A Room of My Own: Three Rivers Tanka

Version I:

a paper boat
made from early drafts
of my poem
sails down the river ...
moonlit memories

Version II:

a paper boat
made from early drafts
of my poem
sails down the river
of moonlit memories

Version III:

a paper boat
made from early drafts
of my poem
sails down the river ...
of moonlit memories


Note: Below is the poem mentioned in the tanka above:

Our Story
after Li-Young Lee


late into night
unable to see
in one darkness
of falling snow
I close my eyes
to see another

in a dream
told in a language
in which I’m a guest
I see Li-Young Lee
fold a paper boat
and send it swirling
down the moonlit river
of my memories


Published in Shot Glass Journal, 5, 2011

To the Lighthouse: The Art of Titling

First with the jokes:

[Let] us consider for a moment the functions of some particular conventions of titling a poem. We may take as a text to start with a well-known literary joke about titles. In Through the Looking Glass, the White Knight’s reading of the parody of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” is introduced by an exchange which has been frequently commented upon by logicians as an example of a set of meta-languages, in this case names, names of names, names of names of names, etc. The White Knight announces at first that

“The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged, Aged Man.’”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called?’”

Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

(excerpted from Chapter X, “Haddocks’ Eyes”: A Note on the Theory of Titles, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form by John Hollander. In her award-wining book, The Title to the Poem, Anne Ferry states that

… John Hollander’s richly suggestive proposal for the study of the titles for shorter poems, “’Haddocks’ Eyes’: A Note on the Theory of Titles.” What Hollander outlines is the possibility of ordering titles in a “spectrum along the axis from redundancy -- what he calls “neutral” titles, which merely name the formal kind and perhaps the topic of the poem -- “to maximum informativeness” -- such as Stevens’s titles, which seem to be an integral part of his poems (p.8)

By the way, John Hollander is known for his one-line, two-word definition poem below:

A One-Line Poem: The Universe.  (Rhyme’s Reason, p.12)

Hollander effectively utilizes the title and successfully elevates the poem to a metaphysical level)

Passion by Chen-ou Liu

for Billy Collins

half a haiku

the morning

already ancient

I wake from my nap screaming. In the dream, my half-naked poem is nailed to the cross, surrounded by a cheering crowd. A critic begins beating it with a hose, trying to torture a confession of its meaning from it. My poem cries out in anguish.

midnight moon

the only thing moving

my right hand

A Hundred Gourds, 2:2, March 2013

Then comes the heavy stuff:

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.

The literary title fills various functions resulting from diverse considerations. One simple function is identification. In addition to this,  "any literary title has a dimension of focusing, summarizing, and representing.” (Taha, p.66). Academically speaking, Harry Levin is the first person who treated this topic using the generic term “titology” (“The Title as a Literary Genre,” Modern Language Review, 72, 1977, xxiii – xxxv), and Anne Ferry’s  award-winning book, The Title to the Poem, is the first scholarly work dedicated to the “theoretical, critical, and historical exploration of the traditions for titling shorter poems by British and American poets from the beginnings of printing to the present. The first six chapters are distinguished according to the nature of the question a reader might ask about the poem, which the title purports to answer. Who gives the title? Who has the title? Who "says" the poem? Who "hears" the poem? What genre does the poem belong to? What is the poem "about"? There are complex relationships between what titles purport to tell and what they actually tell, and this is true not only of titles so worded that they demand interpretation, but also of those that appear straightforward. Though the choice of examples aims at range and variety, certain British and American poets have been exceptionally influential in their contributions to the course of titling in English, so their work receives special and repeated attention here.” (book summary, Stanford University Press)

According to John Hollander’s critical study, modern poems become extremely short and seem generally inventive. The role of the title increases in importance (p. 224). “The rhetorical of the title -- not merely what it directs the audience’s attention to, but how, and with what gestures (flourish? jab? insinuation? deadpan pseudo-labeling ? etc.) it does the directing?” (p. 225)

Finally, today’s food for thought:

Dish 1: 2012 Haiku Society of America Haibun Contest

First Prize: Phases by Tom Painting

Forty years ago, right after the breakup, I cut her out of the photo and  then rounded the edges to make it appear complete. The other day I showed it to my students. One said he bet I had a lot of girlfriends. Yeah, but not the one I wanted.

nightcap the hazy moon

Second Prize: Say Summer by Michele Root-Bernstein

   

And there passes in front of my inner eye a bird's view of the backyard where I grew up. In the early 1950's my parents purchased a small concrete home in a new subdivision built on the former estate of a grand Philadelphia family. At the top of our road stood the towering entrance gates to the mansion that lay crumbling on a farther hill. Between those two pillars of decayed opulence, I inhabited another wealth, the kind a child makes of a small rectangular piece of land, limned by chain link fence and honeysuckle vines. Say summer and the cut grass stains the feet green. Say summer and bees buzz in the clover. If only I had a bee of my very own, I might live just there on the rolling cusp of its drawn-out drone. I hunker by the pinkest white clover I can find, ready with a small plastic tub to trap the plumpest bumblebee, ready, too, for the chance of its sting.

thunderstorm

safe beneath the picnic table

the lightning in me

Third Prize: Dragons Live Forever by Terri L. French

My father reclines in his La-Z-Boy, the afghan pulled up over his head like a burial shroud. His lighter, ashtray, cigarettes, inhaler and oxygen tank are within reach. His nicotine-stained fingers—the color of sausages gone bad—twitch as he dreams.

He is 8-years old, behind the barn with his cousins Donny and Marvin in Yale, Michigan. Donny, three years his senior, clumsily rolls a cigarette, mimicking the moves of their grandfather. He licks the paper and pulls a piece of tobacco from his tongue, flicking it to the ground. Donny hands the gnarled thing to Marvin, the second oldest, who lights it. He takes a puff but doesn't inhale. He hands the cig to my dad who inhales deeply, filling his 8-year-old lungs. He doesn't cough. He exhales slowly and smiles.

My father awakens, turns off the oxygen tank and reaches for his cigarettes. The smoke fills his 72-year old lungs. He exhales, coughs, and reaches for his inhaler.

autumn mist

mom changes the ending

of the fairy tale

(note: you can see all the winning haibun here) 

Judge’s (Roberta Beary’s) Comments:

I looked for a title which added texture,... (note: this means the title is effectively utilized)

The title, "Phrases," can be interpreted in at least two ways. There is the phrase of young love, "he/she is just going through a phrase;" there is the phrase of the moon, which is also echoed in the haiku...(note: the title is effectively utilized to elevate this "relationship haibun" to a metaphoric level)  

The alliterative title of the second-place winner, "Say Summer" leads the reader into the haibun. From there the prose draws the reader in deeper, Grammar rules do not apply here. The writing flows and takes the reader along for the ride... (note: this run-on, alliterative  title successfully sets the seasonal context, which is infused with emotion, and the mood , for the poem)

When I read the title of this haibun, I immediately remembered the song by Peter, Paul, and Mary, "Puff the Magic Dragon" with its refrain, "A dragon lives forever but not so little boys."... In "Dragons Live Forever" the title, prose, and haiku complement one another... (note: you can read the full text of the judge’s comments here)

Dish 2:  2012 Snapshot Press eChapbook Awards

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

There is no comment made by the judge and editor, John Barlow. 

