The Zen of Poetry, The Poetry of Zen

I stand here and watch the people of this world:
all against one and one against all,
angry, arguing, plotting and scheming.
Then one day, suddenly, they die.
And each gets one plot of ground:
four feet wide, six feet long.
If you can scheme your way out of that plot,
I'll set the stone that immortalizes your name.
—Han Shan, 8th century, translated by J.P. Seaton



The Poetry of Zen
Translated and edited by Sam Hamill and J.P Seaton
Shambhala, 2007.

A review.

This is an important anthology to have, right now, not only because it contains many poems new to readers familiar with either Zen or Asian poetics in general, but because this collection focuses the traditions of poetry through the lens of Zen Buddhism. The book contains fresh translations of a wide variety of Chinese and Japanese poems, respectively translated by Seaton and Hamill, both of whom are experienced translators of this material. Many of the poets included are not specifically Zen poets, or even Buddhist, but their poetry, the translators argue, contains the spirit of Zen. These are not didactic poems for the most part, poems that monks and abbots wrote as teaching literature; rather, included here are numerous poems that express the Zen moment, and the haiku moment, the moment of clarity, of clear light in the mind, that moment when poetry best expresses experience, and all other language fails.

The poets included range from those already associated with Zen, to many poets new and less familiar to even the knowledgeable reader. We find here Han Shan, Basho, Saigyo, Issa, Ryokan, Ikkyu, and Wang Wei. But we also find Li Po and Tu Fu, Yuan Mei, Su Tung-po, Dogen, and Sosei, among many others. The anthology begins with a few lines from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, which is appropriate, as Ch'an Buddhism, or Zen, arose in China from the encounter between Buddhism, brought from India, and the native Taoist ideas. Zen has always been more Taoist than Confucianist, more nature-inspired than bureaucratically-aligned.

What truly intrigues me about the poems Hamill and Seaton have brought to the table, however, is the overt demonstration of the paradox of using poetry to talk about the unspeakable. Basho insisted that poetry is a do, a tao, a Way; his insistence upon the Way, and its clarity, is one reason that some haiku scholars claim that haiku began and ended with Basho. (Issa is the exception that proves the rule.) A generous sampling of Hamill's lucid translations of Basho's haibun and haiku are present in this book, demonstrating again how central Zen study was to Basho's thinking.

The paradox itself lies in that realm between language and the inexpressible, between the realization of the clear mind in which all language falls away as one aspect of the illusory nature of reality, and the troublesome necessity of using language to convey the experience, to communicate it, to pass it on to others, to teach or demonstrate it.

Without beginning,
utterly without end,
the mind is born
to struggles and distresses,
and dies—and that is emptiness.
—Ikkyu Sojun, 15th century, trans. by Sam Hamill

This idea of emptiness and non-verbal silence in poetry is one I regularly find myself working with in my own poems, which often seem to hover on that edge where words become wordlessness. It is a central issue to my own work and thought about poetry, and I feel a kinship to these ancient poets in this anthology who have struggled with the same approaches, the same insights, and the same failures. So I am reading The Poetry of Zen in part as a discussion among poets about the limitations of words, about the limitations of their own art, and about the paradox of using words to talk about experiences that remain unsayable and essentially wordless. I believe this is a valid reading of this anthology because both Seaton and Hamill explicitly discuss the issue in their separate introductions to the Chinese and Japanese poetry sections.

In the general Preface to the anthology, furthermore, Hamill makes some very thoughtful points:

Since its inception, Zen has had a paradoxical relationship with literature, especially as regards translation and poetry. . . . The Buddha asked his disciples to translate his teachings into all the languages and dialects of his native India. Those teachings (sutras) contained allegorical tales, anecdotes, recorded conversations, and ritual verses. Even at the beginning of Buddhism, poetry was an essential aid to understanding.

