[13. EASTERN-EPISTEMOLOGICAL]

(nine white masters sitting in a tree)

So I’m reading Heaney on Yeats on “entire

sincerity”—sincerity in life

correlating to quality in poetry—thinking

how this couldn’t have been unshadowed by

what his father had written him re Blake’s

poetry—“revolting and desiring”—being

his whole true self, how this then shadowed

what I’d been reading in Hass on Oppen

on Zukofsky about sincerity being

the first question of poetry, shading even

into truth, how this even worked, if

truth obtained in verb or noun, image

or action, all this, of course, after Pound,

after Fenollosa saying that nature

hosted no true nouns, wherein he, Pound,

composed an ideogram tree, sang sunrise

through its higher branches and through

its shade lanced sunlight down to just the

spot where word’s made perfect, and the

word’s—the word is, that is—the word

is “sincerity”.

Notes:

This poem is from a longer series called 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.

Source: Poetry (March 2023)