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The second issue of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts will be live on August 1st (2013). The online magazine is biannual.



o   website: http://lijla.weebly.com/index.html
o   subscribe: http://issuu.com/lijla/docs/feb2013
o   February issue: http://issuu.com/lijla/docs/feb2013#download


In order to be alerted either subscribe to the magazine at Issuu as above, or keep checking in at the website or my blog.


Alan's blog:

Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts at the Saboteur Awards 2013, Runner Up in Best magazine category.
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/lakeview-international-journal-of.html

First issue and gendai haiku article:
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/lakeview-international-journal-of.html

Gendai haiku article:
The G-force of Blue  |  Touching Base with Gendai haiku :
http://issuu.com/lijla/docs/feb2013#download

warmest regards,

Alan Summers
Haiku Editor, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts

Just got a preview of the full results special feature.  As it's early evening in New York, you might hopefully see the feature up mid-afternoon New York time.

If not, I'll make an announcement when it's up. 

Alan

Nobuyuki Kobayashi — ISSA
1763 — 1827
by Janice M Bostok

The spring moon
Shines Godlike
Upon a flower thief
At work on a hill.         1

Issa was born in Kashiwabara village, Japan, the first son of a farmer. His childhood name was Yatarô but he was registered with Nobuyuki as his first name and Kobayashi as his surname. Issa did not have a happy or fortuitous life. While he was still young (at the age of about three) his mother died. His grandmother took over raising him. Later she also died and his father remarried. His stepmother eventually forced Issa to leave home at the age of thirteen.

He traveled to Edo, which is now the capital, Tokyo. City people scorned country folk and called the peasants 'grey starlings'. Issa wrote over five thousand haiku during his lifetime, many of them about starlings and sparrows and other animals and insects.

joining the starlings
a night of winter
rain

dejected —
even among sparrows
a stepchild


Issa remained in Tokyo for twenty years, living in poverty. He became seriously interested in writing haiku at the age of twenty five. When his teacher died he succeeded him as leader of the group. However, this position didn't sit comfortably with him and he chose to wander through the southwest of Japan until 1801, when his father died and he returned to the village where he was born.

As pine trees grow all over Japan Issa wrote many poems about them. They became a symbol for shelter for the homeless.

in pine-tree shade
eating, sleeping
60 provinces!


Even though he inherited his father's property, his stepmother and stepbrother managed to keep him from moving into the dwelling that was rightfully his and he lived in a rented hut at the edge of the village.

sparrows at the gate —
the brothers' first
fight

well here it is
my final home?
five feet of snow


my dear old village
every memory of home
pierces like a thorn


In 1815 Issa married a young woman of twenty eight years of age. He was fifty two. His wife produced four children all of whom died in infancy. His wife also died in the final childbirth.

evening falls —
a stepchild sparrow
cries in the pine


It appears he really did live in the shadow beneath the pines even in the village of his birth where he should have been settled at home.

Issa married a second time and seemed happy at last. By this time he had moved into his rightful home, although he enjoyed a casual lifestyle. Because of his own treatment by society and closer to home, by his step-family, Issa felt compassion and tolerance for all life, even the fleas and flies.

don't chase, don't chase
children!
that flea has kids

don't swat the fly!
wringing hands
wringing feet


Issa's second wife produced a girl heir for him. Unfortunately the baby was actually born after his death and he never saw her. He was sixty five years of age when he died.

Issa (Cup-of-tea) will be remembered for his masterpiece 'Ora ga haru': The Year Of My Life, 1819. (A Haibun) It should be noted that the particular sect of Buddhism to which he belonged (Shinshû) was a lot more liberal than what Bashô believed in. His wanderings are somewhat more social.
Not consciously developing a style as Bashô may seem to have done, nor writing as formally as Buson, Issa had a personality all his own. He used the local dialects and the language of daily conversation. For us, today, his work appears to manifest the true philosophy of the Buddhist intent without the obvious religious rhetoric which many writers get caught up in. We love him for his simple warmth of humanity and his compassion for all living things.

There is a story, whether it is true or not, that the daimyo Maeda, the great Lord Kaga sent for Issa to come and speak about haiku. Issa refused, because although still a peasant, he would not be 'ordered' to appear before nobility. It may be a true story because Issa also shows some of this 'nerve' in his poems.

losing the contest
surprise, surprise
the lord's mum won.        2


Rather than the ancient anecdotes, I prefer the present-day novel titled Haiku Guy by David G. Lanoue, published by Red Moon Press, in the USA. It's a hilarious, loosely termed historical novel based on Issa — or Cup-of-tea. It is said he was called Cup-of-one-tea because he only stopped to have one cup of tea and then continued on his travels.

It is now thought that many of Issa's childhood poems were written from memory when he was older and more mature. Considering he only began writing haiku seriously at the age of 25, this is probably the case. But it is known that his father wrote reasonably accomplished haiku, and Issa attended the home of an educated man in the village, to learn to read and write. This educated man wrote haiku. So it is possible that he knew quite a bit about writing haiku before he left the village.

It also seems that many agree his poems about animals, bird, and insects are actually about his own lifetime circumstances. He was the orphaned sparrow in his mountain village; he was the peasant starling in the city; and he was the homeless cat and dog looking for shelter and love after returning to his home village — where his house burnt down.