Poetry was not only a didactic teaching tool. Like allegory, poetry was used as way of short-circuiting the usual habits of thinking by startling or shocking them into insight. The koan, or teaching paradox used in some varieties of Zen, is often highly poetic in nature if not always in form. The main thrust of Zen, though, is often anti-language. Many of the greatest Zen masters, such as Hui Neng, advocated "just sitting" as the central practice of attaining enlightenment. As Hamill continues:

Zen practice is eminently simple and profoundly rigorous. All the questions of being are called forth. There is no escape into faith. "In your heart, you already know." [Hui Neng] The tenth-century Zen master Pen-hsien reminded his followers not to depend too much on sutras or koan study. "If you really want to get to the truth of Zen, get it while walking, while standing, while sleeping or sitting . . . while working." Only then, he says, can one begin to define what doctrines are actually being followed.

There is a strain in contemporary poetry (strain is the right word, because the poetry produced often feels strained) that emphasizes the personality-ego "I" of the poet, and there is another strain that foregrounds (or privileges, to use the post-modern rhetoric) language itself. The latter tacitly claims to be anti-meaning and anti-narrative poetry, even aleatoric; the former tacitly argues for self-expression, self-depiction, and autobiography. Neither of these poetries seem to believe in any poetry but their own styles and coteries; both are profoundly inward-looking and ultimately self-regarding. In the end, both of them emphasize the personality-self in different ways, and both tacitly regard the poet herself or himself as heroic. The archetype of the lone hero-poet, a deeply post-Romantic image, runs rampant through most such strains of contemporary poetry. And the method and defense of these poetries has become highly intellectualized and argumentative.

In many ways The Poetry of Zen is the complete antagonist of these poetries; albeit a gentle antagonist, one that does not make manifestos or proclaim laws of poetics. Instead, many of the poems in The Poetry of Zen address the problems around the poetic ego obliquely, by pointing off towards ego-transcending alternatives. (Which have always been available, one notes; it's perhaps the dominance of the psychological narrative-insight coupled with the heroic-poet archetype in Western culture that has led us astray).

Now a cuckoo's song
carries the haiku master
right out of this world
—Matsuo Basho, 17th century, trans. by Sam Hamill

Who says my poems are poems?
They aren't poems at all.

Only when you understand my poems aren't poems
can we talk poetry.
—Ryokan, 18th century, trans. by Sam Hamill

This is a bracing tonic, that if genuinely absorbed by contemporary poets writing in English could completely change their goals and methods. The poetry of Zen is profoundly anti-egotistical and anti-rhetorical while having a deep understanding of the foibles of human psychology; it de-emphasizes the heroic ego and seeks "no-mind" in the sense that the mind's ceaseless self-regard might become still. It seeks to point at the moon, rather than talking about pointing at the moon. Hamill continues later on:

In the thirteenth century, Ch'ih-chueh observed, "The failure of the Zen path comes from teachers without deep attainment just setting forth sayings and showing off knowledge to capture students, and from students with no great aspiration just following popular fads and current customs, content to sink themselves in the domain of intellectual knowledge and verbiage. . . . The 'teachers' and 'students' bewitch each other." As regards "verbiage," Yueh-lin observed, "Ninety percent accuracy is not as good as silence."

These are provocative ideas. The comments about fads and customs, about intellectual knowledge and verbiage, strike me as highly relevant to the contemporary poetry scene(s), which is all about intellectual bewitchment. Yueh-lin's observation is directly relevant to aspiring poets, whose aim at targets of form, meaning, content, and style often miss the mark: Ninety percent accuracy is not as a good as silence.

On Running into the Taoist Master "In Emptiness"

So, say my way differs from yours.
We both have old men's hair and beards.
They say words can kill faith.
I like to arrange spring blossoms in a rough old funeral jar.
—Kuan Hsiu, 8th century, trans. by J.P. Seaton

Now we come to the paradox: If it can't be said in poetry, why bother to write at all? As Hamill phrases the question:

If the essence of Zen is not to be found in words, why so much poetry in the Zen tradition? The use of poetry goes back to the very roots of Indian traditions, as well as to Chinese roots. In the birth of Zen, two poems play a particularly important role. Shen-hsiu, the great Ch'an master of the Northern school, wrote a verse:

This body is the Bodhi tree.
The mind is like a bright mirror.
Polish it and keep it clean,
let no more dust settle there.

Hui Neng write a verse in reply:

There is no Bodhi tree.
No bright mirror exists.
Since all is emptiness,
where could a dust mote settle?

