Review

THE VANGUARDS OF HOLOGRAPHY

Annie Christain

Headmistress Press, 2021

99 pp.

 

When speaking of “The Vanguards of Holography,” one is first tempted to speak of pop culture, as the volume’s tutelary spirits tend toward epigraph figures such as Kanye West, Billy Corgan, and Patton Oswalt.  But a more proper place to begin is with the French avant-garde poet Francis Ponge, beloved interpretive object of Jacques Derrida.  His poem “The Telephone,” published bilingually in Poetry Magazine in September 1952, provides a suitable point of reflection.

             From a portable base with a felt sole, dependent on five yards of wire of three kinds which twist without impairing the sound, a crustacean is unhooked and gleefully buzzes…

While between the breasts of some siren under a rock a metal point vibrates.

Nothing comes out of nowhere.  After all, this volume overtly touts its lineage in the title.  Its poems take us afresh to the fascination of the surrealists and Dadaists, the “historical avant-garde,” with all things modern.  They often brought a childlike wonder, combined with adult sass, to emerging forms of technology, seeing them less as instrumental life improvements and more as sites to marvel at, but also to prompt thoughts of decay, destruction, death, those alliterative counters to life, as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “There Is”:

There is this ship which has taken my beloved back again
There are six Zeppelin sausages in the sky and with night
coming on it makes a man think of the maggots from which the
stars might someday be reborn

There is this enemy submarine slipping up beneath my love…
There is this infantryman walking by completely blinded by
poison gas.

With appreciable wit, Annie Christain catalogues relentlessly the techno-phenomena surrounding us, defamiliarizing them by staging the multiple anxieties about them of the speaker, persona, often undecidable as she/he/it/they.  This being is mutable, alternately tormented by basic yet outrageously physical processes, yet strangely calm and even seemingly in control, even on the verge of being overwhelmed, as in “O.K., Miles Per Hour”:

No one cares about keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore—don’t you get it?

I only have until the next solar eclipse to figure out what a sun-body is and how I lit it.

<We’re kind of like attached to a moving dry cleaner conveyer roller where

                        duplicates of ourselves are assigned to other hangers.>

Whichever self we choose to embody is the front— I’m on the rooftop terrace because Einstein said that’s where my space-time won’t bend as much—keep up.

The world presented seems a flat simulacrum, even when it has four dimensions.  There is no real history available.  The closest one may come is “keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore.”  And even that forlorn reality is at a remove from a remove, the best case being to “lose oneself” in a costume drama, rather than in history itself.

“We’ll Always Have Terracotta Warriors Dusted in Han Purple, Never Looking Behind” presents what Roland Barthes referred to as a “fictive nation.”  In this faux place, real heartbreak isn’t strictly possible.  Rather, we are given a simulation of what that heartbreak might look like, when viewed as a radiograph.

What remains of the warriors is what my outside body was from the start—very ill, but human-looking from ten feet away or more. The Han Purple stacks the air unevenly, and my core self walks away on that grand staircase. My favorite concubine may think she left me, but two thousand years on Earth is ten minutes to me in the upper dimension, so here it’s like it never happened.

One thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a visual representation of the seemingly nonsensical phrase “outside body,” rather a body in motion promoting the idea that there could be a core self both psychologically and physical separate from all the other selves.  This should be normal in our age, according to the poet, governed by a flux of time in which two thousand years is equivalent to ten minutes, when it’s in the “upper dimension.”

The poems in this collection are full of that kind of offhand fireworks.  It would be a mistake to think that “Vanguard” doesn’t offer emotional depth of a kind, but it plays out and pays out slowly, the “I” too dispersed to isolate a single event, except as an ever-evolving displacement.  One may have a favorite concubine, but that lover, like the self, is always already multiple.  One cannot speak of things phantasmagorical because everything manifests as real. Everything is visible, in plain sight, but it simply shows as continuous flux.  If one contemplates it long enough, Duchamps’ nude is moving because it is moving.

A tacit longing floats through these pages, as in “I’m From the Earth Where Only Three Astronauts Walked on the Moon.”  There exists a wistfulness about the fact that in such a dynamic, hard-charging universe, everyone’s hyper-elevated consciousness makes it nearly impossible to connect in the quietly contemplative ways that were presumably easier before Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the space age.

