somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond             

by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Haiku

The light of a candle

 is transferred to another candle

 spring twilight.

The Light of a Candle by Yosa Buson as translated by Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert

As part of National Poetry Month, I'll explore the different forms of poetry.  Let's begin with one of my favorite, Haiku.  

A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.  Last year, one of my favorite poets, Sonia Sanchez published a book of Haiku poems.  This week she published one on her website in remembrance of African American sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett.  Read it here.

I found this history of haiku on poets.org.  Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who wrote this classic haiku:

An old pond!
 A frog jumps in
 the sound of water.

Among the greatest traditional haiku poets are Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. Modern poets interested in the form include Robert Hass, Paul Muldoon, and Anselm Hollo, whose poem "5 & 7 & 5" includes the following stanza: 

round lumps of cells grow
 up to love porridge later
  become The Supremes

Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on associations between images. There was a pause at the end of the first or second line, and a "season word," or kigo, specified the time of year.

As the form has evolved, many of these rules--including the 5/7/5 practice--have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.

This philosophy influenced poet Ezra Pound, who noted the power of haiku's brevity and juxtaposed images. He wrote, "The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language." The influence of haiku on Pound is most evident in his poem "In a Station of the Metro," which began as a thirty-line poem, but was eventually pared down to two:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

 Petals on a wet, black bough.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5782 

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

by Langston Hughes

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express
our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.
The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain
free within ourselves.

Context of the poem:
Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University and Lincoln University. While a student at Lincoln, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), as well as his landmark essay, seen by many as a cornerstone document articulation of the Harlem renaissance, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

Earlier that year, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, mailed Hughes a proof of “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay George Schuyler had written for the magazine, requesting a counterstatement. Schuyler, editor of the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, questioned in his essay the need for a separate African-American artistic and literary tradition.

Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

His attention to working-class African-American lives, coupled with his refusal to paint these lives as either saintly or stereotypical, brought criticism from several directions. Articulating the unspoken directives he struggled to ignore, Hughes observes, “‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites.”
Read Langston Hughes full essay here:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237858



More about Langston Huges:  http://experiencinghistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/negro-speaks-of-rivers.html

Sentences

Sentences

by Quincy Troupe

movement of time through the music of space,
eye hear a bell ringing blue in sentences,

the language spoken in sleep becomes an echo here,
a translation when written down on white paper,

in the air, when spoken, words seem like a dream
pulsating through ether in blue melodies of tongues

weaving inside sentences, packed with local
idioms, carved from blue spaces by human breath,

sounds rooted in voices here evoke metaphors
coursing blood-deep, form ancient tribal gestures,

where words fixed in geographic locations repeat
through reverberating memory, bring recognition

ricocheting through a collective truth, perhaps
then language can evoke a shared history,

music, when sentences mirror rhythms of tongues
poetry rises like suns birthing circles of love

Read more about Quincy Troupe and his poetry on his website:  http://www.quincytroupe.com/index.html