Tuesday, April 30, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: River Tanka by Rajna Begović

English Original

the river doesn't care
if crimson leaves are scattered
along its bank
by the autumn wind,
but what if you start to cry ...

Sretenje, No. 2, 2008

Rajna Begović


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

河流並不在乎
是否紅葉被秋風
沿著河岸
吹散
但是如果你開始哭泣 ...

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

河流并不在乎
是否红叶被秋风
沿著河岸
吹散
但是如果你开始哭泣 ...


Bio Sketch

Rajna Begović, October 4, 1939 - August 15, 2011

Born in Skopje, Macedonia, Rajna Begović was a retired physician at the time of her death. She was a member of the Haiku Society of Serbia and Montenegro. Her work has been included in a number of haiku collections, journals, and anthologies, and she was the recipient of many awards for haiku, waka, and haibun. She also wrote aphorisms, short stories, and classical poems. She lived in Belgrade, Serbia.

Butterfly Dream: Parking Lot Haiku by Adelaide B. Shaw

English Original

mall parking lot --
river gulls shop
the dumpsters

Moonset, spring 2009

Adelaide B. Shaw


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

商場停車場 --
河鷗在垃圾堆
尋找食物

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

商场停车场 --
河鸥在垃圾堆
寻找食物


Bio Sketch

Adelaide B. Shaw lives in Milbrook, NY with her husband. She has published short fiction, children’s poetry and stories, haiku, tanka, haibun and haiga. She has served as an editor and as a contest judge for Japanese style poetry. Her haiku blog is: www.adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com/ Her haiku collection, An Unknown Road, won a 2009 Merit Book Award sponsored by the Haiku Association of America.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Laundry Haiku by Jane Reichhold

English Original

laundry hung out
the old cat and I
sit together

American Haiku in Four Seasons

Jane Reichhold


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

晾完衣服
老貓與我
並肩坐

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

晾完衣服
老猫与我
并肩坐


Bio Sketch

Jane Reichhold was born as Janet Styer in 1937 in Lima , Ohio , USA . She has had over thirty books of her haiku, renga, tanka, and translations published. Her latest tanka book, Taking Tanka Home, has been translated into Japanese by Aya Yuhki. Her most popular book is Basho The Complete Haiku by Kodansha International. As founder and editor of AHA Books, Jane has also published Mirrors: International Haiku Forum, Geppo, for the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, and she has co-edited with Werner Reichhold, Lynx for Linking Poets since 1992. Lynx went online in 2000 in AHApoetry.com the web site Jane started in 1995. Since 2006 she has maintained an online forum – AHAforum. She lives near Gualala , California with Werner, her husband, and a Bengal cat named Buddha.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Poetic Musings: Basho’s First Hokku in the Karumi Style

under the tree
soup, fish salad, and all --
cherry blossoms

On April 10, 1690, Basho wrote the hokku above to start a 36-verse kasen at a blossom-viewing party in Ueno. When he wrote it, Basho said, "Having learned something about writing a verse on blosssom viewing, I gave a tone of Karumi ("lightness") 1 to this hokku (Ueda, p.286)

The middle phrase -- "soup" and "fish salad" -- of this hokku suggests "a realm of haikai that is alien to waka." (ibid.) Basho uses mundane words to suggest, not the gazing at cherry blossoms constantly found in classical poetry, but the festivity of eating and drinking, and his hokku  reveals "[his tendency to seek poetry in things familiar" (ibid.)

In the last years of his life, Basho experimented with the karumi style that “emphasized simplicity and ordinary language and situations,” (Shirane, p. 23) and the verse anthology, Charcoal Sack, was considered by some of his followers, called Rural Shomon poets, as the “epitome of good haikai.” (ibid., p. 28)


Note: Like so many of Basho's critical terms, karumi defies easy definition. In its most general form, as a salient characteristic of Japanese art from cooking to painting, "lightness" is a minimalist aesthetic, stressing simplicity and leanness. For Basho, it meant a return to everyday subject matter and diction, a deliberate avoidance of abstraction and poetic posturing, and relaxed, rhythmical, seemingly artless expression (Shirane, p. 26)


References:

Makoto Ueda, Bashō and his interpreters: selected hokku with commentary, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1991,

Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Butterfly Dream: Sleepless Night Haiku by Marion Clarke

English Original

sleepless night
finally my eyes
rest on raindrops

Marion Clarke


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

失眠的夜晚
最後我的雙眼安息
在雨聲中

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

失眠的夜晚
最後我的双眼安息
在雨声中


Bio Sketch

A member of the Irish Haiku Society, Marion Clarke is a writer and artist from Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland. Her work was highly commended in the IHS 2011 International Haiku Competition and, in summer 2012, she received a Sakura award in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival contest. A selection of her haiku featured in the first national collection of haiku from Ireland, Bamboo Dreams, edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. Marion’s poetry and artwork can be found at http://seaviewwarrenpoint.wordpress.com/

Friday, April 26, 2013

One Man's Maple Moon: Father's Suit Tanka by Joyce S. Greene

English Original

undecided
about which dress to wear
I remember Dad
whistling as he buttoned
his only suit

red lights, 9:1, Jan. 2013

Joyce S. Greene


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

未決定
要穿那件衣服
我記得父親
當他扣上唯一西裝的鈕扣
吹著口哨

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

未决定
要穿那件衣服
我记得父亲
当他扣上唯一西装的钮扣
吹著口哨


Bio Sketch

Joyce S. Greene lives with her husband in upstate New York, USA, and works as an accountant at an insurance company.  She began writing Japanese short form poetry in 2009.  A number of her poems have been published in tanka journals and in three tanka anthologies: "Catzilla!" and two volumes of "Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka."  Within a year of beginning her poetic adventure, one of her tanka was featured on the back cover of "Ribbons," and, more recently, another was selected for the "Ribbons" Tanka Cafe Member's Choice Award.  In addition, one of her haiku tied for first place in the "Haiku this Haiga" competition sponsored by Haiga Online.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Seamless Sky Haiku by Asni Amin

English Original

seamless sky ...
petals fell in the tinkling
of chimes                                    

Simply Haiku, 10:2, Winter 2013

Asni Amin


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

一望無際的天空......
在風鈴的叮噹聲中
花瓣已飄落    

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

一望无际的天空......
在风铃的叮噹声中
花瓣已飘落    


Bio Sketch

Asni Amin lives in Singapore and works as a librarian in a school.  She started writing haiku in 2012 and has her works published in Simply Haiku and various other ebooks on line.

