i was looking for particular poem by ryokan earlier and happened upon this other poem by him:
When spring arrives
From every tree tip
Flowers will bloom,
But those children
Who fell with last autumn’s leaves
Will never return.
spring 2025 is new and many children fell with last autumns leaves and the poem i wasn’t looking for struck me, so i want to share it, but i wasn’t sure where. so, i dunno, what about a poetry thread?
This is a thread I’ve thought of making a few times! Yeah let’s share poetry! I would also love to read anybody’s original work.
I like Ikkyu. For a while, I would start my day by turning to a random page of Crow With No Mouth. Let’s see what happens today.
so burning’s knowing and I’m not even drunk on three wines
plunge into the fire reality pure endless pain
Yeah!
never heard of ikkyu before, sonds like an interesting fella.
sorry to keep coming back to this, but reading further in that wikipedia page on ikkyu:
In Rinzai Zen tradition, he is both heretic and saint.[16] He was among the few Zen priests who addressed the subject of sexuality from a religious context, and he stood out for arguing that enlightenment was deepened by partaking in love and sex, including lovers, prostitutes and monastic homosexuality.[2][16][17] He believed that sex was part of the human nature, and therefore purer than hypocritical organizations and worldly pursuits. At the same time, he warned Zen against its own bureaucratic politicising.[2]
i wanna give him a kiss!
eyyy a thread very up my alley! My favorite poet is louise gluck–I can’t ever put her collections down. I’ve always thought of her and Marilynne Robinson as sort of both describing the same truths, with Robinson doing it in prose and Gluck in poetry
I can see why they named a trail after him!
Every Job Has a First Day
Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what was left. But what could live wanted to and tried, treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins. He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember that, his nickel smile right at me, his fingers letting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filled with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what it was he thought he was doing, but we talked, I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough. They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release when we tense to catch. You have to believe it, he said. You don’t mean any harm.
YESSSSS poetry thread on the IC forums!!! 
really great stuff you’ve all been sharing
here’s two poems that have been guiding me lately
Palinode by
Monica Youn
a bird / falls off / a balcony / panicked grasping / fistfuls of / air
I was wrong
please I was
wrong please I
wanted nothing please
I don’t want
Scuola Metafisica
by Christopher Kennedy
The dead live in the grooves of old 45s, waiting to become music, and the rush of traffic on the highway is the dead saying good-bye. The slow parade of eyes, watching you walk by, the dead live there, too. In the reckless spin of a knife-tip ballerina, the blood of the world’s oldest woman. In the light and shadow that give birth to dislocation, in the statues of antiquity, the green abandoned house where you slept like a rusted engine in an old car, where the fire rose to the roof with the same slow, mechanical movement of a robot’s head. The dead there in all of it. When you speak to the dead, you speak to yourself. You say, I was asleep. Now I am awake. Look how I have grown.
These are all intended to be read in one minute (try it, it’s fun!).
“Indeterminacy 41”
“Indeterminacy 12”
“Indeterminacy 29”
“Indeterminacy 39”
All written by John Cage.
had an easier time clicking my brain over to those than i did proust.
One thing I love about poetry is its ability to defamiliarize the familiar and tickle the ambiguous. This is Pattiann Rogers, “Foreplay”:
When it first begins, as you might expect,
the lips and thin folds are closed, the pouting
layers pressed, lapped lightly,
almost languidly, against one another
in a sealed bud.However, with certain prolonged
and random strokings of care
along each binding line, with soft
intrusions traced beneath each pursed
gathering and edge, with inquiring
intensities of gesture – as the sun
swinging slowly from winter back
to spring, touches briefly,
between moments of moon and masking
clouds, certain stunning points
and inner nubs of earth – so
with such ministrations, a slight
swelling, a quiver of reaching,
a tendency toward space,
might be noticed to commence.Then with dampness from the dark,
with moisture from the falling
night of morning, from hidden places
within the hills, each seal begins
to loosen, each recalcitrant clasp
sinks away into itself, and every tucked
grasp, every silk tack willingly relents,
releases, gives way, proclaims a turning,
declares a revolution, assumes,
in plain sight, a surging position
that offers, an audacious offering
that beseeches, every petal parted wide.Remember the spiraling, blue
valerian, remember the violet, sucking
larkspur, the laurel and rosebay
and pea cockle flung backwards, remember
the fragrant, funnelling lily, the lifted
honeysuckle, the sweet, open pucker
of the ground ivy blossom?Now even the darkest crease possessed,
the most guarded, pulsing, least drop
of pearl bead, moon grain trembling
deep within is fully revealed, fully exposed
to any penetrating wind or shaking fur
or mad hunger or searing, plunging surprise
the wild descending sky in delirium
has to offer.
What about this poem is ambiguous?
how do you interpret it?
I phrased my question poorly. I think what I meant was, “what do you mean by tickle the ambiguous?” Because “ambiguity” can itself carry more than one meaning: inexact, and open. And I am genuinely curious to know!
The poem clearly describes sexual foreplay, wrapped in a metaphor of the spring season. It’s about sex, but it’s also about spring, a transition from closed to openness, as in readiness to receive whatever happens next (in an expansive, poetic kind of way referring to life in all its grandness and madness). The sexual foreplay reading and spring flower reading don’t negate each other, they inform and support each other.
To be brief, using your wording, I am not sure whether the poem describes sexual foreplay wrapped in a metaphor of a flower opening during spring or whether it’s a flower opening during spring wrapped in a metaphor of foreplay, or (as I think) an ambiguous mixture of both. The description is sufficiently vivid that either reading seems plausible.
I forgot what the word ambiguous means. The empire strikes again.
The poem adapted here is “Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed.
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
actually it’s my original gamer poem and the resemblance is coincidental
This resonated hard
