HCSHR: 2:10. Wishbone Moon: an anthology of haiku by women

Wishbone Moon, Roberta Beary, Ellen Compton & Kala Ramesh, eds. Durham NC: Jacar Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-936481-26-5. 104 (8) pages. 20$US  jacarpress.com

excerpts from a conversation
Sandra Stephenson and Maxianne Berger
(April-July, 2019)

MB: Wishbone Moon is an anthology of haiku by women. Apparently the first in English, it was preceded by two similar anthologies in French (2018 and 2008).¹ The 242 poems are by 107 poets from some twenty-one countries. About a hundred are by poets in the United States, such as the title poem by Beverly Acuff Momoi.

my father left me
this dark thirst
wishbone moon

A like number of the haiku are by poets from countries where English is an official language. Another thirty-five are by contributors from non-English-speaking countries such as Slovenia, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, and Japan.

funeral
her first journey
alone

     Marta Chocilowska (Poland)

Canada is well represented by Susan Constable, Terry Ann Carter, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Anita Krumins, and Marianne Paul. Strangely absent are the Romanians. However, the anthology’s primary raison d’être is to present haiku by women, and thus provenance of the poets is less important than the poems selected.

Although the haiku are carefully sequenced, Wishbone is not organized by theme as are the two French anthologies. So maybe some starting questions might be, is there a women’s way of experiencing the world? And if so, how might this manifest itself in haiku?

SS: At a glance it looks like a hundred years of English haiku represented by women deeply involved with the form, many of whom came to it as I did, late in life (47 is late, compared to the 20-year-old poetry most of us wrote). I wonder whether the haiku is a form for the second half of life? Whether it’s the same for men as for women? Whether it’s the same in India, Japan, China, Tibet?

Certainly this poem is timeless, placeless, universal, and satisfyingly contemplative.

breastfeeding
the slow drip of rain
on the nursery roof

     Vanessa Proctor (Australia)

And it describes moments only a woman can experience. It mingles pain with the stuff of life. Haiku like this bring the collection into a safe private place with walls but without boundaries.

MB: Yet it’s interesting how our personal experience, as women, draws us to certain poems. I find this one especially poignant.

snowflakes all the places she was childless

                                               Polona Oblak (Slovenia)

However many of the poems are “genderless,” and truly evocative.

SS: in recent weeks I’ve tried approaching Wishbone Moon a number of ways. I’ve travelled with it and left it lying on tabletops, settees, hassocks and beds in a number of rooms and places. I started at the beginning, read a bit, then started from the end. I dug in at random, flipping the pages and reading till I happened on one that a) made sense without too much effort; and b) appealed to me. Some days I like those that make me linger and tease out meaning, maybe with a pop-out or a giggle. Today, I stopped with the following poem so it would stay with me all day:

flickering oil lamps
around the ancient tree
the temple grows

     Madhuri Pillai (Australia)

There is no kigo identifiable, but there is a distinct sense of place and a hint of night-time. There is shadow and light, timelessness and age. Here is great old age revered and enlivened, somehow growing and spreading. It’s not specific to any gender, though the image of a baobab that came to my mind hints at the swelling of gestation. This poem is full of a deeply burning life, nurturing and sustenance, and its presence in the collection adds gravitas like an anchor.

MB: Haiku that work this well are worth the price of admittance — although so few details, they are so vivid, so evocative. In a similar way, though on the other end of the life spectrum, perhaps, I am struck by this haiku by Susan Constable, which closes the section of poems by contributors.

silence
where the river ran
this bed of stones

It can be a personal metaphor, or one for the Earth itself. And yet the very absence that fills these few lines seems to convey all that is gone. All that might, one day, be gone.

SS: There is loss in many of these poems, but humour too, the fumbling of newness too. “how soft/ the spring rain.” I’ve been struck by the sequencing. It’s like a walk through a forest: there’s a cluster of dogwood, and here a clutch of geese talking the same language. Then you notice trees or the sand for a while, then there’s another fern like the one you saw earlier . . . The poems ring off each other without heavy clumping. The echoes are visual too, the word “mirror” on one page, and in the poem directly opposite it, “circle of light.” Each piece is new yet strangely familiar:

still no news
coffee rings
on his old piano
      Frances Angela (England)

It is, as Claudia Coutu Radmore says, “the business/ of isness.” Under what conditions would a man be able to read this book? I think it would make him faint of heart.

MB: Surely among men who read and write poetry are some who appreciate the experiences of others. Empathy comes with the territory of being human. Soon enough, however, there will be some basis for comparison of themes. After the appearance of the second anthology of haiku by women (Danièle Duteil’s Secrets de femmes), Dominique Chipot decided to edit an anthology of haiku by men.²

autumn walk
my brother leaves the path
before me
      Irena Szewczyk (Poland)

Sandra Stephenson & Maxianne Berger

¹ Regards de femmes, haïkus francophones. Ed. Janick Belleau. (Paris: Éditions AFH; Montréal: Éditions Adage, 2008.) Secrets de femmes, collectif francophone de haïkus. Ed. Danièle Duteil. (Paris: Éditions Pippa, 2018.) [see review by André Duhaime.]

² This anthology is to be published by Éditions Pippa. Chipot’s co-editors are Hélène Leclerc, Daniel Py, and Philippe Macé.