions Edited by Melanie Neilson and Jessica Grim Distributed by: Segue, 303 East 8th St., New York, NY 10009 Small Press Distribution, 1814 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley, CA 94 702 �CONTENTS Jean Day six poems 1 from Kuklos 7 from YOU - the city 12 Selected movement descriptions 14 Fiona Templeton Sally Silvers Tina Darragh "increase 'long' simultaneously with 'fine"' Jessica Grim Aquatic Fetish Trunkation Pat Reed two poen1s Dorothy Trujillo Lusk 16 21 25 Historical Necessity and First .27 Leslie Scalapino from The Pearl (a com.ic book, the fornz of the novel) 35 Hannah Weiner from Pictures and Early Works, 1972 43 Eileen Corder Brache Melanie Neilson Whee lie (or Suture Self) Laura Moriarty Luz and Rosie Diane Ward from Crossing 46 50 53 58 �GAIL SHER front KUKLOS Tamarind Esau. & taps. Kadish. Clam St. Clare too faces. Jasper roach cans Mishna red wing. 7 �Betel has like dipso trough. Padma so bath. Criss par trinity. Hath Da. Peanut Hosanna. Wassail pied cum brindle ergo. 8 �Horse o' sphinx. America. Non dalmatian. * Turbo fra. Islet rebec daybed. I manna cossack. Bodhgaya. Soeur roe Padua. 9 �Milagro. Cunt un. Baptist ash. Meaty noh poi. Kurmos. New gorse. Pony sweetyard. 10 �Contessa bushes. Too feces. Gazetier. Angst 'cause paison. Tilsit. Lacre tarpaulin. Saguaro letterer. Pistol catalpa. Their shells. II � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tamarind Esau Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1989 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_110 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 8 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/2f186f5bf46ac6809d0c781a9389cf3d.pdf 72ca4a1b9113b424cde25d508b74491f PDF Text Text \ HAM BONE ' i 1: I! \ �Editor: Nathaniel Mackey is published in the Fall and in the Spring. Hambone (ISSN Subscriptions are $8.00 a year (two issues) for individuals, $12.00 a year for institutions. Single copy price is $5.00. Unsolicited manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Subscriptions, submissions and other correspondence should be addressed to Hambone, 132 Clinton Street, Santa Cruz, California 95062. Make check or money order payable to Hambone. The publication of this issue was made possible in part by a grant from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Wilson Harris' is reprinted with the author's permission from The . Sleepers ofRoraima (London: Faber, 1970). Edward Kamau Brathwaite's "Manchilen .is reprinted with the author's permission from Black & Blues (Havana: Casa de Las Americas, 1976). Copyright© 1982 by Hambone/Nathaniel Mackey. All rights revert to authors upon publication. No work in Hambone may be copied for purposes other than reviews without the author's permission. �No. 2, Falll982 Ham bone Contents bell hooks: poem from the first life the guard ofcaptive hearts the woman:.s mourning song re-interpreting the source in the manner ofthe egyptians John Taggart: Very Slow Clarence Major: Microcosm Gail Sher: Suppose deeply offers up Susan Howe: "'mute memory vagrant memory, ""Distance and eyes get lost (apse to read) Twig"" ""Genius:., UNot the true story that comes to"' ''right or ruth";, Hsabbath and sweet spices"" / '"Twenty lines of" Wilson Harris: Couvade Edward Kamau Brathwaite: Manchile Clips Jodi Braxton: Progression AI Young: What Is The Blues? W.H. Auden & Mantan Moreland Judy Platz: Stones Wedding Workhouse Habidu Olde Buridl Hill / 1 2 3 4 5 6 12 18 ·23 24 25 26 27 29 30 32 47 50 56 57 58 60 61 62 63 64 �Paul Metcalf: from Golden Delicious Nathaniel Mackey: from FramA Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Jay Wright: Twenty-two Tremblings ofthe Postulant (Improvisations Surrounding the Body) Beverly Dahlen: from A Reading SunRa: Your Only Hope Now Is A Lie Robert Duncan: Quand LeGrand Foyer Descend Dans Les Eaux Enthralld After Passage Ishmael Reed: Ishmael Reed Replies to Amiri Baraka Vera Kutzinski: Something Strange and Miraculous and Transforming (Review of Jay Wright's The Double Invention ofKomo) Susan Howe: Light in Darkness (Review of John Taggart's Peace on Earth) Notes on Contributors \ \ 66 74 85 91 98 115 117 119 123 129 135 139 �GailSher Suppose deeply offers up Crop us. Touches peak hope. So stares back (slowly) as her vowel. Chants some. Some. Not all these wisp surface. VVheresonisconcerned. New on this machine . • Cars pass. Realms of trees beat hugs song (you pick). Solicits (other) impression dependencies. Profusely whispers (means) whispers any amount. Up on each knee. Nine ten the mind thinks . • 18 �Sher What the friend thought at once the image. Traveling as a family. No here. Verbal (remodeled) nights (wants) the human. Despise her circle circles. Give back her. (Animates. This might.) Oh give. As there. Just discouraged and gives . • Sings around (and so forth). Compare her around. Vety telling. Arrives in thin tangible thigh. (Waits) from the inner group. Inherits (shield) for ·this. // This oh want or cost of what penetration. (Neither) her kin. Why wait saying this . • Does it. This intelligence. Some with hair toward the chair. (Slaughter some off as it actually was.) I would care. 19 �!· Hambone When clings the head to the bed seam. The brother wears this description also. Also over the telephone. Cherishes knee (very impressed) . • Pins it on. (Insemination) of t;he proud her. Now the me (so) street and I flesh. In which newspaper figures here. Some joined thing. (Oh) she understands all right. This much hand life acknowledged through the hand. (Dies) aftetwards for just her . • Makes death. (Shrieks) fat (I) am one. Gags or with. (Here) are words. Can't screams would or not. Not as no (love) . • 20 �Sher Not dry. Not this couch hatch (hopes) like food. To shell it (us) no less. Neglects all other species contempt. Spans the girl where she straight (shouts) this can love . • Supposing deeps (explore). Barely pleads & retreat. Caught. Flushes & bends. Entitles it "Oh sweet Resembles him too. Retells year her. The sleep position. (OfY absolute person.) How art waits (fails) eyeing depth and loss . • Man her ins. Stresses chair and bush (lust). Simply her life redness depressed on in. (Was) going to say (cry) touch. 21 �Hambone (Picks) eyes talks about addresses. She was spellbound. Solves our knowledge. Formulates this suction or what must practice from space . • Suppose deeply offers up. Licks and picks. (Come on.) Pick one. Moved per force (exquisitely) pertains cries or wants. Dark (exiguous) tree. Junks dream (said I'd come). Youngs girl. Creates sight independently. \ \ 22 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Suppose deeply offers up Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_109 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 9 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/3e191e0341a1b8314f6e91ad592b40c4.pdf 51b6525bec5ceb03f5697fbd8399d575 PDF Text Text frog pond how important the crunch of fairs leaves Ronan Vol. XVIII, No.3 Autumn 1995 HAIKU· SOCIETY OF AMERICA �HAIKU OF AMERICA . 333 East 47th. Street New York, NY 10017 Established 1968 . Co-founders: }iarold G. Henderson and Leroy President: Bruce Ross, 222 Culver Rd., Rochester, NY 14067 First Vice-Presi4ent: Lee Gurga, .514 Pekin St., ·lL 62656 _ Second· V_ice-President: Barbara Ressler, 1717 Kane St., Apt. 27, Dubuque, IA 52001 Secretary: Doris Heitmeyer, 315 E.· 88th St., Apt. 1F, New York, NY 10128=4917 Treasurer: Raffael de Giuttola, 4 Rd., Nattick, 01760 ·· · Editor: Kenneth C Leibman, P.O. Box 767, Archer, FL 32618-076?; e-mail: kenneth@freenet.ufl.edu · · Regional Coordinators:· · Northeast: Lawrence Rungren;16 Balmoral St. #114, Andover, MA .01810 Metropolitan Area: _John SteYenson, P.O. Box 12.2, Nassau, NY 12123 Southeast: David Hood; 410 S. 4th Sl, Mebane; NC 2?302 Midwest: Harvey Hess. 5{)5 Frederic Ave., WaterlQO, lA 50701 . MicbaeJ McNiemey, 3850 Paseo del #37, Boulder, CO 80301 Northwest: Robert E. Major1 P.O. Box WA Califorina: Michael Dylan Welch, 248 Beach Park Blvd., Foster City, CA 94404 Hawaii: Darold D. Braida, 1617 "Keeaumoku St. #1206, Honolulu, HI Subscnption/Membership US$20 USA and Canada; $28 overseas b.y airmail US dollars by check on a US bank or International Money Order. All subscriptions/ memberships are annual, expire on December 31, and include 4 issues of frogpond. Single copies (except 1992-3) US$5 USA and Canada, .$6 overseas; 1992 & 1993 double issues US$10 each US & Canada, $12 overseas. If xeroxed copies of out-of-print issues are NOT acceptable, PLEASE SPECIFY when ordering. Make checks payable· .to Society of Ameri:a, Inc. and send to Editor at his box number. · - must All funds for renewals, or donations' be sent to Secretary at her home a dUress, with checks or money orders made out-to Haiku Society of America, Inc. In addition, all changes of address are to go to the Secretary. Send.all editorial material (with SASE) to .Editor at. his box number: Send all ot.ber correspondence to the pertinent officers at their home addresSes. When a reply is required, must be enclosed. . · All prior copyrights are retained by ·contributors. Full rights reveri to contributors upon publication in frogpond. Haiku Society of America, its officexi or the editor, do not assume responsibility for views of contn'butors (including its own officers) whose work is in frogpond, research errors, of copyrights, or failure to make proper acknowledgments. · Copyright @ 1995 by Haiku S_ociety of An1erica, Inc: Cover art by Robert .ISSN 8755-156X · t. MaUnowski �yyellow flag signals jellyfish roulette napkin flower-a gift carried the entire day (Mazath1n) Connie Brannan C. Michael Brannan the moon caught on a matagourie thorn snow-capped Aorangi not too big to overlook the mountain lily (New Zealand) Ernest J. Berry in the rain the echo of a buglerRemembrance Day Remembrance Day billboard lips too red (Canada) Leroy G01man Elizabeth StJacques sudden chillawaiting fresh tea this empty cup squall\ I wrap my hands \ around the teacup ' \ Nika \c-:------.. . _... . . Gail Sher the loud silence after the cicada's cry not hearing the temple bell until that cricket Peter Brady a week later Halloween decorations even more cobwebbed Anthony J. Pupello sudden showerrescuing the bathroom spider with a sponge Gene Doty breezeless night ... spider at the center of its web Suzanne Williams October haiVest the orb-weaver feasting on the moon Cherie Hunter Day 22 Matthew Louviere �baibun I am amazed that Tosai, upon reading "the sound of an oar slap-. ping the waves/chills my bowels through/this night ... tears" has only to say "The poet, unable to go to sleep, must be pondering over time that has passed and time that is to come." i m1sty ram veils Mount Fuji only to the eyes ! j \ Gail Sher from the eyes of the soul Two Haiku Favorites An old bottlecap: now just a little pool of freshly fallen rain Tornadofinding in the debris an acorn with its bat Tom Tico 1 1-Ielen J. Sheny 1 The seeking-out of haiku that, for me, represent the inner spirit of the form has become a rewarding pastime. My criteria are: 1) Does the writer give attention to some seemingly insignificant detail of the moment, likely to be overlooked by us ordinary mortals? ... and 2) Is the observation a purely natural one that any of us with healthy powers of imagination could make? Could make, that is, with an awakened "heart-mind," which is the first essential to good poetry of any kind. One of the great Greek nineteenth-century poets, Solomos, wrote: Always open, ever alertthe eyes of my soul3 H.F. Noyes Yrogpond, Spring/Summer 1993 2 The Red Pagoda, Broadside Series, 1986 3 trans. by H.F. Noyes 37 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sudden squall Misty rain Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Society of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. For more information contact the Poetry Collection at lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. IN COPYRIGHT. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/  Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_108 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/ea2b12ac244cdd53b8d5af39bea7cd4f.pdf 3d807b97087b329889a58f75d91b765d PDF Text Text woodnotes winter t995 -Number 27 copyright© t995 Haiku Poets of Northern Cali ISSN 1050·4664 t995-t996 HPNC Executive committee President • John Leonard 49 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley, California 94941 Vice President • Paul 0. Williams 2718 Monserat, Belmont, California 94002 Secretary • Pat Gallagher 864 Elmira Drive, Sunnyvale, California 94087 Treasurer • Helen K. Davie 455 Payne Avenue, San Jose, California 95128 Woodnotes Editor • Michael Dylan Welch 248 Beach Park Boulevard, Foster City, California 94404 Woodnotes Associate Editor • Kenneth Tanemura 10 Wayne Court, Redwood City, California 94063 Woodnotes is published quarterly by the Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to writing, sharing, and studying haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun, and renku. Though HPNC is based in California, it welcomes members from anywhere. HPNC membership includes a subscription to Wood notes. Submissions of poems, haibun, and articles by members (only) are encouraged. Send submissions to the editor or associate editor (addresses above). Only work accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) will be considered (or SAE with two IRCs internationally). You may also submit poems, articles, or news items via electronic mail to WelchM@aol.com. All work submitted must be the original, unpublished effort of the contributor/member unless otherwise noted. The editors and HPNC assume no responsibility for contributors' views, for failure to give proper acknowledgment, or for copyright ment. Copyright reverts to authors upon publication. New subscription effect with all renewals due after this issue (see page 42). A one-year, subscription to Woodnotes is $16.00 postpaid. International subscriptions are us$19.00 in Canada, us$22.00 elsewhere. Single copies of Woodnotes are $5.00 in the United States, and us$6.00 elsewhere. Please make all checks payable to D. Welch," and send them to the editor. DeadUna for next Issue (in-hand) - February 23, 1996 �winter morning the cowbell clangs new snow Merrill Ann Gonzales broken ankle on a pile of pillows ... snow falling outside Carol Conti-Entin snow buries the leaf tipswatch Gail Sher snow over ice muffles the torrent: mouse tracks Ruth Yarrow December mist where he buried bones burying our dog R. A. Stefanac • 17 �last day of workcold wind down the empty CeRosenow ravens raindrops falling from the dead tree Pamela A. Babusci a train whistle blowsperched in a tree crow closes its eyes Gail Sher hawkshadow a sparrow hops twice George RJJlph • 3 �Sher- Berkeley, ealllornla / Tassajara Zen Mountain Center: Summer 1969 Others may wear monpe, jibon, and hippari but Chino Sensei's are impeccable, his tabi spotless, and Danish schoolbag, though Danish, on him seems the epitome of Japanese elegance. He knows how to walk to the zendo without hurrying. He knows how to eat and how to manage a lover within the stringent monastic schedule. His pristine composure inspires absolute confidence so that when I go to him to mention my desire to write, thatl sort of, sometimes write haiku, he immediately takes it up, "Write one a day. Make it a practice." silent snow silent house I stand in the moonlit doorway -Woodnotes #23, 1994 ce Rosenow- Portland, Dregon As I'm sure is the case with many Americans, I first learned elementary school. The few days we spent on the form a somewhat familiar with it when I re-encountered haiku in 1 producing a poetry program on KSCU radio in California and shows with vincent tripi and Jerry Kilbride. vincent and Jerry were so enthusiastic about haiku and the haiku community that I was immediately intrigued. vincent also gave me a copy of his book, Haiku Pond: A Trace of the Trail and Tlwreau, as wen as information about the Haiku Society of America and a number of haiku journals. Hearing these wonderful poets read their own work and discuss the haiku form prompted me to learn more about haiku and to begin writing haiku myself. ESther Banko//- san Francisco, california Adrienne Rich's admonition that 11to enter into the orderI disorder of the world is poetic atitsroot, as surely as itis political a tits root'' found a home in my heart. As a septuagenarian who began writing poetry two years ago, I found my way to haiku's juxtaposition of two-image unrhymed poetry on June23, 1995,atthe 11Haiku City" reading at Border's Books, Union Square, in San Francisco. I'm looking forward to life with my beginner's mind and my political heart. Number 27 Woodnotes • 41 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Snow buries A train whistle blows Tassajara Summer 1969" Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Poets of Northern California Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_107 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/38e86dc8cd4f4f1d5dee66dc43adc145.pdf 703b5d8d7258eef73b0d96980fd714f2 PDF Text Text Winter ttM Nllmber 23 copyright t 994 Haiku Poets of Northam calli ISSN tOSG-4664 A Note from the Editon In this issue of WOC¥lnotes-our largest ever-we are again privileged to share artwork by Cherie Hunter Day. Why goldfish,. for a winter issue, you may ask? Cherie explains: "In winter our focus goesinsidetoour oomes and families, and there is time for contemplation. For me, watching fish swimming ina pond or bowl is the essence ofcalm.Andbesides ... they'rereallyneat.InthecoverdesigtlttheblackfishisaMoor, and the white one is a Veintail." The other fish illustrations are of a twin-tail, a singletail comet, a pair of koi, and an angelfish. Tiley really are neat, aren't they? Contest (see page38). A deep bow of thanks to Donna Gallagher forcoordinatingthis event, to the judges for sifting through the hundreds of entries, and to the 132 poets who entered their poems with care and enthusiasm. We hope you enjoy the winning poems, and find the judges' comments enlightening and informative. In addition to this issue's record-setting 120 haiku and senryu (starting on pages 4 and 12) and 11 tanka (see page 33), we are pleased to share a haibun by Laura Bell (page 11), and a Ouistmas rengay (page 8). Many thanks to Carolyn Fitz for her calligraphyandillustrationsontherengay!Wearealsopleasedtoinclude''Th.elnside of a Haiku" by Christopher Herold (page 36). Chris originally presented his article as a meditation at the LitEruption Literary Festival in Portland, on Sunday, October 23 (see page 47 for more news about this event). We also include news and announcements(page44), book listings (page48),andafinal meeting summary (page 56) by outgoing HPNC secretary Tom Lynch. To Tom and all other retiring officers, many thanks. HPNC has thrived because of your service and dedication. And now, as you begin to savor this issue's poems, we invite you to enjoy their brisk twists and lovely turns in the aquarium of contemplation. Next HPNC Meeting, February 5, t995 HPNC's winter meeting on Sunday, February 5, 1995 will be held at a new location. To get to the meeting at 22 Skylark Drive in Larkspur, California, drive north on 101 from San Francisco, take the San Anselmo exit (just past Lucky Drive), veer to the left onSir Francis Drake, pass the BonAirShoppingCenter,continue to thethird stop light then turn left past a church, turn right on Magnolia, then take the next left at Skylark Drive. Go up a steep hill and park at the top in open lots (not in garages). Then walk north towards the swimming pool and recreation center immediately on the right. Driving from the north, take 101 south to the Kentfield/San Anselmo/Sir Francis Drake exit. Join us at 1:00 p.m. for our winter meeting, with many rounds of haiku reading, announcements, much socializing, a featured reader, and more! �white-breathed hooker looks in the window at the wedding gown "Winona Baker rain on the window the same unopened present under this year's tree Marianne Monaco silent snow silent house I stand in the moonlit doorway Gail Sher a swirl of snowshe lifts her hair out of her sweater Michael Dylan Welch the box everything was inanother Chrisbnas without her GaryHotham • 5 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Silent snow Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Poets of Northern California Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1994 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_106 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/9e7def896f698a02fe07d98e20e42407.pdf bd12ee4c7c461cee3256744857700c47 PDF Text Text I .. ·oNE ·BREATH ··HAIKu ··socrnTY oF- AMERicA . . · .1995 MEMB:ERs' A.NTHoL.ooY· ..... , ·. r Edited by Jean Dubojs :.· Michael · · . · ·· ElizabetJi L. Nichols \ . _>(· · . . . . \ . -Haiku Society , . . . . . �Halku Society of America, Iric . . c/o Japan SoCiety, Inc.· · 333 East 47th Street . · New York, New York i0017 Ddsign and typography by McNierney ISBN 0-9631467-3-4 Copyiight © of America, Inc; by the Jiaiku. Society .· re- All .rights rclserved. No part of book be used or. in any manner whatsoever' . . , from the author or authors except in case of .brief quotations in Rights revert tothe authors upon, publication ofthis - Each poem in this. book. was. chOsen by the editors. from five· ptih. lished or unpublished haiku or senryu submitted by of the Haiku Society-of America in 1995. member whq .chose to submit poems was guaranteeq to one poem _selected for this . · anthology: Acknowledgements Some. of the poems in this boqk previously published in' the following: Modern Haiku, Cicada, Frogpond, ill, ·Haiku Happenings, Haiku Headli,nes, woodnotes, Maiilichi News, ·Brussels Sprout, Iga-Ueno Basho Festival Dedicatory .Anthology, . . . Fire, HSA Newsletter, Haiku Southwest, ID 1992 Anthology,. . Chimera Connections, High on the Wind, Dragonfly, East-West. 1993, The Christian ..: Haiku, Timepieces· Haiku Science . Monitor, The Honolulu Advertiser, Japan· Airlin5!s · Ari.tl}ology, ·Florida State Poet's Association Newsletter., South By .. Southeast, High-Coo, Azami, . San Francisco ·Anthology,·· ,: Virtual Images, Sho)lVcase. No Such· ·Thing as ·strangers (Hurleyville, NY: Julie Hagan Bloch, 1993). Penny Harter's poem: ) is Copyright © 1994 Penny Harter in Stages and VieWs Books, "1994). Reprinted by pe:pniss'iOJ?.·Of the author..The HSAgratefully acknowledges _these �/silent snow silent house I stand in the moonlit -Gail Sher pencils sharpened I stand · the· sineil of cedar . . .Randal Johnson .the snow. even deeper beyond the temple gate I -Kohjiii' Sakamoto shoveled out at hist: \ peeling ·an. extra potato· just in' ... -Liz F.enn 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Silent snow Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Society of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_105 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/34790eac81d0d0ad1d78814b4fbee7b1.pdf 58582670bc6ab110c9935c5e75eeb65a PDF Text Text �RADDLE MOON 1 5 1\ADDLE MOON is published by THE KOOTENAY SCHOOL OF SOCIETY. Donations are tax-deductible (#068870*20*27) in Canada and are receipted promptly. SUBSCRIPTIONS in CanadaandtheUSare $15 for two issues for individuals; $20 for institutions and libraries. US and int'l subscribers pieasepay in US$. All other international subscriptions are $17 for individuals and $20 per year for institutions and libraries . Single copies are $8; back issues are $6. RADDLE MOON is grateful for the support of the Canada Council, our patrons and our subscribers. Thanks also to The Typeworks for mail runs. DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA BY: The Canadian :tvlagazine Publishers Assn., 2 Stewart St., Toronto, Ont., M5A 1H6 and by RADDLEMOON. DIS'I'RIBUTED IN THE US BY: Small Press Disttibution, 1814 San Pablo Ave.t Berkeley CA, 94702. DISTRIBUTED IN GREAT BlUTAIN BY: Paul Green, Spectacular Diseases} 83b London Road} Peterborough, Cambs., UK. DISTRIBUTED IN AUSTRALIA BY: the Collected \Y.forks Bookshop, 1st Floor, 238 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000, Victoda,.Australia. /\) ( ·or <:rfJ LmRARYSUBSCRlPTION AGENTS: SMS Canada) PO BOX2382) London, Ont., Canada N6A SA7; FAXON, 15 Southwest Park, Westwood> 02090 USA; McGregor Subscription Service, 2 South Seminary, Mount Morrisl IL, 61504 USA; Ebsco, 17-19 \Vashington Ave., Tenafly, NJl 07670. EDITORS: Susan Clark & Lisa Robertson; SCOUT; Catriona Strang, KE'Y'BOARDlNG: David Ay.re; PROOFREADING: Lisa Robertson, David Ayre* and the authors; TYPE&: DESIGN(Susan Clark. PRINTING: Friesen Printing Ltd., Winnipeg RADDLE MOON 15 is VoL 8, no. 1. Contents copyright ®for the MAILING ADDRESS: all correspondence should be addressed to; RADDLE . MOON, East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5T 4R8 Canada WEB: http://www.wimsey.com/--ksw/pnet/publicatlraddle/rm.htm lSSN: 0826-5909 PRINTED IN CANADA Your subscription helps support this ma-gazine- thank you. �Contents COVER 3 19 photo: Rhoda Rosel!feld Fiona Templeto!i Out Of the Mot1.tbs, In Other Mouths Denise. Riley of the EarJ The Castalian Spring 31 Benjatnin Friedlander Eight Poems 46 Paul Mutton The Way It Floats 48 Leslie Scalapino from l..Jew Time from An Exchange with Norman Fischer 60 Alan Davies Same Old New Shit PORTFOLIO Rhoda Rosenfeld Iconologos, for Lara Lian Gilbert from Maps of the World �85 Norman Fischer Irregular Coastline 100 DianeWard Five Poems 106 - 113 119 Fanny I-Iowe from One Crossed Out L ailSher Resurrection Seven Sacraments Erin Moure 7 Cues To The Instability OfArtistic Order , 128 Naomi Foyle Rules OfDeportation 135 Edgar Allen Poe ].H. Prynne, 143 Notes a ntvieu1 �Gail Sher Resurrection Supper 1963 scow [reach-me-down] baccarat Lydia ululate 113 �Girl Praying 1977 bluebird Sarajevo para Negro Valhalla bitch cru �Landscape with Figures II 1985 tat slow-boat tro·ugh (queerly) Rick starling starlet osler tamarisk Oology 115 �Embrace of Peace I 1986 n1ockeniut mockernut riverward 116 �The Seven Sacraments The Seven Sacraments (A Celebration of Life) 1980 Clare (see fit) .Godpool 117 �The Fourth Station of the Cross: Jesus Encounters His Holy Mother 1984 thru Him marigold summertime summertime bluefish (pokeweed) WANTED kept cups 118 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Resurrection The Seven Sacraments Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_104 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 10 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e3bf9a671dcd2ff4ab94236f62b8a6d4.pdf 6e66a58a8aa998ebcdd56b109b5765c3 PDF Text Text GALLERY WORKS FIVE �Edited by Peter Holland, Jeanne Lance and John Yurechko Address GALLERY WORKS 1465 Hammersley Avenue Bronx, New York 10469 Gallery Works appears yearly. Submissions should be accompanied by a stamped return envelope. Issues One to Four are available for $2.50 from the above address. T,his issue was made possible in part by funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Copyright © 1981 by Poets' Commune Publications. All rights retained by authors. \ \ �GAIL SHEA RIVER THE OFFICE MY OWN deep pan swallow harbinger tries the note/ of brown deepens otherwise fingers curve/ and not to be this hardened fall common mouth curve interjects/ sue the meditation even so \ \ �GAIL SHER \ LORD AND GIVE THE NECKLACE CHILD race dozen dozen sceptered/whereby the under-morning sandwiched alone nickels crease the tidy /rabbit tilted and shy salvage carrot whooped a_nd practically nest/the brown rood tassel recurrent inhere inhere inner crown/ All will the estuarial \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource River the Office My Own Lord and Give the Necklace Child Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_103 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/2a52f9a0346fb052567f49319f90ee98.pdf 5455d03ee893e7713e7951681ce714e0 PDF Text Text \ & \ �\ Bruce Andrews True Flip To Beau Beaus.oleil Lascaux Steve Benson Blue Book Richard Kostelanetz John Marron Epiphanies Pitch White Barbara Noda Larry Price Poems Penguins At the Tops of Cities Columns Poems Gail Sher Jim Wine copyright 40 from Longwalks GNOME INC 1981 Back issues are available, please write \ �\ Gail Sher was born in St. Louis. She works as a poet and lives in San Francisco. \ �fifty-five or five ow1ng him nickels tricky-tricky talk to goblin Nautilus/ He hawker-walk on lemon sand remarkable (him him) where-to/. Somersault daddy heaving and sighing \ \ �\· \ fish no mind steak tuna tuna to licked/ for she wasn't my eyes (her and her) belly-needle up no kiss �diamond shally late come o mama/ .1.n mysettle cup lovely this the squawk squawk iron-tried firmament tree extend bold. sensation-father great knowledgeable rain \ �folded bloom to heaven legal to to/ the hunter fringe noise: the downer blooms vulgar fish livelier the man/ hawklike �eagle door on sainted whistle this promise her red bud ·bible live (no fool) I· I talked \ �\ 0 1 dear no the Proserpine to find the/ . (for one thing) reformation . hat curly mountains all up-to-up wants/ to feel how much love how awakened intense ducks �aunts no vibration her mouth Oh I her soda bear . 