Below is excerpted from my review, On Beverly Acuff Momoi's Lifting the Towhee’s Song, which was published in Haibun Today, 7:2, June 2013

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 ...

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 use 6 of the title in a poem in order to increase its thematic and emotive impact.

(note 6: 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 "


References:

Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.

John Hollander, Vision and Resonance : Two Senses of Poetic Form, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 2nd ed.

Ibrahim Taha. The Power of the Title: Why Have You Left the Horse Alone by Mahmud Darwish, Journal of Arabic and Islamic, III, 2000, pp. 66-83.  Unicode version.

(Abstract: This article deals with various functions of the title of Darwish's collection Why Have You Left the Horse Alone in three different contexts: as an independent and separate text; in relation to the poem in which it originally appeared; and in relation to all the poems in the collection. Our case discussion shows that the interpretation of the title means in fact a discussion of the entire text, or rather of all these texts. It also shows that the question/title has equally informative, rhetorical, provocative, and communicative facets, and as such our discussion grants it great summarizing and representational power. When all this power is given to the title as pre-text, it in essence also makes the title a post-text. Note: Mahmud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008), one of my favorite writers,  was "a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet.In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as an incarnation of the traditional political poet in Islam." -- excerpted from the Wikipedia entry, Mahmud Darwish )

Butterfly Dream: Election Day Haiku by Kelley White

English Original

Election Day --
the mayor, three senators
and Tom Cruise want me

Kelley White


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

選舉日 --
市長，三位參議員
和湯姆克魯斯都需要我

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

选举日 --
市长，叁位参议员
和汤姆克鲁斯都需要我


Bio Sketch

Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner-city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA.  Her most recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Hot News: New Milestone & Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 45 E-Papers

My Dear Readers/Poets:

Launched on the first day of 2013, NeverEnding Story reached another milestone today:  it had more than 30,000 pageviews, and its haiku/tanka have been regularly reprinted in 45 e-papers.

The newest members are Short Form Trills edited by Köy Deli, Haiku, aprendiendo edited by Javier, The Emotional Orphan Daily edited by The Emotional Orphan, The CANADA Daily edited by Heidrun Karin Peters, The One Stop Poetry Daily edited by One Stop Poetry, THE #HAIKU NEWS edited by haiku crossroads, and The Poetry Daily edited by Karen Ivey Herndon. For more information, see Hot News: Happy Canada Day and Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 37 E-Papers and its comment section.

(By the way, NeverEnding Story seeks haiku/ tanka submissions. Please help spread the word)

Many thanks to all of you that have helped NeverEnding Story grow in any way.

Chen-ou


Updated, July 29

The newest member is  Zibaldone di Ferri edited by Mauro Ferri

Updated, July 30

The newest members are The Nilab edited by Saeed Ur Rehman and WORDS WORLD CHAMPION edited by J. F. Pérez.

Butterfly Dream: Breasts Haiku by Nobuko Katsura

English Original

The nuisance
of breasts --
a long rainy season.

a long rainy season: haiku & tanka

Nobuko Katsura
trans. by Leza Lowitz


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

乳房   
的累贅 --
一個漫長的雨季。

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

乳房   
的累赘 --
一个漫长的雨季。


Bio Sketch

Nobuko Katsura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1914 and began writing haiku under the  direction of the poet Sojo Hino. Her 1974 book Fresh Green received the Modern Haiku Award for Women. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Soen. For more information about her work, see a long rainy season, pp. 33-40.

To the Lighthouse: Haibun Myth

Case 1:

Much older, non-European prose poetry also appears in the form of Japanese haibun, originated by the Japanese monk and poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94). Haibun is a combination of prose poem and haiku, traditionally written in the form of travelogue. With its block of prose either topped, tailed, or interspersed with an ideogrammatic haiku, the haibun is a form of prose visual poetry that predates the European "origin" of the form by 200 years. present tense, bevity, Zen "detachment, " and pictorialization are all foregrounded, whilst the contrast between the density of the prose and the lightness of the haiku provides a harmonic intensity: the haiku amplifies the prose in a tangential fashion. American postmodernist poets, notably John Ashbery and Sheila E. Murphy, have since approproated the form in the US where it has merged as an the idiosyscratic "American Haibun," bearing only residential similarities to the traditional travelogue form.

Andy Brown, “The Emergent Prose Poem,”A Companion to Poetic Genre, p. 320

Case 2a:

Haibun       The generic name for any confection of prose with embedded haiku. Includes, at least in the West, essays and “[haibun] stories,” which may be either anecdotal and imaginary, or a blend of both fact and fiction (See also Kikobun, nikki).

David Cobb,  “Glossary of Japanese Terms, “ What Happens in Haibun: a critical study of an innovative literary form, p.83

Case 2b:

My haibun, "Winter Thoughts," was rejected for its “essay-like quality.”  For further discussion, see my “To the Lighthouse” post, titled “Essay-Like Haibun ?!.”  (note: I  added  one more section to the post, and it contains an  excerpt from and a brief analysis of Basho’s longest haibun, “An Essay on the Unreal Dwelling” (“Genju-an no Ki”). His essay contains about 15oo words in Japanese. As its title indicates, the essay tells of Basho's life at the "Unreal Dwelling/Hut" near Lake Biwa in the summer of 1690. It has a confessional nature, its structure is tight and well-ordered, and it "displays Basho’s prose craftsmanship at its best.”)

