Jack Foley What Book!?—Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
Edited by Gary Gach
Parallax PressIn his great book, Silence, John Cage wrote that "there is no longer a question of Orient and Occident":
All of that is rapidly disappearing; as Bucky Fuller is fond of pointing out: the movement with the wind of the Orient and the movement against the wind of the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air—the space, the silence, the nothing that supports us.
Echoing Cage nearly forty years later, Peter Coyote's foreword to What Book!? asserts that Buddhism, the "gentlest of all practices," "is beginning to capture a population no longer sustained by Judeo-Christian archetypes and dichotomized, comparative thinking...The ‘antennae of the race,' according to Ezra Pound's description of the artist, have been in the forefront of this transmutation, beginning with the Transcendentalists and continuing with the Beat poets in the late forties and fifties."
What Book!? is not propaganda for Buddhism—which needs no propaganda—but a wide- ranging anthology of diverse poetic practices, all of which touch on Buddhism in some way or another. The book is open enough to include Catholic writers such as Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz—to say nothing of Jack Kerouac. In his "Pre Face" (the separation between the syllables is a nod to Robert Duncan and Jerome Rothenberg as well as an evocation of, in Yeats' phrase, "the face I had before the world was made") editor Gary Gach describes the contents of his book as "contemporary intersections of poetry and meditation": "the calm, clear, everyday wonderland of mindful poetry." "I defined ‘from Beat to Hiphop' more as a range of time than as emphasizing any particular style...Thematic elements emerged from the wealth of materials that I discovered, serving as guides, not so much as distinct categories but more often resonating with each other, forming harmonic chords." Gach regards What Book!? as an ongoing process rather than a finished product. He has posted poems not included in the book, along with considerable commentary, on the World-Wide Web (http://word.to/whatweb.html).
What Book!? is divided into nineteen sections, which are unobtrusively noted on the bottoms of pages. Reading along, you're often surprised to discover you're in the midst of a new section. The first of these is called "No Beginning, No End" and the last is "No End, No Beginning." One thinks: Finnegans Wake! In between are categories such as "Original Mind," "You, Everywhere," "Bearing Witness," "Make It New" (recalling Ezra Pound's Confucian motto), "Visible Language," "Song," "Silence" (Cage's famous assertion that "there is no such thing as silence" is not in this section but in "Make It New"), "Toward Buddha," and, the longest, "Nature, the Teacher."
"Teaching" is an important aspect of What Book!?, though the book could hardly be called didactic. Two figures emerge as especially important: Allen Ginsberg and Thich Nhat Hanh. Ginsberg's "Mind Writing Slogans" (beginning, of course, with "First Thought, Best Thought") and "Mind Writing: Exercises in Poetic Candor" are the first two of three appendices Gach adds to his book. The third is Thich Nhat Hanh's essay on "Interbeing"—the term is opposed, perhaps, to "interacting":
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.
This sense of "interbeing," which ultimately includes the entire universe, is also at the heart of the structure of What Book!?: "Thematic elements emerged...resonating with each other, forming harmonic chords."
The central poem of the anthology is perhaps Thich Nhat Hanh's Whitmanesque "Please Call Me by My True Names," which begins,
Don't say that I will depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.This poem is a deep hymn not only to interconnectedness ("interbeing") but to the power of compassion:
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
could be left open,
the door of compassion.What Book!? is full of old faves and new discoveries. As Gach likes to point out, his anthology includes both Asians and Asian Americans along with European and African Americans. Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean's delicate, almost mystical poetry is here, as is work by the great Nanao Sakaki ("Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot"). Actor Peter Coyote has a song lyric with instructions to "repeat until everyone is berserk," and hiphop artist Adam Yauch pledges "to try to make my every action for the good of all beings." Beat poets Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac ("Words are Buddhas"), Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger ("What is this self / I think I will lose if I leave what I know") are well-represented. Kyger's "The Empty Shrine Buddha" has the marvelous couplet, "Poverty is something / Money can't buy." Experimental poets such as Leslie Scalapino (a short but powerful entry) and Clark Coolidge are here as well: the Coolidge selections are from his wonderful, currently out-of-print book, Space. Questioning Buddhist practice itself, Daigan Lueck wonders whether "I have really learned / anything at all these years away / sitting on that round black cushion / watching, breathing, being still." And there is more. It is such a pleasure to see the work of Paul Reps (the "Visible Language" section includes "concrete" or "pattern" poetry), to revisit Gary Snyder's great "Smokey the Bear Sutra," and to find exciting work by young poets such as Jessemyn Meyerhoff, who was fourteen years old when she wrote the poems Gach publishes. "New Formalist" poets are not represented in the book at all, however—there is only one poem in iambic pentameter, Mary Oliver's "Going to Walden"—and one wonders whether there are any Buddhists among them!
I don't want to suggest that What Book!? has no faults. Poets such as James Broughton and Michael McClure should surely have been included. (Gach has posted poems by these writers on the web site.) In addition, not all of the poetry is, as Pound and Eliot used to say, "of the first intensity." Lines like these are not likely to be found in any other anthology:
I am the voice of Redwood Creek
running in the little streams that drain the western slopes of
Mount Tamalpais,
gathering in the waters that roar through Green Gulch
Valley,
out to the Winter Sea.As a river I am small, made of rain and fog
Yet my heart is old....
("River Meditation")The worst moment in What Book!? occurs in the "Make It New" section. Gach took the text of Robert Duncan's "For the Assignment of the Spirit" from the Buddhist magazine Wind Bell (XVI:1, winter 1978-79) and never checked it against the definitive version in Duncan's last book, Ground Work II. The spacing of the Wind Bell version is very different from what appears in Ground Work II—Duncan was a stickler in such matters—and, worse, the two concluding words of the poem, "the burn," are missing.
All the same, there is a lot here. This book is a genuine treasure trove in its deeply passionate, compassionate, Buddhist drive to be everywhere and everything at once. Again from Thich Nhat Hahn's "Please Call Me by My True Names":
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.Even the biographical notes are full of information and a delight to read. "Be assured," writes Gach in his Pre Face, "this assembling will transport you." What Book!? makes good on his promise. Gach's own poem, "Inflight," ends,
wake up at midnight...
don't know where I am, or who!
...return to true self...That is indeed the point. One goes to Buddha and one rediscovers Whitman.
First published (and still archived) in Jack's column, "Foley's Books," at The Alsop Review.