Now I’ll never be able to touch a naked woman

whose skeleton has holes behind the eye sockets.

This submerged sorrow can only be expressed in isolated phrases, in a passing manner, as the poet-seeker-I-you-we-them-he-she-they labors without cease to amalgamate into a sentient self.  And even the most degraded of human activities is more clinically, impartially watched than ultimately judged.  From “Rolling on the Floor with Punches”:

Watching snuff films at computers, a man on clipboard taking notes. Blink twice.

In these poems, it is less relevant to speak of similes and symbols than it is to speak of phenomena.  Yet in the ingenious and theatrical, yet resolutely prosaic presentation of them, one gets suddenly surprised by lyricism.

When you can still discern my burned initials through an adult film star’s tattoo concealment, her authentic crystallization still happened no matter what, bringing out her Diamond Man, and that’s important to reveal.

In a book unafraid of ostentation, I find myself over the life of its pages becoming increasingly aware of its moral center and ethical compassion.  I couldn’t decide whether the author was modulating as she went, or whether I was, like Duchamp’s nude, gradually catching up with myself.

 

— Johnny Payne

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“They Called You Dambudzo” is a memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, Emerita Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She was born in West Germany in 1947. “Dambudzo” was Dambudzo Marechera, a novelist and poet, an enfant terrible of modern literature, born in Southern Rhodesia in 1952.

With their two young boys, Flora and her husband Victor arrived in Harare, the capital of newly independent Zimbabwe, at the end of 1982. Dambudzo was homeless but a legendary writer in Harare, where he remained since his unintended return from Europe. He had been a writer tramp for a few years in Europe after being kicked out of New College in Oxford, where he attended on scholarship.

Flora and Dambudzo met in Harare and immediately fell in love, or entangled.

He died in 1987 of pneumonia caused by AIDS. Flora took care of him till the end.

She did not write a formal biography of Dambudzo Marechera for she felt she was too close to him. Her interpretations of his poems given in this book are often tied to the circumstances of his writing. She must have offered and encountered different readings of the same poem over her years of teaching since that’s the beauty of poetry: no amount of background information limits the effect and interpretation of good poems. Background information as such does not fully explain the motives of one’s life decisions, either. This book is a personal biography: a biography of love between the writer lovers, told often in an intimate second person voice.

What FloraVeit-Wild did to preserve Dambudzo Marechera’s work was tremendous. Marechera, now called the best writer in Africa of his generation, didn’t leave much behind besides a few brilliant publications before his death. His return from Europe coincided with the nation building following the hard fought independence. Publishers stayed away from Dambudzo’s radical and disturbing, yet highly artistic and un-nationalistic, writing; he was often drunk and seemingly paranoid.

Throughout the review, I will call Flora by her first name because that’s how we met. The two of us were in the Iowa International Writers’ Workshop for Creative Nonfiction with Cutter Wood in 2014. The roster showed the participants’ residencies spreading over thirteen countries from Bangladesh to Argentina and South Africa. Most of us lived in two or more languages and chose to write in English. Germany was Flora, and Japan was me.

In the Iowa writers’ workshop, Flora was on a mission to write this memoir. Infected by her enthusiasm, I bought two books: Cemetery of Mind (a collection of poems by Dambudzo Marechera, compiled and edited by Flora) and Moving Spirit (a book that emerged from the tribute symposium for Marechera at Trinity College, Oxford, 2009.) Then, in the spring of 2022, the topic of African poets came up while conversing with a poet friend. I opened the Marechera books, which I hadn’t touched for a while. I was excited when I found, on the internet, that she completed the book.

Let us consider the title, “They Called you Dambudzo.”  Dambudzo is his name in the Shona language that was spoken in the region where he was born. Flora informs us:

They called you Dambudzo (‘the one who brings trouble’) because they were destitute. 

Here, “They” refers to the family; however, Dambudzo’s This is “they” from An Interview With Himself describes “they” of his early life:

 

They ranged from the few owners of grocery stores right through primary school teachers, priests, deranged leaders of fringe/esoteric religions, housewives, nannies, road-diggers, factory workers, shop assistants, caddies, builders, pickpockets, psychos, pimps, demoralized widows, professional con-men, whores, hungry but earnest schoolboys, hungry but soon to be pregnant schoolgirls and, of course, informers, the BSAP (British South African Police), the police reservists, the TMB ghetto police, the District Commissioner and his asserted pompous assistants and clerks, the haughty and rather banal Asian shopkeepers, the white schoolgirls in their exclusive schools, the white schoolboys who’d beat us too when we foraged among the dustbins of the white suburbs, the drowned bodies that occasionally turned up at Lesapi Dam, the madman who was thought harmless until a mutilated body was discovered in the grass east of the ghetto, the mothers of nine or more children and the dignified despair of the few missionaries who once or twice turned up to see under what conditions I was actually living. 