The common misunderstanding about haibun is that haibun was originated by the Japanese haikai poet Matsuo Basho, traditionally written in the shasei ("realist") style of travelogue, exemplified by Basho's famous travel journal, entitled The Narrow Road to the Interior. Below is excerpted from my essay, "Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Basho's Transformation of Haikai Prose," which was first published in Simply Haiku, 8:1, Summer 2010 and then reprinted in Haibun Today, 6:1, March 2012)

First of all, broadly speaking, haibun was developed before Basho and written in the form of short essays, prefaces or headnotes to hokku, such as Kigin’s Mountain Well (1648). Its prose style resembled that of classical prose. 20 In 1671, a well-known Teimon poet Yamaoka Genrin (1631-1672) published his experimental work of haibun, entitled Takaragura (The Treasure House), and in it, he “[emulated] Zhuangzi’s gugen [(Chinese, yuyan)] 21 by revealing beauty and virtue in ordinary household apparatus.” 22 His work was “highly metaphorical and allegorical,” 23 it didn’t have great influences on the way haikai poets at the time wrote their haibun (added note: And Basho's contemporary, Ihara Saikaku (1642 - 1693), "employed an experimental, dramatic form of haibun, or haikai prose, for which there was no precedent in the prose literature of his time." For more information, See Chapter 2, "Ihara Saikaku and the Books of the Floating World," Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 edited by Haruo Shirane, and Christopher Drake's essay below)

It was not until shortly after Basho returned from his journey to Oku that he became more focused on developing a different style of prose, which was infused with a haikai spirit. Around 1690, in a letter to Kyorai, he named this new haikai prose haibun, which was characterized by the “prominent inclusion of haikai words (haigon), particularly a combination of vernacular Japanese (zokugo) and Chinese words (kango).” 24 After the publication the first anthology of the new haibun, entitled Prose Collection of Japan, Basho was recognized as “the first to create such a model [for haikai prose] and breathe elegance and life in it.” 25

Secondly, as Haruo Shirane stresses, Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Interior, “may best be understood as an attempt to reveal the different possibilities of haibun in the form of travel literature.” 26 A lot of commentators also point out that Basho’s work is less a factual record of a travel journal account, where haiku commemorate real but isolated moments keenly perceived on the journey, than it is a highly related set of about fifty haibun structured to convey a specific literary effect. 27

For example, Basho’s travelling companion, Sora, recorded in his diary that on their visit to Nikko, they first visited the temples and shrine on the mountain and then rested at Hotoke Gozaemon’s inn on their last night. Basho rearranged this series of events – resting first and visiting later – in separate Nikko haibun in order to dramatize their stay with Hotoke Gozaemon. In doing so, he was able to compare/contrast three schools of thought: 1. Shinto (the shrine and its history); 2. Confucian (Hotoke Gozaemon reminded Basho of one important passage from The Analects of Confucius); 3. Buddhist (describing in two passages Sora’s religious preparations for the journey and their improvised Buddhist “summer purification retreat”). 28

Furthermore, it is “best considered a long prose poem, which gives vernacular and Chinese phrases the cadence and tonality of poetry.” 29 That is because many commentators observe that Basho’s prose conveys poetic beauty through concise imagery, making the boundary between prose and verse disappear. 30

Therefore, there is no general agreement on exactly where the haibun breaks occur. The majority of English translations do not indicate them. As a result, most readers will look upon The Narrow Road to the Interior as a travel journal infused with haiku. 31 Nonetheless, the haibun is used to divide the text into subsections, indicating a “discrete passage which characteristically ends in one or more haiku.” 32 This is such a non-linear text, freely mixing prose with verse in a way as to demand a relational reading. Significant meaning of a work of this sort is embedded with the interaction of text and context. 33


Notes:  

1 Definition of Haibun in The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature

Haikai writing. Prose composition, usually with haikai stanzas, by a haikai poet. Normally with an autobiographical or theoretical interest, it could treat many kinds of experiences. When it treats a journey, it becomes a species of kiko (note: travel journal) (p. 275)


2 Scholarly View of Haibun:

Rags and Tatters. The Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu
Lawrence Rogers
Monumenta Nipponica, 34:3, Autumn 1979, pp. 279-291.


Haibun

THE term haibun, literally 'droll prose', is an inadequate and misleading term, since it is elliptical and should be understood in the sense of haikai no bunsho or haikai no bun,5 that is, the prose of the haikai poets. Unfortunately these terms mislead us because they are too broad. Such an agentially defined categorization, although accepted by some students of haibun, is meaningless if taken as indicating any and all prose written by a haiku poet, since it would then include diaries, travel sketches, informal essays, haiku criticism, book prefaces, and letters. And while haibun has been the province of the haiku poet, we cannot demand poetic authorship as part of our definition, for many pieces generally accepted as haibun and having those qualities associated with it in this more precise sense were written by literati whose reputations, in fact, rested on other than the haiku verse. Whatever the shortcomings of nomenclature, however, haibun refers to a short informal essay,6 usually light in tone and commonplace in theme, which shares those qualities that we associate with haiku verse, including suggestion, allusion, and ellipsis, and which similarly exploits the techniques of the pun, the associative word, and the pillow phrase and word.7 At its best, haibun is ruminative and reflective, a happy wedding of brevity of form and profundity of content, affording the reader a fresh and unconsidered view of the world, a new look at the commonplace -- a fan, the sweet pleasure of sleeping late, the pitfalls of borrowing money. When it is less than successful, it can be studied, artificial, almost euphuistic in its stylistic ornamentation and the gratuitous intrusion of classical allusion and proverbial lore.8

Stylistics of Uzuragoromo

THE language of Uzuragoromo, by and large, is similar to that of the other haibun collections of the Tokugawa era. The grammar is pseudo-classical, as were all Japanese literary forms of the period, and its diction a melange of contemporary and classical vocabulary, the latter heavily, but not exclusively, Sinitic. Like other haibun writers, Yayu exploited simile, classical and proverbial allusion, parallelism, puns, associative words, and related elements of individual and generic style. Because haibun were written for the eye rather than for the ear, as were, for example, the joruri plays of Chikamatsu, we naturally find less of those devices whose greatest appeal is aural. Thus onomatopoeia, a conspicuous element that strongly colors the modern language as well, is stylistically irrelevant in Uzuragoromo. For the same reason, Yayu did not rely on assonance or alliteration to the degree that Chikamatsu did in his puppet plays. Conversely, an element of style such as parallelism, the appreciation of which is as visual as it is aural, assumes greater importance in haibun. That parallel prose is a stylistic technique of haibun, yet encountered only infrequently elsewhere in Japanese literature cannot, however, be explained wholly in terms of an assumed aural or visual orientation of the genre, and suggests the probability of Chinese influence on this quintessentially Japanese literary form.

Chinese parallel prose (p'ien-wen)9 is characterized by four or six-character parallel phrases, tending toward a florid style, rhyming, and frequent allusion. Such a style is natural, perhaps inevitable, given the essentially monosyllabic nature of literary Chinese, represented by discrete symbols of uniform size, and vocally expressed through a phonological structure capable of sophisticated rhyming. For the same reasons, literary Japanese is clearly not predisposed to parallelism precisely because it is polysyllabic and vocalically impoverished, and thus its sentences cannot be put together like a string of like-size graphic beads.

