sachio takashima

Essay: Critical opinions, 1986-1992

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:32:52 GMT

CRITICAL OPINIONS, 1986-1992

At the time of this writing, I’m trying to reevaluate my previous literary and philosophic work. As part of this process, I’m reflecting back on my creative genesis in 1986, the time of my second conversion to poetry.

At that time, I was thirteen years old and absorbing the western canon at a rapid and imperfect speed. I had very strong opinions on the subject of literary criticism, but I didn’t have the knowledge or establishment to grasp at subtleties, or express my self the way I desired. My prose was far behind my poetry, my vision ahead of my capabilities.

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of Byron’s finest moments, in canto IV of Childe Harold, and Shelley’s Ode To The West Wind. I ventured a comparison with the best of current poetry, looking to the Nation and New Yorker. The effect was a powerful dissonance. What I hoped for was a progression in literature, where my contemporaries would experience the heights of the masters, would entirely reinvent that experience, and surpass them. Instead, what I encountered to my sorrow was what I could best describe as a genre of disjointed prose, notes to self, and dramatic readings, sometimes moving toward poetry, often grounded in the prosaic.

I was of the opinion that the Modernist direction of poetry was away from the direction of what made poetry most uniquely poetry, and over all, tended to replicate what made prose uniquely prose. I
Admitted the highest points of Pound and Elliot, but I was
dumbfounded by the popularity of the poet Rod Mckuen. I’d purchased a set of his books at a flea market, and I quoted from them when visitors came by as examples of a crisis in criticism.

Of course I tried to make up in enthusiasm what I lacked in knowledge. I was just starting to grasp the trajectory from the Age of Pope to the Age of Wordsworth. But it would be years latter that I would read a survey of verse from Imagists to Spoken Word. I felt I understood enough to resonate with an essay by James Stephens, where he wrote

Today, whether it be for poetry or for prose, for painting or for music, there is no artistic-subject: and in consequence, no demand upon, and no production of the graver artistic- energy. It may be; it almost assuredly is, that our predecessors have plundered and exhausted our fields; and that even the instrument of production, technique, has been so diligently over used by them that it, too, comes blunt and inept to our needs, and will work no more.

I was excited by a reinvention of technique, with all that Stephens implied by the word. Though I was far from it in my own verse, I had an idea that poetry should take a step back in to the recent past, from the north, southward to the center to the circle, then, turn east, and move with it in an new direction, one that would be alien to the Romantic tradition, and indigenous to our own time and experience.

Contrary to Stephens, I believed the over all qualities of the ‘poetic’,
The quintessence as I called it, has been proven by world cultures to be inexhaustible. If a group of poets based them selves in the quintessence, the much maligned ‘poetic’, and practiced a union of art and life, and ‘tinctured’ their work with the never-before personality of the ego, a revolution in literature would occur.

While the alchemical expressions came a bit latter (‘tincture of the ego’ etc) the concepts were there at the beginning. The qualities of the ‘poetic’, the mythic, timeless, primal, the musical, the metaphorical, the mysterious, are inexhaustible, and must be recreated, and, to use the phrase of Shklovsky, defamiliarized.

Also, from the beginning, I held the view that poetry will do itself a disservice if it abandons form, or expands the word to include its very absence. Rather then depart from form, I advocated a radical creation of new forms. For my self, I took a sort of vow to never work in free verse, and to start the exploration of new formal possibilities.

In contemplating forms in particular, I tended to view modernism as a bad excess of the libertarian aspects of Romanticism. Out of the clockwork preachiness of neo classicism, the best of Romantics came to a restoration of form in vitality. In modernism, style and content and ethos went back in the direction of prose, but form went into the opposite extreme. Again, my call was not to write like the Romantics, but to recreate form from their sense of ‘organic’ form.

When I went to local poetry readings, I encountered what I felt was a harsh orthodoxy of modernists. One person argued so forcefully against my views, and felt I was taking a ‘conservative’ position. Interestingly, I was surprised at this. I saw my call to be progressive, but from an opposite direction. Conservative I thought was to write in the manner of the currant orthodoxy, in disjointed prose, making witty points, and valuing point of view over art it self. If my own early poems sounded like I was a companion of the Romantics, it was because it was a necessary step to a new literature.

I latter made my slogan ‘NEW FORM, NEW STYLE, NEW CONTENT’ as a way of new discovery in quintessence. I couldn’t fathom how that could be called conservative. I figured it was possible to be a curmudgeon, and say, “this new fangled new stuff, that’s not how we wrote when I was young”, and that’s how I appeared, I felt, to the modernists. In fact I was taking a very different approach, which seemed lost on them no matter how much I tried to explain. I felt as if,-----years latter they were still reacting against Tennyson as if he were the establishment.

I took this orthodoxy to be omnipresent, when in fact it wasn’t. Yes, among currant writers of poetry, among those who organize and attend the readings, but not among the wider public of poetry readers. In the wider public, I latter learned, there’s much more of a critical neutrality. I found more openness, to looking at the sort of poem I advocated, to look at it on its own terms, to see if it’s original, and whether it speaks to experience.

But in the poetry scene, it was very different. Readers wanted strait forward American English that told a story, and made one see the world from a different perspective. Some rhythm was approved, some archaic poeticisms if they showed off the author’s virtuosity, especially if it did so with wit.