1ron burn parchment/ pass light and \ \ �\ adobe cheese . pra1ses blossoms hot stork white ,something leaning on silk \ �whiskered mannequin lay laugh laugh laugh on her/ gho.ul cousin (likely as not) cotton chest \ \'1. �\ I i 1 It I I ·! I I II ! I I II frozen pawn jelly I cat-up her/ mamablood dipped . l.n true pink o lovely � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poems Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_102 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 13 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e61fe382fdffcb8c7b87e67d21dc3214.pdf 65ec41ca57d7aeb24a0bd6e44d17f093 PDF Text Text \\ CREDENCES, A Journal of Twentieth Century. Poetry and Poetics �CREDENCES: A JOURNAL OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY AND POETICS New Series, Volume 3, Number 1 - Spring 1984 Editor: Robert J. Bertholf Editorial Board: Melissa Banta George Butterick James Coover Michael Davidson Dean Keller Production Manager: Stephen Roberts Business Manager: Sharon Schufhauer Editorial address: 420 Capen Hall, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York 14260. CREDENCES is a publication of The Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, and is issued three times a year under the sponsorship of the Friends of University Libraries. The publication of the magazine is, in part, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. All Manuscripts should be accompanied by return postage; essays and reviews should conform to the latest MLA style sheet. CREDENCES is indexed by the Index of American Periodical Verse, and the PMLA Bibliography. Subscriptjon: Fifteen dollars a year. Back issues available. Single issues: Five dollars. ·CREDENCES is free with full membership in the Friends of the University Libraries. Subscription orders and remittances may be sent to: Ms. Sharon Schiffbauer, 434 Capen Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14260. ISSN 0740-4182 �CONTENTS \\ New Writing Bruce McClelland 9 John Taggart 12 Leslie Scalapino tf. r: :;· r· 1: I; Twenty One Times 16 from Buildings Are at the Far End Gerrit Lansing 19 The Milk of the Stars from Her Paps Nathaniel Tarn 24 Nine Poems from u Seeing America First'' Charles Stein 33 from The Forestforthetrees Robert Kelly 43 Towards the Day of Liberation The Man Who Loved White Chocolate ' !. r rf Two Poems Foresong Aaron Shurin 77 The Graces Gail Sher 84 Poems The Library Record Jed Rasula 91 Robert Kelly: A Checklist Jed Rasula 127 Ten Different Fruits on One Different Tree: Reading Robert Kelly April Hubinger 176 Robert Kelly's "The Sound": Notes Toward a Reading Essays �Reviews George Butterick 191 Personism and Populism: Some Useful Tools Deborah Kelly Kloepfer 194 Excavating the Temple: ·. Two Critical Studies of H.D. J. M. Edelstein David Lampe 202 Ezra Pound: A Bibliography 204 No Book is an Ireland: Five Anthologies of Irish Poetry Robert Bertholf 210 William Bronk: Poems at the Center Cover Pen and ink drawing by Laurence Housman, entitled ucain. ,, Reproduced· with the permission of the Executors of the Laurence Housman Estate. J :. 1 -, �84 Gail Sher Que. This would be it shining internal switch back. Sway perhaps. Edits toward the cripple boy. Hard places timing eight. Tap its suggestion. Or across town maybe daylight on the synagogue. Vacuous poise how to. Stretched with implentitude nurse makes up. Others scant attention. Brink one. Two. Necks the truth. Three angry children and how the car would yield to them. Reined bones. Dip here. One after pink. Look through death does. We eat again. �85 Somehow behind tongues. Would cruise behind. Blocks allowed swallows at. But buzz or which aperture. In and out. Bubbles climb under. Hugging rations. Joints of growth swell with speed. Deer over the counter. Doing my part. Tearing them out. · This or that wand arm. Satisfaction..sifiks as I sit on. Shoes and multiple army strata urging and bumping the sabbath. The jar worth. and chewing. Forcing Angular scribes knowing angularity. These cow shadow. Stout fiction say. How to shuffle them reading and waiting heard softly at the zoo. �86 Flourishing. .Slowly the human teethe. Housing it all in a little room. Containers despair here. Crunches through the deer. Que. This would be it shining internal switch back. Thursday node attune in . dogs which again promise enough f:. i. !·: Reprieve told mouths. Her deanery over the stove. Gliders form a screen duality. Here a door there apart. Movement after sleep in the forenoon crust. Certain richness as the · �87 legs fold up. an evemng. Size mounts Cowboys these. Yes withheld from lower scars. My size for once touched. Interchangeable numbers bearing down hard. Which forehead she always thought when pain was intense. Bands or ribbons ·or anything. Black adjoining walls whose door swings. Knives and one parakeet with a possible baby engrossed in black. Or mirrors frozen. Be exact. Couches again home elapse. Tones of your. Amusing through so tired. Listen. Priests emerge. Lined up as a queen. �88 Surrogate (kites) from infancy. This penal being. Separates or rub here before the tree. Ladders lay flat to rub before the dog. Tomorrow is next week say bearing another Friday. To lug. Beauty enough. Ripe eye. Pick up the waltz. Tears are a record. corn tears. Utterly Participates looking uncluttered. Belong while the arms move. Once alive olives gift. Curls imprints beef. your arms sweetie. Raise Geering unsafety. Or curl again in the back part. \ \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poems Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_101 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 9 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/04048236e21dd179367f1e8d40149e3b.pdf b2f8c0ce61ad51e25af39edeb3f79fff PDF Text Text GALLERY WORKS EIGHT �Editors Jeanne Lance and Peter Holland Typography Michael Ballen Paste-Up Janice Tetlow Address GALLERY WORKS 218 Appleton Drive Aptos, California 95003 Gallery Works issues One to Eight are available for $5 each from the above address. Please make checks payable to Jeanne Lance. Copyright© 1991 by Poets' Commune Publications. All rights retained by authors. �CONTRIBUTORS Poetry and Prose Michael Amnasan Dodie Bellamy Julia Blumenreich David Bromige Adam Cornford Timothy Cunningham Beverly Dahlen Norman Fischer Peter Ganick Janet Hamill Katherine Janowitz Richard Kostelanetz Wanda Phipps Nick Piombino CaroiAnn Russell Spencer Selby ) James Sherry c:-:::Gau Sher Hannah Weiner Photographs Harry Dahlgren Cover Art Beverly Richey �GAIL SHER From KUKLOS * Osiris co rider. Hanuman cup. Cam floatation shiksa. �GAIL SHEA Okasa askari. Ganjha blouse Goth zydeco salaam. �GAIL SHEA Piper fra Galilee. Ashkenazi traps. Well furze. Tapes pique trumpeter. �GAILSHER Goby gnu assize. Lo cod. Sabine the reichstag. �GAILSHER Tivoli wight. The atone sri. Joseph angus lassitude. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Osiris co rider Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1991 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_100 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 8 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b36ca116ed9c9499b0665944045518f2.pdf 6959c91ed1dc2dc32511872c23a2bb7d PDF Text Text RAW NerVZ a quarterly of haiku & related material Volume II : 4 Editor Publisher Front Cover Back Cover Design wv:rm ftceff 1995-96 Dorothy Howard · proof press Marlene Mountain LeRoy Gonnan Dorothy Howard Subscriptions : $20 in Canada and the USA, $24 elsewhere Single copies : ppd $6 in Canada and the USA, $7 elsewhere The Editors do not assume responsibility for views of contributors expressed in RAW NerVZ, nor for copyright infringement. Unless credited otherwise, material belongs to each author, with the copyright for protection of writers and artists only. Front cover illustration© 1990 Marlene Mountain, from her Nature Talks Back, book one: untamed one-line haiku. crone without a cause stuff #4, edited by Brian David Johnston. ©1994 Marlene Mountain Copyright© 1996 by RAW NerVZ ISSN 1198-4112 Submission deadlines (March l,Junet.Sept.l,Dec.l) Sorry, no contributor copies Submissions, inquiries & subscriptions to: RAW NerVZHAIKU 67 Court St., Aylmer (Qq CANADA J9H 4Ml Non-subscribers enclose Canadian stamps, cash or IRC (no envelope) Seaso11 fo taste. �CONTENTS HAIKU, SENRYU & TANKA Marlene Mountain (ofc); Ruth Yarrow (3); Sue Mill, Robert C. Boyce (4}; M. B. Duggan, Catherine Jenkins, LeRoy Gorman (5); Larry Kimmel, LeRoy Gorman, Yvonne Hardenbrook (6); Sam yada Cannarozzi (8); Guy R. Beining (15); Jerry A. Judge, Wally Swist, Nick Ressler, Alan Cohal (16); Raffael de Gruttola (20); LeRoy Gorman (21); Michael Dylan Welch, Yvonne Hardenbrook, Jim Kacian, George Ralph (22); Rick Prose, Nika (24); Alexis K. Rotella, Gloria B. Yates (25); Ed Bennett (26); A. Eddie-Quartey, Geraldine C. Little (27): Laila Wah, Jean Jorgensen, David Eliot, Michael Ketchek (28); Larry Kimmel, Michael Dudley, A.M. Forbes, Francine Porad, Gail Sher (29}; Arizona Zipper, Lynn Atkins (30); Tom Clausen (31); chris gordon (32); Darold f:>7'Braida {33);janice m. bost<Jk, M. Kettner (34); LeRoy Gonnan (35); David Elliot, Darold Braida (36); Geraldine C. Little (3 7); Addie Lacoe, Donna Claire Gallagher (38); Yvonne Hardenbrook, Hans Jongman, Ce Rosenow, Ronan (39); John Stevenson, Alexis K. Itotella, Tony F. Konrardy (40); Winona Baker, Marje A. Dyck, Valerie Diane Wallace, Warren D. Fulton (41); Robert Craig, Wally Swist (43); A. Babusci. Makiko, William M. Ramsey (46); LeRoy Gorman, George Ralph, Anna Vakar (47); John Sheirer, Cl:'lrles Easter (48}; Robert Major, Timothy Russell, Jane E. Stewart, Anthony J. Pupello, John Stevenson (SO); Tom Clausen (ibc); LeRoy Gorman (obc) IRIEIMC®I!, f}{J#lO!eJ(Ij)fMa .. FRANGLISH INTERWEAVINGS, Richard Kostelanetz (2) HOME FOR TilE HOLIDAYS. Jerry A. Judge (4) WE ARE ALL SUSPECT, linked haiku, Marlene Mountain Janice M. Bostok (7) San Miguel Haiku, Rick Prose (8) HATE CRIMES, Pmt II, sequence, Jotm J. Dunphy, (17) CARPOOLING OVER THE MOUNTAIN, sequence, Alexis K. Rotella (18)) WHO DOES HE THINK HE WAS? haibun, William Greenhill ( 18) Fat Maizie's Ladies' Haikucycle, sequence, Smith (20) to the City Of good air. sequence, Jerry Kilbride (20) MINIA1URE WIN1ER-a ghazal, M. Kettner (30) TREE & 0 UMB TALE Jolm M. Bennett (32) '!lBIIB LAS'lL' sequence, Nasira Alma (33) PRISON, sequence,JobnJ. Dunphy(33) Marseille, sequence,JeffWitkin(3S) ARCHIPELAGO BLUES, a Haibun in memory of Alfred, Barry Atkinson (36) TAUGHANNOCK FALLS, haibun, John Stevenson (36) --un t i t 1 ed-- Michel Dudley (37) place bonaventure, sequence, Joe Blades (38) The Bad Son, haibun, Charles Easter (42) In Vain We Trust, rengay,Jane Reichhold Zane Parks (42) haibmt, Nasira Alma (42) OLD WOMAN'S BANJO, Renga, Marlene Mountain Elizabeth Lamb Bill Pauly (49) ---ARTICLE--Remembering the Future: Language Haiku, Raffael de Gruttola(9-14) M/.11/&.JLJENJE MOUN'lfJJ.IlN POILJ£. letters by janice m bostok(44), Larry Kimmel (44-45), Jolm Stevenson (45) haiku by janice m. bostok (44), Carlos Colon (45) llteflfi!Bm (35) from Carlos Col6n, Anthony J. Pupello, John Stevenson, Dee Evetts A c k no w I edge na en t s, No t e s, etc. INDEX (52) (51) �LanyK.immel leaning over the muddy boot printa white flower Michael Dudley from a tin I lift out with fork tines the spine of a salmon A.M. Forbes forgotten letter folded in my pocket space bent by time Francine Porad first day of school diesel smoke in mom's eyes not an obscene call the baby's breathy noises GailSher noisy city the old woman lost in her peach okusanjabbering into your cellular phone this windy day 29 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Noisy city Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Proof Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_099 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/2d016fdb5a5d5f734d293615b9e3da90.pdf 7270b193f287fa596fe0ffe1c2670372 PDF Text Text CREDENCES A Journal of 'IWentieth Century Poetry and Poetics �/ - CREDENCES: A JOURNAL OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY AND POETICS New Series, Volume I, Number 1. Editor: Robert J. Bertholf Editorial Board: Melissa Banta George Butterick James Coover Robert Creeley Michael Davidson Dean Keller Production Manager: Stephen Roberts Business Manager: Sharon Schiffbauer Design: Joan Manias Editorial address: 420 Capen Hall, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York 4260. CREDENCES is a publication of The Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the U niversity Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, and is issued three times a year under the sponsorship of the Friends of the University Libraries. The publication of the magazine is, in part, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. All manuscripts should be accompanied by return postage; essays and reviews should conform to the latest MLA style sheet. CREDENCES is indexed by the Index of American Periodical Verse, and the PMLA Bibliography. Subscription: Ten dollars a year. Single issues: Three dollars and fifty cents. CREDENCES is free with full membership in the Friends of the University Libraries. Subscription orders and remittances may be sent to: Ms. Sharon Schiffbauer, 434 . Capen Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14260. Designed and produced at Open Studio in Rhinebeck, New York, a facility for writers, artists, and independent publishers, supported in part by grants from the National 'E\ndowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. g•. - .•._.• __ ��Reviews Andrew Stiller 179 John Cage'sHPSCHD Bill Sylvester 186 John Matthias, Crossing. A. Kingsley Weatherhead 193 Joyce Piell Wexler,LauraRiding'sPursuitof Truth. Brian G. Caraher 196 "Gather. the bits of road that were": Robert Creeley'sLater. Dean Keller 203 Jack \Y.C. Hagstrom and George Bixby, Thom Gunn: A Bibliography 1940-1978. Contributor's Notes 205 �It gives me great pleasure to present the first issue ofCredences as a publication of the Poetry/Rare Books C<?llection of the University Libraries at SUNY/Buffalo under the sponsorship of the Friends of the University Libraries. It is certainly appropriate that Credences, which has already had considerable impact as a forum on modem poetry, should henceforth be affiliated with a collection internationally renowned for its focus on the development of poetry in the twentieth century. I am confident that this new relationship will be welcomed by the . scholarly community and that it will greatly enhance the quality of ·this already innovative and artistic journal. Saktidas Roy Director of University Libraries SUNY!Buffalo �16 GaiiSher #1 She stood all divine in her lash. Grand her very presence look voice the mere contemporaneous fact of whom multiplied by sudden magical amounts the· accuracy with which he heard what he had said just as she had heard it. Various. Fifty women. Her young eyes bred like linen for a wedding the effort of an age awaiting that ceremony. They unwrapped him. #2 The infelicity and confusion of his arm now bent around her eagerness. Like a bride and always about her the breath almost of happy wonderful special. All this about-to-be wait-and-see she wore in her blonde hair and the lilt with which she tip..,chinned shook it back behind her an asset the measure of her wealth taken thereby by what she took so displayingly for granted. Her pretty perfect teeth her very small too small nose deferring with count-onable ease a deference he most assuredly counted on counted more than he could say on its ready . assignation. This quantity the crease of his lambswool jacket confident and loose hang of tie collected so completely that her tea-table vitality pleasant public familiar served and rad,iantly settled over him · an altogether different an altogether self affirmation. �17 #3 He fancied them liked them and passing through them with her more slowly now. Her room was high and cool and bare and opened on another room bare to fullness with sun. Here leaning gently pressing her cheek against the side of the recess she saw flowers a miracle of an exposure kept in durance as an approach her primary furniture to what she can have thought a full and formal air. Producible. Amazmg. #4 Saying nothing with his lips all the while pressing you so with his face. I - Instantly she was all there. Forgiving and from the way she managed to invest the little cubes of embossed butter the table-linen. starched and pressed indeed the very violets in their dish between them reeked so sudden a violetness that it was all before :him in a flash what forgiveness was for her and how it was tremendously was what she did best. She forgives and would forgive anything' and as she sat the demureness of a child her grey eye·s moving in and out of their talk his quick large gratitude had so immediate and intense effect on his perception as to devolve it entirely. Strange and beautiful it was to him as he saw as he saw that he could see that he would now wondrously see always instantly by her acuteness. �1 18 #5 There to be laid in the English sunshine. It was a mild day and as they rowed the long aftemoon sun cast over boats and ripply water its own fine spray one through. which he saw her seated straightly refreshed refurbished. Her pinkness translucent refined flaired even more pinkly pressed against black German velvet and her long loose triple strand of waist-length pearls. These she fingered like a rosary keeping pace with a rhythm so feminine so private that he hearing it darkened. What unheeded prophecies this Cassandra uttering and he her harlequin held as by a beat of air. #6 Haunting so in her tigerish the visual. Sht? was so happy and in her white dress and sofdy plumed white hat sprang into day. Something not as yet traceable (words he couldn't catch?) some such loose handful of bright flowers fell by her as she along the plush air now loosely now arrogantly tripped. What was it that bold high look some form of merit some consecration breathlessly fresh. Even he in this resemblance it even did something for his own quality marked now.as lo and behold nice in this gayness in these new conditions at large. The day was so soft so soft. And yet as black in its certain location can seem light and transparent so this softness against which he daren't push claimed in yes didn't he feel it the very whiteness of its bones colossal reserves. �19 #7 He wanted her verve her other star. She knew. The dark room rode her recognition bearing in its wake a dim parenthetical vocabulary. For it wasn't directly or with a freedom that she surrendered shyly extending as it were a timid hand. This process articulated by its givings out took place in her heart like a habit with all the handsome formalities of a habit which it then fell to her to sacrifice. Bum she thought she pleaded for the light and warmth of it for the cool soft drift of it. Here was a location. Here was an other spot to which she could ride without flame. Free-hand she could ride this memory a constellation bright and new and airless. #8 Her lungs the sperm of air too-tropical. Luxuriant on the crest of whirling silver sapphire her life like a carousel poised at high speed. Realization inassed like a wave and softly rocked the wooded air the too colorful shadow in which she too at once too vulnerable. What she had as part of her own process been avoiding rose as a dread the merest allusion to which exhilarating ineffable stripped her to the account of a new nakedness. So it was that she admonishing what had become for her a vigilence reproved even more mildly the sense in which he surrounded everything that touched him with an elegant permission an indifference she could just now barely make out as that which rendered him above all merciful or even it began to gleam brilliantly beneficent. Its consecration dawned on her there flushed for all its intimacy and conferred on her as a forest of august shade the umbrageous protection of her own derivation. �20 #9 Planting trees not out of politeness. Two in winter. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder as he lay along the river bank old old old. His thoughts blue and in the pebbly water trembling deepened with the tone of the sky as he lay concentric halos of waves lapping every ounce of foamy ooze somehow a syllable in this dream. This dream this blue-grey dreamy rocking the slight rock of a couple of small boats bumped against the landing undressing in their long cool tired line the willows with no waist. Too old. Too tired in the sandy bottom of this special shade of speech the talk was it chatter of the darkening. :.t ., \ \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nine pieces Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_098 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 10 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/3d2b66af06858f4eb108765aac67c3ea.pdf 7be6d053b65869db2468081a7c29d8d9 PDF Text Text frog pond frigid night: bare branches embrace space Ruth Yarrow Vol. XVIII, No. 4 Winter 1995 HAIKU SOCIETY OF AMERICA �HAIKU SOCIETY OF AMERICA 333 East 47th Street New York, NY 10017 Established 1968 Co-founders: Harold G. Henderson and Leroy Kanterman President: Bruce Ross, 222 Culver Rd., Rochester, NY 14067 First Vice-President: Lee Gurga, 514 Pekin St.