Essences explores the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America
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Essence #3
(part 3)
By Carmen Sterba
Carmen Sterba’s Interview with Cor van den Heuvel
〜Part 3 of 3〜
Carmen Sterba: Does the fact that you read your early haiku in coffee houses cause you to be more dramatic in your readings? Would you like to see haiku read more often with jazz? Or even hip hop?
Cor van den Heuvel: I’m sure the way I read my work, including my haibun and haiku, has been influenced by my early experience in coffee houses. I think the haiku spirit as I usually try to follow it, with the emphasis on simplicity, can be complemented with many of the sounds and rhythms of jazz. It could be used in the period of silence between two haiku or after a passage of prose to introduce a following haiku. I don’t think hip hop would work for me.
C.S.: In understanding the roots of the haiku movement in North America, I hope to include both those who see haiku as poetry and those who see it as a Zen poem or something in between. Since 1999, when the last edition of The Haiku Anthology came out, the numbers of haiku poets have exploded through online groups, online journals, and instant news through blogs. In New York, you had such a tight knit group to meet with and write with from 1971. Do you have any advice for those whose contacts are only through the Internet?
C.V.: Only that examining how the poem means word for word and how it is structured on the page is only a beginning to finding out if it works. Sometimes the poet sees in the words what he wants to see, even if it is not really present in the poem. Getting others’ reactions is very important to finding out if the poem is really suggesting what the poet wants it to suggest. I think it is much easier to find this out in direct face to face contact then going through the web. Not only do you get a more immediate verbal reaction, you also get clues from facial reactions and other body language.
C.S.: I would be interested in how you interpret your one word haiku, “tundra”. Or is that left to the reader?
C.V.: It is what it is: “a level or undulating plain characteristic of arctic or subarctic regions.” The important things are to see it alone in the mind or in the middle of an otherwise blank page and to color it with a season, preferably spring when it is blowing forever with grasses, flowers, birds (with their nests and eggs), and insects; or in winter when it is covered with endless drifted snow. To see the vastness of it spreading out from the word across the page and across the world. And to hear the sound of it. The word.
C.S.: May I have your permission to publish the following four haiku?
C.V.: Yes.
sun
on the saddle-bags
snow in the mountains
[Sun in Skull, 1961 Chant Press]
summer afternoon
the long fly ball to center field
takes its time
[Play Ball, 1999 Red Moon Press]
a tidepool
in a clam shell
the evening sunlight
[Dark, 1982 Chant Press]
after the speeches
the honored dead return
to their silence
[A Boy’s Seasons, 2010]
(To be published this year by Single Island Press; Originally serialized in Modern Haiku in 1993)
❧
Thanks to Cor van den Heuvel for his generous interview!
It is my hope that Essences will become fluid with new voices and continue in a way that will encourage new research into English-language haiku history. To make this happen, I have already chosen my successor for 2011 from another country.
Meanwhile, I will continue with the Sixties and Seventies explosion of journals, and haiku organizations in North America, while highlighting some of the English-language haiku masters. I hope that other poets will join in with anecdotes about these times.
Which haiku poet would you like to interview if you had the chance? What are some of the interviews or articles that you read in haiku print journals or internet journals that have been most valuable in your personal haiku journey?
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Essences began as a column written by Carmen Sterba in the North American Post in Seattle, WA, a bilingual newspaper in Japanese and English. Its purpose is to go back to the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America: the major poets, the individual styles of haiku, the books, the journals and conferences as they evolved from the sixties and seventies onwards. This will be a short version, so feel free to add information and comments as we go along.
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Thanks, Jack and Carmen.
No, not adamant that one word can’t be a haiku, just relatively uneducated in the matter and, at present, unconvinced.
“The Aṉangu are rightfully owners, and appear to humour the rest of us by allowing climbers. ” – Alan
Alan, actually, the traditional owners have *always* opposed the climbing of Uluru and with growing support from many Australians over the past several decades. They do not, however, have the power to allow or disallow: that remains in the power of the Federal government. The only progress that’s happened is that for some time, tourists have been asked to respect the wishes of the traditional owners by *not* climbing it. More than thirty per cent climb it anyway. It was hoped that finally, this year, the ban might’ve been brought to force, but it didn’t happen.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/conditions-set-for-uluru-climb-ban/story-e6frg6nf-1225817485703
http://www.environment.gov.au/parks/publications/uluru/management-plan.html
the one word renku John’s referring to appeared in issue XXX:3, p65-9, of frogpond, “COBWEB: Single-word Shisan” and is by H. Gene Murtha, Paul MacNeil and William J. Higginson. It begins, in homage to Cor, with his “tundra”. I would certainly say that’s it probably one of the most interesting linked verses between authors i’ve come across. The connection i make with it is Hoshinaga Fumio’s Dada-like, word-association game ku:
squid peppermint
Red-detective arson
marigold
(trans. Richard Gilbert)
both the shisan and Fumio’s ku have a large amount of explication. Fumio’s ku being almost a condensed version of the shisan experiment.
Richard and i have both tried our hands at something like this:
hungover — ignoble
Jerusalem — cactus
pissing — the cats
—Richard Gilbert
and my own attempt at having fun/playing with the idea:
sea cucumber — freedom
foreclosure — umbrella
mandala — petal rain
Well, Carmen, I do not accept the HSA’s definition of haiku and quit sending any of my work to them for over a decade by now, so I could not venture to interpret one word “poems/haiku” by seeing if they meet the standard set by the HSA; it would be like a sumo wrestler trying to get into a size 6 woman’s bikini.
John, that’s rather charming that there was a renku with one-word verses. Was that Bill’s idea? Do you have a copy of it?
Would you tell us the story behind “core”?
