December 2009

7th Sailing

by Scott Metz on December 8, 2009

huge-sails-like-the-wings-of-bats

. . . 7th Sailing . . .

By Peter Yovu




What Is Your Response to Gendai Haiku?

This “Sailing” will take many of us (I include myself) out of our comfort zone and into exotic waters. The word gendai itself may be enough to send ripples through our haiku foundations, but it simply means “modern.” Just as 20th century Western poetry went through numerous trials and transformations, so did 20th century Japanese haiku. These changes, in each case, were both a response to the old (not necessarily a rejection of it) and a willingness to meet the provocations of a challenging new era, which many felt demanded a new poetry, a revitalized haiku.

In his review of The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century ["Reboot"] (MH 40.3), Scott Metz quotes Masaoka Shiki: “Haiku advances . . . only when it departs from the traditional style.” I am not scholar enough to surmise how far Shiki would have been willing to take this departure, but I will guess that he would have been surprised, at the least, to discover the directions that his disciples and those who followed would take. Certainly a departure from realism, as various movements embraced subjectivity, politics, surrealism, feminism, disjunction and other literary techniques rarely encountered before. Some schools promoted the writing of haiku without kigo, a movement many writers in the West have also explored.

Here are some examples. The first will be familiar to readers of Troutswirl:


like squids
bank clerks are fluorescent
from the morning

—Kaneko Tōta (trans. Makoto Ueda)


autumn nightfall
the skeleton of a huge fish
is drawn out to sea

—Saito Sanki (trans. by Gendai Haiku Kyokai)


in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off

—Yagi Mikajo
(trans. by Richard Gilbert)


from the sight
of the man who was killed
we also vanished

—Murio Suzuki (trans. by Gendai Haiku Kyokai)


Illness in one eye:
I’m walking
like a goldfish

—Ban’ya Natsuishi
(trans. by Ban’ya Natsuishi & Jack Galmitz)


The Gendai Haiku Kyokai (Modern Haiku Association) was founded in 1947. By 1961, I learn from Scott’s review, it was open to “all kinds of haiku styles, including the traditional style . . . nonseasonal haiku and free form.” This, to a greater or lesser extent, is a policy followed by several of our better known publications, not excluding Modern Haiku and Frogpond, but especially Roadrunner and, now, with its haiku section edited by Richard Gilbert, Simply Haiku. Both champion the exploration of new directions in haiku, not necessarily centered on gendai, but certainly encouraged by it.

So, what is your response to this new presence in our lives?

You may recall that Christopher White posted a question (the question, in fact, that prompted me to launch this Sailing) which I will alter slightly to suit our purposes here: “A question I have is whether people feel that gendai haiku contain the standard Japanese aesthetic values or not. I ask this not in order to lay judgment on it—quite the opposite in fact: I’m interested in seeing what it has to say about haiku.”

As always, a number of questions arise from within these central questions. How useful is a study of, or at least exposure to, gendai haiku for you? In what ways? Do you seek new directions for your writing and reading? Is it important to continue looking to Japan for inspiration and education? (I hope to broaden this question of influence in a future Sailing).

It is a concern that some readers, believing they have not had enough exposure to modern Japanese haiku, will feel left out of this discussion. For those to whom it is new, (I include myself), I hope this Sailing will serve as an entry point, and offer directions for further exploration. For this reason, I am especially hopeful that readers who have more familiarity will present examples of work which they feel is significant, educational, or intriguing.

Three excellent sources of information, with many examples of gendai, can be found here:


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Sails is a section of troutswirl that is devoted to presenting questions for discussion and debate on the nature and possibilities of haiku. Sails is overseen by Peter Yovu. For an introduction to this section, see Sails.




Montage #40

by Allan Burns on December 6, 2009

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Montage #40,
presented by Allan Burns,
is now up
on The Haiku Foundation website.


Montage hits 40 with “Now & Zen,” featuring haiku in honor of Bodhi Day by members of the motley sangha: Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, vincent tripi, and Stanford M. Forrester.

stone before stone buddha
— Karma Tenzing Wangchuk


                                                                                before
                                                                                making love
                                                                                i write a death poem

                                                                                — vincent tripi


they actually
are pretty quiet...
wild flowers

— Stanford M. Forrester

Viral 6.3

by Scott Metz on December 3, 2009

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Viral 6.3

Nightgown & Cloud
By Michael McClintock




                                                     white cotton nightgown
                                                     a cloud
                                                     on the bedroom floor


                                                               —Jean LeBlanc




I am a lover of clouds, even this one made from a white cotton nightgown.