Since haiku has become known in the west we have been told not to use simile, metaphor, or personification. Issa certainly used all of these devices in his poems. If we carefully study many of the Japanese master's works we can find a similar usage in their poems, but perhaps not as exaggerated as in Issa's case.

For example Bashõ wrote about 'should I hold it in my hand, it would melt from my tears, the mountain snow'. He was really talking about his dead mother's lock of hair! Now translators are saying 'his dead mother's lock of hair'. Japanese haiku is full of simile, metaphor and personification.

Many non-haiku poems can be interpreted in this manner. The layers of meaning are what makes a poem great. However, because of Issa's compassion we sometimes get caught up in his style of writing and want to share our own understanding and enjoyment of our own environment. But we must remember poetry is language on the cutting edge, as we say. We would no longer think of a fly wringing its hands in begging mode, unless it was a giant cyber space monster perhaps!

In our cynical/belief/non-belief confusion we are more likely to say 'don't swat that fly, it may be your reincarnated grandmother'!

What we should remember is that poems of any form should read naturally, make sense and be mature in tone and capable of triggering the reader's response. What we know is that Issa was a priest-like gentle, homeless person who wandered around for most of his life searching for that zen-like acceptance and peace. Hopefully, each of us will find it in our own way and express it in our own language of today's lifestyle. And, perhaps we should also remember what Bashô said: ...'if one is to write good haikai, one must interpret and describe the lowly and the commonplace with high serious intent' 3


1 The Year Of My Life, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles. USA. 1972. P.40
2 chrysanthemum
3 The Year Of My Life, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles. USA. 1972. P. 17

All poems quoted (unless otherwise stated) are translated by David G. Lanoue.
© 2004 Janice M Bostok

This article is one of a series of four and was first published in Yellow Moon 16 2004 pp. 33-34


Enjoy some of Janice's work here:
http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n1/haiga_Modern/Jan_Bostok/index.html


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Haiku, Personification, Zen, Translation, Now and Zen
Art Durkee (2008)

EXTRACTS

More than one English-language haijin (someone who makes haiku) has felt themselves up against the wall. The wall is the Western belief that anthropomorphism and personification are fallacies, are fiction, are no-nos in poetry. They use Western literary-critical terms like pathetic fallacy (now there's a term designed to be a negative from the get-go) or Eliot's objective correlative. They talk about subject-object relations, which is a Western bias built on millennia of assumptions about the nature of reality: that the "I" of the ego is separate from the "thou" of the world, that we are separate from nature, that we are in fact as Descartes claimed, ghosts in the shell.

But the best haiku are not snapshots, not metaphors, not bridges between the disembodied mind of the poet's language and the untouchable putridness of the natural world—the best haiku are deeply embedded participations. They are unifications, not bridges; participations, not observations; whole embodied experiences, not words about disembodied theoretical experiences. If you don't fall into the poem, into the world of the poem, if you don't feel it in your own body, the poem is not finished. Some would still call that sort of embodiment a personification or pathetic fallacy, of course: how we love to cling to our postural habits and defenses.

Rather than personification, I would say identification-with: the idea of becoming-one-with. I think we get closest to this when we talk about participation. Not subject/object relation, but as Harry Hay put it, subject-subject consciousness. No separation: not-other. Nothing, no-thing.

The point of identification, obviously, is for the reader to complete the haiku experience by embodying it, by being the cricket or apple blossom, rather than just reading about it and keeping that mental (illusory) separation. No separation between "subject" and "object" is what Harry Hay means by subject-subject consciousness, in part. Again, this has deep parallels in the Western mystical tradition, too.


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Excerpt from, "A Commentary on Yagi Mikajo zen kushû" ([Collected Haiku of Yagi Mikajo], Tokyo, Chûsekisha, 2006): "Yagi Mikajo as female "avant-garde" haiku poet" [Joryû "zen'ei" haijin to shite no Yagi Mikajo] by Shiwa Kyôtarô (1954—), a.k.a. Professor Shimoyama Akira, Ph.D., Osaka University of Commerce].


YAGI MIKAJO AS A FEMALE "AVANT-GARDE" HAIKU POET
by Shiwa Kyôtarô



. . . Indeed, the generation of Yagi Mikajo was born in the Taishô era (1912-1926); this is the generation which experienced three main historical periods: Taishô, Shôwa (1926-1989), and Heisei (1989 -). Many people consider the greatest turning point of this generation to be "the gap between the pre-war and postwar eras." However, if instead one considers modern history from the viewpoint of a change in social perception of events and a social shift in values, then the promotion of the advancement of women, in an actual sense, may be definitive. In this regard, when looking at the pre- versus post-1960's era, a complete break or shift occurred in society—a point of paradigmatic change. . . .



股の間の産声芽木の闇へ伸び

mata no ma no ubugoe megi no yami e nobi



between thighs
the birth cry stretches into
budding tree darkness



Yagi Mikajo had a baby just like this. In 1954, when this event occurred, it was an era when many ponds, lakes, and rice fields still remained scattered throughout Sakai city; a time when many street stalls set up in front of our neighborhood houses during festival days. Within such a scene, Yagi Mikajo seemed to feel "darkness." It was the "darkness" that was expressed in the novel Kappa [a water sprite, in Japanese folklore], written by Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892-1927), and similar to the "darkness" that Shakespeare addressed in Macbeth.

