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Tomegaki
A zip shisan: Things to do
On
graduating from the English Department, University of
Minnesota, as a foreign student from Japan, I was asked my
plans. My answer was
quite vague; “I want to do
something that combines linguistics and literature.”
On the day before my departure
from Minneapolis, U.S.A. in 1982, I remember spending hours in
my favorite bookstore. The books I bought then were those on the
definition of poetry, the
translation of verses, or the inner images of the artist.
I admit they were daunting and I have not yet read all of
them. But one book defined poetry as
‘designed language’
and called the language used in poetry
‘triumphant’ over
the regular language used for daily communication. The
adjective, triumphant, was striking. It seemed the writer wanted
to emphasize that words in poems are the core of all the usages
of language which surround the core.
Ten
years later, when I happened to sit in a bi-lingual renku
session with Sanford Goldstein, a great tanka poet, in Iga Ueno,
the birth place of Basho, I realized this was it. In other
words, I was convinced of my goal to cut a new horizon for
bi-lingual renku. Since then I have been learning what it is to
write poetry together and have written quite a few renku and
tomegaki (a short essay on the creation of a renku written by a
sabaki, or a lead poet/coordinator). I think I have been able
to convince readers of the richness one experiences in
collaboration. I am not sure, though, whether the renku texts
were received as something that deserves the adjective,
triumphant.
This
doubt led me to examine ‘Things to do’ severely. The yardsticks
I used are the following excerpts from my past tomegaki:
-
The importance of a
hokku, the starting verse, can never be
exaggerated. With the support of a waki-ku, the second verse,
renku is
supposed to establish itself as a pure poem right there.
-
Secondly, renku has
to have one or two poetic peaks where readers find
themselves motionless for a while, totally forgetting links and
shifts.
Thirdly, a renku is genuine when it brings to you the subtle
sighs and
tiny smiles we experience in this world.
-
Renku is an art to
educate us how to live and die and how to live again.
-
When you link to the
previous verse, the depth and the breadth of your
response surprises even yourself, because a hidden corner of
your soul
is so distinctly illuminated by the previous verse that the muse
in you
awakens in spite of yourself. Is it too much to say that we are
humans
because we write renku?
-
Renku is an art
deep-rooted in the essence of language and has the
capacity to nourish the human soul regardless of nationality.
-
Renku as the product
of pre-arranged pseudo-harmony guaranteed by the
imposition of traditional rules was surely disdained by Basho
who once
wrote on ‘a haikai even dogs won’t eat’.
-
Collaboration in
renku requires a strong willingness to confront and
deal with another soul. It should never mean to submit to others
or to
bury oneself in some social game.
I am
pleased to publish our recent shisan: ‘Things to do’. Not
because this is the final answer in a quest for ‘triumphant’
poetry, but because it turns out as a well designed poem,
comparable to fine chamber music, thanks to the following
factors:
1. We
used a zip form prosody and wrote all long verses in two lines
with 15
syllables
and short verses in one line with 11 syllables. This alternately repeated length gives
birth to
a rippling flow and makes the shisan pleasing to ear, just as
Japanese
renku following teikei (fixed form) is. Thank you, John E.
Carley for
inventing zip! The impact of this form is discussed further on
in this
tomegaki.
2. A rather casual starting verse, which is weak as hokku, is
mightily
flanked by a grand-scale imagery of poetry. I can’t thank Norman
enough
for the ‘milky way’ wakiku and for his love verse with a scene
as if
from a Zola novel. Both links contribute to create vivid poetic
reality.
The relationship between verse 5 and verse 6 is of the same
nature.
3. The solid and the airy were naturally criss-crossing
throughout the
renku to give the poem breathing life. I feel overwhelmed by the
extraordinary light power from ‘frozen diamond’ and fall in love
with
the colorful sari as it changes color. And the veil over the
canal
enhances atmosphere.
4. Richard Wright wrote impressive haiku on magnolia and seeing
them
bloom some day is my little dream. An Englishman who saw this
blossom
in the New World must have stopped for a while in amazement. No
wonder
he named it, sweet bay magnolia. The word ‘heavy’ used here fits
into
our total design with rocks, gravity and diamonds. Linda wrote
us a
glorious blossom verse.
I can
keep on finding, but I must stop. Being a person who loves to
read a dictionary and a thesaurus, this poem is a source of
pleasure to me. It seems I have found the field where
linguistics is entwined with literature.
Now, I would like to explain the
impact of a zip prosody from my viewpoint.
Where does poetry come from? Poetry is born in all corners of
our souls, taking the shape of various imageries, which must be
the source of all human languages. I feel that language, when
uttered, is not so much a scientifically proven sign system as a
mysterious stream of sound.
