Editorial: 15 August 2010

August 12, 2010 In March of this year, five writers, including 2010 Poetry International Festival poet Hiromi Itō, PIW poet Wakako Kaku and PIW editor Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, gathered in the southern Japanese town of Kumamoto for three days of writing Japanese linked verse, or renshi. They were joined by Jeffrey Angles, who translated the results of their collaboration into English, and who, for this issue of PIW, has also written a wonderful introduction both to the practice of renshi and to the creation of this particular renshi, ‘Connecting through the Voice’.

Angles observes that, particularly in the West, “poetry has been a field that has been especially prone to the romantic cult of individuality, no doubt in large part due to the ideal that the poet represents a sort of ‘seer’”. Despite postmodern notions of the author as simply one part of a complex network of cultural and linguistic forces that form a text, the common conception of a poet as a visionary, somehow distinct from the impulses and thought patterns of mainstream society, persists today. As a result, collaborative poetry receives less appreciation and attention than it ought, especially given its important role in the development of literatures around the world.

Let’s celebrate renshi (‘linked poetry’), then, which is derived from the medieval Japanese poetic form of renga (‘linked songs’). Jeffrey Angles likens renshi to a jazz improvisation with multiple players and instruments taking turns to step up into the limelight to play, riffing on themes introduced by the previous player. Each part of the renshi is attributable to one particular poet, so there is room for individual expression and style within the overall collaboration. Unlike jazz, however, in a renshi there is no return to a familiar, predetermined ‘key’ or ‘melody’. Nevertheless, images and themes resound with each other throughout the poem, as is evident in ‘Connecting through the Voice’, in which one poet’s invocation of flowing lava gives rise to another’s image of menstrual blood, which in turn chimes with later images of the womb, planted seeds and children. Eschewing ‘plot’ or a straightforward thought-process, the poem entices the reader to discover and follow the associative leaps between the thirty sections.

Also in this issue the Belgium domain of PIW presents poet, journalist and dramatist Bernard Dewulf. On first read, Dewulf’s poems seem stylistically understated, his diction simple, stripped down. Yet his frequent syntactic play unsettles a cool veneer – in his fractured sentences, repetitions, questions disguised as declaratives, there is a depth of perception and urgency of thought. The extracts from ‘The Litany of Marthe Bonnard’ are particularly compelling reimaginings of the painter Bonnard’s wife as she poses for him in the bath, observing both herself and her husband observing her:

See him sit, sky-high above me,

a pencil like an ice pick close at hand,
already waiting at my surface
for that one thin moment. More on PIW

If you enjoy the renshi, you may also want to listen to a 2010 Poetry International Festival recording of Hiromi Itō in conversation with Yasuhiro Yotsumoto.
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We've also recently added a recording of a festival talk  about Afghan art, with Afghan poet Kamran Mir Hazar and PIW editor Sam Vaseghi.
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And if you missed our last issue, you can access it, along with all back issues of PIW {link shortcut="int_editorial_list" title="here"}.