THE POET

For a long time he was a poet.
Children
called him a poet and
women did too.
Surely he was a poet
more than anyone I knew.
Even the pigs and the boars
grunted him poet.

He died returning from a distant land.
In his hut there was not one word of poetry.
Was he a poet who didn't write?
So a poet wrote a poem for him.
As soon as the poem was written,
the wind blew it away.

Then all the poems of the East and the West, old and new,
flew away, swish, swish,
every one followed suit.


--Ko Un
from The Three Way Tavern
trans. Clare You and Richard Silberg

Back to the academy...

For National Poetry Month, some unexpected money came in via the League of Poets to the QWF for poets to visit schools here in Quebec. Fortunately I was one of the first to answer the call. We had a hard time, though, lining up a school that would have me ... but finally, with four days left in the month, the arrangment was made for me to visit a Secondary 1 class (12-13 years old) at Lauren Hill Academy here in Montreal. (I tell you, it 's so much easier when the writer's organization plugs for you, rather than the poet having to make the intial contacts with the teachers and the schools, which in my experience -- i.e. the Writers in the CEGEPs program -- has up to now been the case. Artists of all kinds need the dignity of representation, esp. when there's money involved. )

To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive, since I've never taught that age group. I spent hours wracking my brains to think up and print out material -- second-guessing myself against the unknown. It turns out I had little to worry about. The class was an enriched English class -- the students were bright, creative, and well-behaved. We brainstormed about what poetry was, I shared with them a few simple but expressive poems by mostly other contemporary poets that they responded to really well (these had been photocopied -- namely Lee Young Lee's From Blossoms, In the Old Days a Poet Once Said by Ko Un, a poem by my friend Nina Bruck, that remarkable anonymous 16th c. poem --

Western Wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

This latter I shared with them partly to to show it's emotional and natural to write in rhyme. Also, that second line, "the small rain down can rain" really pushes the limits of reason, but is so evocatively powerful... Then I had them do a a creative writing exercise patterned after WCW's "This is Just to Say" and Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" -- they could choose one or the other, whichever inspired -- which lead to enthusiastic readings by some of the students of their own work. After that I read a poem I which I wrote at 16 and patterned after the "This is Just to Say"... which brought on, to my happy surprise, an applause. Then I took out my guitar and we ended with some poems put to music and a couple of my songs following typical song verse-chorus structures, just to show some of the difference -- and similarity -- between poetry and song. Needless to say, this eighty-minute class went really well. My instinct not just to focus on my own work, but to present those of others I thought they'd like, was, it turns out, the appropriate one. I can only recommend that to other poets in the same situation: you're an emmisary for poetry, not yourself.

Ko Un

I really quite liked this one that was in today's Academy of American Poets' April poem-a-day. The first poem-a-day I've read this year that really affected me. (Not that I've read every one of them...) It's from a book of translations of this remarkable Korean poet put out by Boa press. You can read more about it, and its author, here.

IN THE OLD DAYS A POET ONCE SAID
by Ko Un

In the old days a poet once said
our nation is destroyed
yet the mountains and rivers survive

Today's poet says
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
yet our nation survives

Tomorrow's poet will say
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
our nation is destroyed and Alas!
you and I are completely destroyed