Letter to Ranek about Buddhist Poets

Dear Jason: I probably own most of Gary Snyder's
books. His ability to shake off the transcendent
and enter into the imminent, into the now, scares me.
I like the safer ground of reflections and dreams.

Read "The Red Hills" by Pao Chao, or "Flowers
and Moonlight on the Spring River" by Yang-ti.
They know. Language is liquid stuff. It is like
the transitions of water. It can be an ocean ready

to drown us in its waves or mists lifting from
the sunbaked sand that want to saturate our hair
with their thin perfumes. I've seen blocks of ice
so rich with the merchandise of mantras, not even

monks sitting cross-legged in their yellow robes
could refrain from chiseling them into poems. Rain?
Read what Li Po writes about it in "Clearing at Dawn."
What waits in that poem nudges Nirvana.

I like best the poems written by Po Chu-i when he
was a scholar at the Han Lin Academy. His poem
titled "Rain" speaks of "Misty birds lost in yellow
air" and the week "night turned into a riverbed."

I find more art than ego in these poems, more playful
jargon than dialectic for the id. Believe me when
I tell you that there is no harm in cherishing one's talents.
Lin Yu's "The Peddler of Spells" shows the way.

copyright 2004 Fredrick Zydek
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