Linguistic predispositions notwithstanding, a kind of syntactical parallelism is possible, and Yayu often resorts to it. The opening line of Tabako no Setsu, the haibun on tobacco, is a striking example:

Yomichi no tabi no nebutaki tote koshi ni chabin mo sagerarezu
Aki no nezame no sabishiki tote tana no mochi ni mo te no todokaneba.

You may get drowsy journeying along a road at night,
but you cannot dangle a teapot from your waist to refresh yourself.
You may awake forlorn one autumn day,
but you cannot feed yourself when you cannot reach the rice-cakes on the shelf.


(important notes: 6 We should not be reticent about using the term 'essay' when describing the haibun genre, since we are using it in the same sense as Montaigne did, that is, literary attempts that are essentially unsystematic discourses, as opposed to the more formal, systematic, expository arguments on philosophy, morality, governance, and the like. 8 Traditional literary scholarship has preferred a topical analysis, dividing haibun into the Pristine School and the Farcical School, and identifying Basho's work as the exemplar of the former and Yayu's as representative of the latter. In fact, from a topical perspective Uzuragoromo seems to be rather a synthesis of the antithetical elements ascribed to the two so-called schools, a confluence of the solemn elegance of the Pristines and the frothy wit of the Farcical stream.)




3 Fuzoku Monzen edited by Morikawa Kyoriku, Basho's gifted disciple
excerpted from World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867 by Donald Keene, pp. 142-3.

... the first important collection of haibun, Fuzoku Monzen is a grab bag of prose pieces by Basho and members of his school,... The prose of Basho's travel diaries is known as haibun because its incise and elliptic style suggests his haikai poetry, not because it has any specifically humorous, "haikai" content; but many selections in Fuzoku Monzen are marred by the deliberate injection of an arch and pretentious humor, which the authors seem to have considered to be indispensable to haibun.... In all, twenty-one "genres" of haibun are represented in the collection. These represent the various categories of elegy, preface, rhyme-prose, etc., derived from traditional Chinese collections like Wen Hsuan (Monzen in Japanese), but little attempt was in fact made to distinguish one genre from another... Of the total of 114 selections in Fuzoku Monzen, ranging in length from a paragraph to eight or ten pages... Fuzoku Monzen was Kyoriku's most lasting monument. it was at once the first and best collection of haibun, and its influence was considerable, not only on writings specifically in this style but on much of the Japanese prose of the eighteenth century (note: there are two haibun with no haiku, "Huzi no hu/Prose Poem on Huzi" by Matukura Ranran and "Minomusi no setu/On the Mantle-Grub" by Yamaguti Sodoo, written in the hu/"prose poem" and setu/"essay or monograph" styles respectively, included in Selections from Japanese Literature: 12th to 19th Centuries edited by F. J. Daniels, pp. 52, 146-9)



4 The Passage regarding their visit to Nikko:

The 30th: stopped over at the foot of Mount Nikko.13 The innkeeper said, “My name’s Buddha Gozaemon. My principle is to be honest in all things --that’s why people call me that. So make yourself at home and rest up, even if it’s just for a night.” What sort of Buddha is this, appearing in a mean and muddy world to aid beggar-monk pilgrims like us? I observed him closely: free of cleverness or calculation,14 he was a man of unswerving honesty. It’s said: “One of sturdy character and steadfast sincerity approaches true humanity.”15 And this man’s natural purity of heart is admirable indeed.

-- Basho’s Journey:The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho, Translated with an Introduction by David Landis Barnhill, pp. 50-1

13. Site of the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), founder of the Tokugawa shogunate.
14. Literally “devoid of wisdom and discrimination.” Scholars differ on whether this is criticism or praise. I take it positively as lacking artificiality, which parallels the other terms used. Note that the portrait begins with references to Buddhism and ends with references to Confucianism.
15. From the Analects of Confucius. (p. 156)


Makoto Ueda' s Comment (excerpted from Matsuo Basho, pp. 138-9)

[Here] is a stubbornly honest man, the sort rarely found in an urban, sophisticated society. He is artless, almost native; he can tell his quests he is called Buddha, without suspecting that they may consider him presumptuous. Basho suspected and watched him closely; he found in him not a Buddha but the sort of man so simplehearted as to precede both Buddhism and Confucianism. Basho saw an image of primeval man unspoiled by the evils of civilization….

… According to Sora, …Basho was entertained by high-ranking samurai and well-to-do merchants at various towns…. Basho makes no mention of them whatsoever. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a literary journal with a deliberate choice of facts.


5 Haibun Fiction by Ihara Saikaku (1642 - 1693)

Mirroring Saikaku: The Great Mirror of Male Love. by Ihara Saikaku
Christopher Drake
Monumenta Nipponica, 46:4, Winter, 1991, pp. 513-541

Saikaku's long haikai sequences did not simply break down the distinction between poetry and prose in the modern sense but developed into a new worldly kind of haibun, or haikai prose, a genre that has virtually become a lost art in modern Japan.

Saikaku did not 'mature' from haikai to haikai-'embellished' prose to more mimetic, less rhetorical prose in his later fictional works. In fact, it can be argued that the later works are even more thoroughly rhetorical because their tropes do not draw attention to themselves. Nor is there any evidence that Saikaku wrote his haibun fictions spontaneously, with no intellectual interven-tion or revision. In the afterword to his 4,000-verse Oyakazu  sequence, Saikaku stresses that he practiced long and hard at achieving a rapid flow of interesting images. Although he and other Danrin poets often use polite humility when referring to their sequences, which are more colloquial and less restrained than waka, renga, or Basho's haikai, Saikaku's haikai sequences and haibun fiction works (none of them, strictly speaking, 'novels') can in no way be described as 'intended as a moment's effort, presented for a moment's pleasure' (p. 27).


6 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics edited by Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, etc., Fourth Edition, 2012, p. 592

Haibun. A literary form developed in Japan that employs a combination of prose and haiku. A haibun may be as brief as a single terse paragraph followed by a single haiku or an extended work involving an laternation of prose and verse. Accordingly, the [haiku] may occur singly, in groups, or in linked series, between prose passages. The best known examples are the travel journals. Narrow Road to the Interior by Basho (1694) and the autobiographical The Year of My Life by Issa (1819). The prose and verse sections of a haibun are intended to function discretely as self-contained texts; however, in combination, they enact a kind of dialogue between them, a compounding of points of view on the same situation or topic. While the form was developed by Basho out of the haikai tradition. of linked verses employing commonplace diction and a lighthearted tone, it has been used for a range of tones and themes; however, personal themes predominate. As with haiku, haibun has been adapted into many languages and cultures. its practice is cultivated by haiku societies, journals, and web sites; it is also practiced by poets such as James Merrill, Robert Hass, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. The form has undergone variations as well: in Merrill's 'Prose of Departure,' the haiku  and prose are connected syntactically, rather than being discrete elements; also, the first and third lines of each haiku rhyme. Others vary the form by not keeping to the strict syllable count of haiku or more flexibly employing free verse --William Wenthe, English, Texsa Tech. University

