HCSHR 1.1: Old Song: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2017

 previously published in Haiku Canada Review 12:2 (October 2018) 68-71

Old Song. The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2017. Jim Kacian & eds. Winchester VA: Red Moon Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-947271-13-5. 170 pages, soft cover, 5½ x 8¼, $17US. redmoonpress.com 

        Old Song is the twenty-second Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku. This year’s crop, from 2017 publications, includes 152 poems (haiku or senryu), seventeen linked forms, and five critical essays. Of the thousands of items read by the eleven editors through the past year, the sources of the final selections include two books, one anthology, thirteen periodicals, fourteen contests, and seventeen on-line sources.

        Of the essays, three in particular drew my attention because of their relationship to the practice of writing. Michele Root-Bernstein is a scholar in creativity studies, and her “Copying to Create: The Role of Imitation and Emulation in Developing Haiku Craft” (from Modern Haiku) reflects this background: there is a broad review of the literature on learning and teaching, which validates the benefits of copying, categorized as “mimicry, imitation, and emulation.” Support for the benefits of copying is further established with quotations from creative artists, such as Pablo Picasso and T. S. Elliott. After a brief discussion of honkadori, Root-Bernstein then presents a variety of haiku which illustrate different types of “copying,”

        In fact, in Old Song itself there is a masterly example of “allusive variation.” Many readers will readily appreciate how Nick Virgilio’s signature poem informs Martha Magenta’s: “pond lily . . ./ at last I grow/ into myself” (from Presence).

        Alan Summers, in “The Reader as Second Verse” (Blithe Spirit), reminds us that “haiku are not poems for the reader to compulsorily be ordered to follow the one way or not at all.” One haiku in Old Song that nicely displays the openness Summers encourages is by Sharon Pretti: “hint of rain/ the hours after/ visiting hours” (Frogpond). Unstated, who is in hospital and why, are details readers can fill in on their own, and these personal, participatory, reader-inserted elements are what give the poem its strength.

        The conclusion of Jim Kacian’s “Characteristics of American Haiku” (Modern Haiku) proposes that “what identifies American haiku is not any one style or value or voice, but rather its multiplicity . . .” as well as the American “willingness to drive [these aspects] to their logical and artistic ends.” In the discussion proper, Kacian mentions the use of American referents, such as Virgilio’s “spentagon”; the willingness to play with form, such as the “monoku” (a term Kacian coined, and one I accept as a truncation of “monostich haiku”); and “a healthy experimentation with organic form” (I see this within the scope of projective verse).

        Kacian begins the article by reminding readers that there is a debt to the English language itself. Through acknowledged details of happenstance, Kacian recognizes that “[t]hese factors have much to do with the relative weight of American haiku within the larger haiku community.”

        I would add to Kacian’s discussion this observation. In viewing haiku through the lens of cultural materialism, one notices that the gatekeeper editors and publishers are those who control what others get to read, and their journals present the structures and topics poets might want to emulate in order to be published. Because of the “sheer numbers” of American haiku readers, the number of journals, too, would play a role in American influence. Seven of the fifteen print journals represented in Old Song are published in the United States, and nine of the seventeen electronic journals are edited by Americans. Kacian has ensured a similar balance for the ten-member editorial board of the Red Moon anthologies: five of them are American, and the other five are not.

        The haiku in Old Song include a generous number of examples of the “multiplicity” of approaches to haiku mentioned by Kacian. American referents, both historic and contemporary, are present. A good example is the anthology’s title poem, by Alan S. Bridges, winner of the 2017 Robert Spiess Memorial Award.

an old song pours
from a Navajo toehold
canyon wren

        Communication these days is instantaneous, and it is not surprising to find verbal memes from the USA used my non-American poets, as does Dietmar Tauchner, from Austria: “fake news . . ./ my father says/ he is fine” (Hedgerow).

        As to monoku, there are nearly twenty in Old Song, including the one in Francine Banwarth’s haibun “Strike a Pose” (Modern Haiku). The prose passage is a medical description replete with the jargon of the field: “a persistent small nodular opacity in the axillary tail of the left breast[.]” The haiku alludes to an image about death in the cultural canon associated with the breast.

hold your breath now and lean back like Cleopatra

        An interesting aspect of monostich haiku in English is that the caesura need not be marked. As such it differs from the Japanese poem that inspired it. This verbal fluidity at times promotes multiple readings. Dan Schwerin’s (Bones) is a good illustration.

men my age jump ship in a bottle

        The sheer number of poems the editorial staff considers each year is daunting. The final selections make for a manageable size to publish, to read, and to appreciate. So it is with Old Song. The essays are thoughtful and thought provoking, and the poems are twice blessed. They bear witness to the contemporary milieu within which the inspirations have arisen; and are verbal incarnations of the aesthetic qualities of composition currently valued by poets, contest judges, editors, and publishers. And readers.

Reviewed by Maxianne Berger