Poetic Musings: Burst of Fragrance [Found] Tanka by William Carlos Williams

Who shall hear of us

in the time to come?

Let him say there was

a burst of fragrance

from black branches.

Al Que Quiere!, 1917

William Carlos Williams

Commentary: This five-line stanza that concludes William Carlos Williams’ short “Love Song,” from his first collection Al Que Quiere! (1917), looks and feels much like today’s tanka in English: the interrogative of the first two lines, the stanza’s two-part structure, the poem’s alliteration, and its vivid, single image from nature are all elements common to traditional Japanese tanka and its English cousin... excerpted from "To the Lighthouse: Introduction to The Tanka Anthology by Michael McClintock"

FYI: For more of "found tanka," see "To the Lighthouse: 'Tanka' Found in Western Tradition"

Poetic Musings: "For Sale" Found Haiku by Ernest Hemingway

For sale:

baby shoes,

never worn.

Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak, 2009

Ernest Hemingway

Commentary: L1 sets the theme of Hemingway's six-word story/found haiku while unexpected yet curious L3 unlocks the reader's imagination, and invites the reader to cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these six words, which might imply miscarriage or sudden infant death. In its terseness, the six-word story/found haiku is a perfect encapsulation of Hemingway's economic writing style. And each word in his found haiku is chosen to unlock a world of the evoked sensation in the reader. 

When a writer composes a haiku, it’s only half finished. The reader is co-creator, and his or her reading can carry the poem out beyond the page and make it almost a new poem altogether. -- Aubrie Cox 

Poetic Musings: Found Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg’s gaps between the nouns (which he terms “ellipses”) are analogous to the white spaces and juxtapositions between colors in Cézanne’s paintings.
-- Brian Jackson, "Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg"


winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain

(found haiku in Part I, "Howl:"
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter
midnight streetlight smalltown rain,)

Allen Ginsberg

Commentary:

Interviewer: You once mentioned something you had found in Cézanne—a remark about the reconstitution of the petites sensations of experience, in his own painting—and you compared this with the method of your poetry.

Ginsberg: ...The last part of “Howl” was really an homage to art but also in specific terms an homage to Cézanne’s method, in a sense I adapted what I could to writing; but that’s a very complicated matter to explain. Except, putting it very simply, that just as Cézanne doesn’t use perspective lines to create space, but it’s a juxtaposition of one color against another color (that’s one element of his space), so, I had the idea, perhaps overrefined, that by the unexplainable, unexplained nonperspective line, that is, juxtaposition of one word against another, a gap between the two words—like the space gap in the canvas—there’d be a gap between the two words that the mind would fill in with the sensation of existence...

So, I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions like “hydrogen jukebox.” Or ... [winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain]. Instead of cubes and squares and triangles. Cézanne is reconstituting by means of triangles, cubes, and colors—I have to reconstitute by means of words, rhythms of course, and all that—but say it’s words, phrasings...

... the idea that I had was that gaps in space and time through images juxtaposed, just as in the haiku you get two images that the mind connects in a flash, and so that flash is the petite sensation; or the satori, perhaps, that the Zen haikuists would speak of—if they speak of it like that...

-- excerpted from the Allen Ginsberg interview by Thomas Clark ("Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry, No. 8," Paris Review, 37, Spring 1966)

Ginsberg recognized that Cézanne’s technique revealed the moment when the eye engaged spatial relationships between objects, discerning form (or finding their “true value,” as Williams would term it), which Cézanne would render as a juxtaposition between colors. Cézanne’s color juxtapositions, as well as the gaps of white canvas between the colors, capture a moment of heightened perception. In other words, the interstices between the forms created by color represent the petites sensations (Ginsberg’s “sensation of existence”) that the eye perceives as a result of looking consecutively and simultaneously. Ginsberg sought to incorporate into his poetry Cézanne’s juxtapositional approach: “So, I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions  like ‘hydrogen jukebox.’ Or . . . [winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain]. Instead of cubes and squares and triangles. [. . .] I have to reconstitute by means of words [. . . and] phrasings” (Spontaneous Mind, 30–31). Thus, Ginsberg’s gaps between the nouns (which he terms “ellipses”) are analogous to the white spaces and juxtapositions between colors in Cézanne’s paintings.

For Cézanne as well as Ginsberg, the gaps and juxtapositions represent the moment of perceiving an underlying order and structure of quasi-religious significance. Such a moment originates from closely attending to the process by which the eye and mind make sense of perceptual data.

