The Seashell Game – Round One

[David Lanoue]

I admit it: the NFL playoffs, during which my beloved home team, the New Orleans Saints, were so tragically dispatched and sent home by the underdog Seattle Seahawks, inspired me to organize a 21st Century Haiku Tournament. Last year, when Periplum was a blog, I showcased the works of twelve haiku poets from around the world who are pushing the genre in exciting, new directions. My idea is to take twelve haiku from these poets and conduct a 21st century "Seashell Game."

You might or might not know that Basho once supervised a similar Seashell Game, back in Old Japan. The Seashell Game originally was a child's pastime that involved a beauty contest of two shells, viewed side-by-side. Basho extended this format to haiku, placing two haiku side-by-side and determining the winner. The important thing wasn't so much who won or lost, but rather the comments of the judge (Basho), who revealed his concepts about what constitutes a fine haiku.

In this Seashell Game, YOU will be the judge. I will present two haiku side by side and ask you to: (1) vote for the winner and (2) explain your reasons. Just as in Basho's day, the important thing will be the reasons that you give, making explicit to the world your ideas about contemporary haiku.

Ready? Set? Let's go!

Our first head-to-head match pits two cutting-edge, contemporary Japanese haiku against each other: Ami Tanaka's "Atom Heart Mother . . ." vs. Keiji Minato's "In my luggage . . .":

原子心母ユニットバスで血を流す
genshi shinbo unitto basu de chi wo nagasu

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

   VS.

手荷物は劣化ウランと夏の海
teimotsu wa rekka uran to natsu no umi

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

Ami Tanaka was born in Tokyo on October 8, 1970, the same day that Pink Floyd's fourth studio album, Atom Heart Mother, was released. Its title derived from the headline of a news story that appeared in The Evening Standard on July 16, 1970. The headline read, "ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED," referring to a woman who had received a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Band member Ron Geesen saw the article and suggested that they name the album's title track, 23 minutes and 44 seconds of instrumental rock, Atom Heart Mother. The track took up all of side one of an album that was originally sold in a cover that showed a picture of a cow in a field, with no text. Storm Thorgeson, the designer of the cow cover, said this about the title song and his cover: "When I asked them what it was about, they said they didn't know themselves. It's a conglomeration of pieces that weren't related, or didn't seem to be at the time. The picture isn't related either; in fact, it was an attempt to do a picture that was unrelated, consciously unrelated" (Guitar World, Feb. 1998; quoted in "Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia). One of the song's writers, band member Roger Waters, said in a 1985 radio interview, "Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again! . . . It was pretty kind of pompous, it wasn't really about anything" ("Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia).

A unitto basu or "unit bath" is a prefabricated bathroom module that includes ceiling, floor and tub made of the same continuous material. Found in hotels and apartments throughout Japan, unit baths have the advantage of being completely water-tight. They can be easily cleaned by showering the whole room. This is the type of bathroom that our Atom Heart Mother finds herself in, in Tanaka's poem.

The poet and the album were "born" together. The image of Mother in the haiku can thus suggest, on one level, Tanaka's own mother. The blood flowing into the prefabricated bathroom can suggest the act of birth. The "unit bath" can suggest modern Japan. And the "Atom" of "Heart Mother" can imply the atomic age from the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to the present moment. Blood pouring into the antiseptic, leak-proof bath unit can suggest the poet's life force. The fact that she came into this world on the same day that a disconnected musical suite was released with an unconnected cow cover says volumes about the absurdity into which she and all of us who are her contemporaries in this atomic world, have been thrown.

Keiji Minato's haiku, "In my luggage . . ." seems, at first glance, to be a joke: the kind that will get you arrested at an airport security checkpoint. "Depleted uranium" is isotope uranium-238, a byproduct of an enrichment process that creates U-235 used in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. "Depleted uranium" evokes, in my mind, images of steel cylinders bleeding a deadly sludge where children play--but then I see that the poet's "hand luggage" (teimotsu) contains also, along with radioactive isotope U-238, "the summer sea." How are we to feel about this juxtaposition? We picture a voyager, home from a long trip with two improbable souvenirs stuffed in his carry-on bag: depleted uranium and an entire ocean, a summer ocean: warm, heavy, undulating and salty. But at a level above or below that level, the joke isn't a joke, is it? Keiji's haiku collects in its verbal suitcase the artifacts of a trip--an actual trip or perhaps the trip of life itself, life in our time.

