The stereotypes about athletes and poets might make it seem like an odd combination, but poetry lives everywhere, and stereotypes need to be broken. The summer issue of Rattle features 22 poets who break the mold—professional athletes from the NFL and NBA, tennis pros, soccer players, weightlifters, marathon runners, and more—capped off with a wide-ranging conversation with semi-pro basketball player and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn. As these poets explain in a particularly interesting contributor notes section, poetry and athletics fit together like a hand in a ball-glove.
The open section will make you laugh and cry as always, with a little more formal verse than usual, and an epic “Choose Your Own Adventure” poem by Caroline N. Simpson, which also adds a splash of color art for the first time in years.
The latest in our always-popular career tributes, Rattle #55 features a collection of seventeen civil servants—poets who have worked for various government agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, the CIA, the Census Bureau, and many more. Apparently working for the public produces a dry sense of humor, because many of the poems lean sardonic. These poets are also smart and down-to-earth, and just may restore your faith in bureaucracy. In the conversation section, Alan Fox talks to formalist and translator A.M. Juster, also known as Michael Astrue, who served as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
The winter issue also includes 21 poets in an eclectic open section, highlighted by haiku poets Penny Harter and Michael Dylan Welch, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.
It’s June and I can’t WAIT for our new crepe myrtle to bloom!
I’ve forgotten the variety of our new crepe myrtle.
I could ask my wife.
But by not knowing the name of our new crepe myrtle,
I don’t know the color of its blooms—
which only ADDS to my excitement! Not only that,
my wife said I can have another gazing ball—
to complement our new crepe myrtle!
Plus, we have a CONSPICUOUS gap in our hydrangeas!
I once climbed the Grand Teton.
2.
One day a man is walking his dog through a leafy park
when he sees a girl with a snake around her neck.
The snake’s name is Noah. Noah the boa.
Only the man doesn’t know Noah the boa’s name
when he finds himself forming some pret-ty definite opinions
about the girl with purple-black hair and skin
the color of no color whatsoever, excluding
the surfeit of tattoos, the gold and silver rings
and pins on her pale canvas.
But the thing about this man, opinions or not,
he can’t help but talk. In addition to Noah’s name,
he learns Noah’s body temperature approximates surrounding air,
so, no, Noah doesn’t cool the girl on hot days. Surprisingly,
the girl works at the psychiatric hospital through the leafy trees
where she takes Noah on her days off to cheer the cheerless.
Also, Noah the 23-year-old, affectionate boa
came from a Rosy Boa rescue,
which makes him feel not so rosy—the man—
since, now, all of his pret-ty definite opinions
are pret-ty definitely wrong.
Soon the man is expressing his displeasure
with the Frisbee golf course that violates the leafy trees,
when, despite their disparity in age, pets, skin tone, etc.,
the girl suddenly says, I feel ya,
to which the clueless man replies, Uh, no thanks.
Some days the man feels like a nameless crepe myrtle
that has forgotten the color of its blooms.
3.
My Grandma Mabel had an aunt named Myrtle.
4.
It’s 1969 and I’m at a Nashville honky-tonk with my friend Norman.
Norman and I are eighteen. In four years,
Norman will become a Nashville cop. One night
he’ll pull me over in my Pinto and ask to see my license. Hey, Norman. It’s me, I’ll say. But tonight
Norman already has a license and a social security card
for one William B. Robinson, age 21 plus. Why, you bo-oys have the say-m nay-m!
our waitress says after careful study.
Norman will matriculate to Vanderbilt Law.
He’ll become a prominent defense attorney. We’re fraternal twins, Norman tells the waitress. I’m William Butler Robinson,
and he’s my brother, William Blake.
Ye-ah, and I’m Tammy WY-nette, the waitress says.
5.
My mother’s maiden name was Angel. Martha Jeanne Angel. I was an angel before I met your dad, my mother liked to say.
6.
One day the man is stopped at a stoplight near the leafy park
(where he seems to spend a lot of time),
when he notices a girl in a giant red pick-up
with a young man’s hands around her neck.
The young man’s name is Tim, Tim as in Get your hands OFF me, Tim! Tim. Once again,
the man finds himself forming some pret-ty definite opinions
when the girl jumps from the giant red pick-up
and starts running down the leafy street
and Tim jumps from the giant red pick-up
and starts running down the leafy street, too.
Naturally, the man can’t help but talk.
But this time his talking must wait until the light turns green
and he drives around the block listening to someone say, You just can’t drive away, you miserable coward!—
bearing in mind there is no one with him in his car.
Later that night he tells his wife what he did say
after he rounds the block and follows the re-occupied, giant red pick-up
to Emergency Parking at a nearby hospital—
which doesn’t make the miserable coward feel any less miserable
or cowardly.
7.
Man: (knocking on passenger-side window of a giant red pick-up)
Are you OK?
Girl: (rolling down window)
Yes. Thanks.
Tim: (jumping from driver’s side of the giant red pick-up,
siren blaring in the background)
Who the hell are you!
Man: I just want to make sure she’s OK.
Tim: (balling his fists)
You might want to leave us alone, m_____ f_____!
Man: I just want to make sure you’re both OK.
LATER THAT DAY
Wife: (watering blue hydrangeas)
He never would have hit someone your age.
8.
Some days it seems impossible to the man
that he is 23 in Rosy Boa years.
That no one will ever hit him hard right between the eyes.
9.
If you don’t know me by now,
You will never never never know me, ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.
10.
If the last 23 years were an illusion,
Simply Red would be singing If You Don’t Know Me By Now,
Noah the boa would be about seven inches long,
and I would be showing this poem to my gentle friend and mentor,
the exquisite formalist poet, Mike Carson,
who would undoubtedly return it to me with the word DECORUM!
written in the right-hand margin of Part 7—
since I would have undoubtedly filled the blanks in.
Never mind Tim the angry, giant red pick-up driver,
or rather angry Tim, the giant—Oh, you know what I mean—
filled the blanks in, too. Never mind Tim is not alive
and pick-ups aren’t so giant.
If the last 23 years were not an illusion,
Tim would be alive, pick-ups would be giant
and I’d be asking when you last heard the word decorum?