 

The list grows longer as he lives on. By the time Flora finalized the title, I could not help but wonder who else she might have added from the fact-finding journey she took as his biographer after his death. She visited his family (your mother was so proud of you,) tracked down the twins you played ‘office’ in a cardboard house and an old type writer you found at the dump, met with the people who knew Dambudzo in London and Oxford (he obviously had a chip on his shoulder about being black,) and many literary figures Dambudzo knew in Africa and elsewhere. Many felt guilty and received her as if she was a tax collector. Quite a few suddenly declared themselves as Marechera’s best friends and believers of his talent. She would meet his other white woman, too. People suspected her motive as his executor, suggesting her misappropriation of his material.

The book begins with Prelude. The Prelude rushes – it is slightly confusing or incoherent for the reader who is not yet familiar with the story. The sudden switch to direct speech such as “You had not written a will,” or “On the day you died, I collected your papers,” might throw you off. But if you return to Prelude after reading the book, you will appreciate it differently. She speaks directly to Dambudzo in the first chapter (many chapters are only 2-4 pages long) and another toward the end. The second-person style grew on me: I hear the tender voice of the woman who loved him despite all the hardships during and after the life with him: The price, high or not, she paid to follow her desire. The composites of short chapters make the book choppy despite her consistent language. Readers should be assured, however, that this book answers all of the questions:What does it mean to live with HIV? To be infected and infect others and meet another who’s on the chain of infection? What was her husband doing? How did she become the executer of his affairs without a will? What was happening in the newly independent Zimbabwe? Flora had anticipated all sorts of questions.

I believe that the choppiness and confusion I feel while reading are because certain things are not made for language. There are things we don’t talk about, or we only whisper a few words and nod as if we understand them. They are, for example, adultery, cancer, AIDS, abortion, depression, and racism. We are not good at articulating these topics in any language. In addition, racism overshadows everything; the racial society directed Dambudzo’s talent. And it was the 80s. We were just beginning to find out about AIDS. We did not have the knowledge or awareness to talk about it. Nevertheless, Flora kept the meticulous record of Dambudzo’s diagnosis of AIDS followed by her and her husband’s HIV positive test results and life thereafter with HIV.

Dambudzo believed in the power of language. Flora asked him as many others did: Why did he not write in his native language? He answered: Shona, the language he grew up in, was filled with violence. So he chose English, yet he didn’t take the colonial language as it is; You have to turn it upside down until it screams your screams. What he meant is described by Édouard Glissant, a French Caribbean writer and philosopher, thus: He (Glissant) intentionally destabilized and de-categorized the standard French to establish the new relationships between the words and the objects to make the others know that he was different. Flora also wrote: You would not allow any white liberal art lover to feel comfortable patting the back of a black writer from the ghetto, however gifted he might be. You would always bite the hand that tried to feed you. Relations, what Glissant called it, are also the technique of poetry or poetic language where most of work is done by associations. Post-colonial writings take the associations to where the colonialist imaginations haven’t been. Dambudzo’s poetry and novels represent that style.

His reputation was made by his novels, but it was his poetry where he communicated his feelings toward Flora and his other white women. The Amelia Sonnet is a series of thirteen poems; Amelia is Flora; Amelia was Heinrich Heine’s woman who didn’t share his feeling. Amelia is the archetype of the unrequited love and the unattainable ideal woman. Yet, in Dambudzo’s poetry, we cannot expect Heine’s lyricism sung in the melodies of Schumann or Schubert. Flora writes:

 

The Amelia Sonnets, which he wrote in anticipation of my departure, talk about his fear              

of abandonment. The ordinary objects around him, the dust, the crockery, the

cockroaches, turn into symbols of absence. 

