The Renku Sessions: Cotton Clouds – Week 1

Welcome to a new renku session. I am John Stevenson and I’ll be your guide for a twenty verse, nijûin renku.

We will be using an on-line list of season words and phrases (kigo) for those verses that require a seasonal reference:  https://yths.org/season-word-list/

Here is our opening verse (hokku)

a pinto colt
canters the meadow
cotton clouds

My original aim in creating this feature was to show a variety of English-language versions of renga/renku. This kind of collaborative poetry has over one thousand years of development in Japan. It is where we get haiku, a relatively recent variation of the opening verse (hokku). Adaptation to English, and to the various cultures within which English is commonly spoken, has less than a century of history. Even so, there are already a variety of practices among those writing renku in English.

Renku is a sort of literary game. As such, there are rules; a lot of them. This can be discouraging for newcomers. Rather than overwhelm participants with a comprehensive emphasis on rules, session leaders tend to choose certain things to emphasize, while leaving other matters for future practice.

In this session, I will be emphasizing the placement of poetic inspiration between verses rather than within. Only the opening verse (hokku) has a two-part structure, with a cut, break, sharp turn, or other devise marking the point of distinction between the two parts. It is this structure that allowed the hokku to function as a free-standing, independent poem, resulting eventually in what we now know as haiku.

In previous sessions, I have noticed references to verses after the hokku as poems. They should not strike us as poems and a renku should not strike us as a haiku sequence. Viewed separately, all verses after the hokku should simply strike us as images – perhaps vivid–  but not complete poems.

If we look at a set of renku verses – numbers 2,3 and 4 –  the combination of verses 2 and 3 should strike us as a poem. The combination of verses 3 and 4 should also seem like a poem but, ideally, a very different sort of poem from the 2/3 combination. And none of these verses should seem to be a poem in itself. The poetry is between verses, not within them individually.

So, you are now invited to offer a two-line verse, with a spring kigo (season word or phrase). It should be a single phrase and, when read along with the first verse it should register as a new poem. The linking of these first two verses can be closer than other links. Your second verse could be imagined as a continuation or extension of the scene depicted in the hokku.

Please enter a maximum of five verse two offers. The deadline for submission will be midnight, eastern US time on Monday, April 28.

Looking forward to your verses,

John

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