Harrison, Annie

 

About twenty participants came to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey for the second Poetry and Practice Weekend Retreat in March. We gathered for our first session in the common room on the Friday, where we discussed our hopes and expectations for the retreat. The focus of the weekend was the practice of writing and reading as ‘potential paths of awareness’, as discussed in the essay, The Zen of Jane Hirshfield ¹ (an interview by Noelle Oxenhandler), which had been distributed beforehand. There would be two workshops, with opportunities for practice and reflection within the Throssel daily schedule.

Our facilitators, Kathleen Madigan and Alex Reed, were clear there would be no expectation of producing polished poems, nor any pressure to share our writing. A wide selection of contemporary poetry books was made available to browse over the weekend, and for me, it was a particular pleasure to discover the work of unfamiliar poets during our rest periods.

Kathleen’s workshop on Saturday began with a discussion on the flexibility of forms such as haiku and haibun and its echoes in the work of the imagist poets. We read Chinese poems in translation: Egrets by Tu Mu (9th C) and One Heart by contemporary poet Li Young Lee. Kathleen then invited us to respond to our first prompt; a ‘free write’ reflecting on Bashō’s death poem:

Sick on the journey
my dreams wander
over withered fields

Our second prompt was The Red Wheelbarrow² by William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Finally, after reading a poem by Izumi Shikibu (C10):

It is true,
the wind blows terribly here –
but moonlight
also leaks between the roof planks
of this ruined house

we set to with the final prompt: ‘there is…but also there is’. Again, we were invited to share these early drafts.

Our session with Alex began with a group discussion about ambiguity in poetry through a reading of Jane Hirshfield’s poem, You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another.³ This was followed by a few minutes of free writing, beginning with the phrase, ‘Today I am’. We went on to discuss Joe Brainard’s experimental memoir: a list of moments from his childhood and youth prefixed with the phrase ‘I remember’. This was the model for our next piece of writing, which several participants shared with the group.

Alex’s final prompt followed a brief discussion of how the musician John Cage used techniques such as the I Ching to generate randomness and chance in his work. Similarly, British polymath Brian Eno has developed Oblique Strategies, a card-based method for promoting creativity. With this approach in mind, we were given a random choice of a single line of poetry picked from an envelope to stimulate our final piece of writing.

During tea with Rev. Master Berwyn on Sunday, many of us shared drafts of work from the weekend, or other poems we brought from home. During the retreat, I was reminded how reading and writing poetry, as with meditation, brings home both a challenging intimacy and attention to our human connectedness.

As Jane Hirshfield says:

Intimacy arises by the permeability inside your own life. We’re here, we’re in these bodies, we’re in these minds, we’re in these hearts, we’re in these spirits. You walk through the world on your own two feet, with your own tongue and your own eyes. ⁴

Deep gratitude to Rev. Master Berwyn and also our generous facilitators Alex Reed and Kathleen Madigan for their guidance and encouragement.

 

*          *          *

 

Supplemental: Some contributions offered at the Poetry and Practice retreat. (All copyright the author.)

Crow

wiping
the hill’s
face

welcome!
black as
was
my hair

Ibnat Ibn as-Sakkān

English version by Mark Rowan, based on a Spanish translation of the Arabic original by Teresa Garulo, in Diwan de las poetisas de Al-Ándalus (Poesía Hiperión), Madrid 1986.

 

 Awaken

if I were to walk now
to the river’s edge
sit
and touch my toe
to the cold water’s surface
it would send small circles
radiating
like radio waves
both on the water
and also in my heart
the same would happen
if you walked by
unexpectedly
and I looked up surprised
….. and delighted
or the temple bell rang
crisp and clear
penetrating the swirling fog of discontent
there are myriad ways
of calling me home
the eternal beckoning
the invitation without end

Kate Bevan Baker

 

The Pure Land is Within*

For Reverend Master Saidō Kennaway

Life

his new-year bell
rings through suburbia’s
brittle air

explaining
bodhisattvas and a city’s
sewage system

Death

bright
in the cold wind: first
almond blossom

Memorial

from the stupa’s
incense bowl: a cloud
of all our offerings

freshly planted
apple tree   its roots growing through
the master’s ashes

dandelion seeds
waiting
for the wind

Fred Schofield.
With love and in gasshō

(First published in the Jade Mountains blog)

*In June 2022 Reverend Master Saidō gave a talk at a Regional Sangha Day retreat in Leeds. He kept coming back to this phrase.

Notes

1. https://www.lionsroar.com/zen-jane-hirshfield/
2. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, Christopher MacGowan, ed. New Directions,1938.
3. Hirshfield, Jane, Ledger: Poems. Bloodaxe, New York; 2020. p. 25.
4. https://agnionline.bu.edu/conversation/zen-and-the-art-of-poetry-an-interview-with-jane-hirshfield/