Jack, I agree with what you said about Lorin’s URLURU
Though I showed a preference for “tundra” that is a just a personal preference, Jack. As you know, Lorin had brought up some questions about whether “tundra” is a haiku or not, and I mentioned that it has a link with seasons (at least winter and summer) that would provide more images. Alpine tundra has vegetation like moss and bushes and/or animals. Even the frozen tundra has sea birds and some mammals. Certainly it also makes sense to see “tundra” in relation to the white page, as you pointed out. So, there are numerous interpretations; however, whether one-word poems can be called haiku or not is another matter. Perhaps, we could at least say, they are haikulike.
I know that even some Haiku Society of America
members have quit over the HSA definition of haiku,
but if we look at this definition below, would any of these one-word poems fit?
“A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.”
tundra
core
PLAGUE
precipice
URLURU
I’d like to hear more comments about this from the dear readers.
As someone who has visited Uluru, and now ashamed I climbed it, it did provide a strong spiritual experience for me.
I can quite truthfully say it changed for me for the better.
The Aṉangu are rightfully owners, and appear to humour the rest of us by allowing climbers.
But (now selfishly) I would discourage anyone climbing this amazing edifice as it is vulnerable to wear and tear.
Uluru sunrise
mirrors off the sunglasses
the photographer
Alan Summers
“in a heron’s eye”
ISBN 0 9577925 pub 2000 Paper Wasp, Australia
Selected from the Paper Wasp Jack Stamm Haiku Award 1999
.
Sorry, Lorin, I would have taken up Uluru, but I thought you were offering it in an off-hand manner, as your previous remarks suggested that you were adamant that one word could not be a haiku.
Now, having looked up Uluru on the internet, I find it a fascinating natural formation-its changes of color as the sky changes color, its shape, its relationship with aborigine dreamtime, the fact that more of its immense size is below ground than above.
Uluru,supposing one word composes a haiku, would definitely be a meaningful one.
” . . . that words are never understood in isolation, but the mind will immediately create a sequence, a relation even where it is apparently missing.” – Jack
True, Jack. Words, especially those which represent things, will call up in our minds other things and their relationships. For me, ‘tundra’ calls up ‘frozen wastes in Canada’, probably because I read that somewhere when young. I seem to recall that they are not ‘frozen wastes’ for about half of the year, but become grassy pasture land in warmer weather.I don’t think of Russia or Eastern Europe, as I immediately would if I read ‘steppes’, though I believe tundra and steppes are geologically similar.
Consider
howl
if it followed on the page after tundra, in context of a haiku book. Then consider it as the title of Ginsberg’s far from concise poem. Or is it possible, once we’re thinking about poetry, not to think of Ginsberg’s poem as one association even if we saw the word alone in a haiku journal?
Plague, imo, is its own ‘season’, as are Fire, Drought and War. In the midst of any of these, as far as humans and animals go, the traditional four seasons are trumped.(Calling one or two seasons when rain doesn’t happen drought, btw, isn’t credible to me. So, many common words in English depend for meaning on culture and experience of place.)
Though core, plague and precipice have been considered, so far no-one has taken up my offering of ULURU. Is it a matter of culture and experience?
photo:
http://www.thepeopleyoumeetinaustralia.com/gallery.htm
Nobody has considered my offer of ‘ULURU’, so far.
Carmen:
I’m not sure I quite agree with your priviliging of “tundra” as a haiku and “demoting” the other single word poems “core,” “plague” and “precipice” as not.
Actually, there are a number of different types of tundras, just as there are other types of cores, plagues, and precipices, so the multiplicity of meanings associated with these words does not privilege “tundra” as offering a multiplicity of assocations in a way different from the other one-worders.
Actually, if you take Cor at his word in the interview, what you have is the word, what it is, and it may be a tundra with permafrost or not; the associations will belong to the readers’ understandings and familiarities or not with the word itself. They same, I think, is true of the other one-word “poems.”
I always thought of a snow covered flat field with no or next to no life growing on it when I read the word “tundra.” So, for me,there was not a juxtaposition of the word and the blank page so much as a correspondence of the word with the blank page: they mirrored one another in my mind and that’s why I appreciated the poem.
But “core,” for instance, is a homonym, and I believe firstly a homage to Cor; secondly, though, it refers in my mind to the center of things, the core of an apple, let’s say, or even better it refers to the single seed in the center of a fruit: cherry, peach, plum, olive, avocado,etc. Read in this latter way, the one word signifies the beginnings of so many life forms; a whole orchard can stem from it and spread and spread to the confines of the page; it is a word that definitely has seasonal reference, taken in this way, and is compact with fruition.
As to “plague,” this word may not have a seasonal reference, but then again all haiku do not have seasonal references. The ingeniousness of this one word on a blank page is that after a plague all that remains is the plague: hence, the plague surrounded by nothing else.
As to “precipice,” it admittedly has a number of meanings, but foremost, I think, is a sheer cliff face and on a blank sheet of paper, it gives the sense of standing on a dizzying height looking down on the vast expanse of emptiness beneath it; it sort of creates a sense of vertigo being inside that one word on the empty page.
I agree with you that if a seasonal reference is a requirement of a haiku, then the last two examples would not suit the form; however, I do not agree that haiku must contain a seasonal reference to be a haiku. If we demand a cutting for a haiku, then I think each of the one-worders has a cutting as the word itself is understood by the reading mind in relationship,even if the relationship is not spelled out.
That’s the wonder of it, I think: that words are never understood in isolation, but the mind will immediately create a sequence, a relation even where it is apparently missing.
As to tundra is “better” than the other examples, who knows. Certainly, it is the first time I ever saw a one-word poem, so my hats off to Cor for creating it!
I recall working with Bill Higginson and others on a version of renku in which each “verse” consisted of a single word.
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