100th Monkey Books

Poetic Evocation & Reveries



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Archipelago
Arthur Sze (1995) 86pages

By turns spiritual and imaginative, meditative and active, Arthur Sze's new poems are inspired in part by the famous Zen garden at Ryoanji where fifteen stones are set in a sea of raked gravel and each stone - or in this case, each poem - is seen only within the context of a larger interdependence. Imbued with the spirit of Zen, Archipelago harnesses the power of silence in order to reveal what Chuang Tzu called "the third unspoken thing," the unnameable that binds the imaginative to the physical world. Here, pachinco parlors exist comfortably alongside Hopi kachina dolls, Rinzai monks carry fax machines, and images from Los Alamos contrast with an afternoon mushroom hunt. Through visionary juxtaposition and passionate attentiveness, Sze draws also from his own Chinese-American heritage, including his work as a translator of classical Chinese poetry, and from a decade of teaching and learning at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He weaves a fabric that is richly informed and clearly envisioned, a poetry no one else could have written. (Copper Canyon)



The Candle of Vision
A.E. (George Russell) (1918) 103pages

When I am in my room looking upon the walls I have painted I see there reflections of the personal life, but when I look through the windows I see a living nature and landscapes not painted by hands. So, too, when I meditate I feel it in the images and thoughts which throng about me the reflections of personality, but there are also windows in the soul through which can be seen images created not by human but by the divine imagination. I have tried according to my capacity to report about the divine order and to discriminate between that which came from a higher sphere. These retrospects and meditations are the efforts of an artist and poet to relate his own vision to the vision of the seers and writers of the sacred books, and to discover what element of truth lay in those imaginations. - from the author's Preface (Prism Press, 1990)



A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry
Edited by J.P.Seaton & Dennis Maloney (1994) 200pages

The poetry in this anthology is the poetry of humans, not dine beings or even of divines. A few of the poets are known to history as Zen Masters, all are clearly seekers of release of themselves and for others. For all of them the poems are, as maybe poems should always be, purified expressions of a consciousness that any, having seen, will be led toward. it appears, nonetheless - and the paradox is a hallmark of Zen - also very a poetry of the human condition, a poetry by and for everyone. There is sorrow as well as joy. There is desire as well as acceptance...it is not wrong to say that Ch'an poetry contains no metaphor: it is the song of phenomena. The mountain is the mountain; the river is the river. A rock in Han San, a rock in Yuan Mei, is a rock in the world. Bite it at your peril. Sit in its shade when the sun shines hot on the mountain top. Yet, in a paradoxical Way, all Zen poetry, each and all Zen poems taken together, becomes a single metaphor. Nature, remade real (for your convenience the cart takes another shape) in the words of the poem, encompassed in the purified consciousness, is metaphor for our natures, which are not separate. The moon that shines from all waters is one moon. So many bright moons as the clouds clear away: a single light. Set your boat adrift here, in the midst of it. - from the Introduction by J.P. Seaton (White Pine)



The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
David Whyte (1994) 337pages

The Heart Aroused will look at the link between soul and creativity, success and failure, efficiency and malaise at work, but it sets as its benchmark not the fiscal success of the work or the corporation (though this certainly can be good for the soul), but the journey and experience of the human spirit and the repressed but unflagging desire to find a home in the world. It is written not only to meet the ancient human longing for meaning in work, but also in celebration of the natural human irreverence for work's authoritarian, all encompassing dominance of our present existence. Preservation of the soul means the preservation at work of humanity and sanity (with all the well-loved insanities that human sanity requires). Preservation of the soul means the palpable presence of some sacred otherness: God, the universe, destiny, life, or love. - from the author's 1st chapter (Currency/Doubleday)



I Don't Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei
Translated from the Chinese by J.P. Seaton (1997) 109pages

