HCSHR 3:1 — Wales Haiku Journal Winter 2019-20. Paul Chambers, ed.

Wales haiku journal (winter 2019/20). Paul Chambers, ed.

                                               notes by Sandra Stephenson

Part I

I like to hold a book or paper when reading. I don’t often get lured into online haiku journals. This one caught my attention for two reasons: when you click on the current issue, you get a long scroll of haiku uncomplicated with anything other than author names; and two, there’s an essay in the featured section comparing haiku to old Welsh poetry. I will comment on both. There are things to say also about a renga with himself by Philip Gross, a much-awarded haiku poet, and about an article about Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Haiku, reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement, but those things will wait.

Of the poems, open and totally accessible with a good-sized serif typeface, many are note-worthy. Canadian Debbie Strange’s egg that didn’t open caught my eye, as did Elaine Wilburt’s dimpled fist full of buttercups. I’ve chosen some favorites that contribute to an over-all impression of outdoors in a place like ours but not. Rabbit pellets, turkey vultures, nettles, white birch amid talk of windrows, milking stools and frozen wool on a barbed wire fence make a Canadian reader perk up her senses. It’s like a “deep breeze” (Gary Hittmeyer) from a familiar but distant past. Here is Adjei Agyei-Baah’s memorable haiku:

well water
I hesitate
to stir the stars

It stirs something probably in readers who have never seen a well. There’s a sense of shadow in this collection of poems from around the world, one I remember from Dylan Thomas’ richly visual hills and valleys.

inside the folds
of a cafe umbrella...
autumn dusk
            Brad Bennett

This collection includes overtones of deep knowing:

from the clifftop
the chough
knows
            Mark Gilbert

There is John H. Han’s “learning to write/ a will” and there are overtones of death:

the same granite
in a stile’s step . . .
village graveyard
            paul m.

Overtones of childhood:

empty hands
before sleep comes
mother’s humming
            Erin Castaldi

bedtime —
brushing the wind
out of her hair
            Elaine Wilburt

Contrasts between movement and stillness:

a squirrel
rearranging a pinecone
steady clouds
            Chris Jeffris

As a collection, these poems are “conkers falling amid the stillness/ of prayer flags” (Wally Swist).

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Part 2

Giving in to the allure of Transcreation, an article by John Rowlands in Wales Haiku Journal, I was rewarded with pleasant and succinct observations about haiku generally. It was an opportunity to llearn what haiku is not and what Welsh poetics involve. (I decided to leave that typo lie!) I found myself unable to review the article because it is flawlessly itself, so below is my extraction of especially notable bits of it, with a few interjections of my own.

Transcreation is non-literal translation. The creator chooses which elements of language and poem to obey: meaning, rhythm, sense, or minimalism for example. Rowlands transcreates his own poems with the result that he gains insight into the languages he’s working with, digging deeper into what one might call yugen using the dialectic of translation and culture. He explains: “I am in the process of creating a collection comprising of a Welsh haiku on the same page as its counterpart, leaving the reader to wonder which was the chicken and which was the egg.” He describes sometimes searching for a single line or word interminably, with the following observation about a specific poem that eluded him:

I often wander up a convoluted garden path and one line that appeared was — a burst of sunfire. All very clever (poetic) but not for a haiku. Also, with some haiku, one returns to them searching for something more but therein lies the danger of losing that haiku moment.

Rowlands cautions against over-analysis and proposes to call his poems short forms to avoid excessive debate about whether it’s haiku or not. “Short poem” is, I understand from a University of Columbia article about waka, the meaning of the word tanka. “Over emphasis on process is a malaise,” Rowlands says.

Here is an example of his paired haiku, which I like first for the look of it in Welsh.

hanner dydd y bwced gwag yn llawn goleuni

noon the empty bucket full of light

(published in the British haiku journal, Blithe Spirit 28:4)

Contrasting haiku with an ancient and rich Welsh form, Rowlands quotes Nigel Jenkins who in turn quotes Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) to describe cynghanedd: “the most sophisticated system of sound-patterning practised in any poetry of the world.” I contest this claim lightly, thinking of Sanskrit slokas such as the Mahishasura Mardini Stotra. Rowlands suggests his early attempts at haiku were a reaction against 24 rigours of the Welsh form. He found in haiku a “refreshing directness” without “poetic pyrotechnics.” 

“Objects become poems and poems become objects,” he says. Still, he writes,

Alliteration is a ploy some of us Welsh speakers seem to enjoy, often playfully…. I invariably have to surpress [sic] these tendencies unless they are of use in short poems as opposed to haiku and senryu …. in this part of North Wales which is at least seventy percent Welsh speaking. Musicality is embedded in the language.

This typo is interesting — a perfectly appropriate word for what Rowlands does: he has to surprise his own linguistic impulse in order to subvert it.

Another contrast which has led John Rowlands to prefer haiku is the public performance nature of Welsh poetry.

Cerdd Dant is a prominent feature in any eisteddfod [festival of the arts] and it is the art of vocalising poetry to musical accompaniment, usually a harp or harps… [h]aiku is usually presented in an intimate atmosphere. …Many haijin think of haiku as being primarily for the page, one-to-one with the reader.

Rowlands writes of the joy of haiku.

I find creating haiku a natural part of my days. I enjoy being on the fulcrum of a see-saw between my cultural background and another culture’s interpretation of life on this floating world. I am well aware that only Japanese speaking poets write pure haiku and only Welsh speaking poets write pure cynghanedd.

In my turn, I enjoy Rowlands’ use of the Japanese word haijin despite his reservations about borrowing from another language. The term has enchantment, with international tones of Djinn and, for me, an almost impish hijacking!

                                                                                               Sandra Stephenson
                                                                                               February, 2020

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