In Japan renku is a poem that undulates in the fixed meter of
five-seven-five. A Japanese haijin or renkujin has this
guidepost when he sets out to making a verse. Free verse haiku
was once attempted by Kawahigashi Hekigotoh, an important
disciple of Shiki, who, in my
opinion, elevated haiku to the lofty art level, but free verse
haiku never gained the citizenship, so to speak. Today, people
would not recognize a short free verse as haiku, regardless of
the subject matter or of any allusion to Basho.
You could say that five-seven-five is synonymous with haiku.
When the chosen English verse (or tsukeku) is recited in an
international renku session, it is usually translated into
five-seven-five too. Many years ago, one professor of English
dared to translate English verses faithfully to their original
meanings, intentionally forgetting the rigid meter. He recited
them in front of the audience. I think it was his experiment.
The audience did not accept that. I still remember the icy
response and the frozen atmosphere.
From the view point of a bi-lingual renku coordinator, the
tragedy of five-seven-five faithfully transferred into English
haiku prosody is the capacity of English to hold more imageries
than fit into the same number of Japanese syllables. This is
inevitable because the two languages use completely different
phonology (red takes one syllable but akai, three).
Let’s say a renku translator had to sacrifice one original image
in the English verse so that it could fit into the Japanese
fixed form. An English speaking renju may then offer a link
based on the omitted image. Then a Japanse renju will have no
way of finding the link. This is what
I describe as a tragic situation…
Having a teikei, or fixed form, on which everyone stands and
depends, literally liberates individuals from creating every
element of poetry on their own. Fixed form also prepares the
communal stage, so to speak, for sharing each other’s verse.
Wasn’t poem reciting meant for every member in all cultures of
pre-historic time? A fixed form encourages many more people to
write a poem even today. For some years I dreamed of the arrival
of a shortened fixed form to be used in our bilingual renku
sessions.
Zip haiku came to the world nearly ten years ago and I gladly
experimented with the zip prosody by translating some of
Hisajo’s haiku. It made a lot of sense and my experiment was a
success. On the otherhand, many English language haijin who did
not share my thirst for the fixed form did not welcome the
arrival of a zip in the way I did.
Other than being a fixed form, I like the layout of a zip haiku:
you can visualize the semantic units of one verse both
horizontally and vertically, allowing you to savor the poem from
multiple angles.
If there is a feature in haiku that is unique compared with all
other forms of poetry, I would say it is its quality of never
describing things. One sensei writes that haiku, helped with the
mysterious power of language, only points the direction. As a
reader, he writes, you are to find what is in that direction on
your own. He teaches that the thing of immense depth and mystery
can only be grasped alive this way. I am not qualified to
examine the intricacy of the zip caesura, but I am
seeing the presentation of several semantic units separately in
a zip positively subtle in this regard.
In response to my request, John E. Carley, the founder of zip,
read our shisan. With gratitude to him, I share the part of his
comments which dealt with a zip prosody:
The draft of the
shisan below is based principally on my final approach
to the question of how to control the function of the caesuras
in the
zip style of prosody. I think my original proposal - that the
stanzas
should be centered on the caesurae - was too rigid and tended to
place
too much emphasis and weight on the respective pauses. I
therefore
reduced the spacing (from a triple to a double space). I also
adopted a
'free hand' method of layout which is a mixture of typographic
centering
and a 'natural' or 'cursive' imbalance such as one generates
when
writing a zip on paper. The generality of this approach was
influenced
by my observation of the way strings of kana are often broken
into
clusters when written, as a part of haiga for instance.
I have also taken the liberty of moving the position of some of
the
caesurae. This is intended to illustrate my own reading of where
the
semantic junctions are and/or where the meter best accommodates
a brief pause. It is perhaps worth observing that, although one
should always resist the temptation to treat the long stanza as
a kind of rebus or word puzzle, the caesura is often most
successful when it facilitates
(or at least does not impede) a reordering to the semantic units
based
on a vertical reading. So verse three for example could read:
up a steep slope - dislodging - mountain goats - small rocks
*special remark: Moira Richards
helped me in completing the tomegaki text. "arigato gozaimasu,
moi."
*****
Things to do
a list of things to do
between my barefoot toes new coolness
sipping tea the milky way to left
and right
up a steep slope mountain goats
dislodging disturbing small rocks
*****
gravity gravitation does it matter?
moonlight on frozen diamonds
guides the old woman home in time
cauldrons bubbling trouble on that
blasted heath
******
warm colours of Holi
turn my pink sari red to purple
rain or haze Canal Saint Martin it
must be
drunk on love and sake
no lodging too narrow for our need
*****
a four poster with a large mosquito
net
its petals heavy in the
rising sun
sweet bay magnolia
on a quiet lane I catch a song in the air
Lastly, I include kanso, or short
notes written to me by the participants. Readers might get a
picture about how our collab-session progressed through these
kanso.