These are my perceptions of these competing haiku. I'm wondering what you perceive, and which of the two you would like to send to the semifinals.

Vote! And be sure to include (the important part!) your reasons. Voting will be open for the next two weeks, up to January 23rd.


WORKS CITED

Minato Keiji. "In my luggage . . ." English translation by the author. Cordite 29.1 (2009). Online journal.

Tanaka Ami. 田中亜美。"Atom Heart Mother..." English translation by David G. Lanoue. The Japanese original appears in 『新選２１』(Shinsen 21).邑書林, 2009. 216.

[AlanSummers]

I decided not to read the notes first.

I'm voting for Keiji Minato's


In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea


Both haiku are run on sentences in their English-language versions but I got an instant "in" with this haiku and the syntax feels smoother.  I can't explain why I feel connected with this haiku except on the non-surreal level we know there is an ongoing trade with materials to make a nuclear device.  

With diplomatic cover anyone could literally be travelling with you on a Summer holiday with the stuff.  But obviously there's other humour and other deeper levels of meaning.

I just feel it has more vertical axis, but interesting that both haiku candidates are takes on 'nuclear power'.

Alan

[Lorin]

手荷物は劣化ウランと夏の海
teimotsu wa rekka uran to natsu no umi

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

I also vote for Keiji Minato's haiku. I don't pretend to read Japanese, so I go by the English versions only.

'Atom Heart Mother' seems more personal and theoretical, to me, focusing on a personal association with an album (far from their best) of a popular band of my youth. The title of that album has as much to do with the news story as the name Procal Harem (another band) has to do with the prize-winning Persian cat that that band's name was derived from. Whilst I can relate to the drama of the coldness and seamlessness of the prefab bathroom (white, in my mind) and the spurting blood of a heart operation gone wrong, there is a distance here, to me, which any personal association (eg. the date of the author's birth) can't quite dispel. The connection feels dramatically neurotic to me.

'in my luggage' gives me an immediate physical chill. I feel that I know the place this traveler has come from like the back of my hand. Unhesitatingly, I admit that I immediately associate the 'depleted uranium' and the summer sea with the country I was born in and live in, though I understand there are other places that would also fit. It hits home. We have a uranium mining industry here, and the 'yellowcake' has leaked into the rivers even of one of the world's special national parks, Kakadu. There was a proposal for a second uranium mine in the area...I don't know if it has gone ahead, despite protests from the indigenous people of the area and others, or not. I certainly feel uneasy about it.

One lovely part of Australia is its beach and sea culture. Many Japanese people have their honeymoons here...the sea and cheap golf courses, for a start. Yet there is a dark side to the mining industry, for the thinking person, and the Japanese are also big investors in the mining industry here. One wouldn't wonder at all if a thinking person of Japanese origin felt quite equivocal about it. I liked the way Keiji Minato has balanced, disturbingly yet without coming to conclusion, what was taken away (from here or wherever) .

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

This is a real human dilemma. This is what a thinking someone has taken away...luggage, baggage, burden.. something sunlit & open & lovely, like the Pacific ocean, but also something quite dark which seeps into the pristine river and from there, of course, into 'the summer sea'.

How does one assess what one takes away from where one's been? What are our priorities?

This is a most contemporary poem! But as Basho emphasized, there is the unchanging and the ever-changing. If we feel an uneasiness in the complexities of this changing world, this is human, and the human perception of the moment is what is unchanging, as far as we're concerned, and is what makes poetry.

- Lorin

[chibi575]

原子心母ユニットバスで血を流す
genshi shinbo unitto basu de chi wo nagasu

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

David, I also remember discussions on this poem in Little Rock, at HSA regional last year.

