Number 287
April/May 2001

Poetry
Copyright © 2001 Poetry Flash
Naming Names
ROBERT KING

OK-KOO KANG GROSJEAN
A Hummingbird's Dance
Were I a Flower
Winter Trees

The Whole Shot
In Memory of Gregory Corso
JACK HIRSCHMAN

Gregory...
LENORE KANDEL

ROBERT KING

I love the words of the name red winged black bird
though my philosopher daughter tells me descriptions
are not real names. And oh I know how the words fail,

turning bright blue prairie blossoms to Spiderwort
a farmer calls Cow Slobber. And I know how lazy
and local we get, talking of buffalo berry, buffalo bird

and grass, Indian grass or fig. Someone called it
Indian bean, the broad catalpa, a tree I met in Kansas
as a child, that place that means the wind, wind people,

south-wind people, a tree whose sound meant flowers,
"head with wings," in the round mouths of the Creek,
a tree which is Bignonia, imagine, in New Latin, when

we wanted to be neutral as science and hence named
a tree for the Abbe Bignon, New Latin librarian
to Louis XIV, hence honoring air again. "Te amo"

my 8th grade girlfriend's friends dared Jayne to say
which didn't mean she loved me, since it was
another language. Later, I took Latin and by now

Miss Hixon's joined Marcus Aurelius who joined,
as he knew he would, three men he names
as learning from and of whom, a footnote says,

"nothing is known" and who, anyway, wrote in Greek
or, for all we know, water. Or the air. Might as well
be air, I've thought, language only a shape of lips.

In Mabel Hixon's Latin class, Gene sat heavily
beside me in his stained work-clothes, his face
a laborious puzzle over the text, the rest of us

wondering why he read, why he was even there.
At our 40th reunion, he turned out to own
the county's biggest truck farm, thank you,

planting food in Latin&emdash;a union of onions,
the radical roots of the radish&emdash;and other tongues,
tomat, batata, the ancient bha-bha of the bean,

the grains of corn gardeners first called maize,
and the people ate the names and they were good.
It doesn't matter we give every wind a name

that dies, Mabel and Marcus other people now.
This breathing sound is how we call, our only ways
to say te amo to the air and bring it back again,

te amo to the black bird with its red spot wing,
te amo tomato and rosy wort, and green grass grown
and Gene and Jayne and all the, all the names.

Robert King lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. This poem was selected by poet Tony Hoagland for First Prize in the Sixteenth Annual National Writers Union, Santa Cruz/Monterey Local 7 competition, 1999, which carries an award of $500 and publication in Poetry Flash. "Upon Losing Her Breast," by Bonnie St. Andrews (Syracuse, New York) won Second Prize; "I Wish His Swimtrunks Would Listen," by Bonnie Auslander (Ithaca, New York) received Third Prize.

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Poet and translator Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean died in her Albany home around 11:00 p.m., October 25. She had been diagnosed with liver cancer earlier last year.

Grace and humility, and a warm, vibrant compassion---active, luminous---characterized her life and her work.

She was born November 1, 1940 in Kwang-Ju, Korea and migrated to the United States in 1963 where she studied for and pursued a career as a chemist and where she met her husband Glen Grosjean, who was teaching Linguistics at UC Berkeley.

She was raised a Presbyterian in Korean, but she slowly converted to Buddhism under the influence of her husband, who had been a Zen monk in Japan for three years, and then triggered by the pain of her sister's death in 1968, also from cancer.

Buddhism inspired all her literary work. She's best known in Korea for translating the Dalai Lama's Policy of Kindness and Ocean of Wisdom, Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace and The Heart of Understanding, Krishnamurti's Flame of Attention and Education and the Significance of Life, and Gary Snyder's No Nature. She also translated into Korean the work of many American poets, among them Jack Foley, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Bruce Isaacson, Joyce Jenkins, Dorianne Laux, Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino, Richard Silberg, and Julia Vinograd.

She translated from Korean into English the Selected Poems of Park Nam Soo and was instrumental in the translation of Oh Sae Young and Ko Un. Her own books of poetry are Horizon and A Hummingbird's Dance. We'd like to remember her with two poems from that second book and one from an unpublished manuscript, Delightful Encounters. &emdash;Richard Silberg

A Hummingbird's Dance

Chung-Hwa Sonsa

Whenever I water flowers
somewhere
a hummingbird appears
and dances.