When I was a child, fishermen would come to our house from Sakai harbor, as they wandered through the streets selling sardines, chanting, "Wouldn't you like to try tete kamu iwashi [sardines so fresh they'll bite your fingers]?"

In this way, Yagi Mikajo recalls the past—. That fishermen's sea has disappeared. Today, such a sea does not exist in Sakai city. Although the mythical and elegant place name [for Sakai city], "Hagoromo" [from the Noh plays of Zeami: "heavenly feathered dress"] remains, and people once boasted of "the absolutely whitest seashore in the East," the coastline of Sakai city is now decorated by polluted sediment and foul breezes. The sea, which nature had purified through hundreds of millions, billions of years. The sea, from which our ancestors had fished "tete kamu iwashi" through hundreds, thousands of years. The sea was "cut" between Yagi Mikajo's and my own generation— this is the gendai [contemporary] situation. The actualities of the era cannot help but include darkness.

Through the baptism of the New Rising Haiku, Yagi Mikajo managed to express the "gendai" era in her haiku works, within the current of our contemporary time—in which everything was "cut" apart. In 1957, she published her book of haiku, Benitake. At that time, in the early 1960's, her title of, "The Flag-bearer of Women's Avant-garde Haiku," appeared in many haiku magazines. When we read her writings of that period, it is possible to clearly discern her inclination toward the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As a result, her various writings were attempts to express "existence [Existenz]" in "extreme/boundary conditions [Grenzsituation]," inclusive of her haiku works. She also wrote numerous challenging essays, in a sense aiming for conceptions possibly beyond her ability to articulate [in prose]; it could be said that her essential character was not that of a philosophical thinker. On the contrary, her definition of "avant-garde" was essentially ambiguous.

Within the darkness: there is no "here"; the real aim of Yagi Mikajo has been to find those vectors or dimensions of existence which touch upon this theme.

In any case, after the publication of Benitake, she began writing essays and criticism for the major haiku magazines, such as Haiku, Haiku Kenkyû [Haiku Study], Haiku to Essay [Haiku and Essays], and many haiku group-journals blossomed out of Kaitei [Ocean Distance; led by Kaneko Tohta], her own journal-group, Hana [Flower], and so on.


BIOGRAPHY

Yagi Mikajo (1924-, born as Yagi Michiko, Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture), graduated from Sakai Women's High School (the same institution from which tanka poet Yosano Akiko, 1878-1942, also graduated), and entered Osaka Women's Medical College (now Kansai Medical University). She received her MD Degree from Osaka City University, becoming the first female ophthalmologist in the history of Japan. Following the war, she was first taught haiku in the shasei style by Suzuka Noburo (1887-1971), then by the previously arrested New Rising Haiku poets, Hirahata Seitô and Saitô Sanki, as well as others. She was given the haigô (haiku pen-name) "Mikajo" in emulation of the kanji found in "Yosano Akiko," by Seitô and Sanki. Her haiku style is known as zen'ei (avant-garde) haiku. She engaged in haiku activities not only with the senior poets of the New Rising Haiku movement, but also with the younger postwar haiku poets, such as Kaneko Tohta (1919 -), Suzuki Murio (1919-2004), Akao Tôshi (1925-1981), and others. In 1964, she became the leader of her own journal-group Hana [flower].

As well as a leading postwar haiku poet, she was active as a feminist, and as a commemorator of Yosano Akiko, who had also lived in Sakai City. In 1982, she founded, "The Choral Group Association of Yosano Akiko" [Yosano Akiko o utau kai], becoming the group's director. From the following year, the "Akiko Recital" became an important annual event. In 1986, the first female prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland (1939 -), became interested in Yosano Akiko, as the Japanese representative had previously quoted from her poetry at the UN Conference on Women, 1985. Mikajo, in an international spirit of friendship, became a founding patron of the "Yosano Akiko Bilingual (Japanese/Norwegian) Poetry Monument-stone," placed at Sakai Women's Junior College, and later traveled to Norway to present an official photograph of the monument to the Cabinet. She also presented her own haiku tanzaku (a formal presentation and mounting of haiku poems in calligraphic hand) to the Minister of Education, and Prince and Princess of Norway. In 1992, Mikajo founded the "Yosano Akiko Bilingual Poetry Monument-stone" at the Council of Gender Equality, in Oslo, Norway. In the same year, she became a founding patron of the Yosano Akiko Museum, which opened in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, in the year 2000.

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Excerpted comment by Uda Kiyoko (1935—). Included within the pamphlet insert, in Yagi Mikajo zen kushû ([Collected haiku of Yagi Mikajo], Tokyo, Shûsekisha, 2006, pp. 3-4):

YAGI MIKAJO AND THE TRACE OF TIME
by Uda Kiyoko


In the late 50's and early 60's, I learned of and first laid eyes on haiku works possessing tremendous impact, such as those by Kaneko Tohta, Hori Ashio (1916-1993), Hayashida Kineo (1925-1998), Shimazu Akira (1918-2000) and so on. Among them was Yagi Mikajo [Uda quotes the two haiku just above, and adds]:



産卵の亀の涙が溶けた朝

sanran no kame no namida ga toketa asa


laying eggs
a sea turtle's tears melt
a morning


. . . From that time, almost a half century has passed, and the situation of the haiku world has changed. Nowadays, without any especially deep consideration, some reviewers and commentators from younger generations will comment, "avant-garde haiku was a failure."