I picked the first poem now as my choice for two essoteric reasons:

First, it's first on the list... sounds silly, but, this is sometimes an edge in being first on a list; and

Second, it's first line, (at not knowing any explanation of the words, initially) the words coalesce in an emotional-visual sequence "Atom"/"Heart"/"Mother" expressing centricity.  L2 and L3 grow further depth of meaning in a juxtaposition way "prefab" - "spurts" - "blood".  Even without explanation this type of connectivity is mysterious, imaginative, and intriquing; and, I feel, provides synergism for the first lines.  A niggling idea also from the initial reading was the fact that the first line instantly gave to me an association with WWII atom bombs used on Japan. The last two lines seemed possible to further support this niggle.

Of course, the explanation adds the temper of reality which re-aligns my original read.

Also, if I may add... the second poem uses "and" (romaji - "to") which was a point against it, in my feeling.  This seemed to demonstrate a flaw in what I understand should be the principle that the "best" Japanese haiku does not present more than one "moment".  The use of "to" in the Japanese risked this, I feel.  The poem risks a form-flaw.  I relate a story/lesson from Akegarasu sensei's (my first haiku teacher) whereby there was a criticism of a poem in an alcove at a tea ceremony, the poem choice was between a beautiful scene represented in one poem; and, a rather mundane and mediocre scene in another.  The tea master chose the second almost soley due to the correct form and not the content.  I suppose this story/lesson stuck with me.  If there is one aspect of Japanese art that marks it from other art, it is attention to detail.  I suppose I relate poetic form a key part of such art.

PS... the first poem may lack "kigo", although, a case may be made for "prefab bathrooms" associated with summer beaches.  The second poem may use "travel luggage" as in "golden week" as kigo.  The letter counts on the first poem, also, are beyond the Japanese rule.  Then, it might all be in my imagination that these are tied to traditional rule.  Both poems are rule benders and form busters, in that case.

[Lorin]

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

What is it that spurts blood, here? That is a problem, in my reading. Note that it is not the Atom Heart Mother or an Atom Heart Mother, nor Atom-Heart Mother, nor is it the Pink Floyd album, which would be rendered, in the English version of a haiku, as a title: Atom Heart Mother. If one didn't have access to the explanatory notes the first line might read as three separate words, Atom, Heart and Mother, despite that they begin with capitals.

L1, if we weren't relying on the background notes or authorial explanation, could be read as a free association of words that have something in common. It might be (just a conjecture) that a contemplation of associated words is interrupted by the person designated by 'Mother', one's actual, living Mother who is in a moment of crisis. This way it would read 'Atom/ Heart/ Mother in the prefab bathroom spurts blood', with the 'hinge' word being Mother.

There is not "more than one moment" in:

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

There is one moment, the moment of the "I" of the poem realizing/declaring (perhaps at customs at an airport) what is in his luggage on return from a journey/ holiday. The shift from a common, ordinary experience/activity hinges on 'luggage' (literally, what one has to lug around, a personal burden). That there are two things in the luggage does not make "more than one moment" any more than a fern frond and a cluster of wattle blossoms together in a vase make more than one flower arrangement.

It's interesting that both haiku have no caesura/ cut/ kire, no kireji/ cut marker. Not in the English versions, anyway, and that is what I'm reading. One has a kigo, 'summer sea', but it is used in an unusual way.

- Lorin

[Don Baird]

My vote:

In my luggage
depleted uranium
and the summer sea

The contrast of thoughts between those of depleted unranium to the dream of a summer sea ...  A vivid pondering between war and peace ... and the burden of those thoughts.  Would it take nuclear answers to create peace or is he pondering the delicate balance of them and wondering which way it will go ... the luggage – the baggage or the burden of thought, alone?

[Mark Harris]

yes, and the poet's conflict could be inward, and his language a borrowing of the outward, so extreme and plural it becomes conceptual--how to wrap the mind around summer sea, the destructive power of uranium? Brings to mind Don's almost use of uncranium.

So, I'll choose Keiji Minato's shell.

Atom Heart Mother must, along with probable other meanings, be a reference to the Pink Floyd album/track, and so far the reverb the poet's channeling hasn't reached me (still listening though).