One Man’s Maple Moon: Tsunami Tanka by Aya Yuhki

English Original

tremendous tsunami
once in a thousand years --
yet we are
the children of sea and
even protected by sea

Ribbons, 8:3, Winter 2012

Aya Yuhki


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

一千年才一次
的巨大海嘯---
然而我們是
大海的小孩
並且受它的保護

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

一千年才一次
的巨大海啸---
然而我们是
大海的小孩
并且受它的保护


Bio Sketch

Aya Yuhki was born and now lives in Tokyo. She started writing tanka more than thirty years ago and has expanded her interests to include free verse poetry, essay writing, and literary criticism. Aya Yuhki is Editor-in-Chief of The Tanka Journal published by the Japan Poets’ Society. Her works are featured on the homepage of the Japan Pen Club’s Electronic Library.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Cool Announcement: A Freebie at AHApoetry.com

American Haiku in Four Seasons 
1993 by Yilin Press, Nanjing, China
Haiku by Jane Reichhold 
in English and Chinese  
     

This book is now out of print. Therefore it was decided to scan in the pages as they were to make the book available to others for free on the web.

The poems were selected by Kazuo Sato, President of the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, Japan. In rereading the over 400 haiku he picked I realized what a good selection he had made. Though he is now deceased, I send thanks to him.

Unable to read Chinese I cannot vouch for the perfection or style of the translations and in a few cases where there errors in the English I was unable to make changes since each page was a scan. There is also some confusion in the numbering in the beginning which I could not correct.

So Dear Reader, this is as the book is in the one last copy I have. I hope the work getting it here will be repaid with your delight in seeing this collection of haiku in English and that Chinese readers will find many new haiku to enjoy.

This new version of the book, American Haiku in Four Seasons, is dedicated to Nu Quang and Chen-ou Liu with thanks for their help and inspiration.

Jane Reichhold
April, 2013


I'm really honored. Many thanks to Jane. I hope everyone will enjoy reading her fine haiku.

One Man’s Maple Moon: Stormy Night Tanka by Barry George

English Original

lying awake
on the night of a storm
even when I close my eyes
especially when I close my eyes
I see snow    

Chrysalis, 1:1, 2007

Barry George


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

暴風雨之夜
醒著躺在床上
甚至當我閉上眼睛
尤其是當我閉上眼睛
我看到了雪

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

暴风雨之夜
醒著躺在床上
甚至当我闭上眼睛
尤其是当我闭上眼睛
我看到了雪


Bio Sketch

Barry George’s tanka have been published in journals including Gusts, Modern English Tanka, Chrysalis, and The Louisville Review, as well as the anthology Streetlights: Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English Tanka. Several of his poems have been winners in the annual Tanka Splendor Contest. His essay, "Shiki the Tanka Poet," appeared in The Writer's Chronicle. Also a haiku poet, his book, Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Monday, April 22, 2013

To the Lighthouse: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

(note: Epizeuxis or palilogia is the repetition of a single word, with no other words in between.)


In his widely-read book, entitled How to Haiku: A Writer's Guide to Haiku and Related Forms, Bruce Ross cautions his readers, “ Obviously, in such a small poem,  repetition would unbalance the haiku.” 1 (p. 22)  Obviously, there is nothing wrong about the employment of repetition in “such a small poem.” It’s because the repetition of a sound, word, phrase, line, or metrical pattern is an important unifying device in poetry. This highly-valued stylistic device performs various literary functions depending on genre, theme, tone, and poet. It’s how the haiku poet uses repetition, not the device itself,  that defines the quality of the poem.

Below is an award-winning haiku by John Soules, one that is thoughtfully reviewed by the judge, Don Wentworth

spring thaw
the stone Buddha
still still

Haiku Third Place, 2012 San Francisco International Competition

Judge’s Comment:

The haiku poet risks all in repetition and, when done correctly, gains it back and more. Here the same word, repeated side by side, elicits its dual definitions (note: Antanaclasis is the repetition of a word or phrase to effect a different meaning) plus a certain additional meaning as a two-word phrase.  Humor, truth, and beauty, all in 7 words – this is admirably executed. Innovative.

The following is another fine example that effectively uses repetition:

Symmetrical Rhythmic Substitution

    letting
           the cat in
           the fog in
 
                       (Vincent Tripi in Ross, 1993)

Rhythmic repetition combines with lineation, creating disjunctions yielding a light, humorous effervescence. In the above [example] brevity also plays a role. “Substitution” refers to word substitutions occurring in symmetrically repeated rhythmic patterns…. the symmetrical substitution evokes a quality of superposition (image layering) and jump-cut, filmic “snapshot” action, as cat/fog… arise both as identities, and are paradoxically separated by the disjunctive technique. [This haiku contains] not one but two juxtapositions, of varying intensity  (excerpted from "The Disjunctive Dragonfly:A Study of Disjunctive Methodology in Contemporary English Haiku" by Richard Gilbert)

As Ian Marshall emphasizes in Walden by Haiku, “one flaw evident in much contemporary [English language] haiku…. is that its emphasis on simplicity and invisibility of language called “wordlessness” 2 at times leads to a flatness that often lacks any “rhetorical anomaly…,” (p. 50) a characteristic of classic Japanese haiku. In his study of haiku aesthetics (included in Chapter Two, "The Poetics of the Haiku," of his award-winning book, entitled The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter), Kōji Kawamoto notes that the appealing power of a haiku mainly stems from some "rhetorical anomaly" that "can come in the form of pun, paradox, repetition, hyperbole, something striking in the haiku's sound or its image, or some disruption of syntax or expectation -- in short, something in the language, some derivation from language's denotative function, that catches our notice." (Marshall, p.50)

Take the following classic Japanese haiku for example: the production of hyperbole includes the repetition of synonymous words and similar sounds (for more information, see Kōji Kawamoto, “Hyperbole through repetition,” pp. 83 -85; “Reiteration in the Superposed Section,” 3 pp. 137-43)

ara toto                            Ah, awesome sight!
aoba wakaba no              The young leaves, the fresh leaves
hi no hikari                       in the sunshine

The repetition of the assonant synonyms in aoba wakaba (“The young leaves, the fresh leaves”) strengthens the emphasis upon the vivid green color of the tree leaves in early summer. The words, hi no hikari, conceal the place name Nikko (meaning “sunshine”), where the mausoleum of the deified first Togugawa shogun is located (ibid., pp. 83-4)                   

Therefore, there is nothing wrong about the use of repetition in haiku writing. It all depends on how the poet uses it to increase the impact of a haiku. Now, I conclude this post with the following two poems: one is a well-known apocryphal haiku often attributed to Matsuo Bashō 4 who, upon the sight of  Matsushima, was at a loss for words, and the other  a “postmodernist sonnet” by Ron Padgett who tinkered with form “irreverently.”

