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What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop

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I am the editor of this anthology.

CORRECTION: The title is not WHAT BOOK - the title is WHAT BOOK!?

Exclamation mark, question mark.

And an UPDATE: it received the American Book Award this year. This is the greatest honor.

These are poems that capture that shimmering moment in time and allow it to illuminate our lives. They are the poems, mostly small, that come from perfect attention - the result of a moment, rendered timeless.

The book also comes with some wonderful tips for writers from Allen Ginsberg.

The single problem: I could find the Beat, but where's the Hip Hop?

Even my friends who think poetry is boring and ponderous and Buddha a smiling statue (thanks probably to some stodgy professors 20 years ago) couldn't put this book down when they spotted it on my coffee table. With a sly sense of humor and enormous knowledge of his subject, Gary Gach has taken a single (and often misunderstood)theme and compiled a "panorama" of examples that give life and texture to Buddha and Buddhism.

What he has done is kind of like a hundred talented photographers, using radically different techniques, having their crack at one single image or subject, each in his or her own way. Uniting dozens of other voices, Gach has given texture and spirit to his subject.

What surprised me the most is that this book never gets old -- I read it over and over again, sometimes a page, sometimes a poem at a time.

The movement of Eastern religions to the West has been one of the most remarkable phenomena of the 20th century. Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing into the late 1990s, the influence of Buddhism (along with other Eastern religions) has been evident, perhaps most strongly in the arts and particularly strongly in contemporary poetry. Here is an enormous anthology of poetry celebrating that phenomenon.

Surfing with the greatest pleasure through Gary Gach's gathering, I find not only a first mapping of the Buddhist presence in our writing, (Buddhist, and non-Buddhist alike), but a needed picture of where poetry itself has gone during the period he covers. If the tag for the book is "from beat to hiphop," the work inbetween gives a version too of the extent to which the doors of poetry and perception have been opened - verbally, visually, mentally - to permit a wealth of possibilities to enter and replenish.

One of the joys of Buddhism is that there are so many ways to get the dharma.

This is a collection of poems that helps you do that. Or, if you aren't Buddhist, it is a collection which looks at life from a point of compassion and wonder. There is a fair amount of reference to Buddhist themes, but you can look them up or just work from context. Definitions are not essential to understand the point.

Two of my favorites include: "A Father's Poem" by Sara Harsone about how to find the time to be yourself when so much of your life has to be for your children. And, "Ecolog" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti about finding unexpected, life changing beauty in fish (Who knew?)

The only complaint I have is that the transposition to Kindle used a method which did not leave all the poems in the same font and size everywhere, making the text of some of the poems too small (have to turn to portrait view and increase font. Then decrease it for the next poem. occasionally having to mess with the margins.)

The poems are pretty eclectic, but well chosen. This is a collection you can return to repeatedly and get something new each time.

Poetry and Buddhism have more in common than one would believe. "What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop" is a collection of poems and essays on both poetry and Buddhism, sometimes both, outlining the many things in common with both the religion and the art form. A wide range of writers come from a wide range of backgrounds to discuss and practice the two things that unite them - poetry and Buddhism. "What Book1?" is a must read for other like minded individuals.

What a book "What Book!?" truly is! Finally the humor, the quickness, the diversity, all the insistent, mundane humanness get a place in this terrific collection of poems.

- NAPRA ReVie