IlluminanceCertain Zen schools conceive of seated meditation as a practice intended for the obtaining of Buddhahood, others reject even this (apparently essential) finality: one must remain seated “just to remain seated.” Is not the haiku (like the countless graphic gestures which mark modern and social Japanese life) also written “just to write”?Roland Barthes, “Empire of Signs”
Rinko Kawauchi (Shiga, Japan, 1972)Her unique approach to “drawing senses” and consistent motifs of every day details, as well as circulation of life and its transience has been admired by art lovers all over the world.
“Fotografia Europea” international festival.
Fotografia Europea 2013 - CambiareKawauchi’s work has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns.Illuminance
Publishers: Aperture, USA / FOIL, Japan / kehrer verlag, Germany / Editions Xavier Barral, France / POSTCART, Italya photographer
reflected off picture glass
mends her spectacles
Alan Summers
Presence (1998)
Haiku have often been said that they are the sum of two parts, and that the haiku, however brief, is greater than the sum of its parts, but really isn’t the two parts of haiku, if that is its core feature, this bi-part verse, more like Bipartisanship where a political situation, usually in the context of a two-party system, finds opposing political parties obtaining common ground through compromise. Where often I experience a dislike, or fear, abhorrence, pity around poetry by the public, they become engaged with haiku, even to the extent they will read a hundred haiku I’ve tied to trees and bushes on an art trail, or blutacked along book shelves in a large library, but I’ve witnessed few people read a single longer poem in, or as, an installation or displayed in a library?
Perhaps the reduced ego in haiku, and of the haiku poet if they are present, creates a cessation that we all crave? In times of crisis, some people will turn to sex to embrace or challenge death not so much to escape it, so some will turn to haiku, even to the extent to reading a hundred haiku where they would struggle to read a single longer poem for two or three minutes.
My
raison d’etre however oblique is to communicate, and I feel more alive interacting with people new or wary of poetry. My writing process is a painful one, even distasteful and something to be avoided, that I do not regularly seek the practice of creating my own poetry, and rarely enjoy, it’s just a compulsion that is uncomfortable with me and if needs must, then I must write it. I’m a very quiet person yet I will stand up and communicate in person as I did for Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square in London, now archived by the British Library for posterity. Perversely I decided against reading my haiku, or talking about haiku, or creating a live renku session, and choose instead to communicate words for an hour direct with the public, from those who did not have a platform to communicate them.
British Library Fourth Plinth Alan Summers Archive:http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223124345/http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Alan_SBBC interview http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8176398.stmBut going back to haiku, and my painful process of writing this and any type of poetry, reminds me of this quote I used to end my piece entitled
“Defying the enclosures of regularity” where Samuel Johnson talked of, back in 1751:
"Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity."counting down
to those waking dreams
my skill at handguns
Alan Summers
c.2.2. Anthology of short-verse
ed. Brendan Slater & Alan Summers
(Yet To Be Named Free Press 2013)Haiku seems to defy its own enclosures, and also defy the enclosures people put upon themselves, or have put upon them by others, around poetry. I guess I write haiku not so much to engage people with poetry, that’s their affair, but to steer them away from their fear of this intensely searingly intimate writing that sometimes they feel only ridicules their own existence, and say hey! you can absorb poetry because each person is a poet, you needn’t write it, or even read it, but you should never be denied the right of it.
am I the ghost
of a child who died before me?
autumn deepens
Alan Summers
Haiku Novine ISSN 1451-3889 (December 2012)
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