However, I do not know of any other period than that of the postwar era when haiku poets wrote with such a strong consciousness in clarifying and discussing their own aims, directly addressing issues of self and society with an acute awareness—this was the so-called "avant-garde haiku" movement. Even in my eyes, a mere spectator's immature eyes, the senior haiku poets' outbursts of their passion toward haiku expression was intensely sharp and powerful. Even now, that time remains burned in my memory. It is absolutely unforgettable.


I have some copies of the haiku journals which Yagi Mikajo founded: Fukurô [Owl], Yatôha [Night Thieves' School], Nawa [Rope], and so on. These were all printed on old mimeograph machines, and the paper quality was poor as well. Nevertheless, every page of these journals is filled with the substantial power and passion of the young haiku poets of that era, who today have become foundational in haiku history. Yagi Mikajo's haiku works represent the traces of a woman who became a pivotal innovator in this era of haiku history.


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THE SPIRIT OF VENTUROUS EXPERIMENT
by Kaneko Tohta

I recall that my first encounter with Yagi Mikajo was sometime in 1956, during the time of the publication of her first book, Benitake [Scarlet Mushroom]. The publication celebration party was held in Osaka, and I attended the party, as I lived in Kobe at the time. My impression of Yagi Mikajo was very strong, and I recall the event quite clearly in memory. At the time, the topic of conversation was focused on [two] haiku containing the title of her book:



紅き茸礼賛しては蹴る女

akaki take raisan shite wa keru onna

worshipping it, the scarlet mushroom
kicks it, a woman



紅茸の前にわが櫛すべり落つ

benitake no mae ni waga kushi suberi otsu

in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off



The subtle wording, especially, in the first example, the use of akaki take [for scarlet mushroom], rather than benitake [indicating language nuance], suggests the presence of a partner to a man [a woman]; in our discussion of this expression, someone mentioned: "this wording is cleverly insidious." [Implying also "foxy" in all senses. Dokubenitake, another scarlet mushroom of Japan (Russula emetica), has a feminine form.] The discussion ended I recall with someone saying something like, "this haiku is about jealousy." In any case, the sort of woman who slips off a comb in front of a man, presents a considerable "challenge" to her partner. [The expression "my comb slips off" implies assertive sexuality. In Japanese culture at the time, a "decent" woman was expected to be passive.] We all laughed in admiration. Our group was a band of haiku poets filled with an energy to write "haiku of "the human," not kachôfûei. [Traditional composition based upon "official" kigo, etc.]

So, the publication of the haiku book Benitake was warmly welcomed with real excitement and a sense of freshness. Mikajo had responded to the aims of our group through her body. Smiling, yet in a definitive manner she greeted us.


Strongly passionate—with piercing sharpness—she revealed a sensibility which encompassed the profound depths of human being. I realized that I was witnessing the emergence of a singular woman haiku poet who had the power to become a leader of the postwar haiku movement. Her second book of haiku, Akai chizu [The Red Map] includes her haiku on Nagasaki. I lived there for a time, due to my business, so I had the chance to meet and talk with her, and realized my expectations were becoming confirmed. In fact, the book contains several of her haiku masterpieces, which caused some later controversy:



満開の森の陰部の鰓呼吸

mankai no mori no inbu no era kokyû


full bloom
in the forest's genitals
respiration of gills



マラソンの足扇形に滝の使徒か

marason no ashi senkei ni taki no shito ka


a marathon runner's legs
fanning to and fro
apostles of a — waterfall



黄蝶ノ黄危機ノキ・ダム創ル鉄帽の黄

kichô no kiki no ki • damu tsukuru tetsu bô no ki


yellow-butterfly's-danger's-yellow-danger :
                                    dam-constructing-iron-helmet's-yellow


And the same experimental sense is also found in her later work,


百足百匹洗骨の儀はすみしかな

mukade hyappiki senkotsu no gi wa sumishi kana


a hundred black centipedes —
the ritual of washing bones
accomplished . . .


Bold, adventurous, sexual, experimental. These are some of the qualities of Mikajo's work. Without concern for consequences, following her passion, creating haiku of the human, Mikajo is a haiku poet born in the vortex of the postwar haiku movement, and assuredly remains today a powerfully influential creator.

Excerpted comment by Kaneko Tohta (1919—). Included within the pamphlet insert, in Yagi Mikajo zen kushû ([Collected Haiku of Yagi Mikajo], Tokyo, Shûsekisha, 2006, pp. 1-2)

Extract from Benitake
Excerpt from the "Afterword" to Benitake [The Scarlet Mushroom] (1956; reprinted in Yagi Mikajo zen kushû [Collected Haiku of Yagi Mikajo] Tokyo: Shûsekisha, 2006, p. 43):

This book of poetry includes my haiku works from 1945 to 1955, the period which represents the era of my adolescence. Although my adolescence was distorted by World War II and the turbulence following its aftermath, somehow or other, in everyday life, the path I followed was ostensibly that of a typical woman, ostensibly a typical life. Having managed thus far, I have compiled the haiku of that period within this present volume. Pondering the fact that I have continued to breathe, even though poor in health, I cannot but offer my gratitude, and acknowledge my great obligation to my teachers, senior comrades, friends, family, and others. In outward appearance, the scarlet mushroom [amanita muscaria] is alluring, yet it exhibits a toxic quality with regard to humankind and other creatures—I have found this intriguing, and for this reason have taken this image symbolically, in titling this volume, while adding a touch of color. This reflects my style of conscious resistance.