When presented with a poem that tried to find its own voice in the quintessence, the result was often confusion. One writes in the way modern people write. If one writes in rhyme, in meter, in metaphors of sun and moon, then one is writing the way they wrote back then. If one writes in the way they wrote back then, then one is not original.

This struck me as a bit shallow. If someone writes in the style of Ginsburg, it can ether be an unoriginal imitation, or quite possibly, make it entirely new, expanding it in a new direction, investing one’s experience in it. Maybe this can be said of any style of verse, that in the right hands it can be made a vehicle of original expression, true to the author.

So, can the same be said for a poem beginning from the foundations of Rilke, and blossoming out from it? Say what one will of Byron, but his poems are distinctive. From the cavaliers he built his lyrics, from the Dunciad tradition his satire. In both he infused his life, and made them his own.

Once this principle is observed, the author is faced with a question, ‘what model will be my vehicle?’ It seemed to me, among the orthodox, the question just wasn’t on the table. The assumption was, “current poets throw out all models, we write from out own experience”. But this just wasn’t the case. Every poem at the reading was modeled, consciously or unconsciously on Mary Oliver or Charles Bukowski, a descendent of someone’s work. They each had their models as I had mine.

Almost invariably there was someone at the readings, or a small cluster, which appreciated my verse, found it a refreshing change in the free verse routine. But people who actively agreed with my critical outlook weren't in the poetry scene. They were ether scholars of literature or free readers of poems, or new poets who hadn't yet adopted the modernist persona.

I wasn't any where near being able to write about the things I talked about, but I day dreamed an essay precisely on the modernist persona, how readers at the readings have unconsciously adopted an identity as the cutting edge, free spirited commentators on current issues, activists against the bulwark of reaction. My essay would question this direction of poetry. It would question this persona, while powerful in relating to contemporary issues, and bonding with other people. Whether it limits the more unearthly calling of the poet, or limits our access to the kind of art that’s world resounding and timeless, that remains another question. Milton, I pointed out, lived in a world of mundane objects, outhouses, doorknobs, ledger sheets, details of legal codes. But instead he wrote in the quintessence. You could dismiss this by saying he did this not out of choice, but custom. And now the custom has changed. No subject is taboo, and poets have unprecedented freedom.

But I felt there was a more probing question. What is the farthest we can reach beyond our selves into what is unexplored? What is the very nature of our art, that distinguishes it from the world of the newspaper?

I wanted to argue that in every great age and culture, in India, in China, in Greece, there was a unique human activity of the poet, expressed in countless ways. It moved with the human experience from beyond the shell of the mundane daily object in a water of subjective objectivity. (I use words I have now that I didn’t have then.) The world of dream, of vision, of trance, incarnating in symbols the immediate experience.

But in the world of the readings, there was the strangest sense that this world of ideals was socially backwards, part of a Eurocentric oppression. Meter itself a Eurocentric oppression. I proposed that they should look to Valmiki and Lipo, but I retracted it, because the translations of Lipo make him seem like a colloquial free verse poet in the manner of the Beats. I felt frustrated and isolated in these arguments. Politically I was a Godwinian anarchist, to the left of their liberalism. But the more ideological among them saw me as a Jesse Helms Republican. My essay was a call for two works, one, creating new worlds in new myths in new music, second, with our hands, creating a social revolution for class equality. The two, I felt, should be complements.

To be honest, the negative encounters were probably few. But I was insecure, and felt defensive in that environment. It made me defensive as my work might be rejected in my lifetime. So I withdrew into a very bad habit of producing and producing, plays poems, epics etc, and being horrible at sharing them, never promoting them. It was a very defeatist outlook, which I’m now trying to undo.

Conversely in my imagination I made a vivid fiction of poets philosophers and painters, who created a subculture of dissident artists reviled in their lifetimes and treasured by posterity. This fiction wasn't on paper, but in my mind. I would smoke my pipe and wonder in the basement, imagining the first appearances of a new artistic movement, a new renaissance of the humanities. I imagined all sorts of critical reviews of their work.

Some of the poets were actual friends of mine, like Edward Egan, others were from the imaginary world, like Julia Strataveri. With each character I had a chance to work out all manner of conflicting ideas and approaches. For the most part, they weren’t defensive, but together simply created the new literature. And there it was.

They addressed themselves to both posterity and antiquity, and built their monumental dramas and works expressing the world of the present in the new language of the infinite. Time passed, and they developed their own readership, their own subculture of enthusiasts. To be left wing, mystically inclined and advocates of a complex metaphorical art were typical traits in this group, always with exceptions.

By 1987, the fiction showed the first signs of manifesting in outward life. With my mother, my cousin Har'i Khan, and Amy Champion, we found the first four of this kind of community. We were producing poems in the quintessence with a strong sense of shared ideals. Latter, Melissa Jameson came into my life, and the new beginnings were discernable. But the story of the Dionysian Rite is written of elsewhere, I should stay to my topic.

The ideas of this time of my life are scattered through my journals, essays, and some fragmentary pieces. There are some small essays in which I try to assess the poems of fellow Dionysians, one called Mortality’s Masque for example, looks at the work of Har’i Khan, but from the lens of our tortured friendship in that time and place.