Butterfly Dream: June Breeze Haiku by an'ya

English Original

june breeze
a hole in the cloud
mends itself

Third Runner-Up, The Heron's Nest Readers' Choice Popular Poets Award (2001)

an'ya


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

六月微風
雲彩的一個破洞
它自己修補自己

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

六月微风
云彩的一个破洞
它自己修补自己


Bio Sketch

an'ya is a haiku and tanka poet who has been published in over 60 foreign languages, and appeared in places and publications worldwide. If you would like to read more of her works and a complete biography, please visit https://sites.google.com/site/existencearts/

Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, II

Mom once said
foreign moon bigger
than ours...
the harvest moon hangs high
between Pacific shores

Atlas Poetica, 15, July 2013


Note: you can read its preceding tanka here or the whole sequence here

One Man's Maple Moon: Chrysanthemums Tanka by Pamela A. Babusci

English Original

the intense white
of chrysanthemums
while making love
i become
a thousand petals

Ribbons,  5:3,  Fall 2009

Pamela A. Babusci


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

菊花
的強烈白色
做愛時
我成為
千朵花瓣

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

菊花
的强烈白色
做爱时
我成为
千朵花瓣


Bio Sketch

Pamela A. Babusci  is an internationally award winning haiku, tanka poet and haiga artist. Some of her awards include: Museum of Haiku Literature Award, International Tanka Splendor Awards, First Place Yellow Moon Competition (Aust) tanka category,  First Place Kokako Tanka Competition,(NZ) First Place Saigyo Tanka Awards (US), Basho Festival Haiku Contests (Japan).  Pamela has illustrated several books, including: Full Moon Tide: The Best of Tanka Splendor Awards, Taboo Haiku, Chasing the Sun, Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, and A Thousand Reasons 2009. Pamela was the founder and now is the solo Editor of Moonbathing: a journal of women’s tanka; the first all women’s tanka journal in the US. 

Butterfly Dream: War Haiku by Sylvia Forges-Ryan

English Original

Rereading The Iliad
another corpse dragged
through Fallujah

Grand Prix, 39th A-Bomb Contest

Sylvia Forges-Ryan


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

重讀伊利亞特
拖著另一具屍體
穿過費盧杰

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

重读伊利亚特
拖著另一具屍体
穿过费卢杰


Bio Sketch

Sylvia Forges-Ryan is internationally known for her poetry in Japanese forms, including haiku, senryu, tanka and renku, which have been translated into numerous languages. Her awards include a Grand Prix Poetry Prize from the Atomic Bomb Memorial Committee, Kyoto, Japan, The R.H. Blyth Award from the World Haiku Society, the Harold G. Henderson Award, and First Place in both the Ukiah Haiku Festival Contest and in the Robert Frost Haiku Competition. She is   co-author of Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace, published in hardcover by Kodansha International, with a Russian translation published by Sophia Press. and a paperback edition from Apocryphile Press. From 1991 through 1993 she was the Editor of Frogpond, the international journal of the Haiku Society of America. 

One Man’s Maple Moon: Day of Reckoning Tanka by Matsukaze

English Original

day of reckoning -
under running tub water
my sister
vomits
a 4 year old secret

Matsukaze


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

清算的日子 –
在浴缸水衝擊之下
我的姐姐
嘔吐出
一個四年之久的秘密

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

清算的日子 –
在浴缸水衝击之下
我的姐姐
呕吐出
一个四年之久的秘密


Bio Sketch

Matsukaze is a classical/operatic vocalist, thespian, and minister. He began writing haiku seriously around 2005, and tanka around 2006. He was recently re-introduced to tanka in 2013 by M. Kei, editor of Atlas Poetica: A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka. He lives in Louisiana; dividing his time between there and Houston, TX.

Butterfly Dream: Space Haiku by Kate Prudchenko

English Original

drifting snowflakes ...
the space between what once was
and what is yet to be

Kate Prudchenko


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

漂零的雪花 ...
曾經是和尚未完成
之間的空間

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

漂零的雪花 ...
曾经是和尚未完成
之间的空间


Bio Sketch

Kate Prudchenko’s poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere, including the London Literature Project, Contemporary Literary Review India, Poetry 24, Magnolia Anthology for Socially Engaged Literature Vol. II, Thresholds:  International Short Story Forum, New Plains Review, The Nevada Review,  Lost in Thought Magazine and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. She has a Master’s degree in English Literature & Writing from Western New Mexico University and lives in Los Angeles. She can be reached on Twitter @kprudchenko.

A Room of My Own: Nevermore

"I should have killed all these clichés when I had the chance," I yell out in the dream. Sunlight slipping through the attic window onto the empty side of my bed.

the raven settles
on a maple branch --
Good Friday morning

To the Lighthouse: "Essay-like" Haibun?!

I want the poem to ask something, and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader's part in an implicit author-reader pact.

-- “The Swan,” Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

I was surprised to find out that Dimitar Anakiev’s “How Narrow Is THE HAIKU PATH? (Essay in the form of a haibun on perspectives of haiku)” was published in Modern Haiku (44:2, Summer 2013, pp. 164-5), whose editor rejected my haibun below under a different name (“Autumn Thoughts” for Peggy Willis Lyles who helped me to publish my first haiku) just one year ago:

Winter Thoughts

for Mary Oliver

rejection slip

a sunflower bending

to the wind

I often get editorial advice like this:

"You will notice that we veer away from authorial comment, abstract language, and the imposition of human qualities on the natural world. Instead, we choose haiku that achieve resonance through the juxtaposition of disparate images, credibly present in the same place at the same time."

Slanting sunlight through the attic window on my coffee-stained desk. Reading Basho's death poem, I can't help but wonder: if he were alive and submitted his poem under a different name, would he have been published at all?

Essential Basho…

my name will be written

in water or marble

Note: Historically speaking, Basho didn't write the formal death poem on his deathbed, but the following haiku, being his last poem recorded, is generally viewed as his poem of farewell.

sick on my journey,

only my dreams will wander

these desolate moors

(posted here on March 4, 2013; see its comment section)

The rejection email I received stated that “it reads more like an essay and is, in any event, not a good fit for Modern Haiku.”

The publication of  Dimitar Anakiev’s haibun shows the editor’s change of heart; however, the subtitle or the authorial/editorial explanation , “(Essay in the form of a haibun on perspectives of haiku),” is completely unnecessary. It’s because that historically and aesthetically speaking, haibun was developed before Basho and written in the form of short essays, prefaces or headnotes to hokku, such as Kigin’s Mountain Well (1648). Its prose style resembled that of classical prose (Shirane, p.213). Most importantly, Basho and Buson wrote “essay-like” haikbun that were engaged in the politics and poetics of haikai writing of their day.  Below are good examples for poets to study and emulate.

