 |
|||||
|
XXIV:1 |
LYNX
A Journal for Linking Poets |
||||
 |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
A TALE OF A FESTIVAL Once upon a time there was a lovely little town known as Ukiah. The town’s name came from the Pomo word “Yokayo,” meaning “Deep Valley.” The small town dozed and twitched for one hundred years beside the Russian River, sprouting pears and walnuts, grapes and babies. Artists and poets trickled into the community, attracted by the green-gold hills, the big sky, and the friendly people. “Haiku?” you might ask. “What’s that?” Ahhh, haiku…I’m glad you asked. Haiku is a wondrous creation of the Japanese – a form of poetry that, when you try to write it, infuses everything in your life, including you, with an inner glow. Dew will glisten more brilliantly, bees will hum more meaningfully, and routine chores will be more fun. Sound like new love? Well, it is, kind of. When you look at the world with “haiku eyes” you fall in love with it all over again, just like when you were a child. It doesn’t matter how your poems turn out – the magic is in the way you see things. So, again, what is, or are, haiku? (The word can be singular or plural). Haiku are simple, 3-line poems. They don’t use rhyme, alliteration, or punctuation, and they don’t philosophize or “psychologize.” They offer a poetic glimpse of a scene or a situation – a snapshot created with words. hovering above sitting all alone Haiku can use a “traditional” 5-7-5 pattern of syllables, such as the ones above, in which the first line has 5 syllables, the second 7, and the third 5; or they can be written in the “contemporary” form, with fewer syllables. Here are some contemporary haiku: late fall fig tree just past mauve – The ukiaHaiku festival was born in the year 2003, and like all infants, it has grown. Now in its seventh year, the festival is thriving. Local poets go to classrooms and instruct students in writing haiku. More than one thousand poems pour in each year from children and adults living in Ukiah and distant places like South Dakota, Romania, and New Zealand. Poetry submissions are judged by the Ukiah Poet Laureate Committee and well-known haiku poet Jane Reichhold, who judges the Adult Contemporary Haiku category. An awards ceremony is held at which the winning poets read their poems, and a book of the winning poems is published. Best of all? People who never wrote poems before are turning their observations of the world into poetry. You are invited, encouraged, and cajoled to submit entries to the ukiaHaiku festival. All categories are free of charge except “Adult Contemporary Haiku,” which costs $5 for up to three poems. Modest prizes are offered, along with publication in the book and the opportunity to read your winning haiku at the festival. The submission deadline for the 2009 ukiaHaiku festival contest is March 13, 2009. Submission forms can be downloaded from www.ukiahaiku.org or picked up at libraries around the county, as well as the Mendocino County Bookmobile and Grace Hudson Museum. Submissions can also be emailed to ukiahaikufest09@yahoo.com. (For the Adult Contemporary category a check for $5 will have to be mailed – see website). This year’s awards ceremony, complete with music and award-winning poetry, will be held on Sunday, April 26 from 2-4 p.m. at the Ukiah Conference Center.
THE FIRST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE HAIKU ANTHOLOGY Borrowed Water, the first published anthology of haiku written in America was the cooperative effort of a group of thirteen women writers in Los Altos California in 1966. Helen Stiles Chenoweth had organized the Los Altos Writers’ Rountable in 1956 for adults interested in publishing their writings. As Chenoweth wrote in the introduction: “The poets used the Japanese tone poem haiku to appreciate the syllabic content of words. Use of the haiku taught the prose writers brevity and simplicity improved their style.” Jane Reichhold: What drew you to the Los Altos Writers’ Roundtable? JR: How did the interest in haiku begin? JR: Can you describe Helen Stiles Chenoweth? JR: How long did the group work on the book Borrowed Water? JR: How did you find the title? JR: How were decisions made about what was accepted for the book? MB: Two of us drew the illustrations. Mine are on pages 69 & 89. JR: I love your haiku: This is so perfect because of the association of flowers /fireworks and the contrast of works/idle. There is also a faint, but important connection between forgotten / idle –as if you were too lazy to remember fireworks. A very new idea then in 1966 and it still is today. Do you remember how you came to write this one? JR: Do you recall the reactions of others to the book? JR: Were you very aware of the fact that, led by a woman, a group of women, thirteen in fact! compiled the first anthology of haiku in English? And what this meant to a male-dominated haiku scene? JR: Do you still write haiku? Or how do you view haiku today? JR: What other works have you published? How this interview came to be. Among the facts I learned at the Gualala Arts Haiku Group (1982 – 2005) was that living on the out-skirts of town, as part-time resident, was Margot Bollock, one of the authors of the haiku in Borrowed Water. At the time she did not attend our meetings and wanted nothing to do with haiku. I had tried to get an interview with her in the late 1980s for our magazine Mirrors, but when I called her she said she did not want to talk about haiku. When we moved from the ridge down to our house on Iversen Road, it was her son, Mark, who provided the transport and heavy lifting and I hoped this would permit an opening to talk to her. It didn’t. Later I met Margot and her husband Max at the opening of an art exhibit at CityArts in Point Arena. I wanted to ask her about Borrowed Water, but ended up being too shy to mention it amid the flurry. I would occasionally meet Mark’s wife, Renee at work at the dentist’s office and would always ask about Margot but only this summer, while helping someone trace down another author, did I need to contact Margot by phone. Suddenly, while chatting together in the friendliest way, did it seem a good time to ask again for the interview. This time, because we had the ease of sending questions by e-mail, she agreed. As far as Margot knows, she is now the only surviving member of the group who produced Borrowed Water.
THE REVOLUTION IS SETTING THE CHILDREN OUT ON THE RAPIDS WHERE THEY KEEP FLOATING ALONG Does it surprise anybody that by now most of the American tanka magazines are preparing their readers for a change in attitude, asking them to wake up and rebel against thirty years of advice by people who didn’t understand the basics of modern poetry? So what’s new about those above mentioned article, what is it that wasn’t said and published ten and more years ago? Well, it’s fun, no, it’s more than fun – it’s a kind of growing satisfaction inside the haiku scene that some editors of magazines now finally are showing a willingness to wake up. They do confess how much irritating, let’s say misguiding things have been said, how little understanding for the integration of foreign forms into bigger English poetry concepts had been exercised. Some of those who feel they can guide a group still don’t get to the point to comprehend fully that only by challenging and modifying the rules of an old form there is a right to call the product English language poetry. In other words, if one gives up most of the dominions of a given form – and sure, why can’t one do that - there is no more reason left to call the product by a Japanese term. Many western writers are still misusing a kind of a ‘Japanese umbrella’ by covering up that the true contemporary poet is – and always was – terribly left alone creating the true poetry of her or his time.
| |||||
ARTICLES A TALE OF A FESTIVAL THE FIRST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE HAIKU ANTHOLOGY THE REVOLUTION IS SETTING THE CHILDREN OUT ON THE RAPIDS WHERE THEY KEEP FLOATING ALONG |
|||||
| |||||
|
|||||
Back issues of Lynx:
|
|
Next Lynx is scheduled for June, 2009 .
| |||
|
|||||