Cid Corman, who died March 11 2004 in Japan, where he has lived most of his adult life, was the first, and will remain a while the foremost, master of the short poem in American English. Few other American poets have yet been able to capture, in such brief utterance, the miracle of life on earth, as Corman did. Classical Chinese poetry and the short forms of Japanese poetry had some influence in the development of his style. The twenty syllable chueh-chu quatrain of the Chinese masters, and the seventeen syllable haiku of the Japanese, may very well have been formal inspirations to Corman in his early career, but literary form itself was never more than the merest container for a spirit like Corman's. Many, literally hundreds, of his most powerful works are, in fact, shorter than either of their Asian models.

The poet himself chose the translations from classical Chinese that are presented here from among his works as his favorites at the time for the Spring 1989 special Chinese poetry edition of The Literary Review (Vol. 32, Number 3).

Corman is survived by his wife, Shizumi. Donations toward her livelihood could best be made directly to her personally in the form of international postal money orders, through sites at several of the links provided. The link to Longhouse, the poet's long time publisher, and publisher of his seminal poetry journal Origin, includes photographs taken last Fall at the hundredth anniversary celebration of the life and work of Lorine Neidecker, one of many of the important American poets whose work Corman published and championed. There the poet and his wife can be seen enjoying the company dozens of poet friends, many of whom met as much to celebrate a great friend and mentor as they did to honor Neidecker, the great American hermit poet who was at several points in her career the beneficiary of Corman's fierce poetic advocacy.

Links on the frame left lead you to Cipher and to Longhouse. The former is a promising new online journal of poetry and translation, where you will find lively and moving remembrances, and tributes to the late poet by a number of his famous and accomplished friends. The latter is an outstanding independent poetry publisher and bookseller which has published, among many other outstanding works, Corman's famous Origin series.

Corman's most recently published book is One Man's Moon, translations of classic haiku (Gnomon, 2003).

                                   —J.P. Seaton