Poems like this seldom get the essay, short or long, that is due them. They touch on the mystery of things and the deeper reflections within the human heart. They defy paraphrasing and resist any kind of satisfactory exegesis; they cannot be explicated by traditional Western means involving the surgical examination of segments and parts, inspection of phrasal structuring, investigation of allusions or close probing of metaphor.

In most haiku, nature dominates the imagery and is the thing we attempt to experience directly, without distraction or intellectual noise. This haiku is obviously different from that norm. Every object in it—the entire scene—is an artifact of human life. That cloud on the floor, for all its likeness in weight and form to a cloud of the air, is a white cotton nightgown. Things are only what they are, yet what they are depends on other things around them: This is not philosophy but how the mind experiences the world of objects and phenomenon, and how it “feels” emotion.

A poem of contrasts and likenesses, this haiku belongs to a tradition that runs as a strong thread through the entire literature. It is not a haiku about nature but human nature, and exhibits the same kind of subjective reality out of which the old masters, using imagination and the faintest, most attenuated form of metaphor, crafted these poems:


     Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
     Of the warrior’s dreams.

            —Bashō


     Scooping up the moon
In the wash-basin,
     And spilling it.

            —Ryuho


     The temple bell dies away.
The scent of flowers in the evening
     Is still tolling the bell.

            —Bashō


     Reluctantly
The willow leaves the boat
     Far behind.

            —Kito


     Every year
Thinking of the chrysanthemums,
     Being thought of by them.

            —Shiki

[translations by R. H. Blyth]

In the LeBlanc poem, it is that (metaphorical?) leap from nightgown to “a cloud” that leaves the intellect behind, and that at the same time opens up for the heart-and-mind a universe of endless possibility and potential within the simple framework of the poem’s imagery.

What is the emotion we feel here? The sensuous, experiential dimension is delicate, intense, very immediate. Hence, it is “real,” meaning solid. There is not one emotion but many, and they shift over time and with each reading. An immediate, subjective reality reels its objects and impressions through our psyche: motion in stillness, urgency in quietude, a cloud out of a nightgown. One thing becoming another, the endless fecundity and beauty of things: it is useless and perfect.

With each reading, between the poem’s first word and last, a kind of portal opens through which our stream of consciousness may pour, like water through a sluice gate. There is a rich and complete story here, to be sure, but what is the story? For me, it is as ever-changing as any cloud in the sky.

Re-reading the poem—at different times, in the day or at night, in different seasons, in different moods and personal circumstances—the poem seems always to tell me a different story about the owner of the nightgown, about the person who sleeps in that bedroom, or who remains awake on top of the bed in the stifling heat . . . Who is about to take into their arms a lover on a cold winter night or, perhaps, with a last kiss, has just let the lover go, to sneak over the wall in the garden . . . Or who, disappointed in love, gazes in sadness at the nightgown tossed lightly upon the floor, all anticipation deflated and a lonely night ahead.

In this poem, the implicit works more deeply on the mind than the explicit. The emotional content is huge, but unstated. The poem’s eroticism is delicate and as much spiritual as physical. While on first reading one may be arrested by the absence of human beings from this bedroom, all that passes in the glimmer of a moment. When reflection begins, we realize that LeBlanc has made a poem in which the presence of human beings is the more powerful and immediate for their absence!

Endlessly various in its possible interpretations, in what it conveys in feelings and experience to a reader, this is one of those quiet, stunning pieces that can shut our mouth and still the chatter in our brain.


≈


["white cotton nightgown" is from Just Passing Through: tanka, haiku, haibun, by Jean LeBlanc, The Paulinskill Poetry Project, 2007.]


As featured poet, Jean LeBlanc will select a poem and provide commentary on it for Viral 6.4.

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Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.

• Viral 6.1 (Metz ➝ Robinson)
• Viral 6.2 (Robinson➝ McClintock)




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