• Lincoln, IL 62656 Second Vice-President: Barbara Ressler, 1717 Kane St, Apt. 27, Dubuque, JA 52001 Secretary: Doris Heitmeyer, 315 E. 88th St., Apt. IF, New York, NY 10128-4917 Treasurer: Raffael de Gruttola, 4 Marshall Rd., Nattick, MA 01760 frogpon.d Editor: Kenneth C. Leibman, P.O. Box 767, Archer, FL 32618-{}767; e-mail: kenneth@afn.org Regional Coordinators: Northeast: Lawrence Rungren, 16 Balmoral St. #114, Andover, MA 01810 East Coast Metropolitan Area: John Stevenson, P.O. Box 122, Nassau, NY 12123 Southeast: David Hood. 410 S. 4th St., Mebane, NC 27302 Midwest: Harvey Hess, 50S Frederic Ave., Waterloo, IA 50701 Southwest: Michael McNiemey, 385'0 Pasco del Prado #37, Boulder. CO 80301 Northwest: Robert E. Major, P.O. Box 533, Poulsbo, WA 98370..0533 C.alifomia: Michael Dylan Welch, 248 Beach Park Blvd., Foster City. CA 94404 Hawaii: Darold D. Braida, 1617 Keeaumoku St. #1206, Honolulu, HI 96822 Subscription/Membership US$20 USA and Canada; $28 overseas by ainnail only, in US dollars by check on a US bank or International Postal Money Order. All subscriptions/ memberships are annual, expire on December 31, and include 4 issues of frogpond. Single copies (except 1992-3) US$5 USA aa1d Canada, $6 overseas; 1992 & 1993 double issues US$10 each US & Canada, $12 overseas. If copies of out-of-print issues are NOT acceptable, PLEASE SPECIFY when ordering. Make checks payable to Haiku Society of America, Inc. and send to Editor at his box number. All funds for subscription/memberships, renewals, or donations must be sent to the Secretacy at her home address, with checks or money orders made out to Haiku Society of America, Inc. In addition, all changes of address are to go to the Secretaty. Send all editorial material (with SASE) to the Editor at his box tmmber. Send all other correspondence to the pertinent officers at their home addresses. When a reply is required, SASE must be enclosed. All prior copyrights are retained by contributors. Full rights revert to contributors upon publication in frogpond. Haiku Society of America, its officers, or the editor, do not assume responsibility for views of contributors (including its own officers) whose work is printed infrogpond, research errors, infringements of copyrights, or failure to make proper acknowledgments. Copyright@ 1995 by Haiku Society o[ America, Inc. Cover art by Robert T. Malinowski ISSN 8755-156X �the wind gets strongerthe air I breathe hasn't been here long f some of the wind gets in with her Night Falls night fallsskin folds around my bones the wind slows downthere's nothing to hear slouching toward the toilet night wind sears me to the bone colder outthe wind moves toward another mountain full moon-facing it knees braced beneath my robe · these fifty years having accomplished nothing I sail home Gary Hotharn Gail Sher meditating . . . the neighbor's caged bird screeching meditating ... a buzzing fly in a web Monday Monday morning ... but the daybreak just as clear meditating . . . the neighbor's shuffle through our fence Monday morning ... a soccer ball still in the cul-de-sac meditating . . . behind me the egret's squawk Monday morning ... children left behind at every comer meditating ... the iron lantern candle's flame unwavering Thomas D. Greer Kay F. Anderson 21 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Night falls Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Haiku Society of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_097 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/2e192694eb7826bef8f2eaaf94cba780.pdf 4b48e828032702b37ac533d270e4273d PDF Text Text woodnotes . . spring f996 -Number 28 Editor • Michael Dylan Welch 248 Beach Park Boulevard, Foster City, California 94404 G Associate/Haibun Editor • Gail Sher .. 00 Heinz Avenue, Suite 310, Berkeley, California 94710 Tanka Editor • Pat Shelley 19223 Shubert Drive, Saratoga, California 95070 Art Editor • Cherie Hunter Day 15584 N.W. Trakehner Way, Portland, Oregon 97229 Copyright© 1996 Michael Dylan Welch Illustrations Copyright© 1996 Cherie Hunter Day ISSN 1050-4664 Submissions of poems, haibun, news, and articles are encouraged. Send submissions to the appropriate editor (addresses above). Only work accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) will be considered (or SAE with two IRCs internationally). You may also submit poems, articles, or news items via electronic mail to WelchM@aol.com. All work submitted must be the original, unpublished effort of the contributor unless otherwise noted. The editors assume no responsibility for contributors' views, for failure to give proper acknowledgment, or for copyright infringement. Copyright reverts to authors upon publication. A one-year, four-issue subscription to Woodnotes is $16.00 post_paid. International subscriptions are us$19.00 in Canada, us$22.00 elsewhere. Single copies of Woodnotes are $5.00 in the United States, and us$6.00 elsewhere. Please make all checks or money orders payable to "Michael D. Welch," and send them to the editor. Contributions also welcome. DeadUna for next lssua (in-hand) - April 26, 1996 �her footsteps on the walkbirds singing Paul 0. Williams Canoeing down stream ... again at this bend, we flush the same kingfisher Donna Claire Gallagher at the rifle range swallow feeds her chicks between volleys Naomi Y. Brown through measles and mumps every eastern songbird on the bedside wallpaper Laurie W. Stoelting Listening for worms ... the robin waits for thunder's end. John Laugenour I I L falls !watchdoor ajar . Gail Sher • ! cr. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Night falls Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_096 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/045445c430cf8a5f0bfcdab4210db2f1.pdf ff53fb577f856179049a7a0fb511773d PDF Text Text copyrlghc Autumn t99S -Number 26 © t995 Haiku Poecs of Norchem califoJ ISSN tOSG-4664 A Note from the Editors From the cover and interior illusbations by Helen K. Davie, to the haibun by Donna C1aireGallagher(see page 12),and in many poems in between, this issue of Woodnotes treats us to the sights and senses of autumn. So when you have a moment after your raking chores, set a fresh log on the fire, curl up in your favorite chair, and immerse yourself into this issue's autumn moments. We are pleased to present 104 hailcu and seruyu (beginning on page 4) ammged in a seasonal progression beginning with autumn, plus 15 tanka (starting on page 28). We also offer a favorite haiku described by H. F. Noyes (see page 21), listings of many new haiku books (see page 46), plus lots of news and announcements, including reports of several recent events (page 38). Indeed, this past summer was a very busy one for haiku in San Frandsro. One of the highlights was a national meeting of the Haiku Sodety of America, and another was the sixth reading in HPNC'sannual Two Autumns series (a report on the reading and the commemorative book, Paper Lantern, will appear in our next issue). Ce Rosenow also shares her thoughts on A Haiku Path in her book review on page 54. And, as usual, our meeting minutes appear on the 1astpage. :Finally, this issue shares some historic contest news-the results of the firstever international rengay rontest, sponsored by the Haiku Poets of Northern California (see page 32). Weare pleased to present the two winners (tied for first p1ace) and three honorable mentions, and look forwani to the possibility of repeating this rontest with even greater success next yea:& As the. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas seasons approach, don't miss the fleeting moments of autumn-the colorful leaves, the pumpkin patches, the kids dressed up in ghoulish costumes. This is a cozy time of year. Watch the sparks fly up from your fire, and savor this issue's poems-brief sparks, but always wanning moments. Enjoy. Nexc HPNC Meeting, November 5, t 995 HPNC's autumn meeting will begin at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, NovemberS, 1995. Please join us in room C-215 at San Fmncisro's Fort Mason. Ebba Story is our featured and Pat Gallagher will talk about "The Oral Presentation of Haiku." We'll also have our usual open rounds of haiku reading, plus news and announcements. Bring your autumn poems to share, and bring a friend too! �Lundhtirneshadeoak -the street paver stretching out Matthew Louviere the sticky sound of tires on noontime asphaltlemonade Larry Kimmel Sweltering twilight a waft of cool air from the graveyard George Swede the day cools offour leftovers warming up GaryHotham .----------\\ night fallscurtains flap in the shallow breeze Gail Sher 24 • � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Night falls Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_095 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/895b2aee525277bface6357c0e0407e7.pdf d3e379becca81d74b4ec414a81a1c80c PDF Text Text GENERATOR 8 volume 1 GENERATOR 8 2 volumes This is Volume 1 Editor: ISSN John Byrum 0896-7431 l 9 9 8 GENERATOR Press 3 5 0 ·s v I r g I n I a A v e Cleveland OH 44109 USA �G E N R E A T 0 8 R volume a magazine of international experimental visual & language material table of contents To n i Si m o n U t t era· n c e Janet Kuypers at least i have this too far the carpet factory, the shoes philosopher at the blue note this is my burden Federica Manfredini (4 untitled works) Cheryl Burket FRAME Gall Sher ___. Lovers Wendy Collin Sorin lithograph with poem by David M. LaGuardia Robin Caton In the Museum Black Point Series, #3 Prelude to Silence Gqlapagos East Bay Vivarium Ann Erickson untitled o how stale & unprofitable seem world the color of pale green darker Lyn Llfshin WASP WAIST THEY USED TO CALL ME I GET AROUND CRICKET MADONNA �Gail Sher Lovers �1. dight Lover!? I 1959 a. jig moon 2. jabs gaffe limn (gig) dilatory 3. dee-dum corpuscle tho' A mogul (shine-on) �Lovers II 1960 (licit) pulque churro rig. plny-off �Tree 1965 au Eve (hill tribe) sol to /ox (our task) �Table I 1959 ''musketo'' ice lock. fracas had �Odalisque 1967 namu Bod snowbird Tara Mater cow cow cow jooal pea-pod {shy sly) �Embrace I 1979 tenement jai deer-basket jai prow (chew) enchantress �Embrace dog-earred sparyard furl ki: ne'er cryer entrain �seem spar seem: grey-dog �Garden Wall 1990 whip-o-will (right by) green grow the rushes. constable green-a fiddle (the rushes) evangel-poem � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lovers Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Generator Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1998 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_094 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 12 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b8b50cc5b1a573ae56a8ca6733653c12.pdf 050152d70028d76920e2a9cc1eb1bb71 PDF Text Text BIG ALLIS Contemporary Writing Issue Number five 1992 �BIG ALLIS Issue Number Five Copyright © 1992 BIG ALLIS All rights revert to authors upon publication ISSN 1043-997 8 BIG AlliS is published twice yearly. Thanks to jean Foos, Harryette Mullen, and Shelby Warrens - and to our good fri.end Rod Smith. Funding for this issue is provided by the literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Cover design: jean Foos. Cover: Niagara Falls. Photo from the collection of julie Weiss. Address correspondence to: Melanie Neilson 139 Thompson St. #2 New York, NY 10012 jessica Grim 44678 Rt 511 Oberlin, OH 4407 4 Please enclose SASE with all submissions. Edited by Melanie Neilson and jessica Grim Distributed by: Segue, 303 East 8th St., New York, NY 10009 Small Press Distribution, 1814 San Pablo Ave. Berkeley, CA 94702 Subscriptions $10 for individuals, $15 for institutions. payable to jessica Grim. checks �CONTENTS Maggie O'Sullivan Narrative of the Shields Andrea Hollowell jean Day from Logic in the Ught of Day from The I and the You Harryette Mullen from S*PeR/\1* K*T Tina Darragh 16 from Interface 22 adv. fans four poems jackson Mac Low 26 30 34 fromLa from Twenties from The Frogs 42 49 four pieces 52 from Times Itself 57 Fiona Templeton Bill Fuller 8 18 Michael Anderson Stacy Doris 5 four poems Rachel Careau jeff Derksen 1 Contributors' Notes �GAILSHER from La Yamulke twilight Marlena Ya' Sobranje Ippolito tsampa Purine Missouri to divestment Bonpo 34 �Pater Kai las Dargo islet dri boa portent Mazurka sarong cum yang telos oui ja dos Gongora 35 �Alhambras d'arc Attila je june paschal Hum summoner Da episcopal Sisyphus: natter bolus Canaan 36 �Rose a ion Figurine gare emergent knifer Celebes Arle Adonoi pucker Chatelaine tic shiktza capstan purr daya jersey 37 �piazza Sancta bellwether Integument vedettes Veronica excision Q)Jatemary 38 �Aureate cabal tho' gendarme container Sut1ej coracle Losar claret demesne 39 �Pyrhonwaa Kye aeries litters Arahat bok Opame 40 �Monlam fenestre Apu dom palms Wence Ali beth Momo nuestro ream deafness 41 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource La [excerpt] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1992 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_093 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 11 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b0cf3693f1b6bfc6788f5aed3b355631.pdf bed5534456a3678573f7b89ec5e7007b PDF Text Text Chain I 3 volume 1 Special Topic: Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media Edited by Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr �Chain Spring 1996 Subscriptions: Chain appears annually. Send orders to Chain at 107 14th St., Buffalo, NY 14213. Make checks payable to UB Foundation. $10.00 for one issue $18.00 for two This issue was made possible by a Gregory Kolovakos Seed Grant Award from the Council ofLiterary Magazines and Presses, as well as the Satnuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and Humanities (Robert Creeley), and the James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock), both of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Distributed by: Bernhard DeBoer, Inc. 113 East Center St., Nutley, NJ 07110 Fine Print Distributorst 500 Pampa Drive, Austin,TX. 78752-3028 Small Press Distribution, 1814 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley, CA 94702 1 Indexed by the Index ofAmerican Periodical verse (Metuchen, NJ: Sacrecrow Press) and by the MLA Bibliography of Periodical Literature. Special thanks to Janet Zweig, Charles Weigl, and GeoffreyWilson. Editors: Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr. Cover Art: Charlene Benson. Marginal Art in front matter by Abigail Child. Copyright © 1996 by Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr. All rights revert back to authors upon publication. ISSN 1076-0520 �Gail Sher INNOCENT DIVERSIONS FROM GEORGE TOOKER: MARGINALIA rudraksha wildwood oink oink Divers 1952 Malachi beadgame tongue & tongues ferry 183 �Garden Party 1952 Acrobats 1950-52 floozy it slurp 'tis stone. old stone caterwauling bambina Paschel Remus pole water twig twig (seem) 'til tail stone 184 185 �In the Summer House 1958 peep-show the Doges: sea-chair priapie chaws chaw Lantern 1977 swan. oral swan (yew) mani cartwheel starry (do it) mulatto/ sea-language snickers cd. bloodstock "hit on" HieiAeffic "maybe I can" 187 186 �Brian Kim Stefans 1. Abiquiu the jug. the (seahawk) Lanterns 19 8 6 2. HOWL plump honeygrass pipergrass 3. lightfoot saluki Enkidu rose-leaves 4. Ox free (nor) rose 188 "Talk poetry" may994 189 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Innocent Diversions Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_092 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/281a9525f634d49dbc72498af46c6c09.pdf d85ba880c7b0504872dd79ff8b608be2 PDF Text Text William J. Higginson, P. 0. Box 2740, Santa Fe, NM 87504-2740 USA 1-505-438-3249 Friday, 5 Jul 1996 Dear 1995 Iga-Ueno Basho Festival Contributors: My sincere apologies for the delay in getting word to you about the fate of your 1995 Iga-Ueno submissions. The year 1995 became a difficult one for the two of us who were administering the English-language competition. First, I was distracted by the massive nHaiku Seasons Projectn, which was suddenly turned into two books by my publisher just about the time the Iga-Ueno results were published--right after the wonderful Haiku Chicago conference. In order to meet my publisher's demands on the first of the two books, The Haiku Seasons, I basically had to "drop everything" and concentrate all my efforts on that; then of course came the reworking of the second book, to be called Haiku World. In the meantime, Kris Kondo was having problems of her own on the Japan side of things. Here is the text of the letter she asked me to send you all--last spring: To those who submitted their haiku to the 1995 Iga-Ueno Basho Festival Publication. Dear Friends in Haiku: It is with great regret that I have to inform you that there are not any copies left of the 1995 Basho Festival publication. They sold out unusually early last year. It was entirely my fault that I failed to order enough copies early enough to ensure that there would be enough to make available to those who submitted their haiku in English. I apologize to all of you. And I have made sure that this will never happen in the future. Sincerely, I /signed/I K.ris Kondo By the time I was beginning to be able to deal with anything other than my job and "the books", Penny and I had both come down with a bad case of the flu. Hers went into a strep throat; mine went into pneumonia. There went March and April. Penny is doing much better, and so am I, though at this writing we are both still under doctors' care-in my case two and three times a week--slowly trying to regain full energy, respiratory function, and muscle strength. To say the least, it has been a challenging year! Well; the books are nearly done. Those of you who sent work for the Haiku Seasons Project should be hearing of the outcome very soon. And now it is time for another :round of the Iga-Ueno Basho Festival. Bashu- . I am enclosing a copy of the English-language pages from the 1995 Festival Dedicatory Anthology (Basho matsuri ken-ei shU)-which is its formal title. It was published in 1995 by the Master Basho Museum, Ueno City, Mie Prefecture, Japan. So here you have full and accurate documentation of the publication. Also enclosed is connection with anthologies this the deadline on a new entry form for the 1996 Basho Festival Anthology, in their 50th Basho Festival. As Kris has promised, we will have year, and I do hope you will join us for this round. Please note the form. Best wishes, �Gerald St Maur Alberta Cold windy morning: curled in a sycamore leaf, :; .:r. 7 Jv · -c 1 :..- · .:c 7 a smaller leaf *:fll e;, blue jay covering I eftovers · · · · · · ·y -c Jv fJ < ':n t t.:: Zinovy Vayman Massachusetts on the glazed snow pine needles X1 /r11 • r171'""'<:..- pine needles' shadows -J 7 1 .:c :,. - · 7 yellow elm leaf '2J.tr L Timothy Russell Ohio x. even with Grant Savage Ontario my eyes closed n the white lily r.:--cv\--rt Paul 0. Wi!'liams California winter- -r- - Jv • o · '7 1 the unheated church 'J 7 A full of morning light &iJnO) stooping to look 8 Sharon Lee Shafii Kentucky for daffodi I sprouts fresh deer tracks <n\t..: x. Jeff Witkin Maryland new leavesa catbird sets forth J1[0)JYF another call e;, n\ it..: t..: "? <. < home at lastnot a single leaf Rich Youmans Massachusetts bitter night windthese new bedsheets, ') -:; 7- . ::t.- on the crooked tree '""'< :..- X u- fJ their crisp white smell =ffiJ9i!,.* L t..: :,.-- '/ 0) '::J3 v\ 8 L a slight breeze '7 1 ') 7 A • J· l:: ;f / 'J :,.- in the 1ight between Ruby Spriggs Ontario Jv e"- · .A 7 ') '/ 7' X spring leaves }tiji 1m Ii. m 7 1) .A Jliji IE i!J:ji lE *ifffJR 0) -Jt 0) q:t 0) tftiHit n\ f1] f1] � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Home at last Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_091 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/a81f4d4c70294b467465b34480d49db0.pdf 0d85a3bc0a2ddbee8d040cd0fcba1492 PDF Text Text big 7 �BIG ALLIS Issue Number Seven Copyright© 1996 BIG ALUS All rights revert to authors upon publication ISSN: 1043-9978 BIG ALLIS is published once a year. Two issue subscription: $12 Institutions: $15 Please makes checks payable to Melanie Neilson. Address all orders, submissions, and correspondence to: Editors: Jessica Grim and Melanie Neilson Associate Editor: Deirdre Kovac The editors would like to express their thanks to Kevin Davies. Design: jean Foos Cover image: Zoe Leonard, Beauty Calibrator, Museum ofBeauty, Hollywood (detail on front cover), gelatin silver print, 1993. Courtesy of Paula Cooper, Inc., New York, NY. BIG ALLIS Melanie Neilson 11 Scholes Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by SASE. Djstributor: Small PTess Distribution, 1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702 BIG ALLIS is made possible by funding provided by the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts and by the Fund for Poetry. With this issue my tenure as co-editor ofBIG ALLIS will come to a close. I want to thank all those writers and friends who, over the last six years, have provided us with such wonderful support and creative efforts, and whom it has been my good fortune to get to know. Jessica Grim �CONTENTS Jean Donnelly five poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Laurie Price three poems ............................ 3 Ann Lauterbach tzvo poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Charles Bernstein five poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Joan Retallack The Earlier N'ames Are Almost Forgotten .... 18 Deirdre Kovac Mannerism ........................... 26 from George Tooker: Marginalia .......... 30 AnneTardos seven poems .. ......................... 34 Hannah Weiner Ubliminal ............................ 41 Mark DuCharme tzvo poems ............................ 44 Elizabeth Fodaski from The Anatomy ofAssociative Thought .... 49 Stephen Ratcliffe from Sculpture (Part I). ................. 53 James Sherry Clean Speak .......................... 56 Tom Beckett untitled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Caroline Bergvall Hands On, Catullus ..................... 59 Michael Gottlieb The River Road, Parts: 11-17, 19 ............ 63 Stacy Doris from A Girl's Thoughts . ................. 67 Rod Smith three poems ........................... 72 Contributors' Notes .................................... 78 �GAIL SHER from GEORGE TOOKER: MARGINALIA The Early Work Audience 1945 II swan Toltec Lumberyard (blimp) Jesse lilies • Dance 1946 pan ney Welsh burl Wotan la la la 30 �Children and Spastics 1946 consuetude see see She • The Chess Game 1947 thy blue skull sweet game gyre gyre: sheltering deer-piece • Self Portrait 1947 Pilate: dog bead dharna Bristol dray Merlin (paw-paw) 31 �Coney Island 1948 soeur Phillippa tore Ali (Pure Land) • Bird Watchers 1948 dos-a-dos not. not aleatory • Festa 1948 piper (St.) the they elmnog: Jinenjo (spriglet) a alee crepuscular 32 �Market 1949 Judaeus flocks at'a smithy (caryatid) • Cornice 1949 hip-hop. the sorrel (so) starlet pointillist Philoctetes 33 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource George Tooker: Marginalia [excerpt] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_090 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 7 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/636597b984fe3b2aa1102177d866656d.pdf b5873a205b8900d38b1ad037f400b617 PDF Text Text CREDENCES -A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics -. I L �CREDENCES: A JOURNAL OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY AND POETICS New Series, Volume 2, Number 1- Summer 19&!Ja Editor: Robert J. Bertholf Editorial Board: Melissa Banta George Butterick James Coover Michael Davidson Dean Keller Production Manager: Stephen Roberts Business Manager: Sharon Schiffbauer ./ / Editorial address: 420 Capen Hall, University of New York, Buffalo, New York 14260. CREDENCES is a publication of The Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, and is issued three times a year under the sponsorship of the Friends of the University Libraries. The publication of the magazine is, in part, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. All manuscripts should be accompanied by return postage; essays and reviews should conform to the latest MLA style sheet. CREDENCES is indexed by the Index of American ·Periodical Verse, and the PMLA Bibliography. Subscription: Ten dollars a year. Single issues: Three dollars and ftfty cents. CREDENCES is free with full membership in the Friends of the University Libraries. Subscription orders and remittances may be sent to: Ms. Sharon Schiffbauer, 434 Capen Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14260. �. i CONTENTS Cover: •\ \ Portrait of James Joyce by Lucia Joyce* New Writing Gail Sher 9 August Kleinzahler Gary Burnett Geoffrey O'Brien 12 16 20 Stephen Rodefer Judy Kravis Ted Berrigan Paul Dresman Douglas Messerli Nathaniel Mackey 27 36 40 44 47 51 Robert Duncan 63 From Another Point of View The Woman Seems To Be Resting Three Poems Six Poems The Ghost of Morning and Arsene Lupin: A Narrative Words in Works in Russian Six Poems Six Poems Three Poems Six Poems From From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Crisis of Spirit in The Word The Library Record Edith Jarolim 71 Leveritt T. Smith and Ralph Maud 77 Paul Blackburn's Journals: Some Final Entries The Charles Olson Papers at Raleigh, N. C. Essays Neil Baldwin 93 Peter Quartermain 104 Varieties of Influence: The Literary Relationship of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky HActual Word Stuff, Not Thoughts For Thoughts.,: Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams �Reviews Virginia Kotiidis William McPheron Sandra Anstey Jed Rasula 125 Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker Donald Byrd, Charles Olson's Maximus 140 Life After Dylan: A Survey Of. Contemporary Anglo-Welsh Poetry 131 146 Pound's Graffiti: Two New Books on The Cantos 153 Notes on Contributors * The cover drawing is reproduced with the permission of Miss Jane Lidderdale, and The Society of Authors. © 1982 Lucia Joyce. .\ I I I \ �9 Gaii'Sher \ FROM ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW THE WOMAN SEEMS TO BE RESTING Naive or feelings of isolation and at the same time naive. The same woman only a feeling of sun now arrested on the floor near her chair. Rocking and making various gestures in concentrated posture. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. Perhaps this resting is what brings the · fields into play. Figures appear. · The sky and the woman each unsurrounded. The sound (of no concern to anyone else) into which she feels drawn suddenly. This scene gives the impression of fields. Separated from fields by a porch. Settles in watchful gesture. Gradual ability. Settles in place for reading and life of reading as insisted internal thing. �10 Speaks about it softly. Volition as a kind of thought. Attributes of body (sun) and muscles of body. (Also light in marked relationship.) Somewhat confused sense or some boastfulness coupled with something else. Time and also clouds. Texture of clouds and so forth in a continuous line or pattern. Landscape and trees. (Haze of trees.). Shoulders arms or occasional repetitive thought. Now reads. Images herself in the dark room. Something recognized as dark. Shouts for the little girl. Presses forward to some extent. �11 Moments held clean and intact now appears as a wall. (Method and exposure to first thought.) The expression fixed. Points of softness absolutely seen by someone else. Seeing heavily or seeing effects of known sedentary person. (Inclusive of her in an early period.) Provides a certain luminosity of detail. At the same time balance. Suggestions in this vein. (Objects) existing in unheard sound. (Both color) and the boundaries of all objecrshitherto mentioned. Trees but basically the house is the same. Reads with attention on trees shifts entering into. balanced reading. Or woman reading. Paraphernalia of mind seen as objects coming to a complete rest. