A Large Seed from the Old Forest
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.
concerning an epigraph to a poem by Meng Chiao
from Poems of the Late T’ang (A. C. Graham)
Here, eat this, said the wooden boy winning at chess,
and the traveler did, and felt satisfied,
but when he got home, he was a hundred and three.
The windy clack of gossiping bamboo,
their inner chambers crowded with phantoms–
how can you know who has wasted a life?
Look! Your axe handle is rotten, said the other boy,
who was losing, and it was, but it had served him well
and had not failed to split apart the earth from its guests.
By finding yourself right, you gain confidence.
By being confident, you find yourself right.
You might never have to go home.
From out of a mumble rises the right thing to say,
and it is not the thing I wanted to say.
I don’t believe I shall say it.
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.