If you find it kind of nice to hear the word decorum
and wish there were precious more of it going around,
chances are you had a grandmother and great-great aunt
with names like Mabel and Myrtle. Chances are
you sometimes forget the color of your blooms.
11.
Some days I can’t believe I’ve become someone
who longs for the days when more decorum was going around,
someone who uses long as a verb and precious at all.
Some days I can’t believe my knees have wrinkles.
That I count lawn mowing as exercise.
That my mower’s self-propelled.
Some days I can’t believe I still say honky-tonk.
That I plant blue hydrangeas.
That both my mother and my dad are angels now.
12.
It’s 2012 and I’m at a funeral home telling my friend Norman
that I’m sorry about his mother, Pearl.
It’s been many years since I’ve seen Norman. Of course
we’ll talk about the time he pulled me over in my Pinto.
The time we hiked The Appalachian Trail.
(I once hiked The Appalachian Trail.) This is my friend, William Blake Robinson,
smiling Norman tells his granddaughter. It’s nice to meet you Mr. Robinson,
smiling Norman’s smiling granddaughter says.
13.
One day in 1704, a man appeared in England.
He claimed to be Prince George Psalmanazar, reformed cannibal
from the island of Formosa—where men ate adulterous wives,
18,000 baby boys were sacrificed each year to an elephant god,
and everyone wore snakes around their necks TO KEEP THEM COOL!
Little wonder A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa,
An Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan was a bestseller.
When a Jesuit missionary from Formosa asked about his fair skin,
Psalmanazar claimed he’d always lived beneath the ground. Sunlight would shine directly down an equatorial chimney,
the astronomer Edmond Halley reasoned. Formosan chimneys are almost always built at crooked angles
and containing bends, Psalmanazar rebutted. Ye-ah, and I’m Tammy WY-nette,
Sir Edmond might as well have said.
14.
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece a my ear.
15.
If the last 43 years were an illusion,
Johnny Cash would be singing A Boy Named Sue
on the jukebox in the Nashville honky-tonk
where I’m drinking beer with my friend Norman,
thanks to the likes of Tammy Wynette.
In four years I’ll get a job in a psychiatric hospital
and acquire a life-long soft spot for those who cheer the cheerless.
After that, I’ll climb the Grand Teton, hike The Appalachian Trail
and develop an interest in ornamental shrubbery—
which will lead to a delight in gazing balls.
One day I’ll gaze into my favorite,
the deep blue ball with light green swirls.
I’ll find it hard to believe I’ve become someone
who gazes into a deep blue ball with light green swirls,
especially with the likes of William Blake
drinking Old Milwaukee Beer in a Nashville honky-tonk,
signaling to Tammy Wynette but gazing out at me
and saying, Who the hell are you?
Mark Williams: “It is a tall order—for someone who wrote a poem called ‘Identity Theft’ to identify himself. I did climb the Grand Teton. I do find my deep blue gazing ball beautiful, along with crepe myrtle, hydrangeas, and boa constrictors—especially rescued ones. After a stint as a psychiatric orderly, I spent much of my life selling houses. Now I read, write, walk dogs, and spend wonderful evenings with my wife. In short, my life, like everyone’s, is hard to identify. Writing poetry is my way of trying. Pink. Our crepe myrtle blooms are pink.”
Releasing this September, Rattle #45 features 41 Poets of Faith. As Kenny Williams writes in his contributor’s note, “To call yourself a ‘poet of faith’ is a dangerous move.” As Chris Anderson says, confessing that faith includes doubt is a cliché: “The hard thing both personally and creatively is to profess what we believe, and that we do believe.” But these poets do the hard thing in poem after poem, exploring the world openly and honestly through the lenses of their various faith traditions.
In the conversations section, Alan Fox discusses poetry and faith in an inspiring interview with poet and Catholic deacon Chris Anderson.
from a Conversation with Richard GilbertPosted by Rattle
from A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD GILBERT
While at Naropa University, Richard Gilbert studied with beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and others, and became a Tibetan Buddhist meditator. He has performed in and produced conceptual art multidisciplinary presentations as a poet, videographer, and electric guitarist. After completing an undergraduate thesis on Japanese classical haiku in 1982, and Tibetan Buddhist seminary training in 1984, he worked as a clinical adult outpatient psychotherapist. In 1990, Gilbert completed a PhD at The Union Institute & University in Poetics and Depth Psychology. He moved to Kumamoto, Japan, in 1997, teaching at university and publishing academic articles on Japanese and English-language haiku, while designing EFL educational software. He received tenure from Kumamoto University in 2002. Gilbert is co-judge of the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition, founder and director of the Kon Nichi Haiku Translation Group at Kumamoto University, and founding associate member of The Haiku Foundation. His book The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Approach to English-Language Haiku, discussing some 275 haiku (Red Moon Press, 2013), was awarded The Haiku Foundation 2013 Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Gilbert has edited and/or translated five other books relating to haiku, and constructed the gendaihaiku website, which presents subtitled video interviews with notable modern Japanese haiku poets. (website)
__________
Note: The following is excerpted from a 26-page interview.
GREEN: What is haiku? Let’s start there.
GILBERT: I’d like to quote a fellow named Hiroaki Sato, “A haiku is anything the author says it is.” [Green laughs] And you might think he’s saying it in a leading way, but it’s because, for one, in Japan, when you go to the daijiten, the big encyclopedic dictionary and look up haiku, there’s no definition. There’s no 5–7–5, there is no haiku is this and not that. What you see is connotation: Haiku began with Basho in the seventeenth century, and he wrote these things, and then there are other well-known haijin (-jin is “person,” meaning people who write haiku) who wrote like this. And it’s mentioned that in modern times Masaoka Shiki gave us the word “haiku,” which didn’t exist before him—it was called hokku, and the hokku was part of a linked form poem. People basically drink together. So the haiku drinking party, the kukai, is the basis of haiku in Japan, and still is today—and it’s not always drinking, anymore, but haiku come out of a collaborative, communal experience that is really fun.
