Poets and bloggers who've written to the tragedies in Japan

I've so far seen a few responses by bloggers & poets (and blogger-poets) to the terrible earthquake & tsunami tragedies in Japan. Art must find a voice even amidst terrible destruction & loss of human lives. It's possibly the only ethical imperative it must obey. I will continue to post more tributes in poetry as I find them.

William Michaelian, poet, artist, & chronicler of the daily sublime has written a wonderful poem at his popular Recently Banned Literature site, entitled "Disaster" (reposted here with permission):

Far away, in an alley,
the earthquake
of one fallen
homeless
man

In true Eastern economy, not a single word is out of place & the "man" ending William's remarkable piece poses a finality that is more than just figuratively real.

Friend, poet and one of Canada's leading lyrical voices, Andreas Gripp, has recently shared with Katherine L. Gordon and myself, via email, a poem on the disaster (posted with permission) entitled "11/3/11".  Andreas's poetry of the devastation has taken the Eastern route also, softening the terrors via blossoms, snow and the child, even preserving amidst destruction a national ('origami') cultural tapestry that natural disasters can't ever subvert.

The cynic in me, on the other hand, might be tempted to read this as the fragility of culture itself, even one as great as the Eastern, in the face of Nature. Does Art prevail or does it, mammal-like, always manage to survive by burrowing deep in the ground, & arising when the sun's out?

Blossoms
were the first to fall,
in the rumble
that ruptured the calm,

and the land was shaken
as a globe of snow
in the hands of a beaming
child,

and window and wall
were cast to the earth
like an expulsion
from heaven of old,

boats and cars
both raced in the rush
of a fleeting, fatal
sea,

and the homes of Sendai
buckled,
as an origami’s
fold,

were carried
with all the dead,
in the swell that defied
the tide,

and the sirens screamed
of fire,
reactors wailed
of melt,

while the callous sun
descended,
teased millions
with its kiss of light.

From Penn Kemp, poet laureate of London, I've received via email the following piece entitled "Facing the Epicentre" from her Luminous Entrance, a sound opera for climate change action (dvd, Pendas Productions), posted with permission:

The time has now come when Earth

forces work us over. The day sparks.

How can we stabilize the Earth? When

she quakes, we too tremble in fear and

resentment. (How dare our mother shake

us off, like a bitch come in from the rain?)


Just when we had our lives organized,

our houses arranged the way we like,

our business minded, our minds at ease.

On vacation.


Just then. Foundations heave.

No leg to stand on. Upright is not

an option.

What is happening below the waves?

“When the ocean floor has burbled

cartographers must draw new maps.”

We still tremble on uneven ground.

Dreams caution us to acquiescence,

acceptance, equilibrium. We respond

with surface calm but the network

of nerve trembles with the earth.


Inner and outer hang on a thread.

The North Pole shifting an inch

makes the Earth rounder. May we too

round out our differences.

Penn has provided the best commentary herself for "Facing the Epicentre": "I so believe in the power of art to shape emotion into action for change, and help, in this case, for Japan... This poem was edited a year ago, the night before the Haitian earthquake, but it still stands!"

Canadian poet & activist Chris Faiers in his Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens blog offers the following tribute piece (reposted with permission):

blue Buddha
draped in white
mourning cloth

now sits above the snow melt in my front yard,
Green Tara incense smudging hope
for the land of Basho ...

He gave me in email correspondence an interesting account of the creation of his poem which I will give here in its entirety:

it took some time & reflection for me to think of any remotely appropriate response. I knew I had to do something ceremonial, so I took the blue Buddha from her backyard perch & placed her on the unused birdfeeder pedestal in my front yard. Then I draped her in a ceremonial white kata given to me at PurdyFest last summer by Theodore of Snow Lion Meditation Shop. I burned a stick of Green Tara incense to complete the installation. Then I wrote the haiku ...  

Canadian poet Irina Moga has posted both artwork by Hokusai and personal reflections of her own at The Continuous Poem. She's retold a tragedy through an ancient painting with its "surge of surreal walls of water" and claw-like waves. Irina wonders, as I do, if poetry made only of words can ever mirror (or even withstand) the unleashed forces of a tsunami. Again, which forces prove to be stronger here: natural or cultural?

Claudia Samperi-Warren has given her own response to the national disaster at poetfranksamperi through expression of gratitude to a place where her father poet Frank Samperi had lived for a time. It's there Samperi had forged a lifelong friendship with Cid Corman and perhaps developed a type of pure Eastern sensibility to complement his own work. Here are cultural influences that have survived unimaginable natural catastrophes. As Claudia says, "[m]y blog has received over 200 page views from Japan since it started. The connection that my father received then and now seems to have transcended over time."

At Issa's Untidy Hut Don Wentworth has posted poet Scott Watson's first-hand account (in the form of email updates) of the devastation at Sendai where he presently resides.

Joseph Hutchison at The Perpetual Bird has written a haiku (reposted with permission) that's given a  particularly eerie sort of horizon for any future Eastern poetics:

hazy moon in steam
from the cracked nuclear plant—
ghost-light passing through

I suggested in my reply that perhaps "season words" (kigo), as in the original Issa haiku after which Joseph's has been fashioned, may have to include the visible presence of radio-active "haze" as part of their poetic language, a creepy nuclear feature that can't be ignored. The  "ghost-light" presence is perhaps intended to lament the end of a purely natural haiku sensibility. A fact which reinforces my own cynicism as regards the ability of Art to withstand unfeeling cosmic forces.