The
following essay is previously unpublished. I wrote it in February, March, and
April of 1994, with revisions in June and September, more in July of 1995, and
again in February of 1997. This essay was prompted by the differences in nearly
identical poems that appeared, almost simultaneously, in Footsteps in the Fog, the tanka anthology my press published in
early 1994 (which was one of the first ever anthologies of tanka poetry
written in English) and Kenneth Tanemura’s No Love Poems. But more than
that, this essay explores larger questions on directions for tanka in English.
What follows are a
few thoughts on directions in English-language tanka, focusing on Kenneth
Tanemura’s No Love Poems (Pleasant Hill, California: Small Poetry Press,
1994, 28 pages, 5½ by 8½ inches; $5.00 postpaid from the author at 10 Wayne
Court, Redwood City, California 94063 [no longer available]). The book itself
does not deserve a fraction of the attention I’m about to give it. What is more
important are the questions it unwittingly raises, mostly to do with the
definition of tanka, its distinctions from haiku, notions of poetic honesty,
and the vagaries of self publishing. My context is a belief that haiku and
tanka could do with more conscientious, balanced, and substantive criticism. By
this I mean the act of in-depth and studied analysis—something far removed from the practice of mutual
back-patting that too often passes as “book reviewing” in some haiku journals,
or conversely, any sort of vindictive and unreasoned flame-throwing that also
sometimes occurs. But I am not able to address such compelling topics here.
Rather, I wish to take a closer look at directions in tanka, using a single
book as an example. Wherever I may speak specifically, I also mean to speak
generically, for we could all benefit from increased conscientiousness and
greater diligence in our writing and in our understanding of the haiku and
tanka forms.
It is not enough for haiku
and tanka poets to ask if they want to produce a book, but more important to
ask if they should. One may create a book collecting some of the best of one’s
poetry published in the previous year or so, as is Francine Porad’s habit with
most of her books. One may publish a life collection offering the best of a lifetime’s
haiku, as with Nick Virgilio’s Selected Haiku or John Wills’ Reed
Shadows. Or one may create thematic collections, as with Adele Kenny’s
environmental haiku in Starship Earth, or, more recently, as with
vincent tripi’s color focus in White. If a hierarchy of values may be
assigned to these types of books, a carefully edited life collection is
probably the most honorable—if the
selection is stringent. Next I would rank those books with a theme or purpose
to unify the collection. Kenneth Tanemura’s first book, No Love Poems, might
initially seem to fall into this category, given the title’s assertion that it
is a thematic collection of “No Love Poems” (the title of which cannot be taken
simply as a didactic declaration that today’s tanka writers should avoid the
themes of love so common, seemingly imitative, and increasingly tired in tanka
tradition). But the book doesn’t contain any bob-sledding poems either, so the
question arises, what theme does unify this book? Without a unifying
purpose, a given book falls into the third category, and it is in this category
where the poet should most ask whether the book should be published. Indeed,
too many haiku books published today result from their authors failing to
confront this question. And too many of the results are mediocre as literary
art. If these writers are not attempting to produce art, then my comments do
not apply. But neither, then, would they seem to deserve to be called poets.
Kenneth’s book is divided into four
sections: “No Love,” “Hopelessness,” “Consoled in Dreams,” and “Consoled
in Nature.” In the book’s first section of twenty-two poems (fourteen tanka and
eight haiku, following a dedication tanka), the irony is that some of these
poems would come across as entirely love-filled in a different context. For
example, consider this poem:
in this photo
the empty space
beside you
I long
to fill
This is an expression of love, or at least
desire. Thus we can infer that the title “No Love” means that the author receives
no love. Yet even this belief is contradicted, for he does at least receive
love from friends:
the love of friends
not stated
leaves me
counting syllables
again
lining my thoughts .
. .
Incidentally, how he
receives this love is not explained, and showing rather than telling this
concept might have improved the poem; also, its last line is abstract and fails
to engage me. At any rate, we must now conclude that the author receives no romantic
love. Yet even this seems contradicted by the tender and beautiful love
poem that concludes the first section:
incense—
the last strand
of her hair
as it leaves
my fingers
This scene is not
likely to take place without some sort of mutual consent, if not love, but I still
see this as a love poem. Thus I sense a lack of clear focus in this book—at least in the first section entitled “No Love.”
The second section of nine poems (six
tanka and three haiku) spirals into “Hopelessness,” offering poems that are
more personal yet still detached, as if the author pleads for our sympathy.
