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Available for
purchase direct from the author
on this website. $15.00, shipping &
handling.
Reviews & Commentary
Ray McNiece
What Breath Burns Away
Haiku and other short forms
Poetrybay: click below
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In
Breath Burns Away, haiku master Raymond McNiece
transfigures the daily ordinary into snippets of
astonishment, gratitude, passion, political
disenchantment, and razor-sharp humor.
thank
you mosquito / for reminding me I’m
in skin / still alive
sadhu walking beach / plastic bag of chai in one hand /
cell phone in the other
we’re
both old farts / but at least you are / four farts older
between bright star / and atom inside, I spin — / breath
burns away
Beautifully illustrated by Timothy Lachina’s
black-and-white photos, and filled with word-snapshots
of his global travel and his love for Cleveland, McNiece’s
Breath Burns Away will gift you with new eyes for a
fascinating world.
- - Dianne Borsenik, author of Raga for What Comes
Next, publisher of NightBallet
Press
Ray
McNiece uses the Jack Kerouac method of haiku writing to
transport us in time and place. Remaining in the moment
he challenges us to revision the world. Particularly
strong is the Basho sequence and his fine essay "Plop!
The Haiku Moment." This book is a Zen blessing.
- - Larry Smith, author of Tu Fu Comes to America
Ray
McNiece's crystalline haiku, like snowflakes, land on
the ear and the tongue and melt into meaning.
- - George Bilgere, author of Blood Pages
|
Ray is a three-time
winner of the
Haiku Death Match
pdfs_texts/Haiku death
match program intro.pdf
 |
AMERICAN STYLE HAIKU AND SENRYU
Many of the poems in this collection are not haiku
in the strictest sense. Yes, they are composed of three
short lines in the present tense releasing a moment of
revelation — outsight insight — in short, a verbal
rendering of the “aha” moment of zen awareness. And they
often depict that intersection between human and nature.
But they do not employ a 5-7-5 syllable format which is,
anecdotally anyway, the first response for a layman’s
definition of the form. Nor do they have a“kigo”, or
season word – in traditional Haiku one word from a set
list to denote the time of year in which the poem
occurs, for instance “frog” for spring. Neither do they
use the “cutting” word, a verbal particle to accentuate
the juxtaposition of images which usually occurs at the
end of the second line; although they do occasionally
use a dash to that effect. Many of the poems here could
be called senryu, comic haiku that describe incidents of
human nature.
I feel compelled to mention this to warn off
purists’ criticisms. These are American English haiku/senryu.
I make no claim otherwise. Those seeking traditional
Haiku should learn Japanese and peruse the copious lists
of “kigo” that a highly formal and ritualized literary
tradition (based on Chinese models) created over
centuries. But bear in mind that Basho, the poet most
identified with haiku, upended that very tradition in
many of his latter haiku — the famous frog pond haiku
being an example of that.
These are haiku and senryu in an American style,
more akin to Kerouac’s beat “pops”, Richard Wright’s
efforts, and Robert Hass’ translations of the big three
— Basho, Buson and Issa. Some haiku herein hew to the
aforementioned formats, while others are aphorisms,
imagist collages, short short narratives, and even jokes
with a set-up set-up/ punchline structure. They are
influenced by my zen studies and my own idiosyncratic
interpretation of the form. They are a direct response
to a moment, be that moment in nature, from reading the
news, or a passing thought, with the technique of
“notice what you notice” and get the ego out of the way
as much as possible. They are not about capturing that
moment, but realizing it and releasing it on breath
—breath which is nothing but the basis of the universe. |
Our
Way of Life
"...a born poet and a born performer..."
- - Yevgeny Yevtushenko, legendary Russian poet
"Make no mistake, Ray McNiece is a patriot in the truest sense of the
word. He has America coursing through his veins, and his poems are an
open highway with a cool Midwestern wind blowing through them.
'Our Way of Life' is a cathartic journey, taking you from
meditations on the atrocious war in Iraq to homages to the nation's
great living poets, and ending in the nooks and crannies of a country
that, despite the heartache found permeating everything, is still alive,
vital and staggeringly beautiful in ways that are breathtaking to
behold."
-- Victor D. Infante, Editor in Chief, "The November 3rd Club"
“Where would we be without the voice of Ray McNiece? Who else would sing
of the migrations from Appalachia to Ohio, dance the Slovenian Polka,
wail the blues for broken New Orleans, mourn the destruction of our last
pristine land, rail against the corruption of corporate government, ache
for the victims of torture and war, then croon love songs to Cleveland?
Who else would connect us with what makes us human? Ray McNiece is our
Whitman, our bard, our bodhisattva, our conscience.”
- - Robert Miltner, Kent State University, Author of Rock the Boat
and
Fellow Traveler.
"It's not enough for an artist to be angry. He also has to be good. And
Ray McNiece is good and angry in these poems (Our Way of Life)
that burn as hot and bright as the extinct blast furnaces of Ohio once
did. Whitman, whose ghost is everywhere in these lines, called America
"the greatest poem." And I am happy that Ray McNiece's passionate,
relentless voice will not stop until he has made us understand how much
we have lost."
