"To be with a koan" by Dick Allen

Poems

November 2012

"To be with a koan"

Burke

was right!

"To be with a koan,”
said the Zen Master,
"has nothing to do with Hamlet,
those old jokes about small pigs
or tiny villages,
bees and bee keepers. No,
to be with a koan,
you must get inside it
without forcing your entry.
It’s like you’re lemonade powder
dissolving in water.
Something other than you
does the stirring,
but there’s nothing other than you,
and after awhile, nothing stirs.”

Dick Allen's new volume of poems, Present Vanishing, has won the 2009 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry.

Webcasts

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Andrew C. McCarthy covers Boston, the Blind Sheikh, the Arab Spring, and Turkey in his remarks at TNC's board dinner.

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George Green reads from Lord Byron's Foot, his collection of poetry that won the 2012 New Criterion Poetry Prize at a Friends & Young Friends event.

Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012
From the memorial service for Robert H. Bork on April 9, 2013 at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC.

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