Editor's
Notebook:
Japanese
Haiku to American Cinquain
Debra Woolard Bender
Florida, US
CHALLENGE
So why
Discuss cinquain
With poets of haiku...
Or speak of any other poem
At all? [DWB]
Japanese haiku has had a considerable impact on the development
of poetry and other literature in the West and visa versa over the
past 100 years. As poets endeavoring to write haiku in non-Japanese
language, we would do well to examine and understand how the genre
continues to affect literature outside Japan—avoiding the
pitfall of becoming so ingrown, one-sided or cliquish as to exclude
the "offspring": hybrid styles, analogues, new forms and
ideas influenced by haiku. The World Haiku Club has set out, as
one of its core aims, to bridge the gap between haiku and non-haiku
poets and their poetry.
Many
of us know that the imagists of the early 20th century were profoundly
influenced by haiku. Doubtless, the impact of the imagists has also
subtly affected our own concepts of haiku as we understand and adapt
to them, whenever composing in the English language.
AMAZE
I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these
[Cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey
(1878-1914) and hereafter]
We may
know that Amy Lowell, along with others, was instrumental in bringing
America's attention to the Japanese haiku. But how many of us realize
that ten years before Ms Lowell and those more prominent imagists
had begun delving into Japanese poetics, another woman, a poet, had preceded
them, influenced by her own independent studies of haiku and waka,
metrics and poetics. While she has been stereotyped and considered
a minor poet, Adelaide Crapsey is yet recognized in importance
as being one of the earliest imagists. As such, this well-educated
teacher and poet was one of the first American poets to independently
experiment with Japanese poetry in the English language. A graduate
of Vassar, she taught at Kemper Hall from 1902-04, afterward spending
a year at the School of Classical Studies of the American Academy
in Rome. On her return to the US, she taught for two years at Miss
Lowe's School in Stamford, Connecticut.
THE GUARDED
WOUND
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
It was
this reclusive, studious young woman who developed a formulaic quintet
which she called by the French term, "cinquain" (hers
is now also referred to as "American Cinquain"), apparently
as an analogue-derivative of Japanese haiku and waka, modified to
fit the polysyllabic structure of English. The cinquain is not a
copy of haiku or waka—seeing that it may be an impossibility
to achieve such a feat, but it seems that it was her effort to create
a similar fixed-form based on her understanding of principals of
short, Japanese poems, while adapted to the metric structures of
English language. Actually, the scientific study of literature,
particularly metrics, was seemingly of greater interest to the poet
than the literary content of her poetry.
NIGHT WINDS
The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?
Between 1909-1911,
having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, Adelaide Crapsey left the United States
to live and study in Europe in an effort to regain health. At some point, perhaps
by 1909, she had read William N. Porter's translation of the anthology, Hyakunin
Isshu, A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, and From
the Eastern Sea by Yone Noguchi. She translated at least eleven waka and
eight haiku from Anthologie de la litt`erature japonaise des origines au XXe
si`ecle, edited by Marcel Revon. In 1911, she furthered her study of English
prosody at the British Museum, London. During this time she continued to develop
her theories, examining relationships between both natural and poetic accents
occurring in English verse. In her analysis, Ms Crapsey compared the percentage of
words employing one and two syllables with the percentage of polysyllabic words
in a selection of English poems. Thereby, she statistically classified poets including
Tennyson, Swinburne, Hewlett and Francis Thompson, drawing her tabulations from
examples of their poetry. Returning to the US from England that year, she taught
poetics at Smith College, but by 1913, her health made it necessary to enter a
sanatorium in New York.
NIAGRA
Seen on a Night in November
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.
As a
result of her studies, she originated her own poetic system: cinquain,
an unrhymed verse consisting of 22 syllables, distributed in five
short lines of unequal length as 2,
4, 6, 8, and 2. The metrical
structure is generally, but not always, iambic, with a pattern of:
one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress and one-stress.
Admiring the imagery and formal aesthetics of Japanese poetry, Ms
Crapsey adapted the haiku technique of superimposing, or juxtaposing,
images. The turn, or "twist", which may lead the reader
to heightened awareness, perception of truth or surprise, is usually
accomplished at the end of the poem's 4th line, leading to the 5th
as the "punch". A good cinquain can leave an aftertaste
to be savored, a sense of discovery and satisfaction for the reader like that
of haiku. Ms Crapsey's cinquain often contain personal reflection
which tend to complete those poems rather than leaving them open-ended,
more similar to waka or tanka. Some are crafted with a delicacy
and elegance like that of English waka translations. Others allude to classical
Greco-Roman mythology or reference literary works popular in that
era. The poet, in her cinquain, did not break completely from the
heavier use of poetic devices foreign to haiku, but common to her
culture and day; some of her poems employ poetic language which, to modern ears
may sound quaint. Ms Crapsey's seasonal cinquain tend to be of autumn and
winter, surely related to the implications of her deteriorating physical condition.