- - George Bilgere, John Carroll University, author of
The Good
Kiss
It is a poet’s job to tell the truth. McNiece strips away the multiple
coats of yellowing varnish in Our Way of Life laying bare
a distressed yet solidly built realism. Rather than the usual pop
cynicism - these poems embrace an idealism of what should and could be
while invoking the language of a poet’s poet. Like a canary in a coal
mine he beckons us to come above ground and breathe deep – before it is
too late.
- - Michael Salinger, Cleveland Poetics, author of
Neon.
Available for
purchase direct from the author on this website.
$15.00,
shipping & handling.
The Road
That Carried Me Here
 The book...and
there is a CD. Hear "The Road..."
Sample Sound, 60 seconds, audio sample,
Ray's CDs
The CD
Now in its 4th printing,
it was published in its
first edition as part of the Working Lives Series by Bottom Dog Press,
Huron, Ohio, Ray McNiece, Copyright, 1998. 109 pages.
ISBN 0-933087-51-9
Short, sample poem below.
Reviews and Comments...
In this new collection Ray McNiece takes us with him
on his road journey through the broken heart of America. These are poems
of great joy and deep sorrow expressed with honest voice and sure, clear
craft. This new book makes it clear why poetry matters to McNiece and to
us all.
"Ray McNiece's Road that Carried Me Here is really almost a
picaresque novel of an Appalachian anit-hero (himself) on the road that
lead Kerouac nowhere except into himself. But McNiece has farther to
go..."
- - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Part of McNiece's charm is his mission to demystify poetry, having
come from a hard-working blue collar family with roots in the
heart-scrabble Celtic Appalachia and Slovenian Cleveland. Like James
Wright's work, these poems show a narrative style, acute attention to
Nature and an emotional affinity with those whose luck has run
out."
- - Amy Sparks, Free Times
"Ray McNiece is a rare poet who fully understands the
honest heart & soul of contemporary American poetry. In one poem,
Ray can have his readers laughing so hard that they'll swear they just
heard the best bar joke in an after work saloon in Youngstown, and in
the next poem he leaves his readers pondering the past deeply while
listening to their heartbeats echo through the side streets of ethnic
Cleveland. Ray's the real deal."
- - M.L. Liebler
Sample (one of the shortest poems in the book):
Staring at a Heron
August. Hazy. Midday.
I stand in the heron's stare,
the heron stands in this stare.
Neither of us will move.
Lulled to the same leisure
by the weather we share,
here we are each other.
The Road... available for
purchase direct from the author on this website.
$9.95,
shipping & handling.
$12.00,
shipping & handling.
The Bone-Orchard Conga
 Library of Congress
Catalog Number 94-65383
Fourth Edition now in print. Poem below with brief sound sample from
the CD
mouth music
Copyright, 1997, Third Edition, published by Poetry Alive! Publications,
Asheville, NC. 96 pages. $9.95, shipping & handling. Purchases direct from the author. See details
below.
ISBN
1-883731-08-9 Illustrations by Michael Shores and Angela
Mark.
Sample poem below, and with sound
sample below if you have very fast connections
Reviews and Comments...
"Ray McNiece is an adept reader of his own
moving, clearly inmaged poems, a skilled performer who does the English
language justice. "
- - X.J. Kennedy, Lamont Poetry Prize Winning Poet.
"McNiece smoothly blends fine writing with an
angry political conscience. His folksy but honed poems are drawn from
the heart of the working class."
-- Amy Sparks, Free Times
"A warm, wise,
gracious guide through an infirm world he teaches his leader how to
love."
-- David Evett, Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Adjust
your volume controls. Note: Best on DSL or ASDL. for slow modems,
great patience...may not work on all browsers.
Click [Sample]
to hear a short sample (not complete) from
The Inevitable Movement of Love - text below
go to CDs for the CD
The Inevitable Movement of Love
by ray
mcniece, copyright 1997
Mothers warned their daughters of sailors
but who warned the sailors of you
and all your candles. As you touch your fire
to the last wicks that forest and cathedral the dark
you tell me what the Swedish wives' tale tells - -
"everytime you light a candle, you kill a sailor."
Many sailors have died in this bedroom
where you lead me to dance unsteady
on my sea-legs of champagne, giddy
with your praise of how I always move
towards what I love as I move now
towards your flushed and flickering body.
Our coming together is the inevitable movement of love,
two lives fastening before groaningly letting go,
invoking god to come, come and show us your face,
our eyes rolling back into our skulls,
obliterating mathematics with the equation
one plus one equals one, intimate wisdom
that widens out into the phosphorescence of stars
where we sink and sleep like luminous fish.
$ 9.95,
shipping & handling.
Us? Talking Across America
Published by Fractal Edge Press, Copyright 2004 by
Ray McNiece, First Edition
ISBN: 1-933126-10-8
Price: $12.00
Book & Cover Design: Wayne Allen Jones
Cover Graphic: Kristen Stuart, Lodestar Visions
New program on US? - Go to What's new,
Ray? for a description not only of the program, but the book.CLICK
ON THE FLAG THERE FOR A PDF: FULLER DESCRIPTION
"McNiece smoothly blends fine writing with an angry political
conscience. His folksy but honed poems are drawn from the heart of the
working class."
-- Amy Sparks, Free Times
$12.00,
shipping & handling.
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