Haibun on Pausing for Peace —
the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society's 2008 Retreat at Asilomar
[by J. Zimmerman]
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[Poems by poets other than this author are reprinted by permission of their poets.]
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2008 Asilomar Haiku Retreat: Day 1.
Yuki Teikei Haiku Society (YTHS)
president Carol Steele,
YTHS,
treasurer
Patricia J. Machmiller,
and
YTHS
Board Member donnalynn chase
brought us together with warm opening welcomes.
Carol's welcoming gift of the following haiku was particularly apt,
with its air
of invitation and openness and exploration — perfect for the start of Asilomar —
and
beautifully presented on a mauve card
in a miniature mauve envelope:
dancing down the trail
staying just in front of us —
the painted lady
Copyright © 2008 by Carol Steele
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We remembered
absent friends:
Jim Arnold
and an early and active
YTHS
member, Mary Hill, whose bamboo garden had been a celebrated site for
the
YTHS
annual
Tanabata celebration.
Carol had brought a wide ceramic bowl
planted with a miniature bamboo grove,
in which we were invited to hang our
haiku for Mary.
We received the
2008 Annual anthology
of
YTHS,
edited by Paul O. Williams
(and beautifully designed by donnalyn chase)
showing
- two haiku per member,
- a most helpful 30-year chronology
of
YTHS, and
- recommended season words for haiku.
The
anthology
includes one of Paul's haiku, his recent winner of the Shiki on-line kukai:
rising
a tadpole
bursts the moon
March 2008 winner — Shiki on-line kukai
Copyright © 2008 by Paul O. Williams
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Author and featured speaker Patricia Donegan,
selected the theme
"Pausing for Peace"
for the retreat. She contrasted two types of pause:
- sometimes a pause occurs naturally, as in noticing sunlight on the wall.
- sometimes a pause occurs on purpose, in the practice of what Tibetans call sky mind:
"we need a mind like the sky so the mind opens up":
- to slow down
- to forget the self
- to see clearly
She read from her new book
Haiku Mind,
in which she shows 108 haiku by modern and classical poets,
with a meditation on each.
"If we can forget the self,"
she said,
"compassion naturally arises.
So haiku is a practice of compassion."
Pausing
for no reason
I can remember
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2008 Asilomar Haiku Retreat: Day 2.
Patricia J. Machmiller
spoke of the importance of using a
kigo
in a
haiku.
The kigo
provides a poetic device (or mechanism)
allowing the poet to evoke in
haiku
the associations through
"stickiness" and "resonance"
that a
kigo
brings.
Participants each received a copy of the
Yuki Teikei Haiku Society's
kigo
list for Autumn, with categories:
- Season. e.g. 'autumn equinox'.
- Sky and Elements. e.g. 'moon' (understood to be the full moon by default).
- Landscape. e.g. 'harvested fields'.
- Human Affairs. e.g. Halloween.
Poets with an international sensitivity will be aware that the
festivals of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere are festival of Spring in the
Southern Hemisphere; similarly, Christmas south of the equator occurs in the
middle of summer. For such reasons, some international poets advocate
minimal use of Human Affairs kigo that can have opposite meanings
on opposite sides of the equator.
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- Animals. e.g. monarch butterfly.
- Plants. e.g. mushroom.
Patricia suggested these autumn
kigo
as particularly apt at the time and place of the Retreat:
- deer. Also 'Asilomar deer' or 'black-tailed deer'.
- fog.
[Note that a qualification can alter the
kigo's season:
'sea fog' would signify Summer while 'tule fog' would signify Winter.]
- late-season poppy.
[Note: the poppy by itself would belong to the season of the
poppy's first blossoming, i.e., Spring.]
- migrating geese.
- pampas grass plumes.
- quail.
- rattle-snake grass.
- sanderlings.
- woodpecker.
We took personal writing time to go for a
ginkoo
(a walk in which we would
create
haiku
and
tanka).
We returned shortly before lunch for three rounds of sharing today's poems.
After lunch Patricia Donegan
lectured on "the Craft of Haiku", though she was so often and aggressively interrupted by
argumentative audience members that I found it hard to track her key points.
This is what I got:
- The
haiku
is more than a literary form because it has a built-in meditative practice.
- Donegan's form is a one-breath poem, written in 3 lines, not necessarily of 5-7-5 syllables.
- Each
haiku
has a clear image.
- Each
haiku
contains one
kigo
(a season word or nature reference).
- She writes of the here and now; writing from memory is possible but not from imagination.
- There is a place for feelings, if expressed subtly:
"haiku's
use of objectivity has been over-rated".
And "show, don't tell".
- A poem should end with (or contain) a surprise, an "ah!"
- A poem should express compassion.
- She simplifies poems as much as possible,
allowing the reader to make the "imagination jump" that fills in details.
Donegan studied with Seishi Yamaguchi in 1986-1987.
