Amen to Life:
Learning from the Haiku Mind of Samuel Menashe
First published in Presence #57, March 2017, pages 79 to 88. Originally written in May and October of 2014, with
later revisions, including a few after publication. + + + + +
“Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent
effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the
human spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of
language.” —T. S. Eliot, The Athenaeum, 11 April
1919
In 2004, the Poetry Foundation awarded its first Neglected Masters Award—and
$50,000—to inveterate New York City poet Samuel Menashe. Menashe wrote in relative
obscurity for most of his life but on the foundation’s website he is rightly
lauded. Stephen Spender is quoted as praising the poet for “language intense
and clear as diamonds” and saying that Menashe “can compress an attitude to
life that has an immense history into three lines.” Christian Science Monitor critic Victor Howes said, “The art of
Samuel Menashe is a jeweler’s art.” Elsewhere, Donald Davie wrote that hearing
Menashe read his poems “is to understand what it means in practice for a poet
to compose by the syllable.” And in 2006 David Orr wrote in the New York Times that “each poem reads as
if it’s been handblown, filled with an exactly measured dose of Wisdom and then
polished 9,000 times by the world’s most precisely folded chamois.” In 2011, Samuel
Menashe died in his sleep at the age of 85. A major reason why recognition did not
come to the poet until late in his life—and he was fortunate to have received
it at all—was because the poetry he wrote was inordinately brief.
Samuel Menashe was not a writer of
haiku, but he was a writer of very short poetry. The New York Times referred to his work as “gnomic,” but instead of
“short” the poet himself preferred “concise.” In 1999, when the first issue of my
publication Tundra: The Journal of the
Short Poem celebrated Menashe as its featured poet (suggested to me by Dana
Gioia), Menashe and I talked on the phone and corresponded briefly. He said he
had not written haiku, and had little interest in it. It seemed to me he was
too New York a poet for haiku, that
haiku was too exotic and foreign. Yet a number of his poems project the scent
of haiku, and it’s worth exploring a selection of them. Many virtues found in
the concise poetry of Samuel Menashe—beyond brevity—are also found in haiku.
My source is Samuel Menashe: New & Selected Poems (Tarset, England: Bloodaxe
Books, 2009), edited by Christopher Ricks. The book also includes an hour-long
DVD, Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, in which the poet recites and
discusses many of the poems from the book—all from memory. Christopher Ricks,
in his introduction, says that “Menashe’s art pours together the elementary and
the elemental” (xxix). Ricks asks, “What great poetry is not riddling?” and
refers to one of Menashe’s most famous poems as “one of those kindly riddles
that is so good as to let you in on the answer without delay” (xxix). Ricks
adds that, in Menashe’s poems, “Nothing . . . is too small to matter” (xxxii)
and that “Not just le mot juste but la lettre juste” (xxix). He says “These
poems are not afraid to be found childlike,” and adds that “we need to be all
the more vigilant that we not mistake for simplicity what is only simplistic,
or simplified, or simple-minded” (xxxiii). In his foreword, Menashe himself
says that “awareness . . . is the source of poetry” (xiv), something that is
certainly true of haiku. Patricia Donegan, in her book Haiku Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2008) says that “haiku mind” is “a
simple yet profound way of seeing our everyday world and living our lives with
the awareness of the moment expressed in haiku” (xi). In The New Haiku (Liverpool: Snapshot Press, 2002), John Barlow writes
that the “expression of truth, producing what Bashō called yojo (surplus meaning), is sometimes referred to as ‘haiku mind,’”
and that through it “the poet can share experiences and hidden significance,
without ever directly telling them” (191). Samuel Menashe has a haiku mind in
seeing the world, and with every poem, each packed with surplus meaning, he responds
to his everyday world by saying “Amen.”