    Matsushima ah!
    A-ah, Matsushima, ah!
    Matsushima, ah!


Nothing in That Drawer 5

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.


Notes:

1. To the best of my knowledge, Florence Vilen's "Repetition - For Meaning and Melody" is the first article that deals with the use of repetition in haiku writing. However, she says nothing about what the reasons are for the dismissal of repetition by the current fashion of haiku " as emphasized in Susumu Takiguchi's preface below:

Here is an important essay by Florence Vilen, dealing with one of the aspects of musicality and content of haiku poetry: the question of "repetition". Repetition is widely dismissed by the current fashion of haiku. However, Florence challenges it and tries to show that it does work in haiku if it is well executed. Not only does she speak from her own conviction but she also draws many examples from leading haiku poets. Put together like this, as in a art exhibition, we experience and rejoice at a mesmorising array of fine haiku using "repetition" technique. One wonders why we have been inhibited to use such a wonderful tool of trade.

2. In The History of Haiku, Vol. 1, R.H. Blyth  lists thirteen characteristics of the Zen state of mind required for the creation and appreciation of haiku: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-Intellectuality, Contradiction, Humour, Freedom, Non-Morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love and Courage. However, haiku as the "wordless poem" was popularized by Alan Watts whose writings and recordings used haiku (what he called "the wordless poem") as a way of illustrating Zen principles (Higginson 1985, 67).

3. The term “superposed,” synonymous with juxtaposition, has been recently introduced in English via Kawamoto’s The Poetics of Japanese Verse:

The main appeal of a haiku lies in the operation of a dynamic segment, which—while drawing the reader’s interest through powerful stylistic features—remains only a single layer that offers little indication of the poem’s overall significance (or else gives only an ambiguous clue). . . . We will refer to this part as the “base section.” Similarly we will use the term “superposed section” to refer to those evocative phrases which . . . work upon and in conjunction with the base sections in order to furnish the reader with clues to the poem’s overall significance. . . . A segment of the base [may] simultaneously function in the role of the superposed section (pp. 73-4).

4. Bash did write the following haiku in spring 1689.

morning and evening,
as if someone waits for me at Matsushima
my unfulfilled love

translated by David Landis Barnhill

Matsu means both "wait" and "pine," and Matsushima is a cluster of pine clad islands famous for its beauty. Basho yearned for it so much seemed that a beautiful lover was there waiting for him (Basho's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho, p. 208)

4 In his brilliantly-written book, entitled Creative Reading: What It Is, How to Do It, and Why, Padgett raises the following questions about his poem: “Did every nothing feel the same? Every in, that, and drawer? Is the tone of each line exactly the same as that of every other line? It can’t be.” (p.45)

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Funeral Haiku by John McManus

English Original

funeral home feeling nothing about feeling nothing

Modern Haiku, 43.2, Summer 2012

John McManus


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

身在殯儀館對於沒感覺感到没感覺

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

身在殡仪馆对於没感觉感到没感觉


Bio Sketch

John McManus is a poet from Carlisle, Cumbria, England. His haiku and senryu have appeared in various journals all over the world and is the current expositions editor for the online haikai journal A Hundred Gourds. He currently works as a support worker for people with mental health issues. In his spare time he enjoys watching films, sharing poetry with friends and spending time with his family.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Creek Haiku by Michael McClintock

English Original

my guest departs ...
the waters in the creek
louder and clearer

Modern Haiku, 39.2, 2008

Michael McClintock


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

客人離開後 ...
小溪的水流聲
響亮而清晰

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

客人离开後 ...
小溪的水流声
响亮而清晰


Bio Sketch

Michael McClintock's lifework in haiku, tanka, and related literature spans over four decades. His many contributions to the field include six years as president of the Tanka Society of America (2004-2010) and contributing editor, essayist, and poet for dozens of journals, anthologies, landmark collections and critical studies. McClintock now lives in Clovis, California, where he works as an independent scholar, consultant for public libraries, and poet. Meals at Midnight [tanka], Sketches from the San Joaquin [haiku] and Streetlights: Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English Tanka, are some of his recent titles.

Friday, April 19, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: Neighbors Tanka by Djurdja Vukelic Rozic

English Original

coffee at 10,
discussing the situation
with my neighbors:
a flaming row over things
we don't quite understand

Feeling the Squeeze, Eucalypt Challenge, October 2008

Djurdja Vukelic Rozic


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

十點咖啡,
與我的鄰居討論
當前情勢:
一個我們不了解
的火爆爭執

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

十点咖啡,
与我的邻居讨论
当前情势:
一个我们不了解
的火爆争执


Bio Sketch

Djurdja Vukelic Rozic  was born on April 6, 1956, and now lives in Ivanić Grad, Croatia.  Editor in chief of bilingual haiku magazine IRIS, and deputy editor for haiku at Diogen pro cultura magazine, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She publishes humorous sketches, short stories, and poetry. For her work she received a number of awards and commendations in Croatia and abroad.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

A Room of My Own: A Man Who Read Basho

he dies
under the staircase
an old dog

He often came to the library shortly before it opened and wouldn’t leave until the chief librarian kicked him out. He spent most of his time leafing through old encyclopedias and vintage copies of The Paris Review. He wasn’t much of a talker, but occasionally he did the monologuous talk-to-the-audience speech on what he had read or thought about.