 

The last four lines of the poem, The visitor, are haunting:

And she, my human hunger, grew pale, lost appetite, became haggard

Shunned by her own kind. Outraged storms, as if fired from some

Celestial cannon up there, day after day blew down upon us. Amelia

Drowned. I shunned man and his daylight ways. I make the terrible pact

And nightly may visit her in spite of her horns and forked tail.

They are the Black Sunlight love sonnets, borrowing the title of Dambudzo’s other prose work. They express perhaps more than his anxiety about Flora going away for a month. His comment:

Another part of the ambiguity of the Amelia poems is that I know that Amelia will never be mine, wholly mine, my own. To love somebody is to want them all the time, to want to drown their identity in one’s own identity, that everything they do or say or decide or think is centered on what I am.

Flora knew she couldn’t give what he wanted. Flora also knew and understood what her white body meant to him. Dambudzo’s words:

Amelia is white; I am black. . .Amelia does not have any sense of race . . . In a very personal sense, it does not matter at all what race Amelia is, but there are times, especially when I have gone through some shitty incidents or I remember some of the things which were happening here before 1980, that’s when I feel very violent towards Amelia. 

Flora keeps asking herself: Why Dambudzo? Do we have a choice in who we love? Perhaps, love is something not made for language, either. In the beginning, it must have been a thrill. Being infatuated with him is easy to imagine. Marechera’s accent. The voice. His talent. His mannerism. In an interview with Fiona Lloyd, a journalist, she admitted that it might not have happened if she had met him a little later once her initial excitement of moving to a new place and meeting new people had time to wear off a little.

And there was his theatricality. Nadine Gordimer recalled him answering Flora’s question about what he was like:

 

‘Marechera was seated beside me at the writers’ workshop,’ Gordimer remembered. ‘Of course, he always made an entrance like an actress, very late, with that big red scarf flying. . . ‘

 

Flora also writes about herself:

 

I had always had a longing for the wondrous, the fantastic, the outlandish. . . Dambudzo appealed to the clownish, melancholic, poetic part of me, which was menacingly dark and colorfully bright at the same time. . . He led me through many closed doors.

 

He was the perfect storm.

She couldn’t extricate herself from him, from the troublesome relationship for a long time. She writes how he banged on her and her husband’s bedroom window in the middle of the night demanding that the taxi driver needed to be paid. Then, there were times like the scene shown in the memoir: Dambudzo performed his long poetic sequence, “My Arms Vanished Mountains” written during her absence, with the background music of Ravel’s Bolero.

 

The story’s left arm was missing

It needed thick-lensed spectacles

They watched him fall from the tenth floor

Chewing gum stuck to his dentures

Such a sun

Such a crying morning song

Falling directly on the spikes

This is my body 

That is my pencil. 

 

The poem is the wide winding river, filled with longing and yearning. The forty-minute performance given by not completely drunk Dambudzo would charm her all over again.

Yet, she was not blind:

 

It was an exciting and a daunting journey into the life and work of the ‘black heretic.’ At times I felt overwhelmed by the effort of it, at others thrilled by the miracles I unearned. I felt so many things, Dambudzo: grateful, gratified, inadequate and, indeed, full of love.

           

Yet, I had a price to pay.

 

Before arriving in Zimbabwe, while she and Victor lived in Nurnberg, she had taken a course in miming. Later, she ran workshops for children. I was wondering why mime, but when I came to the end of the book, she talked about her Gestalt therapy puppets – they made a perfect symmetrical bookends of who she is. Her playful creativity flourishes also in these forms.

She writes about her depression:

 

A year after I had started my position and work as a professor I cracked. 

I had my first bout of clinical depression.

The Lady in Black made her appearance.

 

Years of psychotherapy and medication followed. I learned to do my job.

 

I also learned to live with the visits from the Lady in Black. . . At some point I gave her a body I could talk to or scold or throw against the wall: a gestalt, made of fabric, cardboard, wire ribbons, and beads.

 

Flora began making her puppets. Like her fascination with miming, the puppets became companions. It started with Lady in Black. She quotes CG Jung:

 

‘Depression is like a lady in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.’

 

Other puppets followed. She writes:

 

that many people who saw her puppets proclaimed that they must have been inspired by her connection with Africa but she refutes by saying that she does not feel they are, apart from the general penchant in cultures worldwide —including Africa —.

 

Isn’t this what Dambudzo was saying? He said in an interview:

 

‘I would question anyone calling me an African writer. . ‘He is not a writer for a specific nation or a specific race. 