(This teaching story using poems to tell the truth of Zen has echoed down the centuries. John Cage retold a version of the story, for example, in his lecture-performance text Indeterminacy.)

Poetry often says what cannot be said in prose. It was used for argument, description, ceremony, memorialization, and some were even koans—"cases" for meditation. Poetry is most capable of capturing the essence of a moment's experience. Ninety-nine percent accuracy in poetry is not as good as silence. A good poem says more than the sum of its words, leading the reader into the practice of understanding the great unsaid that is contained, framed in a poem's rhythms, words, and silences. In these ways, poetry opens the mind. "The mind is Buddha!" Hui Neng declares. All of this makes poetry an excellent aid to practice. The same might be said of poetry in the Bible.

Here is the essence at last. Why do we pursue the Way of poetry knowing all along it will fail us? Why does the paradox of wordless wordiness continue to come into being?

Because poetry is most capable of capturing the essence of the momentary experience. Poetry often says what cannot be said in prose—or would take much longer to say. The paradox of poetry, not only Zen poetry although perhaps it takes a reading of Zen poetry to arrive at this insight, is that poetry is always "moves upon silence," as Yeats wrote in Long-Legged Fly. Poetry always contains in it an echo of silence, an awareness that there is a layer of silence somewhere in the poem, waiting for the voice to still itself and come to rest. A good poem is a synergy, a sum of more than its parts; its parts are words and images and language, but a poem transcends those elements to become an embodied experience: if the poem succeeds, the reader may inhabit the experience from the inside. That poetry opens the mind, that it leads to revelation and insight, is the core of Basho's belief that poetry is a Way in itself, a path to enlightenment.

This is the balance-point of the paradox. It is what, in my own poetry, I keep returning to, in attempt after attempt to scale the mountain wall of words to arrive at that paradoxical balance-point where words meet silence. The Zen of Poetry in its paperback edition is, fortunately, small enough in physical size that I may carry it with me on my journeys, and consult it regularly. I will no doubt continue to seek a poetry of silence, and this anthology of Zen poets will no doubt serve as a traveler's guide for the journey. (May it serve you as well. Nine bows!)

I return again and again to the edge where words melt into wordlessness. Why bother to write poetry at all? There remains in every poet a need to find a way to express the inexpressible, as worn-down and hollow as that way might be.

This poor grass-roofed hut
of old brushwood may sound
miserable, but
I very quickly found it
altogether suiting my taste.
—Saigyo, 12th century, trans. by Sam Hamill

Depth Charges

In his Fourth Letter to the young poet Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, in the Letters to a Young Poet:

Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.

Sam Hamill, writes in his essay A Poet's Place, from his essay collection A Poet's Work (Broken Moon Press, 1990):

When Marx declares "the bourgeoisie has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, and the man of science into paid servants," he is wrong only in regard to the true poet. Even in Marx's lifetime, the patronization of poetry on any significant level was nonexistent. Even then, poets existed outside the comfortable drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. By the Age of Marx, the poet has become a religious heretic, one who believes in divine inspiration and its revelatory powers, one who believes, indeed, that all religions are one, and that the revelations that serve as the roots of religion are in fact expressions of the poetic experience. Or, as [Octavio] Paz says, that “religion is the poetry of mankind.”

In the twentieth century, we see such poets as Rilke, Yeats, Eliot and H.D. becoming immersed in hermetic studies, in explorations of comparative religions; we find Rexroth schooling himself deeply in all the world’s major religions, and especially in Buddhism and Gnosticism; we find Robert Duncan’s explorations of the Talmudic tradition and Gary Snyder’s search for the continuous thread that leads from primitive shamanism up through the ages into materialist culture.

This search for origins, for ancestry, is the search for a sense of place in a culture which has no means for justification of the spiritual exercise of divine revelation. The poet returns to tribal culture and gathers a few initiates into the spiritual community, into the secret society of poetry.

