be of good cheer

CHEER

Like the waxwings in the juniper,
a dozen at a time, divid- ed, paired,
passing the berries back and forth, and by night- fall, wobb- ling, piping, wounded with joy.

Or a party of redwings grazing what
falls—blossom and seed,
nutmeat and fruit—
made light in the head and
cut by the light,
swept from the ground,
carried downwind, taken....

It's called wing-rowing, the wing- burdened arms unbending, yielding, striking a balance,
walking the white
invisible line drawn
just ahead in the air,
first sign the slur,

the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in
the mouth melodious, too close, which starts
the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric
silences, the song of our undoing.

It's called side-step, head- forward, raised- crown, flap-
and-glide- flight aggression, though courtship is
the object, affection the compulsion,
love the overspill — the body nodding,

still standing, ready to fly straight out of
itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple-
over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift; back-ruffle, wingspread,
quiver and soar.

Someone is troubled,
someone is trying,
in earnest, to explain;
to speak without
swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect
word among so few or the too many—

to sing like the thrush from
the deepest part
of the understory, territorial,
carnal, thorn-at-the-throat,
or flutelike
in order to make
one sobering sound.

Sound of the breath
blown over the bottle,
sound of the reveler
home at dawn, light of
the sun a warbler yellow,
the sun in song-flight, lopsided-pose.
Be of good-cheer,

my father says, lifting his glass to greet a morning in which he's awake to be with the birds: or up all night in the sleep of the world, alive again, singing.

Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly, "Cheer" from Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2000 by Stanley Plumly.

blue iris

RIPENESS

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.


And however sharply
you are tested –
this sorrow, that great love –
it too will leave on that clean knife.

--ⓒ 2009 Jane Hirshfield

WILD GEESE


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk
on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are,
no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--ⓒ 2009 Mary Oliver


BLUE IRIS

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Can't fly, can't run and
see how slowly I walk.

Well, I think, I can read books.

"What's that you're doing?"
the green-headed fly shouts
as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Well, I can write down words,
like these, softly.

"What's that you're doing?" whispers the wind,
pausing in a heap
just outside the window.

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.
It doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.

"Doesn't it?" says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be,
as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

--ⓒ 2009 Mary Oliver

three man's opinion

Colour-printing in Japan has lost its individuality. It is no longer the peculiar art of the lower orders, and tends more and more to sink to the level of a mere process of reproduction.

To this use it has been put in some notable modern instances the painter, Watanabe Seitei, for example, has had a number of sketches beautifully reproduced by its means but they have nothing in common with the old nishikiye [woodblock prints] and might as well have been drawn for chromo-lithography, or the three-colour process.

Perhaps this is the most fitting place for the author to venture on a brief appeal to Japanese artists to avoid imitations of European work. Of late years some among them have seen fit, naturally enough, perhaps, to try their hands at the Western methods of painting; and Japanese Impressionists, Japanese of the Barbizon school, Japanese of the Art Nouveau, and of the wilder sects of Southern Germany, have come again to their own land with pride and misunderstanding, bearing with them sheaves of pictures curiously wrought in the fashions of the masters of their choice.

Others have tried to blend the Eastern and Western arts, so radically and immovably opposite. Always the result is failure. It could not be otherwise. Their art has a noble history and a place supreme in the love and literature of their country. In the name of all that is beautiful let them keep it there, and not adulterate and defile it with the scraps and off-scourings of the alien.
Edward F. Strange 1906

We see in Watanabe Seitei that art has been vulgarised. The coloured print has become chiefly a child's toy. Artists can no longer afford to superintend the technical processes of its production, and cheap flaring, violent pigments imported from abroad have taken the place of the delicate, rich, and costly colours of old Japan.

Frank Brinkley 1902

The modern Japan found a satisfactory expression of art in Seitei Watanabe. The imagi- nation of Japan has been growing wider and wider under the influence of Western art. You will find here and there in Watanabe the sure trace of a certain classic school; a graceful solitariness, like that of Tosa; a far away imaginativeness, like that of Kano; the memory, as it were, of an old lover, which will not be put aside.

Again, in Wata- nabe, the old conven- tion- alism turns delight- fully into a hint of dignity, and unin- telli- gible symbolism into deep poetry. This artist would keep the essence of each school for his own use. Basho Matsuo, the great Japanese poet, once compared the poets and artists to a beggar's bag, because they gather whatever beauty and truth they may, from anything. Seitei Watanabe used to laugh at the artists of particular schools. He declared that he did not belong to any one.

Yone Noguchi 1903

the abstract

i sat on the swing out back this afternoon, trying to cajole ruby into sitting with me. yellow leaves were falling from the chinese evergreen elm.

i found myself wondering whether a leaf is considered an animate object. and if so, when is it animate no longer. when is it dead? what if it falls when it's crimson, then turns brown and dries out on the ground.

a few days back i drove by a chain-link fence with a vine crawling along it, or rather hanging from it, now. i suddenly realized how often the dead leaf is part of japanese art and how rarely in the west.

can you tell which of these images are by eastern or western artists? ironically, much was written in the west about the incredible influence of japanese design on design in the west. the western images here illustrate that.

but the japanese images here were seen as strongly western in style! "Seiho Takeuchi was trained in traditional Japanese Shijo painting. Soon he developed his own style. And after he had been in Europe for two years, his style had become even more messy seen from the eyes of a strict Shijo painter. Takeuchi became famous as a distinctively Western style painter. " 1

the artists of the 20th century often developed styles that were so closely linked that easterners saw their own artists, now, as western, and vise versa. seitei watanabe also studied in paris, and was considered a western painter. to us they look asian. they do to me.

methods of teaching, though, were very different. seiho could be a rigid disciplinarian, in a way filled with heart. "[An artist] was appren- ticed to the late great Seiho Takeuchi who made him study the lives and habits of wild fowl for 16 years before he might set brush to silk panel.

For several hours a day he was made to squat in the marshes, by the duck ponds, silently meditating. When Seiho Takeuchi decided that [the artist] knew enough of the plumage, the habits, the anatomy, the temperament of ducks he was allowed to begin painting on silk panels with a camel's hair brush, not with oil paints, but with Chinese ink or Sumi." 2

CONTRARY THESES (II)

One chemical afternoon
in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy
on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked
and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust,
the green locust.

He wanted and looked for
a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations
of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun,
the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling
like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes
were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premise from which
all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought
the chrysanthemums’ odor.

Wallace Stevens


“Contrary Theses (II)” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

willow weep for me

cab calloway and his orchestra

Willow weep for me
Willow weep for me
Bend your branches green along
the stream that runs to sea
Listen to my plea
Hear me willow and weep for me


Gone my lovers dream
Lovely sum- mer dream
Gone and left me here to
weep my tears into the stream
Sad as I can be
Hear me willow and weep for me

Whisper to the wind and say that love has sinned
Left my heart a-breaking, and making a moan
Murmur to the night to hide its starry light
So none will see me sighing and crying all alone

Weeping willow tree
Weep in sympathy
Bend your branches down
along the ground and cover me
When the shadows fall,
hear me willow and weep for me

Oh, Weeping willow tree
Weep in sympathy
Bend your branches down
along the ground and cover me
When the shadows fall,
hear me willow and weep for me


Ann Ronell was an American composer and lyricist best known for the jazz standard "Willow Weep for Me" (1932). Ronell was, along with Dorothy Fields, Dana Suesse, and Kay Swift, one of the first successful Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley female composers or librettists. She cowrote Disney's first hit song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" (1933) with Frank Churchill for the film of the same name. She was nominated for Best Song, "Linda." Ronell was romantically involved with George Gershwin at the time she wrote her most famous song, "Willow Weep for Me," and she dedicated it to him.