POSTCARD 30 ~

traditional crafts

men building dry stone wall in the U.K.

photo by Foto-Bank

TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA ~

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s parents fled Tibet in 1959. Raised by her mother in Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, Tsering earned a BA and an MA from Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. 

A friend of Longhouse, we published one of Tsering's earliest booklet of poems.

Bardo 
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa




A hundred and one butter lamps are offered to my uncle who
is no more.

Distraction proves fatal in death. A curtain of butter imprints
in air.

After the burning of bones, ashes are sent on pilgrimage. You are
dead, go into life, we pray. My uncle was a man given to giggles
in solemn moments.

Memory springs like crocuses in bloom. Self conscious and
precise.

Without blurring the cornea, details are resuscitated. Dried yak
meat between teeth. Semblance of what is.

Do not be distracted, Uncle who is no more.

He does not see his reflection in the river. The arching of speech
over  s as he is becoming.

Curvature of spine as it cracked on a misty morning. A shadow
evades the wall.

You are no more, Uncle who is no more.

Every seven days he must relive his moment of expiration.
The living pray frequently amid burning juniper.

Communication efforts require the right initiative.

Somewhere along the line matters of motion and rest are resolved.

Crows pick the last offerings. You are someone else, uncle no
more.


______________________

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
from Rules of the House  2003
Apogee Press

http://14hills.net/node/108



Books ~

    A Home in Tibet, Penquin India, Delhi 2013
    My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2011
    In the Absent Everyday, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2005
    Rules of the House, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2002
    Recurring Gestures, Tangram Press,
    In Writing the Names, A.bacus, 2000

POSTCARD 29 ~

 

Animal Rescue League 1940

Photographer unknown

WALT MCLAUGHLIN ~

click on image to enlarge

HIROAKI SATO ~

click onto the image to increase your reading pleasure

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/int-hiroaki_sato/

Hiroaki Sato has been writing for The Japan Times since 2000. It's not to be beat. I'm showcasing here an article two years old this month, but being the US military and expenditures, it remains timely.

On the Spring Equinox Longhouse will issue a two booklet set of Hiroaki Sato's translations of Miyazawa Kenji. He has been called by Gary Snyder, "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English."




Selected Works

_____________________

Shikishi. Poems of Princess Shikishi. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Bluefish, 1973
Translated by Hiroaki Sato.Ten Japanese Poets. Hanover, New Hampshire: Granite, 1973.
Minoru, Yoshika. Lilac Garden. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Chicago Review, 1975
Takahashi, Mutsuo. Poems of a Penisist. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Chicago Review, 1975
Miyazawa, Kenji. Spring and Asura. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Chicago Review, 1975
Takahashi, Mutsuo. Winter Haiku: 25 Haiku by Mutsuo Takahashi. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Manchester, NH: First Haiku Press, 1980.

Takamura, K Mtar M. Chieko and Other Poems of Takamura K Mtar M. 
Translated by Hiroaki Sato. University of Hawaii, 1980
From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Edited and translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Winner of the American PEN translation prize in 1983.
Sato, Hiroaki. One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English. New York, NY: Weatherhill, 1983.

Yagyu, Munenori. Sword and the Mind. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1986
Haiku in English: A Poetic Form Expands. Tokyo, Japan: Simul Press, 1987.
That First Time: Six Renga on Love, and Other Poems. Laurinburg, NC: St. Andrews Press, 1988.
Miyazawa, Kenji. Future of Ice: Poems and Stories of a Japanese Buddhist. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

Takahashi, Mutsuo. Sleeping Sinning Falling. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. City Lights Books, 1992
Takamura, Kotaro. A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kotaro. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. University of Hawaii, 1992
Ozaki, Hosai. Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat: the haiku and prose of Hosai Ozaki. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1993
Shikishi. String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. University of Hawaii Press, 1993
Sato, Hiroaki. One Hundred Frogs. New York, NY: Weatherhill, 1995.

Sato, Hiroaki. Legends of the Samurai. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1995.
Matsuo, Basho. Basho's Narrow road: spring & autumn passages. Translated from the Japanese, with annotations by Hiroaki Sato. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996
Saiko, Ema: Breeze through Bamboo: Selected Kanshi of Ema Saiko. Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato. Columbia University Press, 1997. (Winner of the 1999 Japan United States Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize)
Mishima, Yukio. Silk and Insight. Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.

Hagiwara, Sakutaro. Howling at the Moon and Blue. Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato. Green Integer, 2001
Taneda, Santoka. Grass and Tree Cairn. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2002
Mishima, Yukio. My Friend Hitler: and Other Plays. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Columbia University Press, 2002
Yagyu, Munenori. The Sword and the Mind: The Classic Japanese Treatise on Swordsmanship and Tactics. Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato. Fall River Press, 2004.

Sato, Hiroaki. Erotic Haiku. Yohan Shuppan, 2005
Miyazawa, Kenji. Miyazawa Kenji: Selections. Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato. University of California, 2007
Sato, Hiroaki. Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Inose, Naoki w/ Hiroaki Sato. Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. Stone Bridge Press.
Sato, Hiroaki. Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yugen. Red Moon Press, 2013.

MARK WUNDERLICH ~

Coyote, with Mange


 
Oh, Unreadable One, why  
have you done this to your dumb creature?  
Why have you chosen to punish the coyote  

rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,  
shucked the fur from his tail  
and fashioned it into a scabby cane?  

Why have you denuded his face,  
tufted it, so that when he turns he looks  
like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?  

The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low,  
and without fur, his now visible pizzle  
is a sad red protuberance,  

his hind legs the backward image  
of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.  
Why have you unhoused this wretch  

from his one aesthetic virtue,  
taken from him that which kept him  
from burning in the sun like a man?  

Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,  
stopped him there and turned his ear  
toward my warning shout?




________________________

MARK WUNDERLICH

    author of ~
    The Earth Avails,  Graywolf Press
    Voluntary Servitude, Graywolf Press, 2004
    The Anchorage, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

ELIZABETH SPENCER ~

Elizabeth Spencer

Starting Over

Liveright 2014

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2417/the-art-of-fiction-no-110-elizabeth-spencer

______________

Novels

 Fire in the Morning (1948)
    This Crooked Way (1952)
    The Voice at the Back Door (1956)
    The Light in the Piazza (1960)
    Knights and Dragons (1965)
    No Place for an Angel (1967)
    The Snare (1972)
    The Salt Line (1984)
    The Night Travellers (1991)

Short story collections

    Ship Island and Other Stories (1968)
    The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981)
    Marilee (1981)
    Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988)
    On the Gulf (1991)
    The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (1996)
    The Southern Woman (2001)

Other

Landscapes of the Heart (1998, a memoir)

 (For Lease or Sale (1989, a play)

 The Light in the Piazza (1960, a novella)

GARY BRIECHLE ~

My idea here with a camera and a book is not to showcase the whole book for the viewer, or even in order — it's to allow 'a look'. After all, I'm a writer, reader, publisher of books and bookseller, so my plan forever has been the life of the book. I want you to seek out this fine book, this fine photographer, and to have the book in your lap looking it through and to put it up onto a shelf. To keep it, or give it to someone else. Hand to hand. Face to face. Eye to eye. The elemental earth stuff.

Maine is an interesting corner state on the US map. When we talk to our local post office they tell us of all the boxes they use as files to ship mail out from Vermont, little goes to Maine.

Many of Gary Briechle's photographs come out of Maine.

~ BA

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/01/gary-briechle-photographs.html