The first example is excerpted from Basho’s short haibun titled the "Sanseizu no san" (“ An inscription on the painting of the three masters”):

When a person fastens his mind on refinement and follows the [changes of] the four seasons, he will probably gaze at [something like] the inexhaustible grains of sand on a beach. People who expressed such feelings, and became deeply affected by such things, were the masters of classical poetry. However, it would be difficult for people today to pursue the words of the masters whose art was flourishing in the era of Bunmai, as if they were the rules of today, as if embodying the truth. The ever-changing of art [haikai] moves on with heaven and earth, and we should only value its never-ending… (Jonsson, p. 126-7) (note: The following translation is more familiar and constantly quoted in the articles:"The ever-changing nature of poetic art [fuga] changes together with heaven and earth. One respects the fact that the changes are never exhausted... ," Shirane, p.265)

The second example is Buson’s haibun, which begins with a reference to Yoshino, the mountain area near Nara prefecture, known for its cherry-blossom.

I do not follow the tradition [of Basho], who, when he hurried on the road to Yoshino, chanted “I will show you the cherry flowers, cypress hat.” I only stay at home and struggle with toils of this world. Should I do this? Should things be like that? So I think, but I fail to carry out all that I have planned earlier. In the end, even though the examples of [people] losing interest in landscape, birds and flowers are the common state of the world, I feel as if I am the only one so stupid, and I am ashamed to see others.

Cherry blossom fallen; in its own darkness – cypress hat        Yahan (Jonsson, p.122)

“Yahan” is one of Buson’s signatures. Below is the full text of Basho’s haiku quoted in the beginning of the haibun above:

  

Up in Yoshino, I will show you the cherry flowers – cypress hat      (Jonsson, p.122)

To conclude this post, I would like to share with you the following haiku written for poets whose poems have been rejected many times:

lust crackles

in the dry winter air

my muse and I

Note: The following is the concluding prose and haiku from Dimitar Anakiev’s haibun:

I offer here a challenge to readers: the following poems are openly satirical – are they haiku or senryu?

These bank clerks

already in the morning they are fluorescent

like firefly squid 

                                    Kaneko Tohta (trans. Kon-Nichi group)

In the Balkans

at the calling out of “rustic”

swastikas sprout

                                      Dimitar Anakiev (trans. [Jim Kacian])

Stuffing

the ozone hole

Flying Pope

                                      Ban’ya Natsuishi (trans. [Jim Kacian])

Updated, July 25:

Basho's longest haibun, “An Essay on the Unreal Dwelling” (“Genju-an no Ki”)

Basho's longest haibun, “An Essay on the Unreal Dwelling” (Japanese: “Genju-an no Ki”), contains about 15oo words in Japanese (Ueda, p. 113). As its title indicates, the essay tells of Basho's life at the "Unreal Dwelling/Hut" near Lake Biwa in the summer of 1690. This essay has a confessional nature, its structure is tight and well-ordered, and it "displays Basho’s prose craftsmanship at its best” (p. 119). The essay first establishes the secluded nature of his new dwelling: it's situated halfway up a mountain, deep in a wooded area where a Buddhist temple had stood there in the long gone past, and where a Shinto temple now stands in the vicinity (p119).

Then, the essay shifts its focus on Basho's life in the past ten years: Basho compares himself to " a bagworm that has lost its bag and to a snail that has left its shell" (p. 120). He thinks he has been "homeless" for years, but when coming to the shores of Lake Biwa and settling in this hut previously owned by a Buddhist monk whose name is Genju ("unreal"), he has become fond of this "unreal dwelling" (p. 120).

The main body of the essay, is rich and nuanced descriptions of Basho's life at the Unreal Hut, including those of the scenic views of the locale and of culturally rich historic sites. He can  "indulge in a free, leisurely way of life without interruption... In the daytime he may listen to a farmer talking about some incidents on the farm; at night he may wander alone in the moonlight, sunk in random thoughts" (p. 120).

After describing his daily life at the hut, the last part of the essay now turns to Basho's inner feelings. This introspective passage is the focal point of the essay, “related to all three preceding parts in a way that gives each a new meaning" (p. 121). Below is the full text:

All this, however, does not mean that I am an avid lover of solitude who wishes to hide in the mountains once and for all. I am more like a sickly person who has retired from society after becoming a little weary of mixing with people. As I look back over the many years of my frivolous life, I remember at one time I coveted an official post with a tenure of land and at another time I was anxious to confine myself within the walls of a monastery. yet I kept aimlessly wandering on like a cloud in the wind, all the while laboring to capture the beauty of flowers and birds. In fact, that finally became the source of my livelihood; with no other talent or ability to resort to, I merely clung to that thin line. It was for the sake of poetry that Po Chu-i tired himself out and Tu Fu grew lean. I am saying this not because I regard myself as an equal of those two Chinese masters in wisdom and in poetic genius. It is because I believe there is no place in this world that is not an unreal dwelling. I abandoned the line of thinking at this point and went to sleep.

My temporary shelter,
A Pasania tree is here, too,
In the summer glove.
(pp . 120-1)


References:

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

Herbert Jonsson, Haikai Poetics: Buson, Kito and the Interpretation of Renku Poetry, Doctoral Thesis, Stockholm University, 2006

Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, Twayne Publishers, 1970.

Butterfly Dream: Frozen Frog Haiku by Jane Reichhold

English Original

pond ripples
heartbeat of a frozen frog
warms again

American Haiku in Four Seasons

Jane Reichhold


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

池塘漣漪
冰冷青蛙的心跳
再次加速

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

池塘涟漪
冰冷青蛙的心跳
再次加速


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.

One Man’s Maple Moon: January Gale Tanka by J. Zimmerman

English Original

January gale
another roof slate    
cracks off --
I can't stand it
that you're gone

American Tanka, 18, 2009

J. Zimmerman


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

一月大風
另一個屋頂石板
斷裂 --
我無法忍受
你走了的事實

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

一月大风
另一个屋顶石板
断裂 --
我无法忍受
你走了的事实


Bio Sketch

J. Zimmerman's tanka have been published in North America, Australia, and Europe. She wrote The Tanka Revision Workbook for her tanka revision workshop. Her haiku and haibun have been widely published and her haiku will appear in New Resonances 8 (2013), a Red Moon Press anthology of selected haiku poets. A winner of the Mary Lonnberg Smith Poetry Prize, she co-edits Ariadne's Poetry Web

Butterfly Dream: Beach Haiku by Neal Whitman

English Original

cold day at the beach
a man casts his line
only twice

Simply Haiku, 7:2, Summer 2009

Neal Whitman


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

冷天在沙灘上
他拋擲魚竿
只有兩次

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

冷天在沙滩上
他抛掷鱼竿
只有两次


Bio Sketch
   

Neal Whitman of Pacific Grove, California, is a member of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Poets of Northern California, Haiku Society of America, and Tanka Society of America. Over the past five years he has published over 400 haiku, haibun, and tanka and haiga with his wife, Elaine, who is a photographer.