In introducing Menashe for Tundra #1, July 1999 (all references
from pages 8–9), Dana Gioia indicates that “Nearly every poem he has ever
published radiates a heightened religious awareness” and that “His central
themes are . . . the tension between the soul and body, past and present, time
and eternity.” He says that Menashe’s work is “alternately joyous and elegiac,”
and that “his short, dense lines slow down the rhythm to encourage the reader
to linger on each word,” each line being “not merely compressed and evocative,
but talismanic, visionary, and symbolic.” Gioia notes that the poet’s technique
focuses on “imagist compression with traditional rhyme” where the rhymes “exist
not only for musical effect but also to freeze two or more words in time and
hold them perpetually in spiritual or intellectual harmony.” Ultimately, Gioia
concludes, Samuel Menashe “is a poet who can only understand physical reality
in relation to the metaphysical” and that he has made a “unique contribution to
the contemporary short poem.” As he might say regarding haiku, Gioia advises, “When
you read [Menashe’s] poems, breathe them in slowly.” Their metaphysical
transcendence, as with haiku, begins with physical reality.
These observations refer to all of
Menashe’s poems, but I would like to focus on the ones that seem most
haiku-like, the shortest of the short. They are not haiku, let me make clear,
and not intended as haiku, but Menashe more than once taps into characteristics
that make haiku successful in order to make his own poems successful.
Between bare boughs
One star decrees
Winter clarity
This poem (13) gains an icy feel by the “e” vowel sounds that end the last two
lines. The poem also relies not just on the clarity of winter light but on the
clarity of imagistic expression. Aristotle said that “The soul never thinks
without an image.” We see one star through the boughs of a bare tree. The
clarity is not just what the poet can see so sharply, but a metaphysical
clarity into life itself. In a later poem, “The Bare Tree” (19), Menashe begins
by saying “My mother once said to me, ‘when one sees the tree in leaf, one thinks
the beauty of the tree is in its leaves, and then one sees the bare tree.’”
This reminds me of a haiku by Ruth Yarrow, in which the last line served as the
title for one of her first books, from 1981: “moonlit
okra leaves / floating in blackness / no one sees the stems.”
Pity us
By the sea
On the sands
So briefly
Menashe is overtly subjective in this poem (21), but his subjectivity dwells
once again in the image, in the sand by the sea, taking the physical into the
metaphysical. Life is ephemeral, like the sands of time, yet his poem is not
about the sand so much as it is about a human visit to the sand by the sea, so brief a holiday, even more ephemeral.
Fall
Dry leaves fall
Down the stream
You walked by
Near the water
I want to die
I quote this poem (23) as a compressed example of how Menashe’s poems, and
especially ones longer than this, depart from haiku. It is rooted still in
image, and seethes with lament for a lost love or lost friendship, but he takes
the image a step further, expressing a wish to die, or at least how he wants to die when the time should
come. Perhaps this poem is more like tanka than haiku, based on length and
feeling, but it’s a step beyond haiku mind.
Landmark
I look up to see
Your windows, the house
Standing on this street
Like an old tombstone
Whose dates disappear
I still name you here
I stood, I saw
The room you left
What you could see
The awe of death
Took hold of me
Here (27) is a further example of departure, and the great majority of Menashe’s
poems are like this, with little to do with haiku—yet still the image is
central. He sees the house and room of a departed friend or loved one, and
tunes in to the emotions he feels. Where he goes with the poem begins with the
same awarenesses that haiku begin with—something is noticed—but he takes his awareness somewhere else, and in this case
somewhere larger.
These stone steps
bevelled by feet
endear the dead
to me as I climb
them every night
I picture Menashe climbing the five flights up to his small Manhattan apartment
where he had lived for more than fifty years. The steps are not stone, but
perhaps the front steps to his apartment are. More likely this is a memory of
some other location, but in this tanka-like poem (39), the poet’s close observation
of worn-away stone—and the centuries of stepping upon them that bevelled them—make
him think of the dead before him. Is he climbing the steps, or climbing the
dead?
