Stone Renga Projected
Originally posted 25 September 2017
I was fortunate to be included in a poetry project conceived by Tom Murphy and Alan Berecka. They selected a group of poets from throughout the US and beyond (some quite well known) to participate in an ancient Japanese art form: the Renga. The renga is a both a verse form and a collaborative project. The verse form is similar to the haiku, but adds two more lines of seven syllables. The collaborative element is that the poem is written by several poets who read each other's words and write in response to the other poems. Stone Regna was several years in the making and includes 60 poets all writing about "Stone." The book is published by Tale Feathers Press in Santa Fe (talefeathers@yahoo.com). Late last week I received my author's copy, and this weekend I munched and crunched on these flinty poems.
I thought about writing a review, but, I think, being true to the form, I didn't want to get into the business of singling out individual poets and individual poems. I think one misses the point if one approaches the book as if it were an anthology. It is really one poem with many voices and many thoughts. It is a community, a constellation, a rock formation with many handholds and footholds. So I decided to do something different. I have "written" a new poem assembling lines and phrases from each of the individual poems/poets in the order that they appear in the book. (It is great being retired and have the liberty to spend a day doing such work, merely for the fun of it.) I also think it would be cool if others did the same: can you imagine 60 new found poems all created from the original 60 poems!
True to our contemporary American sensibilities most of the poets ignored the 5-7-5-7-7 form of the renga. And the cross fertilization of ideas is sometimes difficult to discover. However, as I reread the book and assembled this found poem, I began to see many recurring themes and images. If one ignores the layout of the book--which gives each author and poem a separate page and thus highlights individuality--one can begin to experience the poem as something like a creek bed, many stones, one shoreline. So I think that the book achieves its goal. If after reading my Reader's Digest version of the book, you aren't pushed away, you can purchase Stone Renga at Amazon.
Stone Renga Projected (A Found Poem)
Found stones for luck, for safety, for memory, for luck.
--Tom Murphy
The stone that breathes
communicating by their / stony means:
God’s scrawled, illegible name
clings fast to light just dying,
the gleam of full moon night.
The tight fists of the earth’s primal sense
nestle two stones,
Zen like, polished by waves,
their weight enough to hold.
Remember the thud, the blood,
flung at sea birds.
Still for a moment
a stone in the palm of your hand.
Rocks can dive down deep
Precious in the rough
Distant cross cuts.
Your body cries.
Someone throwing stones.
A soft layer forms,
head is jolted to a stop, shirt instantly red,
curvature of bones.
Skins endless tones new and scabrous
Whittle out the word.
The real work was not the carving,
hard as an alibi,
single sound of a plink, then a tink tink.
I broke the stones
lifted from river silt
from the streaming rivers, creeks / and eddies
water smoothed rounds
telling the wrong kind / of truth,
making it hard to breathe.
Beneath burning cedars
strewn across a protean night
dim witness, bright whirl, sacred,
like clouds becoming nothing,
time’s slow release
seeking its orbit apostles,
a shallow sea receded.
What makes peace possible,
faithful as flesh to its house of bone?
He once asked if any shrouds were dry,
their solemn faces shadowed
flat, mud-grey ones
the ears with warm sticky blood,
the temporary flicker of human life,
red eyes with grey hides,
languishing alone
etched limestone.
Thousands of questions in the air
hurtling to us forever,
remnants of the lost
time we’ve held,
a reminder / of that sunny day
grace / grave / gravity
blessed, sky born,
worn by the winds
given as gifts.
We inhale and exhale stones,
a call to harmony / where everyone shared the moment.