The week before he died, he stopped me on the way out and surprised me by saying, “I've enjoyed reading some of your haiku and quotation tweets. My favorite is ‘to write haiku is to create an imaginary pond with real frogs in it.’” He then slipped a piece of crumpled paper into my hand and left.

lotus pond ...
all that remains
of  frog song

Butterfly Dream: Bathroom Haiku by Kirsten Cliff

English Original

the size of this bathroom
with me in it
as well as the fly

Prune Juice, 7, January 2012

Kirsten Cliff


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

這樣大的浴室
裡面有我
和一隻蒼蠅

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

这样大的浴室
里面有我
和一只苍蝇


Bio Sketch

Kirsten Cliff is a New Zealand writer and poet whose work has been published in journals worldwide, and will soon appear in A New Resonance 8. She is currently working on her first collection, Patient Property, which explores her recent journey through leukaemia. Kirsten is editor of the haikai section of the New Zealand Poetry Society magazine, a fine line, and she blogs at Swimming in Lines of Haiku.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Cool Announcement: Read My Book Online for Free

My Dear Readers/Poets:

Happy National Haiku Poetry Day 2013!

I hope you all have an opportunity to celebrate this special day in some way.

My unique way of celebrating National Haiku Poetry Day is that you all can read my first book, Ripples from a Splash: A Collection of Haiku Essays with Award-Winning Haiku, online for free.


To the Lighthouse: The Title of a Poem Should Never Be Ignored

It’s not uncommon in prominent haiku/tanka-related journals to read a tanka/haiku sequence whose title is taken directly from a line of its poem text. This shows that the poet pays little attention to the functional roles played by a poem’s title. For such a short poem (of  9-25 lines), every line should be fully utilized. Take Adelaide Crapsey, inventor of American Cinquain whose work was influenced by Japanese short form poetry, for example, she is known for skillfully utilizing the title as a sixth line to help communicate a mood or feeling through  intense physical imagery. Experienced poets often use a title to help set the context for the poem. The following poem by Charles Simic is an example:

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.” The title, especially its first word, helps figure out the context and setting, making the opening image visually and psychologically appealing to the attentive reader.

Joseph Stroud’s fine poem also successfully utilizes the title:

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

The following is another good example by David Allan Evans

Neighbors

They live alone
together,
  
she with her wide hind
and bird face,
he with his hung belly
and crewcut.
  
They never talk
but keep busy.
  
Today they are
washing windows
(each window together)
she on the inside,
he on the outside.
He squirts Windex
at her face,
she squirts Windex
at his face.
  
Now they are waving
to each other
with rags,
  
not smiling.

In this brilliantly-crafted poem that succeeds in telling readers about the relationship between two persons through concrete imagery of how they behave toward each other, Evans skillfully uses the title as a veiled authorial comment to stir the reader’s further reflection on the issue regarding human intimacy. Ironically, it reminds me of the concluding line from Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Mending Wall:” Good fences make good neighbors.

Now, I think it's time for the haiku/tanka community to think about the creative use 1 of the title in a poem sequence in order to increase its impact, thematic and emotive.


Note:

1 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. For further discussion on these two poems, see Herbert Kohl, A Grain of Poetry, pp. 54-7.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: Shell Tanka by Marilyn Humbert

English Original

I listen for hours
to the shell’s song
drowning
the constant static
of your voice
   
Kokako, 16, April 2012

Marilyn Humbert


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我傾聽
海貝的歌聲
數小時
它淹沒
你的單調聲音

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

我倾听
海贝的歌声
数小时
它淹没
你的单调声音


Bio Sketch

Marilyn Humbert lives in the Northern Suburbs of Sydney NSW surrounded by bush. Her pastimes include writing free verse poetry, tanka, tanka prose and related genre. She is the leader of Bottlebrush Tanka Group and member of the Huddle and Bowerbird Tanka Groups. Her tanka appears in Australian and International Journals.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Butterfly Dream: November Breeze Haiku by Mike Gallagher

English Original

November breeze
a leaf
steps on my toe

Mike Gallagher


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

十一月微風
一片葉子
踩到我的腳趾

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

十一月微风
一片叶子
踩到我的脚趾


Bio Sketch

Mike Gallagher is an Irish poet. His poetry, stories and haiku have been published in Ireland, throughout Europe and in America, Canada, Japan, India, Thailand, Nepal and Australia and have been translated into . Croatian, Japanese, Dutch and German. He won the Eigse Michael Hartnett viva voce contest in 2010. He was shortlisted for the Hennessy Award in 2011. He won the Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Contest in 2012. He edits thefirstcut, a literary journal.

One Man’s Maple Moon: Night’s Hunters Tanka by Pat Tompkins

English Original

under a half moon
and the gaze of Orion
the night’s hunters:
owls, rabbits, deer mice
unaware of satellites

Scifaikuest, August 2011

Pat Tompkins


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

在上半月
和獵戶座凝視下
的夜晚獵人:
貓頭鷹,兔,鹿鼠
並不知道衛星的存在

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

在上半月
和猎户座凝视下
的夜晚猎人:
猫头鹰,兔,鹿鼠
并不知道卫星的存在


Bio Sketch

Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, The Heron's Nest, Astropoetica, flashquake, and other publications.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Poetic Musings: Ground Zero Haiku by Jack Galmitz

the end of summer
the names of the dead
read at ground zero


Jack Galmitz


The haiku above is the fourth poem in the opening section, titled "memorial stones," of yards & lots by Jack Galmitz. Written in the shasei style, it keenly captures the most moving moment in the annual 9/11 memorial ceremony: each and every one of the names of the dead read aloud at Ground Zero by fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, grandparents, siblings, and coworkers, some choked with emotion. The opening line successfully sets the scenic and emotive context for the poem, signifying the beginning of the process of decline that is initiated by Mother Nature. Like other three “memorial stones” haiku 1, this heartfelt haiku is visually allusive, and it reveals Jack’s thematic concerns that resonate with those explored in the nascent field of memory studies, one that has been influenced by academic theories of Holocaust memory and trauma 2.


Notes:

1Below are the first three haiku in the opening section, “memorial stones:”

two light beams shining
where there were once twin towers –
my son, my daughter



in a field somewhere
a plane went down
remember us


in Bryant Park
2,753 empty chairs


not a breath of air


2 For further information on this topic, please see Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the way in which representations of the Holocaust in literature, memorials, and monuments are transmitters of trauma.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: Illusion Tanka by Beverley George

English Original

if I moved here
how long would it last
this illusion
of belonging
in a foreign land

Kokako, 13, 2010

Beverley George


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

如果我搬到這裡
這種生活
在外國土地上
的錯覺
會持續多久

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

如果我搬到这里
这种生活
在外国土地上
的错觉
会持续多久


Bio sketch

Beverley George is the past editor of Yellow Moon and the founder/editor of Eucalypt: a tanka journal 2006 - . In September 2009 she convened the 4th Haiku Pacific Rim Conference, in Terrigal, Australia. Beverley presented papers on haiku in Australia at the 3rd Haiku Pacific Rim conference in Matsuyama, Japan in 2007, and on Australian tanka at the 6th International Tanka Festival, Tokyo 2009. She was the president of the Australian Haiku Society 2006-2010.

