Yang Chu's Poems: The Book

Description: Literature, Poetry, Avant Zen

Beneath the chaos that enwraps our world there exist profound fragments of beauty; like the lotus - which rises through the murky depths. For Duane Locke, the prolific guru/professor of metaphysical poetry, these hidden treasures have become the most essential elements of his work. With Yang Chu’s Poems, hundreds of his most meaningful yet enigmatic writings are presented to you in what is truly a grand opus of modern Zen meanderings.

Review quotes:

Duane Locke is the quintessential outsider. He has created a world apart from the mainstream -- intellectually and emotionally -- and makes no pretence of being part of the academic community from
which he retired.
____~ Gary Monroe, Extraordinary Interpretations

What we have here is the definitive expression of Duane Locke’s philosophy/religion of getting totally inside-inside the world around him, no real Self at all separate from surrounding reality, a total immersion/oneness with surrounding reality: ‘I seek another language,/a language of non-dual perception, a language/that fuses the binary opposite into a new voice,/A language that abolishes the
separation/Of subject and object, of the ordinary and the mystic.’ (Non-Dual Perception, p.233).

____This isn’t a volume to skim but, but a volume the reader should let enter his/her consciousness
and totally re-shape reality-perception.

____The whole Yan Chu connection is part of a metamorphic psychological process of not self-negation, but self-projection into the essence of what surrounds us. In ‘Sea Slugs, Semiotics,’ Locke has Yan Chu meditating on this whole becoming-reality process: ‘So I Yang Chu/think of Zhuang Zi/who became a butterfly,/But we are not sure,/The Butterfly might have become/Zhuang Zi./If one
cannot become a butterfly,/One will never be a poet./Otherwise, those who think/Their trash is poetry
are self-deluded.’ (p.33)

____A philosophical/aesthetic history intro here too that you read and leave totally transformed into becoming ‘The Present and its Becoming.’ (Familiar Defamiliar, p.7).
____~ Hugh Fo