There’s a famous quote by Basho, “haiku jiyu,” which means, “haiku is for freedom.” And I’d like to explain that. In a strongly hierarchical, class-based society, which feudal Japan was—you’ve got the farmers and the samurai, and there are class-degrees of samurai families—a lot of intense structure. And it’s known that if a samurai wanted to test his sword and happened to hack down a farmer who was walking along the road, that was not a crime. That’s hierarchy, right? How interesting, then, that when you join a haiku group, the first thing that you do is create a haigo, what we would call a nom de plume or a pen name—
GREEN: For the whole group, or for yourself?
GILBERT: For yourself. And someone would often give you that name as a joke—some of the names are like “Twisted Guts,” crazy names—and you can have more than one. Shiki famously had over 100. And each one was a persona. Name change is an interesting thing, anyway, in Japanese culture. For instance, if you achieve a certain rank in a martial art or ikebana (flower arranging) you might be given a special name by your teacher. But the name and the persona is really a new self. The idea of “I am me and I am like this throughout my life” is a bit different in Asian culture compared to our own, generally.
So this idea of haigo has a very interesting socio-political side, because if you’re a farmer you can’t talk to a samurai, unless you’re addressed by them, and then you would have to talk in a very cultivated, formal language called teinei-go. And what if you insulted them? They might hack you to bits! And even among the samurai classes there exist complex language conventions. There’s no way a group could form freely among different classes. But when you have a haigo you are that person, and there is no longer any class. It’s complete equality. And so that’s why Basho said, “haiku jiyu.” It’s one of the many intense paradoxes within Japanese culture, that within the haiku drinking party everyone’s an equal.
Kaneko Tohta is now 94, and is practically a national treasure in Japan. He talks about growing up in the village of Chichibu, way up in the mountains north of Tokyo. His father was a doctor and built a clinic there, so he was from an elite family, but at the same time grew up in this small village, and felt very protective of village culture, and writes a lot about rural themes. He pioneered the movement called shakaisei haiku, which means haiku of social consciousness—he was one of the main leaders of this post-war late-1940s group that first asked the question, “Well, should we write haiku anymore because look what happened, the war, we couldn’t stop anything, and haiku symbolizes this traditional ‘Japaneseness’—this is not good, maybe we should just stop.” As a result of this questioning and debate, he revolutionized the genre, creating many theories about how to think about yourself and connect with your physical embodied being, and at the same time critique your culture intellectually.
genbaku yurusu maji kani katsukatsu to gareki ayumu
never, atomic bomb never—
a crab crawls click, click
over rubble
—Kaneko Tohta
He has many coinages of terms, and one of them that I really like is translated as “intellectual wildness.” I don’t want to get carried away with this, but I studied with the Beats at Naropa, and when you think of anti-establishment poets, you know, Gary Snyder eventually became a professor emeritus at UC Davis, and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and you could say that in their later lives they integrated back into their culture—in other words this idea of “anti-” became much more synthetic. Naropa remains an alternative school, and Gary Snyder has become a leading ecological activist, so it’s not as if the integration is like suddenly watching Fox News or whatever—
GREEN: Change from within, rather than change from without, right?
GILBERT: Right, they found a place within institutional structures. And I wanted to meet the poets who were working, I didn’t want to study poetry academically. I was very confused, and I still am, and that poetic instinct, as you might call it, was strong in my life. I wanted to meet people who felt the same thing—I wanted, not to be a disciple, but to have some mentoring. So I went to Naropa. And when I went to Japan I had that same feeling—at first I was interested in the classical stuff, because I knew about that from studies with Ginsberg and Patricia Donegan, but after I got there I realized that there was this tremendous tradition that happened after WWII that had virtually never been translated into English—at least not with commentary so that you could learn about what these poets were thinking, and not just read the poems, which often translate very minimally in terms of the culture. And when I did begin meeting these poets I found they were absolutely brilliant and eccentric, with a lot to say.
So someone like Kaneko offers what we might think of as a paradox, where he was one of the most radical and pioneering of the post-war haiku poets, and his job was that he worked for the Bank of Japan, throughout his whole career. How can these two things go together? Yagi Mikajo recently passed away—she was the first woman in Japan to graduate from a medical college and found her own ophthalmology clinic. She was a brilliant doctor, and I would call her an eco-feminist radical poet—before the term existed. She was writing these amazing, very erotic, and also what we would call ecological, haiku. But she was as well a doctor; she had a day job. So anti-establishment, in the Japanese sense, has to do with community and your mind, your intellect—it doesn’t mean you have to quit your job and form a new –ism. In fact, Kaneko said he hates –isms and is not too interested in continental “theory” philosophizing; he’s more of a rooted person, it’s more human-to-human.
mankai no mori no inbu no era kokyû
full bloom
in the forest’s genitals
respiration of gills
—Yagi Mikajo
So to finish the thought here, what is haiku—one of the lovely things that I found studying in Japan is that haiku is community. Haiku is groups getting together filling in their own poems. It’s not the lonely pilgrim finding enlightenment—that’s part of Basho’s life, but the main part is that he was this very ambitious guy who sought fame early with his first book, which had a lot of obscene poetry in it, actually. And by the way, he was also primarily gay—he was bisexual, but the great love of his life was Tokoku (also known as Mankikumaru), who was exiled, due to his criminal activity, by the Shogunate.
GREEN: I never knew that.
GILBERT: Scholars have known all through history, but within the institutions they’ve been shy of tarnishing the “Basho the Saint” image. There’s a recent book by Arashiyama, which in translation is Rogue Basho—he basically surrounded himself with criminals and violent people—Basho was closer to a Beat than a mendicant monk. A very complicated fellow, and a genius.
So this idea of the haiku drinking party, or kukai, is the core, and does it relate to the international arena? Is it true that haiku is the only international genre of poetry? Free verse is not really a single genre, but haiku must have certain formal aspects that connote it as haiku. Another paradox of haiku is that these little tiny poems that seem incomplete apparently draw people together who want to talk about them. That is, haiku seem to create community. Don Baird uses the term “haiku DNA,” which I think is an interesting Western idea: There is some sense of a code, a lineage aspect that is a bit mysterious, and yet there’s something about this form that seems to overleap language and culture. Every year over 60 countries send haiku in English to our Kusamakura Haiku Competition in Kumamoto, Japan, where I live. The Balkans are very strong in haiku, France, Germany, India …
So in my role, I judge a contest, I write some theory and publish haiku—and I’m old now, I just turned 60, and didn’t start out wanting to do this; I wasn’t an academic until I got to Japan, really, but suddenly in the last few years, especially with social networking, I’ve developed new friendships. Do you know how hard it is to make a friend when you’re over 50? I mean to really connect? But by meeting others into haiku I’ve met some amazing people. So “haiku is for freedom” has a lot of resonance for me, and it’s also about community.