Friday, April 12, 2013

A Room of My Own: Stained Glass Butterfly Haiku

Version I

Jesus shouted, "Eli Eli lama sabachthani?" which is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

It is finished ...
a stained glass butterfly
circles in my mind


Version II

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

It is finished ...
a stained glass butterfly
circles in my mind


Note: L1 refers to Jesus’ last words from the cross.

Butterfly Dream: Oystercatcher Haiku by Nola Borrell

English Original

cold wind
every oystercatcher
headless

The Enormous Picture

Nola Borrell


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

寒風
每隻蠣鷸
沒有頭

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

寒风
每只蛎鹬
没有头


Bio Sketch

Nola Borrell has had haiku published in New Zealand and overseas since the mid 1990s, and has won various awards. Her work has appeared in NZ journals and anthologies, Australia, US, UK, Croatia, Slovenia, Roumania, Japan and Algeria and online. Nola co-edited (with Karen P Butterworth) the taste of nashi - New Zealand Haiku (Windrift, 2008). Her chapbook this wide sky was published in 2012 (Puriri Press). Nola is a member of Zazen, an international haiku workshop.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: Phone-In Tanka by Helen Buckingham

English Original

3 am
whispers
in my ear...
another phone-in
on loneliness

Modern English Tanka, 10, Winter 2008

Helen Buckingham


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

凌晨三點
在我的耳朵
低語
另一通聽眾電話
談論寂寞

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

凌晨叁点
在我的耳朵
低语
另一通听众电话
谈论寂寞


Bio Sketch

Helen Buckingham lives in Bristol, England. She has been writing tanka for about the last decade or so, and in 2009 took third place in the annual Saigyo Awards. In 2011 she had a tanka collection published alongside (and produced by) Canada's Angela Leuck, titled Little Purple Universes. Buckingham's most recent work is a solo collection comprising a mix of western and Japanese forms (including tanka) titled Armadillo Basket (Waterloo Press, UK, 2012).

To the Lighthouse: Revision, Revision, and Revision


                                                                              this evening
                                                                              I took a comma out
                                                                              of the poem
                                                                              summer stars reflected
                                                                              on the lake of my mind


Read in the context of the Japanese poetic tradition, the night of June 23, 1908, was the beginning of one of those unique creative interludes experienced by the gifted few. The poverty-stricken poet Takuboku Ishikawa wrote at least 246 tanka in fifty hours. Most importantly, 100 of these tanka written in those three days were published in the July 1908 issue of Myojo, edited by tanka reformer Tekkan Yosano (Akiko Yosano's husband). Written at this Muse-inspired time were such famous tanka (Goldstein and Shinoda, p. 18)


on a white strip of sand
on a tiny island
in the eastern sea
drowned in tears
I play with a crab

kidding around
carried my mother
piggy-back
I stopped dead, and cried,
she's so light...

no way back
to 14 --
when
whispering my name
I wept
(Note: The translations above are from Carl Sesar, pp. 27, 33, 61)


For Takuboku, the creative process often didn't end when he finished the work. Although most of his tanka constantly give the impression of having been composed spontaneously, he was actually a painstaking revisionist. He often revised his tanka on republication (Ueda, pp. 117-8). For example, 


Version A, composed on the night of June 25, 1908

For no reason
I left my home
and for no reason
I returned: this I have done
five times already.

Version B, the July issue of Morning Star

For no reason
I left my native province
and for no reason
I returned: this I have done
five times already.

Version C, A Handful of Sand, 1910

For no reason I left my home
and for no reason I returned -- though
my friend laughs at this habit of mine!


For a struggling poet like me (and maybe including some of you), the only way to get a work published is to revise, revise, and revise. As you know, much has been written about revision. But I would like to share with you the following passage from Edward Weeks's book, entitled This Trade of Writing:

A. Edward Newton tells a story of Oscar Wilde at an English house party. Pleading the necessity of working while the humor was on, he begged to be excused from joining the other guests. In the evening his hostess asked him what he had accomplished, “This morning,” he said, “I put a comma in one of my poems.” Surprised, the lady inquired whether the afternoon’s work had been equally exhausting. “Yes,” said Wilde, passing his hand wearily over his brow, “this afternoon I took it out again.” Every writer worth rereading has suffered from this backing-and-filling process.… When the ideas begin to run smoothly they can so easily run away with us, leaving behind pages which in a colder mood seem full of extravagance. In the heat of composition it is not wise to halt for precision; that must come later, the search for the exact word, the smooth transition, the terse phrase that will save half a page…. Revision is the worst possible drudgery; yet no book has been made full and rich without it.


References:

1 Ishikawa, Takuboku, translated by Sanford Goldstein Seishi Shinoda, Romaji Diary and Sad Toys
2 Sesar, Carl, Takuboku: Poems to Eat  
3 Ueda, Makoto, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature 
4 Weeks, Edward, This Trade of Writing

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Yard Sale Haiku by Peter Newton

English Original

yard sale
the empty fishbowl
still wet

Honorable Mention, Kaji Aso Studio International Haiku Competition, 2011

Peter Newton


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

庭院大拍賣
空魚缸
仍然是濕的

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

庭院大拍卖
空鱼缸
仍然是湿的


Bio Sketch

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Peter Newton is a poet, artist and editor. His writings have appeared in a variety of print and online journals and anthologies, garnering several prizes and commendations in recent years.He is the author of What We Find, a book of haiku from Imaginary Press, 2011. A collection of his haibun entitled Joy Ride, is due out in 2013. Heco-edits the online journal Tinywords. Read more of his work on Twitter @ThePeterNewton

One Man’s Maple Moon: Family Reunion Tanka by Bob Lucky

English Original

family reunion
the chatter of voices
and rattle of ice --
I think I could write
a good crime novel                                   

Chrysanthemum, 12, Oct 2012

Bob Lucky 


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

在家庭團聚中
喋喋不休的談天
和冰塊碰撞聲 --
我想我可以寫
一本好的犯罪小說

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

在家庭团聚中
喋喋不休的谈天
和冰块碰撞声 --
我想我可以写
一本好的犯罪小说


Bio Sketch

Bob Lucky teaches at the International Community School of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, The Prose-Poem Project, Emerald Bolts, Modern Haiku, Presence, Ribbons, Eucalypt, and Atlas Poetica. He is co-author of the chapbook my favorite thing. 