Their minds were merging, but Flora kept her private and professional life separate for decades. The memoir was a surprise or confirmation. Her last chapter ‘Out of Closet’ is touching.

 

In all those years, there was the public face of your biographer and editor, of the teacher the critic, the Dambudzo Marechera’ authority’ as people started to call me, the face of the committed scholar who would safeguard your legacy, commended by many, envied and reviled by others. Behind that public face, only known by some, imagined by others, was the private one, the face of the woman who had loved you and had lain in your arms, had seen you die and had her own physical grievances to bear. 

 

And yet, it took more than thirty years until my two Marechera faces blended into one. 

 

The trigger to write the memoir came in 2009 at the Celebration of Marechera at Oxford. Someone asked her: “What was your real relationship with him?” She answered: “I suppose it is time that I write my own story.” And she did. With or without the trigger, I believe that it would take time to be able to write about some things in life if it is at all possible. We also need to be at a certain age to be able to put a pen to paper.

 

The Prelude ends with the last fragment from the Amelia Sonnet sequence.
Time’s fingers on the piano

play emotion into motion

the dancers in the looking glass

never recognize us as their originals.

 

Her recollections might have appeared unrecognizable at times with the passage of time. However, by paralleling her memory with ongoing life and by carrying on speaking to Dambudzo, Flora made the memoir vivid in images and intimately tangible.

 

(“They Called You Dambudzo” A Memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, James Currey, An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd.)

 

 

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Long Rain by Lenard Moore. Berkley, California. Wet Cement Press, 2021. 140 pp. $16.00.

 

 Review by Miho Kinnas

 

霖The kanji character for the title Long Rain, is pronounced na・ga・a・mé in Japanese. The Japanese poetry has been associating the word with the sound of another verb, na・ga・mé・(ru) —眺める that means to glance, look, view, stare, watch, or focus for some time. Playing with similar-sounding words for cascading effects and their meanings for counterpoints have been traditional in Japanese poetry. The state of mind when we watch the rainfall day after day is universal and timeless; reading Long Rain is to observe the passage of time, the fleeting moments, and the love of past and present. We stand behind the poet’s shoulders in a room, a square, a doorway, or a moving vehicle.

The book is divided into four sections, not by seasons as traditional tanka books, but by the four universally recognized elements: Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. Most of the poems contain a keyword that belongs to the element; more interesting, the poems in each section as a group merge into the energy of the title element.

 

 

EARTH ・地

 

The Earth poems firmly ground us. The pace of the poem is andante, and we take each step steadily in this section.

 

country night

how many bullfrogs telling

where they are

as I walk the soggy earth

that my grandfather once plowed

Although Lenard Moore’s poems are innovative, they are never outrageous or pretentious. They are filled with subtle surprises that are created by the juxtapositions of things, deft handling of nuances, and noun choices.

 

 

on the porch

watching you

pick yellow apples

I long to eat

when you return

 

The poem above needs no explanation: It’s such a delicious poem. A reminiscence of William Carlos Williams’  This Is Just To Say?　Or the tanka, Loved as if sucking sweet peach juice and I know I was a woman in my previous life^[1] by Tawara Machi?

Two extra lines of tanka (in addition to the three lines of haiku) are not used for explaining what had started as haiku: the scenes, the people, and the actions unfold as we read, but at the end of the reading, we have everything in front of us at the same time. These five lines (legs) have their way of working (walking.)

 

at the beach

the two of us alone

I felt her legs

open wider and wider

in the darkening air

 

Here is the introduction to Long Rain in a few words:  Long Rain is a book of love poems of grounded, long-lasting, erotic, familiar love.

And for such a relationship, sometimes, a night can be generously long. Simple yet rich joy expands the night.

the night is long

a tavern just off the road

with one parked car

but the man and woman hug

to the song on the jukebox

 

WIND・風

 

The section shows more movements, and the reader anticipates the next unfolding. The poems are far more suggestive and moving faster.

man with a goatee

hunkers in the onion patch—

the wind lifts,

while I descend the steps

into early light

It is mysterious. Tanka is a form both the writer and the readers understand that no more explanations will be added. The poet builds tanka carefully, paying attention to each word.

And we gulp it down with a breath —and read it again. And again.