But more abstractly, primarily interested in innovation, I spent time wondering how forms of one art could be fused with another, and wither it might offer some directions. I launched a long group of poems that ‘translated’ details of musical forms into verse, mirroring the details of first movement form for sonatas, and experimenting with Prelude and Fugue. These abstract and repetitive pomes were so thrilling to write, having the feeling of a new synthesis; I felt I was moving toward the breaking down of barriers of all art forms. I was at that age a convinced Wagnerian in music; I yearned for the Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of all art forms. Poetry, I thought early on, unites all the arts within it, and I went on in detail about the painters' and sculptor’s and composer’s crafts in the narrative poem. When I first became aware of Wagner’s doctrine, I felt I was aligned with a thread of historical Aesthetics without even being aware of it.

Concerned with the reception of poetry, I noted, a person might read an ode by Keats with a cold curiosity, and another person find in it gateways to another world. I thought about the process of writing, but the process of ‘entering in’ to a work seemed like it demanded examination. Very taken by Blake’s ideas of the ‘firm liniments of the imagination’, I wondered how a person might cultivate the visionary imagination as a way to literature. I wondered if there were steps a person could take to ‘enter in’, if this didn’t come naturally to them. With any literature, Chinese or English, an intellectual preparedness opens countless doors to the poets, familiarity with the whole literature allows us to see context and influence and nuance. But a person new to poetry, with a rich experience and a sense of reverence is miles ahead of a jaded scholar.

Around 1988, I started to find a way to look at individual poems that could open one to experience their mystery, together with critical analysis. This started out as a ‘threefold ring of criticism’. The first ring, with the poem in front of the reader, was to try to enter the ‘cosmological’ sense of the piece. That is, the eyes close, one ‘baths in nothingness’ until the world is vanished. Opening the eyes, as if a first fresh glimpse at the wonders of the earth, one enters a symphonic poem, and witnesses to its existence. This is the cosmological sense, the poem’s existence outsides of concerns of history, in and of itself.

The second Ring is the individual sense. From here I quote from a latter synopsis. “Now we descend to the earthly worlds, but retaining closely the cosmological sense, we retrieve or gather our learning of the poet’s individual character, and understand the poem in the context of her life, and try to discover what influence bares on its content. What happened in her life when she wrote it? What part of her earlier life is relevant to it? Above all, what is the unique flavor her character? Where is this found in her art?”

The last Ring is the historical sense. “Now, we retrieve or gather our learning on the history of poetry and social events before, after and during her life. What poets had she studied and learned from? What part of her poetry is determined by her Age and its conventions? Above all, what in her poetry is unique to her, and not found in poets before her?”

These Threefold Rings were latter expanded to Nine Keys to Interpreting the Poets. In short, after the third Ring, there was a forth step, while keeping still to the cosmological sense, the reader interpreted the music, rhythmic and tonal qualities, etc. Fifth, an interpretation of the concrete meaning, the narrative, the concepts, the figures of speech. Sixths, ‘the two betrothed’, reading again with the music and meaning united again. Seventh, interpreting the poem as a whole, the assessment of the unity of its parts. Eighth, retrieving particular phrases, particular images from the whole for savoring, or for noted detraction from its purpose. And last, the interpreter’s life. What dose the experience mean for the reader’s life, how dose it speak to one’s own history and experience?
Very connected to this was my intense interest in Alchemy. The Hermetic process should be mirrored in verse, I insisted, if we could find a way to reflect the very particular procedures of Alchemy in verse, it wouldn’t be merely a metaphor for a lover to a higher state (as in "Alchemie du Verbe”) but could potentially unveil a new nuance in literature. I didn’t believe this alchemy could be divorced from the physical work with metals. So this ‘poetic alchemy’ was to be a spiritual extension of the physical work, and what would remain might be discoveries that stand on their own from a literary perspective. In other words, what for me might have been a weaving of literary aims and personal hermetic practice, should in effect have no dependence on their origin.

I was interested in the process of the imagination in poetic creation, and I turned to various systems of divination as a way of passing to deeper corridors of creativity. These were themselves considered mirrorings of alchemical processes, for example, where I engaged in the sublimation of mercury, in poetic composition, this was paralleled in clairvoyant vision into evocative images, when what was witnessed in vision was brought back into poetic phrases. Again, the aim was regardless how one interpreted this process (skeptics reducing clairvoyance to auto suggestion) the literary experiment would stand on its own.

Over all, the principle out lines of poetic alchemy were as follows:

The play of sun and moon, or sulfur and mercury, were reflected in two directions of verse, that is, ‘Symbolism’, meaning the evocative and intangible, the music; then, ‘Humanism’, meaning the intellectual concrete and narrative. The symbolist aspect might be found in the lyrical fevers of Shelley’s Prometheus, the humanist, in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, with its philosophical groundedness.

The third quality of alchemy, magnesium, was reflected in the verse-form, which cradles the previous two, and creating a pressure, an intensity, and leading where bounds become vehicles of freedom

In assessment of texts, I think I followed a predictable progression. As a thirteen year old, secretly I valued a mediocre moment in Wordsworth more then a fine poetic moment in Elliot. Publicly, I looked for the worst in modern poetry to compare to the best of Romantic verse. As my reading grew, I was forced to rethink my own dogmatism, as I witnessed my self trying to fit evidence to the argument. All throughout I affirmed my main argument, that is, against the twentieth century proseation of verse. But the argument matured as I grew older. I talked more of “Shelley at his best moments” rather then “Shelley”. I became increasingly critical of Byron’s superficiality, and more attuned to his passages of depth and evocation.