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A Room of My Own: A Haiku about the Iron Lady

who claimed that "... there is no such thing as society ... There are individual men and women, and there are families"


Iron Lady Dead!
raindrops in a homeless man's
paper coffee cup

Monday, April 8, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Spring Dawn Haiku by Graham Nunn

English Original

spring dawn
my cup
full of river

The Heron's Nest, 8:4, December 2006

Graham Nunn


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

春曉
我的酒杯
充滿了江河

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

春晓
我的酒杯
充满了江河


Bio Sketch

Graham Nunn blogs at Another Lost Shark and has published six collections of poetry, his most recent being, The First 30 and other poems (Another Lost Shark Publications, 2012). Nunn has won several awards for his haiku and will have work featured in the new international anthology, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. In 2011, Nunn was the recipient of The Johnno Award for outstanding contribution to QLD Writers and Writing.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

To the Lighthouse: To Be or Not to Be a One-line Haiku?

                                        before after and inside me snowflakes drifting

                                       or

                                       before after
                                       and inside me
                                       snowflakes drifting


The standard meter of classic Japanese Haiku is 5-7-5 sound symbols. In English language haiku, the common practice is to begin a new verse line after each metrical unit. However, as early as 1971, in Haiku Magazine, 5:2, Michael Segers published, arguably speaking, the first one-line English language haiku, "in the eggshell after the chick has hatched." 1 Praised for its pleasurable ambiguities, this "aesthetically innovative" form was later advocated by translator Hiroaki Sato and talented poet Marlene Mountain (Allan Burns, Montage, August 30th, 2009). Sadly, today there are only a handful of articles about one-haiku; among them, Marlene Mountain’s  "One-Line Haiku," William J. Higginson’s  "From One-line Poems to One-line Haiku," and Jim Kacian’s "The Way of One" are, relatively speaking, widely read. However, none of them deals with this issue from the perspective of the employment of cutting, except for a brief mention in Kacian’s article (“A third way Western languages can exploit the one-line haiku to novel effect is through the use of multiple kire, or cutting words. Certain critics, such as Hasugawa Kai, feel that kire is the most critical poetic technique exploited by haiku”). 2 Marlene Mountain’s article mainly talks about the issue in the context of the aesthetic evolution of her writing career, showing a lot of her haiku examples. William J. Higginson’s resourceful essay gives a historical view of monostiches in the Western poetic tradition (mainly the French one), and then proposes a typology of one-line haiku, which is based on the degree of the smooth flow of a poem or on the number of (forced/marked) pauses. In “[his] efforts to regain something of what is attained by the original Japanese practice, “ Jim Kacian “has discovered some effects that, for a variety of reasons, are not available in Japanese: ‘one line - one thought’, ‘speedrush’ and ‘multistops.” In his article, Kacian says nothing about how to distinguish one-line “haiku” and other “one-line poems.” Most importantly, there is a big gap/structural issue completely neglected in all these articles: for the same poem text, why does a one-line haiku work better than its three-line twin? 

Below is an in-depth review of a one-line haiku, which demonstrates how to make this aesthetic and structural decision (Peter Harris, ""In a Sea of Indeterminacy: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Haiku," A Companion to Poetic Genre, pp. 285-6):


More rain the sisters slip into their mother tongue

Modern Haiku, 37:3

Scott Metz


Metz employs an unbroken line here in a way that generates velocity and a sense of simultaneity that is in tension with its subtlety. But if it were broken into three lines --

More rain
the sisters slip
into thier mother tongue

-- the pun on slip would have dominated and diminished the poem. As it stands, the single line puts the focus the elusive implications raised by the poem as a whole. What has the rain to do with the sisters returning to their mother tongue? Does it liquidity induce a fresh access of native fluency? Is the rain metaphorical, some fluid quality of language that increasingly permeates their intimate conversation? Is the "mother tongue" metaphorical, implying the sisters are like the drops of water dissolving in their origins? Are the sisters slipping rain into the mother tongue as one "slips" a drug into a cocktail? Though there is no way of proving it, one is tempted to say that this degree of semantic openness becomes more likely if, as Metz does, one focuses exclusively on the haiku form.


Notes:

1 In his essay mentioned above, William J. Higginson emphasizes that it's van den Heuvel who first published the one-line haiku in a small letterpress chapbook called EO7 in 1964.

    a dixie cup floats down the Nile.

"This is certainly one of those poems that goes by so fast the reader hardly notices it, until, stopping short, one grins at the irony of the discarded cup and the great monuments of ancient Egypt juxtaposed, and laments the follies of humankind. I would almost call this a one-line senryu, rather than haiku, except for the bite of that river carrying us into deep time."

2  In his essay, William J. Higginson does briefly discuss the use of cutting. However, like most English-speaking haiku poets, he understands a cut as a syntactic break through the use of punctuation. For more information about cutting, see To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting (in the classic Japanese haiku tradition),To the Lighthouse: Cutting through Time and Space (new/the fourth formulation about the use of cutting), and To the Lighthouse: Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting .

One Man's Maple Moon: Sorrow Tanka by Jenny Ward Angyal

English Original

I sleep
with her cradled
in my arms
this dark animal
we call sorrow

Notes from the Gean,15,  Jan. 2013

Jenny Ward Angyal


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

睡覺時
她躺在我的懷裡
這黑暗
的動物
是我們所說的悲傷

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

睡觉时
她躺在我的怀里
这黑暗
的动物
是我们所说的悲伤


Bio Sketch

Jenny Ward Angyal lives with her husband and one Abyssinian cat on a small organic farm in Gibsonville, NC, USA.  She has written poetry since the age of five and tanka since 2008. Her tanka and other poems have appeared in various journals and may also be found online at http://grassminstrel.blogspot.com/

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Cicada Haiku by Irene Golas

English Original

first cicada…
a feeling of something
running out

Breccia

Irene Golas


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

第一隻蟬
一種用盡
的感覺

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

第一只蝉
一种用尽
的感觉


Bio Sketch

Irene Golas has published poetry in a number of haiku and tanka journals, including Acorn, Eucalypt, Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, Ribbons, and Simply Haiku. Her work has also appeared in Carpe Diem: Canadian Anthology of Haiku; Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka (2010) and other anthologies. In 2012, she and Ignatius Fay published Breccia, a collection of haiku and related forms. She lives in Sudbury, Ontario.