A Room of My Own: Is Something Missing?

George Zimmerman trial --
no sound in the black and white
Rodney King beating video

under the Florida sun
Martin Luther King Jr.
in a hoodie

a trial is not
a morality play ....
killing a mockingbird

Trayvon Martin Day                                 Trayvon Martin Day
a white girl shares her popsicle      or      Justice and Peace painted
with a black boy                                       in black and white

Note: I just added one more haiku ("George Zimmerman trial") to explore these troubling issues. The infamous video of police beating Rodney King in 1991 "increased public sensitivity to, and anger about, police brutality, racism, and other social inequalities throughout the United States."-- excerpted from the Wekipedia Entry, "Rodney King."

Updated, July 16:

I just added one more haiku to make a haiku sequence, entitled Something Missing.

Updated July 20:

I added one more haiku to the sequence and changed the title to Is Something Missing? 

Updated, July 23

I added one more verse as a concluding haiku.

Butterfly Dream: Garden Haiku by Pravat Kumar Padhy

English Original

winter morning
two butterflies
warm the garden

The Heron’s Nest, 13:2, June 2011

Pravat Kumar Padhy


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

冬天早晨
兩隻蝴蝶
溫暖了花園

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

冬天早晨
两只蝴蝶
温暖了花园


Bio Sketch

Born in India, poems widely published and anthologized. Works referred in Spectrum History of Indian Literature in English, Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Poetry etc. Poems awarded high acclamations by Writer’s Guild of India and Editors’ Choice awards. Pravat Kumar Padhy's Japanese short form of poetry appeared in many international journals and anthologies. Songs of Love: A celebration is his third collection of verse by Writers Workshop, Calcutta. Featured in The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India, to be published by Hidden Brook Press, Canada, 2014

One Man's Maple Moon: Family Album Tanka by Diana Teneva

English Original

looking at
the family album
my daughter says hello
to herself and the girl
I used to be

Diana Teneva


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

看著
家庭相冊
我女兒
給自己和年輕的我
打招呼

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

看著
家庭相册
我女儿
给自己和年轻的我
打招呼


Bio Sketch

Diana Teneva is a Bulgarian writer. Her poems have been published in many journals, including Sketchbook, World Haiku Review, The Heron’s Nest, The Mainichi, Asahi Haikuist Network, A Hundred Gourds, Shamrock, and Chrysanthemum. Some of them have been translated into Russian, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Croatian. 

A Room of My Own: Migrant's Dream Haiku

Changing the World One Haiku at a Time Series


July Fourth fireworks...
a migrant's dream intercepted
by the NSA


Note: The National Security Agency (NSA) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense

One Man's Maple Moon: Winter Solstice Tanka by S.M. Abeles

English Original

the time
we made the Earth move ...
before you
and after
winter solstice

Fire Pearls 2:Short Masterpieces of Love and Passion, 2013

S.M. Abeles
  

Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我們使地球移動
的時刻 ...
在你之前
和之後
的冬至

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

我们使地球移动
的时刻 ...
在你之前
和之後
的冬至


Bio Sketch

S.M. Abeles lives and writes in Washington, D.C.  He composes poems on dog walks and train rides, and elsewhere when the moment strikes.  His work appears frequently in the usual haiku and tanka journals, and he posts at least one new poem daily on his website, The Empty Sky

Butterfly Dream: Wrinkled Tangerine Haiku by Pat Tompkins

English Original

winter morning
one wrinkled tangerine
on the window sill

Seasons of Haiku

Pat Tompkins


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

冬天早晨
一個皺巴巴的橘子
在窗台上

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

冬天早晨
一个皱巴巴的橘子
在窗台上


Bio Sketch

Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her  haiku have appeared in various publications, including The Heron's Nest, A  Hundred Gourds, and Mayfly.

One Man's Maple Moon: Steaming Breasts Tanka by Ei Akitsu

English Original

After my bath
I dry
my steaming breasts
as if wiping
my soul.

a long rainy season: haiku & tanka

Ei Akitsu
trans. by Leza Lowitz


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

洗澡後
我擦乾
熱氣騰騰的乳房
彷彿擦拭
我的靈魂。

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

洗澡後
我擦乾
热气腾腾的乳房
彷彿擦拭
我的灵魂。


Bio Sketch

Ei Akitsu was born in Kukuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1950. She has published many books of tanka, including To Lily Magnolia, Opium, and Faint White Light, all to critical acclaim. For more information about her work, see a long rainy season, pp. 77 - 98.

Butterfly Dream: Jasmine Tea Haiku by Ken Sawitri

English Original

jasmine tea --
our argument
diluted

Ken Sawitri


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

茉莉花茶 --
我們的爭論
變淡了

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

茉莉花茶 --
我们的争论
变淡了


Bio Sketch

Ken Sawitri was born in Blora, Central Java, Indonesia, and completed her degree in psychology at the University of Indonesia. She started writing and had the 1st publication in Indonesian national mass media when she was in junior high school. She was the  Psychology & Education editor of Ayahbunda (1995-1998).  A beginner in writing haiku, she had some haiku published in A Handful of Stones, and Asahi Haikuist Network.

Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, I

a new immigrant
in the land of Snow White
I practice
A,B,C... by talking
to the bathroom mirror

Atlas Poetica, 15, July 2013


Note: You can read the whole sequence here

Cool Announcement: A Freebie at Scribd.com

Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing

First English Language Tanka Sequence about Diasporic Experiences

Published by A Room of My Own Press, ON, Canada

                                                                          July first fireworks...

                                                                          is there one among those stars

                                                                          that guides my life

                                                                          through this unknown

                                                                          land of the maple leaf

                                                                          Red Lights, 9:2, June 2013

My Dear Poets/Readers:

Today marked the 11th anniversary of the settling of my life in Canada. I would like to share with you my diasporic experiences in the form of a tanka sequence.

Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, a sequence of 40 tanka, was first published in Atlas Poetica, #15, July 2013. Many thanks to M. Kei for his continued support of my writing.

 

Based on the principles of progression and association employed in Japanese court poetry (for more information, see "To the Lighthouse: Principles of Progression and Association in Tanka Sequences," Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing is the first English language tanka sequence about diasporic experiences. In the sequence, I adopt an intersectional approach to exploring a wide range of issues related to  immigration, English learning,  racialized identity, racism, job seeking, colonization, acculturation, ...etc.

