A sonnet is a form of rails and bars

And not much like the gossamer spider’s web

A foursquare scaffold toward the circling stars

An angled answer to high tide and ebb

For Nature never tamely interweaves

In calm susurrus of alternative

But storms and swirls ‘till rampant Chaos grieves

The blows that she lacks time and task to give

While should the poet spend force, force to show

No blood is shed;—yet forcéd falls his lay,

His every effort effortless to go

Succeeding mere exertions to convey.

We cannot mimic Nature, do our all;

‘Tis artifice that is most natural.

******************************

I pick up pen and, weeping, start to write

The ink is blood of wounds I must display

That seneschal, awake all through the night

Has patient watched my tears fall for this day

When tears will tell their tale and take their toll

Tell all, ‘till all their trial and toil be done

That soft report that echoes in the soul

Yet leaves me unconsoled, consoling none

For when I’ve squared the circle of my pain

I find myself no closer to the cure

By flowered words, truth is deflowered again

I’ve written, to be sure, or—be unsure?

Art is dishonored, used as heartache’s whore

And life dishonored too, by one line more

******************************

We think that feeling must be where we start

Wise Aristotle’s first primeval Source

Of movement, moving mind and mouth and heart

So speak our feeling—wind up feeling worse!

What cart is this we’ve put before what horse?

Does passion lie? Or truth lie somewhere else?

Where does love run when love has run its course?

Has honesty, or poetry, played false?

Perhaps the fault lies neither in our stars

Nor in ourselves, but in this Fallacy—

That strong emotions, and emotions’ scars

Set us in motion; when the truth may be

That motion pulls emotion in its wake;

We move, and moving, love the step we take.

Mark Simos is Assistant Professor of Songwriting.

He notes of this work:  ”This trio of sonnets, tossed off in a playful imitation of the style of the Metaphysical Poets, was inspired by discussions with students in various songwriting and lyric writing classes in the past few years. Though these may read as poems about poem-making, they concern questions that plague contemporary songwriters and musicians as well: Is structure inherently ‘cool’ and artificial? What is the role of our emotions as inspiration for our creative work? Does artistic authenticity depend on the depth of our feelings in the moment inspiration strikes? Can a work of art express thought as well as feeling, and still be affective and not didactic? The last sonnet alludes to the idea that “motion creates emotion”, a ‘meme’ I associate particularly with conversations with Pat Pattison. (I can’t say for sure who first came up with it—especially after a quick Google search showed it in use by cold call marketing trainers and aerobics instructors among others! But I’d like to acknowledge Pat and my fellow teachers in the Songwriting Department for many provocative discussions on these questions.)

                                                                                     Lone Fiddler, Johnson’s Court, Dublin by Fionán O’Connell

Raffael de Gruttola is past President and Treasurer of the Haiku Society of America and one of the founding members of the Boston Haiku Society which is one of the oldest groups in the USA and Internationally.  He has published three books of Haiku: Recycle/Reciclo, Where Ashes Float, and The Rattle of Bamboo Windchimes which are a combination of haiku with visual images or haiga as it is called in Japan. All three of the above books feature visual and/or sumi-e calligraphy with Wilfredo Chiesa, Wilfred Croteau, and Peggy McClure.  The last two portfolios have the Japanese calligraphy as well as the roman-ji by Shokan Tadashi Kondo along with the English text.  Raffael has also edited four chapbooks of poets from the Boston Haiku Society.  He also writes renku (linked verse) and has done two books of concrete haiku with Louisiana poet Carlos Colón: Circling Blackbirds and Wall Street Park. He recently adapted a one act play, HAIKU, by Katherine Snodgrass, Director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre, with Karen Klein and Judson Evans, which will be premiered at Berklee College of Music in the Spring of 2009 with the music of Berklee composer Allen LeVines.

**The images, unless otherwise noted, are by Kaji Aso, the founder of the Kaji Aso Studio on St Stephen Street.  He died a few years ago and a cherry tree has been planted in his honor in the Boston Gardens to commemorate his contribution to the City of Boston for so many years.  He was a professor of Japanese arts and painting for many years at the Museum of Fine Arts School.

Sometimes I wonder, no, always I do, each time I see that face

Nondescript and plain, but we know her by name, staring at the corner.

She, who carried the world’s greatest prize, praised for her fragile state.

Would she have bathed herself in impure waters if someone had chosen to warn her?

Holy Mary, Full of Grace, forgive me, I find it absurd

Your reward for all your virtues was a life riddled with wounds and scrapes.

It never seemed right and I regret that I might challenge the Sacred Word.

But how can we celebrate on into time this wondrous, blessed rape?

Days in her honor, for she carried the Child, the Man who changed the world.

If the Child had come through non-immaculate conception would the legend fall?

Would He be less worthy if his father was not a light hovering over the girl?

Would she not be held to the highest esteem if she lay with a man after all?

And what does it say about us, now, today that we continue to value this tale?

No woman has ever been sainted for being anything but quiet and stale.

So forgive me, Our Father, if I choose to believe she was more like Me.

Just a woman, a wife, with an inspiring life, and those eyes should hold more than we’ve seen.

I saw him there

Bare toes curled into black earth

Hunching over the infected gutter

Where water runs the color of injustice.

