Hello, welcome
to the Renku Column of Simply Haiku. Canada, Croatia,
England, Ireland, Japan ... poets from these countries are represented
in this edition's selection.
If you want
to learn more about renku please check out the fully searchable
Archives
- you can enter 'Junicho' for instance and come up with technical
info as well as high quality examples. lf you would like to add
some of your own work to this growing corpus of reference the
Contents page will link
you into our renku guides. Submissions
gives the general background.
For this
edition the featured poems are short, but not necessarily
sweet. We present
three 12 verse sequences, two Junicho, Covered
by the Wind (in English and Croatian)
and This
Flaming June,
and one Shisan, White
Clover (in English and Japanese).
There is a deal of confusion about the difference between
these
styles;
a search of the Archives should
go a long way to clearing this up. To facilitate a technical
analysis two of the poems
are
annotated to show their seasonal substructure and my own piece, This
Flaming June,
highlights the appearance of a four verse 'love' sequence comprising
the traditional 'call-for-love' and
'end-of-love' positions—verses which indirectly invite,
and reflect upon, the more overtly thematic material.
There is
only one 'rule' in renku—an adherence to that creative dynamic
commonly
called 'link and shift.' Everything else is optional, pragmatic,
and incremental. The seasonal and topical substructures that
characterise
most contemporary renku are variations of earlier approaches
which were themselves adapted from the historic literature.
The best
renku juxtaposes tradition and experimentation. Read some. Write
some.
John Carley.
Rossendale, August 2005
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