There is some honesty in Kenneth’s haunting verses, though, and an attempt at
boldness in his directness of expression. But here again, the poems contradict
the section’s title:
discovering
this tanka world
bird songs
no longer
console me
If bird songs do not
console the poet, they once did, and now perhaps tanka does—and this is
hardly “hopeless.” In passing, too, “discovering this tanka world” is abstract,
and begs the question, how? This bald (not bold) statement happens just in the
head—neither the poet nor the reader gets his fingernails dirty. I feel that
tanka succeed when they happen in the heart—and one does not need love to write
poems from the heart. To fully share from the heart requires honesty, and the
knowing of one’s self. As Sanford Goldstein states in Tanka Splendor 1990 (Gualala,
California: AHA Books, 1991, page 40), the “individual voice aware of itself
must confront us in tanka.” Indeed, one must dig one’s nails into the dirt of
living. For all the apparent honesty in Kenneth’s poems, however, the “honesty”
is controlled, limited, or perhaps inhibited, or suppressed, as in this poem:
fear
of putting ink
to paper—
fog tonight
conceals the moon
In this case the poet
may seem direct and honest in stating
an emotion, yet he does not tell or show or even hint to us why he is
afraid of writing. What is the poet hiding? Why doesn’t he dig deeper? We are
also given no clue as to why the day is blue and melancholy in the
following verse:
gazing at
the bay water
more blue
than this
melancholy day
So in this sense the
poetry is not honest enough or direct enough. And this is puzzling given the
poet’s comment in Footsteps in the Fog, Press Here’s 1994 anthology of
tanka by seven San Francisco–area poets, that in tanka “there is a need for
intimacy and honesty of expression” (Foster City, California: Press Here, 1994,
page 28).
But to put the questions of honesty and
intimacy aside, Kenneth’s book does take a happier turn—and if one is honest with negative matters, one
should also be honest with positive emotions. Perhaps in answer to the
lovelessness and hopelessness of the first half of his book, Kenneth does find
solace in dreams and in nature. The book’s third section, “Consoled in Dreams”
(with five tanka and two haiku), does hint at some degree of consolation:
so beautiful
I follow her
through the bookstore
past poetry, dreams
& all their
immortal words . . .
Yet still the
question persists in Kenneth and his poems:
how is it that
my heart
spills
into
these five short
lines . . . ?
We are not told—and I believe it might be because the poet does not
know. Thus, beyond the weaknesses of choppy line breaks in this tanka and
others, the poems remain opaque and only occasionally and superficially engaging.
And as with other poems, I feel more of a confused or manipulative intellectual
pathos than true honesty from the heart.
The final section, “Consoled in Nature”
(with two tanka and seventeen haiku), is to me the book’s best section. And I
say this with the curious observation that the majority of poems here are haiku
rather than tanka. It occurs to me that Kenneth might be trying too hard to
write tanka—or not hard enough—and is more
natural or comfortable with his haiku. Several of Kenneth’s notable haiku are
included in the book’s last section:
the first petals
to fall from the
branch . . .
summer rain
a single leaf falling
and with it
the morning dew
this cold night
the abandoned car
covered with leaves
The fourth section
and the book concludes with the following poem:
a white swan makes a
path
through fallen cherry
blossoms
floating in the moat
While this poem
paints a pretty picture, it seems derivative (whether consciously or not) of
the following classic poem by Roka, here translated by R. H. Blyth (Haiku, Volume
2: Spring, Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1950, page 364):
The water-fowl swims,
Parting with her
breast
The cherry petals.
Surely many of us
have written haiku about real or imagined moments that other poets have also
experienced. How many poets have written poems about cherry blossoms, beggar’s
cups, or yard sales? Yet to me, Roka’s poem is far superior for its focus on
the bird’s breast. But here I note a distinction that cuts to the “heart” of
Kenneth’s poetry: In Roka’s poem the focus is on the bird; in Kenneth’s poem
the focus is on the bird’s path through the blossoms. Both, of course, are “acceptable”
for haiku. But is he so alienated from humans, and even birds and other
animals, that all he can write about is their contexts or what they leave
behind? No wonder this book’s title is cast in the form of a negative. The bird
is not human, of course, but in the same way that his poem avoids the focus on
the bird, many of his poems, especially his tanka, do not confront humanity
with the honesty, intimacy, and directness that he himself espouses—or at least not with enough of these essential qualities.