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From another point of view the woman seems to be resting Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_089 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 7 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/b9ad7cb4af315bad937861c840e2b7aa.pdf 9db40ca4b024d89c406f0da84e863c57 PDF Text Text ����� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource For Bart II Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_088 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/832a82ab234c9ea840e2fa668a17a02c.pdf 4e8341ef8d9a4c375d6f51105355617d PDF Text Text ����� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource For Bart Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1985 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1985 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_087 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p, Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/390179d0662a071dced96c4948717c90.pdf 74978f31869b624b27dbe0b73f773bad PDF Text Text Modern Haiku Kay Titus Mormino Founding Editor, 1969-1977 VOL. XXVI, NO. 1 WINTER-SPRING, 1995 editor and publisher book review editor art editor Robert Spiess Wally Swist John R. Reynolds Other than as to the literary or artistic qualities of a work published in Modern Haiku, the editors do not necessarily endorse the view of the author. Material submitted to Modern Haiku is to be the author's original work, previously unpublished and not have been submitted simultaneously to any other publication. Payment is made upon acceptance of the work. All materials should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Persons submitting from countries other than the United States of America should enclose two international reply coupons for airmail reply. Published triannually in February, June and October. Subscription: One year, $14.85 in the U.S.A., elsewhere $17.35 in US currency only ($24.50 airmail). Single copy, $5.25. Copyright © 1995, Robert Spiess. Mailfug_ address: Modem Haiku. P.O. Box 1752, Madison, WI 53701. ISSN 0026-7821 �10 . wrngs . jr:ld' 1o rng Its ! a moth comes to rest! • . \ evenmg settI es rn \ L. Gail Sher hazy ring around the new moon, gardenia scent Gloria H. Procsal momning moon, snowing only on the slopes of the ski resort Jeanne Harrington wet seasonthe boredom too is cool and clean Hina old Spanish mission ... only abalone shells mark the graves Rita Z. Mazur the nightly jogfeet between the sidewalk and the moonlit sky Barry C. Eitel invite the moon the illuminate our lovemaking Maria Rewakowicz Tms. from the Ukranian by Paul Pines barred owl calling! get up to look -only snow Don Harrold fast-food containers the weeds green from the warm rain chris gordon coals white with ashlistening once more to the sound of the surf Ce Rosenow � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Folding its wings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_086 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/618e679c2ca6041a1813f031972b29d8.pdf 3dfcf3ac36ed5555a30b15c2d53b8457 PDF Text Text JEANM. HALE 20711 Garden Place Court Cupertino, CA 95014 Gail Sher 2640 Telegraph Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704 Dear Gail, Congratulations! One of your haiku (fallout/a radio blares .. ) has won Honorable Mention at the Hiroshima Haiku and Tanka Competition. The poems are going to be read by Jerry Kilbride on August 3 at the d.p. Fang Galleries, 383 S. First Street, San Jose. It would be wonderful if you could be present at this reading. Congratulations, again. Sincerely, Jean Hale �Haiku Boiled with screams the river incinerates First Prize Faye Aoyagi Honorable Mentions f\.tomic bomb-the moment before · the moment after Garry Gay rocking the body of her dead infant-with no face Margaret Chula how this rose pricks ... her stories of Horoshima Kenneth Tanamura fallout-a radio blares through the empty hallway Gail Sher half century after space station rendevous above Hiroshima Katsue Ingalz � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fallout Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1997 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_085 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/36be272a4cd027709624b0f3c9679dcb.pdf 0a411a1cc49103ac8c934e0633d9fea2 PDF Text Text 49 +I NOUVEAUX POETES AMERICAINS Choisis par Emmanuel Hocquard et Claude Royet-Journoud Un bureau sur 1'Atlantique ROYAUMONT 1991 Action poetique �© Un bureau sur !'Atlantique & ISBN 2-90527142-6 ISSN 1144-7583 Royaumont, 1991 �Onvertore a Ia Oppen . . 205 Extrait de Emergency MeaThe Figures, 1987 (Trad. de Laroque) ANDREW SCHELLING ne plus... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 In Moving Letters 9, 1986 (Trad. Daniele Robert) PETER SEATON Le maitre fils . . • . . . . • . . 212 Ex:trait de The Son Master, Roof Books, 1982 (Trad. Pierre Alferi) ERIC SELLAND Transparences.IV 215 In Temblor 4, 1986 (Trad. Dominique) Ex·voto .............. 222 Extrait de Broke Aide, Burning Deck, 1985 (Trad. Si- Pierre Alferi et mas) JAMES SHERRY Payez comptant . . . . . . . . 224 Travail ordinaire ... 226 Extraits de The Word I Like White Paint Considered, Awede Press, 1986 (Trad. Emmanuel Hocquard) 0 AARON SIIURIN • • • Sphere .... 0........... 228 Agora .. 230 Extraits de A's Dream, 0 Books, 1989 (Trad. Frande Laroque) 0 JOSEPH SIMAS • •••••••• 0 ••• 0 Fragments do je (Journal, premier cahier) . . . . . . . . 232 Extrait de Kinderpart, Paradigm Press, 1989 (Trad. de Laroque) 339 �GAIL SiffiR EX-VOTO En est consciente comme d'un acte social que la autre exige. d'un Utile egale drole dans ce code. Ce qui s'en tient au feminin attire vers le dedans. Le trait d'une paille· au fond d'un verre. Sa quille retive. Se promener devient penible quand 1'air se rafratchlt. Parlant des plantes son ton est evasi£ comme s'il s'agissait d'une la colline, sa £lore relation lointaine. Plus tard ils obstinee a faire 1'angle. Le factice d' autrefois vaguement tenu a 1'ecart. La chambre est sans lumiere, sans fond pour cette rencontre. Elle ouvrit la grille, la £erma soigneusement, ainsi plusieurs minutes passerent. 222 �Cela n' etait qu'un souvenir, et la desolation un evenement passe la concernant. De meme elle examina le trottoir en notant les motifs marbres qu'y faisait le soleil. Une radio dans une autre chambre, drconscrite en un sens, laisse le meme espace vide_. Dans cette circulation une voix s'eleve et baisse. Manque d'idenrite comme l'eau qui bout manque d'idenrite. Traduit par Pierre Alferi et Joseph Simas 223 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ex-voto [excerpt from Broke Aide (1985) translated into French by Pierre Alferi & Joseph Simas] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1991 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_084 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/a5d814d868f9c8c0f9aaf84e05bfd1f3.pdf aeff7ed2fe617a4cfceedddf59ca83f7 PDF Text Text Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here · Edited by Beau Beausoleil & Deem a 1<. Shehabi Contributing Editors: Sinan Antoon Summer Brenner Julie Bruck Jordan Elgrably Susannah Okret Persis Karim Rick London Dunya Mikhail Bonnie Nish Maysoon Pachachi Rijin Sahakian Zaid Shlah Louise Steinman Sholeh Wolpe �Project website: http:/ Jaffe Center for Book Arts: Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Edited by Beau Beausoleil & Deema K. Shehabi © 2012 PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-I -60486-590-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 20II939672 Cover designed by Tania Baban, based on a broadside printed by Suzanne Vilmain for the Street Broadside Project Interior design by briandesign 10987654321 PM Press PO Box23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com �Contents Introduction Beau Beausoleil Preface Muhsin ai-Musawi vii ix I. THE RIVER TURNED BLACI< WITH IN I< The Bookseller's Story, Ending Much Too Soon Anthony Shadid A Man in Love with Knowledge Mousaal-Naseri For ai-Mutanabbi Street Naomi Shihab Nye The Last Word Deena Metzger The Grief of Birds Sam Hamod AI-Mutanabbi Street Lutjiya al-Dulaimi Occident to Orient Zaid Shlah Ways to Count the Dead Persis M. Karim AI-Mutanabbi Street Ayub Nuri Qasida, My Father Spoke at Funerals, Ways to Raise the Dead Marian Haddad Girls in Red on Page One Sarah Browning AI-Mutanabbi Street Eileen Grace O'Malley Callahan Abridged Qasida for ai-Mutanabbi Street Roger Sedarat AI-Mutanabbi Street Elline Lipkin Fragment, in Praise of the Book MeenaAlexander An Ordinary Bookseller Esther Kamkar What Prayer Robert Perry Marianne Moore in Baghdad Gloria Collins The ai-Mutanabbi Street Bombing Brian Turner In Perpetuity Gloria Frym Against the Weather (for ai-Mutanabbi Street) Owen Hill Dead Trees Yassin ((The Narcicyst'' Alsalman Elegy for ai-Mutanabbi Street Jose Luis Gutierrez The Letter Has Arrived Sargon Boulus AI-Mutanabbi Street Peter Money 3 8 12 13 IS 16 21 24 25 28 30 31 34 36 37 38 39 40 42 44 45 47 so 52 53 �_ Voices Surround & Fade: The Hooded One Peter Money A Letter to ai-Mutanabbi Sincm Antoon Escape from ai-Mutanabbi Street Muhammad al-Hamrani into the lizard's eyes Liluia Soto After Rumi Janet Stern burg To Salah ai-Hamdani, November, 2008 Sam Hamill Thirty Days after Thirty Years Salah al-Hamdani Excerpt fr.E!"' 6lue__qaU Sher .--r A half-burned page on ai-Mutanabbi Street Dunya Mikhail My Days Lack Happiness and I Want You Irada al-Jabbouri Remnants Dilara Cirit Ashes Niamh macFhionnlaoich The Color She Wears Erica Goss No Man's Land Daisy Zamora On ai-Mutanabbi Street George Evans The Friend Steve Dickison The River Turned Black with Ink Maysoon Pachachi 54 55 57 6r 67 68 70 1!__ 72 73 79 So 8! 82 83 84 ss II. KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT Matter and Spirit on ai-Mutanabbi Street Summer Brenner Untitled Jen Hofer Untitled Rijin Sahakian Rain Song Badr Shakir al-Sayyab The Poet Jane Hirshfield "Close to God" Jack Marshall A Book in the Hand Susan Moon Revolutionary Letter #77 Awkward Song on the Eve of War Diane di Prima AI-Mutanabbi Street Evelyn So Ethics of Care: The Retreat of al-Mutanabbi Nahrain al-Mousawi A Secret Question Ko Un The Road to ai-Mutanabbi Street Joe Lamb Untitled Katrina Rodabaugh For I Am a Stranger Badr Shakir al-Sayyab Untitled Mohammed Hayawi Excerpt from Five Hymns to Pain Nazikal-Malaika AI-Mutanabbi Street Ray a Asee Attention Saadi Youssef Destinies Gazar Hantoosh A Book of Remedies MarkAbley On the Booksellers' Street of Baghdad Majid N aji.cy Crossroads Lewis Buzbee 91 93 96 98 102 103 104 107 no II4 II? n8 120 121 122 123 125 127 128 129 132 134 �Excerpt from Blue Gail Sher · RARE BEAUTY IS BEGUN, he thinks, seeing into the room the }imitation of my seeing where the dead person lingers. It is myself I muse, looking at the grass, seeing its kindness suddenly. Food is offered, though a throat could disappear. Every given moment that you perceive is the same thing, you say and I'm thinking, It's the bardo. It just arises and you see. The flesh of the bird was broken that day. Which wouldn't hold its feathers, as the flesh was keen. (Old ones said provoked.) I see you on the edge, a fissure or cleft where a breach has been made and I think, Am I the breach? The gestation of wrongness is not carried by wings nor the deep drop of cliff overhanging the swollen stream. Rubbing the bird, stroking its hair so that it is soothed. The old ones receive until they realize I'm dead now. The hair is not an image of sky, though it has sky qualities and has come from the sky. I am halfghost. I eat all of their hair, always. Someone belongs here, she thinks, having the memory ofher mother's hands. A bouquet ofbirds contains her mother's feeling for color. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Excerpt from Blue Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available PM Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2012 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_083 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 5 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/12d7138e2235b8b4fdba183b23d53c46.pdf f6046b70bce828259072cb253aca94c1 PDF Text Text summer t995 -NUmber 25 copyright © t995 Haiku Poets of Northem calfomla ISSN t050·4664 A Note from the Editors Wood notes begins its seventh year of publication with this issue. As something new to try, we're interspersing pages of tanka among our haiku and senryu. Please let us know if you like this approach, or if you prefer tanka in their own section. This time we have 98 haiku and senryu, and a :rerotd 23 tanka. Helen K. Davie has again supplied our cover and interior art. Shells are a now upon us. Helen hassethersand dollars on the cover against a backdrop of an origami paper pattern, and has also provided us with other shell illustrations. Many thanks to Helen, and also a big welcome to her, following the resignation of John Schipper, as the new HPNC treasurer. In addition to an article on the 110rdinary" haiku poet (page 4), we have lots of news and announcements (page 35), a few book listings (page 42), a favorite haiku desaibed by Tom Clausen (page 8), ''The Unlocked Gate," a rengay read by John Thompson and Gany Gay at thespringHPNCmeetinginSan Francisco (page 34), and Pat Gallagher's informative minutes of that meeting (page 44). Meanwhile, we have some tremendous haiku events coming up this summer. Please note especially the announcement for the national Haiku Society of America meeting over the weekend of June 24th, and a special HSA/HPNC meetingonJuly11thfeaturingthenewpoetlaureateoftheUnitedStates,Robert Hass, in conversation about haiku and his most recent book, The Essential Haiku. AnddoconsiderattendingHaikuNorthAmerica,July13through16,inToronto, Ontario. These events are described on pages 35, 36, and 37. And we look forward, of course, to seeing you at our next HPNC meeting on August 6th. But that's not all! Don't forget the sixth reading in our 1\vo Autumns series, coming up on August 27th. All good wishes, and we hope your summer isn't so busy that you aren't bountifully blessed with many new haiku moments. Next HPNC Meeting, AUgust 6, 1995 HPNC's summer meeting will commence at 1:00p.m., Sunday, August 6, 1995. MeetinroomC-205inSanFrancisco'sFortMason.Comeearlytostrollalongthe Marina Green or browse in the shops and galleries. Our featured reader will be vincent tripi. And on this 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Lequita Vance will read from her new book, White Flash/Black Rain: Women of Japan Relive the Bomb. Bring summer poems to share too. Hope to see you there! �humming quietly through my favorite grove ... the sharp snap of a twig Elizabeth St Jacques in his company seeing his grey hair I long for his company GailSher Favorite Haiku * by Tom Clausen yesterday's paper in the next seatthe train picks up speed The feeling and sense of this wonderful haiku have stuck with me for years. Beinginthismomentistobetouchedbyallthatisconstantlybeingleftbehind. The newspaper is a token of what was, not what is, and as such presents a potent reminder in concert with the train's picking up speed that the moment is fleeting and quickly lost. You have a sense of being alone and looking to the empty next seat and there's a random wonder about the person who left the paper and maybe a thought about whether yesterday's news ·is worthy of retrieving. The paper and the train's motion together fill you with a depth of recognition that captures perfectly the heart of loneliness, of leaving and of transience, creating at once the poignancy of an instant. * From As Far as the Light Goes, La Crosse, Wisconsin: Juniper Press, 1990. 8 • �morning shade ... a woman in her garden redirecting vines Peggy Willis Lyles G L the wind blows strongerold women rustle through piles of free clothes GaiJSher yardwork: some of the old tire water on my shoes Tom Clausen quiet hum of the fanthe Sunday sports section lifts and falls Donna Gallagher snoozing straw hat covers my face still, glints of sun Robert Epstein • 13 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Even in his company The wind blows stronger Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_082 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/f9e1814fcd63b18aed9d668142015e3c.pdf a27c66b081df4c0dbe80808857d1e4fc PDF Text Text ant ·ant ::an·t :.ant·:.:· ant the magazine that simulates· itself . . number two·. summer ·1995 nq copyright. . .. appearing SIJ9ra<ijcally twice a year... edited and published by chris gordon with 'the inyaluable of. greg cucina, carol gordon, geoff manson, and andrew young. images: ·shoulder to point - guy r. beining, kelp and orchard - greg cucina, positiqnal asphyxiation and this is nl!t a - a. daigu, in-fidelity - paul dean, breached enslJ and moon - chris gordqn, forklift - geoff soule, bush,· swfngs,.and square -andrew young, coiJer gordon·& ari.drew · versions of hekigodfi1 shlki, · soseki adapted from rrlakoto ueda' s ,· · modern japanese haiku by chris gordon. . · . blessiitgs to ·barks, ozaki h6sai, and ·. courtesy-of ari davidow; ; ·ekphrases from ekphiasis by gregory-Vincent st. '(semiquasi ·pobox 55892 fondre"p. station jackson . . ..a. daigu's uncollected sayin_gs are as the of sb'non·:a.nd big bright. green pleasure machine.· .· · in honduras.worl<;.90 hours a week hi prison-like ms 14 . ' out . making clothes. this magazine. cl<?SE!:·to your face. ·send all submissions; ana· request.s wtt1;t sase to: cherty blossom fist 16177 oakland ca 94610 usa �I'd dance like a fool if I could remember the next step -Steve Sanfield Evening down a road where a car has gone -Sam Savage cross-legged I sit with my back toward these annoying birds summer's eve the pollution of advertising this haiku detonates -A. Daigu peek prodding dubs developed complete brawn waiting for flesh -Dan Nielsen � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cross-legged I sit Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1995 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_081 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/11442a51cd9542a06ad82a2e0c808e03.pdf d739cbd65472236da6c484f8895d1dc2 PDF Text Text HILARY CLARK Three Ghazals .................................... 29 JEAN DAY ROBERT CHRISTIAN nvo Poems ........................................... 11 GERALD BURNS The 1\1ouse Book ................................... 13 GERRY GILBERT Vol'ume ................................................... 17 River Sticks ........................................... 31 DAN FARRELL It was like being hundreds of miles from a tachometer ................................. 36 ERIN MOURE The Curio'US .................................. l\UCHAEL DAVIDSON 1\\·o Poems .......................................... 22 MICHEL GAY PETER CL'LLEY LARY TIMEWELL Translating Michel Gay: Crocodile Sweat .................................... 26 Y incl'US ....................................... .. Includin,g ...................................... . WRITING MAGAZINE JULY1987 �WRITING IS EDITORIAL BOARD Kathy Alexander,JeffDerksen, Nancy Shaw, Calvin Wharton, Gary Whitehead. EDITOR Colin Browne WRITING is published by the Kootenay School of Writing, a non-profit society offering a wide range of courses, lectures and workshops devoted to current theory and practice in all aspects of writing, publishing and performance. Unsolicited MSS to WRITING are welcome and must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Contributions from outside Canada must include Canadian stamps, cash, or International Reply Coupons to ensure return. Current and back issues ofWRITING: $3. $12/4 issues, institutions $16/4. Copyright © 1987 WRITING for the authors. Typeset by Claudia Casper and West Graphika. Printed by First Folio Printing Co. Ltd. ISSN 0706-1889. WRITING is a member of the Canadian Periodical Publishers' Association. Second Class Mail Registration pending. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing financial support of The Canada Council and the Government ofBritish Columbia. Address all correspondence to: WRITING BOX 696og, STATION VANCOUVER, B.C. VSK 4W7 K GAIL SHER lives in Berkeley. Her publications include Rouge to beak having me, and Broke Aide. "Cops" will appear in a forthcoming collection from Little Dinosaur. ROBERT CHRISTIAN lives in Boston, Lincolnshire. His latest collection is In a Blue Car (Pig Press). GERALD BURNS' collection of prose works, Aesthetics is available from Wowapi, 5746 Oram, Dallas, Texas 75206, USA. He lives in Thompson, Connecticut. GERRY GILBERT lives in Vancouver where he edits B.C. 1W.onthl_v (P.O. Box 48884, Vancouver, B.C. V7X lAS). His latest book, 1\1.oby jane (Coach House) is now available, as is his new performance cassette with the Paul Plimley Quartet. MICHAEL DAVIDSON's newest book is The Landing of Roch.eambeau (Burning Deck). Recent essays on poetics have appeared in PoeticsJournal. He lives in San Diego. PETER CULLEY is from Nanaimo, B.C. His new chapbook Fruit Dots is available from Tsunami Press (see back cover). His writing on art has appeared in Vanguard. HILARY CLARK lives in Vancouver and works at U.B.C. This is her first appearance in \1\?iting. JEAN DAY lives in Oakland, her books include Linear C (Tuumba), and Flat Birds (Gaz), and new work is in Abacus (181 Edgemont Ave., Elmwood, C.T., 06110). "River Sticks" is from a longer manuscript entitled No Springs Trail. DAN FARRELL is from Squamish, B.C. New work will appear in The Raddle 1W.oon (9060 Ardmore Drive, Sidney, B.C., V8L 3R9). ERIN MOURE's most recent book is Domestic Fuel (Anansi). She lives in Montreal. MICHEL GAY, a past editor of la nouvelle barre dujour, lives in SaintBruno, Quebec. Y inclus is from his nbj book M.entalite, Detail. Recent work appeared as a collaboration with Serge Tousignant in the nbj anthology Installations! Fictions. LARY TIMEWELL's most recent work is Jump/Cut, from Tsunami Press. His photography and writing has also appeared in The Capilano Review. He lives in Vancouver. �WRITING 18 Gail Sher Cops Only to play wet. Less so honey. 3 �4 WRITING SHER Unlike my flowers they are mine. They stick to me & are wholly like me. Equivocal in this sense. A saucer. A saucer. 18 �WRITING SHER 18 The potty the maker even the harrowing blossoms. My tilt blacker this time. Stillball. The attacker comes parroting. 5 �6 SHER Who are two. My beauty on two. Many forks have broken. They have kissed. �SHER The wasp will play happily. Indeed her beauty is gone. The thread is awkward resting on my ankle. 7 �8 SHER Its mandible done. Mixed with this state of mind. In two through our wave. My dharma gripping. Being instead the same. �SHE:R We pass candles. Find my mass surlily surlily. Lay by me a hundred jellos. A sound is watched alone. In essence alone. 9 �10 SHER Blade of fork thus denied its own violet teams. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cops [excerpt] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_080 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 10 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/345c3c8d895b73d2c9a6b7e58d1fddd6.pdf c5049ace20e9121090b19fa0f82a3aa8 PDF Text Text RCHIVE NEWSLETTER BOB PERELMAN LAuRA CI-lESTER GAILSHER ITINGSERIE LL+1987 BOB PERELMAN OCTOBER 8, THURSDAY TCHB142 • JACKSON MACLOW NOVEMBER 11, WEDNESDAY CENTER FOR MUSIC EXPERIMENT • LAURA CHESTER NOVEMBER 18, WEDNESDAY REVELLE FORMAL. LOUNGE - .• GAIL.SHER EMBER24,J!,lE& AY REVELLE LLOUNGE AlLreadings are at 4:30p.m. and are open to the public For more information, call534 . .2533 Sponsqred by the UCSD Library, University Events & Student Activities, Center for Music Experiment and the Department of Literature �CONTENTS UCSD NEW WRITING SERIES ................................ l A NEW WRITING SAMPLER Bob Perelman ..................................................... 3 Jackson Mac Low .......................................... 8 Laura Chester ............. • ........ ,. ........................ 10 Gail Sher ..............................·...................... 12 REVIEWS Alexander Smith on Robert Bertholf ........ 15 Rae Armantrout on Fanny Howe .................. 18 steve Evans on Don Byrd ........................... 22 Thomas Larson on Grace Paley ................ 28 SELECTED NEW TITLES. IN ANP ....................... ., • 32 THE ARCHIVE NEWSLETTER is published New Poetry. by The Archive for Edilor: John Reviews, interviews; and announcements ot poetry events in the San Diego area are welcome. Subrnisslon$ should be sentto EDiTOR, An.:;hrve for New P?elry, Central University Ubrary, C-075-S, University of Catifom!a, San Otego, La Jolla, CA 92093. �LAURA CHESTER has published a number of books, among them Tiny Talk (Roundhouse, 1972), Primagravida (Christopher's Books, 1975), Chunk Off & Float (Cold Mountain, 1978) ,Watermark (The Figures, 1978), MY Pleasure (The Figures, 1980) and Lupus Novice (Station Hill, 1986). Chester has been editor of Best Friends and Stooge magazines, of The Figures press, and of the f rst anthology of twentieth - century American women poets, Rising Tides (Simon & Schuste;r, 1974). GAIL SHER is the author of point of view the woman seems to be resting (Trike Press, 1981) , (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem (Square Zero Editions, 1982) , Rouge to beak having me (Moving Letters Press, 1983), and most recently, Broke Aide (Burning Deck, 19 8 6) . of Broke Aide, Beverly Dahlen has said that "time and location are as elusive as the site of an a subject exists infinitely." 2 �GAIL SHER COPS Only to play wet. Less so honey. Unlike my flowers they are mine. They stick to me & are wholly like me .. Equivocal in this sense. A saucer. A saucer. The potty the maker even the harrowing blossoms. 12 �My tilt blacker this time. Stillball. The attacker comes parroting. Who are two. My beauty on two. Many forks have broken. They have kissed. The wasp will play happily. Indeed her beauty is gone. The thread is awkward resting on my ankle. 