World Famous Comics: Crow With No Mouth : Ikkyu : Fifteenth Century Zen Master
Crow With No Mouth : Ikkyu : Fifteenth Century Zen Master
From: Copper Canyon Press Publisher: Copper Canyon Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Copper Canyon Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 80 Publication Date: September 01, 2000
Product Description: When Zen master Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) was appointed headmaster of the great temple at Kyoto, he lasted nine days before denouncing the rampant hypocrisy he saw among the monks there. He in turn invited them to look for him in the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters. A Zen monk-poet-calligrapher-musician, he dared to write about the joys of erotic love, along with more traditional Zen themes. He was an eccentric and genius who dared to defy authority and despised corruption. Although he lived during times plagued by war, famine, rioting, and religious upheaval, his writing and music prevailed, influencing Japanese culture to this day.
Stephen Berg is the Editor and founder of American Poetry Review.
Also available by Stephen Berg Steel Cricket PB $16.00, 1-55659-075-X CUSA New & Selected Poems PB $12.00, 1-55659-043-1 CUSA
Sensual, complicated, beautiful If you're looking for pretty, nature, Haiku-esque poetry, then this might not be for you. Many of these are graphic sexual depictions. Many have four letter words. Ikkyu, aka Crazy Cloud-- Zen Monk, Enlightened One, Patron of Whorehouses, Virile and Active into Old Age.
But don't think these are just sex poems. These are poems built of a version of primary colors: light, dark, mountains and wind.
There's a Whitmanesque Bullheadedness and Joy of Life to many of these short poems (most 2 lines long, rocking back and forth in their sliding images and rhythms) but you don't get the tongue-in-your-ear feeling that comes with reading Leaves of Grass.
Whether he's telling you about burying his pet sparrow or going down on a woman in the kitchen as she cooks, Ikkyu rewards the reader again and again.
desert island read hands down one of my top 3 "desert island" books. i don't even know what the other two would be, but berg's translations - ikkyu's work - man...these can - without fail - render the reader speechless, at least one or two times in a reading...easily.
Zen poetry like a sword stroke Ikkyu is perhaps the most like "normal" humans by any accounting of a Zen master I've encountered in print. One can relate to this guy. Some of his poems are like Michael Jordan putting up a final second shot and touching nothing but net. I wasn't sure I would like his poetry since I'm not that big a poetry fan but this is the kind of book to take on a long run down the Grand Canyon or somewhere you might crave inspiration when space is at a premium.
Something to crow about. "Only one koan matters," Ikkyu writes, "you" (p. 67). "Believe in the man facing you now" (p. 21). While meditating on a boat when he was 27, Ikkyu Sojun--also known as "Crazy Cloud" (1394-1482), was enlightened when he heard a crow call (p. 9). As a Zen Master, he was considered sort of an eccentric rake (p. 13), and he never pretended to be much else. He loved sake. He loved women. "The crow's caw was ok," he writes (p. 58), but "a woman is enlightenment" (p. 64). Ikkyu scandalized his Zen community, and his poetry will offend many readers today as well. "Look me up if you want to," he writes, "in the bar whorehouse fish market" (p. 40).
These poems are "frank, naked, sincere" (p. 15), and full of vivid imagery of "erotic renewal" (p. 13). It's enough to say for purposes of this review, Ikkyu lives "in a shack on the edge of whorehouse row" (p. 40). These are the poems of a poet who is "all there" (p. 15), and fully present on his "long pure beautiful road of pain/ and the beauty of death and no pain" (p. 24), whether he is watching his four-year-old daughter dance--"I can't break free of her" (p. 60), watching the "snow moon tangled among black flowers" (p. 39), or "shuttling between whorehouse and bar" (p. 47). Question "flattery success money," he writes (p. 22). "This city these people where I live still are impossible" (p. 30). "Sing until you have no throat then words come by themselves" (p. 55).
I'm not qualified to comment on Stephen Berg's translation of Ikkyu's poems, but I can tell you this book is certainly something to crow about!
G. Merritt
Zen poetry as a beatnik would want it translated Ikkyu wrote his verses in a four line form which has been reworked into couplets by Stephen Berg. It is important to remember that these are version by Stephen Berg not careful translations from the original - as reworkings often are the most accessible translations.
Ikkyu was not a typical Zen master - the monkish disciplines of celebacy and sobriety were not in his repetoire. While this makes him an oddity, it reinforces the ideal that one who is enlightened is one who is free. This freedom (often seen as indifference or non-clinging) is voiced in this poem "Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself / wherever I am I'm there". His freedom from the disciplines is shown in poems that are explicitly sexual not merely erotic. A very tame example: "don't hesitate get laid thaat's wisdom / sitting around chanting what crap".
Ikkyu is definately a poet that students or would-be students of Zen should read ... in fact, we all should read it for the sheer fun and beauty of it.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
