If I have this lavalier microphone, do I need this?
Can you hear?
Can you hear me?
Something's not right.
Do we need this or this?
Both, you need both.
What does this do?
I think it's just for the camera.
Oh, this is a double power experience.
Thank you so much for coming tonight.
I'm honored to be here, and to hear
these wonderful words about my work, and that beautiful song.
And I thought as you told that healing song, that I'm walking
with good people here tonight.
Thank you.
I'm going to start with a discussion,
and reference, and some poems that inspired me
when I was in Japan.
I was delivered there by the United States Army
at 18 years old, which meant I had a lot of leisure to think.
The place I was stationed had been devastated by tsunami.
I was stationed in Sendai for about two years.
And while I was there, I discovered,
and I'm smiling over the use of that word,
I discovered another beautiful place in the world
called Matsushima, a 30 minute light rail ride
north of Sendai.
Matsushima Bay, it's the place in the 17th century
that Basho, one of the most distinguished
Japanese haiku poets, ended his journey to the North.
And on that journey he wrote a combination
of prose and poetry haiku, which are called haibun, haibun
style.
I took immediately to imagistic poetry when I arrived in Japan.
And that surprised me, because I didn't take directly
to Milton or Yeats.
Of course not, because that's a literature borrowed by a nation
that wants to build its reputation.
Not only was I inspired by these accessible, beautiful images,
but I find them everywhere, in ordinary homes, in businesses.
People in the area recognized the poetry of Basho.
As I say, he ended his journey in Matsushima,
and wrote about it; these beautiful pine islands
in Matsushima Bay.
And so I went there, and acted in his presence,
this great experience.
I thought his poems to myself while I was there, and when
a night when the full moon was there,
to appreciate his poetry.
It had a profound effect on me and I still write haiku.
But more than that, it connected directly
to Anishinaabe dream songs.
I didn't have anything to compare
my fairly limited knowledge and experience in Anishinaabe dream
songs.
It's not what people did every day.
But enough to know when I saw haiku,
that this was a shared literary expression and art.
And thank you for that picture behind me;
that's Naples, Florida.
If I'd have known it was going to be behind me forever
this evening, I might have selected a different picture.
And thank you for selecting that quote, because indeed, I
am here by chance.
Not only my experiences in the world, but by age too.
A gift to be as old as I am.
It's when you get older you get these appreciation, achievement
awards.
They only give achievements to young people,
and to really old people.
It's either coming or going.
You can look forward to some kind of recognition
for your achievements.
Have you ever heard of anybody getting an Achievement Award
at age 40 or something?
I don't think so.
You have to wait 30 years.
The essence of haiku is a tease of nature,
and I mean tease in the best native practice and tradition.
A tease that's a bond, not a separation.
Haiku is a concise, intuitive, imagic, you know,
like magic, imagic moment.
And when you read one and know it, you know,
you never want to forget it.
Haiku is actually a mood of that creative act, and it's elusive
and it can be ironic, and there's obviously
a sense of place.
It shows motion, motion and nature.
And here's an irony, it also suggests always impermanence,
impermanence.
This small imagistic concise and magic moment
creates a seasonal reference which is impermanent,
and some interaction with nature and a person or two,
experiences of nature itself, and that's impermanent.
It's a tricky fusion of nature, of culture,
and my word of survivance.
The imagic moments in haiku scenes are virtual, of course.
The fugitive turns of a season, and interior motion,
as you appreciate the either contradiction
or association of the images.
And a continuous sense of presence, not absence, not
abstract, a presence of nature.
Haiku was my first poetry.
I couldn't imagine being John Milton.
The original imagistic associations
of underived experiences, underived,
in the natural world.
The metaphors of my early haiku scenes
were those teases of nature and of memory.
Eighteen years of memory at the time.
The creases of the words actually cut to the seasons
immediately.
Not to the mere cosmopolitan representations or ruminations
of images that we construct, as if they're mirror
images representing nature.
Matsushima, Matsushima, by chance of the military,
was my first connection to a haiku scene.
The actual place the moon rose over
those beautiful pine islands in the haibun and prose
of Matsuo Basho.
"Much praise had already been lavished
upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima",
Basho wrote in his book, Narrow Road to the Deep North,
"yet if further, yet if further praise is possible,
I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot
in the whole country of Japan.
The islands are situated in a bay about three miles wide
in every direction, and open to the sea."
This is Basho.
"Islands are piled upon islands.
