TABLE OF CONTENTS

XVII:1 February, 2002

This Tanka Whirl by Sanford Goldstein. Clinging Vine Press, Linda Jeannette Ward, Editor, P.O. Box 231, Coinjock, NC 27923. Saddle stapled, 55 pages, 8.5 x 5.5, illustrated by Kazuaki Wakui, autumn 2001, $10.00.

A Pattern for This Place by Carol Purington. Illustrations by Stephanie B. Purington. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01329. Perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5, 70 pp. with notes, autumn 2001, price: $12.00.

Moondust – Poussière de Lune. Giselle Maya with Edward Baranosky, Christopher Herold, Mari Konno, June Moreau, Pamela Miller Ness and Linda Jeannette Ward. Koyama Press, 84750 Saint Martin de Castillon, France. Hand-tied, 10 x 13 inches, 60 pages of mica impressed paper, handmade paper cover, illustrations by Aisha Sieburth, 2001, price:$20. + $6.00 airmail postage.

Raku by Edward Baranosky. EAB Pub, 115 Parkside Drive, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6R-2Y8. Saddle-stapled, 8.5 x 5.5, 40 pages, illustrated by the author.

Legacy 2:An anthology of poetry. The Writer’s Literary Series of the Poets of Toronto and Central Ontario Branch edited by Edward Baranosky. Perfect bound, 112 pages, 8.5 x 5.5, $14.95. Contact: Toronto and Central Ontario of the Canadian Authors Association, Box 11041, 97 Guildwood Pkwy., Toronto, Ontario, M1E 5G5, Canada 

RAISING THE BLADE: Haiku and Tanka by R.G. Rader. An AHA Book Online.

Karumi Moon: probing into ancient and modern haiku. Evelyn Catharine Yates. De Senlis & Evelyn 2304-100 Spadina Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5R 2I7, 2001. Perfect bound, 50 pages, 8.5 x 5.5.

HAIKU MENTIONS

Dim Sum by the Route 9 Haiku Group. Haiku by Hilary Tann, Yu Chang, John Stevenson and guest poet – Jim Kacian. Published by John Stevenson, P.O. Box 122, Nassau, NY 12123. Saddle-stapled, 30 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, autumn 2001, $5.00 for a single copy.

A Purple So Deep. An anthology of haiku collected by Leatrice Lifshitz. Saddle stapled, 5.5 x 5.5 inches, 60 pages, autumn 2001.

monk and i by vincent tripi. Illustrations by David Kopitze. Hummingbird Press, P.O. Box 96, Richland Center, WI 53581. Handset and printed on a windmill press by Swamp Press and hand-tied, 60 pages, 7 x 5 inches, autumn 2001, $12.00.

It seems Sanford Goldstein’s own words in the "some after-thoughts" at the end of the book, best express his position of his tanka in the contemporary scene. "And so This Tanka Whirl . . . I have always felt that Takuboku was right when he said in one of his essays that tanka is a diary of the emotional life of the poet. Throughout the years I have followed this principle, yet have myself felt that the content of the traditional tanka was too restricted. Poets talk about love, about nature, about death, about friends, about mothers, and illnesses and trips. I have done that too. But I have tried to broaden even more the content of tanka – the games of children, the impossibility of the tanka form itself, the connection of tanka to literature, my Zen experience and a tanka – a multiple diversity."

Sanford Goldstein has been writing tanka for thirty-eight years and has four collections of his tanka to his credit – the first being published in 1977. He has translated the tanka of Akiko Yosano, Takuboku Ishikawa, Mokichi Saito, Shiki Masaoka and Ryokan so he knows the Japanese tanka as no other person on this earth. Without question he is the Father of English Tanka. We owe him so much and now we have a new collection of his own tanka. The contents are divided into nine sequences of six to nine tanka. Many of the tanka seemed to be addressed to characters or famous authors now living only in their books covering all his sources of inspiration: Ahab in Moby Dick, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Anne Frank, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby and Akiko Yosano. One of the techniques we tanka writers can learn from the Japanese is the art of connecting one’s own work to that of famous persons. Most of us have not yet even begun to work on this facet of the form, but Goldstein brings it to us complete with references to our own literary history.

again, Hamlet,
you haul me to your heart,
to your precious mouth,
and I feel even tanka
can scale the spectacular

whirling
in the glitter of Gatsby,
I recall
all the glory, all the ruin,
of my splintered visions

Akiko,
when you spoke
to those young men
about love ages ago,
did it include this old-fart me?

