TABLE OF CONTENTS

XVI:3 October 2001

Always Filling Always Full Tanka by Margaret Chula. White Pine Press: 2001. Perfect bound, 6 x 9 inches, 112 pages, Artwork by Jef Gunn, Preface by Jane Hirshfield, Introduction by William J. Higginson, $14.00 + postage. Order Katsura Press, P.O. Box 275, Lake Oswego, OR 97034 or White Pine Press, POB 236, Buffalo, NY 14201. ISBN:1-893996-11-5 at Amazon.com.

Circling Bats: A Concrete Renga by Carlos Colón & Raffael de Gruttola. Tragg Publications, Shreveport, Louisana: 2001. Saddle stapled, 8.5 x 11 inches, eight pages, no price. Contact Carlos Colón.

Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English edited by Agha Shahid Ali. Wesleyan University Press (www.upne.com): 2000. Perfect bound, 196 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN: 0-8195-6437-0. Available in bookstores or at Amazon.com .

Decima Mucho by John M. Bennett and Ivan Arguelles. Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43214. Saddle-stapled, 5.5 x 8 inches, 20 pages, $5.00, ISBN:1-892280-09-4.

nothing personal by LeRoy Gorman. Proof Press, 67 rue Court, Aylmer (QC) Canada J9H 4M1. Saddle-stapled, 52 pages, 5.25 x 4.25 inches, ISBN: 1-89-5778-34-4, $5.00 ppd.

Committed to the Road (Predan Putu) by Marinko Kovacevic. Drustvo Hrvatskih Haiku Pjesnika, Zabreb: 2000. Bilingual Croatian / English. Perfect bound, 5 x 7.5 inches, 130 pages, full-color cover, ISBN: 953-6837-02-1. No price given. Write to: Marinko Kovačević, Severin na Kupi 10, 51329 Severin na Kupi, Croatia.

Haiku – One Breath Poetry by Naomi Wakan. Heian International, Inc., 1815 West 205^th Street, Suite #301, Torrance, CA 90501. 1997. Perfect bound, 6 x 9, 72 pages, full-color cover, illustrated with black and white ink drawings, ISBN:0-89346-846-0. 

The Haiku Bag by Naomi Beth Wakan. Lightsmith Publishing, Box 376, Qualicum Beach, B.C., V9K 1S9 Canada. Perfect bound, 4 x 5.5, 116 pages, ISBN:1-894092-12-0, $10.95 + $3.50 postage and handling. Or order from the author at 3085 Mander, Gabriola Isand, B.C. VOR 1XO Canada.

Fragments by Alan J. Summers, Alasdair Paterson, Alison Williams, David Platt, Gerard England, Hugh Waterhouse, John Crook, Matt Morden, Matthew Paul, Paul Blake, Stanley Pelter, Susumu Takiguchi, and Timothy Collinson collected by Ed Alison Williams. Hub Editions, Longholm, Wingland, East Bank, Sutton Bridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE12 9YS, England: 2001. Flat spine, 2.75 x 4 inches, ISBN: 1-903746-04-3, £1.50 / $3.00. Order from Alison Williams, 9 Wood Road, Ashurst, Hampshire, S040 7BD, England.

What is there not to like about this book?
The title grabs one with the insistence of koan. The mind endlessly ruminates on the wisdom and the aptness of what is Always Filling Always Full? Once you get started thinking on this puzzle it remains stuck with the glue of a professional jingle. This is a perfect title for a book and so very apt for a tanka collection because the poems do fulfill the promise of the title.

Margaret Chula’s first book, Grinding My Ink, showed that she was adept at writing haiku and knew how to make a stunning collection of her work. Then she did Shadow Lines with Rich Youmans to show her skills at collaborative work. Yet during all this time, Margaret was also working on her tanka. A portion of the poems was published in magazines while much of her work was seen winning contests. She has won more awards in the Tanka Splendor contests than any other person. And in The Full Moon Tide, edited by Linda Jeannette Ward, where all the winning entries of the past ten years of the contest judged again to be ranked by 1, 2, and 3, Margaret Chula’s tanka were chosen four times when the best of writers were only represented with one win. Each contest has proved her work is popular, is setting a standard for the genre and is easily appreciated by a large number of readers.

See the daring leap she makes? How she packs meaning in the smallest lines? She starts with "the black negligee" which shares its color with over-ripened plums. The second line implies the concept of waiting with a positive aspect of "bought for your return" – good move. In the center comes the pivot where something hangs in her closet and implies that something is also hanging in a tree – the ripening plums. The idea of the ripening plums also gives off the idea of swelling sexual need and then to know over-ripe plums is to have smelled the very essence of sex which is then tied back to the negligee and its purpose of seduction. Yet what does she seduce in her loneliness? Only the birds come and pick clean the plums as her own being is devastated by the passing of time and unfulfillment. This is strong stuff and absolutely the correct emotional material for a classical tanka. Notice, again, how she is able to ‘talk around’ the feelings without naming them directly, but by carefully choosing images she leads the reader to actually get a sense of what she was feeling.

