A while back I was a student of Zen. Specifically, of Soto Zen, and a perplexed reader of Dogen. I practised, and still do, fitfully, Shikantaza, which is Japanese for ‘to just sit’. This simple instruction I soon realised, conceals a depth of nuance that gradually worked on my curiousity and determination. However, as I continued to practise, and to read, I became worried by a tension between Zen, and my writing poems. It is a tension that probably doesn’t exist in a practical way, as evinced by Basho, who was trained by a Soto Zen priest, and by Shinkichi Takahashi, for example, who was in fact a Zen monk as well as a poet, but the apparent conflict between the two in theory preoccupied me for a long time. Despite it’s literature, Zen characterises itself as a transmission of teaching outside of scriptures, and the experience that it points to is essentially beyond language. Now, being utterly enamoured of poems since the day I discovered Dylan Thomas, I am something of a Platonic Realist when it comes to language: what makes the word apple to be about the thing it denotes is the fact that it encodes the essence of the thing it refers to. Somewhere in the word apple is the essence of apple. In addition, I instinctively assent to Heidegger’s notion that language is an objective force with it’s own economy, and that we only speak insofar as we concur with it’s energies. These two features, the Platonic and the Heideggerian, are what, I think, allow for that sense of discovery that sometimes accompanies a poem’s ‘composition’. Now, the worry I had was that the practise of Zen would destroy my attempts to write poems, or at the very least undermine the faith in language that underpinned my attempts to write. On a basic materialist level, I worried about neurological consequences arising from the practise of Shikantaza, a ‘reprogramming’ towards silence. On the other hand, what Zen proffers as a reward is very tempting, and I am also somewhat of the belief that the self, in lower case, is a bloody nuisance at times and that it can obscure the view, the bigger picture. It is a conflict I have never been able to resolve, and one which ultimately has diminished my initial zeal for Zen. I have written about it intermittantly in my poetry, and the fruitfly emerged spontaneously as a miniscule sign of the poet’s necessary engagement in multiplicity. All poets are fruitflies, and hopefully prone to fortuitous mutation.