January 1956
Yagi Mikajo


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Modern Haiku
Volume 40.1
Winter 2009
www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/Gilbert2009.html

Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese
& English-Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective
by Richard Gilbert

Reviewed by Randy M. Brooks

Extracts:


Gilbert's focus on consciousness provides an interesting perspective for looking at haiku — a perspective that leads to his list of types of disjunction that includes: (12) misplaced anthropomorphism


Reading a haiku supposes an implicit contract between the writer and reader to collaborate on seeking or creating aesthetic significance. The haiku writer won't give the reader everything, nor tell the reader what to think nor how to feel about the images or language in the haiku. The poet invites the reader into the space of the haiku — the fragments, the language, the silences, the disjunctions, the consciousness — and expects him or her to collaborate in the process of shaping meaning or perceiving feeling from these pieces. The significance (insight, feeling, realization, understanding) is discovered and created by both writer and reader in this shared act of consciousness stimulated by the pieces of the haiku. It is this sharing of unfinished, incomplete consciousness that is the most characteristic of the art of haiku. Gilbert does an excellent job pointing out the importance of kire, the break or pause in a haiku, as the space that invites writer and reader into a shared collaborative consciousness.

If the motives of the writer or the reader are not trusted, this same space becomes an invitation for ridicule and misreading for the sake of denigration, dismissal, or petty personal attacks. This is true for individual writers as well as entire groups that may be dismissed as being too metaphorical or too realistic or too anthropomorphic. It has always been my contention that the haiku community needs to get past the beginner's mind of definitions and rules and get on with the celebration of the diversity of the genre that is rich and strong only to the extent that there is a wide range of practice, a surprising freshness of voices and perspectives. We need to embrace and celebrate haiku writers who relish dense language and the naming function of words, haiku writers who live in the woods and tap into the biodiversity of ecosystems there, haiku writers who protest injustice and go to jail, haiku writers who resist the male ego dominance of English, haiku writers who meditate and seek the quiet voice within, haiku writers who celebrate being social and the significance of being in community, haiku writers who are religious within a variety of spiritual traditions, haiku writers who are all about people, haiku writers who write senryu and don't care about the distinction, haiku writers who are international citizens of the world using haiku to bridge cultures, haiku writers who are so local nobody but friends at the local pub understand them. This diversity of writers and approaches to haiku is the strength and rich surprise of elasticity found in this literary genre. This is why I love the interviews in Gilbert's book and DVD.

Note from Alan: many of these interviews on the DVD are available on the internet.

Meet Yagi Mikajo, who earned an M.D. degree from Osaka Medical College and became the first female ophthalmologist in Japan. She writes zen-ei ("avant-garde") haiku and became the leader of a haiku group and journal, Hana ("Flower"), in 1964. Owing to Ônishi's age and health, Gilbert's interview is brief, but he includes commentary from Kaneko Tôta and other haiku poets. Tôta writes, "Bold, adventurous, sexual, experimental. These are some of the qualities of Mikajo's work. Without concern for consequences, following her passion, creating haiku of the human, Mikajo is a haiku poet born in the vortex of the postwar haiku movement" (256).

    mankai no mori no inbu no era kokyû

    full bloom
    in the forest's genitals
    respiration of gills

    Yagi Mikajo (255)

Richard Gilbert's Poems of Consciousness does not finish academic arguments, but it is a wonderful exploration of the variety of contemporary Japanese haiku poets, especially the variety of types of consciousness that become the basis of their literary creations. It is the questions this book raises that are so valuable, and the continued exploration and introduction of contemporary Japanese haiku authors that makes this book an essential addition to libraries — personal and public. Buy it for your personal library and ask your local library to purchase a copy as well.


Yagi Mikajo-sensei is a legend. Not only is she one of the last living students who has studied directly under the New Rising Haiku poets Saitô Sanki and and Hirahata Seitô, she is also a cultural treasure. Her brilliance as a poet of gendai haiku is without equal — her radical voice, daring and cutting humor, and unpretentious poetic stance are fearless. Through more than five decades she has been not only a leader, but has served also as a guide to a new poetics. Mikajo is one of a handful of pioneering women of the postwar zen'ei avant-garde gendai movement who not only championed women's issues (in what had been something of a cultural vacuum), but also pioneered gendai haiku itself. Drawing on her experiences as a woman, she presented new dimensions of contemporary haiku.

weblinks:
http://www.gendaihaiku.com/mikajo/index.html
http://www.gendaihaiku.com/mikajo/commentaries.html


Dr. Randy M. Brooks, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of English at Millikin University: http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=96