Again and again in Always Filling Always Full, Chula shows she not only completely understands the tanka techniques and methods but that she has the poet’s ability to take an emotion, give it a parallel in daily reality, and to lead the reader to feel what she was feeling. Another example is:

So what does the failure of a friend’s marriage and rice have to do with each other? Chula does not tell the reader directly, but for anyone who has rinsed rice one knows the feeling of never getting the water to run completely clear. And how it touches us to know a marriage close to our own has failed. It sets one to wondering how to clear and keep clear one’s own relationship with a mate. Is this job as fruitless as washing rice completely clean? Will the cloud of one failed marriage come to her house – to her sink? Her ‘sinking’ feelings? Yet, the poem ends on the positive note that she tries again and again to remove the cloud of bad news from others as well as the cloud of doubts about her own relationship by washing the rice one more time.

For anyone who wishes to see the very best contemporary, classical styled tanka, this book is highly recommended. There is so much to learn about tanka written in English from Chula’s work. In addition she wisely presents her poems without caps, they have none of this lower case ‘i’ for I silliness, and she uses the very minimum of the most necessary punctuation. Only in the sequence "Breaking Even" does she lose her courage and returns to sentence caps and punctuation.

This brings us to the several sequences of tanka. In all cases the poems are collected around a central theme on the title subjects. With her experiments in renga writing and her ability to leap from one part of a tanka to another, it is surprising that she does not apply this thinking to her series. Yet she is wide enough for her sequences to cover the subjects as varying as love and a visit to the memorial at Birkenau. She includes just enough of the longer poems to break up the jerky bounce of individual tanka by offering a smooth surface for the mind to drift and savor, linger and be enlightened.

The tanka are divided into sections, each with an abstract ink drawing by Jef Gunn. In previous books, Chula has chosen Japanese-style sumi-e illustrations, but this time, Gunn is able to match the contemporary feeling of Chula’s tanka with his seemingly simple, but rich-with-meaning abstract forms without imitating the Orientals. The cover illustration, surrounded by the bright red paper and the great title is especially eye-catching and yet stands up to deeper contemplation.

For me, the Preface by Jane Hirshfield could have been longer, but yet I was grateful for her words: "In this world where we have come more and more to see that each thing touches every other, this book is welcome proof of the universality and particularity of the human heart." William J. Higginson wrote the Introduction in which he compares (favorably) Margaret Chula’s tanka with those of the Man’yoshu (Ten Thousand Leaves), the first collection of Japanese tanka. Higginson’s final comment was: "These tanka seem to me among the best I have read." which is high praise indeed.

White Pine Press has done an excellent job (as they usually do) with this book. No typos, everything spaced and placed correctly on lovely creamy papers. The professionalism of their work, with the quality of Margaret Chula’s poems makes Always Filling Always Full a book you should have.

If you are one of those persons who finds renga boring because it seems the same phrases are rolled over and over, if you delight in the leaps but think you know most of the ones possible and especially if you enjoy concrete poetry – this is the book for you. The return of the love of punning (once the basis for renga writing) which is so often stifled in English renga, especially when the work is done for ‘correctness’, is so desperately needed and welcomed when it comes with this degree of expertise. These two authors, by shifting to word pictures, allow themselves the perfect freedom of anything goes. And yet each link is perfectly set in an accompanying appropriate design. Carlos Colón has been doing this many years with his haiku. I remember the first one I ever saw by him which had been sent to Mirrors. I was blown away by his quirky mind, his skill at graphics and his ability to write haiku. Over the years, he has also proved his ability to write renga with the best of them – Alexis Rotella and Marlene Mountain.

At first, to look at a full page of Circling Bats, is like trying read the flight of dimly illuminated flying mice. But as the mind begins to solve the puzzle of each link, curtains lift and view after view comes into focus as the senses are delighted with humor. The links are not signed, (in the back is a list of who wrote what), which keeps the reader focused on the poem. Unfortunately most of the links cannot be replicated here, but this one works in asci (computer keyboard graphics)

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
==========================>
/////////////////

silence
into the heart
of the deer
hunter

Even without the graphic, I would find this haiku by Carlos Colón to be excellent. Other versions have been written on the same theme and prize-crowned, but this one, I feel, is the very best haiku on the subject. And notice how the graphic adds the information the reader needs perfectly to make one more aspect of meaning.

Raffael de Gruttola keeps pace with Carlos’s mind in Circling Bats, with:

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhat

But I wonder what Carlos and LeRoy Gorman, of Canada, who is so well-known for his concrete haiku, could do with a concrete renga. Stay tuned.

Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English edited by Agha Shahid Ali. Wesleyan University Press: 2000. Perfect bound, 196 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN: 0-8195-6437-0. Available in bookstores or at Amazon.com.

Ouch! That added phrase "Real Ghazals in English" in this title brings on the pain felt when the many ‘masters’ who have assumed they have authority to think they can attempt to tell us what a real haiku or a real renga is. It is bad enough to have to read the phrase once in the title but the graphics on the cover repeat it thirteen times across the front. One gets the feeling of a table being pounded, burning bushes and stone tablets. All of this emphasis is really not necessary nor is it welcomed.

We English writers are interested in knowing more of the origins of the ghazal and we can even accept the fact that someone with a Farsi name has an opinion and knowledge of the genre. In fact we are eager to learn all we can about the form as written in both Farsi and Urdu and welcome any information people from these cultures can bring to us.

But we have to feel confident in the abilities of the messenger to bring us the truth. In an example of how he attempts to confuse the information he is supposedly bringing us, Agha tells us that he is the source of the (false) information that ‘ghazal’ is to be pronounced ‘ghuzzle’ (the sound of wine drinking) and that he did it as a ‘joke’ or as he says: "to be teasingly petty". This misinformation got all the way into Lynx pages as we attempted to stay on top of ‘new’ information on the genre. Nowhere in the introduction to Ravishing DisUnities does Agha tell us his pronunciation for ghazal. (Sunil Datta, translator with Robert Bly of Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib, speaks the word as ‘ruzzle’ with a very soft, swallowed ‘r’ with a hint of an ‘h’. But even Robert Bly, on the same stage with Sunil insisted on saying the word as gay-zel). Instead of bringing us some clarity on the subject, Agha mixes up ideas and information by stating: "Perhaps one way to welcome the shackles of the form and be in emotional tune with them is to remember one definition of the word ghazal: It is the cry of the gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it will die." This ties the pronunciation to ‘gay-zel". In discussing this with Gene Doty, he stated that his son-in-law, who is Indian, also speaks the word as Sunil does.

Okay. How are the poems in this the first anthology of English-language ghazals? Like any collection there are a few very good poems and a lot which cannot be read to the bottom of the page. What this book is not, is an overview of ghazals being currently written in English because Agha negates any poem that does not hold to the repeats as he espouses in his set of rules. What he seems unable to achieve is the idea that when a poetry form migrates from one culture to another, certain changes will occur. He also seems to forget that when this happens, the newcomers have the courage to drop the very aspects which are choking the form in its home country. In this case, it is the boredom that sets in with centuries of using the repeats. When the newcomers accomplish this sometimes necessary pruning, the genre blooms forth with new vitality and interest that attracts the best poets of the target country. By setting up the rules as known in Persia and India, and judging English ghazals only with this yardstick, Agha Shahid Ali has missed the marvel of what is really happening to the ghazal in English.

One more gripe: Agha Shahid Ali refers to ‘haikus’, which is bad enough by a professor of Creative Writing of University of Utah, who has also taught at Warren Wilson College, and held visiting appointments at Hamilton College, University of Massachusettes, Princeton, University of New York and State University of New York. He then perpetrates the false idea of the position of haiku in poetry as shared in universities by stating in his introduction: "This seemingly "light" form [the use of the ghazal as song lyrics in many parts of the East] can lead to a lot of facile poetry (haikuish-ly one could say)." and then Agha Shahid Ali goes to write: "It is the sort of thing that happens with haiku (Richard Howard is supposed to have said that as a poetry editor having to read five hundred haikus [sic] a week was like being nibbled to death by goldfish, and James Merrill in his "Prose of Departure" has actually used rhymes for his haikus [sic] so that Americans will know that "something is going on")." No wonder haiku has such a low status among academia when such ideas are dragged out even when informing on a completely different poetry genre. This is gratuitous bashing of haiku - a valid form of poetry by a professor of writing. Why do we have to have people with this narrow mind-set? And why are they the ones who are supported by university presses? The time for a much needed poetry revolution is at hand.

