The Beat Goes… Going, Going, Gone!

Last Month: Heartbeat – why do you miss…?
This Month: The Beat Goes… Going, Going, Gone!

by Neal Whitman, “Poetry Prof”

In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger takes a short Chinese poem and offers… yep, you guessed it… 19 versions of it. The poem in question was written by Wang Wei over 1200 years ago, a master poet in an age known for its poetry, the Tang Dynasty. Wang Wei, who lived from circa 700 to 761, was also a painter and calligrapher. The title most commonly used for this poem is “Deer Park.” Some time ago, I loved reading a library copy of the Weinberger book and now treasure a gift copy from poet-pals I first got to know when they visited the Robinson Jeffers Tor House in Carmel, California, where I am a volunteer docent. [As a bonus, the book arrived with a feather from their parrot, Edward.]

My favorite Wang Wei translation in this book is by Gary Snyder who offers no title and, unlike almost all the others in this book, does not render it in four lines:

Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.
Yet –– here ––
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods:
Again shining
on the green moss, above.

Snyder brings this advantage to his approach: he knows his mountains. Shelved next to my “19 Ways” book is his Mountains and Rivers Without End. This book is composed of 39 pieces written between 1956 and 1996. It is hard to categorize this book. It is a set of poems, but I prefer to think of it, in totality, as poetical rather than as poetry. When he was given the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize in Japan in 2004, he explained that, although he did not consider himself a haiku poet, he was attempting to use a haiku aesthetic in “Mountains and Rivers” to talk about natural landscape and stories about the whole planet. Though influenced by many poetic traditions, he said that the influence of Japanese haiku and Chinese classical poetry was deepest.

Last month I exchanged e-mail with Mr. Snyder, who is a very gracious man. But, I did get a spanking. I put in the subject heading of my second e-mail, “and the beat goes on.” He responded:

“Incidentally for over 30 years now, when interviewed by reporters, I have said, “You must absolutely NOT use the phrase, the beat goes on, in your article or in a headline. We are all sick of it.”

Got it!

Tagged as: Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof.