Before the next poem from Yoon Yong I should mention that Marie Marshall has asked me to be editor for the zen space spring edition. So what I need from people are little poems: haiku, tanka, sijo. Send these poems to my email address: danielpaulmarshall85@gmail.com if you want to get your tiny poems into zen space …
Continue reading "Call for Zen subs & More Insight from Yoon Yong"
I don't usually write short poems, I always get carried away. Marie Marshall & Bob Okaji persuaded me to try my hand at something short, so thanks must go to them for the encouragement & extra to Marie for including me at my most unsure. Writing short poems is so difficult. It's a neat little …
Continue reading "Four Impressions up at Marie Marshall’s Zen Space"
(Bongjeongam is a temple complex set pretty deep in the mountain range of Seorak in the North East of Korea. Monks go there to live & study, as it is more remote than most temples. Last September i spent 10 days wandering around these mountains with a Man Dressed like a Forest. This is quite …
these are astonishing little nuggets of insight. slow, unending applause to Daniel Schnee for these.
Here for the first time is the English translation of the first few pages of my work The Analects of Naneun (ナヌンの論説: “nanun no ronsetsu”), a free-form mixture of haibun and poetry (zuihitsu) I self-published in Japan nearly 20 years ago. Each poem-form in the original work was postfaced by commentary in the form of a Zen koan, but for now I am posting the initial form of each analect. It all will be posted in six parts, so I hope you come back to read each posting, o-negaishimasu!
Original 1999 Japanese Preface
“This work is the quest to think and feel through the artfully polite evasion of directness, the supreme beauty of Japanese “not-saying-as-such”, infused with kotodama (言霊: word-soul) that moves noiselessly through Japanese language. Thus, I have sought to understand the kotodama and psychological rhythm of Yukio Mishima, Kōbō Abe, Dōgen…
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i recently stumbled again upon the old zen riddle of the goose in the bottle: a long time ago a man kept a goose in a bottle. it grew larger & larger until it could not get out. the man did not want to break the bottle, nor wish to hurt the goose; how would …
