Waking Late in My Garden: To Magistrate Han and Secretary Lu in Chaoying

June 6, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Farmers have already started to plow
thick smoke is rising from their yards
birds are singing sweetly from garden trees
being retired I was still asleep
unaware the day was so late
I got up and gazed at the azure sky
I stretched my limbs
and felt happy indeed
then I went back below thatched eaves
poured some wine and considered fine men
adjusting their belts on their way to the office
with nothing but documents to fill their days
wishing they were here in the woods
enjoying the sight of mountains and streams
unless you’re living in enlightened times
why not work on yourselves instead

by Wei Ying-wu, translated by Red Pine

Translation © Red Pine, 2009. This week’s poem is taken from In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

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Born into an aristocratic family in decline, Wei Ying-wu (737–791) served in several government posts without distinction. He disdained the literary establishment of his day and fashioned a poetic style counter to the mainstream: one of profound simplicity centered in the natural world. You can find out more about Wei Ying-wu in a sample from the introduction to In Such Hard Times here.

Bill Porter (who assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work), is one of the finest translators of Chinese poetry into English and the first to translate the classical anthology Poems of the Masters. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China.

In October 2010, Red Pine received the American Literary Translation Association’s Lucien Stryk award for In Such Hard Times. Read more poems from the book on this page.

Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. As the preeminent American independent publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press fosters the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both revered and emerging American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world’s cultures, re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, anthologies, and prose books about poetry. Click here to visit the Copper Canyon website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Sunflower in the Sun

May 2, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Do you see?
Do you see that sunflower in the sun?
You see, it didn’t bow its head
But turned its head back
As if to bite through
The rope around its neck
Held by the sun’s hands.

Do you see it?
Do you see that sunflower, raising its head
Glaring at the sun?
Its head almost eclipses the sun
Yet even when there is no sun
Its head still glows.

Do you see that sunflower?
You should get closer to it.
Get close and you’ll find
The soil beneath its feet
Each handful of soil
Would ooze with blood.

by Mang Ke

This week’s poem is taken from Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in Summer/Fall 2011, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

The anthology, Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China, is edited by Qingping Wang. The translation co-editors are Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt. You can learn more about the new anthology here.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Mang Ke, whose real name is Jiang Shiwei, was born in 1950. He began writing poetry in the 1970s, when, with the poet Bei Dao, he launched the literary magazine Today. He has published half a dozen collections of poetry, including Worries, Sunflowers amid Sunbeams, Time without Time, and What Day Is It Today? He has also published one novel, Wild Things, and a volume of essays. His works have been translated into several foreign languages. He lives in Beijing.

Translators’ biographies

Jonathan Stalling is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in Transpacific poetry and poetics, and is the co-founder and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Literature Today. Stalling is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham UP), Grotto Heaven (Chax Press) and the forthcoming books Yíngēlìshī 吟歌丽诗 (Chanted Songs, Beautiful Poetry): Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath Press, 2011) and Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi 1966–2007 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). He lives in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and children.

Yibing Huang was born in Changde, Hunan, China and inherited Tujia ethnic minority blood from his mother. After receiving his Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Beijing University, he moved to the U.S. in 1993. He holds a second Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Under the penname Mai Mang, Huang’s poetry has been published in China since the 1980s. He is the author of two books of poetry: Stone Turtle: Poems 1987–2000 (2005) and Approaching Blindness (2005). He is also the author of Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future (2007), a book that presents case studies of the generation of Chinese writers which spent its formative years during the Cultural Revolution and focuses on their identity shift from “orphans of history” to “cultural bastards.” Huang is currently an Associate Professor of Chinese at Connecticut College.

Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. As the preeminent independent publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press fosters the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both revered and emerging American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world’s cultures, re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, anthologies, and prose books about poetry. Click here to visit the Copper Canyon website.

One with Others [a little book of her days]

March 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And
this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those
inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those
who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible
signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy
dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the
skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.

by C.D. Wright

This week’s poem is taken from the book One With Others [a little book of her days], and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Investigative journalism is the poet’s realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the civil rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.

C.D. Wright has published twelve collections of poetry and prose. Reviewing her previous book, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon, 2008), The New York Times noted: ‘C.D. Wright belongs to a school of exactly one.’ Wright is currently the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

One With Others won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist. You can read a short interview with C.D. Wright here, learn more about her at this page, hear her discuss the book here, and hear her read parts of One With Others at this link.

Flood Song

January 17, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I sensed the knife in your past,
its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream—
a silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.

The waters of my clans
flash flooded—
I fell from the white of its eyes—
our fathers had no children to name their own
no baby’s cry to place between argument and arguments.

The commercial flashed a blue path
across the lakes of our veins
the bluest glint, a rock in the ear
told our tongues entwined,

that I was reaching for the corn field inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this compass
pointing toward my skull
gauzed inside this long terrible whisper

damp in a desert canyon,
white-washed by the ache of fog lights
reaching to unravel my combed hair.

by Sherwin Bitsui

‘Flood Song’ is taken from the book Flood Song, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

“I bite my eyes shut between these songs.” So begins Flood Song, a concentrated, interweaving, painterly sequence in which Native tradition scrapes against contemporary urban life. In his second book, Sherwin Bitsui intones landscapes real and imagined, populated with the wrens, winds, and reeds of the high desert and constructed from the bricks and gasoline of the city. Reverent to his family’s indigenous traditions while simultaneously indebted to European modernism and surrealism, Bitsui is at the forefront of a younger generation of Native writers. His poems are highly imagistic and constantly in motion, drawing as readily upon Diné (Navajo) myths, customs, and medicine songs as they do contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” Bitsui writes, a map tribal and individual, elemental and modern — and utterly astonishing.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Tódích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizílaaní (Many Goats Clan). He holds an A.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is currently completing his studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the recipient of a 2005 Lannan Foundation Residency in Marfa, Texas, and the Whiting Writers Award in 2006. He also works for literacy programs that bring poets and writers into public schools where there are Native American student populations. Bitsui has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), LIT, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Flood Song is the Winner of the 2010 PEN Open Book Award and a 2010 American Book Award. You can read more about Bitsui here and at his own website here, and more of his work here.

