Tag: haiku

Categories
Poetry

Rhys Hughes on Poetry

THE LAST POEM

I wanted the last poem
I ever wrote
to be profound and clever
and I wanted
to write it outdoors.

But the weather was awful
and my coat
was unsuitable,
so like a dutiful idiot
in my wooden hut
I wrote it with a carrot
carved in the form of a pen.

Luckily I was only ‘like’
a dutiful idiot
and not an actual dutiful
idiot, thus the poem that was my last
turned out to be
quite a good one. Thank heavens for
similes as broad as grins.

And the poem in question?
It went like this:
A parrot in a garret drinking claret
and a pen that is a carrot
are disparate.

 
POEMS OF THE FLOATING WORLD

Haiku floats like boat
The middle line does not sink–
Watertight canoe

A shipshape limerick from Iran
was drifting in circles like a fan.
Each line was a hull,
three pecked off by a gull,
and it became just a catamaran.

A bold ode to a seaworthy sight
floating on the estuary,
a schooner
getting ready to leave at night
to take advantage
of the light of the moon,
while the navigator hums
a tune to Luna
because the sooner
they arrive at their destination,
the faster this crooner
will be reunited with the woman
he calls his wife.

This is a four-line poem
about an anchor that was weighed
and brought to the surface
a surprised mermaid.

And this is a rhyming couplet
about a ship sailing into a sunset.


Poems are rowing
Distant islands are closer
Rhyme schemes are drowning
The syllables are counting
We say tanka very much

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Review

A Dialogue with Stillness

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments

Author: Bina Sarkar Ellias

Publisher: Red River

The wonder of art acknowledges and affirms the potency of stillness, its pregnancy vouching for a revelation that is both vital and imminent. Ambitious as the thought is, is it possible to engage in a dialogue with stillness, to distil the flurry of a day into the transcendence of a moment, and to transform that moment, in turn, into a metaphoric prism for the illumination of all our hereafters? In her recent collection of poems Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments, Bina Sarkar Ellias can justifiably claim to have assayed each of these tasks with remarkable felicity and quiet grace.

A form of Japanese art that flourished between the 17th and the 19th centuries, ‘ukiyo-e’ is a composite of three words – ‘uki’ (floating), ‘yo’ (world) and ‘e’ (pictures), literally meaning “pictures of the floating world”. The ‘floating world’ referred to the theatre districts and (licensed) courtesan quarters that flourished in Japan’s major cities during the Edo period and constituted an important source of attraction for the nouveau-riche of the era. Inhabited largely by courtesans and the traditional kabuki actors, this floating world, despite its low status in the social hierarchy of the times, made its impact as valuable cultural capital, its sartorial customs and mannerisms becoming quite effectively, a rage among common people.

Since paintings could be afforded only by the prosperous, the ukiyo-e artists made a distinct historical move to democratise art by being the first to experiment with woodblock prints which could be produced cheaply and in large numbers, thus making ukiyo-e widely accessible to the  populace. Actors, courtesans, legends, folklore, and landscapes were some of the common subjects that marked this art, the heroic and the erotic being significant thematic notes within it.

Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments revisits this memorable Japanese artform to bring to the reader a remarkable collection of 68 ukiyo-e by 28 artists from across the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, showcasing a delectable mix of the traditional and the modern in Japanese art and its unique blend of native and foreign influences. Compounding the effect of the Ukiyo-e here, is a set of 62 haiku by Bina that excavate, explore and expand the meaning and value of the artworks by bringing them into dense ekphrastic conversation with her own mind and times. “My haiku travels with each of the ukiyo-e works as a companion through this journey, responding with a deep kinship I feel with the artworks,” she writes in her Preface.

In this collaborative project of creativity, the haiku become a companion to the historical journey of the ukiyo-e, illuminating them in a transcultural framework which even as it asserts the omnipotent significance of art, helps draw attention to its omniscience across temporal and cultural divides. “To read a haiku,” says Jane Hirshfield, “is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life.” As Bina places her contemporary and complex historical self within the sensibility of the ukiyo-e, her unravelling of meaning through the haiku becomes yet another act of seeking connection and consolation in an alienated world.

