The Sense That Time Is Passing

Stars
No moon
Ancient light
I am older
A stream surrounds a moss-covered boulder

Poetry and Song 3

Poetry and Song 3

Here is a hokku by Basho:

fūryū no hajime ya oku no taueuta

roots of elegance
on this trip to the far north
rice-planting song

Translated by Jane Reichhold, Basho: The Complete Haiku, page 136, Kodansha International, 2008

beginnings of poetry –
the rice planting songs
of the interior

Translated by Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams, page 125, Stanford University Press, 1988

the beginning of all art –
in the deep north
a rice-planting song

Translated by David Barnhill, Basho’s Haiku, page 91, State University of New York Press, 2004

This hokku is from Basho’s famous journal, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Oku no Hosomichi). Basho had just passed the Shirakawa barrier and met up with some friends. Basho produced this hokku on the occasion of their meeting. Basho’s friends were all poets and this hokku was used as the opening verse of a Renga they composed on the spot; one of three they would compose together that evening.

It is unusual for an opening verse for a Renga because it expresses Basho’s view of where poetry, or art, comes from; the root that nourishes poetry. Normally an opening verse for a Renga expresses season and place; but expression of opinion, or displays of emotion, are rare and some would consider them inappropriate for an opening verse (they could appear in the middle section of a Renga). In a personal conversation I had with Jane Reichhold she agreed that this was unusual for an opening verse, a hokku, but her take on this is that all of the people with Basho in this situation were students of Basho, so Basho used the occasion to impart some basic insight into the nature of poetry and art.

In my imagination I think of Basho, with his trusty traveling companion Sora, hiking into the wilderness of the far north of Japan, crossing the Shirakawa barrier, and there in the field were women planting rice and singing a traditional rice-planting song. This, I think, is a kind of “aha” moment. The rice-planting song is poetry, but it is poetry that is spontaneous and natural song. It is not deliberately cultivated poetry. It simply emerges from the rhythmic activity, the planting of rice, and the culture. It is a natural part of being a human being.

One of the reasons I like Reichhold’s translation is that it emphasizes the idea that this kind of song is the root of poetry not just in the historical sense, but also in the sense of a root continuously nourishing a plant. Poetry is what we see above ground, but the natural expression of song is the root upon which poetry depends.

One of the points I think Basho was trying to make for his students is to not get too far away from this root, to remember that poetry is dependent upon song. The context is one of Renga, or linked verse, which as it developed in Japan became a highly complex, rule-bound poetic form. In such a situation it would be easy for a poet to forget the root. The root, the beginning, the origin of even the most complex and refined types of poetry remains in the simple, natural songs spontaneously given voice to by ordinary, uneducated, people. This is the voice of humanity.

Basho’s hokku is rich in meaning and each time I look at it I discover new reverberations. I think it was Basho’s ability to remain grounded in this nourishing source which kept his poetry alive, fresh, and natural. And I believe that it is still true today that song is the nourishing root which gives life to poetry.

After the Concert

After the concert
The full moon in the clear sky
And the autumn wind

Though it is late in the night
The musicians are hungry

Crowds are gathering
For the restaurant opening
And the five-star chef

All alone in the alley
Asleep in the packing crate

The shelter is full
Ice grips the streets and sidewalks
She buys a new scarf

Harsh static from the cellphone
Leaves a question in the heart

Patiently he says,
"I have told you many times
How much I love you."

A dozen wine red roses
In an antique crystal vase

The lengthening days
Bring the first warm afternoon
After months of cold

"Why don't you go out and play?"
(mom wants some time by herself)

In the summer heat
Dodgeball in the public park
And the radio

"I think they grow up too fast,"
Says the soldier with one leg

The Wheel Turns

New moon,
A cloudless sky,
Vast fields of endless stars,
A once rich homeless man looks up
And sighs.