Rather then ignoring American Romanism, as I previously did, wishing it would go away, I honestly tried to work through what it was that made Bryant seem so inferior to his English counterparts.

At thirteen, at the beginning of this process, I tried to understand what made the Ode To The West Wind move with genius, over and against the praise of anthologists and critics. So latter this same exercise pulled me to deepen my self-examination in regard to texts, and encouraged me to seek a path that was both principled and unidiomatic.

At this point in my life were I feel my work is only beginning, I look back and try to assess my opinions. From my own standpoint, because I am one with the thirteen year old in worldview, I am still an advocate for Dionysian art. I want to see a viable alternative to the proseation of verse, and a recreation of verse form. But the process of maturing views is indispensable. Many of my earlier pronouncements were nostalgic rather then progressive. If carried out, that vane could condemn a new literature to an historical box. The truth is my dogmatism sustained me when what I was doing was completely out of the mainstream of things. I was undertaking a life process with no supports, in fact, faced with quite a bit of hostility. In the end, I was able to turn the criticism onto the critic, and to crave more viable avenues for the same worldview.

If I were to try to look outside my own worldview, in devilish adcocacy, I might have the following affirmations:

If a critic has no such commitment to Dionysian ideals, he or she would be forced to admit the uniqueness of the situation. Even if I ‘did’ fail to produce much of lasting value, I was at least an experiment in an adolescent out of time. In isolation, I found my identity in the Romantic era, and produced work from this inspiration. I developed in this Weltanschauung a philosophical process, a critical and poetic one. This raises an interesting question: is original work, if modeled on the best of Shelley, if fused with a new personality and a modern era, not creating something essentially new? If a poet actually achieved this, then I think my argument was correct. It would have to be judged on its own terms, not on whether it conforms to the current ethos of the poetry scene.

Other details of my thinking, such as the division of poetry into the three components of alchemy, might be seen as interesting and instructive myths, and they may indeed offer new ways of looking at verse. But we could conceive of any number of contradictory myths of structure, and each would look at verse according to its own modal. Perhaps, even if ideologically driven, it can ultimately be seen as a product of art, expressing criticism. And in the right hands, leading to unique approaches.

That said, with out my worldview, my argument that
the best of Dionysian verse would be superior to the best of modernist/ postmodernist verse would be less persuasive. A more objective view might ascribe this judgment to taste and temperament.

But there could be little doubt that the best of Dionysian verse would excel in its unique field, and would be a valued contribution.

Essay: Circle of the Dragon

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:49:27 GMT

THE CIRCLE OF THE DRAGON

I have a rare book collection. I’m sure it must seem pretty unremarkable, as it consists of only two books, one by Goldsmith, one by Rossetti. But in my private world, I fancy it a legitimate collection, with a legitimate sounding name, that is, the Jeremy M Prozeller Memorial Rare Book Library.

Now today, I want to talk about the namesake, not the books. Jeremy was my childhood friend, and it might seem odd that I name my cluster of two rare books after him, as he wasn’t a scholar, but an adventurer, an arch rebel who as far as I know would have been extremely disinterested in the books he now presides over. But I call the books in his honor, because I honor him, and the books to me are meaningful. So in my inner world, it makes some sense, paradoxical, but sincere.

We were classmates at the Green Meadow School, starting in the 3rd grade. How we first started talking is hazy, but I know from the start we met with our mutual interest in the world of the martial arts and Asian culture. At first it was more in dreams of the fighting monks of Shaolin, and latter in the shadow warriors of Japan, Ninjutsu. We always met on the playground, in the far wooded corners as only exist in the world of Waldorf; we practiced our animal-palm forms of Kung Fu. Sometimes others would come to watch.

I still see him, tall and pale and skinny, with his long face and blond hair, attacking trees with flying side kicks. Then, in that Jeremy way, he would land in attack position, recover himself in almost cool confidence, as if it were effortless, and meaningless, and then turn to watch my turn. If you saw us then, punching and blocking and flipping, you might think, what small little acrobats. But in my memory, we were quite full grown, but much less touched by history.

As time passed, our commitment to the Chinese fighting arts grew deeper. We trained intensely, teaching each other new moves, sharing what we learned from every place but books. Somehow we absorbed the Buddhist traditions of Shaolin, and imbibed a good dose of Yin/Yang cosmology.

I used to tell him stories about my half-brother, Jim Ko, who moved from Taiwan, and was already grown up and far away when I was born. But Jimmy Ko, as I heard the story, was something of a ruffian in high school, part of a Kung Fu street gang called the Blue Dragons. Jeremy loved this story but, you have to imagine, in his cool, indifferent sort of way. If he were smoking then, you could imagine him taking a drag on his cig and saying, “That’s pretty cool. We should be Blue Dragons.” Which I was thrilled to hear, as this was precisely my idea, that we should revive the Blue Dragons, raise an army of Kung Fu pugilists, and pledge ourselves to defend the weak. Most importantly, to all have matching black leather jackets with dragons on the back.