GREEN: There is this sense of community that no other genre has—it’s sort of separate from mainstream poetry, but there’s a vibrancy that you can see, with these large conferences like you mentioned—
GILBERT: Yeah, the Haiku North America Conference occurs every two years, it’s international and well-attended …
GREEN: And there are no international sonnet conferences. So what do you think it is about haiku that draws people together? Is it the mystery, the brevity?
GILBERT: That’s a question that I can’t really answer very well. Except the obvious, that there are enough people who like it and who are attracted—
GREEN: But why are they attracted? I mean, my grandmother [Gilbert laughs] who did nothing else with literature, she loved haiku. She had a subscription to Frogpond, and every time she would write me a letter she would include a haiku at the end. She didn’t even read Rattle, really. And there was a little community in her neighborhood that shared haiku. I noticed in your background that you have a PhD in Poetics and Depth Psychology, and I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fascinating—does that relate?
GILBERT: Well, it relates to Jung, and I studied with James Hillman, who had some issues with Jungian theories and created his own field called Archetypal Psychology. And it does connect with some of his ideas about who we are as people—multiplicity in self—and that goes back to haigo, right; if Shiki had 100 personas he was really playing with the idea that you can be a horse and write a haiku.
There’s a poet, Tsubouchi Nenten, who writes a lot of funny haiku about hippopotami—he famously wrote:
cherry blossoms fall—
you too must become
a hippo
—Tsubouchi Nenten
So when you ask, what is haiku, that’s a haiku. Senryū is a term that often means witticism or witty, but in modern haiku we’re not really making that division anymore—
ushirokara mizu no oto shite fu ga kitari
from behind
comes the sound of water
comes news of death
—Ônishi Yasuyo
If the poem has impact and has depth, it doesn’t matter if it has wit or not, it doesn’t matter if it has a human topic. In Japan it’s a little different, because there’s a long tradition of senryū that goes back hundreds of years, and the definition is more clear because senryū poets don’t treat season words (kigo) as special, they just treat them as words, ordinary language. But in English, from a Japanese point of view there is no haiku, because there’s no kigo, no dictionaries of season words that go back for centuries, which is really the vertical depth that makes kigo powerful.
GREEN: Explain that, what are kigo?
GILBERT: Unfortunately for us in translation, the literal translation is “season word.” There’s a literal side, a realism, like for example, “spring moon”—and “moon” itself, by the way, is a kigo; it would always be the moon-viewing moon of the autumn harvest. Kigo are strange, in that they’re not based on naturalism or realism, and many are ancient, so they’re coming from a sense of human imagination and culture that isn’t confined by scientific understanding. So when we say “moon” it could be any season, but in Japanese, when we say “moon” in haiku, it’s always the moon-viewing moon, and people are there in a group, looking at the moon. Often there’s also a sense of impermanent beauty, mono no aware; it’s beauty in its passing, traditionally related with the cherry blossoms falling like snow, or a beautiful woman in her prime, you would say, also feeling the passing of that beauty—of all phenomena. But if a moon is not just a moon, if a moon is actually a moon related to the environment, people going out on a night in the early autumn to view the moon and write poetry, and to maybe drink together, and have a quietly festive time sharing a sense of heart—that’s all included in the kigo. So that’s one level, that kigo are environments, it’s not just the literal moon. In Japan there are some fourteen kinds of cicada, and they all have different periods of time that they appear. So if I say higurashi, which is a kind of cicada that I hear where I live, they come in late summer, as kigo it carries this sense of returning to school, the sense of summer ending, and evokes a feeling of maybe kids playing jump rope in the neighborhood in their free time:
nawatobi no wa ni higurashi ga haittekuru
into the jump rope’s spinning ring a cicada jumps in
—Hoshinaga Fumio
GREEN: Wow.
GILBERT: So kigo are really whole environments, and that’s the first thing that we miss in English. Here’s another contemporary use of kigo by Uda Kiyoko—she’s the president of the Modern Haiku Association of Japan:
mugi yo shi wa ki isshoku to omoikomu
wheat—
realizing death as one color
gold
Here, the summer kigo is wheat—eternity, a paradox, the singular “gold” of life and death expressed in just a few words, the wheatfield of an image.
Just to mention, kigo in modern haiku is not mandatory—I had a group of students research this a few years ago, we looked through several hundred modern haiku and found that about 70% contained kigo.
Another aspect of kigo is a little stranger still, there’s a vertical dimension that really makes kigo powerful, which is that, when you open a saijiki, which is this compendium of kigo—this is a highly redacted, edited compendium, and there might be many hundreds, even thousands of kigo in it. And for each kigo, there are poems using that kigo, or that season word, that go back in time. Let’s say I look up “moon,” which is autumn—I might be able to find, in that case, it’s such a popular and important kigo, I could find hundreds of poems going back through time, layers and layers of history. So what you get, as a haiku professional, is that you look in the saijiki for the kigo, and you really have to understand all those other poets, not just the poem, but who were they, when did they live, what was their era, how does the poem relate to their situation? If they said something like, “The moon tonight/ another cicada calls”—but then you find out that “another cicada” really refers to their patron. So there are often hidden messages, symbolic and literary references, if you study more deeply.