As a poetic form, the haiku establishes a constant romance with the brevity of expression on the one hand and the expanse of space on the other. Its sharp imagism helps to illumine both the moment and the emotional ambience that will render this moment organic in every context. Scale, speed, succinctness and surrealism can all work in concert within the seemingly fragile universe of the haiku to make it an emblem of and testimony to the wide-ranging historical forces within which it is birthed. The animated and tender conversation between colour, form and script in Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments works similarly holding both word and beauty in suspension, mirroring the moment as self and self as moment, and asking us to return to the quintessential celebration of both:

you want to be free
but maya mesmerises-
locks all the doors

The haiku is, often, a lesson in perception. It is characteristic of the haiku to be profoundly epiphanic and in many of her pieces, Bina ascends to that level of quiet illumination wherein an inner truth becomes simpler by the sole virtue of its lucid expression. Art, life, hope, faith, poetry, war, human vulnerability — all emerge as important themes here. One cannot help noticing, however, the collection’s loving partiality toward women. Women and their myriad-layered lives constitute a recurrent thematic motif in these poems:

into the long night
her toil of pleasure-giving
a tale of two worlds

Since in much of the ukiyo-e, the women represented were courtesans, Bina brings a profound sense of tenderness and understanding in reinterpreting their situation for modern women whose lives, in different contexts, remain emotively the same. In their intensity and in the overall poignance with which these haiku delineate women’s ever-shifting roles in terms of profession, domesticity and relationships with the world, Bina evinces a deep knowledge of women’s spiritual multiplicity. To Torii Kiiyonaga’s delicate artwork ‘Bathhouse Women’, for instance, Bina, deflecting attention from the voyeuristic potential of the scene to give the bathhouse a larger cultural and political logic, responds:

a day for washing
wash away patriarchy
energise our souls

Another beautiful narrative turn in haiku is offered in response to Kitagawa Utamaro’s print ‘Naniwa Okita Admiring Herself in a Mirror’ in which Bina imagines a different (more youthful) face emerging from the mirror. While the mirror has mostly been used as a truth-telling device in literature and a means of shattering illusion, this particular mirror becomes a gateway to the discovery of the magical self within, unmarred by the winter of time:

i see a mirage
see my youth in winter years
does the mirror lie?

With Chobunsai Eishi’s ‘The Courtesan Hanaogi of the Ogiya Brothel’, Bina communicates thus:

within the prose
of her pleasure-house living
she breathes poetry

Here is a mature and perceptive weaving of art and life — a recognition of art as art and of life as life with the potential of building strong and tenable bridges across them. It is noteworthy how each haiku stands independently even as it adds a significant hermeneutic or experiential dimension to the ukiyo-e, imparting a certain luminosity to this book. There is a distinct sensation of time-travel in this collection, of moving through the slow whirl of centuries while remaining undivorced from the crises and flavours of the present:

realisation
we were not born violent
let’s repair ourselves

Empathy becomes a powerful voice in Ukiyo-e Days as Bina’s haiku touches raw spots within our shredding cultural fabric to draw attention to greed, war, exploitation and the relentless process of needing to find our integral human selves:

all the world’s armies
trained as cannon fodder
they live to die

In these delicate and consummately-crafted pieces, one finds doors open to deep investigation of the moment and what it stands for in life’s ever-shifting landscape. There is a stillness that the collection speaks from and to, a stillness that characterises both the ukiyo-e and the haiku as art forms. Invested with extraordinary visual and tactile charm and an interesting Preface that throws light on the genesis and growth of the ukiyo-e in Japan, this book accomplishes a unique synthesis between two valuable Japanese art forms, bringing to a connoisseur-reader the unforgettable enchantment of both.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

Mini-Sagas: A Dozen Examples

I first became aware of the flash fiction form called the ‘mini-saga’ in the mid 1980s. They were invented by the author Brian Aldiss (1925-2017). The British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, held annual competitions for the public and the winners were published in the newspaper and also in a series of anthologies.

I submitted a few mini-sagas on a number of occasions but never won. I never even made it as a runner-up. All I can remember of those early pieces of mine was that one of them involved a submarine that somehow was turned upside down while it was diving and went the wrong way through the atmosphere and ended up in outer space.

A mini-saga consists of a story told in precisely fifty words. They aren’t easy to do well, but they get easier with practice (like everything else). The title should have an upper limit of fifteen characters, but this rule is not such a strict one. Because there are so few words to work with, the title is often an essential part of the story.

About twenty years ago I wrote a mini-saga that I was pleased with. It was translated into Portuguese and printed on a T-shirt. For many years I regarded this as my only successful mini-saga. Later I wrote another, not as good, and then forgot all about the form.