Awards and Other Honors: Most Valuable Program (Runner Up) from VOYA, (Voice of Youth Advocates) magazine for haiku workshops at Centennial High School (Champaign, Illinois, 2008); Merit Award, 15th Ito En "Oh-I, Ocha" New Haiku Contest (2004); Special Mention Award, Valentine Haiku Awards, The Heron's Nest: A Haikai Journal (2004); Editors' Choice, Heron's Nest Award, The Heron's Nest: A Haikai Journal V:1 (2003); Third Place, the Haiku Society of America's Merit Book Awards for the Best Haiku Books published in 1999 [for School's Out: Selected Haiku of Randy Brooks (1999)]; Third Place, Penumbra Poetry & Haiku Competition (Tallahassee Writer's Association, 1999); First Place, The Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Chapbook Competition (1999); Runner-up, Snapshots Haiku Collection Competition (Snapshots Haiku Magazine, 1998); First Place, Harold G. Henderson Award (The Haiku Society of America, 1998); Best of Issue Award, Modern Haiku 29:2 (1998); Matsuyama Tourism Haiku Award (sponsored by the Shiki Haiku Museum and the city of Matsuyama, 1997); Second Place, The Haiku Society of America's Merit Book Awards for the Best Haiku Books published in 1992 [for the Midwest Haiku Anthology]; Mainichi Haiku Competition Award, Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo, 1997); Honorable Mention, Japan Airlines Haiku Competition (January 1988); Bonsai Quarterly Award, Bonsai Quarterly (January 1977); Editor's Personal Favorite Award, Modern Haiku (February 1977).

Professor Richard Gilbert, Associate Professor, Department of British and American Language and Literature, at Kumamoto University:
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=159
http://www.haikunorthamerica.com/2/post/2011/07/richard-gilbert-to-speak-at-hna.html

Awards and Other Honors: (Haiku-related): Grants: Research grants awarded by the Japan Ministry of Education (MEXT): 1) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, MEXT Kakenhi 18520439 (2006-08), supported the creation of research materials found at the Gendai Haiku Website ('gendaihaiku.com'); 2) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Kakenhi 21520579 (2009-12) supported documentary filming and book publication of the works and life of Kaneko Tohta (see "Books," below); 3) MEXT Kakenhi 24520628 (2012-15) supports current research, including the translation of new scholarship related to Basho, additional poet interviews, and the publication of a bilingual textbook presenting topics in Japanese and English-language haiku for Japanese EFL university students.

Professional Activities: Co-judge of the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition, Kumamoto, Japan (2003-present). Founder and Director of the Kon Nichi Haiku Translation Group, Kumamoto University (2002-present). Founding Associate Member of The Haiku Foundation.


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in the garden steel ears for dreams come whistling

Darrell Lindsay


between seasons
only
reality shows

Peter Yovu


I read through all the poems several times, seeing what stuck, what caught my attention, what stayed fresh to interest. As there are really no rules in poetry—despite the occasional chosen mechanical ones of a rigid form and the surface cleverness that supports—my take is purely subjective and does not represent that of Fox News. "canyon / replies from the / afterlife" had the necessary frisson; as did "a delay in large leaves". "planning his escape / through the I / in the sentence" attracted me, and if the last word had been "sentience" I would have stopped there.

Finally I wavered between "in the garden steel ears for dreams come whistling" and "between seasons / only / reality shows". The latter had the twists of ambiguity that appeal to me, the natural and the electronic, the pivot of "only" and the flickering substantive/verb of "shows": but the former still stands my test of not being quite here and thus testing me that I am.

Tom Raworth
Commentary for Scorpion Prize #21

Tom Raworth
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/tom-raworth
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=43
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview13
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1252946.ece
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Raworth.html

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a face beseeching
before it becomes
a water lily

George Swede

Usually, one first sees the water lily and then reads a face into it. But here the poet confronts the face itself first, and "sees" it that way for only a moment before it turns into a water lily. And "beseeching" is a good participle in the context: water lilies can't beseech, of course, but once brought to life, they can and do. At the sound level, Swede's 5-5-5- pattern works nicely: we expect change, "becom[ing," but here what changes remains the same, thus confounding the reader.


the silence grows
teeth—a tree
with cracked windows

Scott Metz

[This] deserves praise for its subtle metaphor: first silence (an abstraction) is animated—it grows teeth; then, in a reversal, the natural (tree) takes on aspects of the man-made, with its "cracked windows." The natural is subsumed under the unnatural. And even here there is no refuge for the larger silence outside.


a few grains of sugar
at the edge of the fire
slowly smoking

Chris Gordon

One expects to meet a few grains of carbon here or perhaps particles of food, cooked on the fire. But the few grains of sugar are a surprise: the references makes us look closely at that fire, slowly smoking.

The Scorpion Prize #19
Commentary by Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all), the most recent of which is Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005). Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992) has been used in classrooms studying the "new" digital poetics, and 21st Century Modernism (Blackwell 2002) is a manifesto of Modernist Survival. Wittgenstein's Ladder brought philosophy into the mix; it has recently been translated into Portuguese (Sao Paulo), Spanish (Mexico), and Slovenian and will be translated in France for 2010 publication. Perloff has recently published her cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has been widely discussed. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, coedited with Craig Dworkin has just been published by Chicago (2009), and UNORIGINAL GENIUS: Poetry by Other Means in the Twenty-First Century, is due out from U of Chicago Press, 2010. She has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. She was recently the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and has recently completed her year as President of the Modern Language Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University. She received an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, from Bard College in May 2008.