13 �Its mandible done. Mixed with this state of mind. In two through our wave. My dharma gripping. Being instead the same. We pass candles. Find my mass surlily surlily. Lay by me a hundred jellos. A sound is watched alone. In essence alone. Blade of fork thus denied its own violet teams. 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cops [excerpt read by Gail Sher at UCSD November 24, 1987] Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Archive of New Poetry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_079 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/0380c06a0394c9c1825d3897d8b8f463.pdf c7f6d092e80f2f1f24731d0e083083b5 PDF Text Text •·. �CONTENTS Tanka through the Lens of Haiku .............................. David Burleigh ......... 1 Deep Valley by Arai Akira .................................... Amy V. Heinrich ......... 2 English Tanka .................................... N. H. Lawrence & N. V. Sato ......... 3 Marine ..................................................................... James Kirkup ......... 4 Balancing ............................................................ Werner Reichhold ......... 4 Youth/Age: a tanka string .................................... Sanford Goldstein ......... 5 Queen Dressed In Purple ............................................. Esaku Kondo......... 5 Autumn Rain ............................................................ Sandra Martin......... 6 Thin Smoke Rising ...................................................... Anna Holley ......... 6 Gaijin Diary ........................................................................... Aziz......... 7 Tsuya 1998 for Carter Wilson .................................... Michael Boiano ......... 7 Always Heading Home: New Mexico Sunsets ............... Scott Nicolay ......... 8 A Miscellany of Five ...................................................... E. S. Lamp ......... 8 This Old Stone Wall ...................................................... Dan Pugh ......... 9 Summer .................................................................. A. T. Matsmoto ......... 9 Vigil ............................................................... Sue-Stapleton Tkach ......... 10 Can't Touch You ....................................... Cail Sher & David Rice ......... lO Benefits ................................................................. .-1-oyoko A1sawa ........ . The Scent of Lavenders .......................................... ·... Kazuko Akiba ......... l l Never Make You an Orphan .................................... E. H. C. Ishigaki ......... l2 Winter ..................................................................... Ikuyo Okamoto......... 12 Snowfalling at Port Hamburg .................................... Koichi Takeda ......... 13 ex nihilo ............................................................ Hiroshi Shionozaki ......... 13 Echoes, the Donkey Musicians ................................. Reiko Nakagawa ......... 13 Leaving Me In the Desert .......................................... Michi Masaki ......... l4 Aroma of Coffee ......................................................... Ruri Hazama ......... 14 English, German and Russian Tanka ..................... Hiromasa Hayashi ......... 15 Tears, Oh! Tears, Tears ............................................. Eisuke Shiiki ......... 16 Long long long Absence ................................................ Aya Yuhki ......... 16 By the Spring Sea in Kishu .................................... Fumiko Tanihara ......... 17 Massive Blue ......................................................... Sumiko Koganei ......... 17 Good Night, Guppy ................................................ Shikako Nomura ......... 18 Beautiful Lies ......................................................... Koichi Watanabe ......... 18 Five Tanka by Ishikawa Takuboku ............ S. Hamlow & S. Nichylay ......... l9 Five Tanka by Okai Takashi .......................................... Mari Konno ......... 19 Tanka by Saito Fumi ............................................. Fusako Kitamura ......... 20 Five Tanka by Tokujiro Oyama ........................... Hiroshi Furugohri ......... 20 Rainfall by Tanaka Akiko .......................................... Masashi Kako ......... 21 Five Tanka by Ikuyo Sakamori .............................. Takao Kobayashi. ........ 21 Les tankas choisis de Tamiko Ohnishi ..................... Masako Ishikawa ......... 22 Five Tanaka by Kazumi Sekine .................................... Olive Maillot.. ....... 22 Baba Akiko's tanka translated into Chinese ............... Tsai Cheng Fu ......... 23 Five Tanka on Love ................................................... Kozue Uzawa ......... 23 The Cry of Wild Goose by Kondo Y oshimi ............... Takes hi Morita ......... 24 Five Tanka by Takashi Nagatsuka ............... A. Farr & Y. Kawamura ......... 24 Shino Hiroshi's tanka trans. into Bengali ........................ Atako Noma ......... 25 Classic Tanka ...................................................... Tanzan Matsumiya ......... 25 Book Review: Airports by C. lshigaki .................. Sanford Goldstein ......... 26 Comments on the Joint Translations in No. 13 (1) Jane Reichhold ........................................................................... 27 (2) Amy V. Heinrich ........................................................................ 28 50. Is it necessary that tanka should be translated ?............ H. Kawamura ......... 29 51. Joint Translations of two tanka by Shuji Miya .......................................... 30 51. Readers' Column & Internet Homepage & Notice ....................................... 32 52. Agreement in Japanese and Editors' Forum 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. !THE JAPAN TANKA POETS' CLUB & THE TANKA JOURNAL No.13/ �Vigil can't touch you Gail Sher and David Rice Sue-Stapleton Tkach (for Susan Alexis Tkach-Berg in loving memory of her husband Peter Robert Berg) waddling on your mossy rock toward raging sea and sheer cliff walleven their shadows can't touch you your camera can catch the sun's birth can coax one last coat of light from the demanding dusk In the Ink Dark Moon when the prince died, mourners wrote their grief in verse ; now, in another century those verses speak again. a tin horn sounds the hoers' early tea the cat sleeps even the petals of the side saddle flower droop field trip a Mariposa lily thrills the class at a stream-side lunch stop everyone looldng for newts VVho could have guessed with what suddenness he left ... not of his choosing. she speaks aloud to him ... and the walls echo her words. one continuous sorrel wave its hush this summer nightas the plougher recedes across the hill the loon's wild call VVhile she keeps a vigil skies turn from light to dark an owl trumpets through the darkness in the ensuing silence each meadow mole huddles deeper in its mound November fading the long rains begin obscuring the Ink Dark Moon. -10- � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource can't touch you Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Rice, David Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Nihon Kajin Club Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1999 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_078 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 3 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/594bc3338cac4a83197bcda20d7b93d4.pdf e1359e91be0775ca2bca442f80a8e47c PDF Text Text black bough 7 Park Avenue Flemington, NJ 08822 Single issues are $5.00 a piece ($6.00 outside the U.S. and Canada). A three-issue subscription is $13.50 ($16.50 outside the U.S. and Canada). Please remit International Postal Money Orders or check payable in U.S. currency. Please send no more than 20 haiku per submission. Several haiku per page are preferred. SASE required. Payment for acceptance is $1.00 for each verse, up to $4.00 for a sequence or long poem. There are no contributor's copies. All prior copyrights are retained by contributors. For the protection of the authors, all the writing in this magazine is copyright (c) 1996 by Charles Easter. Rights revert to authors upon publication. All photographs are by Charles Easter and are copyright (c) 1996 by hitp. Some of the tanka on pages 14 and 15 were previously published in Lynx. (black bough does not typically accept previously published material unless it is used in a significantly new fashion.) Editor: Charles Easter ISSN 1079-6568 black bough black bough publishes haiku and related poetry �rain wakes us before the alarm clock John Sheirer ·rJiasho I your rainproof paper hat made with your own hands the one imitating Saigyo 's-1 too have felt desperately alone Gail Sher l---. drying slowly on the clothesline: raindrops Daniel Mills after the heavy rain she wants a fence around the pond Tom Clausen From my hotel windowwalnut leaves dripping rain a Fraulein walking ... Larry Kimmel sweeping the walk one blue shoe, dew covered in the flower bed Michael Ketchek 5 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Basho Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_077 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/bd450deaa5e8e39e08bd0ce00300aadc.pdf 8878ef5c5272e1206d6f9ad3f3ba33ac PDF Text Text a ant/ant/ant/ant/ant of autophthonous poetry and other conundrums number three summer 1996 four dollars no copyright appearing as frequently as possible. edited a1_1d published by chris gordon with the invaluc,1ble assistance of erin casey, greg cucina, carol gordon, craig klapman, ge9ff manson, and andrew 'young. · · images: only l.of 1 and prosiness - guy r. beining, your x 2 -john m. bennett/aug '95, rop,e and dust- greg cucin_a, pt.llimpsest and "don't blame it on the monkey!" - a. daigu, ganesh 23 and 64 ki id baal - di michele, watch it, mr. sun .. cliff dweller, two of a tree .. chris gordon, mo_squi. to .intently - dorothy howard/ zeni b, m"useum pond and bicyCle - andrew young, cover- chris gordon & an unknown me!llber of u.c.l.a. art department circa 1930. · many of these images were translated by andrew young. the versions of dakotsu, kijo, ryilnosuke, seisens_ui, and soja adapted frqm makoto U;edals modern japanese haiku. typographic'l-1 equipment courtesy -of ari davidow. winter's afternoon indoors appeared in raw nervz (67 court street, aylmer, . canada j9h 4m1). , · · next issue: the dalai lama's rifle - gun dharma, buddhist militias, and coming social apocalypse. every ten hours a 100 watt light bulb creates three pounds of carbon dioxide; the ten warmest years on record have all been within the past · ' fifteen years. · storl_<s are tall. send all submissions, iriquiries, and requests with sase to: cherry blossom fist box 16177 oakland ca 94610 usa �Self Healing Cutting Mat retains pattern that covers an excellent gray -Spencer Selby LIGHTENING STORM I STAND UNDER AN ASH TREE -Heather Titlestad A man asks directions hand over his mouth. -Alexis K. Rotella cutting my orange into slivers watching the new moon -Ernest J. Berry � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Autumn leaves Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1996 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_076 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/6b2baf6e12c164a9c83f75e478798d8e.pdf 987246e833e2cd5d76596ee6cb55606e PDF Text Text Ashiya, October 1998 participant in the Haiku Festa: . I.t is with pleasure that we inform you that the Ashiya International Jl.ailru Festa. '98 came -to a happy end having accomplished all ofits aims, and we would like to extend on this occasion our most heartful thanks for your kind support throughout. We a1·e enclosing a collection ofselected pieces as a of the event. We would also like to apologize for the tardiness in sending you this letter. m·th our sincere wishes of happiness and success in all of your endeavors in the years a'head, I re1nai.ri, lOurs very truly; Ashiya International Haiku Festa '98 · Organizing C?ommittee General Secretary 7-6 Seido-cho, Ashiya, Hyogo 659-8501 Japan Asl1iya Board ofEducatio11 Secretariat Li.telong Education Section Fax :{0797)38-2089 �Denmark . Niels Peter Svendsen · ·: ·. England ·Keith James Coleman i;:t.ra,;a:..rr <f'\1fi JIIOJ!ft';:*O)ct -5 £{] tJ }:.:IJ{rL "? -cu-t:. "'9 i; fit--:> llfliJO)tpc the long long flight·· AUTUMN: across· marsh after marsh·· PETALS COVER· , · THE SPARROW'SBODY a flight of geese .. '. . . .m=a-.::. ;-t usA Robert Henry Poulin :ij:\;g< . USA fk tBi ffivto \0) in this early light .. shimmer ·of pale pink cosmos and a haze of gnats USA· 7iB,ij Gai I Sher 0 AS THE COFFIN LOWERS SEVERAL WATCHES SOUND THE HOU·R Elizabeth Searle Lamb ·Canada·· .-s n Q t \ :J .A .:f: .A George Swede c \< 1:: 0 C: · · · tttt 36 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Autumn Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1998 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_075 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 2 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/1fca7b850faa4c3f45f435cf65c824b1.pdf bd06c0410ab975c1d5d29eba6dd4f761 PDF Text Text Tanka Splendor 1997 Sponsored by AHA Books l"\ ;s more ttian a GiFT... it's acompliment. • / nt 1ottg· (}..tu..fiO: /;1. ;J Judge George Swede Series Editor Jane Reich hold �Ta11ka Splendor 1997 Copyright© AHA Books 1997. All rights reserved. All rights retum to authors. Cover design: A collage by Jane Rcichhold. Copyright© Jane Reichhold 1995. ISBN: 0-944676-64-2 AHA Books POB 767 Gualala. CA 95445 USA �Tanka Splendor 199 7 AWARD POETS Pamela A. Babusci Marianne Bluger Janice M. Bostok Margaret Chula Ann Cooper Cherie Hunter Day Jeanne Emrich Caroline Gourlay Larry Kimmel Anthony Knight ai li David Rice I Gail She•· David Rice I Ebba Story Carol Purington Ruby Spriggs David Steele John Stevenson Elizabeth StJacques Teresa Volz Jeff Witkin �David Rice Berkeley, California Gail Sher San Francisco, California Against the longed-for clouds dusk a lingering scent of spring behind the suddenly chill aira white sun hovers- then drops in the shallow sky honeysuckle blossoms infuse the whole room this pot of white tea would warm our if you were here yellow grass bends in the ocean breeze a fog hom blows a blackbird fades in the swill of a white cap just one spout all day whale watchers disappointedon the way home an albino starling on a telephone wire sparkling winter morning icy waves caress my feet crouched on a pole a crow cawsceaselessly a turkey vulture circles with the summer wind . its white and black underwings strikingly clear against the longed-for gray clouds � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Against the longed-for clouds Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Rice, David Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available AHA Books Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-03 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 1997 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_074 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng SherMagazine https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/9bbf32f251df7abe368656fc19821867.pdf 851fd9de2a0fb055c1715019e1c8aa37 PDF Text Text Elm is the third book of poetry in the series Gail Sher began with Sunny Day, Spring (2014) and Ezekiel (2015). It is the thirty-seventh book of poetry she has written since 1982. Gail Sher is a poet, teacher, and psychotherapist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information about her work, and to read her poetry online, go to gailsher.com or library.buffalo.edu/collections/gail-sher. Elm Gail Sher �Elm �Also by Gail Sher PROSE Reading Gail Sher Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice Writing the Fire: Yoga and the Art of Making Your Words Come Alive From a Baker’s Kitchen POETRY Early Work Pale Sky Five Haiku Narratives Ezekiel Sunny Day, Spring Mingling the Threefold Sky The Twelve Nidānas Figures in Blue The Bardo Books White Bird Mother’s Warm Breath The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries though actually it is the same earth East Wind Melts the Ice The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call old dri’s lament Calliope Who, a Licchavi Watching Slow Flowers DOHA Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse redwind daylong daylong Once There Was Grass RAGA Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms Moon of The Swaying Buds Marginalia la KUKLOS Cops Broke Aide Rouge to Beak Having Me (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Elm Gail Sher Night Crane Press 2016 �Copyright 2016, Gail Sher gailsher.com All rights reserved. Night Crane Press 15oo Park Avenue, Suite 435 Emeryville, California 94608 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner and publisher ISBN: 978-0-9978313-0-6 �for Brendan ��My body sleeps in the rainy darkness of space. It is a quiet rain, falling on the trees, trickling through the leaves. Drip . . drip drip . . drip drip . . drip drip . . drip. The sound of drops and wind against the pane is all. 1 �A nighthawk’s cry startled her. As if in response Machie moaned. Her hair, loose now, lay over one cheek and the palm of her hand over that. It was her right hand. The long middle finger reached her jaw. Her other hand fell toward the corner of the bed. It was a child’s hand. 2 �“Take me to bed.” Machie had said it first. The warmth of her, undeveloped, a little skittish, had been unlike the smooth, clean-burning warmth of the woman she was now. Her dark places were warm. Sometimes even now . . . She could be sixteen any minute. 3 �“Can I know you? Will you live?” Once she’d seen a picture of very young Machie in roller skates laughing, arm slung around a boy. But her eyes had looked old. Her laughter somehow stilted. Living old, a child lives out her oldness so that when she comes of age she has the knowledge to be young originally. 4 �A scar on Machie’s shoulder took the shape of violets. Despite the scar the shoulder was young and fresh. Might it be that the scar, the result of her experience, richened the flavor of Machie’s innocence? The scent of a baby came to her. It had the close warm softness of sleep. A faint wild crying from the violets ebbed and rose, ebbed and rose. 5 �The piquant odor of blood, Machie’s menstrual blood, rose from the depths of her slumber. The scent was full with the presence of Machie’s womanliness. “It’s like blood that wants a baby,” Naoko’d once observed, meaning only that it was a rich, good blood. “Don’t say that,” Machie’d smarted. 6 �Along with the smell, pungent yet sweet, was the memory of the smell mixed as it was with their past. “How did you lose your virginity,” Machie’d teased, egging Naoko on with question after question. She looked so new. The undone braid fanned over her mouth. It wore an echo that carried time like the condensed feelings of sadness that made the air crack. 7 �“How many women have you kissed?” Machie had asked and she had asked but they were just sounds to cover the amazement of their passion. Outside there’d been thrushes singing themselves crazy. “Let’s find a less-musical bird,” Machie had joked, rolling out of bed, pulling on her jeans. “Okay, let’s.” But the neighborhood was transfixed. “So how many women have you kissed?” insisted Machie in dazed sobriety. 8 �Lying face up with her legs spread wide, bedding pushed down, Machie slept on. Her head had slid to the far left edge. Lips pursed, the usually broad mouth seemed almost to form a heart, puckered at the center and totally unlike her. Her bones were resting. Even her teeth seemed to be resting. 9 �Naoko remembered a night—she and Machie had newly met. Stars were falling and after making love they’d dozed. She had, she felt, discovered cleanness, cleanness in a woman for the first time. As she’d lain there in the dark, listening to the stars— “love itself is cleanness and cleanness love”—it had come to her whole. Large white specks floated up yet larger and made a background of flowers around Machie. 10 �The memory, like an itch, crept slowly to the fore. Because of the girl’s cleanness, but what sort of cleanness would it be? She pictured her awkward gait, her long legs when she walked almost getting in her way. That sunny day with her purse, zigzagging across the sand. 11 �Two yellow butterflies had been playing at her feet. One skipped to a flower and, resting on a petal, broadly fanned its wings. It remained very still. But when she’d reached out a finger, it skittered up and flew toward an elm nervously. Shortly it came back. Like a yellow leaf it fluttered through the air and landed on some grass a short distance away. “It’s looking for a flower,” she’d thought, scooping it up gently. She could feel its wings, pale as paper, beating against her hand. 12 �“Oh.” It was an “oh” from the past. Naoko saw the sand slipping back under the water. The sand was a world. The water was a world. Utterly estranged their lives coalesced. “The dark night of the sea,” she thought, emphasizing “sea,” seeing how it sat as “soul’s” replacement. 13 �Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It was Machie’s heart. The second thump—thump-Thump—was heavier than the first. Like a limp. She hadn’t noticed this previously. Her breath came warmly. Thump-Thump, thump-Thump, thump-Thump—the sound of her heart’s warmth settled deep in her ear. 14 �As if the heart had a life and was speaking out. The speaking out almost had the quality of breaking out. “Her heart’s daughter wants to be free”—though it made no sense, the phrase flit through her mind. “Who is her heart? Where is her heart?” She was staring at Machie’s heart as if her eyes, if they dug far enough, would hear its warmth, endlessly. 15 �“It’s a dark sound,” she thought, recalling her mother’s breath the winter night she died. Her skin had turned dark. When her own cold hand had touched her mother’s even colder one, the darkness sank all the way to her toes. “Kiko. Kiko,” her mother had gasped and in the stale air coming from her mouth Naoko had seen darkness. She did not remember it now. What she remembered was the color of purple. 16 �She pressed Machie’s hand. At the stroke of death she had been pressing her mother’s in this way. It hadn’t felt like a hand. It had been resting on her throw and she took it up gently, but her mother’s hand was somewhere else. Still she pressed the hand. 17 �“Her darkness had a scent!” The realization shot out. The rough breath had hit her face and its dark scent smelled like a demand. She’d turned her head slightly but the breath followed, insistent, exacting, as if her voice were in her breath now. It was purple and black and she could smell it in her sleep. 18 �But could she? Naoko had tried to see if the smell was there after she awakened. Like her mother’s, her mouth would be slightly open. Her breath had been thick and full of desire. Sometimes when Naoko spoke she’d catch even now the scent of her desire. 19 �“Was it even in her hands?” Afterwards, with a certain sluggish urge, using two fingers of her hand, she had closed her mother’s mouth. She had almost said “shut”—“shut her mother’s mouth.” “Closed” in the event would be more correct, but now that she’d made the slip—“shutting her mother’s mouth” and “closing her mother’s mouth” in the moment of her death would not be the same. Since her mother in dying would, in effect, be shutting her own mouth—“It’s a wonder I felt so determined,” she thought. But the truth was that neither of them had shut her mouth. 20 �And her hands? She could, she thought, smell desire in her hands. It was not exactly a color. It was a will to speak, which did have a color but it was its own color, unconnected with her mother. Naoko would write and the sense would disappear. Often while thinking she’d put a fist against her mouth, sniffing her fist, which was always sweet-smelling. 21 �“If at death she’d been so impelled to speak, would not that imply that in life . . . ” “Can someone die of frustration of not speaking?” “Softer, Ko. Speak more softly,” her father had proded, tamping the air with his hand. “Lower your voice, Ko.” He’d said it so often that it had become an irritant. But she had lowered her voice and what had become of the loudness that was lost. Naoko wondered if the loudness lived on in her hands. 22 �After she died she’d found a photograph of her mother reading. Near her was a table, a cup and some fresh dahlias blooming. You could tell they were red even through the Polaroid. The image was out of focus, however. Each object had a shadow, like a ghost of itself lurking behind itself. As Naoko gazed at the flowers, knowing that dahlias had been her mother’s best, a big red drop oozed from one of the petals. 23 �Suddenly, bringing her left arm up, Machie flung it over Naoko’s waist. The hand was just a hand, flabby, lifeless, without feeling. Naoko set it aside. Who was this person? Far away, becoming more and more mournful, she saw Machie running. Not away from her. Not away from anything, but she was running fast. “Why would I think I know her? I cannot know her. I cannot know the love of her. I cannot know the source or even the person who desires to know the love of her.” “Impossibility, or seeming impossibility and one’s relationship with that, perhaps that, in essence, was the love of her.” 24 �“No.” The word came low. “No.” It came again, more emphatic but still low. Naoko searched her face. Strands of hair touched her nose. “She has died. She has died into me.” The words, she felt, were being delivered to her by Machie. 25 �“Are you cold?” One of Machie’s feet was tucked under the other, seeking heat seemingly. As if in reply, a cold despondency swept through the room. A woman’s body floated up. It was lying on a mat stiffly. Its face was hers but it was a five-year-old face, with brown curly hair and sweet, childlike smile. The body, however, looked all worn out. It moved as if to speak, just the head tilting to the side raising its chin slightly. So much energy withdrew from the face whose expression, under her gaze, seemed to darken. 