He required that his student pay him $1 per haiku for feedback.
[This statement caused an optimistic rustle around the room
as various participants contemplated the joy of setting up such a business ... ]
She suggested three steps to writing a
haiku:
- Be open to the world around you.
- See clearly what is there; notice an "ah!" moment.
- Express the moment in a few words of
haiku.
After another
ginkoo,
we returned for a workshop with Donegan.
She demonstrated techniques she attributed to Seishi Yamaguchi,
cutting words from our
haiku.
I did not offer my 5-7-5
haiku
(an easy target for cutting its last line and more).
But the shorter haiku I offered was rather rewritten,
yielding a different
haiku
from the original.
Additional recommendations arising from Donegan's comments:
- Focus on one thing, one moment.
- Use no more than one verb.
- Use an "I-verb" rather than an "-ing"-verb,
to avoid the danger of an incorrect referent.
[This was another topic that lit a fire under the chairs of a few participants.]
- Traditional
haiku
groups in Japan follow the same calendar as traditional rituals,
using the lunar calendar. This makes their seasons begin somewhat earlier
than Westerners consider the seasons.
Many modern Japanese haiku groups shift the season later in the calendar.
At this point, choose either calendar but then be consistent in its use.
- If a
haiku
becomes complex or obscure, return to the original impetus.
- In removing words, beware that the
haiku
does not become too open with too many possibilities of interpretation;
retain 'enough' information.
- Be willing to take a single experience and write it many different ways,
rather than trying to tug the first attempt into an improvement
that it resists. Keep returning to your original intent and trying again.
In the evening, an introduction to the dreaded linked-verse form, the
renku.
And then a
renku
party, with two teams, one led by Jerry Ball
and the other by Roger Abe.
Both teams finished around the witching midnight hour.
2008 Asilomar Haiku Retreat: Day 3.
The morning was a delicious Art Party presented by donnalyn chase and Carolyn Fitz.
They taught us to:
- Paint with a degradable (lamp-black) ink using sticks and stones.
- Make a multi-folded book from a single sheet of paper.
- Make a multi-leaved book held together with a twig and a rubber band.
That afternoon,
Emiko Miyashita, a delightful Japanese woman
(who lives in Kawasaki and works on the Ginza in Tokyo),
conducted a lively feedback workshop, from which we all benefited.
Volunteers that submitted their work for public review each received a special reward:
a beautiful hand-sewn bag, each made by her own mother.
Also, Emiko Miyashita invited us to submit
haiku
in English for the Asahi weekly newspaper;
she comments in Japanese on English-language
haiku
— a novel approach!
In the late afternoon we gathered to celebrate our fallen comrade,
haiku
poet and naturalist Jim "Ouzel" Arnold, who died last year.
We made an altar of stones and shells he had given us.
We took turns reading his
haiku
from his
A Very Slim Book
[designed by artist and poet Susanne Smith]
and then read our own poems in memory of him:
Months after his death
the river light he showed me
still shimmers
[For Jim 'Ouzel' Arnold.]
[First published in
GEPPO XXXIII:1 (2008).]
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Increasingly our poets are adding tanka to their repertoire, including:
deer come
quietly to look for
windfall apples —
my friend's passing
this night
[Honoring Jim Arnold.]
[First published in
Modern English Tanka (Summer 2008).]
Copyright © 2008 by Linda Galloway
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In the evening (and as at the
2007 YTHS Retreat)
Mariko Kitakubo
in a traditional kimono performed her
tanka
in Japanese.
Her gorgeous costume and graceful gestures enhanced the charm of the performance,
as did the background music.
Her official translator, Amelia Fielden, attended and
read her English-language translation
after each
tanka.
At the end of the performance, Amelia Fielden read some of her own work.
2008 Asilomar Haiku Retreat: Day 4.
The retreat ended with group readings of the two renku, to great admiration.
Then a reading of haiku written for Mary Hill on kimono-shaped colored papers,
hung in the miniature bamboo grove:
After all these years
still learning about bamboo
from Mary, Mary ...
[First published in
GEPPO XXXIII:5 (2008).]
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The closing circle was led by donnalynn chase.
After goodbyes, goodbyes, detouring only to stop and listen to the ocean and watch hang-gliders
take off and drift on threads and foil above Marina,
I'm on the freeway for home.
Other Books on Haiku
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The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa
edited by Robert Hass.
The past-poet laureate of the U.S.A has compiled this enthralling collection of
his own essays in which he summarizes the lives of three masters and inventors
of the haiku tradition in Japan, and
presents the lives, the prose, and 300 of the poems of:
Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker,
Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, and
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist.
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The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World
by William J. Higginson.
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Related pages:
Books of Poetry Form.
Poetry forms and poets.
How to Write Poetry.
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Copyright
© 2008-2016 by J. Zimmerman.
Except for the haiku credited to individual poets.
This page displayed using recycled bits.
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[Thanks for visiting.]
