Syllabic Tanka Day for 2016

Greetings:

Today is January 22nd.  I bet you didn't know that this is Syllabic Tanka Day!  Hooray.  It seems fitting that now that I'm plunging into Genji Monogatari, which has hundreds of tanka/waka scattered through the book, that I take a moment to celebrate this form which has been so rewarding for so many poets and readers down through the centuries.  In the anglosphere tanka has not yet taken root; instead what you have are people writing free verse poems (usually five lines) and then labeling them tanka for no clear reason.  That's OK; it's what is happening.  But for those of us who want to really engage with traditional Japanese tanka the syllabic count is essential.  Thankfully a small number of poets are slowly learning the syllabic shape and using it skillfully in English.

Here is a tank from my collection 'Tanka River', a landscape:

The hours before dawn,
Before the sun has risen,
Before the stars fade,
Before the world rushes in,
The hours of the morning calm


And here is one from a sequence on love:

By the ocean's edge
I wait patiently for more
Memories of you,
Riding the incoming waves
Or the last rays of the sun


And here is a tanka from one of the first tanka collections in English, 'Wind Five Folded', edited by Jane Reichhold:

Walking east, I watch
The moon rise, huge, smokey orange,
Almost full, alone.
Walking home, I'm almost used
To you being gone again.

John Gribble, page 65


And another one from 'Wind Five Folded':

Ginkgos are boring
Until autumn golding and
Persimmons taste tart --
The vague words of your language
Often mean less than they seem

Mimi Walter Hinman, page 77


Slowly a cache of syllabic tanka is being written.  My feeling is that the less a poet has taken on the narrow esthetics of official haiku, the more accessible tanka becomes to a poet.  I see tanka as more closely related to the Psalms and to hymnody than to free verse haiku.  There is the same quiet contemplation, the same sense of steady rhythm meant for chanting or singing. 

But to find these tanka you have to look beyond official tanka organizations and magazines because most of them (all?) were started by people committed to free verse and completely allergic to syllabics.  They seem also to have absorbed the nihinjinron based mythos of the specialness of the Japanese language.  But, again, that's OK.  They get to do that.  And we get to connect with the Japanese tradition by counting on our fingers: 5-7-5-7-7.

On Genji -- Part 1

On Genji – Part 1

I’m rereading The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari).  I’m enjoying it immensely.  I first read Genji decades ago; I think it was at least 35 years.  And, if memory serves, I did not read the entire work at that time, finding myself overwhelmed by the immense cast of characters and the huge size of the novel (over 1,000 pages).  I admired the work at first reading, and there were passages of great beauty that spoke to me; but as an overall whole Genji eluded me.

This time I am responding differently.  I love it.  I think this is partly due to simply being older.  The understanding of impermanence permeates Genji at multiple levels.  The world of nature is one way that this expressed, but there is also the impermanence of human relationships both at a personal and political level.  I think it is easier for an older person to resonate with this; in any case it speaks more to me now than when I read Genji before.

The fickleness of human desire is another major theme in Genji and, again, I think this is something that is learned, if it is learned, over time.  All relationships end in parting, either by death or divorce; and though that is a universal truth, it is a truth that takes some experience to really comprehend.

I am also more familiar today than I was when I first approached Genji with the specifically Buddhist references found in the novel in every chapter.  References to past lives and karma, to the Lotus Sutra, and to the Pure Land add dimensions of depth and meaning to Genji that, I suspect, most westerners would miss.  Murasaki assumes that her audience knows these references, but a modern westerner, unless, like myself, he took a lot of time studying the Japanese Buddhist tradition, is unlikely to pick up on most of them.  And the Buddhism of Murasaki’s time differs in significant ways from Japanese Buddhism today.  Modern Japanese Buddhism is the result of the turmoil of the 13^th century and ended up with strongly sectarian traditions that view each other with suspicion so that in Japan today you find institutionally separated traditions like Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren.  In the time of Murasaki (the 11^th century), however, the Buddhist tradition had not yet fragmented into these mutually antagonistic sects.  There were divisions, naturally enough, but they were divisions found within an organization rather than divisions between organizations.  For this reason the understanding of Buddhism in Japan at that time was more singular and more pervasive than it is now; either in Japan or in the West.

I am also struck, at times amazed, by Murasaki Shikibu’s ability to comprehend and write about human psychology.  The world of Genji is in many ways strange to us.  It is an insular world, an elite world, a world of mannered gestures and coded complex customs that are no longer part of the world (either the western world or Japan’s).  Yet beneath these striking differences Murasaki uncovers motives and purposes that drive her characters and that we can fully recognize as operative in the world today.  That is how Genji can manage to speak to a modern audience.