I identify with Snyder’s search for “the continuous thread.” I have undertaken a similar search myself, beginning at a very young age:

It is 7th Grade at Tappan Junior High School in Ann Arbor, MI; I am 13 years old. In my Civics class that year, I discovered for the first time how the Christian holiday festivities I had taken for granted my whole life were borrowed or stolen from existing pre-Christian holidays, such as the Roman festival of Saturnalia, and the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Yule or Tannenbaum trees. This was revelatory: I realized at that age that all religious practices have a timeline of historical development. Later on, in graduate school, reading David Lowenthal's book The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), I came to realize that every tradition is an invented tradition. In fact, I realized that in this 7th Grade Civics class, in our weeks-long unit on comparative religion; but I was unable to articulate it clearly until I had read Lowenthal, years later.

Some insights sink into the bone, even before you have words to express them: and that is what poetry is for. Some things are best expressed in poetry, and song.

That same year, in that religious studies unit of that same Civics class, I read for the first time Huston Smith's classic of comparative religious studies, The Religions of Man. I had spent the first half of my childhood in southern India: I was the only person in my Civics class who had seen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam being practiced at first hand, in my presence. I had a feel for comparative religion that my classmates didn't share; I think my teacher recognized it, though, because in retrospect I believe she encouraged me to go further with my studies than most of my classmates did.

I also at that time began to read a classic anthology of spiritual literature: The Choice Is Always Ours, ed. by Dorothy Phillips, Elizabeth Howes and Lucille Nixon (originally published in the middle of the 20th Century; there is in print a 1989 unabridged reprint from HarperCollins). This tremendous anthology contains large excerpts, organized thematically, of spiritual, religious, and psychological literature. Looking back, I am sure that this book was my first introduction to the writings and sayings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Gustav Jung, Meister Eckhart, Sheila Moon, and many other writers I now view as central to my education: my mentors. I had already read Moon’s young-adult novel, Knee Deep In Thunder, which is based on the Navajo creation myths—which Moon had also written a nonfiction study of, from a poet’s and Jungian’s perspective—and I had already started reading and studying all I could find about the Navajo (Dineh) people. The Choice Is Always Ours became for me both a guide and index for who I needed to go search and read in more depth, and a kind of a substitute bible. Since bible essentially means a collection of books, I began at that time to collect together my own books, into my own personal ur-bible. I still keep a collection of books, only it is very much larger now; but there is a small subset of books I keep on hand to read, and reread, and a few of which I always take with me when I travel.

All this information about religion was revelatory to me. It began my life-long tendency to Question Authority. It was the beginning of my understanding that life is always more rich and complex than you believe it to be. It began a life-long study of the history of ideas. It was also the beginning of the end of my unthinking devotion to the faith of my parents, who were rationalistic Lutherans. (Lutherans tend to be pragmatic; they largely don't believe in mysticism. They are devoted to improving the quality of life of this world, in fact the reason I grew up in India was because my father was a doctor who spent ten years doing medicine, and teaching it, in India, sponsored by the Lutheran Church in America.) This was the time of my life I began to realize that I was a mystic, although, again, I did not have the language to describe it at that time. I had already been seeing visions of other levels of reality, which were largely ignored or dismissed by the rationalist branch of Lutheranism that was the norm of the church my parents attended. (The pastor at our church in Ann Arbor was personally very supportive of me, but he didn’t pretend to understand me.) We had a lot of college people, professors and staff, at that church. We had a terrific church choir, because the choir director was also a choir director at the University of Michigan. I sang in that choir out of the pleasure of singing, for several years after I had lost all faith in Christianity. This time, when I was age 13, was when I began to lose that childhood faith. By the time I finished confirmation studies, at age 15, and was confirmed, I no longer considered myself any species of ordinary Christian. Everyday Christianity could no longer fulfill my needs, and no longer spoke to me rationally or theologically.

