A Poem by Cid Corman

Post date: Nov 20, 2012 8:18:13 PM

New to the Poems by Others page, in the “Selected Poems About Haiku” section, is “The Bashō Story” by Cid Corman. It was my privilege to visit Cid at his home in Kyoto a couple of years before he died, and of course to exchange letters with him (including his famous blue aerogrammes) for many years before that. Notice how each line of this poem is consistently five syllables. If Bashō was a Zen poet, one can ask, as Cid seems to ask with this poem, if all of Bashō's haiku are a lifetime effort to explain Zen. Or perhaps not.