Comments on: Montage #40

By: Allan Burns

Allan Burns — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:37:12 +0000

Thanks, Merrill, for mentioning vincent’s water-strider, the emblem of a life lived in the stream w/o polluting it. It sets an impossible standard, esp. for the citizen of a modern industrial nation; but contemplation of an ideal can still nudge one in the right direction. An exclamation from the heart, it implies a whole philosophy of life, and as a keen observer of natural phenomena, he found just the perfect objective correlative here.

Btw, there’s a wonderful little portrait of vincent on the back of “paperweight for nothing” by none other than Merrill Ann, a very skilled visual artist.

By: Merrill Ann Gonzales

Merrill Ann Gonzales — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:09:49 +0000

typo: great depth…
humble words

sorry folks.

By: Merrill Ann Gonzales

Merrill Ann Gonzales — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:08:14 +0000

vincent’s AUTHOR’S NOTE in his “paperweight for nothing” I find instructive.
“Love, hate, courage, fear, anger, joy…enlightenment. Everything comes & goes. Cannot be weighted-down, grasped, butfor an instant.
Everything is here. Cannot be contained but in the heart…the unchanging heart-of-the moment.
THE BLUE JOURNAL 2003″
When I read this book, I find a man with sorrow in his mouth as marbles, speaking clearly.
The paperweight is a bluebird…(of happiness?) (of joy?) the sisters of sorrow and grief.
These are poems of mid winter.
Pine woods…
i look for the perfect place
to be a Christmas tree
(All change is wild)
To experience the heights and depths of the human heart
in “words” on paper…and to know that it is all for nothing???
The sudden relief to find a water-strider that doesn’t seem to be concerned in the least….
“Ah water-strider never to have left a track!”
Making love is not the same to this poet as is love itself…
the passion he carries on his journey.

I’m hoping his next book that will be out after the holidays
will carry the same unrelenting truth that vincent has always managed to convey in his poems of great debth that require no artifice but hunble words of the human heart on a monk’s journey.

By: Louis Miero

Louis Miero — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:14:33 +0000

What did your face look like before your mother was born?

By: Christopher A. White

Christopher A. White — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:03:11 +0000

I second Bill’s support of the great comments.

Tenzig’s poem really does open out onto several substantial readings. Another of these, not directly mentioned here but which I enjoyed, is:

“stone before stone / buddha”

Reading “stone before stone” might conjure the image of a stone pathway, or a dry stone wall, or perhaps the idea of temporal regression (stone before stone before stone, all the way back through the history of the universe, there was always “stone” – though perhaps stone of a metaphorical nature). This temporal regression is then juxtaposed with “buddha” – a word which can be read as very present-moment (and almost atemporal), but also thought of as having infinite temporal regression. This simple fact, the nature of “stone before stone”, could be thought of as “buddha nature”.

Great stuff.