For a long time
I've watched that dance
not knowing
what moves me so.

Today
I see.

In a hummingbird's dance
there is no bird
only movement.

The dance
danced without "I"
is the dance with a heart.

Were I a Flower

Were I a flower
I'd like to be
anonymous and wild
hidden amongst pine needles
near a lichen-covered rock
deep in the mountains.

But it would be good
to catch the grateful glance
of a lonely traveler
like Basho.

Winter Trees

I
Bare tree
reminds me of my own parting.
When my hair is white,
will I be as noble as that tree?

II
Like pilgrims standing in prayer,
those bare winter trees
on the way to Jenner
are ready to bloom.

"Were I a Flower" and "Winter Trees" reprinted from A Hummingbird's Dance, Parallax Press, Berkeley, 1994.

 
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________The Whole Shot
In Memory of Gregory Corso

JACK HIRSCHMAN

Most, given the death we've all been given
before we die, die.
Greg didn't, Greg wouldn't Greg ain't.
He burned his being burned and being burned up
right in front of you,
up front,
in your face, he was a fighting little neighborhood,
city-wide.

I never saw him sing, he never sang, copper,
O but he sang.
And guzzled and fixed and trashed and mashed.
Consumed. He was consumed by consuming,
conpetition's fool
from Maldoror through every lowdown kind of
kinahoor clear down to his own stretch-marks
in Dannemora.

I went to see him in the hospital once
when his head, 3 times its size, some blood
he'd dissed in the drunk-tank had kicked in.
Which was after he'd once right-crossed me
for no good reason, like my best friend the
Calabrese kid in my neighborhood in The Bronx.
Which was before a bull-dyke once decked him
for dissing lesbians, and for being monstrously cute,
humiliating in public to women and men alike,
a self-styled "rotten fuck" who never cleaned up,
a nice guy who said, "No more nice guy,"
all brag and loudmouth blow,
fame up his ass
"I'm Gregory Corso"
like at a horseshow,
provoking, stirring shit,
yelling, "Hey, Ginzy!" up to Shig's place on Grant St.
when Allen was visiting, for some dough.
Or: "Hey, Jackie, where's Neeli? He took
Max for a walk…"

In this bar or that, running with this or that mug,
that chick or this,
toking in an alley or back in the john,
or cross-legged serious in the Caffe Trieste
reading the Chronicle or The Times
mixing it up with a mouth in a gallop
like Billy Hallop
with twinkle and charm out of hell,
he was one of a kind
of a devil character,

so you might never have known
he could precision an image
to its finest fain,
turn a phrase and make it sit in
with a combo of sounds
that unearthed a flagrant poesy
from ancient undergrounds,
write from a spring
without himself in it
and make the running diamonds
"the whole ball game"
or "the stiff arm of Cuba"
more than just sport,
"the whole shot"
in the senses that toppled
lying news reports,
taking one's breath away
and leaving a real agape suddenly
sprouting daisies in your empty spaces,
the way it is when you're met
by a pair of eyes on the street
above a mouth that might say anything,
above a body that might do anything,

yet those eyes in a slow, smiling
recognition rise and wink:
"Hey you, human bean, you Poet,
you synechdochal yokel of All,
Nothing's concealed,
Nothing's hid.
Cross my heart and hope to live."

The Kid is dead.
Long Live the Kid!

Jack Hirschman is a poet and translator who has been dubbed the 'unofficial poet laureate' of San Francisco. The Endless Threshold and The Back of a Spoon are recent books of his own poetry. His translations include Fist of Sun by Ferruccio Brugnaro, The Sea on its Side, by Ambar Past, and Clandestine Poems, by Roque Dalton.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Gregory....

LENORE KANDEL

In New Mexico
He put his rumpled body
between me and the police
when the DA swore he'd arrest
me for reading my poetry

Here, when I was motorcycle smashed
he cooked dinners for me
that I couldn't eat

His heart was as tender as
a cactus without any spines
a rose with soft thorns

Lenore Kandel's poetry books include The Love Book (prosecuted for pornography in the mid-sixties) and Word Alchemy.