I think of it like a geology, imagine the Grand Canyon: You’re going back through strata of eras, and all of these poets that use that same season word are in a sense developing a multi-generational dialogue. As you go through time those later poets were aware of the earlier poets, and so it keeps going like that, to this day. And I asked some of the poets I was interviewing, “You’ve written plays and essays, modern poetry, why do you want to be known as a haiku poet, why restrict yourself?” My friend and colleague Hoshinaga Fumio said, “One word can create an environment; one word can create this sense of history and lineage. So why reject it?” But at the same time, I’ll give you another example of a poem of his:
athlete’s foot itches
still can’t become
Hitler
“Athlete’s foot” is a kigo. We perhaps wouldn’t think of that as a season word, but there are all sorts of kigo—that’s summer, of course. But with “athlete’s foot” he’s deformed that kigo into something much more modern, as Uda also has done, with “wheat,” and the content is really socially conscious and contemporary. He has another that I like:
spring tree
I climb until I can
see the war
So “spring tree” is a kigo, and by using it, he echoes back to all the haiku before, but it was also a warlord culture, and he was a child of war. He’s 77 now, and Hoshinaga describes how he was a nationalist child until the war ended and he realized he’d been lied to his whole life. There is this generation that are now in their 70s, who were children during the war, who became these, I would say, radicalized post-war gendaijin—meaning modern, contemporary writers—who really didn’t believe anything. If you’ve studied about the fire-bombing of Japan, there are historians who say this was a crime against humanity, fire-bombing civilian cities—the houses were all made of wood, so they just burned. Kumamoto, where I live, was 90% burned to the ground, I think. There are photographs of just few little concrete ruins sticking up.
Kigo in English, then—Gary Snyder, in a recent talk said something that surprised me, he said that haiku, the term, should be reserved for only the Japanese genre, and that what we’re doing in English is not haiku, it’s a short poem that has certain rules. And you can really make that case, on a scholarly level. I do, though, disagree with Snyder on this point about terminology.
GREEN: Is there an analogous way that English could be used, maybe through etymologies …?
GILBERT: There really isn’t—there are people who have tried to create season-word dictionaries, William Higginson has a book, Haiku Seasons, that does that, but no one uses it. Because this is not coming from a tradition in which you can just make it up, in a scientific world. It’s not naturalism; it’s not realism.
Kaneko Tohta wrote the introduction to the Modern Haiku Association Saijiki (gendaihaikukyokai saijiki), it took them like fifteen years to produce it, and the fifth volume is muki, that is “no-kigo kigo”—which is a great paradox. There are a lot of things you can’t have as kigo, like a dog. Things and beings that are close to us. Sparrows in Japan live in the eaves of the houses and are with us through all the seasons, so they can’t be kigo. So that’s one solution, this muki haiku, no-kigo, yet-kigo haiku. When you get into this topic, though, when you get into the modern era of Japanese haiku, what you start to find out, it’s a lot like English-language haiku. There’s an expansion of the kigo concept, and also a free verse haiku style that’s not 5–7–5; they’re experimenting.
And by the way, Japanese 5–7–5 has nothing to do with syllables, in any way. Linguistically, these languages, English and Japanese, do not meet at all on the level of the syllable; they meet on the level of the metrical phrase. So if I say, “spring tree/ I climb until I can/ see the war,” you can feel the three in it, right? Doesn’t it feel like short-long-short? In English I can pause, but in Japanese you can’t. Japanese is a sound-syllable-timed language, called moraic language. In English I can use our accentual-syllabic language to stretch and pull and shorten and lengthen in ways that are really interesting. Like I composed this haiku:
as an and you and you and you alone in the sea
Here I’m using a repetitional language feature of English to replicate the feeling of bobbing up and down in the sea, well to me—but it’s also this sense of how you come back to self-awareness and how it disappears, so it’s this feeling of coming into yourself and losing it. I don’t want to interpret my own work too much, but you might call it Language poetry, or playing with language in a way.
Here’s a poem by John Stevenson, a newer haiku:
pretty sure my red is your red
Is that a haiku? Or is it just sort of a cool strange thing? Where is the short-long-short? Now we’re getting back into the question of what is a haiku. In the modern tradition in Japan there’s an awful lot of flexibility. And probably a modern Japanese poet, if we translated that into Japanese, would say, “Yeah, of course, that’s haiku,” and they’d see it. So then instead of saying what is the limit of haiku, let’s say what makes a haiku a haiku. The key feature in language—this has to do with reader consciousness—is the same in Japanese as in English. In Japan the word is kire, which means “cutting” or “to cut.” What this means is that the haiku has to be cut in space and time in some way. This sense of cutting can be indicated by a mark, an actual grammatical mark in Japanese, and it has an emotional charge. In English this has commonly been translated as a dash, or a colon, semi-colon, sometimes ellipsis, but you can also just apply lineation.
All these methods mentioned have a sense of cutting, but I want to get a little more specific. I want to take the most famous haiku, from Basho:
old pond—
frog jumps in
the sound of water
One thing is, historically, we know how that poem was created, because one of his main disciples, Kyorai, wrote it down.
GREEN: Oh really?
GILBERT: Basically, the guys were drinking in the Basho-an, which is the Basho hut, and they’re drinking sake, which was a nice thing to do, and it was kukai, the haiku drinking party—not a wild party, but you sip sake, and hang out, and collaboratively create poems. So a lot of times haiku—or hokku, at the time—were part of a collaborative poem called haikai no renga. They had certain kinds of rules of how you’d link the stanzas; they had the kigo at the beginning stanza, which the master, in this case Basho, would have created. And after that they link together, and it’s very playful. Sometimes it’s really jokey, and even obscene, and sometimes it’s more serious. And Basho is known as combining the more humorous style with this very deep level of insight and some would say enlightenment or depth of humanity.
GREEN: Would these be generated quickly and spontaneously, going around the room, or would it be slow and contemplative?
GILBERT: I think that it was whatever the mood was at the time; I think it’s a very human thing. I think it’s not very different than who we are in some way. There’s no TV; you can’t check your iPhone or whatever. There’s not a lot of distraction when you’re sitting in this little hut, and this is what you do if you have the time for it. And like I said, you have a haigo, so everyone has a pen name. By the way, Basho means “banana tree”—someone gave him a banana tree, and he planted it next to his hut, and that’s how he got the name.
