The Seashell Game – Round One

[chibi575]

Lorin brings a point about ELH that is relatively rare, but, more common in haiku from Japan, that being, historical/cultural references.  Considering the newness of the literature and cultural events associated with the USA's 200+years, as compared to Japan's older literature (if we start with just the Manyoshu) 1700+years, the USA has less to draw from.  Japanese poetry was for over a thousand years the realm of the royalist and warrior class.  The royalist especially in the manyoshu model was steeped in historical literary reference taking the lead from Chinese/Korean poetry.

In the Atom Heart Mother poem, this is done through referencing directly a title of the Pink Floyd band album.  I think that the use of historical reference in ELH will become less rare in time as more awareness of world events (naturally) increase.

An rather recent example of this was as Carlos mentioned at the HSA Regional Conference, Hot Springs.  A few poets were composing their poems using "Atom Heart Mother".  Of course, only those that had read discussion at David Lanoue's site as well had attended the conference knew of the reference without an explanation.

I look forward to such historical infusions in future short poetry.  I think it good form to use such techniques.  I venture to guess those that have barely began to explore the world of haiku and haikuish poetry would not need note for referencing Bashou's old pond phrases used in any short poem. 

What is the sound
of one frog jumping?
.... [haiku]

-- chibi (contemporary, original on the header page for "happyhaiku")

Perhaps, there would be no need of note to explain the reference to "koan" and Basho in the above?

[eluckring]

Lorin, you are one of the most thoughtful readers I know, and I hope you did not take
my response as glib in regards to your puzzlement. 

I agree with you that Tanaka embraces a kind of abstraction.  For me Tanaka uses images in a very associative way, they are not illustrative or literal, but suggestive...and so my leap, via a kind of Shiva like dance of destruction/creation, to the idea of birth in relation to the development of contemporary haiku and the "new" post-war japan.  Mark, your comments about movement and stasis are quite interesting in this regard.

In regards to the issue of needing to know extraneous information and biographical or personal
information about gendai poets in order to understand a poem, I guess I don't feel that it has become any more important than with past poets.  Many of us have read lots of biographical info about Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki; we study what life was like in another country at another time; we learn about the literary and cultural context within which the work entered as well as the history that laid the road for it. This information changes how we might later understand a work that we first read without the additional information.

Critics and scholars have commonly used biographical information about modernist Western authors and artists in analyses of their work--even while at the same time they said that the work was self-sufficient on its own. Perhaps poets/artists themselves approach a work with less of an inclination to learn about its author and context; perhaps especially when we think we share the same language, and generational and cultural context.  I do believe that many contemporary poets/artists do expect that there might be additional info outside of the work itself that can add to the reading of it--maybe though this is not felt very strongly within the origins of American ELH and its pioneers.  Though Postmodernists declared the death of the author, capitalism has had to keep the author alive. Dada never succeeded in destroying the art object; it simply paved the way for conceptualism to be traded in the marketplace. 

My reading of Tanaka's poem is my own personal read without the background info. Once I learn about the Pink Floyd album, its title's relation to the imagery on its cover, and its relationship to her birth year, all that adds to how I continue to think about the poem and enriches the engagement.  My relationship to the poem
is not predicated by it. 

I remember you wondering if a poem you wrote recently was too obscure because many people had limited knowledge of some of the references you were making.  I say, No.   The observations were quite acute; and, just because some people had difficulty gaining entry and were not curious enough to explore the references further, does not mean the poem is too obscure.  It means the poem has a smaller audience; it makes meaning for a more specific group of people. 

Sorry this got longer than I had hoped and I don't think that I can fully address your expressed concern here adequately, so maybe in another forum.

Back to the seashells.

[AlanSummers]

First of all, before I too go off tangent <grin>

I didn't choose Atom Heart Mother because I wasn't comfortable with its syntax in the English-language version, and that unfortunately was what I was judging.  It's my bad that I don't read Japanese, I envy Dhugal and others. ;-)

Off tangent. ;-)

Eve wrote: "I remember you wondering if a poem you wrote recently was too obscure because many people had limited knowledge of some of the references you were making.  I say, No.   The observations were quite acute; and, just because some people had difficulty gaining entry and were not curious enough to explore the references further, does not mean the poem is too obscure.  It means the poem has a smaller audience; it makes meaning for a more specific group of people."