The following is the preface:

Following the Moon to the Maple Land

Welcome to Canada.

Name: Chen-ou Liu (phonic);

Country of Birth: R.O.C.;

(Cross out R.O.C. and fill in Taiwan)

Place of Birth; Date of Birth; Sex;

simply more technocratic questions

the Immigration Officer needs to pin down my borders.

He is always looking for shortcuts,

more interested in the roadside signposts

than in the landscapes that have made me.

The line he wants me confined to

is an analytically recognizable category:

landed immigrant. My history is meticulously stamped.

Now, you're legally a landed immigrant.

Take a copy of A Newcomer’s Introduction to Canada

I hope you will enjoy this e-chapbook as much as I did.

Many thanks for your continued support of my writing.

Chen-ou

Note: A Newcomer’s Introduction to Canada was written and issued by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to give new immigrants helpful information for planning ahead, but it is not a detailed guide. For more information, they will be given another book called Welcome to Canada: What You Should Know. It contains specific information on all the practical aspects of living in Canada.

One Man's Maple Moon: Border Crossing Tanka by Christina Nguyen

English Original

Canadian geese
hiss at each passerby
somewhere
guns are fired
at a border crossing

Atlas Poetica Special Feature: Snipe Rising from a Marsh

Christina Nguyen


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

加拿大鵝
對路人嘶嘶叫
在邊界過境
的某個地方
槍聲響起

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

加拿大鹅
对路人嘶嘶叫
在边界过境
的某个地方
枪声响起


Bio Sketch

Christina Nguyen is a poet and writer living in Minnesota, USA. Find her on Twitter as @TinaNguyen and blogging Japanese short form poetry at A wish for the sky…. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including Modern Haiku, Ribbons, GUSTS, red lights, American Tanka, Frogpond, Prune Juice, Moonbathing, and tinywords. In 2013, some of her poetry will appear in A New Resonance 8: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku from Red Moon Press.

Poetic Musings: Raindrops Haiku by Neal Whitman

hanging rain drops

in the maple grove

still autumn

Patricia Machmiller ‘s Comment:

This haiku's beautiful image of stillness embodied in the hanging raindrops is deepened by a second reading of the way the word, "still," works in the poem. In this second reading, it is as if the drops hanging on the branches, as long as they hold on, it will still be autumn. It is as though their very act of clinging is enough to stave off the inevitable -- the coming of winter.

-- excerpted from Blyth's Spirit by Neal Whitman (p. 28)

Neal's haiku is a typical example of one word that can make or break a poem. I principally agree with Patricia’s comment, especially with the conclusion. Neal’s audacious use of “still” and his good choice of  a seasonal reference add emotional weight and psychological depth to this little poem.

One Man’s Maple Moon: Centrepiece Tanka by Kirsten Cliff

English Original

he creates
a new centrepiece
for the dining table
a size nine shoebox
full of medications

Presence, 44,  June 2011

Kirsten Cliff


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

他為餐桌中央
設計一個新的
裝飾品
九號大的鞋盒
裝滿藥物

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

他为餐桌中央
设计一个新的
装饰品
九号大的鞋盒
装满药物


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.

Butterfly Dream: Independence Day Haiku by Fay Aoyagi

English Original

Independence Day --
I let him touch
a little bit of me

Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks , 2011

Fay Aoyagi


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

獨立紀念日 --
我讓他碰觸我
一點點

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

独立纪念日 --
我让他碰触我
一点点


Bio Sketch

Fay Aoyagi （青柳飛）was born in Tokyo and immigrated to the U.S. in 1982. She is currently a member of Haiku Society of America and Haiku Poets of Northern California. She serves as an associate editor of The Heron's Nest.  She also writes in Japanese and belongs to two Japanese haiku groups; Ten'I (天為) and "Aki"（秋), and  she is a member of Haijin Kyokai (俳人協会).

A Room of My Own: The Nature of Poetic Truth

oh, so, you're a poet
the aftertaste
of her words

where is your Howl?
this odor
of impending death

drifting snowflakes...
your poem, a bit of this
and a bit of that

One Man's Maple Moon: Relationship Tanka by Amelia Fielden

English Original

halving fruit
my second husband's
way of love --
hard to change habits
so late in life

2nd Place, 2000 Tanka Society of America International Tanka Contest

Amelia Fielden


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

將水果分一半
是我第二任丈夫
表達愛的方式 --
在生命的晚年
很難改變習慣

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

将水果分一半
是我第二任丈夫
表达爱的方式 --
在生命的晚年
很难改变习惯


Bio Sketch

Amelia Fielden is an Australian. She is a professional translator of Japanese Literature, and an enthusiastic writer of tanka in English.Amelia has had published 18 books of translations,and 7 of her own work, as well as 2 collections of responsive tanka with fellow Australian, Kathy Kituai,and 2 bilingual  collections with Saeko Ogi. In 2007 Amelia & co-translator Kozue Uzawa were awarded the Donald Keene Prize For Translation of Japanese Literature,by Columbia University, New York, for the anthology Ferris Wheel : 101 Modern & Contemporary Japanese Tanka.

Butterfly Dream: Gendai Horizon Haiku by kjmunro

English Original

when my gendai world was flat I kept falling off
                                              
                                                                                          the text horizon

Notes from the Gean,  19,  May 2013

kjmunro


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我的現代俳句世界是扁平時，我不斷地從文本地平線
                                                                                                        摔落下來
                                              
Chinese Translation (Simplified)                                                                            

我的现代俳句世界是扁平时，我不断地从文本地平线

                                                                                                        摔落下来                            


Bio Sketch

Born & raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, kjmunro moved to the Yukon Territory in 1991. She is a member of Haiku Canada, and volunteers with The Whitehorse Poetry Society. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript.

Hot News: Happy Canada Day and Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 37 E-Papers

My Dear Canadian Poets/Readers:

her shoulders quiver

with a tremor of pleasure

smell of July First

Happy Canada Day!!

My Dear Readers/Poets:

NeverEnding Story's haiku/tanka now are regularly reprinted in 37 e-papers, of which four are Japanese. The newest members are The #haiku Daily edited by Paper.li community, The Haiku Now edited by 黒谷くろやぎ, Gogyohka Daily edited by Gog, and Red Dolbster Tribune edited by Leanne.

For more information, see Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 30 E-Papers and its comment section.

(By the way, NeverEnding Story seeks haiku/ tanka submissions (especially well-crafted tanka). Please help spread the word)

Many thanks to all of you that have helped NeverEnding Story grow in any way.

Chen-ou


Updated July 2:

The newest member is  Poetry Paper edited by Margaret Fieland