Mountain
  stars

  eyes
  in the

  open
  do

As Thomas has noted previously, it’s hard to find a good English haiku (that is, a haiku specifically written in Engilsh, as opposed to translations of Japanese haiku, of which many excellent examples exist)¹. Corman, though, has written a number of poems that, while not haiku, have been influenced by the form.

I’ve always liked minimalist poetry (when it works, of course), and today’s poem is no exception. The way every word has been made to count is fascinating - such poems look deceptively easy to write, but they’re far more structured and carefully crafted than it would appear. One of the main differences between poetry and prose is this economy of words, the need to choose every one carefuly because it has to carry, besides the surface meaning, several layers of imagery and connotation². And this is a particularly stringent requirement when writing minimalist poems, where there aren’t that many words in the first place. In today’s piece, for example, the imagery evoked by the conjunction of ‘mountain’ and ‘stars’ is not just beautiful but impressive in the way it’s conveyed in just two words. Note, also, the effective use of the line break - free verse has been accused of being ‘prose with interesting line breaks’, but the breaks are far from arbitrary; they’re just as carefully chosen a part of a poem as the punctuation is.

more on the poetry/prose distinction

The other notable thing about today’s poem³ is, of course, the dependence on the last line⁴. ‘Mountain’, ‘stars’ and ‘eyes in the open’ do not between them form a poem - they’re just a disconnected set of fragmentary images (albeit nice ones). The final ‘do’ works on several levels - not only is it a neat piece of wordplay, it also ties the poem together, resolving the string of fragments into a connected whole. All in all, quite an achievement for a two letter word.

treatment of this technique

Biography and Assessment

Cid Corman is author of more than eighty collections of poems, essays, and translations. He began publishing Origin in 1951, featuring many of the finest young poets of the day, and it continues from Japan, where he has lived since the late Fifties. Of himself, he writes, “Harvesting the sun / and earth and sky - no need to / gild the dragonfly.”

– http://www.levity.com/interbeing/authors.html

“Nobody knows how to do so much with so few words as Corman. And Nothing/Doing is rich with his austerities, poems full of wisdom and tenderness and absurdities. It’s a book that seems to have come from every time in the man’s life, as if all his times were in his custody at once. It feels to me like the summa poetica of Corman’s work, where he stands up to be counted. And shows the power and grace of what he does so well.” –Robert Kelly

Corman is one of modernism’s enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky nd George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among such modern giants, Corman’s verse is perhaps the most refined, refusing the temptation of “effect” for the tactile ink of line and “touch.” Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: “There’s only/one poem:/this is it.”

– http://www.wwnorton.com/nd/fall99/Corman.html

Links

Here’s something interesting by the man himself:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/corman-on-radio.html

A set of Cid Corman links (some broken) can be found at http://alpha1.albany.edu/~poetry/corman.html

And for the discovery of Corman I must thank Seamus Cooney, http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/index.html