But when I was staying in Sri Lanka earlier this year, I read Brian Aldiss’ book, 50×50, fifty mini-sagas in total, a very short collection, and I wondered if I might do something similar. But I decided to write 500 instead of 50. This turned out to be perhaps too much to chew on, but I had already bitten it off, and so I persisted and intend to keep persisting.

My book of 500 mini-sagas will be published when it is finished. So far I have written 216. Some are obviously better than others. I am pleased to now present a short selection from this project in progress.

Plate Armour

The army is on the move, crossing borders and conquering new lands, and the key to their success is mobility. They never stop for meals but eat as they go along. They wear armour specially adapted to hold the curries, pickles, bread, cheese, rice and puddings they enjoy. Plate armour.

Ulysses offering wine to Polyphemus. Courtesy: Creative Commons

A Gift for the Cyclops

Odysseus: Here’s a birthday present for you.

Polyphemus: A strange object?

Odysseus: Binoculars is the name. They permit you to see further. Hold them to your face in this precise position.

Polyphemus: Like this? But I can’t see a thing!

Odysseus: Quick men, let’s escape while he is temporarily blinded.

Bytes, Not Scratches

You are typing on your computer when your cat reaches out a paw and deletes your work. That’s the end of the story. If your dog does the same thing, you can say “Fetch” and it will leap into oblivion, find the document and retrieve it for you, tail wagging.

Pinocchio’s Brother

Pinocchio has a brother whose nose grows shorter whenever he tells a lie. He is the opposite of his more famous sibling in this regard. If he tells enough lies his nose retreats into his face, leaving a deep crater. He is unfortunately too popular with the fraternity of golfers.

In Sheep’s Clothing

An eccentric shepherd in these parts has dressed his sheep in pink frocks. The wolf is reluctant to clothe himself the same way but remembers he is cunning and to fulfil the conditions of his reputation he has no choice. He takes care not to be seen by other wolves.

My Nose

My nose was in the Guinness Book of Records. It’s a volume that lists the most extreme instances of various things. There’s a chapter about the tallest person ever, the longest hair and so forth. My nose was in that book. Then the librarian told me to take it out.

Going for a Walk

She said she was going for a walk with a book. I imagined she wanted to sit and read somewhere, but when I went to the park later, I saw her with a Tolstoy novel on a lead. It was opening its back pages against a tree while she waited.

The Haiku Hiker

The haiku poet went hiking and somewhere along the route he lost count of his syllables, so he just kept going. After walking far, he found an isolated tavern in the enormous forest. He fell on the beer like a shooting star. The syllables could find their own way home.

Runny Honey

Runny honey: see the jar sprinting down the street. It grew legs secretly at night in the cupboard when no one was looking. When I opened the door, it jumped out and escaped! I chase it with a spoon. I will never buy runny honey again, only the solid kind.

He was Mighty

An early start was required. He rose from his bed in the castle and called for his squire, who carefully dressed him. A frown for his forehead, an increased pulse for his chest, perspiration for his skin. Now the mighty worrier was ready! Off he went to do anxious battle.

The Toothbrush Duel

There were no other weapons available, all the swords and pistols were missing or broken, so they decided to duel with toothbrushes. They met at dawn, saluted each other, then battled for an hour on the field of honour. Toothpaste squirted into the air. It was a good, clean fight.

Something More Comfortable

The woman took the man home. They had met only an hour before but had felt an instant attraction. “Allow me to change into something more comfortable,” she said. He nodded eagerly. In a flash she transformed into a big fluffy white dog that jumped up to lick his face.

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Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Poetry

Thread of Life

By Eduard Schmidt-Zorner

I tie the Ariadne’s thread into my wide-meshed cardial net, where points of view dissolve and deep thoughts evolve. Lead him past the rubble heaps where longing grows and stockpiled are forgotten things. Bind him where the swallows fly and fix him near heaven’s dome where clouds rush by and seagulls are at home.

Eduard Schmidt-Zorner is a translator and writer of poetry, haibun, haiku and short stories.He writes in four languages: English, French, Spanish and German and holds workshops on Japanese and Chinese style poetry and prose.

Member of four writer groups in Ireland and lives in County Kerry, Ireland, for more than 25 years and is a proud Irish citizen, born in Germany.

Published in 76 anthologies, literary journals and broadsheets in USA, UK, Ireland, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Bangladesh, India, France, Mauritius and Canada. Writes also under his pen name: Eadbhard McGowan