Letter to a Lover

November 8, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport.
My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.
My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.
I am trying to catch a ray of sunlight in my mouth.

I look forward to showing you my new furniture.
I look forward to the telephone ringing, it is not you,
you are in the kitchen trying to figure out the coffeemaker,
you are pouring out the contents of your backpack.

I wonder if you now have golden fur?
I wonder if your arsenal of kind remarks is empty?
I remember when I met you you were wearing a grey dress,
that was also blue, not unlike the water plus the sky.

They say it’s difficult to put a leash on a hummingbird.
So let us be no longer the actuary of each other!
Let us bow no longer our heads to the tyranny of numbers!
Hurry off the plane, with your rhinestone covered bag

full of magazines that check up on the downfall of the stars.
I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the moving stairs.

by Matthew Zapruder

‘Letter to a Lover’ is taken from Come On All You Ghosts, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Editor, translator, and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, Matthew Zapruder in his third book blends humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to “a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun.” The title poem is an elegy for heroes and mentors—from David Foster Wallace to Zapruder’s father—and demonstrates a new, expansive range for the poet, highlighting as well a larger body of poetry that is surprising and direct: writing that wrestles with the desires to live rightly, to make art, and to confront the vast events of the day.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, American Linden(Tupelo Press, 2002), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), and Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2010). The Pajamaist was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. He has been a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas, and a recipient of a May Sarton prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He works as an editor for Wave Books, is a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s Low Residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and is the Fall 2010 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.

Pig’s Heaven Inn

May 3, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight —
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi Village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows his nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we, too, vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

by Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze was born in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he has conducted residencies at a number of different universities in the United States including Brown University, the University of Utah, and Washington University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and has received grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, Carol Moldaw, and daughter, Sarah. You can read a recent interview with Arthur Sze here.

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. In his ninth book of poetry, The Gingko Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which ‘Pig’s Heaven Inn’ comes, Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and flowering to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendour. He ingeniously integrates the world’s mundane and miraculous into a moving, visionary journey. More poems from this collection are available to read here.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click here.

Dark View

March 29, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree

Derives its path of seashines
(Spiritual centrality) from my

Regard. I sent it
My regards. Some yards

Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted in the likes

Of it, or maybe
In the likes of me — a long

Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun — and there

Before my eyes the palm
Puts lashes round the sun.

by Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh, a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays, including a Griffin International Poetry Prize translation, as well as Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist volumes. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), the book from which ‘Dark View’ comes, McHugh presents a fast-paced, verbally dexterous, and brilliantly humorous book. Utilizing medical terminology to work through loss and detachment, McHugh’s sly rhymes and rhythms talk of love, raised hackles, and much in between. You can read further selections from her new collection at this page.

80

February 8, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Imagine a small state with a small population
let there be labor-saving tools
that aren’t used
let people consider death
and not move far
let there be boats and carts
but no reason to ride them
let there be armor and weapons
but no reason to employ them
let people return to the use of knots
and be satisfied with their food
and pleased with their clothing
and content with their homes
and happy with their customs
let there be another state so near
people hear its dogs and chickens
and live out their lives
without making a visit

by Lao-tzu, translated by Red Pine

Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translations. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia in 1972 and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he produced over a thousand programs about his travels in China. In 1993 he returned to America with his family and has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington.

Lao-tzu’s Taoteching, from which this poem comes (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), is an essential volume of world literature, and Red Pine’s nuanced and authoritative English translation is one of the bestselling English versions. This revised edition includes extensive commentary by Taoist scholars, adepts, poets, and recluses spanning more than 2,000 years. You can read two more selections from the book here, and learn more about Lao-tzu here.

Like the Ghost of a Carrier Pigeon

December 14, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In a couple of hours darkness will throw its blanket

over the scene she will pretend to read a mystery
the mower and hammering will cease

The bees leave the andromeda and then

So much has been spent constructing a plausible life
she did not hear the engines of dissent run down

Some still attempt to cover the skull with the wire of their hair
others shave everything instead

A solitary relives the pleasure of releasing his bird

There is no sacrosanct version there is only time

Even now if someone yells Avalanche she has one
Thoughts shudder against the ribs and go still

Soon the son would be out running around in her car
with a sore throat soon the decibels commence killing off hair cells

She checks to see if the phone is charged and then

The ones responsible for slaying the dreamer are mostly in the ground
but the ones responsible for slaying the dream

suffer only metabolic syndrome

Even now now that her supply of contact lenses has dwindled
she was refusing to sing the Wal-Mart song

The bees would be back and then

All efforts at reconciliation aside even if everyone exchanged germs
happiness is only for amateurs

A dress worn only once before has been hung on the door
the mirror under the cloth receives its image

by C.D. Wright

Deeply personal and politically ferocious, Wright’s thirteenth collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) addresses, as Wright has said elsewhere, “the commonly felt crises of [our] times” — from illegal immigration and the specific consequences of empire to the challenges of parenting and the honesty required of human relationships.

C.D. Wright has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honours are the Robert Creeley Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives near Providence, Rhode Island. To learn more about her work, click here.