Review Articles
Stone Frog: American Haibun and Haiga: Volume 2
Stone Frog: American Haibun and Haiga: Volume 2 edited by Jim Kacian and Bruce Ross. Red Moon Press, POBox 2461, Winchester, VA 22604-1661, USA 2001. l20pp. $14.95 plus $5 postage ISBN 1-893959-19-8 ([email protected])
Lotus blossoms
a vendor shouts
“want to buy some food?”There is a reception line waiting for the monks, small children to grey haired adults. Three or four barefoot monks with shaven heads, wearing drab orange clothes, move slowly down the line. After an offering is put in the monk’s bowl, sometimes the person kneels, and the monk chants a short blessing before moving on.
And so on. Interesting? Maybe, but surely in, say, The National Geographic Magazine and not a literary anthology. This is the plod tendency in haibun that dominates this volume much as in Volume 1, reviewed in our previous issue. At least this time round the editors confess that ‘most of us writing haibun suffer from issues of narrative style, particularly that we are often too prosaic in manner’.
A prose of flat, earnest and colourless factuality, emotionally stilted at best, is what characterises the plod tendency. The haiku have been likened to pearls in a mud bank, except that they themselves often succumb to the prose style. So here, for example, we have travels in Japan recalling after-dinner solo holiday reminiscences (one goes on for eight pages). ‘I stop at the Matsuhana for lunch. Thank heaven the less expensive restaurants use katakana rather than kanji for their menus!’ And then there’s Mickey and Marcia, lost when canoeing in some Mississippi version of the Everglades. After three long paragraphs I began to hope something nasty might have happened to them. No such luck!
Just as we were about to turn around the spreading willow into Half Moon landing there came a happy shout from behind us. It was Mickey and Marcia pulling up fast. They had not found a short cut home, but neither had they gotten lost. Unwilling to give up the day’s adventure, they had merely given in to the allure of the next bend in the channel and the next bend after that.
Many of the plod haibun do have a more interesting story to tell, and sometimes, as in the two or three childhood reminiscences, the style relaxes warmly. And some again do have a glow about them which brings them closer than others to the dozen or so (out of a total of fifty) which I believe have some true literary appeal. Close study of the dozen suggests some of the qualities which make for that appeal.
Firstly, there is that rarely mentioned quality which Bashō identified as shiori - warmth of feeling. For example, there is a three-pager by Kate MacQueen which at first looked like another pedestrian, unidimensional narrative, about ringing and measuring birds. But early on the poet lets fall that she was ‘passing through with the warblers, seeking a little spiritual sustenance while avoiding entanglements’. We become sensitive to the developing narrative. And then...
The man with the gentle hands has a laugh that ripples and lights up his face. It is the sun on the water, and like a thirsty bird I can’t resist splashing there. Words, too, tumble from him, tripping over all he wants to say until they pool into a place of clarity on my last night. Startled by what is reflected there, I retreat into jokes and witticisms. Only later, when 1 am alone, do I admit to my thirst.
turn of the tide
a gull walks along the shore
with a broken wing
Secondly, all my dozen are in a prose that Bashō called haikai no bunsho - ‘writing in the style of haiku’. That is to say they are written in a concrete, economical, direct style, free of abstraction and philosophising (though even the best writers sometimes fall into the temptation to tell after they have already shown, just in case we haven’t got it). The writing is crisp and light-handed and rich in imagery. And such haikuprose can take many different forms. Here is Jesse Glass with a Joycean, or, more precisely, a Faulknerian version:-
There in that collapsing shed near the pond I waited hearing my own heart feeling the clutch of the summer heat in my throat where the dragon flies witched each freshet to its source where the worm flew on its secret thread I was alone with the light on the broken floor...
And here is Judson Evans, ‘laying above you / tracing the Braille / of your name’, carved in granite:-
…the simple maze of 8, the oxbow of S, the great Serpentine without its Versailles, the drained lock of H, its empty artificial waterways. The great moulds emptied of artificial summer. The prison yards, pristine canals, the stalls and slave quarters of E.
Thirdly there are a few haibun here which have something of that light-handed symbolism, that ambiguity, that mysterious space left for the reader, that is found in the best of haiku. In haibun this implies a well-crafted, complex and thematic literary creation, even in short pieces like Yu Chang’s ‘Refrigerator’. Here there is a subtle interplay between the breakdown of the fridge and the death of an old friend. With Cherie Hunter Day we clean and explore an old mahogany chest of drawers... with the ‘lemon oil-soaked scrap of flannel’. We see the different surfaces, feel their texture, and discover how it was all put together, right down to the cabinet maker’s pencil marks. We find ourselves intimate with the maker himself. And from the ancient hairpin which the poet finds she delicately suggests a possible romance: ‘Candle glow - / he untangles the cascade / of her scented hair’.
The few outstanding haibun here therefore have a layered textual density, rich in allusion, like the melodic counterpoint in baroque music or classical jazz. This has a power greater even than the finest unidimensional haibun prose, like the Ion Codrescu piece, wherein it is largely the haiku alone that must carry the mystery.
Two pieces by Jesse Glass and William M Ramsey I found most profoundly enjoyable and cominend to haibun students for close examination. With its shades of Garry Snyder and Kenneth White, Glass’s reverie calls to mind a fourth haibun resource. This Haruo Shirane calls ‘the vertical axis’ of social context, history, literature and myth which can further power up our haibun. The title, ‘Unsen’s Stone’, refers to where a great Nagasaki brush painter worked his apprenticeship. This is blended in with the poet’s Japanese marriage, the ancestral family place and the ancient and modern views from it.
In dreams Unsen’s stone becomes the world, master-works of shadow glyph its surface, there a mountain, here an old man in a boat, none will ever be erased it seems, but abide there in most perfect form.
far off - a young boy’s laughter
My language the smallest
bamboo ladle, now set
aside, still wet
William Ramsey bought a soul for Christmas by mail order. It has now ‘been hanging on my refrigerator door for nearly a decade’.
The novelty has worn off, and I can’t say I look at it much anymore. But it’s nice to have it up there, along with my child’s school artwork. I do notice it sometimes, like when the overhead fan is spinning and its soft, feathery edges flap like angel wings.
This is no whimsy - playful, yes, yet deep and subtle. ‘My talisman, my mail-order exhalation of God’.
bursting from blackness
of ditch brambles at dusk -
wings crossing the moon
Sandwiched between the haibun are 28 ‘images and poems’. A few struck me as rather too clever or too obscure, but many are enjoyable both poetically and graphically. ‘Soho gallery - / in the sound-proof room / the Hokusai print’. And there it is, The Great Wave, nicely brush-stroked.
Design and production follow the winning formula of the first volume. There can be few more attractive-looking books on the haiku market.
Page(s) 56-59
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The