A Poet's Roving Thoughts: On Beverly Acuff Momoi's Lifting the Towhee’s Song

Dual-Perspective (structure & titling) Analysis of an Award-Winning eChapbook of Haibu (with two updates; see below)

Lifting the Towhee’s Song by Beverly Acuff Momoi. Snapshot Press, 2012. eChapbook, 26 pp. Free and available online at http://goo.gl/3Ijy7

The thing that is truly superior and extremely rare in poetry is not the fine line, or even the percentage of fine lines which people think they can point to in a work and deliberately single out from the whole; it is, in my opinion, the composition of that whole, by which I do not at all mean the logical sequence and abstract hierarchy of ideas, but the composition which ordains the succession of forms, images, tones, rhythms, and sonorities, and which alone makes of the poem a unity that is indivisible . . .  -- Paul Valéry

Beverly Acuff Momoi’s Lifting the Towhee’s Song, a 2011 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award winner, is a collection of 19 haibun “written in the weeks after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan . . . . The chapbook began two weeks after the initial disaster, moving between California and Fukushima, what [she] heard on the news and what [she] learned from [her] family.”1 

The thematic threads that run though much of the chapbook are the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and their after-effects, emotional, familial, communal, environmental, and socioeconomic, such as “Mornings I sit. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, but I am terrified. I close my eyes, and with each breath, waves slam against the harbor . . . . Since the earthquake, 10,418 people are dead. The number of victims is expected to grow. The meteorological agency has issued warnings for a severe drop in temperature . . . . Sometimes he waits eight hours for a quarter-tank of gas but he does not dare let it drop to empty. He does not know where, or if, another station will be open . . . . she became hysterical, throwing herself against her mother and crying, ‘I can’t stand this! I can’t! I can’t!’ She recalls my grandmother looking straight into her eyes and saying, “Yes, you can. You can stand it. You will . . . . Every night now I fall asleep with the television on. Sometimes it seems my husband does not sleep at all . . . . Four weeks after the quake, and there is no running water in the shelter . . . .The man shakes his head. He was in Kobe in ’95. Helped in the recovery after the Great Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’ . . . . Does grieving ever end? For weeks, people in northeast Japan wander among the wreckage of their lives, looking for family and friends, praying to find their bodies . . . .” Thematically speaking, each haibun in the chapbook not only works on its own, but also can be read as a juxtaposed haibun to the 19-haibun sequence through the “content link.”2

However, these 19 haibun vary little in structure, corresponding relationships of prose to haiku, and style. All the haiku, except the two in the title haibun, are solitary and used as the closing verses. Eight haibun consist of one paragraph and one haiku, and another eight two paragraphs (usually one long and one very short) and one haiku. Structurally speaking, most of the haibun in the chapbook function like the basic unit of standard haibun as described in Jeffrey Woodward's “Form in Haibun: An Outline”: the prefatory prose, “a vignette that focuses upon detail carefully chosen for its significance to the motif and a closing haiku’s sensory perceptions compared with or contrasted to the imagery of the preceding paragraph.”3 

The prefatory prose is written mainly in the two styles, emotionally evocative and journalistic, which are exemplified in the first two haibun:

March 26, 2011

Mornings I sit. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, but I am terrified. I close my eyes, and with each breath, waves slam against the harbor. In . . . and out. Homes, now kindling. Family cars in Tonka toy pile-ups. In. And out. And with this breath. People scrambling, leaving all but life itself. Again. In. Out. How do I let them go? A woman sitting, palms joined. No words. Just the ocean. And this moment. In. Out.

Earth Hour --

it’s lights out, just the stars

what’s left of the moon

Snow Country

The interpreter’s voice is tight. Her words stumble, start over sharp intakes of breath. The water in reactor number 2 is extremely high—ten million times higher—in radioactive substances. The source of the leakage has not been determined. About the workers who stood in irradiated water in reactor number 3, the degree of injury may not be known for several weeks. The government has criticized the utility for improper management.

