National Poetry Month

[telophase]

Lemming-like, I post.

I was trying to decide what poem to post, and thought about some of my favorites, which tend to be florid, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, or melancholy, like Shelley's Ozymandias, and melancholy is not a place I like to go at one in the morning when I'm about to go to bed, since it leads to staring at the ceiling half the night, thinking depressing thoughts.

SO I'm going for something that's a hell of a lot lighter, from one of the books I've got out of the library: Robert van Gulik's Sexual Life in Anceint China. For the prurient-minded of you out there all of you, there's a lot of cultural detail; it's not entirely sex. And this being publsihed in 1961, van Gulik's got a distressing tendency to drop into Latin or just leave a coy note of "Not translated" when it comes to some pssages in the sex manuals of the Sui and T'ang Dynasties. But he also quotes poetry - one can hardly write about China and Japan wihtout quoting poetry, since it seems to have been the major form of literary expression for three thousand years.

This one is from the Shih-ching, or "Book of Odes," one of the Five Confucianist Classics, and is very old, dating back to 1000BC or earlier. It seems, much like the earliest Western texts, to be a recording of oral songs and poems.

This particular one is from the early period of CHinese history, according to Gulik - it's in the chapter titled "Early Period and Former Chou Dynasty: ca. 1500-771 BC." It is a song about a spring festival, where young men and women courted each other and snuck off into the bushes together. It seems that festivals of this sort were mostly matchmaking things, where men and women would pair off and court, and if the woman proved pregnant by fall, it would conclude in a marriage.

The peony is a traditional image referring to female sexuality.

The rivers Chên and Wei,
See their waters rising!
Boys and girls
Carry armfuls of orchids.
The girls ask: "Did you look there?"
The boys answer: "We are just back,
But shall we go again?
For on the other bank of the Wei,
There is a lovely field!"
The boys and girls
There assemble for their sporting,
And a peony is the gage.

The rivers Chên and Wei,
See how clear their waters!
Boys and girls
Carry baskets filled with flowers.
The girls ask: "Did you look there?"
The boys answer: "We are just back,
But shall we go again?
For on the other bank of the Wei,
There is a lovely field!"
The boys and girls
There assemble for their sporting,
And a peony is the gage.

Comments

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

because you're so great & you posted poetry (my life!) and i swear you've turned me onto a new hobby (srsly, going to buy more perfumeystuffies when i get paid), i'm going to share with you one of my favourite pieces of poetry.


Godzilla Dreamed of a Man Planting Rice
Jay Snodgrass

Who rose, all day bent double, to see
the flash of the Hiroshima bomb.
All day the drone of decoy bombers
Set fire to the cities, while he went on

Planting rice. I believe it was a moment
for which the man felt nothing, his feet
wet, his back bent permanently
from bending, pushing seedlings
into mud through the reflection of his

Face framed by the sky, green in the patty
the clouds still white, still passing
above him, or below him. It didn't matter.
It was just a flash and a sudden wind to him.
He could hear the sound of singing in the distance.

I don't know much about madness
but that it lives in the body like a harp string,
beside the heart, makes it painful to move.
That bowing your body towards madness
gices slack to it, but also,

Changes the note, Maybe I have dreamed
of a dead man, who I have buried
Inside me so that I can listen until
I hear the sound of a distant note
through the drad brances of my skull.

I wonder if it is possible
to give music to the dead, to watch over them
with statue eyes, until they are finished
with their work.

-After Larry Levis