-- excerpted from Brian Jackson's essay, titled "Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 52:3, Fall 2010, p. 304


Note: For more information about  Allen Ginsberg's view of haiku, see Dark Wings of Night: Allen Ginsberg's View of Juxtaposition and His Haiku


Selected Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

Against red bark trunk
A fly's shadow
lights on the shadow of a pine bough.

Selected Poems 1947-1995

In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.

Selected Poems 1947-1995

A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)

Journals, Mid Fifties 1954-1958

The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.

Journals, Mid Fifties 1954-1958

To the Lighthouse: "Tanka" Found in Western Tradition

To the best of my knowledge, there are no collections of "found tanka" published yet. Michael McClintock is the first tanka poet who edited an anthology of 50 tanka pulled from the English and American literary canon in poetry. Below is excerpted from his article, titled "Tanka in Western Tradition: Sneaking Tanka from the Canon," which was first published in Modern English Tanka, 2:3, Spring 2008, pp. 11-25:

Modern English tanka is not entirely without roots in its native literature. With surprising frequency, one can find the essence of tanka in the lines and longer poems of the masters. …

The poems in the following anthology are pulled from contiguous phrases within longer poems—poems that were not necessarily made better, or more poetic, or more worthwhile, because they were longer. In case after case, in fact, the part of the poem I have isolated out and labeled a “tanka artifact” is often the chief parthaving any real poetic value at all…

What you see as tanka, below, is what is there in the originals. To me, it looks like tanka, reads like tankaand is, in fact, essentially tanka. And all of it was written before tanka (or waka) as a literature of Japan was known or studied as such in the West.

In the article, McClintock doesn’t explain what a tanka form is. In my view, tanka are not just five-lined free verse poems or five-lined poems with a strict syllabic structure, such as cinquain. They are short  poems structured into two parts, between which there is a scent link, and made up of five poetic phrases (or ku in Japanese) 1.

For more information about the characteristics of found poetry, see "To the Lighthouse: 'Found Haiku,' Walden by Haiku , and for more information about tanka composition, see "Poetic Musings: Bruise Tanka by Susan Constable" and the tanka I found in the opening poem of of Power Politics by Margaret Atwood ("Poetic Musings: 'Found Tanka' by Margaret Atwood).

Selected “Found Tanka” from the Canon

Let thy west wind

sleep on the lake;

speak silence

with thy glimmering eyes,

and wash the dusk with silver

William Blake

from “To the Evening Star”

This ship

was naught to me,

nor I to her,

yet I pursued her

with a lover’s look

William Wordsworth

from “With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh”

A troop of laborers

comes slowly by;

one bears a daffodil,

and seems to bear a new-lit candle

through the fading light.

Lizette Woodworth Reese

from “April in Town”

a migrant bird

in passing sung,

and the girl

closed her window

not to hear.

Trumbull Stickney

from “Near Helikon”

Your voice watered

the sand dune

of my chest

inside the wondrous

phone booth made of wood.

Federico Garcia Lorca

trans. Willis Barnstone

from “The Poet Talks on the Phone with His Love” 

Note:

1 "The syllabic units of Japanese prosody are known as ku, a term traditionally translated into English as "line," I too call them lines and treat them as such, though this practice has recently been called into question, at least as it applies to tanka... There is ample evidence, however, that the Japanese have always -- or at least since the first treatments on the subject in the eighth century -- thought of the ku as meaningfully distinct units, to which different formal criteria might apply....
-- excerpted from Edwin Cranston, A Waka Anthology: Volume One, The Gem-Glistening Cup, xix

ku (prosodic unites of 5 or 7 syllables) ...
-- excerpted from Edwin Cranston, A Waka Anthology: Volume Two, Grasses of Remembrance, xxi

Dark Wings of the Night: Simin Behbahani's "My Country, I Will Build You Again"

I was notified that Simin Behbahani, an icon of the modern Persian poetry and a human rights activist, died at 87 on 19 August. Below is a "found tanka" in memory of her:  

My Country,

I will build you again,

If need be,

with bricks

made from my life

Simin Behbahani, Iran's national poet known as “the lioness of Iran"

               

Note: In a 2011 video message to the Iranian people in celebration of the Persian New Year, President Obama said Ms. Behbahani’s “words have moved the world” and quoted a poem she wrote in 1982.