In some ways I feel while I am reading Genji like when I am reading some sci-fi novel set in another world.  I am thinking, for example, of the Darkover novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Bradley constructs a world on a distant planet named ‘Darkover’, with groups and factions that differ from what we have on earth today.  Yet Bradley’s novels nevertheless speak to us.  Murasaki is a better author; but my point is that reading Genji  today has a similar, off-worldly, feeling to it; like you are dropping onto a planet (a Star Trek first contact) that is filled with strange customs and has a completely different history.  Yet, in spite of that, they are still humanoids and not only is communication possible, but it is surprisingly enriching.

And I am a more experienced poet now than when I first tried to read Genji.  Murasaki was not only a great novelist and storyteller; she was also a great tanka poet.  The world of tanka poetry is a major theme in Genji.  Numerous tanka from the imperial waka/tanka collections, such as the Kokinwakashu, are quoted.  In addition Murasaki herself composed almost 800 tanka that are scattered like jewels throughout the novel.  This integration of story with poetry has left a lasting impression on Japanese literature.

The English language world is blessed with four excellent translations of Genji.  The earliest one is by Waley and is still admired by many.  I am currently reading the Seidensticker translation which I find lucid with just enough footnotes to assist the reader with customs and references.  There is also a translation by Royall Tyler; it is more recent.  And late last year Dennis Washburn published a brand new translation through Norton.  In addition, there is a translation of all the tanka poetry found in Genji by Edwin A. Cranston found in A Waka Anthology, Volume Two: Grasses of Remembrance.  I don’t know enough Japanese (in fact, I’ve forgotten almost all of it that I used to know) to judge the quality of each translation.  (And Genji  is written in Japanese that is 1,000 years old.  My understanding is that modern Japanese read Genji in translations into contemporary Japanese because the Japanese of Genji is too remote.)  Each translation has its advocates.  If you are inclined to read Genji my recommendation is to go online and read from the translations and find out which one resonates most with you and go for it.

This is the first post about Genji I plan on writing.  In subsequent posts I want to address what Genji offers us in terms of insights into human nature, and the place of Murasaki’s poetry in Genji, which, I believe, hasn’t been fully recognized by her English language translators.  I think this can tell us something about our own poetic culture at this time.

More to come.

Anonymous

Anonymous

In the first imperial collection of Japanese Tanka, known as the Kokinwakashu there are a large number that are anonymous; meaning that we do not know the author of the tanka.  Here are two examples:

220.

Now that autumn hues

tinge the bush clover’s low leaves,

will they not perhaps

find it hard to sleep at night –

those people who live alone?

798.

If your affections

were to scatter like blossoms,

would I alone grieve,

wailing as a warbler sings,

to see the end of our love?

(McCullough translation)

According to McCullough about 40% of the poems are anonymous (Brocade by Night, page 176). 

The oldest collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, (aka the Classic of Poetry, or The Book of Odes) is entirely anonymous.  This collection of poems is one of the Confucian classics and appears to consist, to a great extent, of folk songs and ritual poetry, all unattributed. 

It is more difficult to find anonymous poetry in collections of western verse.  Perhaps this reflects differences in cultural attitudes.  It is a fairly common observation that the west is more individualistic than the far east and the dearth of anonymous poetry in western collections may be a manifestation of that.

But in some of the more extensive anthologies readers do come across anonymous poetry.  In The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition there is an early section of “Anonymous Lyrics of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries”.  But this is a very small percentage of the anthology; nothing like the 40% of poems found in the Kokinshu or the 100% anonymous poetry in The Book of Songs.

I bring this up because I want to touch on an incident that happened in 2014 in American poetry that, I believe, tells us a lot about how we approach poetry today.  I tend to avoid remarking about the various squabbles among contemporary poets and poetry institutions unless they directly impact syllabic verse and its place in English language poetry.  First, it is inherently unpleasant and, second, it is almost always unproductive.  For these reasons I refrained from remarking on the incident at the time it took place.  But now that more than a year has passed and it is no longer a ‘current event’, I’d like to make a few remarks.

The incident occurred when the American poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, found that he could not get his poems published.  So Hudson adopted a pen name, Yi-Fen Chou.  The result was that poems that had been repeatedly rejected were now accepted for publication, including one poem that had been rejected 40 times and was now accepted by Best American Poems of 2014.  This anthology was edited by Sherman Alexie, who is Native American.  Alexie admitted that he gave the poem extra credit for its minority source.  To Alexie’s credit, when the truth came out that the poem was written by a white guy using a nom de plume, Alexie retained its place in the anthology.