Leah bribed Jacob
With mandrake roots
To make him
Lie with her
Take me poems
Biblical references, mostly Jewish, are common in Menashe’s poems. This is among
my most favourite of his poems (67). Menashe’s desire for love or companionship
seems to motivate the writing of his poems, or at least this one. Menashe’s poetry
may seem to be like mandrake roots used to entice a lover. But he is not Leah
seeking Jacob in any sort of sexual way (he was a lifelong bachelor—married,
instead, to his poetry). Rather, I would speculate that he wants readers to lie
with his poems, not with him. Here I think of a favourite poem by E. E.
Cummings:
if you like my poems let them
walk
in the evening,a little behind you
then
people will say
“Along
this road i saw a princess pass
on
her way to meet her lover(it was
toward
nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants.”
Where Cummings paints his poems as subservient to the object of his desire that
motivates them, Menashe has no such modesty. He wants you to take his poems.
The hill I see
Every day
Is holy
Here (77) Menashe demonstrates his reverence for the world. Is the hill itself
holy? Are all hills holy to him? Perhaps, more likely, it is being able to see
a particular hill each day that, to him, makes it holy—the value of ritual.
Either approach is haiku mind, and speaks, once again, to transcendence.
O Lady lonely as a stone—
Even here moss has grown
The ravages of time catch everything. We are given no clue as to who this lady
is, but even she, as an everywoman, succumbs to time. The moss is metaphorical
because the stone is a simile. Perhaps, though, the lady is an object, like a
brownstone apartment in New York City. Whatever the case, the compression of
the poem (83) makes readers focus on the unfolding of time.
The hollow of morning
Holds my soul still
As water in a jar
The conceit of this poem (89), that the poet’s soul is like water held in a
jar, is tempered by the time of day—that still moment of morning, before the
world stirs. What is not said is how that water is used later in the day,
whether it is drunk, sprinkled on plants, or left to evaporate. As with haiku,
the unsaid speaks as well as the said.
Dusk
night
into
earth
from
rise
Voices
The key to this poem (95) is to read it from the bottom up. The clues are the
capital V in “Voices” and the inverted syntax of “from / rise.” Once we figure
this out, we can enter into the image, that voices rise from earth into the
night. Thus Menashe plays a visual game that some haiku poets play, by the
vertical arrangement of words, if not the reading from bottom to top. Are these
the voices of the dead (in the earth)
or the voices of the living (on the
earth)? The careful use of ambiguity, also common in effective haiku, gives us a
moment, and a message, to ponder.
A flock of little boats
Tethered to the shore
Drifts in still water
Prows dip, nibbling
The image of boats tethered to the shore in this poem (107) is extended by
metaphor into being birds. The flock is not just drifting in the still water,
but nibbling, a delightful way to
show the reflected prows dipping into the still water. The poet trusts this
image, and just enough of his metaphorical extension of the image, to do its
work.
Beachhead
The tide ebbs
From a helmet
Wet sands embed
Menashe fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, but that inland battle
had no beachheads. Instead, for this poem, we can easily imagine Normandy. Similarly,
readers of haiku can hardly apprehend this poem (116) without thinking of two famous
Bashō haiku: “how
piteous! / under the helmet / a cricket” (Makoto Ueda’s translation) and “summer
grass— / all that remains / of the warrior’s dreams” (my own version). For
those unfamiliar with haiku, or these haiku in particular, Menashe’s poem still
taps into the melancholy image of the soldier’s absence symbolized by the
helmet. And here, too, we witness the flowing sands of time, knowing that the
soldier and his war are as ephemeral as ever.
A pot poured out
Fulfills its spout
More of an aphorism than a haiku, this poem (128) is among Menashe’s most famous.
A key way Menashe’s poetry is distinguished from haiku is by overt
subjectivity, here manifested by the choice—brilliant in this case—of the term
“fulfills.” Haiku, nevertheless, creates an aspect of inevitability, of
rightness, the suchness of existence. Menashe relies on that suchness with this
poem. In the introduction to Samuel
Menashe: New & Selected Poems, Christopher Ricks comments on this poem
by asking, “Child’s play? Just try it. A minimalist’s maxim, the poem fulfills
itself, just so” (xxviii).