Extract from:
The keynote speech, given by WHC Honourary President, James W. Hackett,  for the WHF2002 English-language session.

The World Haiku Festival 2002
Yuwa-town, Akita 20-22 September

Spiritual union is sometimes confused with anthropomorphism, whose attribution of strictly human characteristics to things stems from hubris and sentimentality. The haiku scholar Joan Giroux asserts in her book, The Haiku Form, that spiritual identification in haiku is not merely "cute anthropomorphism" but is:

... an instant in which the mind becomes united to an object, virtually becomes the object, and realizes the eternal, universal truth contained in being.

Only strong empathic intuitions rising directly from our 'heart of hearts' intimate spiritual union. That Basho held such interpenetrative experience to be an
important principle in haiku is clearly shown by his advocacy of:

...entering into the object, perceiving its delicate life, and feeling its feelings, whereupon a poem speaks for itself. (British Haiku Society, Consensus, n.d.)

Again, in the following, Basho makes clear in no uncertain terms the importance of such identification in haiku creation:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one — when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if the object and yourself are separate — then your poetry is not true poetry but a semblance of the real thing. (Yuasa, The Narrow Road: 33)

In analyzing the theme of Oneness, Aldous Huxley explains:

Direct knowledge of the (Spiritual) Ground cannot be had, except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That'. (A. Huxley: 35, The Perennial Philosophy)

Basho's advice regarding the importance of such interpenetration makes its neglect in contemporary haiku more than enigmatic or ironic: it seems sadly emblematic of the hubris and superficiality of our age. Indeed, serious haiku poets might consider how costly to the genre is the neglect of this profound spiritual principle: one with a long, hallowed history, having evolved from ancient Vedic origins in India, through millennia, to Mahayana Buddhism, to Zen, and now beyond — to the world, and this very time and place.

If the principle of "That Art Thou" were utilized in haiku poetry, I believe there would be fewer 'snapshot' and 'So What?' verses to sully the name of haiku. The
extent to which haiku is marginalized from the world of Western poetry is surely due to a proliferation of trivial verses, lacking any literary or spiritual attributes. And the suspect practice of omitting the terms "poetry" and "poem" from that of "haiku," has doubtless played a role in vulgarizing the genre.

A harsh assessment? Perhaps. But the major reason for writing this "That Art Thou" text is to renew and reassert the neglected Tao/Zen spirit of haiku. And by so doing, to raise and return haiku's status to not only that of "poetry," but beyond, to the spiritual Way I know haiku can become.


SPIRITUAL INTERPENETRATION IN HAIKU
from The Zen Haiku and Other Zen Poems of J. W. Hackett
(Tokyo: Japan Publications @1983 by James W. Hackett)

A tiny spider
has begun to confiscate
this cup's emptiness.

Grasshopper's game:
to light on a tip of grass
then ride out its sway.

Too cold for snow:
the loneliness standing within
each flophouse doorway.

Signaling wildly
for all to take care: the tail
of the pissing cat.

    See this fly
that long since met eternity,
his kneeling remains.

Playful kitten,
how calmly it chews the fly's
buzzing misery.

R. H. Blyth and J. W. Hackett is the keynote speech, given by WHC Honourary President, James W. Hackett,  for the WHF2002 English-language session.

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From the website of soji aka Gary Barnes:

Butterfly! These words
from my brush are not flowers...
only their shadows.

Natsume Soseki

This haiku, by Soseki, is from the Peter Pauper Press volumes.

My love of haiku, and the way I write it was fostered by the works of those talented masters as translated by Peter Beilenson, who rendered  translations of their poetry and collected it in three volumes;  Japanese Haiku, The Four Seasons, and Cherry Blossoms. Peter began, and Harry Behn completed the fourth volume in the series, Haiku Harvest, because Mr. Beilenson journeyed to the "other side".  Each of  the poems capture a moment with the deft strokes of the artist's words. The four works were published by Peter Pauper Press.


The haiku that you find on the following pages have been written over many years. Though I have attempted to capture  the essence of a moment, some schools of haiku would say  that many of my haiku fly in the face of their most dearly  held tenets because I occasionally use metaphor, and on  occasion, anthropomorphism.(assigning human characteristics  to non-human or inanimate objects). I started learning haiku, however, before attending any of the "schools".  Most schools agree that maintaining the classic Japanese haiku form in English can be very restrictive and difficult, or leads to padding, excessive verbiage, when using the seventeen syllable, 5-7-5 format found in the works of haiku masters such as Issa, Basho and Buson.

Gary Barnes, from his Haiku Poets Hut

Alan:
I wouldn't call this personification or anthropomorphism, but a tinge of it perhaps makes this a charming haiku, and I'm sure we've seen this done right up today.
   
roadside diner
a fly inches across
distant hills

author: soji

Is this closer to the topics to hand, I don't know, but sometimes when you spend long hours with wildlife, a certain empathy real or otherwise can surface.

why such a disguise
black-masked sparrow?
the bird seed is free

author: soji aka Gary Barnes
http://www.haikupoetshut.com/whoiam.html


The Peter Pauper Press haiku books can now be purchased on Kindle too for those who like to be able to take their haiku library with them! :-) weblink: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=peter%20pauper%20haiku




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Devora,

You said:

Quote from: devora on July 06, 2013, 03:15:02 PM
My comment was neither fatuous nor frivolous, and did not warrant your rather smarty reply.