What I did understand, at age 13, and what I was able to articulate to myself, even then, was that all the existing religions had forerunners: None of them had sprung out of whole cloth, in the fixed forms in which they now existed. None had sprung forth fully formed, by divine fiat. They had all evolved. All of them had accrued cultural habits of practice that may or may not have been true to their original revelations. (Go look up why Catholics eat fish on Friday: the reason for that is nowhere in the Bible.) I began a quest of study for myself, at age 13, to search for what I then formulated as “the original religion.” I formulated this, even at that time, as the spiritual revelations, experiences, and sacred technologies that underlie all the world’s existing religious institutions. I set about to study religions almost as an anthropologist would, and within 3 or 4 years of reading, felt I had found something of an answer to my quest. Others had made the same search before me, and written about it:

My search for the original religions led me, eventually, to shamanism, what Mircea Eliade in his groundbreaking academic study of shamanism termed archaic techniques of ecstasy. Shamanism, I discovered, was ecumenical: it exists, or existed, in every cultural stream, in every civilization or tradition, in every culture, worldwide. Shamanism is a spiritual technology, not a religion. You can be a practicing member of any of the dominant organized religions, and still be a shaman. Shaman deal with the divine, or its helper spirits, directly, on many levels. Shaman tend to be pantheistic, or panentheistic. As a Tungus shaman once told an anthropologist: Everything that is, is alive. This is what I discovered, in my religious studies, as the best candidate for ‘the oldest religion”—even though, technically, it’s not a religion, but a set of near-universal ecstatic practices, trance states, ecopoetry, and pharmacology. Shamanism is everywhere, even if it has been subsumed by later ritual practices, or condemned by later orthodoxies. Shamanism is universal, and heterodox. And shamanism, as are all spiritual technologies, is a form of pragmatic or practical mysticism. This is the worldview I have come to subscribe to, more deeply than any other.

So, my somewhat precocious search for the roots of religion led me eventually to mysticism—which, in its depths, is the same as poetry. Poetry for me remains a taproot to the divine. I am a poetic heretic in this rational, language-based day and age, and I proudly admit it: for me, poetry at its best is never about just the mind or intellect, never about playing word games, never about intellectual puzzlery, never about academic theorizing. Poetry at its best, for me, is revelatory, divine, deep, resonant, spiritual, evocative, concretely imagistic, and, yes, inspired. I find most modern poetry, with its focus on self-conscious self-revelation—the celebration of the self—to be shallow. Even poems I admire, but poets I admire, in this modern age, lack spiritual depth. I agree with Gary Snyder when he says, As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. I agree with this sentence; my artistic inspirations are paleolithic as often as they are modern, and they intermingle with each other, with complex, fractal edges. As a poet, I am of this paleolithic, ancient tradition, as well.

So: All my life, poetry has been my mysticism, and mysticism has been my religion. I subscribe to no creed favored by established, organized religions. (I prefer what you might call disorganized religions.) Yet I do find wisdom and truth in the creeds of all the world’s great religions. I find great poetry in their wisdom traditions. I have felt it to be true, since I was a boy, that at their hearts, in their depths, at their roots, all the world’s great religions have an essentially similar mystical experience, of Union with the Divine. The differences between the religions, I feel, grow out of their local languages, customs, and beliefs—those local systems of mythology that color perception of the Undescribable. At their cores, all of the religions speak of similar things; and it is most remarkable how the mystical teachings and writings, of all these diverse religions, all depict some very similar, even identical, wisdom teachings.

And, just as it was for many of those poets, artists, and musicians, who I deeply admire and emulate, and who I view as my mentors, creativity is my spiritual practice. And Frederick Franck has said, Art is a Way.

Punctuation & Pedantry

I've been called on the carpet two or three times this past week, for not using "proper rules" of punctuation and capitalization in some recent poems, including the one just posted here, on the topic of Samhain. Once or twice the objection has been made on the grounds of purism: the purist adherence to grammar, punctuation, and capitalization rules. But, as I've said before: Poetry is not prose, and does not need to strictly follow rules of prose construction.

Another objection to my use of full punctuation without capital letters in the poem for Samhain, is that "it doesn't look right." But this devolves to a matter of taste, as using capital letters in this form I have developed, the five-line fractal poem, looks wrong to my eye. This style now seems natural to this form.

Punctuation is another tool of style, and can be used artfully and with internal logic in support of the poem. (Like all tools of craft, which are in service to the poem.) There are lots of poems I like that use only minimal punctuation: to indicate breaths, or breaks, or pauses, or shifts and turns, as in musical notation. There are plenty of successful poems that use punctuation quite experimentally. If you end with a period, the poem can come to full stop; but if you end with something else, or with no punctuation, sometimes that's how you can get the poem to lift off into flight. It's a way of indicating the story continues, and life goes on, even after the poem is done being read.

