Another Graduate of the Ezuversity

Click on the image for a legible view.

Interesting to see Ezra Pound acknowledged as a teacher by Gerald Vizenor, who includes him on the dedication page of Favor of Crows. The page also includes “In a Station of the Metro” as an epigraph.

Vizenor’s book collects fifty years of his haiku, with a fine introduction that pays homage to the form using two words crucial for Vizenor’s work, “fugitive” and “survivance“:

Haiku scenes are tricky fusions of emotion, ethos, and a sense of survivance. The aesthetic creases, or precise, perceptive turns, traces, and cut of words in haiku, are the stray shadows of nature in reverie and memory.

The original moments in haiku scenes are virtual, the fugitive turns and transitions of the seasons, an interior perception of motion, and that continuous sense of presence and protean nature.

Haiku was my first sense of totemic survivance in poetry….

And here are a few of Vizenor’s haiku from the autumn section:

broken fence
horses browse in the orchard
crack of apples

autumn wind
garage doors open and close
wings of a moth

chilly night
crickets chirp in a down spout
last words