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Twisty Chunks was the first solo (or dokugin) renku I attempted to write. By the
late 1980s I collaborated on haikai no renga with several
fellow writers and studied its form, mainly through Dr. Earl Miner’s
works and various translations of Japanese renku. When I began the
solo project I knew that Japanese renku relied on remarkably complex
rules. In English my friends and I had worked out a simple version of
renku that employed several rules, such as moon and flower stanzas and
its three-part structure. But I had to learn how difficult it would
be to maintain the essential nature of the renku in a solo renku, what
Miner termed disjunction; no three stanzas may be read together
without some disruption or change of season, character, subject, mood,
etc. As Hiroaki Sato wrote, “Two consecutive stanzas must make sense,
but three may not.” (Japanese Woman Poets 529)
Serial
disjunction as an organizing principle may be found in another
discipline, screenplay writing. Usually for constructing a single
scene, one is told: start as close to the end as possible and always
write a new beat in each scene for some character(s) or object(s).
The relentless forward movement of film, and its myriad rich technical
transitions (for instance, cuts; jumpcut, matchcut, smashcut, etc.),
also mandates the dramatic need to introduce continually some new
emotion, fact, perspective, image and so forth.
As an
intensely visual artist, I consequently thought of renku as a home
movie, because of its immersion in daily life. Japanese renku
started as “a parlor game for multiple participants” (Sato 529) and
for me that emphasized its communal aspect, as if a film production
company in your midst were constructing a movie from the shared
glimpses of day-to-day experiences.
When I
examined a famous renku by Basho and friends, such as “At A Tub of
Ashes”, I recognized that some of each stanza’s principles and/or
transitions could be described with screenplay stage direction
vocabulary. Two screenplay terms I will use that might not be
familiar are these: uninflected images are what anyone might
see/experience, as opposed to an inflected image, where a certain
person or group sees/experiences this. These are Odagiri and Miner’s
translations from The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat (270-271)
Stanza 1:
Opens with a tracking shot up from tub up to a vista as one sound
effect fades away and another starts. Outside. Day. Uninflected
image.
At the tub
of ashes
dripping
sounds yield to stillness
as
crickets chirp
2.
A tracking shot from tub
into a sleeping chamber subsides into crickets chirping outside the
window as a voice-over tells us about a sleeper there. Movement from
outside to inside with overheard narrator. From day to evening. An
inflected image occurs when the narrator looking at the room remarks
on the sleeper’s habits.
At the tub
of ashes
dripping
sounds yield to stillness
as crickets chirp
in his
lamp the oil grows low
and autumn
brings him early sleep
3.
The voice-over now is
heard over a medium shot of the sleeper, his chamber and window with
the moon in it, a very composed scene. Movement from inside to
outside the room. Evening to night. Shifts from an inflected image
to an uninflected image: no narrator because anyone would notice that
new matting has been put down.
in his
lamp the oil grows low
and autumn
brings him early sleep
the floor matting
freshly
laid out in the chamber
shines in the moonlight
The
brevity of each frame/stanza/line matches its cinematic parallel to
frames of a film. That same simplicity and brevity also connects to
the renku’s many styles and principles of construction and
transitions. Over the years such film principles became a helpful aid
for my testing and revision of stanzas.
Alas, I
also discovered that a solo renku rapidly drives its writer right up
against any limitations of one’s perceptual and linguistic habits.
Having
partners makes writing a renku easier.
Through
renku writing in general my awareness grew about how my ways of
speech, perception and construction were restrictive and habitual.
For a solo renku my variations in scene conception came up short again
and again and again, as my stanzas’ movements of perception were cast
in similar molds over and over.
As a fiction writer I
thought the renku was marvelous, really great practice for sharpening
the art of transitions and transitional thinking, even while at the
same time I repeatedly despaired over at my own self-inflicted
limitations. Time after time I created a new stanza with high elation
only to see later that this stanza really duplicated a previous stanza
via some shared essential element, grammar or visual logic.
Consequently Twisty Chunkstook over two
and a half years to write its thirty-six stanzas. Truly, as the old
saw says, I abandoned this poem rather than finished it. And even now
passages give rise to mild resignation, seeing their inadequacies in
construction, perception and art.
As a
document for a long passage of my time in California, Twisty Chunks
still charms me, though the associations and information are largely
so personal and so time limited that they resist my commentary.
Nostalgia and deep pleasure returns as I recall some of the seminal
moments for particular images. Here’s one example.
large piece of
driftwood
on a fence
post grows eyes,
a red throat, flies away
This
moment occurred on Point Reyes peninsula during one of its remarkable
drifting misty ocean fogs at August’s end. A split second of driving
around a coastal curve bordered by fence posts, barbed wire and green
pastures rolling away from the road contained these two events: that
instantaneous perceptual shift from Oh, this to No, that:
first a driftwood shape, then a turkey buzzard taking flight. This
nanosecond of complex perceptions seems to me a quintessential
haikai no renga moment.
So many
more stanzas arouse thirty years of Californian memories and
pleasurable emotions long-lived but no longer available for my
commentary in the usual way that my renku writing friends and I now
employ.
So,
recently when I tried to write a commentary for Twisty Chunks’
individual stanzas, I failed. For particular passages the starting
points for relationships between the incidents (such as autumn
firewood cutting or summer haze/smog) seem fugitive when I consider an
audience’s responses. I know that these incidents are seasonal
but perhaps most readers cannot, because they don’t live in that part
of California. One must write such commentary while the brainpan
griddle is hot.
Let any
new readers find or form their own running commentary as they read it.
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