Shamrock Haiku Journal

Vera Markova (1907 - 1995), Russian poet and academic, was renowned for her translations from classical Japanese poetry. She began translating Japanese tanka and haiku at the end of the 1960s, and less than ten years later published her translations from thirty poets, from Saigyô to Bashô to Kobayashi Issa, in the anthology Classical Japanese Poetry, which has since been regularly reprinted in Russia. A very interesting poet in her own right (and a life-long friend of the famous Marina Tsvetayeva), Vera Markova was a fluent Japanese speaker and travelled to Japan twice, on one occasion to receive from Emperor Hirohito an honorary medal commemorating her efforts in promoting Japanese culture abroad.

In her essay entitled ‘Hokku’, published in the afore-mentioned anthology, Prof. Markova analysed Bashô’s work, and in the following years used some of the topics highlighted in that essay in her lectures to university students. She taught them to appreciate Japanese tanka and haiku, but also tried to stir up their creativity.

Later, Prof. Markova wrote a short text offering a few suggestions for aspiring haiku writers. She added a few of her favourite quotations from Bashô, and at a later stage even included the opinion I gave while discussing the ‘Hokku’ essay with her, making me the third partner in that imaginary conversation, which was most flattering. She arranged parts of the text, belonging to its three authors, in a manner resembling that of the old Japanese masters of renga, linked verse. Her students used to call the text ‘Vera Markova’s ten haiku lessons’.

These ‘Haiku Lessons’ are reprinted here. I should mention that, as some readers may already have guessed, Vera Markova was the person who once introduced me to haiku, and so started me on an exciting and unpredictable journey…

1. Allow your reader to think his way into your haiku. A revelation occurs when your and his thoughts meet at a halfway point. (VM)
2. Watch the River Sunagawa flow: it is not trying to be deep. (MB)
3. Bashô enjoyed reading and re-reading classical Chinese poetry, especially Tu Fu. There’s still plenty of water left in that well. (VM)
4. Don’t follow good dead poets but search for what they searched for. (MB)
5. The underlying theme of Bashô’s work is compassion. He avoided grotesque and mockery, and rightly so. (VM)
6. Colour is important in haiku writing, however a ‘monochrome’ haiku can sometimes have even a stronger effect on the reader. (AK)
7. Don’t try to be witty every time you write haiku: numerous ‘comic’ haikai-renga, written over the course of several centuries, are remembered merely because Shiki used the ‘hai’ syllable for the word ‘haiku’ that he invented. And bear in mind that ‘hai’ means ‘joke’ but also ‘surprise, an unusual thing’. (VM)
8. Hokku can’t be assembled from component parts. Poet’s work is similar to that of a goldsmith. (MB)
9. Bashô became the great poet Bashô only when his hokku reached the state of karumi (a Japanese word meaning ‘lightness, simple beauty’.) (VM)
10. Haiku are always set in the present moment. Nevertheless, listen out for history breathing behind our contemporaries’ backs. (VM)

AK – Anatoly Kudryavitsky

(First published in Poetry Ireland Newsletter, November / December 2006)

Trees

by Asya Shneiderman (St. Petersburg, Russia)

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cold slams the air

clearing the bird-table

a sparrow-hawk

sitting with you...

burning through till dawn

the corridor light

deep in the wood

leaning against a pine tree

afternoon sun

insomnia –

through the door in my head

another door

-- Caroline Gourlay (England)

a new year . . .

watching hare inch

out of her warren

steadfast, the

horse, grazing in

her shadow

staring wistfully

at the moon . . .

year of the dog

-- Robert D Wilson (USA/Philippines)

sick in bed

my cast-off clothes

moonlit

setting sun

a tractor's sound turns into

cricket songs

dense snowfall

the black cat disappears

behind the sofa

-- Dietmar Tauchner (Austria)

mosquitoes and young couples in love in another language

autumn illness the white noise of crickets

waking in a strange place to a voice not my own

after a night of drinking all the way home downhill

a wet-black boulder blue december sky

-- Jim Kacian (USA)

poor singing voices

nevertheless

they have built a nest

a small kitchen

the toaster

warms one corner

Impressionism

ladies with parasols

walk to the next painting

-- John Stevenson (USA)

a tiny brown frog

leaps from the spring pool

back into camouflage

Holy City market

hawkers ignore

the call to prayer

news of a birth

now news of a death…

waning harvest moon

-- Maeve O’Sullivan (Ireland)

the Japanese character:

New Year cards –

good wishes 

threaded on a string 

winding road – 

the moon gallivants 

from left to right

dusk – 

the moon slowly meets 

the streetlights 

-- Katherine Gallagher (Australia/England)

Old Curiosity Shop –

laquered dolls

out in the mid-day sun

art café –

the security guy hums

a James Bond theme

beachcombing...

a periwinkle rotates

deeper into itself

-- Alan Summers (England)

---------------------------<->----------------------------

A Crow’s Time

by Alan Summers

the sun is high    skinny lizards freeze in their own tableau

just the angry buzzing grind of cicadas

coarse grass curls

round my walking shoes

an ant enters my bag

I move through parched grass and fallen ringbarked gumtree

to a plain of rocks with high bramble to face a narrow path past caves

once home to something very ancient

fading last note

the torresian crow’s sound

a darkening sky

now    under a black sky    stars more bright than I've seen before

that shift   move   vibrate    to suggest something more

it’s my last sighting of Jupiter    above Venus

susurrus of moths

round fire that flickers on

like the night

it's brittle cutting cold    the moon's no longer full

this brutal simplicity of a night    a crow’s shade of feather

it spirals towards

the southern cross

my woodsmoke embers

quiet and dark    then a rustle reminds me of the Dreamtime Dingo

white and feral    imagination lends fear to a night that leers at me

it’s a long time before I see a lightening    but then

a quickening between two trees that’s a hurt violet    the morning

rekindling the fire

past pale blue trees

a red sunrise