Really, what would the Green Meadow School think? As more and more fourth graders came in with black jackets of the Blue Dragon fighters? Would they suspect? That Jeremy and I were running a Kung Fu school in the woods, secretly, by blood oath, teaching classmates the Animal Palms in exchange for loyalty to our orders?

It actually happened once, ( in Jeremy’s or my daydream, I don’t remember) that a motorcycle gang came bursting into the school, riding down the hallways, desecrating the Anthroposophical paintings, holding the whole school hostage for no reason but destructive laughter, all while drinking beer.

When the situation was intolerable, Jeremy stood up on a desk and said, “I’m giving you a warning. Hit the road, or face the consequences.” (If it was my day dream, then it was me who said this.) The gang leader scoffed, with his beer and sweaty tattoos. Then I stood up, gave a Buddhist mudra. And a group, in uniform deliberence, made their way to the coat rack and put on the black jackets… the bikers looked on in confusion; the teacher looked on in nervousness. Everyone struck the opening position, and the battle was begun. The whole school over, Jeremy and I flying up and down the walls, coordinating the battle in the different rooms, until the bikers, (those who were still conscious) fled for their lives. Jeremy and I stood side by side at the edge of the school, arms folded, and declared, “Beware the wrath of the Blue Dragons”.

Right around this time, our Chan-Shoalin esoteric Buddhism was being changed into Shingon- Ninjutsu. We incorporated more and more Mikkyo finger-weaving spells and Ninjustu weapons into our work.

I cleaned out the long closet next to my bedroom, which also opened out into the next room, and in this new space I made a secret Kung Fu/ Buddhist temple, complete with racks displaying my collection of lethal weapons. The walls were hung with
three sectional staffs, butterfly knifes, and my father’s samurai swords. Behind the figure of the Buddha was the main rack, with wooden octagonal nunchuku at the top,
crossing Sais at the bottom, and in the center, a shuriken, or throwing star, with a Tai Chi Yin/Yang emblem on it. Some weekends, Jeremy visited, and we would light the candles and incense, and sit for an eternity in deep Chan meditation.

Once, we sat in this state of counting breaths, trying to make it to an inward state, to transcend both space and time, and open our eyes in North Shoalin to seek our master.
At other times we centered in to find the single-pointed consciousness that underlay all fighting arts, the Yang resolving in the Yin.

The phase of Ninjutsu was growing stronger. Over and again I played a recording of Japanese Classical music, and we practiced with my father’s Samurai swords. At this time, my father was reinventing his Chinese identity into a somewhat mythic Japanese one (he was born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan). He was claiming that the Japanese form of his name, Takashima, was in fact an ancient Samurai clan's, and even hinted at the possibility that some of our ancestors were black-clad magical assassins, or masters of the Ninja arts.

Jeremy and I both seized on this furiously, started to read manuals on Ninja combat, started to collect our own Ninja gear, grappling hooks, spiked palm straps for scaling walls. We made trispikes to scatter on floors when ambushing opponents, smoke bombs to vanish with Shingon mudras into the ether.

Learning the Shingon mudras became more prominent. We wanted to be masters of perfect stealth, to be, by skill and equanimity, invisible. We acquired from my father’s old furniture a roll of rice paper, with which, with Japanese music playing, with candles by the Shingon Buddha, we practiced, time and again, the art of walking soundlessly. Hunting parents or friends with silent stealth was paradise. Such lengths of time in soundless movements, quieting the heartbeat with the breath, moving as in between the moments, till nearly beside the unsuspecting would-be victims.

One night, we emerged from the secret chapel, and to the music of chanted Samurai haiku, we downed a shot of sake, and then ritually dressed in full Ninjutsu apparel, tying on our masks, bowing deeply, and receiving our swords. We strapped ourselves with weapons and stars, and ascended the stairs to the highest outside window. We went out to the top of the high arched roof, and in the darkness, drew our swords from our backs, and flew through the Ninja craft of sword play.

Then from the eve of the roof to a tree, and down the tree to the shadows of the yard. The moon now was full and bright, and the air was warm and eerie. We were over the neighbor’s fence, moved stealthily and swiftly through her garden, merged with the shadows, rolling into the next position, looking each way for opponents.

Once over the border to the next yard, the next and the next, being deep in the heart of the interior neighborhood. Though growing nervous about dogs, we steeled our nerves, and went on. A man did dishes inside his kitchen window, as we in the darkness in the stealthy Ninja steps traced the wall beneath with our backs. There was a climbable tree, whose branches were close to the wooden roof of the patio. Then, with racing hearts, with grappling hooks to the tree, we were up on the tree and on his roof. We waited to calm ourselves, and then back down, creeping out of the yard, we were startled by a rustling behind us (perhaps a raccoon?) and came back through the last yard by moonlight, exhilarated by a night of training, we arrived in my yard, all weapons intact, looking up at the stars, and collapsing in the grass.

We had a distinct image, partly jest, partly fantasy, that the morning paper would have a report of prowling Ninja warriors, with a front page photo of two Ninjas on a roof, with glistening swords and throwing stars, positioned for combat. Though in my memory of our imagined photo, we didn’t look like nine year olds.

I love to remember glimpses of Jeremy the wide-eyed innocent. He tried so hard to be aloof from innocence.

