Poetry ABCs

[Saffron]

Xuan -- the mysterious quality that makes poetry to be poetry.

Tom, where did you find the above info? I read the link you included with your post. I'd like to read more about the concept/idea Xuan. If you have a source to point me to, I'd appreciate it.


Jackie
P.S. And I thought X was going to be difficult! We are doing great!

[Thomas Hood]

Xuan -- the mysterious quality that makes poetry to be poetry.

Tom, where did you find the above info? I read the link you included with your post. I'd like to read more about the concept/idea Xuan. If you have a source to point me to, I'd appreciate it.


Jackie

Jackie -- how did I earn this revelation? -- I'd like to point you to a clear, simple introduction to xuan, but don't know of anything better than Lu Ji's Wen Fu. The short quote I gave is from Macleish's Poetry and Experience.

Because Chinese is rich in homonyms, and there could be hundreds of distinct words pronounced 'xuan' ( 'x' is pronounced like 'sh'; I don't pronounce Chinese, but apparently xuan is pronounced like 'shwan' to rhyme with 'tan'.) it's important to see the character:

Xuan: 玄

To see the Chinese character, you may need to enable UTF-8 on your browser by clicking on View, then Encoding, then UTF-8.

That is xuan, radical 96. Xuan is mystery, the dark, obscure, allusive, outline in a fog, the suggested as opposed to the explicit, ethereal, spiritual, ghostly, hidden parallel. Xuan is the quality of the Chinese classics -- Yi Jing and Dao De Jing. The Great Mystery Classic (太玄經, tai xuan jing) is Yang Xiong's explication of xuan, and Michael Nylan's translation is usually on my desk, but it is not an introductory text. Unless you are willing to delve into Chinese correlative thinking, the best introduction may be Lu Ji's Wen Fu.

In Lu Ji’s preface, he himself said that -- “Perhaps it will one day be said that I have written something of substance, something useful, that I have entered the Mystery.”

Translations:
1. Most of Achilles Fang's translation of Lu Ji's Wen Fu is in the Google Book

The New Directions anthology of classical Chinese poetry
By Eliot Weinberger, *William Carlos Williams*

2.

http://www.humanistictexts.org/luchi.htm

3.

http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/w ... /LuChi.htm
Lu Chi's Wen Fu: The Art of Writing (circa A.D. 300)

About Lu Ji
http://www.answers.com/topic/lu-chi

I have not found the Chinese text of the Wen Fu on the Internet, and it is definitely needed because, as I judge from conflicting section headings, the translators have taken liberties.

Tom

[Thomas Hood]

I tried to look-up Rednuhtetum.

Well, since we are considering xuan, Rednuhtetum is an anatomical euphemism. Think rosebud.

Tom

[Saffron]

Thanks, Tom. Your post on Xuan was very helpful and I could see the Chinese characters.

[Saffron]

Y

We are just about at the end of the alphabet. What should we do with the last few days of April? Numbers, colors, themes?

[Saffron]

Yellow Bowl
by Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

Note to self: Jackie, I think you have a thing for fruit with your poetry.

[MaryLupin]

Half-Season by Simone Yoyotte

I
Embarrassed cold
in that splendid time when I was naked
I think about saying

far from there
from feet to head
THE SONOROUS SHADOW

Cries
like the seagull
I’m afraid of those eyes

atonal desire
for the first roots

II
to J._M.
living comet on the peak
such a one
who likewise plunges
does not possess the source of pleasure
I was
like the rocks
an extra immanent
truncated
evil-minded
but the murmuring makes me change
place and ink
to my own measure
like
a liquid
weight that obsesses me
finds its way in a dream
and turns

translated from the French by Myrna Bell Rochester from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology

[Thomas Hood]

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
Here upon Earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving East
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
upon those underlands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travellers in the Westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
of evening widen and steal on

And deepen in Palmyra's street
The wheel-rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

-- Archibald MacLeish

I don't know why I like Macleish. Maybe it is because he is so ordinary he's a nostalgic reminder of the way things might have been. I'll leave Yeats to someone else.

Tom

[Saffron]

Z

And now what???

[Thomas Hood]

Zilpha Marsh

AT four o’clock in late October
I sat alone in the country school-house
Back from the road ’mid stricken fields,
And an eddy of wind blew leaves on the pane,
And crooned in the flue of the cannon-stove
With its open door blurring the shadows
With the spectral glow of a dying fire.
In an idle mood I was running the planchette—
All at once my wrist grew limp,
And my hand moved rapidly over the board,
Till the name of “Charles Guiteau” was spelled,
Who threatened to materialize before me.
I rose and fled from the room bare-headed
Into the dusk, afraid of my gift.
And after that the spirits swarmed—
Chaucer, Cæsar, Poe and Marlowe,
Cleopatra and Mrs. Surrat—
Wherever I went, with messages,—
Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed.
You talk nonsense to children, don’t you?
And suppose I see what you never saw
And never heard of and have no word for,
I must talk nonsense when you ask me
What it is I see!
-- Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology