Foreword xiThe price of this ticket known as Buddhist or Daoist stillness is a
shedding of poetic effect such as we see in the work of Han Shan, the
Zen poet. The ticket allows the dance with the moon. One is so rooted
in serenity that as one approaches self-realization there is a connecting
directly to all that exists in material reality and in that way a connect-
ing to the harmonious motion of nature’s harmony. From there one
may grasp the truth, which is that reality is not real; here we find the
image of the slipping of muddy water over small banks and the indo-
lent nonchalance of geese waddling to the trees, unmindfully stopping
traffic as they thus waddle. This is where a poet can go into stasis and
thus a crisis.
The beauty in these realizations rivals the poetic. Such is bliss.
The poet describes the experience of the sage as he looks out from
inside his own heart at the bare lines that configure the sublime’s
victory over the mud as it were, but the poet is not totally envious. The
mud has its own attractions, the accoutrements of fame, the heart
indulging itself, seeking and giving itself pleasure, perhaps even pos-
sessing a higher wisdom, which is that the geese themselves are not the
sublime. No, the heart’s own higher wisdom says the absence of both
muddy river and waddling geese are the sublime. Knowing this, what
poet would wish to be simply air? We have a definite purpose, strug-
gling to create the art and live with the relative anonymity of fame that
is the reality of contemporary life for the poet.
There is the strike of the pen or the brush to paper, the creative act
that resists the sublime. What is it that we poets do and why do we
persist in so doing?
We waddle as we go, some of us hoping that our work will make a
difference in the world, although we cannot see the end of good inten-
tions. A gesture made now toward producing positive change in the
world could in several decades bring untold misery, chaos, and suffering.
We simply cannot see the end of good intentions, nor can we ignore
this need to bring a blossoming to a place struggling with the lack of
the same, a place that lacks even the gift of a sluggish rivulet. To make
it more complex and thus challenging we can say that these places are
often spaces in the human heart. What are we to do with this gift of
ours, this poetry? What we receive compassion tells us we should also
give, a blues kind of generosity.
Yeats’ foul rag and bone shop of the heart is the crisis brought on
by a poet’s maturity, when self-awareness and self-knowledge replace
the blind ambition of the younger poet. Here a poet must decide what
the other priorities are for what remains of his or her life. This is a
more serious matter than simply saying that, as a poet ages, more is9781403976079ts01.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 8:47 AM Page xi