Subway Vision

It’s odd when what we’re reading merges with where.  So it is when Dan’s interior meditation
on a William Carlos Williams poem fuses with the visages of fellow train travelers.

Our thanks to guest artist Ann Ropp for her haunting images of isolated faces (selected from
her watercolor series titled “Ancestors”).
                                                                                                                   -- Suzanne

[For more about Ann's art, see the bio below.]



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                   Note to Doctor Williams, from a DC Subway,

                          in the Lull Between Christmas

                                  & New Year’s Eve

                               “To give a damn”

                               (and to not give a damn) —

                                most difficult resolution!

                                William Carlos Williams

                                when your Christmas greens went up in flame

                                by your own hand (town father’s and life-giver’s),

                                at once a conflagration and a prayer,

                                I breathed that thickened heat

                                with you . . . .

                                             Writing this on a train,

                                your book in hand,

                                I dwell on faces purified, this moment,

                                by the task of being human,

                                simmering, I imagine,

                                                       with the slow incessant flame 
                                                       of gentle sorrow.

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An earlier version of "Note to Doctor Williams … " appeared in Dan's original book of

poems, The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press), and will be included in his
forthcoming selected volume, "Back to the Source: Selected Poems & Parables" (San
Francisco Bay Press, 2018).
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Ann Ropp has exhibited work in galleries throughout the US and Europe, and is also the
recipient of a Southern Arts Federation / NEA Fellowship.  Since earning an MFA from
Columbia University (NYC), she’s maintained a studio in Johnson City, Tennessee.  In 
2011, Ann and Suzanne first collaborated on an unusual series of drawings, later exhibited
as “Two Characters in Search of a Title” at East Tennessee State University’s Tipton Gallery
(see Scott Contreras-Koterbay’s lively review in Antennae: The Journal of Animals and
Visual Culture at http://www.antennae.org.uk/back-issues-2013/4583481046
issue 25, Summer 2013).

 

Ann Ropp in her studio

      

Bewitched

And now for something a little different . . . 

     
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  Pumpkins

They deceive us.  And we them.

Carving our kids’ whims into

their plump & gusty flesh,

handfuls of scooped seeds

mounding the newspaper-strewn

floor, bent to the scarred oilcloth

saved from the year before,

we huddle in the circle of their

scent — acrid & still — blades

tracing grins already inked into

their bland & swollen skins

that we might alter, always, if

we dare — slight frenzy, grimace,

calm — by one swift slice or angle

of the wrist.  Our kids, all goggle-

eyed, watch on.  And on we carve,

refining lines — the razor’s edge

of their gapped teeth — not

quitting where we might, now

hardly conscious that we carve

for them . . . .  Finished now.   

  

They stare, queer, droll, triangle-

eyed, crescent mouths agape.

Our kids squeal with delight.  

Days beyond festivities, the

neighborhood grown calm 

again in chill fall’s leafless time,

they lean from the porch ledge,

dull orange, spent, features

caving in & turning pulp.  We 

watch them now the most,

& feel them kin.  Their smiles

as they rot, become more real.

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Dan Stryk's X-ray







"Pumpkins" first appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, 
and later in Dan’s first full-length volume of poems,The Artist 
and the Crow (Purdue University Press). This revised 
version will be appearing in Back to the Source: Selected 
Poems & Parables [San Francisco Bay Press, 2018]. 

"Shell" by Shinkichi Takahashi (Translated by Lucien Stryk)

Back in the 1970s, when still living among the cornfields of Illinois, I remember listening—spellbound—to my father-in-law’s bold 
resonance when reading us his translations of Shinkichi Takahashi’s contemporary Zen poems. Four decades later that voice 
blent with a Japanese poet’s vision moves me still—stirring the cycles of life and death while I paint the wavy image of a conch. 
And inspiring me to weave that painting into a video combining both their spirits with my own.

                                                                                                                                      -- Suzanne


 


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Shell

Nothing, nothing at all

    is born,

dies, the shell says again

    and again

from the depth of hollowness.

    Its body

swept off by tide—so what?

    It sleeps

in sand, drying in sunlight,

    bathing

in moonlight.  Nothing to do

    with sea

or anything else.  Over

    and over

it vanishes with the wave.

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Dan’s father, the American poet and translator of Buddhist 

literature, Lucien Stryk (1924-2013),* was instrumental in 

bringing this highly unorthodox Japanese writer (already 

locally renowned for poems melding experimental

freedom with traditional Zennist thought) to the attention

of the English-speaking world in Triumph of the Sparrow 

(Grove Press), a comprehensive volume of the 

Zen-inspired poetry of Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987).  

Lucien visiting Takahashi in the latter’s Tokyo study (1970). 

*See "Featured Post" (top left of this page) for a video based on two of Lucien's original poems.