So there they are in the Basho hut, and as they’re drinking, sipping from their small cups, maybe someone’s serving them a little food, and they’re composing and talking, and as they’re doing it, occasionally there’s a sound outside. Maybe there’s a stream somewhere not so far away. And the frog—Allen Ginsberg famously translated that poem’s last line as “Kerplunk!” with an exclamation point. I really related to that, growing up in Connecticut; the wetlands of Connecticut have bullfrogs and they do kerplunk! And Allen’s from New Jersey and they kerplunk there, but in Japan they don’t kerplunk. And the reason why goes back to the kigo; the frog is a kigo, and there are poetic frogs and non-poetic frogs. It’s not about naturalism, right? So what are poetic frogs? Well, they’re the size of your thumbnail and they’re really cute, with big eyes, and they sing; they’re like peepers. Tiny frogs, sometimes you see them in the yard in the late spring or early summer, and those are the singing frogs of Japan.
This means that the sound of the frog was heard from inside the hut of Basho, occasionally, as they were drinking—and you can’t tell plural, so either a frog or frogs—were making a tiny sound. And we know from the historical record, Basho gave the last part of the haiku first, “frog jumps-in the sound of water.” He did the 7–5, but the first 5– was missing. One of his friends said yamabuki ya, which is a mountain flower—and this would have been a radical thing to say, for reasons we won’t get into, but this would have been the anti-establishment move, to mention this flower with the frogs; it was against the traditions of renga at the time. It was kind of a cool idea, but it would have been like, “Yeah, take that aristocratic tradition!” [Green laughs] We’d have to imagine that a mention of a flower was a radical act, but it was. And Basho rejected that after a while, and finally, after some discussion, he came up with furuike ya, “old pond,” with that cut, the “ya.”
What’s all this mean, why is this important? Well, it’s important because we can look to Basho as the originator of the depth of the tradition, and we know that the poem was his groundbreaking, signature poem, but what we tend to think is it’s a poem of realism. It’s not a poem of realism. We think it’s this Zen-like moment of awake mind—well, not really. It’s not really like that. And by the way, in Japan, too, there were people who went hunting for the pond. Was it his patron’s pond, where were they, there has to be an old pond somewhere? Over some 300 years of searching they never found it. Hasegawa Kai recently wrote a book called Did the Frog Jump into the Old Pond? It’s a 320-page book, and the short answer is, no. The frog did not jump into the old pond. How could he say that, after 320 pages? The poem says the frog jumped in—any rational person would have to disagree.
So he must have some really tight logic on it—and he does. What makes this not a haiku of realism, what makes it distinctive, why this poem caused a revolution in creating haiku as a high art—meaning an art that wasn’t just a way of playing with language in a pleasurable and witty way, but actually made it into something that could deepen us or create a contemplation—has to do with the kire, the cutting. It has to do with “ya.” When we say, “cut in time and space,” it is completely cut. So when there’s a cut, or a “ya” in this case, meaning the keriji (cutting word): It creates these two broken parts that don’t go together. So what “old pond” has to do with “jumped into the sound of water” is completely open to question. It’s like there’s this old pond, and then there’s a black hole, a singularity, and then a frog jumps into sound of water. So in the formal structure of a haiku, in Basho’s idea, there’s no connection—but then at the same time, even though there’s no connection, the reader has to forge coherence out of these non-connected fragments. How do you do that? How do you put it together? The answer is called toriawase—the haiku is existing on two levels of reality. If I put it into prose: “Hearing occasionally the sound of frogs jumping in water, an old pond arises in mind.” The old pond couldn’t be found because it doesn’t exist: There is no pond.
So the sense of the haiku cosmos is this: The use of disjunction is a technical feature of haiku, and is the key feature of why it’s not an epithet, and why this famous haiku is not realism, but it’s also why Basho named his school shofū, which means “eye-opening.” It’s the eye-opening school. I think this got carried way too far with Zen. Zen Buddhism took his haiku and said there were stages of enlightenment, but that’s not part of the haiku tradition at all. Aitken Roshi wrote A Zen Wave, which I think is sadly a very misleading book, in terms of the central tradition of haiku in Japan. Zen ideas are not very much a part of the literary tradition of haiku, that I can find. It’s just not central to the discussion. There is a tradition of using haiku in Zen, in Rinzai koan practice, and they’re used in a very specialized and specific way, and Aitken Roshi in his book was referring to that method, but he seems uninformed as to the main tradition of haiku.
That’s kind of a side-light, although it’s interesting in terms of Western perceptions. R.H. Blyth was a British expat who loved Japan, was very well-read and very “modern” in his era—he ends up in Japan, ironically in a POW camp, and his library was bombed and burned. But the POW camp was a good place for him to work on his first book of haiku, because there were a lot of Japanese people there, too, for various reasons. And his first book, Haiku Vol. 1: Eastern Culture, came out in 1947. But what Blyth did was mistranslate the tradition—in a very interesting way, in a very impassioned Zen Buddhist way, and so that’s why we tend to associate this idea of haiku as having a “haiku moment” and that they should be spontaneous. A lot of that is just coming from Blyth, and he had a very interesting, idiosyncratic understanding of Buddhism that was very beautiful, and he’s a very good writer, and there are many people who are in Japanese studies to this day who read Blyth when they were younger and just wanted to go to Japan. So on the one hand he is quite powerful and passionate, and on the other hand, if you ask people in Japan studies, they’ll just say, I have quotes, “Oh, if only those books could be removed from the library.” In his translations, there are some things he’s really not understanding in the social context—many of his interpretations were not Japanese interpretations; they were his ideas.
But that’s what comes down to us, so we’re getting to an interesting discussion: What happens when one cultural tradition plops into modern poetry? In Japan they have kigo and they go back and there are some ancient ones into China, and there are all these sajiki, these collections, and then it pops into our lives as Ezra Pound, creating arguably the first really modern poem, “In a Station of the Metro.” That poem is these days largely considered to be a decent, if unusual, haiku. And he describes how he came to it, you know, first he started with this 30-line thing, and then he cut it to 50 words, and then 14. He talks about how concision becomes fragment, and he talks about this cut. It’s hard to say whether he innovated here, because he had a Japanese friend who spoke English and gave him some haiku ideas; he was weirdly mistranslating Japanese and Chinese in his own way, on purpose. But he’s a great innovator, and he’s looking for this idea of modernity. So as a result, this idea of disjunction, of very strong cutting, has come to us as an Imagist fundamental of modern poetry.