And islands are joined to islands
so that they look exactly like parents
caressing their children, or walking with them, arm in arm.
The pines are of the freshest green,
and their branches are curved in exquisite lines,
bent by the wind constantly blowing through them."
I was there; in that same haibun scene,
almost three centuries later, and tried my best
to envision the presence of Basho.
I wrote this haiku.
Water Striders "Master Basho wades near shore,
out of reach."
The United States Army, by chance,
sent me to serve first on Hokkaido Island,
and then at a post near Sendai, Japan,
in the northern part of the country, as you know.
I was 18 years old at the time.
Haiku, in a sense, caught me out on the road as a soldier,
in another culture, and gently turned me back to seasons.
Back to native memories.
Haiku scenes are similar, in a sense,
to the dream songs and visionary images
of the Anishinaabe or Chippewa.
I was inspired by these literary connections at the time.
The association seemed so natural to me now.
Once words, and worlds apart in time and place,
these poetic images came together more by chance
than by fate; and later by intuition,
and by literary consideration.
Many Anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals,
birds, and other totemic creatures of experience,
of visions and of memory.
The same can be said about haiku scenes,
that the visions of nature are the perceptions
and traces of memory.
Kenneth Yasuda wrote in his book, The Japanese Haiku,
"that haiku is an aesthetic experience,
and that sense of a haiku moment is eternal."
He writes that "every word, then, in a haiku,
rather than contributing to the meaning,
as words do in a novel or a sonnet, IS the experience.
That is, the words and image IS the experience, not
a description of it."
That eternal moment is natural reason, in Japanese haiku,
and in Anishinaabe dream songs.
He writes, "a haiku moment is a kind of aesthetic moment,
a moment in which the words which created the experience,
and the experience itself, can become one."
Haiku scenes and native dream songs
are imagic moments, in this sense,
the actual experiences of nature as an aesthetic survivance.
The Anishinaabe dream songs are visions
of motion and perception, and at the same time,
they tease nature.
Haiku scenes and Anishinaabe dreams songs
are created by natural reason.
You'll just have to trust me about what
natural reason means.
My first literary creations were haiku scenes,
and since then that imagistic sense of nature
has always been present in my writing; all of my writings.
I may never know if my haiku are right by nature,
only that the scenes are my best memories of nature.
In this way, my sense of presence, my experience,
and survivance, is in nature and in the book.
Yosa Buson, another distinguished Japanese haiku
poet, was the son of a farmer, who
was born more than two centuries ago,
and yet we met by chance and nature in the book.
He was a cultural dilettante, and at
the same time a brilliant haiku poet.
Buson writes with wit about the seasons,
and teases his own sense of transience in the world.
He was actually never devoted to nature, as other poets were,
but he created memorable, imagic haiku moments.
R.H. Blyth translated this haiku, Scene by Birdsong.
"Winter rain a mouse runs over the koto."
That's a stringed instrument.
It's the winter rain, and a mouse
runs over a stringed instrument.
I heard the natural music of that scene two centuries later,
and wrote this haiku back to him,
one early winter in Bena, Minnesota,
on the Leech Lake Reservation.
"Cold rain field mice rattle the dishes, Buson's koto."
The Anishinaabe dream songs, and tricky stories of creation
that bear the nature and ironies and, yes
the tragic wisdom of natives, were depreciated
by the literature of dominance.
Listen to this.
"The sky loves to hear me sing" is
one heartened invitation to nature in an Anishinaabe dream
song.
"The sky loves to hear me sing."
That's the arrogance of natural reason.
The poet singer listens to the turnout of the seasons,
and then puts the word of his song
directly to the wind and sky.
The gesture, in part is, of course ironic,
and it's a tease of nature.
The sky loves to hear me sing.
I can imagine he had a pretty bad voice.
Or this one, "With a large bird above me,
I am walking in the sky."
"With a large bird above me, I am walking in the sky."
That's a translation of another avian vision
by an Anishinaabe poet singer, who heard more than a century--
was heard more than a century ago in northern Minnesota.
Frances Dinsmore, the honorable recorder
of Native songs in ceremonies, especially the Anishinaabe,
translated these strange songs at the turn
of the last century.
The songs are imagic moments, they are haiku moments,
similar to the tease and nature of haiku scenes.
Here are some examples,
"As my eyes look across the prairie,
I feel the summer in the spring."
"Overhanging clouds echo my words with a pleasing sound."
"Across the Earth everywhere making my voice heard."