26 �An image of Machie’s lips, blue and cold, ascended disembodied, as if the time to speak had come and they MUST speak, even if they die. The lips grew larger, and, as she watched, fuller and more voluptuous until, from their place in the sky, they looked down upon her and were directed solely at her. What entered Naoko was a beam and from within the beam the very essence of Machie. Naoko thought “essence” because it was, she felt, the thing that had been withheld. She knew Machie and the poverty of her life, but there had been something in that cool, clear interior void that she hadn’t known and wondered even if Machie knew. 27 �The lips were parted. Saliva had made them wet but the wetness, sticking to the surface, caused the light of them to eclipse. As the sun fell to the west, the mountain, holding the sky’s last red, stood suddenly empty. It simply existed, undistinguished, barren. Even the snow, brilliant white under the glare, draped over the peak uniformly and without texture. The peak itself, having lost the majesty of the sun, seemed, in one quick dive to disappear. 28 �“Hold me the way you used to,” Machie had said, scooting up to her. Now that they were in bed, both felt tired. They lay still enjoying the shafts of a very young moon. “Your hair is the same. Its smell . . . “ “It’s thinner, you know.” “Let’s not talk.” Machie without deciding it was letting Naoko lead. 29 �Alive in silence Machie seemed content. A grin made a line from her ear to her collarbone, sidelining her neck, slender in the light. Her cheeks glowed softly. Mind in a deepened state, body, a modicum of peace, might it be performed together with her, to live out her life together with her? 30 �“What are you thinking about, dearest?” Machie hadn’t replied. A knot of meanness had settled in her body which even she didn’t understand. “I’m thinking how bare everything is going to be.” “I thought you liked this time of year.” “I do. You asked what I was thinking about.” Naoko lay still. She too was worried about the trees. They’d looked so pitiful drooping limply in the dry air. “There’s still some green,” she said in a meek voice, but she had to admit they looked decrepit. 31 �“Am I boring?” Machie, having bathed, had come into the living room. “Boring?” “I’m sorry. It feels like I’m ignoring you.” “I’m sorry,” she muttered again, sitting down next to Naoko. “Let’s just be together today.” 32 �Naoko had been about to speak but refrained for words seemed empty. Also saying anything, she was afraid she would start to cry. She had never seen Machie look so pale. “Perhaps,” she thought, “she will not live.” The possibility however had not saddened her. As she stared, caressing her mentally, she felt the two of them becoming inseparable. “Whether or not she lives, I will never leave her.” “I will go wherever she goes.” 33 �Elm is set in Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in the spirit of the humanist typefaces of fifteenth-century Venice; it was released by Adobe Systems in 1990. Cover art: Gail Sher Cover design: Bryan Kring 34 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Elm Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017-02-02 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2016 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. 9780997831306 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_073 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 41 p. Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. LIB-PC011 Language A language of the resource eng publications SherPublications https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/f2dd02f0ece7794af81029e1836041c1.pdf ed5384a8abfee55b00fe4095be9107de PDF Text Text Reading Gail Sher Reading Gail Sher describes the development of Gail Sher’s poetry over a thirty-five year period: the early radical language experiments, the reimagining of ancient Asian literary and musical forms, the “wisdom mind” poems rooted in Tibetan Buddhism, and her late work, influenced by contemporary writers and her experience as a psychotherapist. The book includes detailed illustrations of the linguistic strategies she has used to help a reader “open to the inconceivable.” It concludes with a bibliography and two brief chronologies, one of her outer life and one of her inner, psychological relationship with language. Reading Gail Sher by Gail Sher Gail Sher “When I found Gail Sher’s books, I imagined her having stepped from a Japanese Noh play. Her poems, sharpened by rigorous Buddhist discipline…grabbed me instantly. Despite their wild turns of phrase… they showed a sensibility that was refined, educated, attentive to natural detail. They put me in mind of the writers of Japan’s Heian court, the best of whom were women. I still hear echoes of Murasaki Shikibu or Ono no Komachi when I open Gail’s books.” —Andrew Schelling Gail Sher lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area as a writer, teacher and psychotherapist. For more information and to read her poetry online go to: gailsher.com or to library.buffalo.edu/collections/gail-sher. Night Crane Press �Reading Gail Sher �Also by Gail Sher PROSE Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice Writing the Fire: Yoga and the Art of Making Your Words Come Alive From a Baker’s Kitchen POETRY Early Work Pale Sky Five Haiku Narratives Ezekiel Sunny Day, Spring Mingling the Threefold Sky The Twelve Nidānas Figures in Blue The Bardo Books White Bird Mother’s Warm Breath The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries though actually it is the same earth East Wind Melts the Ice The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call old dri’s lament Calliope Who, a Licchavi Watching Slow Flowers DOHA Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse redwind daylong daylong Once There Was Grass RAGA Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms Moon of The Swaying Buds Marginalia la KUKLOS Cops Broke Aide Rouge to Beak Having Me (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem From another point of view the woman seems to be resting �Reading Gail Sher Gail Sher night crane press 2016 �Copyright 2016, Gail Sher gailsher.com All rights reserved. Night Crane Press 15oo Park Avenue, Suite 435 Emeryville, California 94608 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner and publisher ISBN: 978-0-9858843-9-0 072316 �for Brendan ��Contents Preface 1 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 13 The Way of the Poem 17 The Way of the Living Word 55 Late Work 60 Appendix I: Reviews 63 Appendix II: Chronologies 76 Bibliography 86 ��Preface “Poems need prose precincts,” Ted Hughes once wrote to a friend. Like animals, poems could become extinct if the poet didn’t endow them with a “habitat.” Critics and poets alike, he felt, have an obligation to steward the “achieved human voice” found in poetry. “Achieved” is the important word. Writing-overtime accretes into a voice that rings of the poet and that grows her poems, gradually, into maturity. This book is an attempt to locate and describe the “habitats” of my own poetry. In retrospect, and certainly not by design, it seems to have organized itself into phases: 1. Radical Language Experiments, 1982-1997 When I first began writing, everything was a test. I had no idea of writing “poetry.” I never read poetry. I avidly read prose. But my concerns, as I reluctantly learned, were all of them of a poet, not a novelist, short story writer or essayist. I came to understand that I am a poet because I think like a poet. And it 1 �was singularly poets and poet-editors who first saw and supported my work. An early distinguishing underlying feature—that my writing simply arose—remains to this day. I don’t write what I already know, or perhaps, stated more exactly, since my writing stems primarily from the “linguistic unconscious”1 and not from everyday consciousness, I find it a continual surprise. 2. Asian-influenced work, 1997-2008 Taking writing as a practice followed eleven years of studying Zen. Living a monastic life with its strict schedule of zazen (sitting meditation), assigned work, dharma talks, dokusan (interviews with one’s teacher), and the concentrated reading of Zen texts immersed my mind and body in an ancient Japanese culture. Actually my Asian-influenced poetry derives, in addition to Japan, from India, China, and Tibet and draws from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism (both philosophy and practice) and Hinduism (both philosophy and practice) which I studied for many years after leaving the zendo. 1 See Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious, pp. 3-6. 2 �In this aspect of my work, I re-imagined ancient Asian musical and literary forms using: — haiku to create extended narratives2 — haibun (prose + haiku) to write biographies3 and autobiography4 — four-lined Chinese kanshi to establish the rhythms of four book-length poems5 The foundation for RAGA was the Indian raga and for DOHA the Tibetan devotional song. 3. The Wisdom-Mind Collection, 2009-2013 Between 2009 and 2013 I wrote a series of books, beginning with The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities, and culminating in The Twelve Nidānas and Mingling the Threefold Sky that are rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and 2 Five Haiku Narratives. 3 The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries. 4 The Moon of the Swaying Buds. Watching Slow Flowers; Once There Was Grass; redwind daylong daylong; Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms. 5 3 �dedicated to “stretching” English in order to create gaps so that Wisdom-Mind might flow through to the reader.6 Wisdom and knowledge are different of course: the former cannot be grasped by the intellect alone. The idea in these poems is to not-quite-makesense. The beauty (hopefully) of the surface language + the strategy of “approaching-narrative” first intrigues then holds a reader, allowing, in stillness, the dawning of a new kind of intelligence. As a poet I feel that this body of work is my most important. 4. Late Work, 2014-present Sunny Day, Spring, Ezekiel, Pale Sky and Elm (in press) are examples of writing indirectly influenced by contemporary writers and twenty-five years of practicing psychotherapy. Compared to the earlier work they are more accessible yet, deeply interior, they too reside in a vacuum of silence. Mother’s Warm Breath, White Bird and The Bardo Books were also written from this perspective. 6 4 �* The opening section of this book, “The Way of the Poem,” details some of the linguistic strategies I’ve used to help a reader open to the inconceivable. Cumulatively they present the poem as a tool, poetry as a Path. The next section, “The Way of the Living Word,” is about the word itself—the body of the word, the mind of the word, the transmission that each word carries. Headings such as these alert the reader to a “take” on language that is visceral rather than cognitive. For reading my poetry, this is key. The final section, “Late Work,” addresses writing that speaks to a different part of the brain. Prose-like in appearance it makes room for the conceptual, yet remains rooted in the concerns that characterize my work as a whole. Appendix I contains reviews by poets who have their own ideas about my work, and an early letterto-the-editor I wrote prior to publishing my own poetry, defending a poet who whose work I felt was misunderstood but whose approach I admired and 5 �still do. Appendix II contains chronologies of my external life circumstances and an internal, psychological history of my relationship with language. 6 �Acknowledgments The many people who have supported my writing over the years are too numerous to recall. My deepest apologies in advance to those precious people whose help I remember but whose names I can no longer remember. My heartfelt thanks to them and to: —Beau Beausoleil and Merry White Benezra who saw, encouraged, wisely critiqued and supported my work from its earliest beginnings. —Robert Duncan, who attended my first poetry reading at Beau Beausoleil’s San Francisco bookstore. He was standing in the back and after I read he called out, “Would you read that again?” Afterwards, he introduced himself and encouraged me to send what I had read to a new poetry journal at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Credences. My work appeared in the inaugural issue of that journal, along with poetry by Duncan himself. It was my first poetry publication.7 “Nine Pieces,” Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series, vol. 1, no. 1, Buffalo: State University of New York, 1981, pp. 16-20 7 7 �—Robert Bertholf, editor of Credences and curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, who invited me to Buffalo to read, address his graduate students and stay at his beautiful home as a way of promoting my experiments in nonconceptual poetic language. —Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop who designed, printed and published my early “retablo,” Broke Aide, in their elegant Burning Deck series, chose it as an NEA selection for the Frankfurt Book Fair, and remained supportive and available for many years. —Charles Bernstein who attended every Village reading I gave, and offered the kind of critical affirmation that helps poets grow. —Kathleen Fraser, whose perceptive analysis of my first book, From another point of view the woman seems to be resting, placed my work in an historic line of modernist women poets—Gertrude Stein, H.D., Lorine Niedecker—thereby recognizing in today’s women poets what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut saw in modernist playwrights and composers: the articulation of a hidden suffering characteristic of 8 �our age, thus creating the possibility of new forms of wholeness.8 —Joey Simas who published Rouge to beak having me in his Paris-based Moving Letters Press in the days when poet-friend publishers were not rare, and translated a long section from Broke Aide into French for a French anthology of New American poets9, something I didn’t think was possible. —Andrew Feenberg whose invitation to lecture to a group of innovative thinkers in business, the military and the sciences inspired the talk that lead to Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious. —Jessica Grim, co-founder, with Melanie Neilson, of Big Allis, the poetry journal that promoted the experimental work of women writers early in their careers—exactly my situation when they welcomed me into their first issue. Kathleen Fraser, “Overheard,” Poetics Journal, no. 4, May 1984, pp. 98-105. On Kohut, see Gail Sher, Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious, pp. 10-12. 8 49+1: Nouveaux Poètes Américains, choisis par Emmanuel Hocquard et Claude Royet-Journoud. Royaumont (France), 1991, pp. 222-223. 9 9 �—Leslie Scalapino, fellow former graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, who arranged for me to move into the apartment next to hers, and joined me for long walks around Berkeley and fun out-of-town trips to visit other poets. She read my work and offered invaluable criticism regularly and generously. —Andrew Schelling, friend, poet, teacher, who attended my readings, shared the pleasures of cowriting Japanese style renga together, and honored me with reviews and jacket cover statements erudite beyond my dreams. —Philip Whalen, fellow poet and fellow student at the San Francisco Zen Center, who took serious interest in my work and who, when he was living in Sante Fe with Baker-roshi, attended the reading that Leslie Scalapino and I gave in Albuquerque. —Ben Friedlander, Pat Reed, David Sheidlower and Jessica Grim who were part of a poetry “neighborhood” that surrounded me and accompanied me through all the years of my poetic tests. —Michael Basinski, Curator of the Poetry Collection 10 �at the University at Buffalo, who has supported my work for over thirty years. Most recently, he and his knowledgeable staff, especially James Maynard, a Robert Duncan scholar, have been expertly archiving my books, manuscripts, correspondence, art, and all the paraphernalia related to the poetic struggle that has been uniquely mine. To all of them I offer a deep bow of gratitude. 11 ��Introduction “Language is beautiful even without us. Once it was put into motion it was beautiful.” —Beau Beausoleil Before the Poem is the Poem Because of the poem, the poem can happen. Literature does work by “penetrating consciousness at a level not reached by the speech of everyday transactions.” (Ted Hughes) The poem, superseding event, is like a brain clicking away, thinking in riffs and patches and incomplete discrete phrases. Yet the whole is intentional and feels authentic because it attends to the whispered voices in the gaps. “Not often have I come upon words with so much mystery which at the same time seem so responsible. They have teeth” (a critic of my work). This is the poet’s gentleness. 13 �And the dignity in her lines. Its language, connected to itself by a kind of prayer, propels a search wherein nothing provable is unearthed, yet the act of opening one’s mind creates a free moment in which existence itself speaks lucidly and candidly if not, strictly speaking, rationally. And this is how the truth is grasped: feelingly. 14 �The Double Life of A Poem So there’s the poem that let’s you “in” (if you allow it to open you) but “in” is not the poem. “In” is your heart and mind. Yet you read with your mind also. Your mind reads the poem, which is your mind. The poem itself disappears. It is the you-before-the-you that is trying to read itself. As long as you think this, there is dualistic mind. But that same mind, entering the poem . . . She tries to feel her floor, but she is thinking about a cavity, something fluid like a worm and she wants to say the worm. A moan is a moan and where can it reside if not on her floor, the speech body of that word. She jerks it up but trips so that she is the 15 �floor and the glue and the shame. I have a habit of glue, she confesses. A flame of everything sears into shape, which is not the word, but the colorless basis of its Pure Land.10 10 Mingling the Threefold Sky, p. 5. 16 �The Way of the Poem When a poem of uncertain portent maintains its own isolation and integrity, like music, an independent language all its own will sing the place, inviting the reader. For music can perhaps be thought of as pure-logic divested of the bothersome friction of words. Along with the words we ingest the pure logic that is realized on its own, with its own wit, its own farinfrared dialectic. A handful of parentheses sets a mood for the optional and that’s all you have, like the flick of a conductor’s wand.11 geshé geshé you hook the word o Usnisavijaya (Shukden of despoil) Parentheses don’t contain. They shield. As Kathleen Fraser points out, they are also “a usuage which women continue to find useful in breaking out of a misleading sense of stability.” Poetics Journal, no. 4, May 1984, p. 100. 11 17 �to gull the sky sweet gull of northwest flowers I am tall I am slow full walker12 12 Who, a Licchavi, p. 43. 18 �Memory A poem has its own memory. And the poem’s memory provides a feeling context to the private memory of each word. Their inter-change creates a field. “I SEE it,” says a reader who then sallies along smelling all the flowers. First seeing, then entering the poem’s field, in part authors the poem’s memory. Actually poetry is memory, endowing words with a kind of eternity. 19 �Allure While the poet’s oral rendering of her poem is a powerful venue for the poem, sometimes on the page a voice can be more “catchable.” Being drawn into its world, partaking of that world such that for the moment of the poem, you are the person, affected. Certain poems, like Paris, so completely BELIEVE in themselves that their world—even one word— becomes an entire creed. I see a photograph of her throat, which is not the actual throat. Where is her throat in the wake of that? (I’m guessing that means after her throat.)13 13 White Bird, p. 68. 20 �Frisson The frisson of a word rouses a reader. As does the frisson of a phrase (the electrical atmosphere in its magnetic field). The frisson of a word, the frisson of a phrase is the poem’s event. I see the fish who is my brother. Its time is pink like mine. We flow in the same yard.14 When reading Gail Sher, stay with that. 14 The Bardo Books, p. 3. 21 �Tension-Sense Dialogue A word does not designate. A word speaks (jells) within its individual context and resting in the detail of its universal specificity is never just, say, “duck,” or “Buddha” or “tit.” Add the presence of another word and “things” happen—a word gets tense. Some things make words more tense, like following “thought” with “of ” or taking a noun in the singular. And sense (in our usual understanding)—sense dissipates tension. Actually sense works for language in much the same way as background music for script. The action rolls along but then someone says something off or there’ll be a pause and if the background music captures everyone’s secondary attention, no one even notices. Without it (if we don’t use sense in this way), all of the other aspects of a word are exposed and can work directly. 22 �Non-sense Sense, like a cart rambling down a long, linear road, carries a phrase not carried by all of the other aspects. Scrambling-what-would-be-consecutive forces a mind to stop. To space out literally. “Let’s really space out, not just haze but blast outside our ordinary sphere,” the not-quite-sensical words urge. It’s unconscious, therefore powerful, increasing our chances of pausing ordinary mind’s chatter. A body dissolves and there is no memory of its having been undissolving. Like a bird whose hair got swallowed of its color. It is sizeless, jigsawing red, as if red is the surrogate of all possible places. A man taps a bird on the window of its head. He can dissolve with passing away, someone says. 23 �Then I am in my body but not captive in my body, because the reflection of my body as a “high” black bird got swallowed up.15 15 The Bardo Books, p. 28. 24 �Repetition From here, one adds the element of repetition. (I almost said “passion.”) When a word repeats it seems more genuinely to be one’s feeling. Repetition soothes and instills desire. “Tell me again,” “read it again,” like a record one will play over and over and over, digging the groove inside the soul that played it over and over even before it was born. Counting, a “take-off ”—da-t’-da, da-t’-da, da-t’-da, da-t’-da—it’s in the human gene. The “hook” of the word creates the safety-ofenvironment. We need to feel safe to risk slipping through a gap. Poetry is dangerous, after all. 25 �Gaps The marrow of the style is gaps. Hiatus and lucid gaps. Lurking behind would be a story verging on revealing itself were the gaps colored in. The reader gets an invite—“Please, dear reader, color me in”—such that the poem is co-creative, the revelation is co-creative, shaping itself to each individual’s paradigm. Mother’s warm breath, like a plate of breath. Yet it is old breath, having eaten many crackers. My breath is a wall, she whispers from real breath, instantly present to birds. The energy of the animal appears to be experienced internally, its breath (a shadow) withheld in its own stem. What’s left of mind as a squirrel leaps out?16 16 Mother’s Warm Breath, p. 79. 26 �Pacing a poem by breaths not only creates an intensity but also a sense of ongoingness. For what is language and what is breathing, the one propelling and originating the other? The words elude while the breaths make a philosophy. Syntax is the motion. Each word has it own syntax, 27 �Searching Energy Each word has a location so that when we hear a word, unconsciously we expect for it. Just naturally, by virtue of the human mind. We complete what is happening by listening it. (We HEAR the word into LIFE.) The mind, activated by a word, allows its affective nature to touch it. Sparrows seem used, uninvented. Scaly mud, dull sky, colorless birds, remind me of my mind. To see the autumn leaves scatter in my home. (The longing they arouse as they lie on the wood turning red.) Is it of my body that they partake?17 17 Watching Slow Flowers, p. 58. 28 �Searching Energy + Stumping Mind Using words to baffle the mind releases the brilliance of the mind. The language breaks. The mind is stopped. When, barring understanding, words must instead be grasped— thru Him marigold summertime summertime bluefish (pokeweed) WANTED kept cups18 we hear the silence objectified. 18 Marginalia, p. 94. 29 �Disappearing Words A word can be fused or rigidified into being apparent, its nature frozen in space. Taken apart, language is reamalgamated, releasing the poor word from being so pinned down. Moderating-the-deathly-state-of-being-signified offers it up to a different kind of precision. After all, the very unreality of compositional realism points towards a stylistics that supports vanishing. to be sky-full once a rag of nods as the tide seeps in the camera of her (wanting numbers to fit) now and again an instant will finish19 19 Calliope, p. 65. 30 �Semiotics (words as symbols serving to convey meaning) Words have a kind of television capacity. They captivate, distract and bring one to a zone of forgetting. One feels the superficiality, the projection of an “I,” the true or false identity and the meaninglessness, almost, of the very question of falseness. Using words we fall into a similar stupor—replication where the machine of replication is forgotten or not considered. Deadened by use we forget that words are signifiers, as we ourselves, outside the experience of “one taste,” forget that this body is a sacred mandala for the victorious ones. Gertrude Stein noticed. She spent her life as a nurse reinvigorating (resuscitating) flabby (traumatized) words. Addressing questions of origin and responsibility, meaning grounds the mind in what it thinks it knows. 