Friday, April 5, 2013

A Room of My Own: The Road Less Traveled

In 1693, parting from his favorite disciple Kyoroku, Basho said, “Didn't the retired Emperor Go-Toba say of Saigyo's poetry that it contained truth tinged with sorrow? Take strength from his words and follow unswervingly the narrow thread of the Way of poetry.”

a sliver of moon...
I cling to the thin line
of labor
to capture loneliness
in love poetry


Note:  Emperor Go-Toba (1180-1239) was perhaps the best poet among Japan's sovereigns. For more information, see Yoshiko Kurata Dykstra, Sources of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600. Volume 1, p.351.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Blind Date Haiku by Brian Robertson

English Original

blind date
she smiles then notices
his shoes

Lynx, 28:1, February, 2013

Brian Robertson


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

盲目約會
她笑了並且注意到
他的鞋子

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

盲目约会
她笑了并且注意到
他的鞋子


Bio Sketch

Raised in Ottawa, Brian Robertson studied in Toronto and Rio de Janeiro and is currently writing a doctoral thesis in green economics with a German university.  Brian began writing prose in 2006.  Since 2010, ten of his short stories and twenty-nine of his haiku have been published among journals, newspapers, contests, and one anthology among the countries Germany, Austria, the US, Australia, and Japan.  His major project is a novel about the 1999 bombing of Serbia.

One Man's Maple Moon: Relationship Tanka by Ernesto P. Santiago

English Original

believe as you look
deeper, deeper, and yet deeper
into my eyes
your (love) history does
not matter to me

Ernesto P. Santiago


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

相信當你看得
深入,深入,更深入
我的眼睛
你的(愛情)歷史對我
一點也不重要

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

相信当你看得
深入,深入,更深入
我的眼睛
你的(爱情)历史对我
一点也不重要


Bio Sketch

Ernesto P. Santiago enjoys exploring the poetic myth of his senses, and has recently become interested in the study of haiku and its related forms. He lives with his wife Nitz in Athens, Greece. He is Filipino.  

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Poetic Musings: Ezra Pound’s "Metro Poem" as a Yugen Haiku

 In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Lustra, 1916

Ezra Pound

(note:In his most widely-read book, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, William Higginson emphasizes that Ezra Pound’s metro poem is the “first published hokku in English”)


Following the lead of Hugh Kenner -- "Apparition reaches two ways, toward ghosts and toward visible revealings” -- in The Pound Era, Jyan-Lung Lin links Kenner’s reading to a Daoist-inspired Japanese poetic characteristic, yugen.

(note: The compound “yūgen” 幽玄 (lit., depth and mystery) is made of two Chinese characters: “Yū” means “faint, dim,” and also “deep;” “gen” indicates the black color, the color of heaven, something far away, something quiet, and an occult principle. We find the character “gen” used in the Tao Te Ching (Classic of the Way and Integrity) to describe the “Way:"

These two -- the nameless and what is named -- emerge from the same source yet are referred to differently. Together they are called obscure (Chinese, xuan; Japanese, gen), the obscurest of the obscure, they are the swinging gateway of the manifold mysteries.1

Thus, “yūgen” is something well beyond the reach of man’s immediate perception and understanding, since it is too deep and too far for humans to reach, even conceptually. In ancient China, yūgen came to indicate the other world, as well as the Taoist Way and Buddhist enlightenment.2  -- Yūgen by Michael F. Marra)


Below is an excerpt from Jyan-Lung Lin’s essay, “In A Station of the Metro’ As A Yugen Haiku," which was published in  Paidenma, 21:1-2, Spring/Fall 1992, and posted on Modern American Poetry:


A great deal has been written about Ezra Pound’s discovery of a structural technique, "a form of super-position," (note: For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position) in Japanese haiku and his first use of it in his "In a Station of the Metro." (note: For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Poem” )

    [….]

However, it has seldom been noticed that when Pound first imitated Moritake’s most famous haiku, he imitated not just its super-pository technique but its mood of Yugen (note: There is no mood of yugen conveyed in Moritake’s haiku. Obviously, Lin didn’t know about the Japanese poetic device, “mitate, taking one thing for another," and about Moritake’s allusion to the Zen saying: “The fallen blossom cannot return to its branch." However, I do agree principally with Lin’s analysis of Pound’s metro poem from the perspective of yugen. For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position), one of the four dominant Zen moods--Sabi, Wabi, Aware, and Yugen -- often found in Japanese haiku and Chinese classical poetry.

The word Yugen actually represents two Chinese written characters . . . literally meaning depth and mystery.

    [….]

Lucien Stryk in his Encounter with Zen more clearly defines Yugen as the sense of a mysterious depth in nature: "Yugen, most difficult of the dominant [Zen] moods to describe, is the sense of a mysterious depth in all that makes up nature" (Stryk 60).

    [….]

First let me use the following haiku of Yugen as an example:

    The sea darkens,
    The voices of the wild ducks
    Are faintly white

And this Yugen in the Zenrin Kushu:

    Wind subsiding, the flowers still fail,
    Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens

As the two preceding poems may show, in a typical Yugen the mood of a mysterious depth in each cluster of images is well balanced with and reinforced by the mood in the other. In Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" a similar use of parallelism to strengthen the mood of Yugen can be seen clearly.

In the first line of his poem, Pound uses the word "apparition" to mystify the visual yet unmetaphorical image "these faces in the crowd." As Hugh Kenner observes, "‘Apparition’ reaches two ways, toward ghosts and toward visible revealings" (Kenner 187). Indeed. Pound’s use of the word "apparition" internalizes and at the same time externalizes his feelings about "these faces in the crowd." In other words, his use of the word "apparition" allows him and his reader to walk the edge between what can be seen and what cannot be seen, which not only mystifies the image "these faces in the crowd" but gives a depth to it. In the second line, by inserting the two adjectives "wet" and "black" in between the two flower images "Petals" and "a bough," the poet suggests that the ["kigo"] or season, a basic component in a haiku poem, is between spring and winter and the time is probably the evening, which is between day and night. By allowing the season and the time to walk the line between spring and winter, day and night, which may represent life and death respectively, Pound succeeds in building up a mood of mystery. This mood of mystery is deepened particularly by the color "black," whose profound darkness points to an unfathomable depth.

