The Renku Sessions: Many Shapes – Week 6
Welcome to this renku session. I am Linda Papanicolaou and I’ll be your guide.
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- CHOICE OF VERSE 6
For this week, the call was to be a two-line, non-person verse, non-person but otherwise with a fairly free choice of autumn season references. The range of responses was so varied and appealing but I decided to show you a much longer selection than I have heretofore:
bright eyes of deer
on the backroad
Margaret Anderson
tapioca pearls simmer
in pumpkin spice
Scott Anderson
cloud catcher
the hook of the day moon
Shelley Baker-Gard
after apple picking
one golden delicious
Stephanie Bauer
frost-laced rose hips
beg to be pluckedM
Belinda Behne
squirrels gather nuts
one by one
Nancy Brady
the lively silhouette
of a pole-dancing scarecrow
Marion Clarke
dining in moonlight
on the pub terrace
with Kevin Costneri
John Daleiden
red leaves break the fall
of a late fledgling
Tracy Davidson
our first humanoid tries
bagging leaves
M. R. Defibaugh
fields of pumpkins
all along the road
Debbie Feller
the long night
brightened by Venus
Lorin Ford
olivine glow
of ghost fungus
Valerie Green
a skein of fog unravels
the out-going geese
Laurie Greer
new golf bin a fairy ring
nobody dares to step in
Padmasiri Jayathilaka
nestled in the grass
a group of fly agaric
Carol Jones
Pelicans
soar away from the new coolness
Madeleine Kavanaugh
crickets at their apogee
around midnight.
Michael Henry Lee
migrant insects
flying lower in the cold
Laurinda Lind
only a yellow leaf
remains on the disco floor
Urszula Marciniak
frost on the pumpkin turning
the tractor wheels orange
Guliz Mutlu
no one to see
red leaves falling
Pauline O’Carolan
scarecrows dance
‘till the cows come home
Andrew Pineo
Canada geese
beyond the last billboard
Anton R-kelian
puss in boots juggles
pomegranates
Clysta Seney
swallows departing
fieldfares arriving
Andrew Shimield
crickets revving engines
in the roadside weeds
Richard Straw
Enjoy all of them! Then, rather than comment individually, I’ll say a bit about how they address our need for variety in renku. In the saijiki, you’ll have noticed that the kigo for each season are sorted into categories such as season, sky and elements, landscape, humanity, animals, and plants. in addition, Each renku club may have its own chart of categories and topics, but the concept is similar across clubs. Included are human activities such as food and drink, clothing, architecture, work, arts, religion, science and technology, and current events (Kondo and Higginson, “Link and Shift,” http://www.2hweb.net/haikai/renku/Link_Shift.html). The objective is that the renku cover a diverse and balanced array of topics in line with a concept in Buddhist and Daoist thought called “the 10,000 things” of the created universe. We won’t be able to do more than scratch the surface in a 12-verse shisan, but we still try for as much variety as we can, and we do have an impressive range in this week’s offers: yellow and red leaves, falling or fallen leaves in the landscape category; rose hips, apples, pumpkins, grass and weeds, and fungus in plants (though scientifically we no longer classify fungus as plants); deer, squirrels, geese and other migratory birds, crickets, and migratory insects (monarchs or dragonflies) in the animals category; fog and “new coolness” for sky and elements. In the human category we have tractor wheels turned orange from plowing over pumpkins, a humanoid robot attempting to rake reaves (can you picture it?), and a zany Puss in Boots with pomegranates, which I have discovered to have been a 2011 crossover of that year’s Dreamworks movie with the Fruit Ninja video game.
The offer I’m going to place is Andrew’s. If you live near a migratory flyway, you’ll know that the autumn migration is a parade of species after species passes through on their way to winter habitat. In California we have cliff swallows, including the famous San Juan Capistrano swallows that arrive around mid-March and depart late October for Argentina. We also have barn swallows, a world-wide species with extensive North American and Eurasian breeding grounds and migrations to South America, sub-Saharan Africa, India, or the Indonesian archipelago. Fieldfares, as I have learned, are a European species of thrush whose migratory pattern is more to the north of the swallows. The breeding range of the European populations is from Scandinavia through Siberia, while their winter range is through the UK, western and central Europe, and North Africa.
Knowing that Andrew lives in the UK, I picture what this looks like from the author’s point of view: As I’ve gathered, the swallows depart UK mostly in September, some as late as October or early November, while the fieldfares arrive early October through November. This allows us to place the verse in a moment in October, between the departure of the swallows and the arrival of the fieldfares. In the Lunar calendar, this would be late autumn.
In terms of form, what attracts me to Andrew’s verse is how the two lines are a parallel construction of present participles. It enhances the verse’s sense of transition, departing and arriving. Coming after that stoplight in the moon verse, it completes the sky picture of the moon and it opens us to the possibilities of the next side.
We have thus completed our second side. Here is the entire renku so far:
Summer Shisan: “Many Shapes”
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
——
first performance of a famous actor
in our provincial town
Urszula Marciniak
only one stoplight
between here
and the moon
Michael Henry Lee
swallows departing
fieldfares arriving
Andrew Shimield
——
- CALL FOR VERSE 7
We are now entering the third side, seasoned winter. Here is the template
three lines— no season
two lines—winter or no season, and love
three lines—-no season or winter (whichever is opposite of the previous verse), and love
Given winter and love topics, this side will have a very different flavor from the previous. Verse seven should be a three-line nonseasonal verse that links to Andrew’s migrating birds and shifts away from Michael’s moon and stoplight verse. Other than that use your imagination to take us somewhere we haven’t been yet.
Please use the submission box below to submit no more than two verses for verse 7. Submissions will close on Monday, September 7 at midnight, US Eastern time. Selection of verse 7 and instructions for submitting to verse 8 will appear here on Thursday, September 10.
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