I think I'll read some small little poems.
There's a marvelous poet, who is a Japanese poet,
whose name is Issa who lived at the time of Wordsworth.
And Issa wrote poems mainly that were haikus.
Haikus are beginning to be written now in the United
States for the first time, and it's a marvelous thing,
because most of the emotions that we
have are very short and swift.
And that's the advantage of a haiku.
It's only three lines long.
It's only 17 syllables long.
So the Japanese poets don't have to have an emotion
as long as a sonnet, as long as Paradise Lost.
They can have tiny emotions and make poems out of those.
But in the United States, where we respect Paradise Lost,
and all of that sort of thing.
When I was in college, I had the impression
that the way they judge poems is by their length.
You just measure them.
And an important poem, you know, a poem was at least 14 lines
long, was that was the form.
And a significant poem was at least 70 lines long.
An important poem would be 200 or 300 lines long.
A great poem, at least 500.
You couldn't remember 500.
So the Japanese don't think about that way at all.
Issa wrote nothing, really, but these small, little poems,
and they're considered all to be great.
One of his little poems that I love the best was he
was wandering around one day in his little house, a very
poor man with no maids to come and clean up,
and his bed was full of fleas and things of that nature.
As Jonathan Winters says, "Crocodiles and things
of that nature."
And he saw a cricket in there.
And he was going to go to sleep.
He wrote this little poem, "Cricket, be careful,
I'm rolling over."
[LAUGHTER]
And everybody laughs when you read a haiku,
and even the Japanese laughed.
But one of the reasons you laugh is that it's a little funny,
but also you laugh out of astonishment,
that how much unselfishness was in Issa to make
him think of the cricket that way.
It's this little shoot of unselfishness coming out
from him, like a light ray that's so surprising.
And another time, oh, yes, he had some fleas in his bed
one night, and he wrote another little poem for them.
"Fleas, oh, yes, for you, too, the night
is probably just as long, long, long."
And he saw, one time.
Oh yes, this poem about the flies is marvelous.
"Don't kill the fly.
Don't you see him there, wringing his hands,
wringing his feet?"
So how many people, how many poets,
have seen a fly washing his hands
with his little black feet?
And no one ever thought that he was begging for mercy
until Issa came along.
So and here's another wonderful poem.
It goes like this.
"One human being, one fly, in the large sitting room."
That's got a little punch, too.
Because what he is saying.
You know, people say, don't you believe in the dignity of man?
And he is saying, yes, of course the man, human beings,
are very important, just as important as the fly.
Flies are not unimportant either,
just as important as a human being.
So therefore, if you have a fly and a human being in a room,
there's two.
And this is not really unusual.
Or whether-- we can't say it that way.
We have to say that he used his forms to express ideas.
He was a devout Buddhist.
And for a Buddhist, all preachers
are divine and not to be killed, because there
is something in them.
Gary Snyder and I gave a reading at Houston a few days ago,
for a bunch of 6,000 English teachers, to be exact.
And then we gave a benefit reading at El Paso
two nights ago, which was a very sweet thing for the Committee
for the Advancement of Culture in El Paso.
[LAUGHTER]
We had an abandoned Baptist church,
and it had a marvelous feeling about it,
exactly like an old fundamentalist services
of the 1890s.
And Gary Snyder himself is a devout Buddhist, as he
Issa was.
And so it took on more of that tone, because Gary Snyder began
to talk about what Buddhism meant, and these things.
And he started to help.
And he lives in Japan, in a Zen monastery,
or participates in the work of a Zen monastery.
And of course, they asked him questions.
And so he was saying one of the questions
that you're asked to answer is, "Does the dog
have a Buddha nature?"
And of course, the answer is "no-oof."
Anyway.
So that says the same thing.
You think you're very different than the dogs?
You're not.
But imagine how English poetry would express this.
When he's saying one human being,
one fly in a large sitting room.
Howard Pope says he'd go on and on and on.
A proper study of mankind as man.
When I was...and so on, and so on, and so on.
They express things by direct statement,
by throwing out the words as the newspaper does.
And it took a lot of them, a lot of them, to express.
But notice what Issa says.
He just presents a single tiny picture, one human being,
one fly in a large sitting room, and he doesn't
waste all of those words.
And he's got something that you'll never forget the thing.
I've forgotten everything of Pope
except that one line, which I profoundly
hate, "The proper study of mankind is man."
The proper study of mankind is not man.
Well, anyway.
So Henry, here's a couple other poems of his.
He was writing.
He'd love to write poems for frogs and all sorts of animals.
One day, he was walking through the woods,
and he saw frogs leaping around on all sides.
You've all seen them, when they jump like this.
And so he said, "Leaping for the river,
the frog said, excuse me for going first."
Well, that's a very polite Japanese frog.
But he had another wonderful poem.
He saw two frogs fighting, a skinny frog and a fat frog.
And Issa was very poor and very skinny,
and he associated himself with the skinny frog,
and so he wrote this poem.
"Lanky frog, hold your ground.
Issa is coming."
[LAUGHTER]
So don't tell me that he is not a great poet.
[LAUGHTER]
And in some of his other poems we're a little different.
One time, he saw a line of black ants on the ground.
He said, "This line of black ants,
maybe it goes all the way back to that white cloud."
And that's a little different, because he suggests--
because the purpose of Pope is to tell you what
you already know,
"The proper study of mankind is man."
Everybody has said that for 100 years before Pope said it.
That's all.
The secularization of Western culture.
And maybe you wouldn't express it quite that way.
Maybe you'd take a paragraph.
Pope only took a line.
But what Issa is trying to get you to think
is thought you've never thought before.
So Issa, what this poem suggests is possibly
there is a connection between the black ants
and the white clouds.
Maybe there isn't any difference between those two things.
Maybe there's no difference between black and white.
Try thinking that sometime.
Anyways, that's the purpose of the poem,
is to nudge you towards little thoughts that you
haven't thought before. .