Poetry and Experience

Harrison Coombs was not doing at all well in English C. It wasn't the grade, he reminded himself--they usually gives you a B-if you do the work--but the principle of the thing. A B--in English C never qualified anyones as "deep."

And now he was stuck. He had produced one thinly disguised story about his roommate's sex life, two reminiscences of childhood in Dobbs Ferry, and the coffee cups poem. He hated the idea of writing a "potboiler," but he was three thousand words behind. Three times that weeks he had started another reminiscence of his Dobbs Ferry childhood, only to give up in disgust.

"After playing hopscotch, Elsa and I liked to pick Japanese beetles off the rosebuds in the yard. They crawled on our fingers like a symbol of our half-formed feelings...."

It was Professor MacLeish's third lecture on poetry that saved him. Like the Renaissance discovering the Greeks, like Goethe discovering Shakespeare, like the nineteenth century discovering nature, Harrison discovered Oriental poetry. He had run across the cryptic, ordered verses of the haiku before in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; but since he had read the novel for sex (it was disappointing) their beauty had escaped him. Now, however, he was fascinated with the idea of three line verses which did not require grammar, meter, rhyme, or even logical progression. As Harrison told his roommate after the lecture, "All you gotta remember is that third line that makes the others make sense."

Harrison's roommate was skeptical.

"For instance," said Harrison, "Climbing up Cold Mountain Path/Cold Mountain Path goes on and on/ long gorge choked with scree and boulders/wide creek and mist-blurred grass/moss is slippery though there's been no rain/pine sings but there's no wind/who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?"

"That's interesting," said his roommate. "You make that up?"

"No," said Harrison, "that's Han Shan. I got it out of The Dharma Bums. The reason I quoted it was because you have to hear Oriental poems a couple of times before you get used to them. Listen: Red ivy on brown brick/spike heels catch on cobblestone walks/ pennants hang limp on barroom walls/Christ, if my love were in my arms and I in bed again."

"Huh?"

"Oh, that. I put that in there in order to give a hint of the Renaissance balled tradition without losing the basic Oriental structure--while still talking about Cambridge. Didn't you like that line about spike heels? I mean the way it brings you in touch with reality."

"Are you planning to hand that in?"

"Well," said Harrison, "right now I'm working on a haiku about English sparrows. I've got a great first line but I don't know where to go from there. 'Gray sparrows sing in gray gutters.'"

"How about 'The pigeons on the grass, alas,'" said his roommate. "It gives you that Oriental-American flavor while still talking about Cambridge."

Harrison muttered an unhappy obscenity and proceeded to his room. Once there, he began grinding out haiku after haiku in an attempt to produce the Oriental poetry equivalent of three thousand words of fiction. "Window panes are crying raindrops/Bicycles skid on slippery streets/Who will sunbathe with me?" "Japanese beetles crawl on rose bushes..."

"Hey, Harrison," yelled his roommate from the living room, "how about 'The quick brown for jumps over the lazy dog?' That way you could capture the totality of the alphabet while retaining that basic Oriental structure. Or how about 'Foggy day in London town,' capturing that Anglo-Oriental music hall essence. Or how ..."

Harrison picked up his '62 beer mug.

"...about 'Rain, rain go away,' thus alluding to the childlike innocence of the nursery rhyme while re..."

He never knew what hit him.