My earliest memories of his father’s house were the best. It was in the mountains, surrounded by woods, and there was a cast of characters from surrounding houses. In particular I remember a little boy, maybe six years old, who rode everywhere on the back of his St. Bernard dog. Jeremy and this boy screamed out to me not to run when the dog chased me, but it was too late, I was already running with a giant beast on my tail, running up a fence just as he pounced and licked me. It was terrifying fun. When I look back, I think of the house in the mountains, together with the Green Meadow school, as the best places for the best parts of his soul. He seemed here the most joyful, the most at home in his surroundings.

His friends there called him Bullfrog. When I asked him why, he took me through the woods to a pond, and showed me how he loved to catch the frogs, lifting them squirming out of the water, with a face of controlled joy, he gently let them back.

Soon after, his father moved to another house, and I can see now how darker times lay ahead. There were in his life some horrible things, and a few times Jeremy left his home. I remember the police coming to the school to look for leads on the missing child. When he was finally ‘found’, he told me the thrill of his week-long adventure… the whole time, he hid under the porch. The weather was fine for camping out and he could monitor when his dad was home, and sneak in for food as he needed. At the end of the week, his father mysteriously stayed home from work, and saw him.

At some point he started to live with his mother in Stony Point NY. The move into the urban environment opened new vistas for his adventurous spirit, but not all vistas are wholesome.

When I came to see him in this city, I realized how the level of adventure had risen beyond my dreams. On the top of a high cliff, there appeared the silouette of a wooden cross. The word was that it was put up and burned by the KKK. Jeremy and I and his friend Chris decided to investagate. We set out to climb the untamed mountainside, but we lost our direction, and the side was too steep for climbing. So that evening we went out to an under age dance club, left the club early, and before his mother came to pick us up, Jeremy and I figured out how to climb a drain pipe, all the way to the roof of the supermarket. It was amazing. We leaned over the side of the roof to call to Chris, (who I think was a lookout) and we felt almost dizzy at the height. We went to see the other side, to the back of the giant buzzing lighted sign, then looking out on the parking lot, where the cars all looked so small. The roof was like a never-ending playground, many leveled, dark and dimly lit by the back of sign lights. Chris found us, called up to us that Mrs. Prozeller was waiting…Jeremy slid down the drain pipe, but as I lowered my self down I panicked, going down backward was different than going up. We ran around finding a different way down, and I ended up jumping down to a lower roof , then onto a dumpster, and we were back in the car with innocent smiles.

Best of all…and I’ll never forget this…was the freight train.
Jeremy had already observed just the right places where the train comes to a near halt, and it’s easy to jump on a ladder, ride a bit, and jump off. Once when I visited, we went to the place with some food and juice, waited for the right time in the blazing sun, the smell of railroad tar, the feeling of impending adventure.

A train came by, slowed down perfectly, as if it beckoned us to jump aboard. We did it, braced our selves on the ladder, him above and me below, and this time we stayed on longer than he ever did before. It went on and on, and no one was around to see us. It felt as if there wasn’t a person left on the earth but us and this endless train. And the train went faster and we started to worry, our arms clamped around the ladder were growing sore and tired, and the faster it went, the more the ladder vibrated, until all the vibrations pounded through our bodies. And then the ultimate of all – to our wide-eyed terror and bewilderment, we passed over the highest, biggest train bridge you could ever imagine, over the biggest body of water on the earth, looking down with horror at the depths, our arms at any point ready to let go without our will.

We made it to the other side, our arms never let go, as if frozen into a painful lock. And at long last, the train slowed down, just enough for us to lower our selves, and jump. I jumped, and a second later, Jeremy jumped, but in a second's difference was so far away. We lay by the woods in a new exhauststion, with a new life, having lived, and lived amazingly.

These were the last of our adventures.

I left Green Meadow when we were twelve. We stayed in touch, but when I embraced Romantic literature at thirteen he was a little disturbed.
“So, you’re into poetry now.”
“I am”.
“Poetry. You gotta be kidding me.”
I tried to impress him with the adventures of Byron , but he didn’t buy it.

When we were sixteen, he discovered the music of King Diamond, and embraced Laveyan Satanism. He called more frequently for all sorts of Occult conversations. I was engaged in the esoteric, but I confess, I saw Satanism as a very superficial and selfish religion. I tried to interest him in elder and more benign forms of the horned god, Bacchus and Pan, and Min. “Of course” he would say, “it’s all the same.” But I couldn’t dissuade him from the Church of Satan, however subtly I tried. It seemed to give him a sense of home. “I have everything I need right here. I have my music, my Bible, my religion.” But I felt like he was slipping away.

Over the next few years, he would call sporadically, usually from payphones, at 2:00am, with a friend, and so full of drugs he would barely be coherent. My efforts to find him the next day, calling his father or uncle, were fruitless. By this point, no one knew where he was.

Not long ago, I learned that he passed away.