This is yet another contradiction inherent in this self-financed book. No doubt
this alienation is a source of the otherwise inexplicable and distressing anger
sometimes present in the poetry:
you write
of chrysanthemums
now let me
show you
these two fists
To me this is not an
honest confrontation of humanity in the sense of accepting and correcting a
problem maturely; rather, it is pure anarchy, an angry adolescent rebellion
against some hidden demon—again, unexplained and opaque.
Perhaps, for now, rebellion is the only action the poet can bring himself to.
At any rate, amid these growing pains,
Kenneth would have us believe he is consoled in nature, as well as in dreams.
If so, we may find a message of hope in the face of loveless hopelessness:
faraway birdsong
my closest companion
this spring morning
Yet for me the
question still remains: should this book have been published? Has the poet’s
urgency (by his own admission, noted by Sanford Goldstein in the introduction)
clouded his judgment? And has a youthful enthusiasm for merely wanting to make
a book hindered or disabled him in producing a potentially powerful, clearly
focused collection that could stand proudly after many readings and many years?
Perhaps so—perhaps he should have waited.
It would have been preferable to have seen a better book than this
(for some have had high expectations for Kenneth), but better still to have
seen a book with less contradictions, and more focus. I say this considering
the book as a whole, however, and wish to stress that several fine individual
poems are included, mostly in the fourth section, on nature, some of which I
have already mentioned. If you wish to see a representation of Kenneth’s poetry
thus far, such as it is, then this book is for you. But if you seek a mature
mastery of the haiku and tanka arts (or even a respectable attempt), or if you
seek a valuable compilation of such poetry in unified book form, then I suggest
you wait.
I suppose I could have filtered these
comments as certain others do by saying only complimentary things on only the
successful aspects of the book (and some of the poems do succeed), but I
feel that such an approach, if too sweet, eventually does both the author and
the haiku and tanka communities a disservice. This is especially so here,
given the growing interest in tanka in English and the fact that Kenneth
recently dabbled with editing a new tanka journal called Five Lines Down, with
Sanford Goldstein as coeditor [this journal was soon discontinued]. Yet I do
wish to encourage Kenneth as a poet, no matter what his age. Furthermore, as
this country does need a dedicated tanka journal, I
am pleased that someone was
willing to tackle this task. Lynx, of
course, has thus far centered most of its energies on renga, although tanka is
increasingly important in its pages. More recently,
Laura Maffei has started American Tanka,
which already shows a clearer vision and greater promise. Meanwhile, the future
remains open for us to observe how Kenneth’s own poetry will develop. No Love
Poems does leave room for growth.
Before I find a place for No Love
Poems on my shelves of haiku and tanka books, I would like to raise
three more points. The last is particularly important in considering the
direction of tanka in English today—but I will get
to that. The first point is in regard to Sanford Goldstein’s introduction (Ken
dedicates his book to Sanford). Goldstein notes that “Kenneth writes me that he
is ‘young and urgent’ and suggests that the majority of old-age poets have no
passion in their writing.” Goldstein says he has “no time to debate that,”
implying that he disagrees. I too disagree, although I do think it is good for
poets of all ages to maintain passion and keep from slipping into tired habits.
I presume that an “old-age poet” might be anyone older than Kenneth, who was
born in 1970. In Footsteps in the Fog, it was important to him to stress
in his biography that he was the youngest poet to be included. But I think the
point is not that many older poets supposedly lack fire. Rather, Kenneth seemed
to feel, at just 23, that his youthful fire was somehow being suppressed and
rejected by the “older” haiku establishment. He might even feel that way on reading my
comments here. My wish, though, is to respond to
the poetry—where age is not always relevant—as literature and heart language.
Perhaps a greater maturity and less defensiveness would lead him to recognize that he is
not victimized, and as a consequence, we might have had a better book. Perhaps
we will later.
The second point is a small one in
regard to Kenneth’s overuse of ellipses in his tanka. Five of seven tanka with
ellipses end with these three dots (one ends with an ellipsis and then a
question mark). In all cases I would drop the ellipses from the ends of these
tanka, as nothing is added by their use that is not already implicit in the
poetry. One of these five poems also appears in Footsteps in the Fog, where
he agreed to drop the ellipsis at the end. That he so readily agreed suggests
to me that not enough thought went into deciding whether the ellipses should
have been used. Do these poems need ellipses? I have quoted three examples
previously that you can judge for yourself.