Onward and hopefully this review goes upward. Several poets who have published poems in Lynx are included in this anthology (Marcyn Del Clements, Mary Jo Salter, Robert William Watkins and Bruce Williams) since they also wanted to follow the strictures as Agha puts forth in his announcement of how to get into his book. Names of well-know persons who successfully jumped through the hoop are: Marilyn Hacker, Maxin Kumin, W.S. Merwin, Paul Muldoon. Missing and greatly missed are the works of Adrianna Rich, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Carolyn Kizer, Gene Doty, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

I was very excited to find one poem in the whole anthology in which I felt the repeats worked. The poem was written by Robert Hastings whose bio states: "was in his early teens when he sent in this ghazal. Now in his mid-teens, he is the youngest contributor to the anthology. He lives in Chicopee, Massachusetts." His stanzas were so bizarre and refreshingly odd that the repeats were a welcomed relief in the flow of madness. There is hope for the genre when the young can write like this:

Ghazal

Trying to fly in the meantime
ready to dry in the meantime

flocks of turds have fun with words
wanting to rely in the meantime

herds of sheep don’t love you as I do
wanting to tie in the meantime

licorice love intoxicates trees
about to expire and die in the meantime

obsessed with masturbation and desiring sex
teens begin to cry in the meantime

depending upon the density of fat
pigs float by in the meantime

BOOK MENTIONS

John M. Bennett and Ivan Argűelles almost have too much fun with this book. This work is done in the spirit of ‘hacking’ as known in John Bennett’s magazine, Lost and Found Times. Maybe I should explain: in the zine, a method of writing has evolved in which one person writes a poem or titled prose piece and another person hacks it apart by rewriting what s/he finds in the original work and makes a distorted and distended copy. An example from Decima Mucho is John’s piece:

Slip
Slop anew o slap the
choking fall against yr
leg ‘n small knee
toothy egg stand a
mile ‘n rubble free.
clumps chorizo, smoking
noose. while you were
freezing! "opposition" apes
mainly dumps ‘n plans;
turned around’s the same

Then Ivan Argűelles, under the influence of his culture, mother tongue (and who knows what else) ‘hears’ John’s piece and records it as:

Shloooooop!
woops she died a failure of mortal
re gress, shames a bit off the chin ‘n
shoves the rest into the reader clamp
for a heavy re load into gutted space,
while mean at the raunch a slogan
fetters re trail wi’ souds a’ sci,,u
(didja ivver?) floating eventu ality
choking carnally that, is, if ya can
stand like that against the wind whilst
splicing muumy’s gore little piddle

With two to three haiku per page divided into four groups and even some eye-ku tossed in for good measure, the reader truly gets his or her money’s worth in nothing personal. Though the title sounds as if the haiku are haiku cool, LeRoy Gorman is never without his sense of humor, puns and rabid jokes. An example:

a schoolbus passes
cattails give it
the finger

But he also has his serious side as he takes on environmental issues, global and personal madness, and the ills of society.

a yellow truck
herbicide fogs
the green ditches

And Gorman has his gentle moments in today’s hectic world, too.

wildflowers in bloom
the cop turns off
the radar

Highly recommended for the good, the bad, the funny and the beautiful!

The Association of Croatian Haiku Poets, seeing the need for the publication of the books of their associates, has started a press exclusively dedicated to bringing haiku beyond the borders of their country. This venture is to be greatly applauded, supported and even copied. Should that more poetry genre clubs take up their example. If I could tell others which country I felt was producing the most interesting haiku-inspired poetry today, I would unhesitatingly name Croatia. Again and again I am amazed by the poetic quality of the poems from their writers. An example from Marinko Kovačević:

Two pairs of steps.
Each gone its own direction.
Snow and silence.

Winner of The Canadian Children’s Book Center Choice Award, Haiku – One Breath Poetry, in the hands of Naomi Wakan, makes haiku approachable and easy to learn for both kids and adults. Grounded firmly in the Japanese haiku, the book blossoms out in the topics necessary for the appreciation and writing of haiku in English. The book straddles a great many deep subjects with aplomb, brevity and ease and includes a brief bibliography for different age groups. As blurb on the back is:

Pick up a pencil,
or turn on the computer . . .
now breath in, and write.

Over half of the book is given to identifying haiku, telling how-to-write haiku, haiku history in brief, and quoting haiku by ‘famous’ writers before coming to the haiku of Naomi Beth Wakan on page 57. Her haiku are arranged by seasons. A sample from autumn:

Planning to fasten
The vine up, I see
The spider did it first

Forty haiku from the 13 writers (Alan J. Summers, Alasdair Paterson, Alison Williams, David Platt, Gerard England, Hugh Waterhouse, John Crook, Matt Morden, Matthew Paul, Paul Blake, Stanley Pelter, Susumu Takiguchi, and Timothy Collinson), who have only met over the Internet, though they all come from England, Scotland and Wales. Interestingly enough, the authors are indicated only by initials below the haiku. To solve the riddle of who wrote what, one has to turn to the back for the list of contributors. From the compiler, Alison Willaims:

Armistice day -
two men come
to mend the fence

Who We Are

The next deadline is January 1, 2002

Read book reviews in previous issues of Lynx:

XV:2 Book Reviews
XV:3 Book Reviews
XVI:1 Book Reviews
XVI:2 Book Reviews

Read the previous issues of Lynx:
XV:2 June, 2000
XV:3 October, 2000
XVI:1 February, 2001
XVI:2 June, 2001