August 17, 2026

When Poems Aren't Poems

Who says my poems are poems? These poems are not poems. When you know that my poems are not poems, then we can begin to discuss poetry!

Ryōkan was an eighteenth-century Japanese Zen monk who walked away from temple rank and titles to live alone in a mountain hut, begging for rice and spending his afternoons playing games with village children. In this verse he refuses to let even his own writing harden into a fixed category, insisting that the moment you call something 'a poem' you stop looking at the thing itself and start looking at the label. Zen calls this fresh way of encountering the world shoshin, or beginner's mind: meeting a cup of tea, a familiar face, or a well-worn line of verse as though seeing it for the very first time. The tradition teaches that expertise, however useful, quietly narrows what a person is able to notice, while the beginner, holding no fixed idea of what should be there, stays open to what actually is. Ryōkan's small joke about his own poems is really an instruction: drop the name you have already given something, and the thing itself has room to appear.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Beginner's Mind →