Since the earthquake, 10,418 people are dead. The number of victims is expected to grow. The meteorological agency has issued warnings for a severe drop in temperature. High winds, rough seas are also likely. People are advised to take care.

not a cherry blossom in sight

spring arrives late

in snow country

The obvious weakness in these two haibun is that the closing haiku are not strong enough to cap the prose and function as the culminating point of the composition. It’s because in the first haiku, “it’s lights out” is implied in its preceding line (“Earth Hour”) while in the second one, lines 2 and 3 are explanatory. Like the first two haiku in the chapbook, most of the rest cannot properly fulfill their functional role mainly due to the overuse of figurative language and the weak cutting effects created by the juxtaposed images in the haiku,4 such as the following:

full moon maple

struggling to bloom

March flurries

(in "Waiting for Gas")

shadow of spring --

how hungry the waves are

reclaiming the land

(in "Asleep")

this precarious spring

see how the bamboo bends

bows

(in "How the Bamboo Bends")

against this

wide and sorrowful sky we are

all ashes and smoke

(in "All Ashes")

earthquake light

how does the tree survive

this spring

(in "Earthquake Light")

This weakness reminds me of Woodward's insightful advice in his above-mentioned article: “This form, while well-adapted for the abbreviated anecdote or descriptive sketch, may find its efficacy called into question with the introduction of greater expository or narrative complications. One concluding haiku will rarely balance well with a story that employs multiple characters and requires hundreds of words for the telling.”5

However, the poet pays little attention to the functional roles played by a poem’s title. The titles of these 19 haibun, except that of the opener, are taken directly from their prose or haiku. All of them are not fully utilized. For example, in the following three short haibun, I don’t see any thing beneficial by using titles that are the lines taken from their poem texts.

Savage Spring

In California, the poppies are brilliant this year. I have been so lost in grief, then suddenly this wild swath of life. I see them as if for the first time, golden faces turned to the heavens.

savage spring

a single mud-stained photograph

of her three-year-old

How the Bamboo Bends

April 11, 2011. 02:46 p.m. Throughout Japan, sirens. Then silence. How to endure this endless grief.

this precarious spring

see how the bamboo bends

bows

Golden Week

It’s the start of Golden Week in Japan, and all the trains are crowded. My husband waits in line for over an hour to get a ticket on the Shinkansen. Everyone is going home.

last day of April

returning to Fukushima

for the funeral

In the poems above, every line could have been fully utilized to increase the impact of a poem. Below are two fine examples by Charles Simic and Joseph Stroud respectively that can help make my point:

Slaughterhouse Flies

Evenings, they ran their bloody feet

Over the pages of my schoolbooks.

With eyes closed, I can still hear

The trees on our street

Saying a moody farewell to summer,

And someone, under our window, recalling

The silly old cows hesitating,

Growing suddenly suspicious

Just as the blade drops down on them.

Without the first word in the title, this image-dense poem could be easily misunderstood as a flight of poetic fantasy. Simic’s title helps the reader to figure out the context and setting, making the opening image visually and psychologically more appealing.

And I raised my hand in return

Every morning for two weeks on my walk into the village

I would see the young goat on the grassy slope above the stream.

It belonged to the Gypsies who lived in the plaza below the castle.

One day on my walk back to the mill house I saw the little goat

hanging from a tree by its hind legs, and a Gypsy was pulling

the skin off with a pair of pliers which he waved to me in greeting.

Stroud's skillful use of the title as the speaker's response to the events portrayed in the poem is emotionally effective, and his title can be read as the conclusion of the poem, and is therefore part of the poem itself.

In this collection of 19 haibun there are five titles repeating the words or phrases in the opening sentence, such as "Waiting for Gas," from "I sit in a queue two-cars deep, waiting for gas"; "Shudders’" from "My mother shudders at the first whisper of wind"; "Shigata Ga Nai," from "Shigata ga nai"; "Asleep’" from "Every night now I fall asleep with the television on"; "Golden Week," from "It’s the start of Golden Week in Japan, and all the trains are crowded." This shows that the poet doesn’t recognize the corresponding relationship of the title to its haibun. Take “Shigata Ga Nai,” for example. The use of a run-on title can increase the thematic and emotive impact of this repeated phase at the end of the prose.