31 �Refusing that releases the taste of what it cannot. For poetic meaning accretes, not logically or deductively but through a process of settling. Like a sensation that arises in sleep, of warmth and grace and sometimes intense feeling that adds up to, say, what a soul-catcher catches. 32 �Poems of Origin “Origin” (poetically) takes place every minute. Existence, not locale, is the question. To claim by language the source, this kind of accuracy, to own it with the word while the breathing of the poem (its contraction and widening) claims the paradox of its inexplicability. Earth overflows. That’s what day breaks. Do you understand? (Many die confused.) Wandering through the bardo, the endless preserving of fat. I stare at the heavens just now cracked. Where in me is the vision of the great ones?20 We are the investor and the material word—its resonance of pain, the beauty of its failed dialogue . . . The dialogue is beautiful because it fails, because of the impetus at its source. The double-edge is pronounced. 20 -   DOHA , p. 13. 33 �Reading pain, the synovial fluid yoking word-breathlife in perdurable somersault with word-death-life— it’s the joint venture of the cycle and the seeming endlessness of the cycle. 34 �Multi-dimensionality surface beauty meaning underlying the surface an aha moment of true perception O’dear no the Prosepine to find the/ (for one thing) reformation in hat curly mountains all up-to-up wants/ to feel how much love how awakened intense ducks21 21 unpublished 35 �Here language and sexuality may be confused, the one propelling and originating the other. Then a continuing sense of the power of sexuality and a deeper respect for its implications. Finally the realization that desire—to communicate, to touch, to procreate and to exist—are all in fact one breath. Breath IS creation. IS origin. We do not “contain” God; we are God and it is our will to exist and acquire that brings the world and its pain into being. Acceptance of this responsibility opens the door to intimacy, perhaps our deepest form of grace (the grace of the world to speak intimately to us). The world speaks its pain and its beauty—to see this in a material way—to simply stand and see. Poetry is our cane. 36 �Weight22 “Weight”—not of the poem (the matter of the poem) but the “hand” of the poet as she writes. Like a pianist, a poet can bear down, but her bearing down is internal. For language is an instrument that bears weight, dare one say, even more sensitively. Not is good also. Not is a mechanism, like picking on a banjo, that to weight, by its nature, is impervious. China bloodless boy people of mast here are some if we are dumb if we are dumb so puffed and slobbering to themselves * See David L. Sheidlower’s review in Appendix I for further elucidation of this concept. 22 37 �shouting it down the mountain lugging the beast back to his people * over hills, over fields the moon’s condition come to pass come home stars lay down your heads nailed to the earth across the pasture23 23 Calliope, p. 14. 38 �Meter Take complexity + staccato. Or leaving out an expected additional syllable. At length in kin beatitude At length in kin beatitude must as congenial amulet (person). Pardon me. Cutting the street the embankment (tourniquet) few thoughts reference24 A sustained jazzy meter can create a humorous continuum. It helps one depend—hang upon or be contingently attached, even to the un-expressed. 24 Early Work, p. 117. 39 �Rhythm: the internal rhythm of a word and the overall river of words Rhythm is the bedrock, the voice, the fundamental principle upon which a poem is built. Rhythm is the “what” of what’s being said because “how” is what’s being said. A continuous flow, for example, suggests that thoughts themselves are contiguous though not exactly causing one another. Rhythm keeps the music clean. It spells the pulse of cyclical existence. tiger tiger from Yarlung Valley head arising from the flower from the bath of ancient wood Tara of the neck help me through this birth 40 �draw the word through its beauteous hole25 25 Who, a Licchavi, p. 27. 41 �Linkage Renga (Japanese) are linked poems of varying length launched by a haiku. Often composed in a group setting, each poet jams off the previous poet’s offering, grounding by links what otherwise might seem lame.26 The best links are invisible. They register, but on a first hit, not as a thought, but a flow. Though renga are associated with haiku, the strategy, linkage, works just as well in other settings. (Note the current page and the one previous.) For an example, see: Gail Sher and Andrew Schelling, “Hundred-Stanza Renga,” Simply Haiku, vol. 8, no. 2, Autumn 2010, simplyhaikujournal.com/autumn2010/rengags.htm. 26 42 �Saturation To saturate means to fill—to flood, glut, overload. To imbue or suffuse, to impregnate, permeate, steep. Each word carries its absolute full load so that there is little distraction or waste of time (leakage). The poet stuffs each word into a little canon. It socks the reader. 43 �Density Puns, near-puns, verbal internal references, grammatical sleights-of-hand, keep the weave of the poem dense. Take deliberate mis-use of grammar: Cleans the smile. Youngs girl. Come of its own (alone).27 The senseless plural echoes “cleans” and just barely (gently) deflects the “young girl” pixels. Confined contrasting feelings work similarly. A woman alone at a large open window gazes at the sky. The soft flesh of her arm folds around a basket. If she is dead, the colors may be alive.28 Sometimes a word careens out like a nightmare. Or the gravitational pull of the poem’s self-referents may become so great that no light-of-import can escape it for a reader. 27 unpublished 28 Figures in Blue, p. 1. 44 �The poet cannot cheat. If she loses track of her “coding system,” her words are at risk of becoming black holes with little to inform them and keep them warm but their own sounds. 45 �Simplicity “Accurate” and “muscular” are two words that describe workable simplicity in a poem. Its stark feet need to be stable. And flawless. “Spare but right” holding its karma loosely. As Hemingway taught, it requires a lot of control. o buzzard in the sky invoked the girl riding pillion29 29 old dri’s lament, p. 62. 46 �“Equivalents” as Sub-logic or the Forgotten Vocabulary of a Word Georgia O’Keefe used the term in this sense: When she paints a flower she’s not painting a flower but what she feels about the flower so if she chooses a line or a color to paint a geranium, for example, she may paint a green square which could be very exact. Or how Swann in Proust’s Swann’s Way always did regard a phrase or musical motif as an idea, an actual conception veiled and impossible to know, but nonetheless distinct, unequal in value or significance. In the same way words, as for a baby when it talks, behave with powerful though eclipsed intensity. A doll talks and if she’s a tall doll, in dependence on a listener, her presence will not disperse far. Her body covers her life as if it were a cast. Mop-like braids fall to her waist. If I were a Cyclops forging thunderbolts, I too would be being born she posits. 47 �A man binds his mind so that it doesn’t scatter. He tucks it between his breasts. How have you left your mind before? someone asks, speaking politely.30 30 though actually it is the same earth, p. 38. 48 �Restraint Language is just language, “ghosted” as one critic of my work said, “by the anxieties of actual experience, ribboned by sexual shadings and innuendo, tense with a pent energy resembling the un-had orgasm . . . so that the hair of the language stiffens and all the tissue is tight with implication unreleased.” Call it explosive reserve. Or “restraint,” implying holding back, curtailing, lopping, as in a harpsichord, the gush, which by virtue of containment becomes all the more eruptive. Words are little volcanoes. The vortex, embedded in the word, whirls around picking up particles via energy, time, physical structure, psychology. Lazy minds sleep. With convention snore. Disruption wakes—to a fresh start, a new seeing, a quick “Wait! Did you hear that?” 49 �Masks: Catching the Surface with the Essence “All profound things love the mask,” said Nietzsche, and for poetry masks write the dress-code. Not this couch hatch (hopes) like food . . . 31 Masks loosen the mind and make a barrier around the word so that its soul escapes to wander freely. The gravity of time can easily make a word make itself into a mask so that we can tell it’s . . . what? What is it precisely that we say, saying a word? To satisfy a bias for the world, for descriptive writing on no matter what descriptive level, or beyond mere description to answer instead the riddle of what it is to describe— the wherewithal of birds flown/ from the evening and settled32 “This stanza works and I hardly know 31 Early Work, p. 139. 32 Early Work, p. 66. 50 �why. It is vibrant, and multi-dimensional, and very glad and celestial,” commented a reader. Another: “I’m crazy about it. I can’t even say why—I mean without “where-/withal” it wouldn’t work, and how the rest of the words are seemingly so common, and yet one has created something extraordinarily perfect and beautiful. Like a haiku yes.” The “I hardly know why . . .” Actually masks work by disburdening. The frontal lobes relax releasing a different kind of intelligence. Relevance becomes implicit. It drifts around latching onto that or this or something that never happened. Curiosity takes a stab. “Oh I know!” If there’s an I, of course, we already know it doesn’t, really, know anything of importance. The journey, however, self-replicating and earnest, can be immensely revealing, transformational, and indeed “profound,” to borrow Nietzsche’s word. The face beneath the mask may wear another mask but anyway will glow from the mere care of the person. 51 �Titles A title may name a poem but also spring out—be energized by—the poem. Or a title can take place in a poem unexpectedly, as if stumbled over. It can give information, create atmosphere, commodious dream to wherefore thou internal to beam/ to is this sun33 “Here the stupendous length of the title is equal (in some cosmic suchness value) to the brevity of the poem. In fact the title partially makes the poem through the sharp contrast of gloomy depths and translucent light,” one reader explained. bliss and in her cabbage-petal fall the arch-meal’s bitterly, another title, is similar. savannahs of the new world, another title, is similar. 33 Early Work, p. 99. 52 �Tricking you into the poem, a title may double cross You avail yourself to language whose very nature double crosses. Colloquialisms, almost sloppy in the midst of intense precision, surprise and slip you between the cracks whose rough edges you might otherwise skirt around. These “lines you can trust” signify conclusions ultimately not deducible. unravel Jacob prairies presses (juice of flowers) hovering like bread falling around 53 �light lowering steeples of thought34 A title may be inviting but not always inviting. Sometimes they have the stereoscopic effect of enlarging dimensions, lifting one out of what takes place. A title may point away but at the same time may itself be the subject. A title may point to a place unlocatable in the poem. Setting up a poetic shiftiness. The language proceeds with a duplicate motion that consumes and sucks the wily words back in and you end up, or start out, when the title does it too, in a void. 34 unpublished 54 �The Way of the Living Word The Body of the Word The ordeal of a word is like trying to sleep with God. The exchange is its offering. We enter and awaken to our death and resurrection, if we’re still enough, ripened enough. The felt word, its intelligence, its thrall—inherent in its body is the clear light shining. Take the word “spoon” with its energetic “p,” its soothing “o’s,” the soft sound of its “n.” The “s” of course risks getting tangled in the “p,” but it’s a good word, easy to use, respectable. The sensual, obdurate “thing-ness” of its shape stands in its opacity purely for itself, leading to no other conclusion. It doesn’t ask to go further. It refuses to go further. Saw (too) to cling here chessmen35 is its own explication. 35 (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem, unpaginated. 55 �The Mind of the Word Reaching for narrative, undermining narrative, taken alone, a word is a kind of narrative. For time in a poem is discrete, and time in a word lets loose back to its own etymological pratfalls. The vision may occur before imagination. The event may sound prior to its happening. The insouciance of a word . . . The royalty of a word . . . Eros lives in every word. 56 �Through the eye of a word we see. (The word looks, from the vantage point of its mind.) Disjuncture is its power, unhinged from meaning, bouncing off artifacts synonymous with an absence. In a farrago of words, each word-moment is connected to all the others, the more seemingly unrelated, the stronger the psychic thread. A woman carries a jug dexterously embroidered on silk. The woman’s skin shines like the interior pink of a river. The dimensions of the jug’s magenta is implicit yet exacting. Out is not a direction but an aspect of conference around the jug’s battered aggregates. Bringing yellow out, where out is a structure of color and light, intensifies out, as if its DNA changes.36 36 though actually it is the same earth, p. 23. 57 �A word reveals a healthy lust for the innards of its survival. One whishes you up into a vacuum where there is no placement, no resolution, nothing that can be returned to. Its performance leaves no trace (though there is something so familiar). Held there in your wanting, you reach, you stretch and the stretching opens and deepens what you feel so that almost becomes an invitation and at the same time an entrance to what finally gives way to another name. 58 �The Transmission of a Word The Path of each word decouples its identity. Different contexts feature different parts. Also different paths. The Path of a word has trails that carry the word even into the midst of the bodies of other words. Thus we have the word, its figuration in a different word, and the meditation in our mind of the marriage of the two thereafter. Marriage, a sacrament, includes an oath made with words. For God and Word are the same, plucked from the same stream. However remote, something of that consecration lingers—as we are using words, contemplating words—as Ted Hughes’ phrase “achieved human voice” ratifies. His heightened relationship with words elevates this awareness, but for all who care, all who attend, the transmission is there along with the respect of the word. 59 �Late Work Late work (the poetry I began writing in 2014) addresses a different part of the brain than my earlier work. The element of space directs itself no longer to wisdom mind but to lesser-exalted areas of the self, not necessarily pre-verbal. That human beings are primarily relational takes on new significance. Formerly silence was in the word and was the word (introverted). Now it is also referential (extroverted). New Year’s Eve listen— snow is falling37 Sensation becomes memory. What erupts may be from the reptilian brain but may also stem from more highly evolved areas. Meaning extends beyond the word into clusters of 37 Pale Sky, p. 10. 60 �words, sentences and remainders after the sentences have passed. The mind of the woman is warm, her sweaters and chickens and all the places on the boat . . . “Hello,” Unn offers. “What?” shouts the woman.38 Meaning finally is useful. Before, it not only was not useful, it obstructed what was useful. Before there was the boat. Now there’s the other shore. The device—thinking you know what it means— becomes authenticated by the text—you do know what it means. She wondered if the fact that things ceased to exist in her meant that they ceased to exist. Does time cease to exist or does it flow parallel to what looks like one’s existence? 38 Sunny Day, Spring, p. 3. 61 �What is one’s existence? What is the relation between time and one’s existence?39 It means what it means to you, but meaning is intended whereas in the earlier work, the flow toward meaning was simply bait. 39 Ezekiel, p. 78. 62 �Appendix I ANDREW SCHELLING Gail Sher: Poetry 1981-2006 A review essay I first met Gail Sher in the early nineteen-eighties when we were both living in Berkeley. I’d already read her earliest published poetry and heard friends speak about her practice of both Buddhism and writing. In a modest way she was a legend among local poets & Zen students. When I actually met her, she was finishing up a book of bread recipes, an activity less surprising in those days than it might seem now. The story about Gail’s poetry was that she’d begun to write her tough, multi-layered, flint-like poems, often in series, while a student at Zen Center’s Tassajara Mountain retreat. She had continued to write as a daily discipline after returning to the East Bay where she dwelt on the far fringes of the energetic language poetry crowd. The earliest events she and I appeared at together were conversations about poetry and Buddhist practice—once in San Francisco, once 63 �at Green Gulch Zen Center near Muir Beach. To my imagination though, she remained a figure of Tassajara. Tassajara lies in one of those cañados that in summer visiting season crackles with tough, aromatic brush—as well as manzanita & poison oak—deep in the mountains inland from Monterey. The site, along a boulder strewn creek, was first known to native peoples for its healing hot springs. You can only readily get there during the dry season, & only with a serviceable car, standard transmission, to take you seven miles uphill, then seven precipitous miles down a harrowing dirt road. The road twists along a valley wall held in place by the roots of dwarf oaks. When I’d visit in the seventies and eighties, I went in my big, square ’64 Pontiac, which burnt through its brakes the first time down. From then on the car stayed at China Camp, a hilltop site with primitive facilities. Seven miles down to Tassajara by foot— bathe in the creek, drink tea generously provided by the Zen Students, buy a loaf of Tassajara’s renowned bread, sit zazen in the zendo—then trudge seven miles back to the clatter of crickets. On one of those 64 �trips I heard of a poet who had taken to a daily practice of writing, and did it as a solitary discipline. So different from the gregarious poets I knew in the Bay Area! When I found Gail’s books, I imagined her having stepped from a Japanese Noh play. Her poems, sharpened by rigorous Buddhist discipline—& not to everybody’s taste—grabbed me instantly. They were tough, refreshingly hard-edged, full of the natural world—constructed of bits and pieces of mineral, insect, bark, summer grass. They could cry out from the page in several languages at once, with English functioning (I thought) like a piece of steel to strike the spark. They felt classical. Despite their wild turns of phrasing, fox barks & cricket clicks, under the surface they showed a sensibility that was refined, educated, attentive to natural detail, & enamored of the chipped, the asymmetric, the rustic. They put me in mind of the writers of Japan’s Heian court, the best of whom were women. I still hear echoes of Murasaki Shikibu or Ono no Komachi when I open Gail’s books. My ear had been tuned to Modernist rhythms 65 �& syntax by Pound’s Cantos and his haunting translation of Noh plays. I’d been schooled in the compressed poems of Lorine Niedecker and the Objectivists, had started to collect the crisp haikuinflected translations of American Indian poems done by Frances Densmore, and gotten first-hand know-how of Asian poetry through the mustardcrackling syllables of Sanskrit. When I found Gail’s poems, they became instant companions. I knew she was up to something special. (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem was probably the book that first showed me how my own generation’s often extreme experiments with language—cracking words apart & recombining syllables or sentences in ways that carried ear & mind to completely new realms—could be more than politically radical. They could be ecologically radical, spiritually radical. I remember many poems by Philip Whalen & Diane di Prima also written at Tassajara, and maybe some by Norman Fischer or Pat Reed. Once on the twisty, uphill walk back to China Camp through burnt-over oaks—frightening wildfire had raced through in ’77 or ’78—ghost faces leapt out where the firefighter’s 66 �axes had slashed through scorched trunks and exposed bright inner wood. I composed a lengthy poem (thankfully lost long ago) to capture the California landscape with its Zen center, lizards, and rattlesnakes. Of all the writing Tassajara’s inspired, though, Gail Sher’s must be the most fully generated out of that canyon, its geothermal forces, its healing hot springs. Gail has worked with, & been instrumental in naturalizing to our North American continent, several Asian poetic traditions. This is something only a Left Coast or Pacific Rim poet could do with ease, and a direct if invisible lineage runs through her from the Far East. She has worked haiku and its linked-verse cousin renku. She has written an autobiographical account of her Buddhist training in haibun form. More recently, familiarity with yoga practice has drawn her to India’s musical tradition, and the outcome of this was the serial poem RAGA. In conversation with Tibetan Buddhism, she also wrote DOHA , a book modeled on Tibetan songs of devotion and instruction. Every plant, wild animal, watershed, well-crafted 67 �building, every poem or human being, holds a quality that is the root of its life and spirit. This quality is quite sharp, objective, wise. It is also creative and fluid so cannot be caught or described. Matsuo Basho found this spirit to animate haiku, lyric poems, the tea ceremony, archery. It runs through all of Gail Sher’s poetry—loose, alive, relaxed, content with imperfection, winding around an inward mystery. Her writing reveals the finely edged relationship between ourselves and our surroundings. When I go to her poetry I do it the way I hike into the mountains or up a gorge, or for that matter step into a temple or meditation hall. I find things fully alive there. Not opinions, ideas, notions—just the wild spirit of living things. What is the natural habitat of North American poetry if not the great ecosystem of the Small Press? An ecosystem comprised of energy pathways, migration corridors, nutrient exchanges. It is alive with life & death chases, sweeping unpredictable weather patterns, and acts of breath-taking generosity. Gail’s poems saw light here: Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press, Matt & Sarah 68 �Correy’s Rodent Press, Joey Simas’s Moving Letters. But the world of publishing got rougher in the 1990’s (absorption of corporate publishing houses into media empires, overthrow of distributors who handle small presses). One response has been for poets to consolidate their resources. Gail’s poetry has moved to a new home, Night Crane Press. Small and micro presses serving the San Francisco Bay Area have taken totem animals for a long time. White Rabbit, Grey Fox, Coyote Books. Turtle Island fits in too. Now Night Crane, with its whiff of transient life, is collecting Gail Sher’s poetry into an online edition. This is a wonderful gathering. Much in these books will be rough going, though, even for seasoned readers. Tibetan words, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Japanese. Syllables cobbled into seed-like stanzas that don’t easily crack. Of course poetry has always been hard to crack. “Don’t follow in the steps of the old masters,” said one old master, “seek what they sought.” What a hard lesson. Fourth of July Valley May 31, 2006 69 �DAVID L. SHEIDLOWER Miming the Phrase Review of (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem by Gail Sher (San Francisco: Square Zero Editions, 1982). Gail Sher places an incredible weight in each phrase of this book. They are phrases mostly, the discreet & seemingly incomplete units which make up this short book. I find the weight in the phrases, not on them; they are not burdened, rather each has its own volume & density, can attract the phrases around them or be inert and integral. Take the phrase: “Tubers & iron/even to prepare/this.” From their natural state, both the vegetable & the mineral are prepared by heat, in that sense they’re even (or equal). Very dense consistencies also. Then the “this” which, locating only itself (i.e. not subordinate as in “this thing here”) pulls down on the three words above it & the question is not “even to prepare this what?,” but can the middle phrase double itself? Rather than one incomplete phrase, there are two phrases here, with “even” meaning “as well” and “equal” simultaneously. 