[inserting an edit here to add: that last sentence was a clumsy way of saying that despite David's interesting speculations about Ami Tanaka's personal connections to Atom Heart Mother, as Lorin put it, "there is a distance here, to me, which any personal association (eg. the date of the author's birth) can't quite dispel."]

[Mark Harris]

When David first introduced Keiji Minato's haiku on the blog, my thoughts turned to the information below. I offer it not because it pleases me for you to read it, but because it might give insight into the poet's use of the words "depleted uranium". Reading it again, I'm unpleasantly reminded of the fire-bombing of Tokyo near the close of WWII, and can imagine why a young Japanese person might become preoccupied by similar thoughts...the highlights are mine, not the authors':

"In the early 1970s, the US Army began researching the use of depleted uranium metal in kinetic energy penetrators and tank armor. High-density materials such as tungsten (density 19.3 g/cm3) and DU (density 19 g/cm3) were considered. DU was ultimately selected due to its availability, price and pyrophoricity (Danesi, 1990; Anderson et al., 1997). Tungsten has a much higher melting point (3410°C) than uranium (1132 °C) and lacks pyrophoricity. Therefore, a tungsten projectile becomes blunt on impact and is less effective in piercing armor (Peterson, 1999). During processing DU penetrators are hardened by reducing the carbon content and by alloying with 0.75% by weight of titanium (Bukowski et al., 1993). The surface of a DU penetrator ignites on impact (especially with steel), due to the high temperature generated by the impact and the relatively low melting point of uranium (1132 °C). In addition, the projectile sharpens as it melts and pierces heavy armor (Rostker, 1998). DU projectile impacts are often characterized by a small, round entry hole (US-ACS, 1995). The 30-mm DU rounds, which were used by the US air force in the Gulf War and in Kosovo, can pierce steel armor up to a thickness of 9 cm....

...When the penetrator hits a hard object, e.g. an armored vehicle, the penetrator pierces the metal sheet, generally leaving the jacket behind. The DU dust which may be formed during impact can be dispersed and contaminate the environment. It is estimated that normally 10–35% (and a maximum of 70%) of the DU penetrator becomes an aerosol on impact or when the DU catches fire (Harley et al., 1999). Most of the dust particles have been reported to be smaller than 5 µm in size which keeps them airborne for an extended time, and will spread according to wind direction. DU dust is black and a target that has been hit by DU ammunition can be often recognized by the black dust cover in and around the target (US AEPI, 1995)." ---"Properties, use and health effects of depleted uranium (DU): a general overview", by A. Bleise, P.R. Danesi, W. Burkart, Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 64 (2003) 93–112

[ccolon]

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

My vote is for "Atom Heart Mother," which generated much discussion at the Haiku Society of America South Region Conference in Hot Springs last November.  Being a long-time Pink Floyd fan, I was familiar with the allusion in the first line, but was also intrigued by the various interpretations of the poem from the conference-goers.  For all those who would want to cut this poem from the competition, I will just caution, "Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene."

"Atom Heart Mother" became a catch phrase throughout the conference.  One of the poems generated was this one of mine, which actually was a community effort.  I can't ever remember if I came up with the punch line, or if someone else did.

"Atom Heart
Mother" coffee
decalf


Carlos Colon
Shreveport, Louisiana

[Mark Harris]

Carlos, I think you might have misspelled that 3rd line. Are you sure you didn't mean
Atomic Heart Mother decal?     

            . .     ..
           :     .     :
            .    X   .
              .     .
                 .

[Mark Harris]

now that I got that out of my system...

Carlos, I'm interested to hear more about the discussion Ami Tanaka's haiku inspired at the conference. Will you share some of it with us?

[Lorin]

now that I got that out of my system...

Carlos, I'm interested to hear more about the discussion Ami Tanaka's haiku inspired at the conference. Will you share some of it with us?

Hi Mark,...yes, that'd be interesting. I've reread David's comments in the intro now, and I'm wondering whether this might be a clue to Ami Tanaka's haiku?

