Dreams Wander On: Contemporary Poems of Death Awareness, edited by Robert Epstein
Baltimore, MD, Modern English Tanka Press, 2011.
A review by Don Wentworth
Part of the trouble, some might say a great deal of the trouble, with Western culture and the increasing Westernization of Eastern culture, is the conscious and unconscious distancing of death from everyday existence. As a result, society’s psychological health is at great risk. In a mere one hundred years, the widespread changes in many countries in the chain of custody of a deceased body alone, from time of death to the filling in of the grave, is testament to a repression so deep as to be immeasurable in its repercussions.
Books such as Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning study, The Denial of Death, and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death broke ground in bringing these concepts to the forefront of the collective Western mind.
Of course, death gives life meaning. We all know the various legends of the curse of immortality.
In the East, death has more often been in the foreground. Buddhism in its tenets and practices confronts death head on. Many everyday disciplines reflect these basic tenets, everything as seemingly diverse as Zen gardens, the Japanese tea ceremony, ikebana, the samurai arts, and literature mirror and highlight the four Noble Truths. Each of these disciplines is a Way, or practice, with the goal of satori or enlightenment.
Not the least of these practices is the verse form haiku.
Dreams Wander Onis a collection of haiku, and its related forms such as senryu and tanka, centering around the death experience. In his excellent prefatory material, editor Robert Epstein contextualizes the death poem (and the death awareness poem) in its intent, execution, and implications. He bows deeply to Yoel Hoffman’s fine work, Japanese Death Poems, and acknowledges his own volume to be a Western counterpart to that seminal study.
Haiku itself has many definitions and it is not my intent to set forth still another. The three most important elements universally acknowledged as being present in all definitions that have particular application to this volume are that haiku are brief, one-breath poems, that they deal with nature based themes or images, and that they have a general, holistic or Buddhist feel. In addition, regarding the particular collection at hand, the first Noble Truth states all life is suffering and, one might argue, death itself is the ultimate suffering, often more in its anticipation than in its realization.
This collection of poems, be they haiku, senryu or tanka, confronts all these elements, very often in a stark, straight-forward manner, and uses them to probe the mystery and uncertainty at the core of existence. I would argue strongly that all important poetry, regardless of its form or origin, is about, whether directly or indirectly, this very mystery. The brief poem exemplifies this confrontation in its very form; this is poetry that does not blink, or look away while whistling past the graveyard, if you will.
Dreams Wander On contains approximately 400 poems and the quality and intensity of the work cannot be minimized. In my first pass through, I noted an astounding 68 poems that warranted further, close investigation. That, of course, is just through the lens of one particular individual, with her/his commensurate bias, prejudices, predilections etc.
The title itself comes from Bashō’s well-known death poem:
Sick on a journey –
over parched fields
dreams wander on.
translated by Lucien Stryk
On the very brink of death, Bashō captures the essence of the mystery: hope, doubt, and wonder, all in three brief lines, a perfect choice to encompass all that is to come.
Firmly grounded, Linda Ahern’s poem helps open the volume with an aforementioned unblinking stare:
winter day
wildflower rosettes
on the plot reserved for me
Since it is winter, someone had to bring the flowers and it would probably not be a stretch to speculate that it was the poet herself. That simple gesture notes a level of acceptance one might not normally expect; consider the typical depiction in popular culture on seeing one’s own headstone - for example Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol - of fear and sheer abject horror to appreciate this poem’s power.
A little further on, there is a stunning poem by John Brandi:
Now that fallen leaves
have buried the path
the trail is clear
There are many ways to read this poem and death awareness is definitely one. Though it may seem a bit wrong-headed to suggest, death awareness is, in my view, a sub-set of awareness. Certainly, either might come first, but it is hard to imagine one without the other, at least for very long.
In this instance, I suspect each reader may fine a different revelation, which is probably the best definition of haiku there is. Once we stop following the way of others, we find our own way. Or the more literal, with all the leaves down, one might actually see the way out without a path. Or, as the leaves themselves represent death … and so on.
fossil
older
by the second
Helen Buckingham’s five word bit of wonder is another outstanding haiku. The pacing is perfect – ba ba, ba ba, ba ba, or, if you will, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock – we actually physically feel time passing and are still, miraculously, in the present moment. The poet utilizes another of the time honored elements of classic haiku – the contrast of seemingly disparate things – to maximum effect. The smallest of time units is evoked to measure tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of years. And what, after all, is being measured here really if not the duration of human life itself?
