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    Zen Master Poems
    Zen Master Poems
    Zen Master Poems
    Ebook141 pages40 minutes

    Zen Master Poems

    By Dick Allen

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    About this ebook

    A unique voice in American poetry evocative of Han Shan’s Zen verses, Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, and the writings of Jack Kerouac.

    What a long conversation
    we never had!

    All those rivers?
    we never crossed together.

    You so busy with your own life,
    I so busy with mine. 

    Dick Allen, one of the founders of the Expansive Poetry movement, has won the Robert Frost Prize, the Hart Crane Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize—among others. His work has been anthologized five times in the Best American Poetry volumes, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Tricycle, The Buddhist Poetry Review, and The American Poetry Review, as well as numerous other publications. He’s a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a former Poet Laureate for the state of Connecticut, where he lives and writes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWisdom Publications
    Release dateAug 23, 2016
    ISBN9781614293200
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    • 5/5
      ***This book was reviewed for Wisdom Publications via Netgalley***Zen Master Poems by Dick Allen is a lovely collection of modern Zen poetry that brings the essence of Zen into the everyday world. These poems, written in a variety of styles, speak to one on so many levels. They flow beautifully, and will make you stop, to ponder and process, which is what any good poetry should do, but doubly so for Zen poetry. You’ll be left yearning for a simpler life, against the crush of the frenetic pace of daily existence. Allen’s poems invite one to pause and contemplate the quieter side of the coin, and the fullness of the One Which All and Nothing. I loved the imagery evoked through his words. To Be with a Koan equates existence with lemonade powder dissolving in water, being stirred by something other than one's self, until eventually there is only you, and nothing stirs. How Good It Would Be entices one to think about how peaceful life would if only we could cease questioning things.How Can I Keep Them Together was a personal favourite. It's all about the question of keeping a child’s sense of wonder into one’s adult years. Words Collected was another favourite. It’s a list poem of colours and materials that reveals itself to be a meditation niche. Moment was a beautiful example of mindfulness in action, focusing on the simple act of opening a jam jar.These are just a few of the offerings within Allen’s Zen Master Poems. Each and every one is a jewel to be treasured. ?????Highly recommended for students Zen Buddhism, and those who enjoy the thought-provoking works of Thoreau and Emerson.

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    Zen Master Poems - Dick Allen

    Preface

    I.

    Composing these poems over these past twenty years or so, unexpectedly and sometimes inexplicably I discovered myself writing in the voice of one who’s a Zen Master, one as devoted as I am to traditional Buddhist scripture and to taking a meaningful and somewhat offbeat way through life.

    For a long time I’d studied koans in the Blue Cliff Record. I’d repeatedly walked through the Asian section of the Yale Art Museum. I’d shunned chocolate malted milkshakes, then indulged in them. Through these practices and others, I became more and more able to hear the Zen Master. At times in a semi-trance, at times in a willed act of identification, I found these poems. More accurately, they found me.

    The Zen Master is my alterego, my doppelganger, a persona.

    II.

    Working with a persona has to do with empathy — with thinking and feeling as another might think and feel. It calls upon what John Keats famously called negative capability: when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

    Empathy and negative capability seem to me yoked to compassion and mindfulness.

    And, in Zen, compassion and mindfulness may lead to realizations about how caring and right intention unveil that which wasn’t hidden at all, perhaps a look of puzzlement in shadows behind a confident face.

    You can see what compelled me.

    Many of the Zen Master poems are drawn from such realizations as well as from the Zen Master’s journey and struggle (and my journey and struggle and maybe yours) to push through cobwebs and mist, to walk down puzzling metropolitan streets… and to experience if not enlightenment then at least a few glimmers of it.

    As the poems arrive from numerous compass points and at least one hillside, they repeatedly imply that I should slow down, be mindful, accept the Present, not take myself too seriously. Sometimes I’m able to listen. At other times I foolishly hum or forget to skip stones across Thrushwood

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