"Band member Ron Geesen saw the article and suggested that they name the album's title track, 23 minutes and 44 seconds of instrumental rock, Atom Heart Mother. The track took up all of side one of an album that was originally sold in a cover that showed a picture of a cow in a field, with no text. Storm Thorgeson, the designer of the cow cover, said this about the title song and his cover: "When I asked them what it was about, they said they didn't know themselves. It's a conglomeration of pieces that weren't related, or didn't seem to be at the time. The picture isn't related either; in fact, it was an attempt to do a picture that was unrelated, consciously unrelated" (Guitar World, Feb. 1998; quoted in "Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia). One of the song's writers, band member Roger Waters, said in a 1985 radio interview, "Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again! . . . It was pretty kind of pompous, it wasn't really about anything" ("Atom Heart Mother," Wikipedia)."

Could it be simply that Ami Tanaka's haiku is what, in the 60s to early 70s, was called a 'found poem', even then a late flowering, in the West, of what was left of the European Dada movement? Why is the author's date of birth being the same day as the album's release so important, as well as the information about the  track and cover?

Could it be that this haiku, like the album, "isn't really about anything", has no further meaning than, "I am the child of the post-war 'baby boom' generation, the daughter of the 'me generation'. There is nothing left for me but to rearrange old things that might've had a meaning for my parents, to 'sample' and 'mix' in my haiku, as others of my generation do with music." ??? (and only then if we are heavily prompted by being given the author's birth date and the date of the album's release) This was, after all, the notable whinge of that generation in the West, until they all became computer wizards in their mid 20s to early 30s.

Otherwise, why all the extraneous information to support the poem?

(later... because this haiku seems like a puzzle, and the information like clues:

"ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED," - news headline, evidence of a real woman prior to headline

Atom Heart Mother  - album title, a 'found' phrase, divorced from context, twice removed from the original, real woman,

Atom Heart Mother    - L1 'found' phrase repeated, twice removed from headline, thrice from real woman
in the prefab bathroom       - like the first line of the haiku, a prefabricated thing, 'found' as is
spurts blood                      - ? bleeding a sign of life, though 'wounded life'

Nope, still can't put it together. Something abstract about it, like a demonstration of a mathematical formula, keeps me locked out, if there is anything to be locked out of.

- Lorin

[eluckring]

What beautiful seashells, David.  Their contours are exquisite and the different sounds they make as the ocean washes through them create a lovely dialogue between them.

I have remembered Minato's poem (in David's translation) since I first read it; it is an absoloute favorite of mine.  However, I would like to share my reading experience of
the first poem here:

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

I first approach this poem through the power of its words and the searing image created by them. (For me the Pink Floyd album/cover is the backstory, not my entry point.)  I see  a birth in all its messiness, and a violent one at that.  In stark white and red, I see the colors of the Japanese flag with its circle of red on a white background, or more appropriately, the "rising sun" military flag flown by the Imperial Navy until the end of WWII —with its radiating, "spurting" design.  The U.S. Atomic bombs that defeated Japan also birthed contemporary Japan (and the American occupation/intervention which changed its culture irrevocably), and as happens with the technological advancements made through military research, eventually the science filters into other uses, more constructive than destructive—the nuclear pacemaker of "Atom Heart Mother" and the age of chemistry that brought us modern plastics and prefab bathrooms. The "unit bath" is used for cleaning the body and bathing (toilets are separate), so there is a sense of renewal and refreshment from this reference as well as the suggestion of industrial mass production.  However this birth is imaged not with the mother's water breaking, but with spurting blood, as if an artery has been severed.  I read into this poem the birth of contemporary haiku in relation to Tanaka's generation, and the often vitriolic debates that accompany most experimentation and change, especially in a form as old as haiku.  And here again, war and birth collide --the blood here is pulsing with the life force of the heart; must there be an amputation, or can we save the limb?
So for me, Atom Heart Mother is just that, a mother. 
The heart of the atom is its nucleus and there is an extraordinary power to be found there,
invisible to most of us, the power of creativity is as strong as the power of destruction.

