Wild Violets, Yuki Teikei Haiku Society Members’ Anthology 2011
Edited by Jerry Ball and J. Zimmerman ISBN 978-0-9745404-9-8.
YTHS: www.youngleaves.org
Review by Alan Summers
The anthology showcases seasonally focused haiku from its members; a summary of winners from the Tokutomi Memorial Haiku Contest (2010); haibun; and essays.
Ann Bendixen’s fine interior art as folding inserts open out into larger pages that work as fine art subject dividers: a great idea, and very practical. An idea of her dramatic and effective touch of colour is shown with the full colour book covers.
I would like to state that this is a most beautifully put together book by a great team, and my only regret, and worry, is that the book may have already sold out but I see on their homepage that a second printing has been authorized. Do check the Society’s home page on a regular basis, and even ask if you can get advance orders, it will sell out!
So many haiku to choose from, but here are a handful:
witching hour
a cloud slips away
from the moon
Christopher Herold
his oxygen tube
stretches the length of the house
winter seclusion
Deborah P. Kolodji
spider silk
it too has come to ruin
under the cherry tree
Michael McClintock
By way of a review I will be addressing one essay in particular as it covers a contentious subject, possibly even deemed controversial in some quarters.
This Editors' Greeting that introduces the anthology includes this paragraph:
The first three essays concern our core tools. Patricia J. Machmiller discusses the considerable value of the kigo. In 2010, she led several one-day seasonal workshops to study the use of the kigo in haiku. Her essay "Kigo: A Poetic Device in English Too" opens the essay section because the kigo is the bedrock of our study. Anne Homan, lead-editor of the San Francisco Bay Area Nature Guide and Saijiki (first published in 2010) shows us the importance of a saijiki (a kigo dictionary) and YTHS's process of constructing one. Deborah Kolodji addresses the ginko (the practice of writing haiku while walking).
The anthology's title is from a haiku by Patricia J. Machmiller:
the little child
wanting only to be held—
wild violets
For anyone not familiar with Patricia J. Machmiller:
Machmiller approaches the subject in an intelligent open manner, giving a clean clear introduction about kigo for those new or even familiar with haiku.
She explains that kigo (plural and singular spelling) are devices used in haiku and renga and are symbolic of a season, and hold the power of allusion to literary, religious, and historical references. This simple statement holds a key, if not the key, to the ongoing debate whether non-Japanese writers can be allowed to use the kigo device.
Kigo have had two histories, one of a poetical device that resonated deeply with writers before, during, and shortly after Matsuo Bashō, on a level that may have included a genuinely deeply felt emotional set of triggers and insights for both writers and selected readers. But which readers, of what socio-economic or cultural background? Was kigo limited to aristocratic circles and later also to the emerging and dominant merchant classes of the new middle classes?
Bashō made renga and its starting verse of hokku (later to morph into haiku) more accessible, to a wider audience. But were the ordinary working class members able to be allowed access to enjoyment of haikai literature (namely renga, and standalone hokku, later haiku) and its devices including kigo?
My preamble is to wonder whether the kigo was purely an academically created and driven poetic (literary) device privy to just an elite, perhaps articulated in an exclusive manner from working class people’s awareness of the natural world around them via their agrarian ties. We know that the post-agrarian society entering the industrial age had access to writing implements, and paper and card, and may have utilised seasonal words and phrases in their greeting cards and letters, as well as poetry, but were these the same as kigo, or early naïve attempts?
The second history is of the increase of centralising kigo despite Japan’s different climates from the South to the North of its islands. Bureaucracy decreed that kigo became regimented, and pre-eminence given to those that related to the environs of the old capital of Kyoto, and the newly emerging capital of Edo aka current day Tokyo.
Is kigo really the Japanese people’s collective consciousness, and so all non-Japanese people must be excluded? Or the secured preserve of a few?
We know that hokku and haiku began to be readily available under two American actions, the mid 19th Century arrival of US black ships brokering an end to isolation for Japan and opening up of world trade; and the 1945-1952 Occupation of Japan after WWII. Japanese artists welcomed these actions and embraced Western art, which influenced haiku poetry, and of course the West were introduced to Japanese art including poetry.
