Jerome Rothenberg
SIX POEMS FOR A ROUND OF RENSHI
Kumamoto, Japan, 2010
Let us offer up a song, may the gods of these fields bear witness The gods look down, the farmers plant their fields and are glad -ITO HIROMI , from a local folk song 1 TWO TANKAS the future rising as does my name red mountain summit high above the earth below in darkness hole the fathers called sheol . soon to be with you on Aso not Death Mountain in the other poem (Shiyo, d. 1703) beneath which looms the shadow of a visionary fish (S. Tanikawa) 2 LINES AFTER TANIKAWA SHUNTARO The language of those who hate me The language of those who will love me so that he starts again until the mud through which he walks covers his body starts again but robs him of his breath 3 LINES AFTER ITO HIROMI I must have been born to play, I must have been born to frolic, yet in his emptiness, his voidness he is a real man only when he murders so in love with death he leaves me desperate the more I look into his eyes I see a dead bull gutted but a living man 4 LINES AFTER ITO HIROMI I left my infant child in my lasciviousness and slept with many men -how does she know the time then? -by fits & starts -and if the time starts running? -she runs behind it -then try to pin her down & hear her squeal -a word caught in your throat is still a word 5 LINES AFTER WAKAKO KAKU passing through will sweep all illness away, they say will change one into infinite blue- the body whole 840 million thoughts the sutra says (Jōdō Bosatsu Sutra) come every night & overwhelm the sleeper looking for a place to hide for which he writes his death poem as a perfect circle (Shisui, d. 1769) 6 LINES AFTER WAKAKO KAKU We put logic to rest We celebrate the outrageous The last song remaining is our offering to the world people speak at me & I don't understand except my name & yours & little words like koko & asoko & those that aren't words at all but sounds remembered first as sounds the small nouns crying faith (he wrote) (G. Oppen) what poets always knew what still astounds
NOTE. Renga, the traditional & well known form of Japanese collaborative or linked writing, has its modern counterpart in Renshi, generally practiced with projective or open forms but always with the shadow of the ancient orders somewhere in the background. While the renga practice goes back some 800 years or more & follows a wide range of traditional rules & constraints, renshi is tied closely to the freeing up of verse during the upsurge of a new poetics in the half century & more of Japanese "postwar writing." Its notable Japanese practitioners include Ooka Makoto & Tanikawa Shuntaro, key figures of the modernist or postmodernist "postwar" groupings, & an occasional foreign participant such as British poet Charles Tomlinson in the late 1990s.
My own brush with renshi came in March 2010, a four-day event in the southern Kyushu city of Kumamoto where I was the fifth wheel with Tanikawa, Ito Hiromi, Yotsumoto Yasuhiro, & Wakako Kaku. For this the chosen site in Kumamoto was the happily alternative Orange cafe & bookstore, as a result of which the place for writing, unlike some other renshi that I know of, was open rather than private, a small area at the rear of the equally small cafe, which was however closed off to outside business during our time there. Even so, people came & went freely, which only enhanced the sense of writing in public - in-the-open, so to speak. That and the relative speed required gave it - to my mind at least - a performative & improvisatory feeling, while responding - always - to what came before & after. For all of that it was the sense of writing that dominated the proceedings - pen & paper augmented by the computers that all six of us brought to the event. At the end the Japanese poets used brush & ink (& long strips of Chinese paper) to transcribe their work in calligraphic form, as did Jeffrey Angles who functioned - largely for my benefit - as our principal translator. There was also - to top it off - a public reading & discussion, a paying event that drew over 400 people to an auditorium adjacent to the city's Literature Museum. So, while I'm limiting the offering here to my own six poems & brief cuts (in italics) from the poems to which they linked, at a later time I would like to publish the renshi as a whole & to discuss, or have the others discuss, the strategies behind the links. The over-all restraints (laid down by Tanikawa as the master of our ceremonies) were minimal - to keep the poems short & to avoid the links being too direct or obvious. There was also a degree of referencing to earlier works & sources, a practice in which I was happy to engage, as a further instance, let's say, of "othering" or "writing through." (Hiromi Ito in this regard drew all her entries from earlier, largely oral, sources.) And there were also references to matters that came up in conversation, which would be more difficult to uncover but had a resonance for some of us that may carry over (or not) to those who read us. Of all such "distant links" (soku), the fifteenth-century poet-monk Shinkei wrote in his Sasamegoto, a masterwork of renga poetics & of poetics over all: "A soku poem is said to be one wherein it does not matter that the upper and lower part are put together in a seemingly unnatural and arbitrary way so long as they cohere in the mind." (For which see Murmured Conversations: a Treatise on Poetry and Buddhism by the Poet-Monk Shinkei, translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, Stanford University Press, 2008.)