Machine by Peter Adolphsen

Author:Peter Adolphsen [Peter Adolphsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Italy stands the other side!

While like a guard between –

The solemn Alps –

The siren Alps

Forever intervene!

I want to be able to write like that, Jimmy thought and grabbed a pen, only to suffer an instant attack of writer’s block. I need to read more, he decided, and ordered most of what the library service offered by way of ‘poetry’. On going through the two small piles he realised that most of it was hogwash. However, a few writers caught his attention, for example Brother Antonius, Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima, but he was especially moved by the poetry of the Far East as it presented itself to him in two volumes by Kenneth Rexroth: One hundred poems from the Chinese (1959) and One hundred poems from the Japanese (1964).

Jimmy’s interest was also kindled by a book with the simple title Poems, composed by one Seymour Glass. The photo on the inside of the jacket showed a man with a large nose, meaty ears and kind eyes. The only information below the photo was the dates 1917–1948.

The poems, numbered 1 to 184, were all a type of double haiku – that is, six lines of verse with thirty-four syllables in total, often, but not always, divided into two stanzas of three lines with the following number of syllables 5–7–5/5–7–5. Glass’s slender stanzas were immensely elegant in a very Japanese-Chinese way, but yet radically twentieth-century American.

The rhythm and behaviour of the haiku form, almost like the breathing of a small animal, seemed to Jimmy an accessible format, and after a winter spent reading Basho, Issa and his other heroes, and tinkering every evening with his newfound form of expression, he produced two poems, which pleased him:

The wind turns pages

in the book one of us left

on the garden chair

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