70 �A line by itself reads: “Mime is first”; and yes the words are, at first reading, gestures of phrases. Like a mime (on a still, empty stage) pretending to be thrown forward by the short stop of a bus he’s not riding on, these phrases imitate the motion of phrases in a context, but are surrounded by white space & make their own sense: “Dawns or/parson.” The next line is “Or go god,” That’s a real choice in this poem which invites speculation on whether or not religious characters (specific & general): “monk”, “god”, “nun”, “Christ”, “the Moslem”), religious actions (vowing, chanting, renunciating, gracing) & religious imagery (“the/shepherd”, “The wooly flesh”) can maintain their religious meanings in such undevotional as well as non-moralistic phrases. And of course they can if you let them. The poem is not didactic, offers choices. Hence, the only pronunciation is a handful of parentheses at the beginning which sets the mood for the optional: “Saw (too) to/cling here”; take or leave either “to” or “too” or both. Some phrases end with “this” or begin with “As,” attracting surrounding phrases (but there is no syllogistic sense which definitely connects any 71 �two phrases and hence the connections are optional). The poem offers the choice between action and being: “A rung or yelling,” “The grit or/hear”; but wonderfully & conscientiously blurs the distinction between the two “As hover from the/elbows is something/growing.” And so the distinctions between mime and the actual are blurred. Berkeley, 1982 72 �GAIL SHER Letter to the Editor of The San Francisco Review of Books (June 1979) 40 Dear Mr. Nowicki, Last night I read the following in a story called “The thrower-away” by Heinrich Boll: …I am making an intensive study of a young man from my neighborhood who earned his living as a book reviewer but at times was unable to practice his profession because he found it impossible to undo the twisted wire tied around the parcel, and even when he did find himself equal to this physical exertion, he was incapable of penetrating the massive layer of gummed paper with which the corrugated paper is stuck together. The man appears deeply disturbed and has now gone over to reviewing the books unread and placing the parcels on his bookshelves without My first published writing defends another writer, Barabara Einzig, but it somehow describes the kind of writing I end up doing myself thirty years later in my “late work.” 40 73 �unwrapping them. I leave it to the reader’s imagination to depict for himself the effect of such a case on our intellectual life. and wondered if this could be the problem in the style of the reviewer of “Some Problems of Style” in Barbara Einzig’s Disappearing Work and if so, should we be glad or sorry that so much potential is being “thrown away” as it were. Perhaps something could be done to help the matter along, for example the reviewer might appreciate receiving an unwrapped copy of the above mentioned book. I myself would be happy to provide him with one. He could then have the pleasure of easily reading it and I’m sure upon so doing he will notice immediately that though indeed novel it is not a novel at all, though full of precision it has no chronology (the first section is later than the second), it has no “protagonist” and is not “just another” anything but an entirely unique (not story) but brilliantly executed expose of the unconscious male or female. Apologies are in order. They would do wonders for the fast failing reputation of SFRB not to mention the 74 �alleviating effect they might have, if it’s not too late, on our intellectual life.41 San Francisco May 8, 1979 The editor replied, “Whether or not Einzig’s book is categorized as a novel, my opinion remains that it is flat and too low-key to arouse the reader’s interest. . . .” 41 75 �Appendix II A Personal Chronology of External Life Circumstances 1942: Born in St. Louis, Missouri’s Jewish Hospital. 1947-53: Elementary school in University City, a suburb of St. Louis. 1954-57: Hanley Junior High School in University City. 1958-60: University City Senior High School (avid reader, diary writer and aspiring pianist studying with Harold Zabrach). 1960-61: University of Florida, Gainesville (study piano, music history, composition, theory). 1961-62: Hebrew University, Jerusalem (study Hebrew, Torah and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music). 1962-64: BA in English at Northwestern University. Receive Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. 76 �1964: Choose instead to study Middle English at the University of California, Berkeley; meet Arthur Weiner, fellow graduate student in English and reader for the poet Thom Gunn. 1965: Arthur and I marry. 1966: Receive a secondary teaching credential from U.C. Berkeley. 1966-68: Enjoy teaching high school English at Ygnacio Valley High and Pleasant Hill High; win ”Teacher of the Year” Award from three education faculties (Stanford, Berkeley, San Francisco State). Have a harpsichord built and begin studying harpsichord with a very gifted teacher, Jean Nandi, a student of Gustav Leonhardt.42 November 1968: Arthur and I separate; I begin sitting zazen at the Berkeley Zendo (part of the San Francisco Zen Center). Summer 1969: Attend Summer Practice Period at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center with Suzuki-roshi. For more on Jean Nandii’s unconventional, inspiring life, see Unconventional Wisdom: A Memoir by Jean Nandi, downloadable at www.elverhoj.org/archives/nandi.html. 42 77 �Fall 1969: Move into the Berkeley Zendo; and, encouraged by Jean Nandi, begin a second BA, in music, at UC Berkeley. 1971: Move to San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in order to practice Zen full-time; ordained a lay disciple of Suzuki-roshi. 1980: Leave Zen Center after eleven years, realizing that my practice needs to be writing.43 I had already abandoned the formal practice of music, consciously dedicating my musical ability to writing, selling my harpsichord and donating the proceeds to purchase a great temple bell, crafted in Japan, for Zen Center. 1980: I move to an apartment on Haight Street and begin writing daily, publishing poems in small literary journals. Become friends with Beau Moon of the Swaying Buds describes how I came to this decision. Through Zen I discover “Yes Practice”: only doing those things I can say Yes to with my whole body and mind. By then, however, “I am through with Zen Center. I need to define my own regime. Zen Center has had it with me anyway. I am told privately that unless my attitude changes, I will not be accepted for Fall Practice Period. Indeed, my attitude has changed but not in the direction that would pique my interest in Fall Practice Period” (Moon of the Swaying Buds, 2001, p.392). 43 78 �Beausoleil, Leslie Scalapino and Merry Benezra. 1982: Move to Etna St. in Berkeley; work as personal assistant for Billy & Alice Shapiro; continue writing daily and begin publishing books of poetry with small, independent presses. 1982-1993: Yoga-based meditation practice with Self Realization Fellowship. I am attracted to this heart-based practice, which complements the mindbased Zen I knew; I especially appreciate that this community, founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in the 1920s, is led by women. 1985-1990 Complete MA in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University; meet Brendan Collins, former Benedictine monk, photographer, teacher and psychologist. 1990: Brendan and I marry; I begin private practice as psychotherapist; continue publishing with small presses. 1995: Meet Adzom Paylo Rinpoche, meditation master in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and begin a concentrated study of 79 �Tibetan Buddhism; complete the Longchen Nyingthig Ngondro under his direction and guidance. This form of Buddhism brings together the heart and mind practice I have long sought. 1997-continuing: After the closing of so many small independent presses, Brendan and I establish Night Crane Press; I continue writing early every morning, working as a psychotherapist, practicing Tibetan Buddhism, and enjoying living with Brendan. 80 �An Internal History of My Relationship with Language “The literary persona who enacts the poet’s struggle can be glimpsed, always, in one early work that Ted Hughes calls the ‘first,’ which contains, in a single image, ‘a package of precisely folded, multiple meanings.’ The origin of this image is a trauma, usually hidden from the writer’s consciousness, that partakes in a wholly personal way of some destructive aspect of cultural life.” 44 The dates are vague. We live on an army base in North Carolina where my father, Charles Sher, is stationed. While he is overseas, I live with my mother, her three volatile sisters, her absent father, nervousbreakdown-prone mother, and a slightly older, noisy and aggressive male cousin. In this household—I am two—I begin stuttering and am diagnosed with Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—A Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 245. 44 81 �a “nervous breakdown.” The symptoms—stuttering, hypervigilance and nonadaptability to change— are consistent with recent research on pre-school children in traumatic, disruptive, unpredictable environments. I am removed to the apartment of my paternal grandmother who says to my mother, “You can live here but I’m not paying for her milk.” With his impressive purple heart my war veteran father returns. “Honey, that’s your father.” “No it’s not. This is my father,” I say, pointing to his photograph. I believe I am four. A primary memory is sitting on an outside step striving toward collecting all my words and feeling extremely frustrated that I do not know how to write. My hysterical mother and war-traumatized father fight constantly (about money and sexual transgressions on both parts). I act out in elementary school. Feel very very ugly. Take refuge in reading the interesting books provided by my mother. 82 �I rock in bed, at my desk in school, in my rocking chair when I am reading. Begin to adjust socially in 9th grade, become a cheerleader and am liked by boys, but I cannot think analytically and only do average in my classes, which feels not only humiliating but somehow wrong (incorrect). In 10th grade an English teacher compliments what she calls a “parallel structure” that I use inadvertently. On the spot I decide to become a writer but am discouraged by my father who says, “Oh everyone wants to be that.” Thinking and writing analytically continue to be problems all the way through graduate school, though at Northwestern I devised a way to pass written exams, receive my B.A. and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics. Meanwhile in high school, in an outside study, I test at the 99th percentile in math and language, and have been in a longitudinal study for gifted children ever since. (I am now 73.) 83 �Oddly (to me) I feel I “belong” in the gifted group yet consistently my drifting mind and grades do not back that up. Eventually I have the following thought: “I CAN’T see white like everyone else, but the black I see is not nothing. It is rich and full of music.” I begin to feature it in my stabs at writing (having still the sense that I do not know what I’m doing, but liking the result). The thought that it is something is a turning point. Based on recent research on the neurological effect of trauma, my frontal lobes probably were dysfunctional, but my implicit memories and awareness were not dysfunctional. Since this is all I have, I lavish my attention on THAT. I discover that I am hyper-aware of aspects about language that most people ignore. With years of disciplined Buddhist practice behind me, I force myself to write from the right side of my brain and discover a whole new relationship with words. 84 �In retrospect I feel that were it not for the trauma— whose effect was at the forefront through my thirties, into my forties and to some extent is still present—I would not have seen, certainly not so clearly, the contents of the space brightened by a shut-down left frontal cortex. I feel grateful for the passion that insisted on a way, and eventually found a way, and made it my WAY. 85 �Bibliography Poetry Books by Gail Sher organized by phase: 1. radical language experiments, 1982-1997 From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. San Francisco: Trike, 1982. (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem. San Francisco: Square Zero, 1982. Rouge to beak having me. Paris: Moving Letters Press, 1983. Broke Aide. Providence: Burning Deck, 1985. Cops. Berkeley: Little Dinosaur, 1988. KUKLOS. Providence: Paradigm Press, 1995. la. Boulder: Rodent Press, 1996. Marginalia. Chicago: Rodent Press, 1997. Early Work. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. 86 �2. asian-influenced work, 1996-2008 Five Haiku Narratives Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press. 2015.45 Moon of the Swaying Buds. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002. RAGA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. redwing daylong daylong. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Once There Was Grass. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. DOHA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2005. Watching Slow Flowers. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2006. Contains the following out-of-print chapbooks written between 1996-2002: Like a Crane at Night (1996); One Bug ... One Mouth ... Snap! (1997); Saffron Wings (1998); Fifty Jigsawed Bones (1999); Lines: The Life of a Laysan Albatross (2002). 45 87 �The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. 3. the wisdom-mind collection, 2008-2013 though actually it is the same earth. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2009. Mother’s Warm Breath. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. White Bird. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. The Bardo Books. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2011. Figures in Blue. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. The Twelve Nidānas. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. Mingling the Threefold Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2013. 88 �4. late work, 2014-present Sunny Day, Spring. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2014. Ezekiel. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Pale Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Elm (in press). Publications by Gail Sher by date, 1981-2016 All of Gail Sher’s poetry in books and in journals is online at: gailsher.com and at: library.buffalo.edu/ collections/gail-sher. Print copies of her books and the journals in which she has appeared are in the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Books published by Night Crane Press remain in print and can be ordered from any bookseller, including online sellers. 89 �p r o s e b o o k s (print) Reading Gail Sher. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Poetry, Zen and the Linguistic Unconscious. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Writing the Fire: Yoga and the Art of Making Your Words Come Alive. New York: Random House/Bell Tower, 2006. The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice. New York: Penguin, 2002. One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. New York: Penguin, 1999. From a Baker’s Kitchen: Techniques and Recipes for Quality Baking in the Home Kitchen. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Marlow & Co., 2004. From a Baker’s Kitchen: Techniques and Recipes for Professional Quality Baking in the Home Kitchen. Berkeley: Aris Books, 1984. 90 �p o e t r y b o o k s (print) Early Work. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2016. Pale Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press. 2015. Five Haiku Narratives. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press. 2015. Ezekiel. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2015. Sunny Day, Spring. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2014. Mingling the Threefold Sky. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2013. The Twelve Nidānas. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. Figures in Blue. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2012. The Bardo Books. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2011. White Bird. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. Mother’s Warm Breath. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2010. 91 �The Tethering of Mind to Its Five Permanent Qualities. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2009. though actually it is the same earth. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. The Haiku Masters: Four Poetic Diaries. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2008. Who, a Licchavi. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. Calliope. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. old dri’s lament. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. The Copper Pheasant Ceases Its Call. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. East Wind Melts the Ice. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2007. Watching Slow Flowers. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2006. DOHA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2005. RAGA. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. 92 �Once There Was Grass. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. redwing daylong daylong. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2004. Look at That Dog All Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002. Lines: The Life of a Laysan Albatross. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2002 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. Moon of the Swaying Buds. San Francisco: Edgework, 2002. Moon of the Swaying Buds (Limited Edition). Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001. Fifty Jigsawed Bones: A Sea Turtle’s Life. Emeryville, CA: Night Crane Press, 2001 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. Saffron Wings. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1998 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. . 93 �One bug . . . one mouth . . . snap! A Year in the Life of a Turtle. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1997 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narrative]. Marginalia. Chicago: Rodent Press, 1997. la. Boulder: Rodent Press, 1996. Like a Crane at Night. Berkeley: Night Crane Press, 1996 [reprinted in Five Haiku Narratives]. KUKLOS. Providence: Paradigm Press, 1995. Cops. Berkeley: Little Dinosaur, 1988. Broke Aide. Providence: Burning Deck, 1985. Rouge to beak having me. Paris: Moving Letters Press, 1983. (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem. San Francisco: Square Zero, 1982. From another point of view the woman seems to be resting. San Francisco: Trike, 1982. 94 �p e r i o d i c a ls & a n t h o l o g i e s “Excerpt from Blue.” Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. Eds. Beau Beausoleil & Deema K. Shehabi. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. 71. Print. “Hundred-Stanza Renga” [with Andrew Schelling], Simply Haiku, 8.2, Autumn 2010, simplyhaikujournal.com/autumn2010/rengags.htm. “can’t touch you” [with David Rice]. The Tanka Journal 14. Tokyo: Nihon Kajin Club [Japan Tanka Poets’ Club], 1999. 10. Print. “Lovers” [nine poems]. Generator 8.1: A Magazine of International Experimental Visual and Language Material. Cleveland, OH: Generator Press, 1998. n.p. Print. “Autumn” [includes Japanese translation]. Ashiya International Haiku Festa 1998. [Award]. Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan: 1998. 36. Print. “Against the longed-for clouds” [with David Rice]. Tanka Splendor 1997. [Award]. Gualala, CA: AHA Books, 1997. n.p. Print. 95 �“Fallout.” [Honorable Mention]. Hiroshima Haiku and Tanka Competition, 1997. n.p. Print. “Silent snow.” One Breath: Haiku Society of America 1995 Members’ Anthology. New York: Haiku Society of America, 1996. 14. Print, “Basho.” Black Bough 8. Flemington, NJ: 1996. 5. Print. “The Paintings of Social Concern.” Juxta 4. Charlottesville, VA: 1996. n.p. Print. “Wipers steady,” “Home at last,” “Night Falls” [corrected version]. Frogpond 19.1. New York: Haiku Society of America, 1996. 8, 20, 52. Print. “Innocent Diversions” Chain 3. Special Topic: Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media. Buffalo: 1996. 183-188. Print. “Night falls,” Woodnotes 28. [Associate Editor: Gail Sher]. Foster City, CA, Spring 1996. 9. Print. “The boy dozes,” “Winter sun.” Woodnotes 29 [Associate Editor: Gail Sher]. Foster City, CA, Summer, 1996. 10, 22. Print. “George Tooker: Marginalia” [excerpt]. Big Allis 7. 96 �Brooklyn: 1996. 30-33. Print. “Autumn leaves.” Ant 3: A Periodical of Autochthonous Poetry & Other Conundrums. Oakland, CA, Summer 1996. n.p. Print. “Resurrection,” “The Seven Sacraments.” Raddle Moon 15. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1996. 113-118. Print. “Noisy city.” Raw NerVZ 2.4. Aylmer, QC, Canada: Proof Press, Winter 1995-96. 29. Print. “Winds blow briskly this evening.” Five Lines Down: A Tanka Journal. Redwood City, CA: Winter 1995. 12. Print. “Even in his company,” “The wind blows stronger.” Woodnotes, 25. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Summer 1995. 8, 13. Print. “Cross-legged I sit.” Ant 2. Oakland, CA: Summer 1995. n.p. Print. “Home at last” [includes Japanese translation]. Basho Festival Dedicatory Anthology. [Award]. Ueno City, Mie Prefecture, Japan: Master Basho Museum, 1995. n.p. Print. 97 �“Night falls.” Woodnotes 26. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Autumn 1995. 24. Print. “Snow buries,” “ A train whistle blows,” “Tassajara Summer 1969.” Woodnotes 27. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Winter 1995. 17, 31, 41. Print. “Folding its wings.” Modern Haiku, 26.1. Madison, WI: 1995. 10. Print. “Sudden squall,” “Misty rain.” Frogpond 18.3. New York, NY: Haiku Society of America, Autumn 1995. 22, 37. Print. “Night Falls.” Frogpond 18.4. New York, NY: Haiku Society of America, Winter 1995. 21. Print. “Silent snow.” Woodnotes 23. San Francisco: Haiku Poets of Northern California, Winter 1994. 5. Print. “la” [excerpt]. Big Allis 5. New York, 1992. 34-41. Print. “Ex voto” [excerpt from Broke Aide (1985) translated into French by Pierre Alferi & Joseph Simas]. 49+1: 98 �Nouveaux Poètes Américains. Eds. Emmanuel Hocquard & Claude Royet-Journoud. Royaumont (France): 1991. 222-223. Print. “Osiris co rider” [from “Kuklos”]. Gallery Works 8. Aptos, CA: 1991. n.p. Print. “Tamarind Esau” [from “Kuklos”]. Big Allis 1. New York: 1989. Print. “W/” Abacus 35. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press: 1988. n.p. Print. “The Fasting Spirit.” [review essay on anorexia nervosa, with excerpts from “Moon of the Swaying Buds”]. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 8:2. San Francisco: 1988. 61-80. Print. Starving passion: A Tribute to Anorexia. Thesis (M.A.), John F. Kennedy University, 1988, listed in: catalog.jfku.edu; print copy in the Gail Sher Collection, Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo (SUNY). “Cops” [excerpt read by Gail Sher at UCSD November 24, 1987]. Archive Newsletter: The Archive of New Poetry. San Diego: University of California, 99 �1987. 12-14. Print. “Cops” [excerpt]. Writing 18. Vancouver BC, Canada: 1987. Print. Ten poems. Gallery Works 7. Norwalk, CT: 1987. n.p. Print. “For Bart II.” Karamu, 10:2. Charleston, IL: Eastern Illinois Univeristy, 1987. 14-19. Print. “The Lanyard.” Notus: New Writing, 1:1. Ann Arbor: 1986. 13-21. Print. “For Bart.” Tramen, 4. San Francisco: 1985. n.p. Print. “Which Collateral Bends the Sea,” “Deft and Resilient.” Gallery Works 6. Bronx, NY: 1984. n.p. Print. Poems. Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 3:1. Buffalo: State University 0f New York, 1984. 84-88. Print. “From Another Point of View the Woman Seems To Be Resting.” Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 2:1, Buffalo: State University of New York, 1982. 9-11. Print. 100 �“Suppose deeply offers up.” Hambone 2. Santa Cruz, CA, 1982. 18-22. Print. “River the Office My Own,” “Lord and Give the Necklace Back.” Gallery Works 5. Bronx, NY: 1981. n.p. Print. Poems. Gnome Baker 7 & 8 (1981): n.p. [10 pages]. Print. Nine Pieces. Credences: A Journal of Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, New Series 1:1, Buffalo: State University of New York, 1981. 16-20. Print. 101 �Reading Gail Sher is set in Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in the spirit of the humanist typefaces of fifteenth-century Venice; it was released by Adobe Systems in 1990. Cover design: Bryan Kring � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reading Gail Sher Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- -- Criticism and interpretation Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Night Crane Press State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_068 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Language A language of the resource eng SherPublications https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/e4fc5b10f7233d9438f7d0ab3d9d9b71.jpg f91b42616a4f700f7836870dca80ede5 https://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/files/original/ac48e1b4ca1e15ed8385a0b00f7e3b8e.txt 194d3d76537d47238abfe80e4b7dbad6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gail Sher Collection Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Poetry -- United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011 Moving Image A series of visual representations that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poetry reading, September 30, 1982 Subject The topic of the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Description An account of the resource Gail Sher reads <em>From another point of view the woman seems to be resting</em>, (<em>As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem</em>, "Deft and Resilient", "At Length in Kit Beatitude", "To Cope On the urge Remark", "Which Collateral Bends the Sea", "Sends out Signs", and "Everything as She Knew." Norman Fischer and Sandra Meyer appeared on the program (but not on this excerpt). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sher, Gail, 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource State University of New York at Buffalo. Poetry Collection. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright Gail Sher and used with permission. Contact the <a href="http://library.buffalo.edu/pl/">Poetry Collection</a> for more information. <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">IN COPYRIGHT</a>. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Video Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LIB-PC011_071 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. 2016 Language A language of the resource eng Streaming Video Elements needed for streaming video for the VideoStream Plugin Video Filename Actual filename of the video on the video source server LIB-PC011_071 Video Type Encoding for the video; mp4, flv, mov, and so forth mp4 Video Source Source of video. Streaming server, YouTube, etc. Streaming server poetry poetry reading SherInterview