Joe Pulichino
Author
Info@ZenRomantic.com

Joe Pulichino, Ed.D. is an educator and poet who has enjoyed a long career in the field of personal and professional development with organizations such as the New York Open Center and the Human Capital Institute, and his own consultancy, Athena Learning in San Francisco. He recently was named a winner of the 2008 San Francisco Poets Eleven Award representing the North Beach District.

My story is about writing poetry and the delightful intersections one crosses traveling along the twin winding paths of spiritual discovery and finding the love of one’s heart. Although I’ve been writing poetry since I was a teenager, and even taught creative writing for a brief spell at Rutgers University, I was never inclined to a career as a poet nor ever put any serious effort into getting my work published. I was content to write simply for the joy and challenge of putting pen to paper and playing with the rhymes and rhythms that somehow found their way to my ears. I worked much like an amateur wood smith crafting furniture in a garage workshop, fashioning the raw material of words into objects of beautiful utility. Often, I would share my poems with a friend or lover, but that was as far as they ever went. I know I am not usual in this way. I know there are many, many poets like me who write of out of their own simple and pure devotion to this oldest of arts, striving to find expressions that speak to the heart, stimulate the mind, and ignite the spirit.

A few years ago, while preparing a household move, I found myself rediscovering many of the poems I had written over the past three decades. They were stuffed away in various and unorganized folders, boxes, and desk drawers. Some were fairly new, some very old. Some were written and then left alone, some edited and reworked many times over. As I read through them all, I found much to my surprise that seventeen of the poems, though written at different times and stages in my life, shared a common thread and could be sequenced as a story – a love story that traces the arc of a relationship from beginning to end. Thus, were born the Love Songs of Zen Romantic.

So, what’s a Zen Romantic? I’m not sure I know precisely, but as I heard anew the voice of these poems and gradually discovered the love story that they told, they seemed to me like songs sung by a troubadour that I recognized only from a distance, and the name of this voice, Zen Romantic, came to me out of nowhere, from the place where I believe all poetry comes.  Now I don’t claim to be a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, nor am I any kind of expert on what makes love relationships work, but I’ve surely had my share of dalliances with both Zen and romance – enough I suppose to hear the quiet and rustlings of each and to write simply out of that experience of looking clearly and directly into the essential realness of something – whether motorcycle maintenance, archery, and in this case of these love songs – romance.

At first, the words Zen and romance seem to oppose each other – the first implying the ascetic and solitary – a life of discipline and singular focus; the second conjuring up images of passionate longing and indulgence – a heart willing to go out of control to find connection with another. Yet, in the tension created by these opposing directions, much like the “unlogic” of a koan, perhaps we find their common ground – that ”momentous present” realized both in Zen meditation and in the discovery of love, both being experiences that move one beyond self to true Self. Yes, I think that Zen and romance are all about the moment, the singular timeless golden moment in which reality comes present and we embrace just what is the true nature of me, of you, of all of us – full and alive, now and forever.  And this path can be found in many poems, like the haiku of that original Zen Romantic, the eccentric Japanese monk and poet, Ryōkan, “Singing waka, reciting poems, playing ball / together in the fields - / Two people, one heart.”