On this day – a celebration that serves as a bridge from the past to the future – I would like to close with a quote from the poet Simin Behbahani – a woman who has been banned from traveling beyond Iran, even though her words have moved the world: "Old I may be, but, given the chance, I will learn. I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny. I will recite the Hadith of love of country with such fervor as to make each word bear life.   ~ President Obama, Nowruz Message

Below is the full text of  Simin Behbahani's 1982 poem:

My Country, I Will Build You Again

My country, I will build you again,

If need be, with bricks made from my life.

I will build columns to support your roof,

If need be, with my bones.

I will inhale again the perfume of flowers

Favored by your youth.

I will wash again the blood off your body

With torrents of my tears.

Once more, the darkness will leave this house.

I will paint my poems blue with the color of our sky.

The resurrector of “old bones” will grant me in his bounty

a mountains splendor in his testing grounds.

Old I may be, but given the chance, I will learn.

I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.

I will recite the Hadith of love and country

With such fervor as to make each word bear life.

There still burns a fire in my breast

to keep undiminished the warmth of kinship

I feel for my people.

Once more you will grant me strength,

though my poems have settled in blood.

Once more I will build you with my life,

though it be beyond my means.

To the Lighthouse: "Found Haiku:" Walden by Haiku

                                                                   Walden published

                                                                    Elderberries

                                                                    Waxwork yellowing

                                                                    Thoreau's journal entry for August 9, 1854

Found Poetry

The idea of “found” poetry is not new. This concept originated with the early 20th century  Dadaists, “who extended their art of collage, for example, to include items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, and so on” (Shirley McPhillips, Poem Central: Word Journeys with Readers and Writers, p. 131). Found poetry is the literary version of a collage in visual art, giving lines new meaning(s) in a new context. The poet selects words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages (such as Dog Talk, A "Found Tanka Prose" by Mary Oliver) from a source text or texts, and reframes them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines (such as "Found Tanka" by Margaret Atwood), or by adding or removing text. The resulting poem can be defined as either "treated," which means a thematic/emotive/visual/tonal change in a profound manner, or "untreated" or virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.

Found Poetry achieved prominence in the mid twentieth-century, sharing many aesthetic characteristics with Pop Art, an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. In her 1995 Mornings Like This: Found Poems, the award-winning author Annie Dillard states that:

Happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts — all objet trouvés, the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.

Found Haiku: Walden by Haiku by Ian Marshall

Ian Marshall's Walden by Haiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) is the first collection of found haiku that won a award (2010 Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Awards for Best Criticism) for its opening up new insights into haiku and its source text, Walden. Ian Marshall distills Henry David Thoreau's musings on nature and the world around him, chapter by chapter, down to 293 "haiku moments." Each chapter ends with an explanation of the specific haiku aesthetics or principles that fit the theme, such as juxtaposition, wabi, sabi, yugen, resonance, and impermanence. In the introduction, Ian Marshall speaks of his threefold purpose in writing the book: "to offer a primer on haiku, to provide fresh insights into Walden, and to demonstrate the pertinence of haiku aesthetics as a theoretical basis for understanding the nature-writing tradition in English” (p. xvi),  and he also emphasizes that

Thoreau’s aesthetic principles and his relationship with the natural world do turn out to have a great deal in common with haiku. Let us count the ways: an emphasis on simplicity, a respect for worn and humble and familiar things (wabi), a sense of aloneness (sabi), a reliance on paradox, and the use of humor, especially in the form of puns …. in trying to see the world as it is, to come to know it through direct experience, to inquire into the meaning and value of a natural fact, to wonder what it means ‘to live deliberately,’ Thoreau indeed had to have in mind (some of) these intentions and to have pursued them deliberately, in a way that suggests some convergent evolution between Thoreau at Walden and the writer of haiku… Thoreau's senses and intuition become his primary means of engaging with the world around Walden Pond, much like renowned Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho's experience at "The Old Pond.” … I contend that the haiku moments are latent in the text [Walden], waiting to be "found" or unearthed or brought to our attention, and I contend that haiku aesthetics can help us better understand what is going on in Walden . . . I suggest that a whole vein of American-nature writing tradition may be similarly compatible with the aesthetics of haiku, and so literary ecocritics might find a long-standing body of aesthetic theory useful in reading and understanding their subject (pp. xv, xvi, xvii, xx, xxviii).