You will notice that in printing his tanka, Goldstein had dropped caps and periods, but still retains the comma when it only comes at the end of line. Does anyone beside me question this?

Something in me wants to be extremely critical of Goldstein’s poems to point out that:

the handle
of this racket,
these green
balls,
and this celibate me!

is awfully close to haiku or even kyoku. I suspect he, too, feels there is more to get out of tanka when he writes in the first poem of the book:

so tame,
so tame,
these tanka tribulations:
sometimes I want berserk music
for some world in me gone berserk!

But as I read through the book again and again my admiration grows for the path he is on and his steadfastness on his exalted climb and my quibbles shrink away.

Read more about Sanford Goldstein in the Poet's Profile.

If you admired Carol’s previous book of tanka, The Trees Bleed Sweetness, for the amazing experiment she was attempting, you will be glad to read the continuation and expansion of her idea for a theme in A Pattern for This Place. In both books she works from the premise that she is able to re-enter the persons, the women, of her heritage who settled this area of Massachusetts about the time of the Revolutionary War. She walks in their shoes and writes their poems and does an excellent job of it. One feels that if the tanka form had been available to these early settlers, Carol’s poems could have been found tucked away in some leather-bound trunk by an ancestor named Purington. She is firmly acquainted with the outer history of the area (that which is known in books as records) and the inner herstories she has channeled to make her poems completely believable.

If she had been writing about herself some of the associations made in the poems might have been too sweet or too affected, but by reaching across time for another personality, Carol has created a space that allows her to be very personal without placing herself in the reader’s lap. She is on to something here – a very interesting writer’s device. One of the so-called ‘weaknesses’ of the tanka genre is an overabundance of whining, lamenting, bitching (call it what you will) but Purington is able to balance these themes with ones of thanksgiving, praise and joyfulness simply because she is outside of her character and because she has, herself, weathered enough storms to see that all parts of her emotions are worthy of being recorded in poetry.

In the title of the book, you will not find the word "tanka" and I applaud her maturity for making this step. She subtitles the poems simply "Words of a Pioneer Woman". And in some ways, Carol Purington is herself a pioneer woman who, from the room in which she is confined, explores realms and times not accessible to the average person. And she is a pioneer in the writing of tanka – one who has finely honed her craft until one is not even aware of the art. In a letter to me she wrote that she felt she had moved so far from the ‘ideal’ tanka (whatever that is) that she didn’t even know if she could call her poems tanka. But still, her love and expertise in the form follows her on her journey.

I’ll let you decide if these are tanka or not – or if the issue is even worth thinking about. Here are the poems from the time the woman’s husband goes to war.

Summer thunder
coming, they say, from British cannon
not far enough away
Each peal rends a man,
tears a mendless gash in a woman

His letter
I fold away inside my dress
Its stiffness against my breath
tells me that seventeen sunsets ago
he was still alive

The handle of his ax
held idle against the wall
by a dusty web –
day and night some spider worked and worked
to weave a patterned world

With the same care she composes her poems, she designs her books. The concept of A Pattern for This Place is continued and carried out in the very apt illustrations. Her sister-in-law, Stephanie B. Purington, who lives on the same farm, has sewn quilt blocks which fit in theme to various poems. The sepia photographs of the quilt patterns are lens to another time, just as the poems are. In the same way that individual blocks, made of bits and pieces of cloth can make a complete bed covering, the shortness of the poems is combined to tell the story of a year and a little more in the life of woman who exists only because Carol Purington has called her to life.

The 48 poems, one to a page, interspersed with the calm but engaging illustrations, and expanded with generous endnotes makes the book feel complete. Again Larry Kimmel at Winfred Press has done an excellent job of presenting Carol’s work with the professionalism and expertise it deserves.

Giselle Maya has consistently employed collaboration with other writers for her haiku and tanka collections such as Cats, The Four Seasons, and Tea Ceremony. In Moondust she writes collaboratively with six different authors who regularly draw on a variety of writing styles. Maya’s own voice is so definite that her work pulls together with the others to create a style that none of them alone would have written. It is a fascinating study to read the individual works by her various partners and then to compare those poems with the way they write when replying to her words and ideas. This, I find, is the miracle of renga. How each person, secure in a personal voice, yet when writing collaboratively, bends just enough to 1.) make a cohesive work with someone else and 2.) find a new tone or viewpoint in their own style. One can almost feel this group exchanging ideas as well as inspiration for new ideas for individual work.

Moondust blurs the line between authors physically (the links are not accredited to the writer) as well as bending each to a subject and theme that farther unites the work. The line is also blurred between genres (a positive plus, I feel) in that one never knows if reading a traditional renga as in "Year of the Dragon" with Edward Baranosky or linked tanka in "Summer Solstice" with June Moreau. Only because of previous publication in Lynx and writing with these two partners makes these differences clear to me. I am not saying we need to know if the poem is composed of ‘linked tanka’ or ‘renga’ to enjoy the work; I am only commenting on this step in the wiping away of genre lines as these Japanese forms make themselves at home in English. Though there were times in reading Moondust that I wondered "who wrote that link?" and would have looked to the right for some initials, I must admit the poem worked better for not having names naming such brief links. The names are linked under the titles so the reader knows who the collaborators are.

It was interesting to note that even between the same pair (Giselle Maya and June Moreau) the forms expressed differences. In "Summer Solstice" this pair had seemed to be counting syllables into 5-7-5-7-7 and in "Fukiyose – the gathering of things blown together by the autumn wind" the short lines often have only two or three syllables and the long lines have three or four (sometimes more) syllables. This certainly adds a freshness to the book and keeps the patterns and the rhythms from becoming repetitive to the point of sing-song reading.

June Moreau who also writes haiku and tanka is Giselle’s most active partner - the two have been friends for many years. This pair also use both forms in their combined poems. Thus, "Shadows" and "Voice of One Cricket" is a sharing of haiku in a partnership in the same way tanka are combined in "Sacred Trees" and "Bells".

I was especially impressed with the leaps made in "Incarnation" by Mari Konno and Giselle Maya. Not knowing who wrote what, I can only assume that somehow this combination of minds struck fire in a noteworthy way. In the other poem, "Ascending" by this duo, the leaps are equally astounding.

cherry orchards
in full bloom
spring snow
soft footsteps
around the corner

a cat’s tail
swaying among blades
of young grass
a breeze cooling the tea
no small talk

In "Cloud Bound", Giselle Maya with Christopher Herold one can feel the tension as the two authors tug on the same themes, coming up with fish of different colors. Sometimes you can almost feel one person saying "we have had enough verses on that subject; I want a change" and suddenly there is a delightful leap. Writing collaborative demands a balance act of togetherness and yet needs some dissention to keep the voices clearly separate and individual. The great poem comes from a weaving back and forth of togetherness and separateness.

Some of the poems had too many repeats of similar words and subjects (like trees, clouds, cats, dragons, dreaming) and one understands and would welcome the Japanese renga rules against these overworked usages. In finding a new way of working – making collaborations without writing renga – many ways have to be tried and experimented with to see what really works. It is hard when collaborating (and trying to be English nice) to say with any degree of conviction to the partner that this or that link is not thought to be good for the complete poem. I guess this is why the Japanese have renku masters and why the English have editors. This one small criticism should not hold you back from investigating the brave work this group of people has tried and accomplished. Giselle Maya has put a lot of hard work into making this book (even the moondusty covers are of handmade paper) and the poems deserve to be read and evaluated for what they can teach each of us about collaborative writing.

To quote from Baranosky’s Foreword: "By choosing Raku for the title of this chapbook, I am drawing a parallel with what has become haiku and related forms of poetry which, although probably never to be exactly as their progenitors, bear a genetic inheritance from all parents. Just to make things more challenging, the difference between raku and other pottery may be as narrow as between Haiku, Tanka and their pretenders. But it is the quality of the experience communicated which finally makes the nature of raku apparent."

The book contains a series of sijo, six series of tanka, several tanka and prose pieces, individual haiku and tanka, glosa, a renga with Melisa Fauceglia, a sedoka exchange with Evelyn Catherine Yates, and a ghazal.

Raku is the Japanese term for a method of firing pottery in which the vessel, instead of being allowed to cool, is pulled from the kiln in a red heat and plunged into a container of sawdust, leaves or water. This stress, on the pot and the glaze often creates metallic flare and crackle patterns or shatters the pot. The title is a very apt one for Baranosky's book.