Poetry and Song 2

During the Tang Dynasty in China, (618 to 907 C.E.) Chinese poetry reached unprecedented heights of beauty and expression. During this period their emerged two short forms of verse. Both of them were Quatrains (four line poems), or Jueju. One consisted of five characters per line, wujue, for a total of twenty characters; and since the characters in Chinese are one syllable long, twenty characters also means twenty syllables. The other Quatrain form consisted of seven characters/syllables per line, qijue, for a total of twenty-eight characters/syllables. (For the sake of simplicity I will refer to the “wujue” form as the “Five-Four” form and the “qijue” form as the “Seven-Four” form.) These taught, concise, structures became the vehicles for some of the most famous poems in Chinese history. Such poetic luminaries as Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, along with many others, poured their considerable talents into these highly restricted forms.

Chinese poetry in general is rooted in song. The oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, put together by Confucius, is often title the “Book of Songs” or “Book of Odes”. That is because in many cases what we are reading are song lyrics; some of them from folk sources, others from more aristocratic origins.

The Tang Dynasty continued that association. I don’t mean to say that Chinese poets were writing songs in the Tang Dynasty; rather I am suggesting that the pulse of song, and I suspect specific melodies, underlay, or permeated, the poetic landscape so that the connection between poetry and song was never really broken. The two categories, “poetry” and “song”, remained porous to each other.

In the book How to Read Chinese Poetry, by Zong-Qi Cai, there is confirmation of this in the following quote:

“The rhythm of the heptasyllabic (seven-syllable) line . . . differs from that of the petnasyllabic (five-syllable) line, which has implications for how poets approached it. When pentasyllabic poetry is chanted, it rather naturally falls into eight beats per line:

tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest, rest, rest);
tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest, rest, rest).

The length of the silent rests gives the overall rhythm a slow and stately quality, which implicitly suggests that the content is weighty and important. When heptasyllabic poetry is chanted, it also naturally falls into eight beats per line:

tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest);
tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest),

. . . [T]he single beat of rest at the end of the heptasyllable gives the impression that each line rushes into the next. Thus heptasyllabic poetry has a distinctive flow, continuity, and lightness. The best poets of qijue (quatrains consisting of seven syllable lines) carefully crafted the sound quality of the syllable combinations, employing alliterations, internal rhymes, and reduplication more frequently than in the pentasyllabic line.”

(How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, by Zong-Qi Cai, page 223, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008)

The author implies rests at the end of the poetic lines, but it is also possible that the last syllable of each line was held, lengthened, to fill in the eight beats. In this case the last syllable of the seven syllable line would be held for two beats, while the last syllable of the five syllable line would be held for four beats. This would replicate what was described in Part 1 of this series on Poetry and Song; that is to say the way that the rhythm of five syllable and seven syllable lines are handled is the same for Chinese Quatrains and for Japanese Tanka.

The convergence between the two cultures in the handling of the rhythm for the two types of lines even extends to the meaning given to these two. Takashi Kojima refers to the seven syllable line of a Tanka as “breezy”, while Cai refers to the seven syllable line as having “lightness” as compared to the five syllable line.

This can’t be coincidence; Chinese poetry had a huge influence on Japanese poetry. I wish I knew more about the specifics of the historical interaction of these two poetic cultures, but these hints are sufficient to suggest a connection. The differences are also striking. Japanese Tanka uses both five and seven syllables lines in its Tanka. Chinese Quatrains use either five syllable lines or seven syllable lines, but not both. Thus the Chinese Quatrains have four lines of repeated rhythm, while the Japanese Tanka has alternating rhythm, concluding with two seven line rhythmic units. Try chanting out these rhythms yourself, just to get a feel for how they differ.

Immortality

Take enough Vitamin C, they tell me,
And you can end up living forever.
However, leaving aside forever,
You can, they say, live a very long time.

Taoist immortals ate cinnabar,
Many searched for the fountain of youth,
Many prayers to heaven beg for more years,
Such endeavors bring only dust and tears.

Where the soaring rocky mountains now stand,
Grand ocean waves once shifted shore side sand.
Where desert heat now endlessly shimmers,
Once a green fern forest quivered with life.

The mayfly lives but a single season,
Can you tell me the seasons of a star?

A Canine View

Beagles
Bark a lot
Not for good reasons
They do not give it much thought
When people object they bark, "Why the hell not!?"