the de-struct-ed poem, whose cement
vies for wholedom,
its un-liver-ed masonry depleted as
bones ran out of
bone to break song with song with
song as much as
the eye stains the gullible pen as much
as the pool of
ink stutters did it matter then as it
doesn’t now?
Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins
And the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright:
Branches weep as the forest perches
Mournful cadences, remote and clear.
from ‘Sadness of the Gorges’
1.
I take the wooden chimes, breathe in the salt of an ancient wine, prepare for flight, wary of a few wayward ants gnawing at the base of my poems, as if their ghosts were larger than their pretense.
—
The rocks are steep, the path turns off course.
When the evening chimes send off the departing guest
The notes I count drop from the farthest sky.
from “And Excursion to the Dragon Pool Temple on Chung-nan”
2.
The loud screech mulls what is possible: could the lament be more careful and could the wine see more than what the ink allows?
—
The wind which roams without design
Cleanses of passion’s transient strife.
from “Stopping on a Journey at the East Water Pavilion at Lo-ch’eng”
3.
It is not strife that leaves its mark but the bluntness of the unsheathed sword. We can tell this by the stained parchment’s lonely strains.
—
These times, the traveler’s heart
Is a flag a hundred feet high in the wind.
from “On Mount Ching”
4.
I grit my teeth amidst the ice-mountain and the fire-sea, and what do I see but the wind sawing through the grain of my lost poems.
—
Who will say that the inch of grass in his heart
Is gratitude enough for all sunshine of spring?
from “Wanderer’s Song”
5.
Night is not just possible, it is dread. And day is the mere blight of sun that wore itself down in a hurry to meet the impending made possible, made true in the image of night.
—
Note: All five excerpts are taken from A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late Tang.
I have long been entertaining the possibility of somehow tying together the three areas: poems, social justice and data visualization. It has been tricky, but here is my first attempt.
The 10 poems by Audre Lorde and Muriel Rukeyser (wellsprings of poetic sensibility) are intended to provide context for the accompanying data visualization on gender (using data from genderstats.un.org). This is intended in a tangential and somewhat disruptive way. Data for indicators in the development world is mostly presented in a cut and dried way. Add to that their lumping together in neat categories and the bobbing up and down of pretty graphs and charts, and you end up euphemizing the underlying reality. The technical brilliance on display then serves as spectacle. That of course does not take away from the fact that the underlying numbers have been painstakingly collected and systematically organized. And these numbers are pretty much the only authoritative ones that map the reality that social activists use to change the world.
Hence the poems as corrective.
the allowable burn has its own topology, the forbidden its own – ash then becomes
trajectory manufactured as solace, the green greet of a nonindulgent poesy – what
burns now, the tangent or its numbered whole? an open space is permission to suffer
or perhaps the inkling of withheld balm – what need kills my whet & stuns my why
ordinarily, pejoratively, oblivious to the whole ? three tangents dance perpendicular –
if I operate minimally, do I enforce closure? do the rapids teach wind a nonrepentant
quietitude? does the whole unwind when its parts scream out for recompense? and does
the physics of atomic unwholes descend as humans do, part license, part vicissitude?
the regenerative ways of subservient error
a history of consequence error as anchor that
drives the molten sky error as the whether,
the or deciding to be thus and and – undoing
the fount of each query is the unquestion,
particle of, rentier of the perennially mutable
triteness of being – the anti-nihil poemsaying noto
no we pen our quatrains as we love our polite
inknesses we allow the sunspeak to speaksong
Gathering just-a-bit-o moss 