As for the reference to the Pink Floyd album and the chance relationship of the titling and image....yes! Chance!  On Aug. 9th the heavy cloud cover over Kokura saved that city from the atomic bomb and planes were redirected to Nagasaki.  We all know how much
chance can change our lives.  and then of course, it's connection to the poet.

One more comment:  so many people describe Tanaka's poems as puzzling and intellectual.  I have only been able to read a few translations by David and Fay Aoyagi
but in all of these, the power of the image is so incredibly strong that I feel immediate entry and then I'm rewarded with an unfolding over time that gives me more and more.  Maybe people are puzzled because of they are not used to reading these types of images--—she certainly doesn't give us Disney or Hallmark pictures-- or an impatience to let their own insights come to surface in the face of something new.

[Lorin]

Eve, thanks! I admit that 'Atom Heart Mother' has become an intriguing puzzle for me, so to find your explication here is a delight. I find your association of a white unit bathroom and 'blood spurt' with the Japanese Imperial Navy flag image quite compelling. This, of course, was the flag of the Kamikaze.

I'm not quite as clear on how we get from 'spurts blood' to birth through the power of the words and images in the poem alone, though I can understand that association when the supporting information about Ami Tanaka's birthday and the origin/ backstory of the Pink Floyd album title are taken into account. (A unit bathroom, even in Japan, contains the whole works though; a spa module is different)

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/817/Unit+Bathroom/

For me, a general dilemma about context, one I haven't yet resolved, comes up in relation to this haiku. Like many of us in Enghlish-speaking countries, I started from the viewpoint we are taught as we approach haiku in the West, that haiku, like the hokku of renga/renku, is a 'stand-alone' verse, one which can stand scrutiny as 'a poem in itself'. Next, I understood the idea of the '4th line', the author's name and perhaps country of residence, where clues as to nationality and gender (and much more, if the author happens to be well known) may supply a bit of background information, and fair enough for most purposes; after all, back in old Basho's day there was no question of nationality or where the author lived in the wide world.  But I still haven't come to terms with the idea that a poem which comes with too much extraneous information, and perhaps relies on that information, is actually a haiku, a 'stand-alone' poem to be experienced, interpreted and assessed on its perceived merits. Yet I have read Richard Gilbert's Poems of Consciousness, so I understand that the author's biography and even intent is taken to account in Japan.

This is quite different to the (perhaps now dated?) Western idea, expressed succinctly by D.H. Lawrence: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

('The critic' can be replaced by 'the critical reader'.)

I'd be really happy to hear from anyone, here or privately by email, who has any insights which might help me with this dilemma. Some, and by no means all, gendai haiku, given the amount of extra information, strike me more as potential haibun than 'haiku-as-I-understand-it'.

From adulation of the author in the C19, through 'death of the author' in the C20, it seems that the author has been resurrected and has now entered through the back door whilst I was looking the other way!

- Lorin  ( 8) not a fan of Disneyland or Hallmark, or even of sentimentality )

[Mark Harris]

Atom Heart Mother
in the prefab bathroom
spurts blood

is her subject nothing, or nothing and everything. I keep thinking of the mythmaking (against all odds) of Pablo Neruda, and wish I could read this haiku in the company of others by the same author. To Lorin: would this one stand alone after knowing the others? Can we ever go home again? No, says the wolf. So what? asks Virginia.

if we take this poem apart, as I suspect the author has, and doubt her use of the word prefab was arbitrary, even if chance is her subject, as if we weren't all here be chance, supernatural or otherwise, as if our personal mythologies matter or if we can make them matter in the face of the modern, the modular, the postmodular, uses and reuses of Pink Floyd songs, hokku by basho, john cage compositions, the theories of Democritus and Einstein...

Eve's comments got me thinking about something I find compelling in this poem, movement contrasted with stasis:

the first line combines 3 words that imply warmth and movement, at least as long as there is life. An atom always moves, a heart beats, a mother, well, along with other behaviors, she mothers.

the second line describes the stasis of a prefab bathroom, not hard for most people, at least in the contemporary "developed" world, to visualize, which says something.

in the third line, spurting blood, movement that implies at least the possibility of life quickly draining away, back to stasis again