The Renku Sessions: Many Shapes – Week 4
Welcome to this renku session. I am Linda Papanicolaou and I’ll be your guide.
- CHOICE OF VERSE 4
Verse four is a two-line non-season verse. Closing out our first side and starting the second puts certain responsibilities on it. It must link/shift from its previous and leap over verses—2 and 3— while also signaling that we’re moving into the ha phase of the renku. Thanks to everyone who submitted. Many of the offers explored topics appropriate to the ha and it was fun reading them. I’ve compiled a short list of offers that fell into a range of topic categories—education, food, music, and theatre—each in its own way sliding easily into the slot Here are verses 2 and 3 followed by the short list:
a shire horse shoe
glistens on the anvil
Robert Kingston
the long clang
of a solid ringer topped
with shouts of “what luck!”
Clysta Seney
——
the old college try
from a high school dropout
Michael Henry Lee
“Give it the old college try” means to make a big, honest effort even when the final result may not be successful. According to Google, the idiom originated in American baseball in the early 1900s. Michael’s pairing it with “high school dropout” lends poignant irony, even sympathy for this person whose poor educational choices have left him with diminished options, though he still tries.
——
soup du jour
for the incoming crowd
Carol Jones
One topic we may use in the ha is foreign language—in this case French meaning “soup of the day” (soupe du jour). A Google search reveals that the specific phrase “soup du jour” is more common in American and English-speaking restaurants than in France. The cultural mashup is delightful and the offer would lead off our second side with light humor.
——
the first performance of a famous actor
in our provincial town
Urszula Marciniak
A traveling theater company with a starring name in the lead role, or a small local troupe in a “provincial town” that has brought in a guest actor to star in their production—how many versions do we know of this story (there’s even one offered right now on Public Television, a musical comedy called “Happiness” from New Zealand). In Ursula’s verse, I picture the moment when the actor first comes onto the stage and the play stops as the audience bursts into applause.
What especially attracts me about the verse is its expressive use of form. At first glance, that 11-syllable first line may look as though a line break has been deleted to force three lines into two, but it still feels right as-is. The reason is that it’s an accentual rather than syllabic couplet with 4 beats in the first line and 3 in the second. Writing on form in haiku, Patricia Machmiller characterizes 4-beat accentual lines as “emphatic, assured, declamatory, attention-getting,” while 3-beat lines bring “a sense of energy, change…” (“Jewel in the Crown: How Form Deepens Meaning in English-Language Haiku,” Modern Haiku 33.1 (spring, 2002, /https://www.hsa-haiku.org/EducationalResources/Machmiller-Form.pdf). Read this way, the form expresses and enhances the moment.
——
he pulls a tattoo out
of the cereal box
Valerie Green
How many of us as children persuaded our parents to buy a particular brand of cereal because of the promised prize inside? And I remember those tattoos—a paper with a water-based ink design that you would wet and press to your arm for the transfer. This offer would begin the side with a whiff of childhood discovery.
——
the scent of patchouli oil
in the music filled room
Pamela Garry
Patchouli oil is an aromatic essential oil with medicinal uses. With a fragrance described as woody, sweet, and spicy, it is used in perfume in aromatherapy because of its calming quality. I know patchouli because my mother was into potpourri, and I probably still have a small flask of the oil in her trunk. This would take the renku indoors, transform the clang of horseshoes into music, and introduces scent to the renku.
Each of these offers would lend the new side a feeling of initiating something new while also opening the poem to the moon verse that comes next. The offer I’m going to place in the slot is Urszula’s “famous actor.” From the appreciative onlookers at a game of horseshoes to a small-town theatre audience, it links to verse 3 in the first side. “First performance” articulates the beginning of the second side. And the “famous actor” on stage receiving his due is a perfect setup for our moon verse coming next.
Our shisan so far:
Side 1:
stones on rocks
the many shapes
of the waterfall
Mike Barrett
a shire horse shoe
glistens on the anvil
Robert Kingston
the long clang
of a solid ringer topped
with shouts of “what luck!”
Clysta Seney
Side 2:
the first performance of a famous actor
in our provincial town
Urszula Marciniak
- CALL FOR VERSE 5: AUTUMN MOON
Special topics in renku are the moon, blossom, and love verses. Moon (autumn) and blossom (spring) are major anchors of the poem’s structure, with moon signifying the celestial realm and blossom representing transience and the cyclical nature of life.
As a short form of renku, shisan has one moon verse. This is ours, and it’s an important one. The template calls for a three-line moon verse that links to Urszula’s “famous actor” while shifting away from Clysta’s game of horseshoes, and of course avoids anything that sends us backwards to the hokku. Also bear in mind that “moon” by itself means the autumn full moon. If you’d like to expand your understanding of this topic, a good reference is Gabi Greve’s entry in the World Kigo Database (https://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/2006/01/moon-and-his-links.html).
Please use the submission box below to submit no more than two verses for the 5th verse, our moon verse. Submissions will close on Monday, August 24 at midnight, eastern US time. Selection for Verse 5 and instructions for submissions for verse 6 will appear here on Thursday, August 27.
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