The Renku Sessions: Many Shapes – Week 7
Welcome to this renku session. I am Linda Papanicolaou and I’ll be your guide.
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- CHOICE OF VERSE 7
This week again I’m offering you a larger shortlist because there were so many great offers. In particular, it’s interesting that several of you linked to the bird migration verse by turning it to human travel. It’s a nice turn and certainly one of the themes we like to use in the ha.
mouths agape
as the sushi train
circles the diners
Margaret Anderson
wool blankets
left
under bridges
Stephanie Bauer
a cool tattoo
on the back of the neck
of the boy in front
Marion Clarke
in space, viewing
Earthrise from a ship
headed to Mars
John Daleiden
a white feather
pressed into
her father‘s ration book
Tracy Davidson
“Grand Central Station”
our joking way of portraying
any busy place
Debbie Feller
climate change
will make many saijiki
redundant
Lorin Ford
we heel starboard
as we share binoculars
on the steamboat
Pamela Garry
my fate
revealed in a
fortune cookie
Valerie Green
for a change
the kids play
peek-a-boo
Lakshmi Iyer
short circuits
send the androidsp
into overdrive
Carol Jones
oh la la la
comme j’adore
le pétrichor
Madeleine Kavanagh
Grandpa’s old binoculars
found while cleaning out
the attic
Urszula Marciniak
the hole
left on the wall
by the painters
Biswajit Mishra
a refugee
looks back at her home
being raided
Sean Murphy
snow whitens
mom asks when I’ll settle
the kettle oracles
Guliz Mutlu
the Grand Marnier soufflé
doesn’t make it
to the table
Orense Nicod
late last passenger
hurries through
the gate to their plane
Pauline O’Carolan
crushing granite
sound of receding
car on gravel
Ahmad Olawale
crossing through dark
train windows lit
with strangers
Anton R-kelian
at the edge of town
a traveling carnival
hosts a petting zoo
Clysta Seney
a clock’s hands
overlapping without
touching
Richard Straw
I liked how some of the submissions not only linked but also brought an infusion of energy and offered a good beginning of a new side. What I have decided is to do something different this time by tweaking the template. As given us by John Carley in Renku Reckoner, the third side (verses 7-9) calls for a three-line nonseasonal verse, followed by a two-line love verse, and then a three-line love verse. One or the other of the love pair should include this side’s season: winter.
Templates are not sacrosanct; they are guide guidelines for pacing the renku and moving it through all its slalom gates. We can adjust it as long as we can preserve the necessities—in this case the pair of love verses and our single winter verse. So, we’re going to lead off with love because a very nice one has come in and I want to take advantage of it. It’s Marion’s boy with the tattoo. The previous verse’s bird migrations morph into a gathering of humans in which the narrator’s gaze lands on a young man with a tattoo on the back of his neck. It’s not overt, but there is a subtle eroticism that makes it a first sight of a potential lover, which is one of the subtopics in the love category. A more overt love verse to follow it will draw out this reading. This is one of the things I love about renku, how each verse depends on the context of what comes before and after to realize meaning.
By now you’ll have realized that I also look for elements of prosody to make a renku fun to read. Marion’s verse opens with iambic meter in the first line, anapestic meter in the second, and both in the third; plus, there’s the parallel construction of “back” in line two and “front” in line 3. There’s a light skipping rhythm that opens our new side with an infusion of energy and promises a very different mood from side 2.
Here it is in the context of the two prior verses:
only one stoplight
between here
and the moon
Michael Henry Lee
swallows departing
fieldfares arriving
Andrew Shimield
——-
a cool tattoo
on the back of the neck
of the boy in front
Marion Clark
- CALL FOR VERSE 8
This will be a two-line love, with your choice of non-season or winter. A bit of information about love verses: This important special topic has its origins in renku’s beginnings in Japanese aristocratic poetry. Love does not refer to love of children, family, beautiful sunsets, nature, etc; it is about human carnal desire as practiced in medieval courts where all such involvements were extra marital. In our era and culture, we make adjustments, but these verses are still about the frisson of anticipation, anxieties, pleasures, and disappointments of romantic relationships. Bill Higginson once named several sub-topics within the love category, including “first sight of a potential lover,” “assignation,” “absent lover,” and “end of love” (sorry, I wish I knew the source for this but I can’t give you an online citation). We already have “first sight” in Marion’s verse, so think of any of the later stages of an affair to cap it. Renku avoids a continuous storyline, so changing points of view, genders, etc. to open space across the link.
The verse may be winter or non-season, but if including winter with your love idea over-stuffs the verse, go with the nonseasonal option. We can do winter with the third verse of the side.
Please use the submission box below to submit no more than two verses for verse 8. Submissions will close on Monday, September 14 at midnight, US Eastern time. Selection of the verse and instructions for submitting to verse 9 will appear here on the Thursday, September 17.
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