Peace
As I lie on the rock
With my eyes closed
Absorbed by the sun
A creak of oarlocks
Comes into the cove
When I published this poem (132) in Tundra
#1 (1999), I badly wanted to ask the poet to remove the title “Peace,” and I
regret that I did not at least inquire if that might be possible, or how he
felt about that. The poem itself is peaceful, and about peacefulness, so to me the
title feels redundant, telling readers what the poem shows. What remains is an
immediate imagistic experience, more tanka-like than haiku-like, perhaps, but
we are transported to this moment of transcendent—and peaceful—awareness. In
his introduction to Menashe’s book, Christopher Ricks says that Menashe’s lines
“are there to be read between. Which means that above all they must not be
underlined” (xxxii). Yet here is a case where Menashe himself felt the need to
underline. Perhaps more of a haiku mind would have prompted him to omit his
title, as he did with so many other poems.
Sleep
gives wood its grain
Dreams knot the wood
In this poem (154), the title reads directly into the first line, and thus
might not be seen as a title at all. In a previous book, “Sleep” is simply the
first line with no blank line after it, making the poem at least look a little closer to haiku. In any
event, we see the image of knots in woodgrain, and take the metaphor of dreams
as a logical way in which the grain gets its knots. This is fanciful, of course.
A haiku would show knots in wood, and juxtapose that image with a sleeping
person, perhaps implying a dreamer. It would be too much of a leap for readers
to infer that dreams knot the wood of sleep, however, so we can be glad that
the poet made that final leap for us, whether the words create a haiku or not.
The poem is assertive with its image, saying this is so, and it is assertive
with its metaphor.
The sea staves
Concave waves
The staves of a barrel are the gently curved wooden pieces bound by wooden or
metal hoops. In this poem (169), Menashe creatively uses “staves” as a verb to
show the curve of concave waves. This is not Hiroshige’s great wave, towering
and frothy, but the gentle concave undulation of a much more common and
ordinary wave, perhaps barely a wave at all. The densely compact sounds
coalesce here to show us the sea in its brooding strength.
Leavetaking
Dusk of the year
Nightfalling leaves
More than we knew
Abounded on trees
We now see through
This poem (194), the last in Menashe’s finest book, returns to the bare boughs
we witnessed at the beginning. Dusk is a metaphor for autumn, and the poem points
to the leaves that used to be so plentiful on the trees we can now see through.
Life, in fact, seems to become something that the poet, from a place of
transcendent wisdom, now sees through. Where the prior poem valued the shape of
the tree, here we see a more complete picture, and a lament for the leaves as
well as the tree from which they fell. Has Menashe therefore grown in his
appreciation of the tree and its leaves? We see growth in another poem (53),
updated by changing a single word, forty-six years after the poem’s first
publication—a poem that seems to move from hope to loss, yet in either version is
about both:
(1960) (2006)
Always Always
When I was a boy When
I was a boy
I lost things— I lost things—
I am still I
am still
Forgetful— Forgetful—
Yet I daresay Yet
I daresay
All will be found All
will be lost
One day One day
I’d like to close by quoting
“Now,” the second-last poem (193) from Menashe’s book. It is not as short as a
haiku or even tanka, but it carries something of the haiku mind. Samuel Menashe
should never be confused with a haiku poet, and it is not necessary for him to
have haiku mind, nor defer to choices that such a perspective would tend towards.
Nevertheless, aspects of his poetry show commonalities with haiku sensibilities,
including a kind of wide-eyed existentialism. In an interview with The Paris Review, Billy Collins once remarked
that “a very deep strain of existential gratitude . . . runs through a lot of
poetry. It’s certainly in haiku. Almost every haiku says the same thing: ‘It’s
amazing to be alive here’” (#159, 2001, 194–195). I think that’s what Samuel
Menashe is saying, too, and that every poem he has written offers, emphatically,
an “amen” to life.
Now
There
is never an end to loss, or hope
I
give up the ghost for which I grope
Over
and over again saying Amen
To
all that does or does not happen—
The
eternal event is now, not when.
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