THE WARNING
Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk...as strange, as still.
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?
Ironically, like haiku master, Masoaka
Shiki (1867 -1902),
her contemporary in Japan, Adelaide Crapsey was faced with the
death knoll of tuberculosis. And just as Shiki wrote haiku and tanka
about his personal experience with ill-health,
the subjects of Adelaide's cinquain also often address her own weakened,
frail condition, often in a "sideways" manner: using
covert
metaphor. Sadly, her first acceptance for publication arrived just
the week before her death on October 8, 1914. She was 36.
Shiki
had died 12 years before, on September 9, 1902, just a few weeks
before his 35th birthday. The
diagnosis of his tuberculosis must have had been a factor toward
his determined focus to develop his poetic theories—most prominently
his haiku concept of "shasei" (sketching from life). In
turn, his resulting poetry, essays and teaching, highly influenced
by Western thought and literature, revived and modernized
haiku and tanka.
So, it appears that the prospect of a shortened life
had the exact same effect on Adelaide Crapsey toward her focus to
compose her ideas on poetic metric theories. The resulting development
of her cinquain form and poetic theories, so influenced by Japanese
thought and literature—worked quietly to profoundly influence
directions of American poetry. After her death, Ms Crapsey's
influence has made a difference to contemporary poets, including the
late Ann
Sexton, and continues infiltrate the present century, not
least those of us who write Japanese forms in English. Although they
could not have known of each other, the lives and poetic work of Masoaka Shiki
and Adelaide Crapsey almost seem to intersect in this odd way.
UNTITLED*
Why have
I thought the dew
Ephemeral when I
Shall rest so short a time, myself,
On earth?
Ms Crapsey's written works
display perceptiveness, concision and clarity with an ability to
distil information. It has been said that she destroyed
many of her poems written before 1911. The surviving few examples
of her cinquain had been composed between 1911 and 1914, some of
the best ones having been written during her last year. Ms Crapsey's
cinquain
series, along with her other works, were published posthumously
in her book titled, Verse
(Claude Bragdon, Manas Press, 1915). The poet's theoretical analysis,
A Study in English Metrics, although incomplete, was
subsequently published in 1918 as an 80 page volume.
TRIAD
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow...the hour
Before the dawn...the mouth of one
Just dead.
Carl
Sandburg paid tribute to her cinquain in his anthology, Cornhuskers
(1918), as did Louis
Utermeyer in Modern American Poetry (1919), bringing
the poet and her signature genre into public recognition and respect.
In fact, her book was so well-read, that in 1922, Alfred A. Knopf
reprinted Verse in 1926, 1929, 1934 and 1938, the latter
with even more of her unpublished works. While the Imagist Movement
died out, Adelaide Crapsey's cinquain form lives on, being
written and enjoyed by the poets and readers beyond America. While studying and enjoying
the Japanese genre, haiku, let us appreciate
its contributions to World poetry developments and movements
beyond itself. There may even be something we could learn from the
studies and theories of this early 20th-century woman, poet and
thinker in relationship
to our own concepts of haiku and tanka!
SAYING Of IL HABOUL
Guardian of the Treasure of Solomon
And Keeper of the Prophet's Armour
My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.
Read
more about cinquain in Part One: Lost in Translation by John E. Carley
Read
Editor's Choice: Short Verses- Cinquain
WHCshortverses
Cinquain Workshop 2002: Lesson 1, Denis Garrison
WHCshortverses
Cinquain Selections
to:
Amaze, the Cinquain Journal
Resources:
Aha!
Poetry: About Cinquain,
Jane Reichhold
State
University of New York Press: The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of
Adelaide Crapsey, Susan Sutton Smith, editor
The
Poems of Adelaide Crapsey, Karen Alkalay-Gut
*Uncollected
Poems: first published in the edition made by Susan Sutton Smith in (Albany:
SUNY, 1978)
Discovering
Adelaide Crapsey: Confessions of a Convert, Karen Alkalay-Gut
Amaze,
the Cinquain Journal
Women
in American History: Adelaide Crapsey, Encyclopaedia Brittanica
Bartleby.com, Carl
Sandburg, Cornhuskers, 1918:
Adelaide Crapsey
Bartleby.com Louis
Untermeyer, ed., Modern American Poetry. 1919: Adelaide Crapsey
American
Verse Project: Adelaide Crapsey
American
Poetry and Japanese Culture, Sanehide Kodama; Hamden, Connecticut, Archon
Books, 1984
[rev. 3-23-01,
3-10-05]
