Shared Silence

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.”

—attributed to Claude Debussy

This is a book you might enjoy in at least four different ways. You could focus just on the verses by Nicholas Klacsanzky (on the left side of each page), just the verses by Hifsa Ashraf (in the middle), or just those by Jacob D. Salzer (on the right side). Each experience will grant you a focused view as you welcome the words of each distinctive poet.

But the best way to read this collection may well be to receive all the verses linearly, three per page, to feel the interplay between the poets. That’s the heart of this book, the relationships between poets and poems. The spaces between these haiku and senryu are equally vital, as each verse reaches beyond the emptiness between the poems. This book celebrates the mysticism of varied spiritual practices. But more than that, the arrangement of these poems also generates its own shared mysticism.

To attune yourself to the leaps between the following poems, you might want to avoid thinking of the connections as leaps at all. Instead, think of these spaces, these silences, as their own stepping-stones. Read the poem between the poems. However you choose to apprehend this collaboration, you might go back and read the previous poem after reading the second or third poem on each page. You might read each verse aloud to help you slow down and feel each poem’s sounds and physical vibrations, finding echoes of meaning, but also welcoming silence as the echoes fade. You might also read these poems in reverse order to see how expectations and influences change, and to see what subtleties arise. But whatever you do, read slowly, looking for a shared silence, not just between the poems and the poets but between the poems and you.

Michael Dylan Welch

Sammamish, Washington