Jeremy, I see you now, the bullfrog catcher, in the fields and woods of the unexplored mountains, with the boy who rides on the back of the dog, and the girl who gave you flowers, I see you with your sword, in luminous black, smiling in the sun, waiting to be lifted from the weight of the next adventure.

introduction

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:16:35 GMT

Someone commented that my poems on this site are sad. Do I have any happy poems? I think I'm posting sad poems because I'm suffering from a broken heart right now. In the next week or so, I'll put up some work that's not so lugubrious.

bio and synopsis of poetic works

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:15:29 GMT

This is a rough overview of Ko-Yin's areas of creation and activity. It’s written in the third person and in the style of a literary encyclopedia. Why? To see what it looks like!

LIFE

Sachio Ko-Yin was born in 1972. He is the only child of Adrianna St.John, poet, and a Confucian philosopher Hideo Takashima. He attended formal school to the 6th grade, after which his mother, inspired by the doctrines of anarchism, removed him. From that point to the present, he is entirely self taught in European philosophy, English literature, and Greek and Roman classics.

His driving mission in life is poetry. He decided on the career of a poet at age ten when he fell in love with Lisa Charde ,and at age thirteen, he wrote both his first epic poem , 'Pantheistic Lines', and his first verse-drama ,'Queen Syrinx , in four acts.Over the years he has written forty books of lyrical poems, a large collection longer narative and dramatic verse , an epic poem in ten books ,and fifty one journals.

By the time he was twelve , he had fallen far from what Lisa had showed him in poetry and was quickly spiraling into criminal behaviors . At thirteen , he drasticly changed diection overnight , having happened on a poem by Lord Byron . He spent the Whole night writing a new Lisa poem, and from that point on was overtaken by a maelstrom of energy, reading the British romantic poets, then reading everything they read. For example, Shelley introduced him to Plato and The anarchist Godwin. From that moment on his education became a rapid wave of inspiration in the humanities, though thoroughly deficient in the Sciences. Since he had been previously freed from the constraints of school, his daily routine was organic, spending whole nights reading major poems, (playing his flout at the ‘gates of dawn’) living on bread and ‘black wine’ (coffee) and smoking his pipe on roof tops or trees.

The tendency of all his early poems are to the world of imagination and aesthetic spirituality .To a great degree this can be attributed to his early childhood life . In his early life the home he grew up in was troubled and violent in the extreme, but the boy found refuge in the arts and nurtured in music by his mother’s harp and piano performance. His imaginary world became full of mythological creatures and vivid experiences of the spirit of nature.

The physical house he was raised in was very old, with a long history of supposed supernatural incidents .Family members and visitors reported strange encounters with extremely strong presences, and with classic 'poltergeist' activities. While the boy was raised in an atmosphere that strongly tended to the paranormal, this 'occult' element was tempered by his father's Buddhist practice and his mother's Catholicism, both traditions guiding the boy in the direction of contemplation. Against his father's wishes, he studied with a nun and received first communion at age ten. The mystical tradition of Christianity introduced his mind to a treasure house of medieval arts and legends. But the boy saw no conflict between this and the Buddhist path to enlightenment.

At age eleven, he still could barely read or write, probably do to the chaotic nature of his home life. But he began to improve his reading as he became engaged in books on magic and the supernatural. He devised elaborate magical rituals and wrote his first little book on the subject, 'Magical Spells and Dances' based on his belief that the apple of Eden empowered humans with the gift of sorcery.

From age sixteen to nineteen he studied classical ballet with Irene Fokine, grand daughter of choreographer Michael Fokine.His life as a dancer came to an abrupt end when he was expelled.

At age nineteen he entered the anti-war movement, for the first time putting into practice his long held commitment to nonviolence and anarchism. He founded the Anarchist League (which publishes the periodical 'Anarchia') and co-founded the Root and Branch Collective with his comrade and lover Melissa Jameson and others who were driven by the pacifist vision.

While training in Buddhism, he affiliated with the Society of Friends as a distinctly non-Christian pacifist, serving on several committees and teaching at the Friends Nursery school. His esoteric practice also led him into freemasonry, where he was made a master mason, like his mother's father, and served as the Senior Deacon of his temple. .Soon after being 'raised ' he went on to the thirty second degree of the Scottish Rite. Throughout, he continued his affiliation to 'irregular' Masonic orders.

At age twenty five, his life took a dramatic turn. He and a fellow pacifist enacted a 'ploughshares' action at a nuclear missile silo, cutting through the gates ,setting off the alarms , painting a mural on the blast cap and symbolically hammering on the lid and tracks so as to beat 'swords in to ploughshares' . In keeping with there Gandhian beliefs, they waited at the site for forty five minutes till the arrival of the military police, greeting them warmly with a message of disarmament. They both were convicted of sabotage and conspiracy. Ko-Yin was sentenced to a two and a half year sentence.

Prison was ideal for poetry, and while serving his sentence, in addition to writing his 24 preludes to his ‘spiritual bride’ Agnieszka, he wrote the first verse-play of his dark tetrology, ‘Verfallen’. He and fellow Buddhists made there prison life a monastic experience, to the extent possible, and they started an unauthorized poetry group called the ‘Francois Villon Society’in honor of the fifteenth century burglar-poet.

Since his release, due largely to the patronage of l----p-----, he has completed his epic poem and five verse-dramas. This period is perhaps his most productive to date.

THE APOCRYPHON

The Apocryphon is an epic poem in ten books. It creates its own mythology in the framework of the Greek primal myth and explores the ordeals of initiation through the stories of Eteius, a trickster diety whose imagination teems with universes. The Titans seek to destroy his cult by imprisoning him, and in his isolation and resulting insanity his imagination overflows the boundaries of him self, and his prison becomes a portal to his ‘word realm’ or incarnated imagination.