The third point is in regard to
distinctions between tanka and haiku. And here is probably the most important
observation I can make about this poetry. Indeed, the implications of this
distinction have an even larger impact on the direction of tanka in English. In
describing the sections of Kenneth’s book, I have indicated the number of “tanka”
and “haiku” therein. It is more accurate to indicate the number of “three-line”
and “five-line” poems, for a few of the three-liners are tanka-like and
sometimes longer (in number of words) than the five-line poems, and many of the
five-liners seem stretched into five lines and could easily be rearranged into
three. The distinction between haiku and tanka seems acutely to be blurred
here, whether intentionally or not. Simply put, by classification at least,
these poems are not sure-footed.
In Tanka Splendor 1993, both
George Ralph and Jane Reichhold are “concerned with the all-too-easy practice
of passing off haiku chopped up into five lines as tanka” (Gualala, California:
AHA Books, 1994, page 43). Yet Kenneth has committed this unconscientious sin
himself, as two of the three-line poems (one assumes they are thus haiku)
appear in five lines in Footsteps in the Fog, Press Here’s tanka
anthology mentioned previously. For example:
my father asleep—
every wrinkle on his face
reveals the fatigue
This verse appears in
five lines in Footsteps in the Fog, with additional line breaks after “wrinkle”
and “reveals.” As the publisher of Footsteps in the Fog, it startled and
disappointed me to discover this transmogrification. But, in five lines, is
anything added? Rather, isn’t something even lost? Likewise, consider this
poem:
writing haiku—
the cat pushes my
pencil
with her nose
It appears in five
lines in Footsteps in the Fog—with “haiku” changed to “a poem” in the first line as
my suggestion to Kenneth in the five-line version that he submitted to me as a
tanka:
writing a poem—
the cat
pushes
my pencil
with her nose
My intent in choosing
quality poems for Footsteps in the Fog was to be as democratic, broad-ranging,
and educational as possible, in that I wanted to represent the tanka form as
each San Francisco–area poet believed it to be. And as brief and as unusual as
some of Kenneth’s poems or line breaks were, and although he did not tell me he
was also about to publish No Love Poems, I was willing to provide a
platform for his Takubokian musings.
Indeed, Kenneth’s approach to tanka is
highly Takubokian—he even states in Footsteps
in the Fog, “I am
Takubokian.” Yet I note with interest William J. Higginson’s recent description
of Takuboku as being “sadly self-involved” (Modern Haiku, Volume XXV,
Number 1, Winter-Spring 1994, page 93). To the extent that this description
also applies to Kenneth, or at least to his so-called tanka in No Love
Poems, perhaps we get a clearer picture of the limitations of these
poems. Aside from their problems of form, line integrity, and so on (as I see
this poetry), perhaps it is this sad self-involvement that keeps most of the
tanka from being anything but superficially engaging, despite the surface
appearance of pain-wracked honesty.
At any rate, several of Kenneth’s brief “tanka”
in Footsteps in the Fog and many more in No Love Poems seem
artificially split into five lines. That the line splitting is artificial in
the five-line versions is confirmed by Kenneth himself in the three-line (and
superior) versions already cited. My emphasis is that Kenneth seems unclear of
the formal distinctions between haiku and tanka, as shown by the rearrangement
of the lines in these poems. Yet these trivial changes do not miraculously
transform the poems from one type of poetry to the other. Kenneth occasionally
latches onto something in these poems, but, I am afraid, too often doesn’t. The
implication, for the rest of us, is that perhaps we are all still wrestling with
the concept of tanka—both its form and spirit. Or, if
we are not wrestling with it, having worked through this question already, or
being blithely ignorant, its form and spirit are still vital to understand.
Tanka is as different from haiku as the sonnet is from the epigram. Until
so-called tanka poets recognize this, I feel the direction tanka takes in
English will likely be misguided.