I'm not sure what this is referring to?  It's grabbed my interest though. ;-)  Is this one within the THF forums?  Could you give the URL if it's here, or even if you mean somewhere else?  Or better still create a new topic? 

It's definitely a fascinating topic and deserves to be discussed outside the Seashell Game. <grin>

Alan

[Don Baird]

Hi Eve (and Alan)

Eve wrote: "I remember you wondering if a poem you wrote recently was too obscure because many people had limited knowledge of some of the references you were making.  I say, No.   The observations were quite acute; and, just because some people had difficulty gaining entry and were not curious enough to explore the references further, does not mean the poem is too obscure.  It means the poem has a smaller audience; it makes meaning for a more specific group of people."

"Could you give the URL if it's here, or even if you mean somewhere else?  Or better still create a new topic?" ~ Alan

A great topic to add here:  http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/forum_sm/in-depth-haiku-free-discussion/

:)

Don

[Lorin]

" I agree with you that Tanaka embraces a kind of abstraction.  For me Tanaka uses images in a very associative way, they are not illustrative or literal, but suggestive." - Eve

Hi Eve,
           I'm somewhat used to associative ways in contemporary longer poems, both in the reading and the writing of (I've had such poems published, before I began to focus on haiku), but in longer poems there is 'time' to build a context within the poem itself. I know that these techniques/ 'mind-states' are used in gendai haiku, too, but they don't always work for me without a lot of extra-textual prompting. A good example is Hoshinaga Fumio's:

烏賊・薄荷・アカ・刑事・放火・きんせんか

    ika     hakka      aka-deka     hôka     kinsenka

    squid peppermint
    Red-detective  arson
    marigold

-  Hoshinaga Fumio, Poems of Consciousness, p177

Undoubtedly, the rhythms here are strong, a chanting rhythm, even in the English version and here they reverberate in the repetition and do create 'a world'. But, as in 'Atom Heart Mother', I feel locked out or at least distanced. There is a sense in which these two poems are, for me as a reader, 'poems of unconsciousness', no matter how conscious and deliberate the authors were in the making of them. They resist access.

Sure, without the author leaning over my shoulder and telling me how to read them, I can make my own 'free associations' out of the template of words and rhythm, but I can do that myself by highlighting words in a magazine, more or less at random, and then arranging them. I've done this, some years ago, and it's an interesting exercise. There's nothing contemporary or new about it, though. The European Dada poets were doing this sort of thing before WW2, and these days it's been incorporated into general 'mainstream' poetry and the teaching of 'creative writing'.

Perhaps I'm playing 'devil's advocate'  8)

- Lorin

[AlanSummers]

I'd second what Lorin has to say, although Hosinaga's other well-known haiku does let me in totally as a reader:


ni-ju oku kônen no gishyô omae no B-gata

twenty billion light-years of perjury: your blood type is "B"


There is a Modern Haiku (U.S.) weblink for both these haiku:
http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/HoshinagaFumio.html

Alan



One of a few haiku that really hit the button, and had the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 

[eluckring]

O.K.
back to Atom Heart Mother:

I've been thinking more about my jet-lagged flight of fancy in reading Tanaka's poem.

Lorin's correction that a unit bath does have a toilet made me think A LOT and reminded me of the fact that earlier, when I had googled "genshi shinbo" (Atom Heart Mother), I had found an interesting link talking about a hip bar by that name in a in Tokyo (Shinjuku, I think). http://no-sword.jp/blog/2010/04/kyokii.html I didn't think too much of it at the time, but that unitto basu was stuck in my mind...
Tokyo being a place where we might find plenty of unit baths.

( pre-fab/ unitto basu)  An interesting case where I was thinking "prefab" from reading the translation and then looking back at the romaji and using the term "unit bath" as I wrote.  As Lorin's link provides, and a little more google searching confirmed, "unit bath" has a more specific meaning than the typical pre-fab/ plastic formed bath/shower area of larger bathrooms found in many middle class homes outside of the density of urban downtowns.

So maybe this poem is more descriptive and illustrative than I thought!! and my lack of knowledge sent me associating.   (That's the way my mind works.)