Most importantly, paying little attention to the functional roles that can be played by a poem’s title is not an individual, but a communal problem. It’s not uncommon in prominent haiku/tanka-related journals to read a haiku/tanka sequence (of nine to 25 lines) or a short haibun whose title is taken directly from a line of its poem text. Now, I think it is time for the haiku/tanka community to think about the creative use6 of the title in a poem in order to increase its thematic and emotive impact.
 

Finally, there are a few words I would like to say about Beverly Acuff Momoi’s Lifting the Towhee’s Song. It is a material-rich, theme-heavy, artistically-unbalanced collection of haibun with least-utilized titles. If Momoi can take more time enhancing her haiku, rethinking about the corresponding relationships of prose to haiku, and effectively utilizing the titles in the book, I think Lifting the Towhee’s Song will be a good book to read and reflect upon.

Notes  

1. Momoi, Beverly Acuff, Lifting the Towhee's Song, Haibun eChapbook, accessed at http://goo.gl/gIkxf

2. In a “content link,” the added verse is joined to the previous verse by cause and effect, narrative development, scenic extension, temporal progression, or any other logic connection based on “content” (kokoro). See Shirane, Haruo, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 87. 

3. Haibun Today, 4:4, December 2010, accessed at http://goo.gl/yzBZM  

4. For further discussion on the issue related to cutting effects, see my “To the Lighthouse” posts, “Cutting through Time and Space” and “Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting,” which can be accessed at http://goo.gl/gh2sM and http://goo.gl/yikEE respectively. 

5. Woodward, ibid. 

6. One of the most skillfully utilized titles I've known of is Ginsberg's "Written in My Dream by W. C. Williams." The form of this brilliantly-crafted poem, line breaks, and sentiments are his response to and elaboration of Williams's "The Locust Tree in Flower." In his allusive title, Ginsberg acknowledges dual authorship and presents his poem as a tribute to his friend and mentor, W. C. Williams (Herbert Kohl, A Grain of Poetry, pp. 54-7). For further discussion on this neglected issue and more examples, please see my “To the Lighthouse” post, entitled “The Title of a Poem Should Never Be Ignored,” which can be accessed at http://goo.gl/8Vuhx

First published in Haibun Today, 7:2, June 2013


Updated:

1 I published another "To the Lighthouse" post on titling, in which I further explained what I meant by "effectively utilizing  the title of a poem" through insightful excerpts from scholarly references and the judge's (Roberta Beary's) comments on the 2012 Haiku Society of America Haibun Awards and two "so-called rule-breaking" poems (included in the comment section). This post has been well-received and constantly reprinted in e-papers, which will be included in the forthcoming "Hot News" post. For more information, see my "To the Lighthouse" post, titled "The Art of Titling."

Below is excerpted from my comments on the art of titling:

Titology 101:By taking a line from the poem text to use as a title, the poet runs the risk of weakening the power of the line.

One exception: Effective use of repetition. For more information, see "To the Lighthouse: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition "

Two examples:

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

"The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" is repeated four times in the poem. The repeating ebb-and-flow action of the title gives a strong visual feel to the poem, guiding the rhythmic pace.

Nothing in That Drawer by Ron Padgett

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

In his “postmodernist sonnet,” Ron Padgett tinkers with form “irreverently.”

