An Invitation to Rengay
The following is the introduction
to my book, True Colour, published in December of 2014 by the City
of Redmond, Washington, as one of my activities as the city’s poet laureate.
The book consists of thirteen solo rengay, each one paired with a colour
photograph in a design by Dan D Shafer. Also included with the book is a brief
tutorial on rengay, “How to Write a Rengay.” See also Rengay Worksheets, and all the individual rengay in True Colour.
“We write to taste life twice, in
the moment and in retrospect.”
—Anaïs Nin
If you’ve ever tried writing haiku, you’ve written what began as the hokku, or
starting verse, for a linked-verse form known as renga, later called renku. For
centuries in Japan, two or more poets wrote renga collaboratively in a sort of
poetic conversation. Renga parties were social events, something to do when
there was no television or Internet. Each verse linked to the previous verse,
yet shifted away to present something new at each turn. As the renga unfolded,
it sought to “taste all of life” in its many glorious colours. The starting
verses of renga are where haiku came from, because poets often preserved these
poems, even while the social dialog of writing the rest of each renga was
forgotten.
In Japan, renga were often a
hundred verses long, or longer, but also popular was the kasen renga, a shorter
variation with just thirty-six verses. As a modern adaptation, in 1992
California poet Garry Gay invented a six-verse form, which he called rengay,
combining the word “renga” with his last name. Unlike renga, a key goal of
rengay was to develop a central theme. Garry and I wrote the very first rengay
together, following the pattern he proposed for two poets, and I also proposed
a pattern for three poets. Writers have also adapted rengay for six poets, and
for one poet writing solo. The pleasure of writing rengay lies mostly in
writing together with one or more partners, or in exploring the chosen theme.
While rengay is primarily intended
as a collaboration between two or three poets, the pieces in True Colour are
all solo rengay, written with different colour themes for each rengay—each
verse tasting life in one colour or another. In this book, the poems become
collaborations through the photographs and design artistry of Dan D Shafer. I
invite you to try writing rengay yourself, whether solo or in collaboration
with others.
Michael
Dylan Welch
Redmond Poet Laureate
Postscript
How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart.
—Ono no Komachi, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, from The Ink Dark Moon
Rengay, as with haiku, is a poetic means of catching the colours of the heart.
With both haiku and rengay, we can record daily experiences as they pass by—and
so these moments will not pass us by. The goal with each verse in a rengay can
therefore be to capture the essence of an object or experience, observed in
either nature or human nature—a matter of tuning in to the cosmos and what it
has to offer us.
Indeed, one of the fundamental
principles in the art of haiku as practiced by Bashō, its greatest master, was
that of following zōka, or “the way
of the cosmos” (according to Haruo Shirane in his book Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō,
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998, 260). For Bashō, “the
way of art (fūga), the way of the
inner spirit (kokoro), and the way of
the cosmos (zōka) become inseparable” (Shirane, 260). In 1702, one of Bashō’s disciples, Dohō, compiled the book Sanzōshi. In it, he quotes Bashō as saying “the changes of
heaven and earth are the seeds of poetry,” and that “when the color of the
heart, of the thoughts and emotions within, becomes the object, the verse is
created” (Shirane, 265, 333). Shirane explains that “‘Seeing’ is as much an
internal matter, of realizing the zōka
within, as it is an external matter. The ‘cherry blossoms’ do not exist by
themselves in nature,” but “come into being only when they are ‘seen’ by and
fuse with the zōka within the poet”
(261). As Thoreau said, it isn’t what we look at that matters, but what we see.
The poems in True Colour are, I hope,
examples of seeing, or recognizing the myriad details of our lives—indeed, the
colours of human existence.
More than this, I hope these poems become experiences themselves. Pablo Picasso once said that “There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.” Likewise, ordinary haiku are experiences transformed into words, but extraordinary haiku are words transformed into experiences. At the very least, I side with Vladimir Nabokov, who said “All colours make me happy, even grey.”
—29 November, 4 December 2014
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