There is an old Chinese saying, "The Three Ways are One." Western students of Chinese culture often find the saying a fine example of the supposed "inscrutability" of the Chinese. Confucianism is famous for its artificiality and its inflexibility. Taoism is admired for its mystical naturalism and its emphasis on spontaneity. The two are joined perhaps, only in their rejection of the supernatural, and through that rejection they are both apparently at odds with institutional Buddhism. The reduction of the paradox is made possible, and even necessary, in Chinese worldview by the presence of the overarching influence of the concepts of Yin and Yang. The harmonious balance of action and inaction, creative and nurturing forces, of the pragmatic and the imaginative - embodied in the graphic symbol of the T'ai Chi - is the underlying image of perfection in nature, in society, and in the individual consciousness within traditional Chinese culture. Yuan Mei the man, and the poet, offers a perfect embodiment of the ideal...Yuan Mei's poems resolve the paradox. They find beauty and truth in the smallest, and in the greatest, of nature's phenomena. They find the spontaneous enjoyment in the small delights and the little challenges offered every human by every day. They demonstrate an ability to find moral meaning in mere phenomena that denies convincingly the necessity of a supernatural sanction for human existence. This ability arises precisely at the intersection of practical social commitment and ethical concern of the Confucian with the disciplined attention and humane spirit of the practitioner of Zen. The poems offered here in translation are the artifacts of a life given form by the Three Ways made One. It was a life lived to the fullest, and observed and reproduced in witty and graceful poems meant to be shared widely. - from the translator's Introduction (Copper Canyon)



Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Jane Hirshfield (1997) 228pages

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry's knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other. This book is an attempt to understand more fully that particular mode of comprehension. It is an exploration of some of the pathways words take toward meaning, and an effort to investigate poetry's gestures and conduct, to map a part of the terrain where it lives. To think consciously about the distinctive forms of poetry's perceptive speech isn't necessary before participating in the activity and grace of poetic mind - that mind and its music comes first. Still, in trying to understand the ways a poem may carry itself into comprehension and beauty, I have always found an added resonance and pleasure. Here, as elsewhere in life, attentiveness only deepens what it regards. Yet I hope that present in this book are not only ideas about the art of poetry and its workings, but also some part of my gratitude, respect, and wonder at the mysterious informing it offers to all who pass through its gate. - from the author's Preface (Harper Perennial)



On Poetic Imagination and Reverie: Selections from Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard (1971) 112pages

A compendium of excerpts from his poetics of Air, Water, Earth, Fire, and Space; selected, translated and introduced by Colette Gaudin.
Imagination is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images. - Gaston Bachelard (Spring,1998)



The Rose Window and Other Verse from New Poems (Bilingual Edition)
Rainer Maria Rilke (1907/8) Selected & Illustrated by Ferris Cook (1997) 149pages

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague and died in 1926 in Switzerland. Rilke developed a rich poetic style characterized by striking symbolism and visual imagery, and is generally regarded as the greatest lyric poet of modern Germany. Most of New Poems was written in Paris, where Rilke admired and was influenced by, Rodin. The Rose Window and Other Verse from New Poems is a selection of poetry taken from New Poems, published in two parts: the first in December, 1907 and the second in August 1908. (Bulfinch Press)



Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o
Translated from the Chinese by Burton Watson (1994) 145pages

Poetry was for the Sung gentleman, even more than for his predecessor in the T'ang, a part of everyday life, a normal medium for expressing his thoughts and feelings on any subject he chose. The work of Su Shih (1037-1101), the greatest of the Sung poets, more commonly known by his literary name, Su Ting-p'o, well illustrates these qualities...The Chinese literary tradition, particularly in poetry, grew by feeding upon itself...A good poet was expected to draw aptly and skillfully upon the works of his predecessors, thereby a richness of association to his diction. But a great one had to have such complete mastery of the tradition that he could at the same time express his own thoughts freely and naturally, and could advance and enrich the tradition in some way, adding new depth and nuance. This Su Tung-p'o did... My selection consists of 112 poems, plus the two prose poems and the excerpt from a letter mentioned above, which I have arranged in chronological order and divided into five parts for the sake of convenience. I have naturally chosen poems which I like and which I think go well into English. At the same time, I have tried to suggest the breath of forms used and subjects treated by the poet, and to convey something of his distinctive personality. - from the translator's Introduction (Copper Canyon Press)



The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien
Translated by David Hinton (1993) 92pages

T'ao Ch'ien (365-427 A.D.), equally well-known by his given name, T'ao Yuan-ming, stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting. Although the Shih Ching (Classic of Poetry) and Ch'u Tz'u (Songs of the South) are ancient beginnings of the Chinese tradition, T'ao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which all major Chinese poets inherited and make their own...T'ao Ch'ien dwelled in the Great Transformation (ta-hua) , earth's process of change in which whatever occurs comes "of itself" ( tzu-jan: literally "self-so," hence "natural" or "spontaneous")...The language T'ao created perfectly mirrors the life he created. He crafted an authentic human voice, and its simple, unassuming surface reveals a rich depth.- from the translator's Introduction (Copper Canyon Press)


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