Out of the thirty-three poets represented in this, the second in the series of presentations of Ontario poets, five authors are competent in the Japanese genres. Haiku is represented by Evelyn Catherine Yates (with a series from her moon haiku in Karumi Moon) and Monica Sanchez and Lorna Moor Schueler with individual haiku. Dina E. Cox has a series of sijo and another one of haiku. The tanka poem, "Footnotes to Noah" by Edward Baranosky closes the book. It seems fair to say that without the influence of Baranosky’s classes in renga and related forms under the auspices of the Canadian Author’s Association, these forms would not have been so well represented. It is to Baranosky’s credit, not only that he takes on the enormous, and often thankless job of editing such an anthology but that he continues to be the instigator and guiding light of form poetry among so much ‘free verse’ in Canada.

By clicking on the word  book  you can read, print out or download this book right now. R.G. Rader was active in the early years of the haiku scene with his own haiku work and his Muse Pie Publishing. Then he went into writing plays and acting which seemed to leave little time for his earlier pursuits. But he continued to write haiku and began writing tanka, too. This book, Raising the Blade, is a collection of his work. The reader will quickly find out that R.G Rader is at the cutting edge of subject matter in these genres – as his title warns. Suicide, city-life, prostitutes, bums and this world are side by side with his own love life. Instead of reading more of my words, I suggest you simply go read his book to find your opinion good opinion of his work.

The title could be seen as being slightly misleading because Karumi Moon does not bring the reader any ancient haiku but the contemporary haiku of Evelyn Catherine Yates. In the back of the book, on the white pages (the poem pages are cream) there are glossaries of Contemporary Forms and Styles, Precursor Forms and Styles, and Readings for Study or Sheer Delight which maybe seen as a "probe into ancient haiku" but one could argue that with a poetry history of over 1,400 years, the four hundred year old haiku is hardly ‘ancient’. Karumi Moon also contains examples of tanka, sijo, ghazal and renga links as well as an assortment of other independent forms. Of the ten tanka (printed one to a page on the right-hand page only) I liked best this titled one:

Monarch, summer’s gone.
Harsher winds will gust you now
to winter sojourn.
Why so late, why lingering?
Go now. Your gold’s safe with me.

Aside from my academic quibbles, the book is beautifully designed and made. The cover photograph, made by John Yates of Saskatoon, is gorgeous. The eye returns joyfully each time to it and I would let Evelyn Yates design any book for me. Her care and sensitivity show on every page. Frankly, the best part of the book is its potential. There is the feeling that with a little guidance, a bit more work, further experiences that Yates poetry could be very good. She has laid the groundwork with this book and now she is free to grow into her full dream.

HAIKU MENTIONS

Jean Jorgensen deserves to have her haiku highlighted in this series with such haiku as:

shaping the bread
a sprinkler turns slowly
in the summer wind

This is the second time this group has presented a collection of their haiku in this engaging format. It begins with Hilary Tann’s

clear morning
the deer lifts one hoof
then another

with a stop at the guest poet’s spot for this from Jim Kacian

for my birthday
another trip
around the sun

to close with Yu Chang’s haiku:

lighthouse -
she promises
to keep in touch

A Purple So Deep. An anthology of haiku collected by Leatrice Lifshitz. Saddle stapled, 5.5 x 5.5 inches, 60 pages, autumn 2001. This non-commercial, unpretentious book is like a Who’s Who of Haiku. In addition to picking excellent poems to represent each person, Lea has performed the miracle of how to present haiku interspersed with relevant prose. She asked each author for a paragraph of explanation of how or why the haiku was written. By placing the haiku on the right hand page, the reader can enjoy the haiku for the poem it is. Then turning the page, on the left-hand side, the mind can unwind and follow the author back to the origin of the haiku. Back and forth the reader goes -  easily refreshed and ready for the next excellence of another haiku. I think Lifshitz has rediscovered a way to add to the enjoyment of haiku. The haiku are arranged alphabetically by the authors’ last names and contains none of Lea’s haiku. How many editors of anthologies could match this humility? Make the effort to get this book!

Vincent Tripi had started to keep a record which he calls "Watching Journal". Among his recorded comments and observations on nature and the grace of living, are his haiku. Arranged two, three or four to a page, the reader gets a good sampling of tripi’s haiku such as:

Plum blossoms. . .
remembering all the names
of God

A bittern’s boom -
mist of the mist
of the mist

Who We Are

The next deadline is May 1, 2002

Read book reviews in previous issues of Lynx:
 XVI-3 Book Reviews
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
XVI-3 October, 2001