Essay on Tu Fu, Poetry by Brian Glaser
Essay on Tu Fu
By Brian Glaser
1.
If I begin in sadness again
it is because I hope to write towards sadness leavened by joy.
A bombing at a mosque in Afghanistan:
the killers made the roof collapse, crushing sixty worshippers.
It is necessary for me, necessary to do properly:
absence-thinking.
If I had loved one of those worshippers
this poem would be obscene.
Perhaps that is what freedom means, at its darkest depth—
to love yourself for no good reason.
2.
One philosopher writing on John Dewey
says to believe in democracy requires a sense of the tragic.
I wasn’t able to ask the naturalist at our cemetery walk
how evolution explains poison fruit.
Not to know—
Lao Tzu says he who speaks does not know.
And he who knows does not speak;
so the poet speaks—to become unknowing, to dream for another.
3.
If there is a primordial void
there must be a first vessel, a dwelling for emptiness.
Thus, absence cannot be before all things—
the meaning of the Tao may be understood without difference.
Keep the fish, says Chuang Tzu,
and let the net that caught them be forgotten.
If you have been touched by presence in this way,
absence is a danger.
All poetry is translation, says a friend—
words die without translation.
4.
Reading Tu Fu’s early poem
written across a distance to his little boy:
the poem—like many others in this section of the book—acknowledges the presence of grief at its end.
An insect—it is unusual, I don’t know its name—
climbs up the page and turns around and descends.
Among the gifts of fatherhood,
light and unexpected was the innocence of poems.
5.
As I was explaining the Tao to my younger son, he said—
so, basically, it’s just like the force.
Yes, I said, sort of—the force without all the magic.
Oh, he said.
Spring rain, wine in a garden with a friend, the waning moon—
it is as if Tu Fu discovered
someone would still listen after he said that—oh—to mortality.
His poems of war and refuge are another matter.
I do not find them to offer any consolation for suffering.
This is their eloquent case against life.
6.
Tu Fu rejected Taoism, I think,
for more or less the reason I can’t be a Christian.
The doctrine of the omnipresence of the culture’s consecrated spirit
is out of our range.
One timeless way of absence:
so David Hinton translates Tu Fu’s late verdict on existence.
When there is joy to be found here,
it belongs to neither silence nor to words.
Brian Glaser has published two books of poems, The Sacred Heart and All the Hills, and many essays on poetry and poetics. "Essay on Tu Fu" is from The Dances, a book-length meditation on Taoism and art-making.
Inquiry
The following discussion provided by the poet:
The Dances, in which this poem will appear, asks a few questions about Taoism, which I have been studying seriously for about a year. Lao Tzu’s vision of individual spirituality and his political vision seem basically incompatible to me. His spirituality extols naturalness and spontaneity; his politics are umbrous and manipulative. (Scholars mostly agree that Lao Tzu is a myth and that the Tao Te Ching is a compilation of different wisdom traditions.) I suppose this poem asks: Is tragedy the first and final genre for our collective situation today? Does the essay have something to contribute, too—perhaps if only to clarify, to cast a bit of light?