{"id":24,"date":"2009-05-08T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/05\/dharma-poetry-philip-applemans-o-karma-dharma-pudding-and-pie.html"},"modified":"2009-05-08T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T09:00:00","slug":"dharma-poetry-philip-applemans-o-karma-dharma-pudding-and-pie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/05\/dharma-poetry-philip-applemans-o-karma-dharma-pudding-and-pie.html","title":{"rendered":"Dharma Poetry: Philip Appleman&#8217;s O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was on the train, reading poetry, when I stumbled upon a delightful Philip Appleman poem that I thought simply must be included in the dharma poetry series.&nbsp; Yes, indeed!&nbsp; The poem begins as follows:<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,<br \/>gimmie a break before I die:<br \/>grant me wisdom, will, &amp; wit,<br \/>purity, probity, pluck, &amp; grit.<\/div>\n<p>Immediately one sees many qualities of a certain dharmic voice that arose in the 50s and 60s, namely, the beat voice.&nbsp; There is the lightheartedness, the accessibility, the earnestness.&nbsp; Technically speaking, there is an emphasis on rhythm and rhyme, an abundance of alliteration, laid-back spellings (&#8220;gimmie&#8221;) and funky punctuation (the ever-hip ampersand).&nbsp; The casual pairing of Karma and Dharma with pudding and pie is classically beat: Big Ideas are down-to-earth, while Pie itself is divine.&nbsp; Moreover, probity is a cool word.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThe short poem continues:<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,<br \/>\ngimmie great abs &amp; a steel-trap mind,<br \/>\nand forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice&#8211;<br \/>\nthese little blessings would suffice<br \/>\nto beget an earthly paradise:<\/p>\n<div align=\"left\">Even in a prayer, which is the form this poem takes,<br \/>\nwe get laughs.&nbsp; The poet is praying for great abs.&nbsp; Now there&#8217;s an<br \/>\nhonest prayer.&nbsp; Amitabha, grant me entrance into the Pure Land, but in<br \/>\nthe meantime, how about we cut out this thinning of my hair.&nbsp; Levity<br \/>\nand irreverence are essential qualities of the beat voice, and of much<br \/>\nAmerican Buddhism in my experience.&nbsp; Moreover, not only does the poet<br \/>\nspeak directly to the gods, he offers the following advice in the<br \/>\npoem&#8217;s closing lines:<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">make the bad people good&#8211;<br \/>\nand the good people nice;<br \/>\nand before our world goes over the brink,<br \/>\nteach the believers how to think.\n<\/div>\n<p>\nThat&#8217;s the stuff.&nbsp; I dig it: the simple diction, the sincere supplication, and the call&#8211;<i>in a prayer<\/i>&#8211;to <i>reason<\/i>.&nbsp;<br \/>\nBuddhism&#8211;not that I&#8217;m claiming that Appleman is a Buddhist, in fact, I<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t know much about him besides the facts that he served in the Army<br \/>\nAir Corps in World War II and he taught English for decades at Indiana<br \/>\nUniversity&#8211;or at least, American Buddhism in its evolving form is a<br \/>\nscience of the mind, a religion for the post-Enlightenment world, a way<br \/>\nof constructing reality that emphasizes those prime Enlightenment<br \/>\nvalues of reason, tolerance and human dignity.&nbsp; And this reasonableness<br \/>\nis one of the, well, reasons that I am proud to call myself a<br \/>\nBuddhist.&nbsp; Also because the view has produced some seriously loose and cool and<br \/>\nmeaningful poetry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was on the train, reading poetry, when I stumbled upon a delightful Philip Appleman poem that I thought simply must be included in the dharma poetry series.&nbsp; Yes, indeed!&nbsp; The poem begins as follows: O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,gimmie a break before I die:grant me wisdom, will, &amp; wit,purity, probity, pluck, &amp; grit.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Dharma Poetry: Philip Appleman&#039;s O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/05\/dharma-poetry-philip-applemans-o-karma-dharma-pudding-and-pie.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dharma Poetry: Philip Appleman&#039;s O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was on the train, reading poetry, when I stumbled upon a delightful Philip Appleman poem that I thought simply must be included in the dharma poetry series.&nbsp; 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He writes book reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. His poetry and fiction can be found on his website: http:\/\/thepennies.blogspot.com. He believes enlightenment is real.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/author\/pgriffin"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}