Student Poetry Reading

I hosted a poetry reading today for my students. This semester they have studied many of the traditional Japanese poetic forms, including: the sendouka, the chouka, the mondouka, the haiku, the cirku, the lune, the tanka/waka, the renga/renku, the haibun, the haiga, the jisei, tanka prose, the senryuu, and the kasen. We learned about each of these formal traditions in Japanese (including their history), and also studied how they have been adapted for usage into English. Part of the way the students learned about these adaptations was to try writing each form in English. We had a unit on the problems of translating Japanese poems into English, and the students had a go at that as well. We also did various traditional games/activities based on the forms, including karuta (a card game based on tanka), a ginkou (a haiku walk), and renga games (timed writing of linked poems).

Today was the culmination of our class: each student had to read three poems at a reading (two original poems and one from the literature, which they may or may not have translated on their own). Many students chose to share visual poems such as haiga and cirku, and that was very gratifying for our audience. Each student also was responsible for giving our audience a brief explanation of one of the forms we studied.

For her senryuu assignment (a haiku-like poem which is often ironic, and sometimes sexual) one of my students wrote about the irony of learning about Japanese poetic forms in English from an American teacher, rather than in Japanese from a Japanese teacher. I enjoyed her poem, and felt I had really succeeded is helping her understand what irony was.

All in all I'd say the semester and today's reading were both successes, and I'd encourage other teachers of English in Japan to consider using Japanese poetic forms as a classroom device.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt to have refreshments at the end of the reading!

Your Haiku in Space!

NASA is looking for haiku to include on a disk to be carried into space by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. While only three poems will go to Mars, all entrants will be listed on the disk. Winning poems will be determined by popular vote. July 1st is the deadline. GO!

(Thanks to Sky News HD for the story.)

Here's the submissions info, and an article from NPR on the topic (the title says "NASA Seeks Poets". How often is that going to happen? GO GO GO!)

New Year Haiku

I turn to the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) for New Year haiku on this New Year's Eve Day.

These I found at the site Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, where there are over 10,000 of Issa's haiku, complete with a handy search function so you choose your topic. I  searched for New Year and found 17 haiku, a few of which I present below.

I chose this one because it has been flitting snow all day here in Kobe.

1820

.御降りの祝儀に雪もちらり哉
o-sagari no shûgi ni yuki mo chirari kana

 

 

sprinkled in
with the new year's rain...
flitting snow

 

 

This one I chose simply because it captures my mood.

 

1822

.年立やもとの愚が又愚にかへる
toshi tatsu ya moto no gu ga mata gu ni kaeru

 

 

a new year--
the same nonsense
piled on nonsense

 

 

This is is about old age, which I have been thinking about a lot, and about eyesight, which is a constant obsession in our family. (Son #2 got his first pair of glasses yesterday, as it happens.)

 

1813

かすむやら目が霞やらことしから
kasumu yara me ga kasumu yara kotoshi kara

 

 

all is misty
even my eyes!
from this new year on

 

 

This one suggest that the barley fields will soon change color, turning green, ripening. I am currently working on a linked series of prose poems about color, so this appealed to me.

 

1819

けふからは正月分ぞ麦の色
kyô kara wa shôgatsu bun zo mugi no iro

 

 

after today
a new year begins!
the color of barley

 

 

And of course, children, their constant needs and gifts.

 

1822

.今夜から正月分ンぞ子ども衆
konya kara shôgatsubun zo kodomoshû

 

 

after this night
a new year dawns!
children

 

This one echoes the previous haiku about the barley changing color, doesn't it?

 

This website also has a random haiku generator. Click on that link and get a random haiku by Issa. Or search for what you want.

 

Either way, Happy New Year!

JWC 2012: My Impressions

So I've been threatening for weeks to tell you about the Japan Writers Conference 2012 and here it goes. I was able to attend for the full two days this year, so I'm going to just tell you about the presentations in which I learned something specific.

I went to Australian poet David Gilbey's poetry editing workshop. Since I left Florida over 8 years ago, I haven't been part of a workshopping group, so it was instructive and surprising to listen to feedback on my work. However, what I really learned in this presentation was how to be a better reader. David was generous with the kinds of questions he asked the poets, never assuming that something was done without intending effect, but rather asking for clarification of the intention whenever something "interesting" was done. Furthermore, many of the poets were non-native English speakers writing in English, so when I saw syntactical or grammatical errors, I assumed it was due to that, but David and another participant were always quick to assume that the poet was doing something interesting (which often wasn't the case, but why not make this generous assumption as well as notice if there was a happy accident in play). I'm also quick to find logical inconsistencies in poems, and another participant pointed out that the inconsistency might be saying something about the voice of the poem, rather than the poet, which is something I'm ashamed to say I hadn't considered. So basically, I learned that I need to be a more generous and flexible reader.

As I mentioned previously, I attended two haiku workshops, because I may be doing a class on Japanese poetic forms next year. The first class was on the history of haiku in English, by Philip Rowland, who is one of the editors of a forthcoming haiku anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton). He covered the first known haiku in English by George Ashton in 1877, which followed the single line that is the traditional Japanese form, then he went through the imagists', including Amy Lowell's, fascination with haiku, the form's influence on the Beat poets, up to present day English haiku. I particularly like this haiku shared by Rowland:

cobwebs
hesitating
us
     Paul Reps (1959)

The second class was a craft class by Nagoya-based poet and friend Leah Ann Sullivan, in which parameters of haiku in English were discussed, and we had a chance to try our hand at reframing a traditional seasonal (autumn) Japanese haiku with our own imagery. Leah does interesting collaborative work with musicians, pairing their improvisations with her seasonal haiku, and we got to experience that during her workshop. She also does a haiku gingko walk in Nagoya, during which people walk around a course and read haiku (aloud, not printed, I believe) about the season. Leah has a very inclusive original way of working with artists from all genres which I admire.