Carlos Colon connects nature, creativity and death awareness in this fine little gem:
all the poems
I’ve written
melting snow
and the pointed, humorous, wonderful:
pointing
my way home
the starfish
With a mere 7 and 6 words respectively, Colon captures the is-ness of living, the is-ness of dying. How could anything be better than this? Norman Darlington quickly corrects this thought, showing it can at least be done as well by doing it differently:
a lone raindrop —
the short journey
from cloud to ocean
This is-ness is in that “short journey,” within which existence is completely captured, the poet using an analog here in the manner of Kobayashi Issa: the poem is what it is and, if you wish, is something else, too.
Bruce Dickson, too, puts forth an analogy that is perfect on the surface and perfect underneath:
in darkness
the smell of the candle
blown out
In terms of death awareness, these poems are as fragile as life itself. For Dickson, one sense substitutes for another just as memory sits in for the real gone thing.
Real gone thing, indeed.
Never were more honest words spoken than Sylvia Forges-Ryan’s:
Ten times ten thouusand
terrible things in this world
and still I don’t want to leave it
This may not be a “proper” haiku or senryu but it is a very potent, winning poem.
Nature is never far away from these works, nor should it be. Stanford Forrester’s mastery is evident in whom he shares co-author credit with:
writing a haiku
in the sand . . .
a waves finishes it
Poem after poem after poem hammers home variations of the same tune, and it is in the variation that we find the music:
rain turns to snow silence
This S. B. Friedman’s poem is a fine piece; we all know that “snow silence.” I love the way the auditory and visual aspects perfectly dovetail and, depending on where you put the emphasis, the snow continues or, like the rain, stops. Again, as an analog to death awareness, this has perfect precision.
Tyrone McDonald mines a similar image and the result can be seen even more clearly here:
death poem—
the no sound
of snowflakes
Peggy Harter consistently touches the deepest point of all in her work and, in the following, a moment could never be more alive:
broken bowl
the pieces
still rocking
It is that present tense “rocking” that is as succinct an image of grief’s continuous loss as one might ever be imagined.
Ruth Holzer brings the doubt, delves into the mystery, and somehow celebrates it:
not everything
has a solution—
autumn leaves
john martone underlines that message, literally:
you’re part of the secret
With each poem, the reader feels as if s/he is communing with master after master and learning the life lessons each of us so desperately seeks.
Art Stein, too, sees the mystery for precisely what it is, and where:
so awkward
this stage between
birth and death
There is the death of the dying, and then there is the death as experienced by the ones left behind:
seated between us
the imaginary
middle passenger
When perceived from the point of death, the pain of true loss is conjured by John Stevenson in a deeply cutting way. This poem, too, as with others in this collection, might be read in other ways, but we are here to discuss a specific type of loss, and so it is.
There are many, many other pieces in Dreams Wander On that will strike other readers as powerfully as these have me. This book is as important to the discussion of haiku and Eastern poetic forms as a Way as any I’ve had the privilege to encounter. Let me close then with a poem by one of our finest artisans of the haiku form, George Swede, whose preciseness of language and image always takes us to the center of things:
falling pine needles the tick of the clock
The true dilemma of existence is one of balance: there is life and there is death, how might both aspects mutually complement the other?
Of course, this is the wrong question. Duality itself, as found and treated in the masterworks of such great writers as Bashō, Wordsworth, Issa, Hermann Hesse, Yosano Akiko, and Lawrence must be transcended.
Death is life, life is death. All is all.
Dreams wander on.
Don Wentworth is the editor for over two decades of the poetry magazine Lilliput Review, which has an exclusive focus on the short poem. His own poetry has appeared in publications as diverse as Modern Haiku, Rolling Stone, bottle rockets and bear creek haiku. His first full-length collection of poems, Past All Traps, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2011.