There’s a story all of the cultural elites know about Bill Clinton that makes them swoon every time they tell it to each other. Clinton was having dinner with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great writer and Nobel Prize winner, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and they were having dinner together, probably sucking out shell fish together, tossing their shells onto the hand woven rugs from Nepal at some billionaire’s shack in Martha’s Vineyard, some place like that, and during the dinner Marquez and Clinton get to talking about novels, and old Bill pushes back from the table, stands up and recites two or three paragraphs from a William Faulkner novel, I forget which one.
That’s a true story. Listen: you think it had to do with Clinton’s tax plan or something. Or with that little fist thing he did when he was talking to the camera. That’s not why they loved Bill. He was a cultural elite who could recite Faulkner. You have no idea how far reciting Faulkner can take you in life—if you know when to pull it out.
Here on this blog we’re going to keep things simple, at least for today. Instead of three paragraphs by Faulkner, three lines by the great haiku poet Matsuo Basho from seventeenth century Japan (translated by Robert Hass):
Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
It takes like ten seconds to memorize.
But don’t anyone sound the What the hell does that mean? alarm bell. Don’t anyone jump out of a window because they “don’t get it.” The secret to poetry is that there’s nothing to get. You either like it or you don’t. You don’t take a bite of salmon and spit it out because you “don’t get it.” If the salmon tastes good, you keep going. If not, you move on. Same with poems.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t talk about poems. My lawyer friend who wants to be one of the cultural elite told me that this particular poem would be more original if it didn’t repeat the word “Kyoto.” Like it should be “Even in Kyoto I long for, oh, I don’t know, Paris.”
But that’s the whole bloody point, I said (and here I was tickling the edges of the get-it/don’t-get-it quagmire, a risk I felt I needed to take). Because, I explained, even making love to your wife, you long to make love to your wife. Even getting someone the death penalty, you long to get someone the death penalty.
Oh, he said. Oh.
And I knew the words I long for Kyoto had lodged in his heart, that his dream of someday becoming one of the elites was that much less a dream, that much more a possibility. That in actuality, there is more to life than getting people the death penalty.
But you got to know when to pull the poem out, when and how to do so. Fortunately, in this case, it’s easy: any time you get a whiff of nostalgia, a bit of homesickness, a wave of yearning. For example, you’re walking through the woods on a crisp autumn day with your significant other. You stoop to pick up a blazing red leaf, which you hold up against the sky to admire the contrast. And you pause.
Now she’s waiting for you to say something, to explain this sudden gesture of sensitivity. And what do you say, just as you let go, red leaf twirling to the ground?
Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
It’s very important, though, that you say the poem in the correct voice, with the correct rhythm and tone and emphasis. You’ve got to feel the words, like death, coming up from the soles of your shoes, traveling through your body.
If you’ve got to say it with an accent, then dammit, say it with an accent. Whatever you do, don’t blow it. I recommend studying the final scene from The Last Samurai, which I have included below, before trying this out for real. Watch the clip. Where the dying man says, They are all perfect, you say, Even in Kyoto. That’s the voice you’re going for.
Let me know how it works out for you. Are you one of the cultural elites?
(Just so you know, the guy doesn't really die in that clip, not in real life I mean.)
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