My reply was simply an acknowledgement before I posted more on personification and anthropomorphism.  The posts are there to take or leave them, and I'm keen to show a variety of examples not just from classic and modern times but also contemporary examples. As your very first words were "Please forgive me, Alan" I felt a reponse was necessary, and made with light humor, before I continued with my posts on this topic I started. I'm sorry that you took my good humor into a different direction but that was not my intention.

I personally felt that "slammed by salt and sun" was a very powerful line and not something of an ordinary sentence construction.  I've only worked in prisons as a haiku poet-in-residence during colder climes, but paint is such a huge feature in prisons as it regularly peels off the metal surfaces and needs to be repainted.

I personally found the commentary by Paul Pfleuger, Jr highly illuminating and the fact that the paint has no chance suggests neither have the residents.  I'm also reminded that the interview technique using shaken up cola cans that was adopted further north a disturbing memory and I hope that practice is outlawed, but alas as waterboarding seems de rigour in interviews, I fear not.

Different readers read differently when engaging in such a short genre practice as haiku, and gladly it will always remain controversial outside the safe confines of historical haikai verse of classic times.

Quoting a large extract from Pfleuger Jr's commentary:

Egad, hasn't the poet broken a rule here?

No worries.

Paying any attention to that might have resulted in a less than compelling haiku. It adds layers of nuance. The poet still vividly depicts a moment with an image that makes good use of suggestion and implication; and it has an objective feel about it.

From that slam at the beginning to its end, it brings to mind the brutal and unforgiving conditions of the Mexican correctional system, which has received a bit of news coverage in recent years, but nothing is overstated. The two-line construction seems utterly perfect for conveying the tone, as well as the rapidity of the machine gun's firing, when reading the last line the way it stands.

Commentary by Paul Pfleuger, Jr
Roadrunner X:1 Copyright © 2010.

More on Pfleuger Jr and David Caruso:

I can heartily recommend Paul Pfleuger Jr's first collection, a Zodiac, as a must for any one interested in contemporary approaches to haiku:
http://roadrunnerhaikublog.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/a-zodiac-paul-pfleuger-jr/

For more information on David Caruso:

pic and about:
http://www.davidhaiku.com/?page_id=19

recent haiku:
http://www.davidhaiku.com/?page_id=11

David Caruso THF Registry:
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=260


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Another quasi-surreal haiku of note by Bashō is:

takotsubo ya hakanaki yume wo natsu no tsuki

an octopus pot—
inside, a short-lived dream
under the summer moon

Apropos of which, Watsuji goes so far as to suggest: "Isn't it possible to imagine that Bashō had completely entered into the mind of an octopus inside the pot?

He became an octopus, so to speak."22 Such outright anthropomorphism prefigures contemporary haiku poet Tsubouchi Nenten's more humorous and direct:

sakura chiru anata mo kaba ni narinasai

cherry blossoms fall—
you too must become
a hippo        23

In a not dissimilar vein, among the more astonishing haiku on the British front is Stanley Pelter's:

a pig's memory
it leads to colours
of hesitant hills       24

while both of the above bear comparison with the surreal, cartoon-like humour of
the following, by Nagata Koi (trans. James Kirkup and Makoto Tamaki), featured
in Blithe Spirit as a "favourite haiku" chosen by Yasuhiko Shigemoto:

dojo uite namazu mo iru to iute shizumu

The loach floated up.
"There's a catfish down here too"
he said, then sank back          25

The surreal turning-upside-down of ordinary reality also characterizes Scott Metz's:

somewhere
fireflies are
eating rhinos       26

At the same time, the concision, topic (fireflies) and playfulness of Metz's poem clearly situate it in the tradition of haiku. Wittily reversing the traditional expectation of a specific context or occasion for haiku, the "somewhere" turns out to situate a quite specific but objectively "impossible" image. The poem thus enacts a sudden shift from objective realism to the limitless site of the surreal imagination.


22. Makoto Ueda, Basho and his Interpreters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) p201.
23 Trans. Richard Gilbert, Poems of Consciousness (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2008),
p157.
24 Blithe Spirit, vol.13 no.2, June 2003, 34.
25 Blithe Spirit, vol.13 no.1, March 2003, 51.
26 NOON: journal of the short poem, vol. 5, Autumn 2007, 33.

Extract from:
Roadrunner  August 2009 IX:3
SURREALISM & CONTEMPORARY HAIKU
~ OR ~
SURREAL HAIKU?
by Philip Rowland

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the World Haiku Association Conference of
2004 and published in World Haiku 2005 (Tokyo: Nishida-shoten, 2004).


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I forgive you.  :)

Quote from: devora on July 06, 2013, 07:52:17 AM
Please forgive me, Alan, but I just cannot see why the following is considered a haiku, and subsequently, deserving of a commentary on why it is anthropomorphic. Seems to be just a simple sentence (albeit nice alliteration):

slammed by salt and sun
the paint has no chance in this mexican prison

David Caruso