As can be seen in a typical Yugen haiku, the mood of mystery and depth suggested in the dark, chilly ["kigo"] in the second line of Pound’s poem is parallel with the same mood suggested in the word "apparition" in the first line. Since the moods in both lines are well-balanced, no copula or adjectives such as "is" or "like" should be used between the lines so that the mood in each line would not be limited to a certain suggestion. Instead, the two lines should be juxtaposed as they presently are so that each of the two clusters of images, which, if viewed separately, is not deep and mysterious enough to be called Yugen, would produce a deeper, more mysterious mood. Moreover, a sense of distance or space between the two clusters of images can be built up, which allows the reader to associate, to imagine, to dive more deeply into what Watts calls "the unknown never to be discovered."

In fact, in a Yugen haiku like Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" meanings are not so important. What is important is the effect, the mood of Yugen. This mood, as mentioned before, is identified by Zen people as an essential precondition of enlightenment. It produces and at the same time is produced by the image, which is not to be used as an ornament but to point at the Tao or self-nature, a mysterious totality of the inner and outer nature. This Zen mood may well be compared to the kind of mood Pound has written about in his Gaudier-Brzeska. It has something to do with "the image," "a radiant node or cluster"--"sea, cliffs, night"--, something to do with "a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing," something to do with "the equation," of which Pound’s explanation sounds much like a Zen master’s expounding of the Dharma: it "governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time" (Pound 9 1-92).

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Butterfly Dream: White Chrysanthemum Haiku by Roberta Beary

English Original

white lie
the mirror doubles
the white chrysanthemum

The Unworn Necklace

Roberta Beary


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

白色謊言
鏡子反映雙重的
白菊花

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

白色谎言
镜子反映双重的
白菊花


Bio Sketch

Roberta Beary is the haibun editor of Modern Haiku. Her book of short poems, The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007, 1st HB ed. 2011), was named a Poetry Society of America award finalist and a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award prize winner. She is on the editorial staff of the annual  Red Moon Anthology and a longtime member of Towpath, the Washington, DC haiku group.  She is married to the writer Frank Stella.  Her website can be accessed at www.robertabeary.com

Butterfly Dream: Full Moon Haiku by Ed Baker

English Original

full moon
opening the door
to see more fully

Full Moon

Ed Baker


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

滿月
打開門看得
更完滿

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

满月
打开门看得
更完满


Bio Sketch

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1941, Ed Baker is an artist and poet who resides in Washington, D.C.. He is 72. Full Moon and Stone Girl E-pic are two of his recent titles. For more information about his work, see Joseph Hutchison's and John Mingay's  reviews.

Monday, April 1, 2013

A Room of My Own: The Inconvenient Indian for Thomas King

Three limo-loads of corporate lawyers and accountants are heading to the airport... a Haida elder stands at the ocean's edge with the cedars at his back and the azure sky on his shoulders.

Easter morning
First Nations youth  dance and chant
Idle No More...


Note: "Idle No More" is an ongoing protest movement originating among the Aboriginal/First Nations peoples in Canada.

Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 15 E-Papers

                                                                                      drunk on reading
                                                                                      The Neverending Story
                                                                                      shapes of this spring night         


I just finished reading  A Companion to Poetic Genre (first edition, 2012), "a collection of essays that examines genres and forms with longer traditions in English (p. 281)." In the book, there is a chapter (pp. 277-92), entitled "In a Sea of Indeterminacy: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Haiku," on the haiku aesthetics. The following is an excerpt from Peter Harris's essay (note: His analysis of Scott Metz's one-line haiku is done in a professionally excellent way, and it will be analyzed in my forthcoming "Poetic Musings" post, which deals with one-line haiku)


... the over-elastic term haiku, a word that in mid 2011 garners over 50 million hits in an instant search.

The undifferentiated deluge of haiku has caused some literary journals to refuse to consider haiku for publication. Most haiku are published in specialist journals -- Modern Haiku and Frogpond -- to take two prominent examples -- that serves a population almost hermetically sealed off from mainstream poetry. Arguably, the specialist publish the most accomplished haiku. This paradox of haiku's ubiquity and marginalization provides an interesting window on the ideology of poetic fashion.

Below is my answer, an excerpt from my Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold:

L: What do you feel we as haiku or tanka writers need to do to get these forms more accepted by the mainstream poetry world?

CL: In terms of defining what poetry is, there is an asymmetric power relationship between the mainstream poetry world and the haiku/tanka community. It’s difficult to change their perception of haiku/tanka in a top-down manner. In my view, the most effective way of reversing this unbalanced relationship is to adopt a bottom-up approach; that is to consolidate and expand our readership base through online publishing and social networking sites. If there are more people who love reading/writing haiku and tanka, the mainstream poetry world will eventually open their main gate to haiku and tanka poets. This approach to reversing the asymmetric power relationship has been demonstrated in the case of the power transfer from traditional media, such as news papers, TV, and books, to online and social media....Most importantly, living in a hectic society, most people now only have a short attention span. If they are interested in reading something meaningful, I think short verse forms, such as haiku and tanka, will become more and more popular.

Today, Easter Monday, is a good day to announce good news:

NeverEnding Story has 152 pageviews/per day, and most importantly, there are 15 e-papers that regularly reprint the haiku and tanka published on NeverEnding Story. The newest members are as follows:

13 #Haiku Today, edited by Wendy o_O
14 The SPOT #poetry Paper, edited by Xhabir M. Deralla
15 The Poet Daily, edited by Bradley Howington



Updated, April 1

Now, the newest member is Shiv’s Poetry Journal, edited by Shiv.

Updated, April 4

The newest members are  Haiku Review (edited by David Rheins) and the Weekly World Haiku News (edited by Haiku Crew)

Updated, April 6

Poems & Ponderings (edited by Nickers and Ink) and Poetry Lifetimes (edited by Sara Russell) now are the newest members.

Updated, April 9

The Wounded Warrior Poetry Daily, edited by Jan "Beyond Survivor," is the newest member.


Note: The Neverending Story (German: Die unendliche Geschichte) is a German fantasy novel by Michael Ende, first published in 1979. The standard English translation, by Ralph Manheim, was first published in 1983. The novel was later adapted into several films. --an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry, "The Neverending Story."