The idea of cutting in haiku gets more nuanced than the idea of a mark or of a sound. And this is called ma. And this gets more into what I’m interested in, which is reader phenomenology. If haiku are incomplete and fragmentary and broken within their very being, their DNA, let’s say, that’s just part of what makes a haiku different than a tanka, or different than any modern poem. It has to have a very strong experience of cutting. Japanese has these cutting words, these kireji—ya, kana, kire, etc., but Basho himself said, “When you use words as kireji, every word becomes kireji. When you do not use words as kireji, there are no words which are kireji … From this point, grasp the very depth of the nature of kireji on your own.” He’s talking about reader phenomenology. He’s saying that both as an author in your intention and as a reader in your experience, there are some really interesting things that can happen between the text itself and our experience. We can have author intention to create an experience in the reader, and yet it also takes a skilled reader to experience that intention. If we have a cut like “a frog jumps into water sound,” that’s kind of strange—it’s not a cut like ya, a cutting word, which would be really strong, but it’s merging together, by forcing together the verbal part and the object. This is an irruptive experience; it’s not a strong cut and yet it creates this feeling of what I call psychological in-betweenness. This is also disjunctive. There’s a word for this in Japanese, ma, which is very hard to translate, but it really means a psychological “in-betweenness” caused by disjunction.
Note: For citations to haiku included in this conversation, and links to further reading, visit Richard Gilbert’s page on our website.
IN THE KETTLE, THE SHRIEK by Hannah StephensonPosted by Rattle
Review by Anne Champion
IN THE KETTLE, THE SHRIEK
by Hannah Stephenson
Gold Wake Press
5108 Avalon Drive
Randolph, MA 02368
ISBN-10: 0985919124
2013, 82 pp., $15.95 goldwakepress.com
I have always been attracted to the notion of poetry as prophecy, shamanism, or spirituality. As Percy Shelley famously said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” As a young writer, I would go to poetry readings and hear the rhythms and cadences of haunting truths that made me nearly fall to my knees in worship of the writers. I am reminded of this when reading Hannah Stephenson’s first collection, In the Kettle, the Shriek. She is a shaman of words, a poet of consciousness. She journeys into a deeper reality with the aid of language, bringing back energy and healing through poetic acts and the shapeshifting of physical objects and landscapes. In Birth of a Poet, William Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic calling: “O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession, the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize! Shamanize!” Stephenson accomplishes this with a visionary and magical sense of clarity, producing a collection that explores longing, loss, and want through a “cornucopia of deterioration.” With curiosity, precision, and awe, Stephenson’s “I” transforms into the collective body; her “I” is an eye, a keen observer of the world.
In “Telepathy,” the speaker engages in an interesting sort of poetic engagement with the reader that I have never encountered before. The poem begins as a familiar game: “Pick a card. Picture it.” However, it takes an appropriately magical turn when it says:
You’re at the volcano, grinning big, I mean
really big, with your eyes totally open
in surprise because someone is standing
next to you with his arm around your shoulders.
Who is it. Who do you see. What does he do
when the ground starts jostling against your feet.
Suddenly and surprisingly, the speaker forces the reader into deep self reflection, plunging us into an imaginary territory where we must admit who we love most, who we want protecting us, and how they succeed or fail as the world begins to shake or crumble. Additionally, Stephenson does not use question marks for her questions (a technique that is continued throughout the entire book). Normally, I would find this annoying, but Stephenson’s purposeful use of it made me thoughtfully pause over the questions more than I would have with question marks present. I began to see that our questions themselves are so revealing that they are not questions at all: they are facts and truths about humanity.
Some of the most potent commonly shared human experiences are loss and death. The collection thematically coheres by meditating on grief in many poems.
In “Seasonally Affected,” the images allude to death throughout: daylight “drains away,” branches are described as bones, plant life remains but does not grow. The poem ends with these lines:
Tell your cells
that this bulb is the sun transformed into
a potted plant. They may or may not
fall for it. There will always be
darkness in you. What can you build
with it, with your sensitivity.
I found these two stanzas tenderly poignant. They point to the way that we try to deny grief, rationalize our way out of it, trick ourselves, often unsuccessfully, into not feeling it. However, ultimately, our sensitivity, our hurt, our darkness is engrained into our DNA.
In fact, even Stephenson’s titles reveal how interested she is in exploring what is most common among people. Many of her poems are titled after common clichés or phrases, in which she trumps the reader’s expectations by turning the cliché on its head. Some examples are “Little Black Dress,” “Five Second Rule,” “First Things First,” and “Serious Stuff.” In one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Dot Com,” she addresses the millennial age of the internet:
We cannot touch
meaning, but we can gesture
toward it, point at it, point it out
for others in the room so they
can share with their grandchildren
what it was like, beauty dot edu,
a great calm dot com. #Amen.
While the use of hashtags and dot com in poetry can be read as humorous, I believe this poem is actually a profound exploration of the notion of spirituality, connection, communication, and community in contemporary society. In fact, I often wonder why poets don’t talk about texts, emails, hashtags, facebook, and dot coms more often, as that is the real world that we remain deeply submerged in on a daily basis. In this poem, Stephenson explores what that immersion means for our traditional ideals of love and connection.
Similarly, Stephenson examines serious topics such as change, death, life, and mortality in a poem titled “Fraction,” which responds to a tweet by Jimmy Kimmel: “One day, my heart will stop beating. (Not everything is a joke).” The speaker then begins to imagine a world without herself in it. The objects owned are dispersed, the celebrities change, the friends are all dead as well. She states:
Feathers fill the pillows, and teens
and preteens take the risk of placing
their tongues in each other’s mouths.
Forever, you will never come back.
Here, we see that in death, life is not that changed at all: the cycles of love, risk, and the daily pleasures of life remain. Life changes, and we change, but life also stays exactly the same as it’s always been.
Hannah Stephenson’s first collection is soul food: it’s heavy and it sticks to your ribs long after you have consumed it. She’s tackling big game in this collection, carefully examining notions that may seem beyond our grasp. She looks at topics that terrify straight in the eye, and the originality of her images exposes a clarity that is difficult to pull off, but her risks are well worth the reward. I’ll end this review with my favorite lines from “Reciprocity;” they beautifully embody the themes of loss and memory that anchor this stunningly prophetic book.