I saw him there, so small and beautiful

Eyes heavy as the stifling tropical air

So small and beautiful, unnaturally aged

Tiny fingers gripping the plastic cup

He knew he had no choice

But to drink

Hannah Ferber is currently a student at Berklee.  This poem was written for the Poetry Workshop .

Listening to a Monk’s Ch’in in Depths

Carrying a ch’in cased in green silk, a monk

descended from Eyebrow Mountain in the west.

When he plays, even in a few first notes,

I hear the pines of ten thousand valleys,

and streams rinse my wanderer’s heart clean.

Echoes linger among temple frost-fall bells,

night coming unnoticed in emerald mountains,

autumn clouds banked up, gone dark and deep.

Li Po (701-762)

Bamboo-Midst Cottage

Sitting alone in silent bamboo dark,

I play a ch’in into breath chants.

In these forest depths no one knows

this moon come bathing me in light.

Wang Wei (701-761)

Listening to Cheng Yin Play His Ch’in

Another Juan Chi ripening wine’s renown

in bamboo forests full of crystalline wind,

you sit half drunk, let down flowing sleeves

and sweep your dragon-rimmed ch’in clean.

Then it’s a fresh tune for each cup of wine,

dusk’s blaze sinking away unnoticed.  Soon,

thoughts deep among rivers and mountains,

I hear this mind my former lives all share.

Meng Hao-jan (689-907 C.E.)

In Reply to Vice-Magistrate Chang

In these twilight years, I love tranquility

alone.  Mind free of all ten thousand affairs,

self-regard free of all those grand schemes,

I return to my old forest, knowing empty.

Soon mountain moonlight plays my chi’in

and pine winds loosen my robe.  Explain this

inner pattern behind failure and success?

Fishing song carries into shoreline depths.

Wang Wei (701-761)

David Hinton was a recent Visiting Artist at Berklee.

LETTERS FROM EXILE

These are the letters I leave behind me,

dull lines written for the censor’s eye.

There are no stories here, only headlines,

statements of fact, shielding the truth.

But how can I write my life without politics

when each word placed is part of an equation?

Talk of my income will be translated

into an exact amount for blackmail or ransom;

Talk of our culture will be interpreted

as a covert call to arms.

I cannot tell you

that I am learning our language,

that I stand as a poet on a Western stage

crying out the loss of our country.

I cannot send you

photographs or cassette tapes.

You will not see my hair turn gray

or my voice change accent

as I become American.

I cannot even send you postcards

because such pictures

are considered currency in our country

and will go home with the postman

to be traded for food.

I write these words for you

knowing the line of people that stands between us:

my cousin, who will sit beside you, translating,

the villagers, hoping for news of their families,

and the government clerk, who will slit open

this letter, like all the others,

checking each word, over and over,

the most sensitive reader I could ask for.

SRI LANKAN SCHOOLROOM

Traipsing across sports grounds

picked clean by equator sun,

we visit my father’s school,

long-distance callers

at the museum of memory.

My father points out the places

where, giggling, his friends once sat,

names that belong to old men

in London and Toronto now, names

that could barely fit behind these desks.

His teacher remains unchanged.

Paper-dry voice crackling

he dictates the rites of duty and decorum,

the triumph of courtesy and reason

over the casual accident of race.

It is Jaffna, 1983.

It is one day in a long, hot summer.

It is one day, seconds away from war.

Decades from now, this is all that I’ll remember

of that visit to that country:

the sand dust in the air,

the sun, bleaching dry the shutters,

and the walls, empty of pictures,

not even a map of the world.

EVENING

Because evening is not just the end of the day

but the drawing together of death’s dark forces,

because night is a place through which shadows stalk

and a dynasty of our ghosts still wanders,

because I am the daughter of your only daughter

when our sons are all dead

and the names of our living have been scattered,

you will weave these dark time prayers for me,

pour water, biting like steel, through my fingers,

place ash, sacred, between my eyes.

Grandmother,

holding a house whose rooms have been emptied,

where the heirlooms have vanished

and the photographs of our men

are garlanded with silence,

you will light these camphor lamps for me,

chant mantras that pull down planets,

name stars that will stay faithful,

following my footsteps,

even into exile.

MY COUNTRY IS A WHITE BLINDNESS

My country is a white blindness,

an absence of newsprint,

a vacuum of words,

the falling snow of radio static.

So where is there left

for me to pour out my secrets?

I will dig graves deep in the earth for them.

I will tear holes in the white silence of the page

and bury the words of witness

deep in the tomb of the text.

Let them bear fruit there,

let the sprouting grasses shout out their secrets,

let the blade-cut reeds blare out their names.

Pireeni Sudaralingam and Colm O’Riain were recent Visiting Artists at Berklee.

A torrent of white

noise affiliates,

Pressing firmly

against my

ears.

Feel the pressure as

silence floats

by.

Parissa Roohipour is a Berklee alum.  This poem was written for the Poetry Workshop. 

The years fall from you all at once

I know that now. we spent a season

watching the cat shed, after all

and she licks her paws the way I wish

I could sing: full of confidence,

a luckless success.

And so:

I’ve written about

what it’s like to be denied

but I don’t really know what it’s like.

I’ve walked into traffic,

not thinking

and found myself

in the wake of death

she pulled me by the arm

away from the light

and threw me into some

lurid highway park-and-ride

and that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten.

Jan Rosenfeld is currently a student at Berklee.