The Great Wave off Kanagawa has been described as possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art, as well as being a contender for the most famous artwork in Japanese history. This woodblock print has influenced several Western artists and musicians, including Claude Debussy, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet.
Roger Start Keyes, art historian, Hokusai scholar, and co-founder of York Zen, wrote his poem “Hokusai Says,” featured on the York Zen Welcome Page, in Venice in 1990. It appeared suddenly as he was making notes for the “Young Hokusai” paper he was to give at a symposium on Hokusai the following day.
Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention, notice. He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing. He says look forward to getting old. He says keep changing, you just get more who you really are. He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself as long as it’s interesting. He says keep doing what you love. He says keep praying. He says every one of us is a child, every one of us is ancient, every one of us has a body. He says every one of us is frightened. He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear. He says everything is alive – shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees. Wood is alive. Water is alive. Everything has its own life. Everything lives inside us. He says live with the world inside you. He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books. It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish. It doesn’t matter if you sit at home and stare at the ants on your veranda or the shadows of the trees and grasses in your garden. It matters that you care. It matters that you feel. It matters that you notice. It matters that life lives through you. Contentment is life living through you. Joy is life living through you. Satisfaction and strength is life living through you. Peace is life living through you. He says don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand. Let life live through you.
Click to listen to poet Roger Keyes recite his poem, Hokusai Says.
Hokusai’s instructions, received, written and recited by Roger Keyes, about paying attention, noticing things, and living life fully, remind me of Mary Oliver‘s lessons on attention, receptivity, listening, delighting in and writing, expressed in many of her poems, like Mindful and Praying.
See this remembrance of Mary Oliver (1935-2019) and her astonishing poetry, with links to articles, interviews, and readings, as well as more of her favorite poems I’ve loved and posted over the years.
— Written and compiled (citing sources) by Ken Chawkin for The Uncarved Blog.
I recently discovered Ada Limón. I found her refreshing and her poetry accessible. She is the author of six poetry collections and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. This past summer she was selected as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate for 2022-2023.
Here are 3 related sequential videos: a Library of Congress interview, followed by a PBS interview and announcement, and Ada Limón giving her inaugural reading as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. I added a bonus video at the bottom, from 2019—Life of a Poet: Ada Limón.
1. July 12, 2022: Ada Limón: 24th Poet Laureate (19 min)
Ada Limón talks about her poetry and her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with Library of Congress Chief Communications Officer Roswell Encina, in the Library’s Poetry Room.
When asked how she writes, Ada explains that composing a poem is an all-body experience for her. She involves all her senses, not just her mind. She is asked what inspires her, and replies: “I find inspiration in so many different things. I always say the muse is, or my muse is the world. It’s everything.”
At 6:45, she expresses the essence of what it means to be a poet.
But I think I’m always amazed by how deep attention can turn into a poem, that deep looking is a way of loving. And it can transform the smallest thing into something of great importance. And no matter how many years I’ve been writing poems and no matter what I’ve done, that is the thing that brings me the most joy, that gives me shivers, the way that looking and attention and really giving your all to something can transform it.
I’m always amazed by how deep attention can turn into a poem, that deep looking is a way of loving…can transform the smallest thing into something of great importance…the thing that brings me the most joy, that gives me shivers, the way that looking and attention and really giving your all to something can transform it. (edited)
Ada Limón, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate
The other side of the equation, of course, is how the poet is also transformed by this process. It is obvious that Ada Limón was meant to be a poet, and now a poet laureate.
But what she said reminds me very much of what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about this experience. I discovered it in Jane Hirshfield’s book, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, in the chapter on Poetry and the Mind of Indirection, pages 119-120. Rilke gets to the essence of what that deep attention, deep looking (and loving), can bring a devoted poet. Hirshfield writes:
Both readings of Novalis’s aphorism—that an awareness in the things we wish to observe and know, and that the way we come to them matters—enter into a letter from Rilke, sent in the winter of 1920 to Baladine Klossowska, a lover and fellow writer with whom he shared a passionate correspondence.
This next paragraph, translated by Stephen Mitchell, reveals that essential art of deep seeing, and its surprising hidden reward of spiritual transformation.
These Things whose essential life you want to express first ask you. “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me . . . ?” And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign of friendship, or word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart, entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy, which makes it so like the constellations in the sky. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which, through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe, and which, in that incomparable place, is on that day attended by angels.
These Things whose essential life you want to express first ask you. “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me . . . ?” … In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which, through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe, and which, in that incomparable place, is on that day attended by angels. (edited)
Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Baladine Klossowska
For John Keats, this experience of reverse deep seeing was to inhabit a state of being perceived outside himself. It involved negating his Self to become The Other, what he described as ‘negative capability’.
2. Jul 27, 2022: PBS NewsHour: Ada Limón on becoming the new U.S. poet laureate (6 min)
Ada Limón has been named the nation’s new poet laureate. Jeffrey Brown recently met with Limón to learn more about her life’s path, one that includes backyard groundhogs, Kentucky bluegrass, pokeweed and plenty of poetry. It’s part of our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”
3. Sept 29, 2022: Live! at the Library: U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón Opening Reading (56 min)
Award-winning poet Ada Limón will give her inaugural reading as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, with an introduction by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. The historic reading marks the beginning of Limón’s laureateship, and it traditionally launches the Library’s literary season.
4. January 30, 2019: Hill Center poetry series, The Library of Congress. (63 min)
Poet Ada Limón discussed her work with Ron Charles, book critic at the Washington Post. It was a rich interactive and intimate conversation, introducing and then commenting on her reading certain meaningful poems from her life. Enjoy Life of a Poet: Ada Limón.
“I do, because it involves a wonderful contradiction, which is, in order for it to happen, you have to be there, and you have to disappear. Both. You know, nothing feels as good as that. Being there and disappearing—being possessed by something else. Something happening through you, but you’re attending it. There are few other things in the world like that, but writing is pretty much a relief from the self—and yet the self has to be utterly there.”
An inspiration for a poem came to me from such receptivity to a tree. The first words entered my mind while admiring it. I wrote them down, and the next morning, I rewrote them as a stanza, and then the sequential stanzas naturally followed, reiterating what Mary Oliver describes. It was as if I was given a creative seed and it sprouted. This gift from the tree was much appreciated. I later called it Being in Nature. Its sequel, trees, was about the nature of trees, and what we can learn from them. Another poem once came to me from a rock with a sense of humor. You can read RIVER ROCK SPEAKS in my Vancouver Park Poems.
Read about Mary Oliver (1935-2019) and her astonishing poetry in this memorial acknowledgment to her poetic legacy. It contains links to articles, interviews, and poetry readings, as well as many of her favorite poems I’ve loved and posted over the years.
The Uncarved Blog 