Selected “Found Haiku” by Henry David Thoreau

a borrowed axe

returned

sharper

where a forest was cut down

last winter

another is springing up

much published, little printed

     the rays which stream

         through the shutters

huckleberries

the bloom rubbed off

in the market cart

Listen to the Public Radio International Interview with Ian Marshall (9:58)


Updated, August 24:


Source Text, Walden by Henry David Thoreau

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence... "Economy", p. 19.

Found Haiku by Ian Marshall

trying to hear
what is in the wind
I lose my own breath

Walden by Haiku, p. 4

Opening Statements from the Conclusion of "Economy," p.5

What better point to initiate a discussion of haiku aesthetics than "economy?" If haiku is the essence of poetry, economy is the essence of haiku. Make do with less, make less count for more, make every word count. In haiku the concept of hosomi, usually translated as "spareness" or "slenderness" or "underemphasis," is roughly eauivalent to Thoreau's economy.

Commentary

The wind, then, is the gossip in the air around town.  Note the language of business and commerce ("capital," bargain") in some of the phrasing left out of the haiku.  Thoreau uses a lot of the language of business in "Economy," of course, but his use of that diction is so clearly metaphoric, I've not included much of that diction in any of the found haiku in this chapter... p. 104

Poetic Musings: "Found Tanka" by Margaret Atwood

Opening Quatrain of Power Politics by Margaret Atwood

You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

Found Tanka:

You fit into me

like a hook

into an eye ...

a fish hook

an open eye

The untitled quatrain above is the opening poem of Margaret Atwood's Power Politics, a "groundbreaking book and cultural document,.. characterized by a typical Atwoodian blending of genre and gender revisions" (Reingard M. Nischik, Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood, p. 18). It is one of her most famous poems and successfully sets the tone for the whole collection, in which Atwood incisively criticizes love as an "earthly religion" and dismantles all the ideals and conventions of love poetry (Nischik, p. 7).

Structurally speaking, Atwood's "found tanka" is made up of five poetic phrases (five ku in Japanese), and the two parts of the poem consist of similes, separated by "..." that gives the reader a longer pause to reflect on the significance of the superimposed image of psychological and physical brutality through the double meaning of "eye/I." And the use of enjambment in L2 helps foreground the image of a hook that creates different thematic and psychological effects in the two parts of the poem.

Thematically speaking, the opening simile suggests a complementary combination in which two people join together to form a loving relationship (between the active "you" and the passive "me"), and symbolically speaking, this emotionally positive simile embodies a sexual dimension -- a "scenario of possible penetration" (Nischik, p. 25). However, the superimposition of the second part of the poem makes a dramatic shift in theme and tone. It erases all the positive connotations of the first part by  specifying the meaning of "hook" and "eye" as fish hook and human eye and relating to each other in a brutally different way (Nischik, p. 25). The image of a fish hook in an open eye reveals a destructive and painful nature of the union. Through the skillful juxtaposition of these two different views of gender relations, Atwood's visually stunning and thematically unsettling "found tanka" stirs the reader's emotions and reflection on what a loving relationship/love is.

Poetic Musings: Dog Talk, A "Found Tanka Prose" by Mary Oliver

Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases with each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously and in support of each other. They both sneeze to express pleasure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. In the car, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the ocean begins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum.

With what rigor

and intention to please himself

the little white dog

flings himself into every puddle

on the muddy road.

-- excerpted from "Dog Talk" (Mary Oliver, Dog Songs, Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 111-3)

Structurally speaking, there is no form of tanka prose composition that we as readers will encounter more frequently than the one above by Mary Oliver. This observation can be verified by a casual survey of any tanka/tanka prose journal, in print or online, and historically speaking, this basic unit of one paragraph and one tanka was the dominant form of  tanka prose in the Japanese poetic tradition. It is mainly because of  the functional role of the prefatory paragraph, a sketch that provides a compositional or thematic context and/or visual detail for its significance to the motif.

In the case of “Dog Talk,” a "found tanka prose" by Mary Oliver, the prefatory prose opens with a simple, succinct yet vivid account (functioning as a thesis statement, "He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs," for Oliver’s dog talk) of the main character, a small white dog named Bear, and then Oliver proceeds to describe its brotherly relationship with a big dog named Ben. In the concluding tanka, she skillfully reveals Bear's ("the little white dog's") personality trait and enhances the thematic motif (Bear’s learning to love the world) through an eye-catching and emotionally powerful image portrayed in Ls 4&5.