Category: education

• June 20, 2013

  Basho’s poetic spirit: A mode of radiance

  For Basho (1644-1694), in whose hands the haiku form achieves its essence, the poet must submerge himself within a natural object, to perceive its delicate life and feel its feelings, out of which a poem forms itself. A poem may skillfully delineate an object; but, unless it embodies feelings which have been naturally emerged out…
• June 18, 2013

  ‘Why is Tu Fu sad?’ asks the master

  ‘Why is Tu Fu sad?’ asks the master. A Poem About Radiance ‘It is obvious,’ replies the first pupil. ‘It is, as Tu Fu says: the longest bough has been broken.’ A second pupil differs: ‘The world is unjust: the violent and strong will always crack and break the weak and frail. Had we not…
• June 17, 2013

  The quivering haiku

  ‘The brevity of haiku,’ writes R.H. Blyth in Haiku: Volume III–Summer/Autumn, ‘is not something different from, but a part of the poetical life; it is not only a form of expression but a mode of living more immediately, more closely to life.’ Here is Arakida Moritake, a sixteenth century Japanese poet cited in Alan Watts’…
• June 8, 2013

  Wandering babies in Topanga Canyon…

  Early in Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby exuberantly proclaims that there is no place he would rather live than in a cottage and, in particular, in a cottage that in all respects resembles the one the Dashwoods have let. Eleanor replies–come, come now, dear Willoughby–that the hallways are dark and the quarters are cramped. Would he really…
• June 4, 2013

  ‘Dear, dear, dear, dear, dear Santa Fe’

  When the peacocks honked, I awoke and turned on my side and went back to sleep. I dreamed, off and on, that we were embedding mosaic tiles and brooches and seashells into the wooden stairs of the Santa Fe house in which we are staying. But instead of making good on the beautiful designs of…