The fact is I am deeply humbled by their generous words… Am I
so fortunate to have been their sabaki!
In India, we use a term known as ‘saath
sangat’ — the coming together of like-minded people,
be it in religious matters or in performing arts. Indian
classical music is extempore, where the musician delineates
the raga (melody) on the dais, and if the accompanying
artists (the drummer and the harmonium player) do not
co-operate then there is utter chaos – which becomes
blatantly obvious to the audience and mars the entire
performance. So ‘saath sangat' is something that is
treasured by professional musicians for it enriches the
concert, uplifting it to great heights. All that I can say
is that we witnessed that ‘saath sangat’ here to a great
extent, as each poet was given all the space and the help to
achieve her best verse. A truly rewarding experience and I
thank Eiko for allotting the ageku to me and it was a
pleasure to work with everybody toward reaching an ageku
which took off...
_kala
In this shisan we have been carefully guided
on our exploration of this imaginary journey. With Eiko’s
carefully considered directions and verse determinations, we
have eloquently covered a great many and varied topics. From
folio #1 which sets the untrampled journey off, through to
folio #2, where there is a degree of trepidation, to #3
where peace and calm returns, so that finally in #4, there
is utter contentment in its completion. The reasonings on
each verse were very helpful as I endeavoured to understand
more. All members shared in their respect for each other and
for the sabaki making this a pleasurable experience. “Things
to do” has touched on body, mind, cosmos, animal, insect,
clothing, seasons, colours, place, plants, love, drinks,
furniture and music – all nipped tightly to fit within the
constraints of the genre. It was a privilege to work on my
first zip shisan with someone as patient and understanding
as our sabaki, Eiko. I thank you.
Barbara
This was my first zip haiku and my first zip
renku. I liked the experience of working with a strict
syllable count and I learned a lot about the structure and
momentum of the shisan; but what I will remember is the
interaction among the poets – the way we worked together to
bring out the best in one another. Eiko you did a wonderful
job teaching us and I hope you will consider leading another
longer session...
perhaps a kasan?
Karen
I had written no more than two or three zip
haiku and had participated in one shisan, prior to becoming
involved with the endeavor here. It has been and continues
to be a rich learning experience for me in both poetic forms
as well as in the dynamics of participating in a
collaboration. First, there was the practice in learning to
write zip haiku. By the time we reached the last side, I
began to acquire a feel for the 15- and 11-syllable lengths
and was pleasurably surprised to find that they sounded
'right' when the count was correct. Second, when I'd written
for shisan before, I was unaware of the concept of sides; my
understanding is still imperfect and comes from
participating in kasen and triparshva, where the 6- and
10-verse length requires reading as a sequence. By contrast,
I find that the 3-verse sides I learned about here can be
processed in steps; Because of the digestible nature of the
sides, and because each verse has built-in caesuras that
interact with the spaces of the links, I read the renku
differently--not as a simple linear progression. I'm still
enjoying it--each time I go through it, something different
rises to my attention, and I expect that this feeling will
go on for some time. The third thing I learned from my
participation was the experience of working with you, Eiko:
how as sabaki you thought ahead and took an active role in
shaping the renku, rather than just waiting and picking what
was offered.
Linda
This shisan makes a lot of sense to me
(though I like writing in all forms). Summer just gone, I
was treated to a play by our national playwright, Tartuffe
by Moliere. The rules of play writing and versifications
have always been much stricter in French than in English,
even a play could only take place in one place, during the
span of one day, round one single plot, encapsulated in the
two following famous 'alexandrains' (=12 syllables).
Qu'en un jour, qu'en un lieu, un seul fait accompli. (12
syll.) Tienne jusqu'à la fin le théâtre rempli. ... (12 syll.)
[that...in one day, in one place, one single deed must
keep till the end the theatre full] and all of that in
rhyming alexandrains! Like many of my generations, we mocked
that form of writing, refusing all constraints, thinking it
obsolete... wanting the natural, the speech like, the 'just
as it comes out'... It got reinforced in me by the Haiku
world adopted stance on: no western poetic devices! The
sheer beauty of that night and the rhythm of that play left
me breathless. Admittedly, the magic of the evening: in open
air in the dusk of a scented Provence, on the
“terrasse”
of a perched castle overlooking soft rolling hills, with a
brilliant cast.... , yes, the magic of the moment surely
added to the sentiments but the magic of the rhythm of fixed
form verses is undeniable. The magic of language!
sprite
I am
looking forward to composing renku with my renju here, who
participated from as many as seven different countries, face
to face around one table some day! We will drink, eat and
laugh as we continue linking.
eiko
yachimoto,20 October, 2009
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