I also went to Kiyoko Ogawa's presentation on jisei, which are Japanese "swan song" poems, or poems composed before death to be left to family and friends. These can be done at any point in life, and many can be written throughout a single lifetime, but they do tend to be written during old age or times of peril. The form is generally short, 3 to 5 lines or so, and the themes include comforting the bereaved, recalling good times, lamenting on the ephermerality of life, expressing anxiety and/or regret, seeking comfort, musings over acceptance or destiny, longing for salvation, and expressing readiness to die. Here are few translations offered by Ogawa:

Life was something like
the moonlight
barely reflecting
on the water
I scooped in my palms.
            Ki no Tsurayuki (c868-945)

Blossoms shall be blossoms,
people people,
only when they come to know
the right time to fall.
             Hosokawa Gratia  (1563-1600) (This is a women traitor to to the family in power. She later became Christian, and as she was preventd from commiting suicide by her beliefs, she had her servant do the deed.)

Like pleasure
I'm trying to familiar with
what is stealthily coming next to me
in darkness.
              Nakajo Fumiko

We all attempted our own jisei, which was an interesting exercise. I like the one I came up with but it was really addressed to myself, so someday I'd like to write some more with my children in mind.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's presentation on ecopoetry was an eye opener for me. I had thought that ecopoetry dealt only with ecological themes, but Jane argued that the category includes any poem discussing human relationships with nature and/or animals, as well as discussions on attitudes of assumed stewardship of humans over nature. Jane further went on to say that any kind of recycling of language or imagery (sampling) is also ecopoetry. Using an abundance of examples from over a thousand years ago till today, Jane showed us that while the term ecopoetry is new, the writing of ecopoems is not. I even realized that I write ecopoetry, and hadn't known it.

Ann Tashi Slater gave a talk on flash fiction, and I asked her what she thought the difference between flash fiction and prose poetry was. This is a question that I've been wondering about for some time, and I had heard on a podcast that flash fiction has a plot, and a discernable beginning, middle and ending, but the flash fiction I've read doesn't necessarily have those, and can be quite indiscernible from prose poetry much of the time. Ann said that she thought both forms were language-driven rather than plot-driven (I hope I'm not misrepresenting her opinion!) and that the difference was in many cases simply what you classified a piece in order to meet the demands of the marketplace you were attempting to place it in. That is, many pieces can be called flash fiction when submitting to the fiction market, and prose poetry when submitting to the poetry market. This seemed to be consistent with what I've observed, but I'd LOVE to have anyone else's opinion on the matter as well. So feel free to comment (on this point as well as any other).

Finally, I went to James Crocker's presentation on the new JALT (Japan Association of Language Teachers) journal, The Font, which will be a literary journal with the theme of language acquisition and teaching. This is a new venue for writers in Japan and out, and those in the teaching (particularly TESOL and TEFL) profession and outside of it as well. I was also surprised to find out that Crocker is married to a colleague of mine!

I went to a few other presentations, but that's enough for today!

Tshirt Haiku

So I got my computer back from the shop yesterday and one of the first things I found was an email from my sister, telling me about a tshirt worn by one of her students (my sister is a math teacher, by the way--it runs in the family). Here's the tshirt :

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator


I attended two workshops on haiku at the Japan Writers Conference 2012 (since I may be teaching a class on Japanese poetic forms next spring), and I have been unable to report on those presentations as well as the others I enjoyed that weekend. So look for a conference update coming soon, as soon as I get everything reinstalled on my computer and feel back to normal.

Issa and Hass

Gwarlingo's "The Sunday Poem" is always a treat, but this week it features a video of Robert Hass reading haiku by Issa, which Hass translated. The video focuses on the humorous aspects of Issa's haiku, and is a real pick-me-up in 2 1/2 minutes.

Gwarlingo also includes a brief biography of Hass, a favorite poet of mine, and of Issa. I didn't realize how little I knew about Issa till I read this info at this site. For example, I didn't realize that he had disputes with his biological and step families, nor that he had written over 20,000 haiku, with over 200 about fireflies and 90 about cicadas, and many more about other small beings inhabiting our planet.

Haiku for Those Who Baiku

I'm in favor of promoting poetry through unusual methods and via surprising usages of it. But I think the city of New York's Department of Transportation may have gone a little far in using haiku signs to promote traffic safety.

Consider, for example, this sign:

Or perhas this one:

By the time you figure out what you are being warned against, you may have created a different safety hazard by blocking traffic while reading and pondering, or drifting into bicycle traffic to get a better look at the sign.

Click on this link at the New York Observer blog to see more of these interesting safety haiku paired with visual images that may cause more problems than they solve. (Shout out to my Osaka-based friend Tracy for making me aware of this article.)

Haiku Topical Dictionary

From my friend Leah I just learned about the Japanese Haiku topical dictionary at the University of Virginia Library Japanese Text Initiative, a program making classical Japanese texts available online.

Choose your season, choose your season word, and a screen pops up and defines the season word (and closely related season words) for you, and then displays several haiku employing them, both in Japanese and translated into English.

For example, the weather here has changed almost overnight from unbearably hot to refreshingly cool, so Leah looked under the season autumn for the word sawayaka, which the dictionary defines as "fresh refreshing, crisp (of weather)". Below the definition are five haiku using this word or a related word to describe the beginning of autumn.

Enjoy browsing haiku using this handy topical dictionary.