The following is an excerpt from Clay Matthews' essay, "On Ron Padgett :"

Similarly, in “Nothing in That Drawer,” another of Padgett’s poems in form, and one of his most anthologized, we find a sublime revelry in the sonnet and by extension poetry at large. In this poem, each of the fourteen lines that make up the sonnet is the same: “Nothing in that drawer.” The repetition becomes comedic, as we visually imagine a speaker looking in one drawer after another, or perhaps the same drawer over and over. And yet the move to search in this poem is also reminiscent of the postmodern sublime, as it constantly points to the failure of language and form to achieve an absolute unity—with themselves and with the Idea. We have in this sonnet the constant search, constantly postponed or deferred. We’re never sure what the speaker is even searching for, or if the movement of the poem is simply language, or boredom, even. We’re left with a sort of constant opening and disappointment, which in many ways is what poetry as postmodern sublime is—an opening on a thought or structure accompanied by a delight in the failure of the opening. And in the case of “Nothing in That Drawer,” because we’re never sure of the action, or even the context, it seems the poem is less about a nostalgia for the unpresentable and more about the loss as bliss, the sublime itself.

Instead of lamenting the gap between form and content, word and concept, Padgett places them in conversation with one another, allowing the form to speak to the content and vice versa. The sonnet form in this poem is wrapped in a contemporary humor, much like the Gehry house Jameson discusses in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. And like the Gehry house, which features an older, traditional home renovated by postmodern architecture, Padgett’s poem allows the inside and the outside to converge. Thus, the form of the sonnet, the sonnet as move from proposition to resolution, offers a narrative to the very language that also works to deny that narrative and/or resolution.


2  Below is excerpted from Ray Rasmussen's "Commentary: Jeffrey Woodward's "Time with the Heron" –Poetic Techniques in Haibun Composition," Contemporary Haibun Today, 9:3, October 2013:

I. The Use and Abuse of Repetition

Having myself been an editor for several haiku-genre journals, I have often encountered instances of what I call the 'lazy writer sin'. These are writers who repeat words and phrases out of habit and who may simply be unaware that unintended repetition can detract from the flow and beauty of a piece. And I've often seen members of writing forums criticize repetition with little consideration for whether the writer intended a deliberate use of a poetic device. The message conveyed is that writers should use a word or phrase but once in title, prose passage and poem. Although such criticism may be valid in a given instance, to suggest it as a hard and fast rule constitutes the parallel sin of 'lazy criticism'. If a reader has insight, suggestions may be helpful.

Of course, the generalization that repetition is something to avoid is nonsense. Repetition, fragmentation, compression and rhyme are well-established devices in poetry...

To prove his point, Ray gives a detailed analysis of  Jeffrey Woodward's  "Time with the Heron:"


Time with the Heron

The angler will do well to set his fly-rod aside and forget for a time the alluring ritual to-and-fro rhythm of a cast, to sit on the bank beneath an inviting willow, to watch the current slur over a sandy shallow or ruffle above a rift in the rock.

Time will allow one to study the blue heron not far from the willow's shadow, to learn the skill that is his by concentrated patience and poise. The heron stalks his prey—stepping lightly upon stilts now—with a deliberation given only to one for whom time has no meaning. Even so, the heron's painstaking stealth muddies the stream. Even so, the heron pauses, stares.

Time will allow one to repeat the lyrical names of hand-tied flies—Blue Quill, Royal Coachman, Pale Evening Dun, Yellow Sally, Gray Hackle—until the syllables become a meaningless babble, having only their own inherent musical properties, like the voice of the brook before the first man came.

Time will allow the angler, also, to study that maze of light everywhere at play with the water and to gaze, without ease of penetration, at the cloudy trail a heron makes.

when the water clears,
the mind, also, of
a great blue heron


In her article, titled "What Haibun Poets Can Learn From Non-haikai Western Poetry Practices: The Valentine's Day Skywriter Spells Out His Own Name, " of the same CHO issue,  J. Zimmerman gives readers a lot of quotes about titling and some statistics about the poets who take lines from their poems to use as titles, but she never makes any following distinctions:  between a short poem and a longer one; between the poems with effective use of repetition (like the ones discussed above) and the ones without. Most importantly, she  never analyzes one single poem mentioned in the article to prove her point. How do Rasmussen's article and hers rate as to enrich the reader's understanding the issue of titling in the context of  the use of repetition ? It's your judgement call.