Why the resistance regarding haiku’s most potent tool, namely kigo, when haiku already started to absorb some Western techniques under Shiki? Would we, should we, insist that Japanese writers desist from writing Italian (or English) sonnets if they so desired? Of course not, and at least sonnets in English have been done.
I wonder if the mystification of the Japanese people by Westerners is bordering on not only mistaken beliefs, as if the Japanese people were separate from all other cultures and races, but encompasses patronising characteristics which are disingenuous, and precariously close to an odd form of inverted racism.
The West is a larger group of poets than ever before, and joined by those in other nations, who look to Japan’s haiku as one kind of inspiration or another. The one great strength of Japanese haikai tradition is to share, and the non-Japanese nations also share by reading each other’s work unless there is censorship imposed on them.
And certainly poets since Milton have strived to read widely, and absorb widely the many methods of other poets, of anything that could inform their work. I am often reminded of Bill Manhire’s poem On Originality: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/manhire/originality.asp
These last two verses sum up my own approach to poetry, where I long ago left my early misinformed isolationist stance, and fear of contamination, so common amongst many poets first starting out; where we avoid the influence by others, of whatever nation or race.
It is a difficult world.
Each word is another bruise.
This is my nest of weapons.
This is my lyrical foliage.
Each word is another bruise.
This is my nest of weapons.
This is my lyrical foliage.
We know poets concern themselves with form (or genre) with its shapes and techniques, and yet out of all forms and genres of poetry worldwide it seems there is almost an embargo on haiku with its most telling technique, that of the kigo. Where it is common practice in poetry to utilise and adapt new and old techniques from other lands, it is almost seen as verboten, and actually anti-Japanese to use kigo, and label it as such. I feel that both Bashō and Shiki would have been perplexed at this block in a poet’s attitude, and a potentially dangerous chink in their arsenal.
Merely calling something a season word or a seasonal reference, if a non-Japanese writer attempts haiku, could be misleading and unfairly limiting both to writers and readers of haiku outside Japan, especially if the word(s) go beyond just the spelling out of a season.
I agree with Machmiller when she says:
“…I do not believe that the Japanese have a lock on kigo…”
Unlike Machmiller I feel it’s time to make saijiki (the kigo dictionary) a regular actuality in countries where there occurs a large number of haiku and renga writers. This process needs to be fluid and inclusive: not an exclusive club for elite literati to dictate to lesser mortals. As well as potential new strains of inverted racism, I worry that an ongoing inverted snobbery has gone on for too long both in Japan, and in the West. Or is it misguided rose-tinted spectacles placed on a fainting goat?
Machmiller states how certain words and phrases in Western culture already operate as kigo. I don’t intend to quote or reveal any more of Machmiller’s essay, as I want the anthology (in its entirety) to be part of many a haiku poet’s reference library.
On a final note, it seems that the terms kigo and its partner term kidai are Post-Isolation Japan:
“After haiku became a fully independent genre, the term "kigo" was coined by Otsuzi Ōsuga (1881-1920) in 1908. "Kigo" is thus a new term for the new genre approach of "haiku." So, when we are looking historically at hokku or haikai stemming from the renga tradition, it seems best to use the term "kidai." Although the term "kidai" is itself new—coined by Hekigotō Kawahigashi in 1907!
Itō, Yūki. The Heart in Season: Sampling the Gendai Haiku Non-season Muki Saijiki, preface in Simply Haiku vol 4 no 3, 2006.
This was reviewed in:
Notes from the Gean Vol. 3, Issue 3 December 2011
Lynx: A Journal for Linking Poets XXVII:1 February, 2012
AWARD WINNING ANTHOLOGY
Wild Violets received Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Prize Honorable Mention for Best Anthology 2012.
The judges, Carolyn Hall and Christopher Patchel, said
“This very attractive book (made so by a beautiful cover and foldout Chinese brush paintings by Ann Bendixen) includes two poems by each of 57 member poets, as well as haibun and informative essays by well-known haijin.”
Amazon USA
p.s.
See my article on the cutting and seasonal techniques of haiku:
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Thanks Allan. This looks amazing. I will be looking for a copy
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Maureen Sudlow