Any hint of the self is absent in most haiku scenes,
but even one subjective experience is mentioned.
It is not a self of nature, it's the singer's presence
in nature.
Issa, another distinguished native, I'm sorry,
Japanese poet, for instance is moved by nature
as other haiku poets were, and included references
to himself in his haiku scenes.
Similar, in a way, to Anishinaabe
dream singers, who include their presence in nature.
"Issa's whole life was a tragedy" Blyth wrote.
"He was one of those men who attract
failure and misfortune."
"Issa was moved by a sense of fate."
Blythe writes, "Life goes along joyfully and painfully,
with ecstasy and anguish, and Issa goes with it.
He does not praise or condemn."
Here's Issa, "For you fleas, too, the night
must be long it must be lonely."
Probably not the standard song we hear about fleas, today.
"For you fleas, too, the night must be long,
it must be lonely."
Issa's sympathies were always with small and weak animals.
Perhaps because he identified himself with them,
as he was a victim of his stepmother's cruelty.
Donald Keene, a distinguished scholar of Japanese literature,
observed that and translated this poem.
"Skinny frog don't be discouraged, Issa is here."
What a comfort.
Try it.
See a frog, "Skinny frog, don't be discouraged, Lucy is here."
Likewise, the Anishinaabe created
an elusive self in their dream songs,
but not the self of nature.
It's their the singer poet's presence in nature.
"With the large bird, I am walking in the sky"
are the voices of visionaries, the motion of intuition,
and actually the transformation of the self, not the ego self,
but the self in nature.
"The first to come among the birds, bringing the rain,
Crow is my name."
This Anishinaabe dream song is about the arrival of spring,
and the crows, a natural motion of the seasons.
The singer has taken the name of the Crow
and teases a shamanic visionary voice of nature.
The Crow or Raven is a sign of wisdom, tricky wisdom,
maybe even tragic wisdom.
A dream song.
"Overhanging clouds echoing my words
with a pleasing sound across the Earth
everywhere making my voice heard."
Surely that's what we all do as poets.
"Overhanging clouds echoing my words
with a pleasing sound across the Earth
everywhere making my voice heard."
Basho died on November 28, 1694.
He dedicated this hokku, or haiku,
to his student, Dongshu three days before his death.
Basho.
"On a journey ailing my dreams roam about on a withered moor."
A waiter wrote of this poem, "As it was a balmy day,
many flies had gathered around the sliding screens,
and the students were trying to catch them with a lime stick."
Basho, ailing and almost dead, amused
that some were more skillful than others
in handling the stick, the lime stick,
laughed and said, "Those flies seemed
delighted to have a sick man around unexpectedly."
Now that's an association with nature!
He spoke no more, those were his last words.
"Those flies seem delighted to have a sick man
around unexpectedly."
Basho was amused, and the image of the flies
moves me, by my experience with him in the book.
Basho might have teased me over this scene;
my haiku about fat green flies at a restaurant
in Ellsworth, Wisconsin.
"Fat green flies dance on the grapefruit honor your partner."
A film company was putting together--
Filming scenes of poets in the upper Midwest,
and I was selected as one of them.
We had to choose a place to read our poems,
and they gave you some choices.
And I chose Ellsworth, Wisconsin- small town,
no stoplight then.
I went into a restaurant of maybe half a dozen tables
and maybe eight stools at the bar.
It was run by a family; mother, father, and daughter.
I guessed at the time the daughter had probably gone
to Chicago, and didn't like it and came back,
happy to be in a small town.
So we arranged to film my reading a poem,
and they agreed.
And so I said, "Now, when I read it--"
we ordered food and things--
"when I read it and it's filmed, you just
respond exactly how you feel to the poem."
So I read "Fat green flies square dance
across the grapefruit honor your partner"
and she looked at me like I was really cuckoo.
She looked to her parents for permission to insult me.
They agreed.
And she said to the camera, "That
ain't what we do with flies around here, mister!"
So you'll see my haiku scenes and imagistic influences
in longer poems.
This first poem is "Almost Ashore,"
clearly a reference to my age, I'm almost washing ashore.
"The winter sea over my shoes, shadows and bright round stones
at San Gregorio.
Every wave turns a season, forests adrift, empty shells,
memory of fires so far away in the mountains, and canyons.
Silent pools raise my faces by early tide,
sleight my hand, my shoulders, almost ashore.
Light breaks over the plover's certain steps,
and my traces of blood bone stone turn natural.
And heavy waves rush the sand."