There was a lot written about this incident, mostly focusing on the political and ideological aspects.  Conservatives considered it an example of SJW thinking run amok.  Progressives, in contrast, viewed the author as engaging in a strategy of oppressive deception.  But what I would like to focus on here is what it tells us about how we, today, tend to read poetry.

To shed light on how we read poetry today, I want to consider is how we read an anonymous poem.  When we do not know the author, how do we engage with a poem?  How do we find an anonymous poem meaningful? 

In a way this is not a difficult question.  If we think of a poem as an artifact then we can make an analogy to other artifacts that we use in our ordinary lives.  I don’t know who made the mug I am drinking coffee from, but that does not hinder me from using it, admiring it.  I do not know who developed the particular type of rose in my neighbor’s garden, but that does not create a barrier to my appreciation.

In a similar way, I can admire a poem without knowing anything about the author.  The poem can speak to me, inspire me, offer me insight even though I do not know anything specific about the author or the circumstances which caused the poem to be written.

Take poem 220, quoted above, from the Kokinshu.  The poem comments on loneliness and isolation and uses late autumn as a seasonal expression of loneliness.  This poem speaks to us because loneliness is a common human experience and resonates with the fall season in a way that makes sense to us even though we are living in a very different culture and centuries removed in time.

Similarly, poem 798 is about the fear of losing the affections of someone we love.  Again, this is a common human experience; one that almost anyone can relate to (the exceptions being those who have never been in love).  This poem might have been written by a woman, by a man, by someone young, or someone older, by an aristocrat, or by a peasant.  Those details do not really matter because the experience transcends the specific autobiography of the author.

The tendency today is to read poetry through ideological categories; but I think that is a mistake.  Such a tendency imposes on the poem the specific intellectual apparatus of a time and place.  For example, the Confucian Book of Songs was often interpreted by later Confucians through the lens of their own Neo-Confucian ideology.  The result was to take a simple poem, what was probably a folk song, and turn it into an elaborate allegory on duties to the State and Emperor.  This kind of ideological apparatus, to my mind, actually creates a barrier to understanding the poem; rather than allowing a poem to speak to us directly we force the poem into our own preconceptions.  Beginning in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries scholars divested themselves of this Neo-Confucian apparatus.  It took a lot of work.  But it was worth it.

Ideological analysis always, always, always, diminishes our capacity for understanding art.  And I think that is as true today as it was in the past among the Neo-Confucians.  In the 20^th century the ideologies that dominated were Fascism and Marxism.  In the 21^st century the dominant ideologies seem to be Progressivism and Radical Feminism.  Running at a distant third place is an ideological Traditionalism.

The interpretation of poetry through an ideological lens dominates most University English Departments in the anglosphere at this time.  This is a primary reason that I recommend that young people interested in poetry not major in English literature or pursue an MFA in poetry.  There are exceptions and if you have found a specific teacher, or even an English Department, which has not been completely taken over by an ideological agenda, then ignore my suggestion.  But for the most part I suspect that my observation is correct.  My feeling is that a young person’s love of poetry will be badly deformed at most Universities today.  I say this because I regularly read contemporary literary criticism and it is as marked by ideological bias as the Neo-Confucian interpretations of the Book of Songs.  This is obvious to those who do not share the ideological biases of the authors.

How do we break free from this tendency to read poetry ideologically?  I believe that a significant step in that direction is to read the poem as if it were an anonymous poem.  For example, when you read Stopping by Woods by Robert Frost, never mind that it was written by someone we know about.  Read the poem as if the author was unknown.  Assume you have no idea if the poet is male or female; white, black, or asian; rich or poor.  And then get a feeling for what the poem is saying.  In other words, bracket the authorial specifics.  This bracketing of the authors specifics opens up the universal message of the poem.

You see, my view is that what all of us share is more significant than the specifics of our biographies.  And what is it that all of us share simply by virtue of being human beings?  We all share mortality; we are impermanent.  This is a central fact of human existence and poets have been speaking about this, and how it impacts our lives, in a multitude of ways that help us come to terms with this truth. 

We all share the experience of parting with those who are our friends and those we love.  Again, poets have illuminated this experience in many ways that resonate with us across time and culture.

We all interact with other human beings in ways that are both helpful and stressful.  We all have obligations that we are expected to fulfill.  And we are all limited in our abilities which can give rise to frustrations of various kinds or appreciations for our own and others’ talents.

Because these aspects of our lives are universal it is possible for an anonymous poet to speak to us about them, and to illuminate their meaning, even though they may be of a different race, class, sex, gender, and speaking a different language.  This is what ideological approaches to poetry miss.  And to my mind what they miss is the heart of what poetry is about.