The spurting blood during/after a night of hipster partying brings a whole different set of associations now for me.  And WWII is not exactly a direct reference for many folks from Tanaka's generation, beyond its pop culture associations, so may be I was stretching tooooooo far....but those associations were my honest entry into the poem.  Tanaka would probably have a good laugh at my interpretation.

about Atom Heart Mother, the bar,
Here's one blog entry from http://archive.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/469/bars.asp

"Soon we were perched at Gen-shi-shin-bo's—the name in Japanese—seven-seat counter, typical of Golden Gai's plethora of lumber shanties. The bar, whose name is Japanese for Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother album, is owned and operated by Masami-san, an avid music and manga devotee with a penchant for all things "Atomic." Amid CDs, Astro Boy figurines, Akira originals and aged V.I.P. passes and posters all splayed out in an organized mess, Tokyo's artistic elite come to talk art, politics and philosophy in this dimly lit cubbyhole of a sanctuary away from the Pachinko parlor-infested, J-pop-blaring streets of Shinjuku. And we soon found out that regulars like Quentin Tarantino made it easier for us to fit in."

I can imagine Tanaka as one of the young "artistic elite" in this bar.

The discussion here has been invaluable.

As Alan and Don have both implied, I think a poem strikes us when we can feel its references somehow.  An intellectual understanding gained by research can allow us to appreciate a poem, but possibly still not be moved by it.  The experience of a poem is a really personal thing--why does one well crafted poem knock our socks off and another simply feels like a good poem.   I don't know why, but the phrase Atom Heart Mother is strong enough to make me feel something, however vague, especially in contrast to the sterility of a pre-fab bathroom and in relation to spurting blood--it's just visceral for me.

I'm not sure I like the poem as much as I learn more; however, I feel the journey has been more than worthwhile, even as my understanding of the poem is changing radically.

I'm still jet-lagged, so who knows what will wake me up thinking in the next couple days.

[Mark Harris]

Eve, thanks for those tidbits.

Tarantino, a hip nightclub, a unit bathroom and activities that might ensue there. Believe it or not, when reading Atom Heart Mother, one image keeps intruding on my thoughts, probably inspired by the spurts blood line: the scene in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta jabs Uma Thurman in the area of the heart with an adrenaline-filled syringe. A spurious association, I thought, but here we are.

[eluckring]

wow Mark, that image hadn't entered my mind...
not so spurious I think...especially compared to my first read!

[Lorin]

I don't know when Ami Tanaka's 'Atom Heart Mother' was written, but Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with it's extensive use of pastiche, definitely feels right on-scent to me, Mark, and Ami's 1970 birthday puts her (?) or him right smack in the generation that formed a pop cult around the film.

So I've skimmed the wikipedia entry for Pulp Fiction, now. Among much else: 'The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere's list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments". '

One certain thing about a unit bathroom (prefab, modular bathroom) is that, along with 'Atom Heart Mother' in the poem, it references something...well, pre-fabricated, given, done, 'found'. Also it shows a 'time leap' from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Using Hoshinaga Fumio's way of associating for 'squid peppermint', based on a traditional Japanese song, "Goodbye Triangle (which everyone knows)..." -Hoshinaga Fumio, Poems of Consciousness p178

Atom - has a nucleus: Heart - is inside the body structure, is a kind of nucleus: Mother - has a womb, another kind of nucleus: prefab bathroom - is a womb-like space (claustrophobics beware)

Atom Heart Mother   
in the prefab bathroom       
spurts blood

So there is an implied 'cut'/ kire between the things in the first two lines and 'spurts blood'. Perhaps that's why 'spurts blood' appears to have no subject? If it were all three of 'atom, heart, mother' we'd have been given the correct form of the verb for the plural items, 'spurt', or we'd have 'spurts of blood' or 'blood-spurts'. If the first line were 'Atom-Heart-Mother' (one thing), 'spurts' would be the correct form of the verb.

... further, ( ::) ...one never knows where curiosity will lead once one begins googling )

' Warning -This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial references' - wikipedia

'In Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction, bad things happen to John Travolta's character, Vincent, every time he uses the toilet. To wit: Mia Wallace snorts and overdoses on heroin while he is in the bathroom; Butch returns to his apartment to retrieve his father's watch, and shoots Vincent (who was waiting for him) when he emerges from the bathroom; Pumpkin and Honey Bunny begin their robbery of the diner while Vincent is in the restroom.'