I have little use for totally traditional, gramattically-correct punctuation usage—unless the poem seems to call for it. I have little use for a complete lack of punctuation—unless the poem's style calls for it. I write employing both extremes of the punctuation spectrum, depending on what the poem seems to want, and in all variations in between. For me, it's all about matching the poem's form and style to its contents, tone of voice, mood, length of breath. I like to play with punctuation, and see what's appropriate to the poem.

I think the idea that there is one hard and fast rule about punctuation (or other elements of craft) is misleading, and probably harmful as well as false. Again: poetry is not required to follow all the rules of prose grammar. Why? Because is not prose.

Punctuation may be used to indicate pauses in reading a poem out loud. Sam Hamill, poet and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, has described a sequence of duration of pauses in poetry performance, using punctuation. Essentially this is musical notation. Hamill describes punctuation as marking the duration of breath-pauses, from short to long: comma, semicolon, colon, dash, ellipse, period, line end, stanza break, strophe. This is a potentially useful system, and since it exists in parallel to the traditional rules of grammar, it is complementary rather than contradictory.

The argument is then made: You have to know the rules in order to break them. You have to know what you're doing!

The problem I have with this argument is the constant harping on formal grammatical and syntactical rules that many poet-critics insist that poetry must use. Without excusing sloppiness in craft, I frequently feel as if this insistence on "correct" punctuation is like focusing on the moss on the trees, and ignoring the forest. It seems as if this attitude forgets that poetry is a different, perhaps looser medium, than prose: condensed language; heightened speech; intensified reportage.

This opinion on my part is reinforced by the critiques I get, correcting me as if I was ignorant, whenever I do something unusual with punctuation. I am not a beginner-poet, although I do my best to retain "beginner's mind" when undertaking creative acts. Experimentation is often mistaken for error, even by those who one might nobly expect to know better. For example, I recently posted a poem that ends in a colon, with a specific, intended effect; although one critique seemed to get what I was doing, many other comments focused on that one (innovative?) punctuation element to the point of obsessiveness, ignoring everything else about the poem.

Hence, I restate my original position on this point: how you employ craft elements such as punctuation depends entirely on what you're trying to do with the poem, in the poem, for the poem. Every case is different, so it's hard for me to subscribe to general rules when I see so many valid exceptions. While I agree in principle that it's wise to know the rules before you set about breaking them, I would also point out (an opinion based on experience and observation) that so much emphasis on knowing the rules before one breaks them, almost guarantees that no-one will think to break them. Such over-emphasis can build a barrier in the poet's mind against imagining the very possibility of exploration. I'm all for internalizing the rule-sets that go with various skill-sets, but after they're internalized, I'm all for going for that level of mastery where one doesn't have to think about them all the time, either. The great haiku master Basho said: Abide by the rules, then throw them out!—only then may you achieve true freedom. A wise dictum.

At this point, I find myself thinking again of Thoreau's comments on pedantry. I mislike pedantry about the rules of language, and I mislike the rules themselves whenever they are used as a bludgeon rather than in support of the work. It is all too common to use the rules as a bludgeon on beginnners, who in some cases may choose to rebel out of some anti-authoritarian backlash. I still think it will come down to what the poet wants to do with the language, and to what is appropriate and necessary for any given poem. All languages continue to change and evolve, as long as humans still speak them. Only dead languages are completely fixed. So, the rules will continue to change, possibly even in your own lifetime. To demand that all poems be in the same punctuational style, even from the same poet, would be an example of taking a good idea to an extreme.

I realize that I am spiraling around arguments I've already made, and I risk repeating myself verbatim. The truth is, it keeps coming up, for the reasons I already mentioned: critiques of poetry that assume that experimentation is error, rather than intentional. As long as the pedants argue for purist formalism, the counter-argument needs to be made for exploratory freedom. The tools of writing are themselves neutral: it is what we do with them that matters.