So it is with cities that we go away from.
That which we leave
Swipes slimy fingers over us, slipping out.
What we hang onto
gets compressed, layered. Remembering
destroys a place,
obliterates whatever does not glitter, makes
a new thing for us
to miss.
__________
Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Pank Magazine, The Comstock Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of the Academy of American Poet’s Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a St. Botolph Emerging Writer’s Grant nominee, and a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop participant. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and received her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College. She currently teaches writing and literature at Emerson College, Wheelock College, and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. (anne-champion.com)
There are some things about my past I’d rather forget. I think that’s a pretty universal thought, isn’t it? But after reading Tailor Shop: Threads, I’ll never see forgetting the same. It’s a political act, an act of survival even, to forget, to reshape history, to look away from what brings us pain. Cesarco Eglin’s poems don’t let us do that; they don’t let me do that. These are poems about clothing, sure, about a family’s profession, tailoring, about language, about migration, about history, and how these aspects are threaded together through generations to create identity. These poems speak to the importance of remembering.
For example, in the poem “The Tailor” the reader is introduced to a central character, a man with “an eye for measurements” and a tailoring “career in seams.” Through beautiful language and careful detail, we get a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of his life which began in Lithuania and ended in Montevideo, Uruguay. But what happened in between? There’s something sinister beneath the surface with “other fabrics he tied to his feet to unbalance the march towards death. Crude footprints in the winter.” Here, we see the past alluded to, not stated directly, of the Holocaust, of World War II, of pain and upheaval. Instead, the speaker chooses to emphasize the “measuring tape on the shoulder, the glasses on the nose,” and the fact that the tailor sewed “himself an afterwards” across an ocean. Forgetting. In this poem, in the tailor’s life, “the seams don’t show.”
This act of forgetting and remembering, of silence and retelling, is played out again in the chapbook’s next poem, “My Granddaughter and the Chronicle,” where the reader is allowed into this intimate moment, a girl sitting on her grandmother’s knee, going through a box of family photographs. The granddaughter is aptly described as “the princess who kisses the past and awakens it to live.” In these photographs, we examine what’s included and what isn’t, much like one could do to a history textbook, wondering about the implications. The grandmother explains that her wedding photos were cut “to ankle height … the shoes … did not much the bridal outfit” in Rome. The beautiful memories sharply contrast the more painful ones, of Zeide in a concentration camp, “his integrity clinging to the bones,” and too, his feet, “frozen and numb from the death march,” are cut out from the photographs. And again, the larger metaphor of tailoring is interwoven here—that in order to move on, to survive, one must “cut and trim from memory everything that hurts” to “continue making suits.” But ever more important is keeping the story, the memory, “To tell it—a generation later.” The speaker knows how to “refute oblivion” how to “engender/ memory,” and to “conceive a lineage” in voice, in braids, mannerisms, and perhaps most importantly, “keeps repeating alterations.” All of this is done through the act of telling history, of remembering.
Perhaps one of the strongest aspects of this chapbook, however, is how the author is able to weave in language and culture within the context of tailoring, of history, of remembering, and examining this particular thread with such delicate care. In “Connotations” we’re let to explore what the word “camp” can mean: “a place to rest the head and forget” or to “pronounce it with more than just the mouth” to see both the “grass brush against Uruguayan prairies” and “a disquieting gray/ between life unraveled.” It’s both a playground and a concentration camp in one, instead of having to choose one or the other. Here, we see the complexities of identity, of culture, all explored within just one seemingly simple word. Of course, this being a chapbook of translations, one would expect language play, code-switching, and Tailor Shop: Threads is, at its heart, an exploration of the connection between identity and language, the skin and tongue. And perhaps the most significant way to keep memories alive are to speak them—to “ingrain them in my language” to mark them “in my tongue.”
And after examining the Cesarco Eglin family’s roots, in examining identity at its seams, where it was cut, where it was patched, I couldn’t help but think of my own past, which is suspiciously holey like Swiss cheese. It made me wonder what I’m “forgetting,” leaving out from my personal history, my family’s history, our nation’s history, just because some things are too painful or difficult to examine. Tailor Shop: Threads does just this, on a micro-level—these are rich poems that don’t let us forget, that encourage readers to examine not only the past of one woman, one family, but their own history, their family’s, their world’s. It makes me wonder what stories have been cut out, discarded like leftover cloth from the histories we tell, forgotten. Remembering—it’s painful; it’s beautiful; it’s vital. Laura Cesarco Eglin made me want to remember, look back, and reconsider history, all of this from a chapbook you can read in one sitting. Tailor Shop is a little collection of translations that will sit on your tongue like the complex strands of “special shtikaleh broit” with “One generation in each strand.”
__________
Katherine Hoerth teaches English at the University of Texas Pan American. She is the author of three poetry books: a collection titled The Garden Uprooted (Slough Press, 2012) and two chapbooks titled The Garden of Dresses (Mouthfeel Press, 2012) and Among the Mariposas (Mouthfeel Press, 2010). In addition to teaching and poeming, she is a regular book reviewer for Boxcar. She is currently infatuated with chapbooks. (kghoerth@utpa.edu)
The stereotypes about athletes and poets might make it seem like an odd combination, but poetry lives everywhere, and stereotypes need to be broken. The summer issue of Rattle features 22 poets who break the mold—professional athletes from the NFL and NBA, tennis pros, soccer players, weightlifters, marathon runners, and more—capped off with a wide-ranging conversation with semi-pro basketball player and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn. As these poets explain in a particularly interesting contributor notes section, poetry and athletics fit together like a hand in a ball-glove.
The latest in our always-popular career tributes, Rattle #55 features a collection of seventeen civil servants—poets who have worked for various government agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, the CIA, the Census Bureau, and many more. Apparently working for the public produces a dry sense of humor, because many of the poems lean sardonic. These poets are also smart and down-to-earth, and just may restore your faith in bureaucracy. In the conversation section, Alan Fox talks to formalist and translator A.M. Juster, also known as Michael Astrue, who served as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