A Titan wonders through the portal and witnesses the struggles between the brothers Krato and Anarchos, and the myth moves through the Island of the Serpent and the stories of Queen Eudaimonia.

Over all, the mythology and cosmology of the poem are extremely complex, and often explore many levels of symbolism resolving in monism.

Each line of the poem is a thirteen syllable meter of alternating hexameters and pentameters. Each book is comprised of a thousand lines divided into ten cantos.

THE DRAMAS

The recent verse-dramas consist of the Verfallen Cycle and three ‘Syrinx’plays. Each of these plays are built on a mythic autobiography where the author’s friends, family and fellow poets take on mythic proportions, and instances in the author’s life are used to enter the human psyche.

The Verfallen Cycle is divided into four tragedies,1) The Beads, 2) The Ancient Word, 3) The Bridal Bed and 4) Thanatei.

Of these four, The Beads is the shortest and the most abstract, being a symbolic painting of life in prison ,where the prison it self is an emblem of hidden memorys of childhood horrer.

In The Ancient Word, the figure of Arius (from the Apocryphon) prepares to enter his ancestral home, where the hidden memories of suffering are buried under piles of refuse in the house, until it is unenterable. Lisa appears to him and leads him through the ordeal of facing his origins as a form of initiation. Through the excavation of the house the refuse serves as a geological time clock, revealing an anthropology of madness.

The Bridal Bed is a tragedy in only the broadest sense of the word, that is, the tone of ritual seriousness, and in serving as the third of a tragic cycle. But the actual subject is closer to a mystical comedy, being the story of Agnieszka and Arius, how they met before his imprisonment, and the nature of there spiritual marriage. In this way, it speaks explicitly of the themes alluded to in The Beads, The actions that lead to imprisonment and the approaching doom of facing the memories of the ancestral home.

[ Thanatei

queen syrinx

the revels

ousia]

From the lyrics

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:14:50 GMT

REQUIEM

                                    I hear you, whispers in the valley, weep
                                    with sensuous fragrance that only pines
                                    could scatter through the meadows of our sleep
                                    where slumber to its darker place resigns.
                                    I have dreams of the shadows gathering
                                    and in its flux a deeper amber pounds
                                    with the frightened heartbeat of stillborn spring
                                    in its disinduced and divided sounds
                                    of internal exile from the concave
                                    of sleep, and its acquiescent falling
                                    to the still more fearful lips of the grave
                                    where, not even the crickets are calling
                                    or pleading, but the pulse is quieting
                                    till only marble remains of the spring.

                                                                                                                          May 30 2001

                                                       ILLUSION

                                To enter Illusion and name its nature
                                is the secret. I am so full of darkness,
                                and I think that I see the world as it is
                                unveiled of the paintings of the sentiment,
                                but I know it's my illness. And Death's caress
                                makes all the spectrum black and red, and these
                                appear the whole of colors, sacrament
                                of vision in the strained intensities
                                of unearthly focus . And in the bent
                                reality of this, and in this moment,
                                I look through all I know is true
                                to the glimpse of illusion's detriment.

THE LABYRINTHS May 23 ‘07

I am lost in the labyrinths of my heart.

East is the south and the south is the north

And the west is withered in the shadows.

And eerily I recollect the past

Of my name which once was clarity, forth

Among the threefold syllables, snows

Of wretchedness quilt all sound, and my name

Is dark unspoken. Where do I go now

To find the sun? The spring they say, arrives

In tender moistures, nurtured in the flame

Of day light, but the vain of a broken vow

Was opened, and all the myriad lives

Of the psyche cried out and bound my eyes.

May I emerge now. May I open out

To the wilderness beyond me, and light,

And freed of the merging of my cries

With the vacancy of faith. I dream about

The balance of breath, the sleep of the night,

And the beautiful truths of the morning.

How do I begin again? For the doors

Of my heart are stairwells to the streams

Enclosed in the caverns of forsaking.

I will hear the cadence, waves on the shores

Of the world. Touch and taste, free of the dreams

Of delusion’s self-illusions. Lure me,

Gentle voice of springtime. Remind me where

The daylight is, and where the birds will sing .

For your voice is the gate and mystery

Of morning, sun-wet refractions of air,

And the glimpse of the gardens of the spring.

SONNET

From the cloud of the soul’s discrepancies

Comes out the moments of a turn, where mist

Becomes the incense of the flowered breeze

Of faith’s soft reclamation. We are kissed

By time in this moment, the atmospheres

Of burgundy veils surround us and find

The inmost portions of our words, and tears

Are the springtime dues that nourish with kind

Caressing, in omens of forgiveness.

Most beautiful friend, come home to me,

Out from lands, decision’s wilderness,

Gentle, to the place where we used to be,

Fragile, to the room by the waves and sky,

To that closeness, which is the mystery.

August 23 07

selectios from the apocryphon

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:14:06 GMT

la la la.

From the Dramas

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:09:21 GMT

in this place cut and past from floopy.

theas anartatein

Sat, 05 May 2007 03:07:22 GMT

in this p;ace, cut and paste bio from myspace.