The Renku Sessions: Cotton Clouds – Week 6
Welcome to the current 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 my short list of verse 6 offerings:
sunglasses to mask
where his eyes are focused
Michael Henry Lee
the talk soon turns
to skinny-dipping
Lorin Ford
at last I find someone
who likes my sweat
Tracy Davidson
wind chimes drown out my
lamentable chat-up lines
Tracy Davidson
their umbrellas touch
in a sudden shower
Anne Fox
picking grass seeds
from her hair
Lorraine Haig
he fell for the sundress
on bare shoulders
Debbie Scheving
she clings to me
on a hot night
rob barkan
It probably won’t do much good to repeat it every week. I’ll just say that verses that are written in the style of haiku will not be selected. Renku verses are not haiku. They do not feature internal juxtaposition of disjunctive images. They do not feature grammatical breaks. Verses that start with a prepositional phrase (a very widely used mechanism in English-language haiku) almost always follow it with a grammatical / syntactical break.
Here is my choice for the sixth verse:
he fell for the sundress
on bare shoulders
Debbie Scheving
This was a very hard choice, with several verses offering something special. “picking grass seeds” was my early favorite. If one assumes that a second person is doing the picking, it is a lovely image of intimacy, with one quality among young people and another among older ones. Unfortunately, it can be read as self-grooming or as childcare.
The directness of “the talk soon turns,” “at last I find someone” and “she clings to me” is appealing in each instance.
The link of a “shell” with “sunglasses to mask” seems smart and provocative. Because we know that this is a love verse, we are likely to have similar ideas about what is being surreptitiously observed. But, without that knowledge, I’m not sure that this image announces itself as a love verse.
So, “he fell for the sundress” is my choice. Juxtaposed with a new shell, it suggests to me the way in which our clothing is taken as an element of identity. At the same time, it is an element that will change as we change. It serves us until it no longer does so, just as successive shells serve a hermit crab.
So, here is what we have, so far:
Cotton Clouds (working title)
a pinto colt
canters the meadow
cotton clouds
John Stevenson
muddied boots
on the welcome mat
Jennifer Sutherland
a bounty
of tulips spilling
over the vase
Eavonka Ettinger
the comfort of song
sung together
Anne Fox
the hermit crab’s
new shell glistens
in the moonlight
Sally Biggar
he fell for the sundress
on bare shoulders
Debbie Scheving
This week, we will be working on the seventh verse. This will be three lines. It will be a non-seasonal verse, so it must not contain a word or phrase from our list of season words. It is the second of a pair of love verses. Here are some other considerations:
- Love verses, in renku, are about love between adult human beings.
- Since our first love verse suggests a first attraction, the second can be anything later in a relationship.
- An urban setting would still be helpful here.
- We are now in the middle section (the ha), where anything goes and very broad strokes can be taken.
Please enter a maximum of five verse-seven offers. The deadline for submission will be midnight, eastern US time on Monday, June 2.
Looking forward to your verses~
John
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