 

I sniff the wind

as the scent of honeysuckle

rises from the path

Her blouse blows wide open

the shape of her full breasts

 

A surprise is a necessary element in poetry.

 

The next poem depicts a scene as if it is the beginning of a film, yet enough is said. A detailed sight and sound and “shapes on the wind” — what’s that? The sixth sense? The interpretation is up to each reader.

stranger nearing—

in an angle of sun

the hound’s bark

grows deeper

and shapes on the wind

 

 

FIRE・火

 

Fire: hot, bright, burning, maturing, rupturing, ripeness, and agedness. The stories thicken in this section. The word “old” appears a lot here, such as “old homestead,” “old bulldog,” “old photographer. “ An old man must be an old man, not just a man. A black woman must be a black woman: It is an extended noun, not an adjective + noun.

 

The items of our daily life stream in: clothesline, the shack door, hospital, wheelchair, exhaust smoke, shacking sweet corn, the sloping fence, wire fence, post office, telephone booth. And a woman is, of course, pregnant.

rising sun

the pregnant woman walks

through falling mist

with the fragrance of pine

the ancient path narrows

The following tanka is precious. It is so simple and small, yet each word, each line, forces  a reader to ponder.

 

anniversary

a point of light flickers

on the buffed floor—

our daughter notices it

while cooking breakfast

1) anniversary – what (which) anniversary?

2) a point of light flickers – what light? how does it move?

3) on the buffed floor — the clean floor – a loving family

4) our daughter notices it – what did she say? how old was/is she?

5) while cooking breakfast – was she cooking?what did they have?

 

A day we take for granted is eternalized.

 

The signature Lenard Moore poems: They are the oil paintings with deep southern colors.
a black man bending

over the low cotton bush—

gunfire on his back;

the flap of a burlap sack

while blues hide in my throat

 

Music is sensed. Music, especially jazz and blues flow out of his work; his poetry readings are often framed with music; the poet lives in music.

 

There is no doubt there’s music in the next poem, even though it is not spelled out.

Unbearable heaviness. A poem like this one is the direct link between the spirit of blues and the essence of sabi. The merged aesthetics characterize Moore’s work.

heading home —

dozens of planes roaring

in the night sky;

no wind pushing back

the suburban heat

 

When the poem oversees the broader landscape, this American tanka rooted in Japanese waka (more traditional tanka) reflects further back at the Chinese classics. This poem reads like a Tang dynasty poem in the North Carolina setting.

autumn moon rises;

rot of pumpkins rides the breeze

on remnants of fog;

old cabin on a hillside

where hungry wild deer roam

 

WATER・水

 

A Japanese composer, Takemitsu Toru, wrote a series of music on the theme of water. He went to see a dam emptied for a repair and saw a freshwater stream that kept flowing separately from the main river. Water often runs unexpectedly in independent forms; the section of Long Rain also includes many different bodies of water.

 

twelve noon

a green tin lunchbox gleaming

behind the courthouse

goldfish swimming under

water lilies in the pond

 

The poem above is densely packed. It takes courage and experience to write a poem like this one. A mere pond behind the courthouse, where we meet the misery of others and our own, holds the poem together.

sleepless

I listen to your breathing

this shortest night

the warmth of thighs

all over my body

 

And sometimes, the night is too short even for the man living the long-lasting love. The short night, incidentally, is a kigo (season word) of summer in haiku. The effect immediately intensifies the poem to the readers aware of a great number of haiku showcasing what short night could evoke. In this poem, the restlessness shortest night exudes sensuously.

 

One more tanka:

 

rain ends—

reflection of headlights creeping

down the two-lane road

and from out the hushed woods

a black cat crossing my path

 

Even a very long rain eventually ends. In this poem, the speaker is driving; the rain ended because he left the raining area or it stopped; the poem shows how time is exchangeable with space. A multidimensional parallel world appears in five lines.

 

 

*

 

 

Lenard D. Moore (born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in 1958) is an internationally acclaimed poet, especially known for his work with Japanese forms, and is the author of The Geography Of Jazz, A Temple Looming, and The Open Eye, among other books. He is the founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, and co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group. He was the First African American President of Haiku Society of America and is the Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. (from Long Rain)

Moore teaches African American Literature and Advanced Poetry Writing at the University of Mount Olive, where he directs the literary festival.

^[1] Translated by the reviewer. From The Chocolate Revolution, Tawara Machi

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