Nothing Doing
by Cid Corman
New Directions, 1999.
Paperback, 150 pages. $13.95.

This latest collection from the internationally-renowned poet, editor,
and translator presents
work from the 1980's and 1990's culled from scores of limited edition
book and magazine
publications. Corman is a master of the lapidary muse. His poems are
brief, precise and, on the
whole, stunning.

Two major categories of poems can be seen in this book: the first, and
least successful (to my
mind) are the “wisdom poems.” An intelligent voice speculates on
presence and absence in
time, urging stoic resolve in the face of ultimate dissolution. The
printed word is posited as an
object of meditation, a bulwark against nothingness. Large issues are
mulled over and
questioned, yet the ultimate answers often arrive in statements like this:

the
meaninglessness

We live
because
life wants
us to.

which reads more like a marginal note to Teilhard de Chardin than a poem.
 Others are more
successful:

We want to
want more than
anything.

which could easily find a home among La Rochefoucard’s Maxims and
Lichtenberg’s
Aphorisms. Unfortunately, statements such as these do not do the work of
poems–i.e. the
language is not compelling enough to draw attention to itself, though
vertically arranged on the
page and exhibiting limited word play and vowel music. Fortunately,
Corman takes his own
advice as offered in one of the best of the “wisdom poems,” the Blakean

If you would step into the infinite–
Only go into the finite everywhere

with the second major type of poem the result. These poems exhibit
Corman at his best. Rather
than telling us how to think, they show us words engaged with each other
and with the world as
mediated by a keen and attentive mind.


To sit in the room
without a light and
feel the evening come

over the garden
into the house. To
feel it coming home.

Or this one, titled “headline”:

A leaf on
the doorstep–
don’t even

have to pick
it up to
know the news.

Moreover, Corman’s “Psalms” show us that a King James-like music is not
out of place in
miniature poems of two or three stanzas. Indeed, the “Psalms” is one of
the highlights of
nothing doing and is worth the price of admission alone. In addition,
Corman’s mind ranges
among the greats of Western art and literature–da Vinci, Stein,
Joyce–taking their measure
cleverly in five lines or less. The giants of the East, Issa and others,
are honored with deft
translations sifted in among the original work without fanfare. More
personal
poems–meditations on family and friends–afford us yet another pleasure
and give us further
evidence of Corman’s attentiveness to the word. “The exercise,”
addressed to his wife Shizumi,
touches on the poignancies of love and the passing of time in its
seven-line sweep:


Shizumi

from the height
of the nuns’

temple steps

running down
as the sun

sets to me.

The sureness, the simplicity, and the clean lines of much of the poetry
offered in nothing doing
show the hand of a master at work. Cid Corman, now in his seventies and
living in Kyoto,
continues to write such fine poems every day. For this we should be
thankful.