' ... Uesugi Kenshin, a warlord in Japan, died on April 19, 1578 with some reports stating that he was assassinated on the toilet.[citation needed]'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet-related_injuries_and_deaths

'Other sources hold that he was assassinated by a ninja who had been waiting in the cess pool beneath the latrine at Kenshin's camp with a short spear. '

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uesugi_Kenshin

So Eve's bathroom-associated birth was a good intuitive stab at things. . . birth & death are inextricably linked, after all.

It's a clever poem, a pastiche about pastiche. It could also very well, with the partcular assocaitive technique and the 'blood' (red in colour), be alluding to Hoshinaga Fumio's 'squid peppermint' poem.

...recursion...I sensed it had something to do with maths and computers, being a mathsophobic.

http://lolympics.com/files/images/infinite_recursion.jpg

:) ... and that's enough from this little red-detective. It's been great fun, thanks all!

My vote is still with the Keiji Minato haiku, though.

- Lorin

[Mark Harris]

"So there is an implied 'cut'/ kire between the things in the first two lines and 'spurts blood'. Perhaps that's why 'spurts blood' appears to have no subject? If it were all three of 'atom, heart, mother' we'd have been given the correct form of the verb for the plural items, 'spurt', or we'd have 'spurts of blood' or 'blood-spurts'. If the first line were 'Atom-Heart-Mother' (one thing), 'spurts' would be the correct form of the verb." --Lil' Red Detective

even with cuts, Tanaka goes all the way, doesn't she? and yes, however I read her poem, I end up understanding Atom Heart Mother as singular, more that than plural anyway. and Lil' (may I call you Red?) you make a good point about unseen centers moving in concentric circles outward from micro to macro--perhaps that's Atom Heart Mother's superpower?

me too, it's been fun, thanks

[Lorin]

(may I call you Red?)

You may, Mr. Woodcutter, since you're the character who split the wolf-atom and released Grandma.  :)

- Lorin

[Mark Harris]

                           "Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene."

[Lorin]

                           "Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene."

... especially in the unitto basu ?

" The stars are screaming "

[eluckring]

So there is an implied 'cut'/ kire between the things in the first two lines and 'spurts blood'. Perhaps that's why 'spurts blood' appears to have no subject? If it were all three of 'atom, heart, mother' we'd have been given the correct form of the verb for the plural items, 'spurt', or we'd have 'spurts of blood' or 'blood-spurts'. If the first line were 'Atom-Heart-Mother' (one thing), 'spurts' would be the correct form of the verb.
- Lorin

Funny, driving home tonight I too was thinking about the structure of the poem in relation to this new reading, and the idea that there may be a cut, where I had felt none before.  

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


My understanding of Japanese grammar is very, very poor, but the way the first two nouns bump up against each other without other particles??  

If there is an implied cut, I was wondering if it was possibly after genshi shinbo (Atom Heart Mother).  

For me it's either reading

1.  without a cut, "Atom Heart Mother" becoming the subject,  a character (as in Astro Boy, i.e. a kind of chic, post-war, urban "Shiva/Brahma"--destoyer/creator--/ Tarantino's Uma Thurman resurrected), while retaining all its other allusions and associative meanings: the album, a specific bar,  and a whole cultural mise-en-scène/state of mind/aesthetic.
or
2. reading genshi shinbo as setting the scene ( the album is playing) or as a specific place (the bar), and with a cut occurring after it, suggesting we have gone home, or to someone's place after the bar ( it's that unitto basu issue again--why would a bar have full unitto basu and not just a toilet?)  Then the context would "fill in" the unspecified subject -- the one who spurts blood ( a Pink Floyd groupie, a bar regular, etc.).  

Perhaps the poem holds all these versions simultaneously-- the reader can decide where they feel a cut and read it different ways.  Certainly this is a device I and others have used in ELH, especially in the one line format.  I tend to think so: the poem is playing with ambiguity, or perhaps more accurately, a type of abstraction, in a similar way to how pastiche uses recognizable but generalized references.

DAVID  ????  any insights on the syntax/structure ?