To The Lighthouse: Rensaku, Sequential Composition

... Shiki's concept of form is distinguished by what he called rensaku, or "sequential composition." This term refers to the practice of writing haiku or tanka in sequence, usually in such a way that the poems, although autonomous, take on additional significance when seen as a group ... Shiki's interest in rensaku seems to have had its beginnings in a pedagogic, rather than a poetic, motive. He taught that a student of haiku should compose as many poems as possible on a given subject and then choose the finest as his final product ... (Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, p.45).

For example, Below is my rensaku about "war cemetery:"

the road

to a war cemetery

morning glories

dappled shadows

on a new gravestone

war cemetery

fireflies

out of a war cemetery

starless night

... The practice was not unknown before Shiki's time, but seldom was it carried out with a conscious artistic aim. Shiki was the first to see a new poetic possibility in the technique; indeed, he seems to have invented the term rensaku. Although it does not figure prominently in his statements on theory, he practiced rensaku a number of times, with such successful results that he started a trend, especially among the tanka poets who looked to him for leadership ... (ibid.)

Below is Shiki’s 10-poem rensaku about the wisteria (Burton Watson, Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems by Shiki Masaoka,  pp. 105-110)

Sprays of wisteria

arranged in a vase

are so short

they don't reach

to the tatami

Sprays of wisteria

arranged in a vase --

on cluster

dangles down

on the piled-up books

When I look

at wisteria blossoms

I think with longing of far-off times,

the Nara emperors,

the emperors of Kyoto

When I look

at wisteria blossoms

I want to get out

my purple paints

and paint them

If I were to paint

the purple

of wisteria blossoms,

I ought to paint it

a deep purple

Sprays of wisteria

arranged in a vase --

the blossoms hang down,

and by my sickbed

spring is coming to an end

Last year in spring

I saw the wisterias

in Kameido --

seeing this wisteria now,

I recall it

Before the

red blossoms

of the peonies,

the wisteria's purple

comes into blossom

These wisterias

have blossomed early --

the Kameido wisterias

won't be out for

ten days or more

If you stick the stems

in strong sake

the wilted flowers

of the wisteria

will bloom again like new

Commentary by  Donald Keene (The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki) 

At first reading, this tanka seems little more than a statement that consists of a single sentence; but if the reader is aware that at the time Shiki composed the poem he was lying immobile in a sickbed, unable to touch the wisteria because it did not reach as far as the tatami, the poem becomes unforgettably poignant. The unadorned plainness of the expression adds to the strength; this is not so much a poem as a cry. The remainder of the sequence is mainly in the same vein. Readers who do not know Japanese may find the sequence among the most difficult of Shiki's poems to appreciate fully, even with Burton Watson's excellent translation to assist them. The bareness of expression is likely to seem prosaic, but with time, as is true of minimalist music, the bareness may seem the essence of poetry… (p. 11)

… The ten wisteria tanka have been well translated by Burton Watson in Masaoka Shiki, 105-110. Robert Brower, in "Masaoka Shiki and Tanka Reform," 403-8, discusses the wisteria tanka, which, taken by themselves are "very flat and prosaic," but which acquire other dimensions when one takes into consideration the time of composition (p. 223).