To return to Kenneth’s book, however,
there could be no clearer objective evidence to show a need for greater understanding
of at least the formal distinction between haiku and tanka than the
rearrangement of lines in the two preceding poems. With this evidence in hand,
one may grow suspicious of all of the five-line verses in No Love Poems and
wonder how many more might be rearranged into three lines. Considering this,
perhaps it is no wonder that I find the haiku so much more uniformly successful
in this book. Indeed, of the 28 five-line poems, I must assert that fully 25 of
them are easily recast into three
lines (as are, I might add, 13 of his 21 tanka in Footsteps in the Fog). This possibility indicates that
Kenneth’s “tanka” are indeed brief, yes, but also makes me wonder more
emphatically if he truly knows the distinctions between haiku and tanka, as I
do not think he is intentionally
trying to blur the boundaries here. This question is potentially
disturbing as he edits his new tanka journal (even the title of which, Five
Lines Down, seemed overly concerned with one accepted formal property of
this poetry in English, perhaps to the detriment of heart and spirit, although
I have since learned that this phrase came from Sanford Goldstein, the
patriarch of English-language tanka, who often spoke of spilling tanka, dwelling
in these short poems, “five lines down”). Also, when one reassesses Kenneth’s “tanka”
as haiku (if rearranged in three lines), many of them fail, as in this example:
once
did
I really once
have did
I really have purpose,
purpose, a
life of dreams?
a life of dreams?
I also feel the
five-liner fails as a tanka, but it clearly does not work as a haiku,
lacking natural images, careful implications and juxtaposition, or a moment of
heightened imagistic awareness. It is merely an intellectualized statement—in question form—and is to my mind an unfinished comment,
much less a poem. To Kenneth’s credit, though, the failure of some five-line
poems to work as haiku in three lines indicates that there is a difference
between his haiku and “tanka,” in that what he says in five lines is sometimes
not haiku if in three lines. Yet I am still troubled by the lack of clarity and
distinction between the two forms as given in this book.
A small tradition does exist for
three-line tanka. Witness, for example, the three-line translations by Juliet
Winters Carpenter of Machi Tawara’s immensely popular tanka in Salad
Anniversary (Tokyo and New York Kodansha, 1989). Yet I note Jane Reichhold’s
June 1991 letter to the editor of Poetry Flash (issue #219; published in
Berkeley, California), in which she decries Carpenter’s three-liners in favor
of the late Jack Stamm’s more “classical” (as she says) five-line versions
(published in Japan by Kawade Bunko, also in 1989), although the credibility of
her comments may suffer when one learns of her vested interest in Stamm’s book,
for which Jane was then acting as North American distributor. My point is that
Kenneth might have legitimately presented his tanka in three lines,
given how brief they are in either three or five lines. But then what
would distinguish them formally from the haiku he also includes? I am concerned
about content as well as form, but because he chose to present his “tanka” in
five lines, I am left with the problem that his spare poetry is artificially
stretched to fit that number of lines—and the
question of his distinction between haiku and tanka seems simply to be muddied.
For these reasons and others, I believe
Kenneth should have waited until later to produce a book with the clarity I
trust he seeks. Since he has not waited, one can only hope that this book is a
stepping-stone to that clarity. Again, this is not just a clarity of form I’m
discussing here, but a clarity of content—in addition to
the need I mentioned earlier for real honesty. He may write a tanka diary, but,
whether in three or five or twenty lines, not every diary entry is poetry, much
less publishable. As Kenneth states in Footsteps in the Fog, “tanka is
not an idle, aesthetic craft.” He would do well to follow his own advice more
closely (as would we all), to polish and define at least the tanka side of his
writing (fortunately, his haiku are much stronger). I wish him well with his
next collection of poetry—although it would likely do him well to wait until
his voice, style, and editorial judgment have sufficiently matured. He has the
potential to make a dramatic impact, and quite possibly, as Sanford Goldstein
notes, he “will become an original in our short-poem universe.” But for now, as
Sanford asserts, he is not yet there.
The greater message for others exploring
the tanka form is that we are well-advised to give conscientious thought to the
nature of tanka, striving to learn, read, and understand it. I do not think we
should write or revise our tanka lightly. For the sake of its direction in
English, tanka deserves our careful attention indeed. Only with a considered
understanding of its form and content—and the
subject of content requires deeper analysis than I have been able to give it
here—can we then begin to confront the question of whether our books of tanka
should be published. My hope is that many more tanka books will be published (a
few already have been, not the least of which is the wide-ranging tanka
anthology, Wind Five Folded), and
that in the future we can rejoice with each author by saying, yes,
such-and-such a book had to be published. Given the current surge of
interest in tanka among English haiku poets—due in part to the efforts of
Sanford Goldstein and Jane Reichhold—I can only hope this enthusiasm,
symbolized by Kenneth Tanemura’s youthful urgency, is tempered by the necessity
of editorial insight and conscientious discipline. No matter what our chosen
form of poetry, be it haiku, tanka, or longer forms, it is commonly discipline
that transforms the poetry into art.