Tracking the Rampant Renku

The vast majority of what I have read about renku has centered around rules of linkage and debate—lots of debate—about the use of season words. So much has been written and discussed about these issues that I feel I cannot add anything that would be helpful. At the same time, I realize that even if linking is sound, and the season words correct, a renku as a whole may fail. Because attention has been so focused on these two elements rather than on the piece in its entirety, many renku are spoiled.

Renku is a moving picture much like cinema. Good renku and good cinema, like good novels, demand variety, texture, and above all, movement. As Makoto Ueda put it in The Master Haiku Poet Matsuo Bashō, “. . . renku is said to have anticipated the modern film technique of montage.” Too often this important element is forgotten and the renku remains in one season for too many links. Generally, that season is “neutral.” The next most common pitfall is to have people (girl, old man, small child) as the subject link after link.

Without having actually computed the numbers, I would say that well over eighty percent of the links in the 1991 Haiku Society of America renku contest that I judged with Paul O. Williams and William Higginson were about people and were set in a neutral season. As I saw this repeated in renku after renku, I set up a chart which I used to track each link of the poem. The chart contained five columns listing Season, Image, Place, Vocabulary, and Idea. As I started using this system, it soon became clear what was happening. Most links were neutral, most involved humans, and often the same images and words kept reappearing. For instance, trees and birds were popping up again and again in the same poem. I suspect we choose trees and birds because they are easily accessible as metaphor.

At times it was not just the same word reappearing but the same idea. If, for example, the link—

after lunch

the pregnant mother rests

among the hay stacks

were used on page two, on page three there might be something like—

full and sleepy

the cat heavy with kittens

between pillows.

While the links do not describe exactly the same situation, the idea is essentially the same. It could be that one of the reasons something like this happens is that as the renku develops and takes on its own life, it can lead the poet in a direction where repetition is understandable. By that I mean that the renku becomes so strong on its own that we do not remember that it is supposed to move over a wide range of topics, moods, vocabulary, landscapes, and seasons.

For my part, I find the use of the season/image/place/vocabulary/idea chart a great help. What I plan to do in the future is to use the chart for each renku in which I am involved. Just a quick glance at the chart will tell me that “she” has already been used sixteen times, how the seasons are progressing, if birds or trees (no matter what species) are being overworked, if I am just about to restate a previous link using a different character, and if the landscape of the poem is changing or bogged down in one location.

This may sound like another complex consideration to keep in mind when trying to adhere to all the other rules we already face when writing a renku. But that is not really the case; actually, it is much easier and simpler to keep track of the different elements and correct a link at the time it is written. I am sure many of us have had a renku partner write us to say that the link we have labored over needs rewriting. The chart tells us immediately if a rewrite is necessary.

By keeping Ueda’s comparison of renku to the modern film technique of montage foremost in our mind, and by “seeing” the montage of the renku as it develops, we will construct a better finished poem. Invoking Ueda’s observation and using the chart may help us track our way more easily along the renku road so that we become freer to concentrate on the important part: the poetry itself.