The Difference Between
Things
A selection of one
short verse
Debi Bender, Editor
Quite a number of well-crafted, inspiring short
verses were submitted to, and published in this issue. As editor for the
WHCshortverses column, I've not set a limit as to how many poems to select
within any particular genre in a given issue. In this way, there can be a
variety of style, hopefully with an excellence represented in different voices
from novice to seasoned and in-between, which is one of the aspects of the World
Haiku Club. There were more tanka
submissions at this time than any previous issue. In the shortverses column,
readers will find tanka in different styles -- more than several portray a
spirit of wistfulness and longing, reminiscent of Japanese waka; others, more
contemporary and even vanguard in subject theme and style. These differences in
style carry over into the linked verses (symbiotic and solo) and cinquain
selections, including a war-themed cinquain
series from lisa janice cohen. Among other very fine poetry in the column's
pages is an exciting new form called an "International
Bilingua" by an'ya and Jasminka; a "zip
sequence" by hortensia anderson and Marjorie Buettner; "linked
zips" by semi and a seaside haiku
series by lynne steel. Richard Stevenson, inspired by the first dragon boat
race held in Alberta, Canada, in which he participated, wrote a tanka series
called "Riding the
Dragon," along with a delightful recount of his experience.
Being very much an internet poet, most of my
own writing in Asian forms, analogues and Asian-inspired verse has developed
while participating with others on mailing list poetry fora. And one of the WHC
poets I've had the pleasure of reading, working with, and watching the evolution
of, is Cindy Tebo. Cindy is a poet and musician who lives in a small, rural town
in the mid-American heartland. Even the town has a name with a musically poetic
flavor: Catawissa, Missouri. Cindy's poetry often has a dry, sardonic sense of
humor which I tend to associate with Kansas and Missouri folk, especially
farmland natives, having once lived in Kansas for about six years, myself. Yet,
Cindy is a world-person who works for a large airlines company. She has
developed a personal style which lends itself well to senryu, as well as to the
symbiotic and solo linked poems in which she frequently engages. An independent
spirit, a rebel, Cindy experiments freely; many of her poems are full of irony,
tongue-in-cheek mockery, wry wit and incisive perception into the human
condition. She is diverse and prolific, able to write along the confines of more
traditional expectations -- or "out-of-the box" -- as well as in
different genres.
Many Western poets writing in Asian forms enjoy
writing solo or symbiotic (participatory) chains of haiku or other short verse
such as tanka, sijo and cinquain. These are called "series" when
written on a particular theme or event, and called "sequences" when
arranged chronologically, as narrative arrangements, or when defined by some
other sequential factor. They may enjoy writing interpretive or responsive poems
to photographs and artwork, similar to the process of haiga, as evidenced in
interactive member projects networked with WHC, such as Mitty Abe's Interactive
Photo-Haiku sites and kukai, Kevin Ryan's Charnwood Arts Haiku
webWORKS and Kukai,
Paul Conneally's WHC-Bristol-Poetry
Can Parade of Life Kukai, Ray Rasmussen's RaysWeb
Haiku-Spring and other of his sites, and many such independent projects.
My selection for the July 2002 Editor's Choice
is Cindy's tanka series, which she has written in response to a series of
paintings by the master-artist, Henri
Matisse (1869 - 1954). Whether Cindy viewed the paintings at a museum
gallery, in a book or on the Internet, I don't know, nor does it matter. One's
source of inspiration can be the world of nature outside our door, the
experiences of the here and now, those stored in memory, and memories charged
and changed in dreams. The muse might take the shape of the world perceived
through someone else's' senses: their painting, photography, sculpture, music,
theories, poems, essay, story...we need not limit ourselves unless there is some
personal aim for which reason we elect to narrow our focus. In haiku, renku and
tanka, while there are precedents in theory, guideline and technique, there are
also creative freedoms which allow growth of both form and poet, sometimes
within the tradition, and sometimes which lead to new artistic territories
beyond.
Henri Matisse is one of my most favorite
artists of all time, not only as a colorist and drawer, but as a simplifier. He
is able to deftly reduce color, line and form, thereby distilling his imagery to
a primitive power evoking emotions and sensory response in the viewer. In
February 2001, I indulged myself and purchased a "coffee-table book"
by Gilles Néret, simply titled, Matisse, a biography with colorful
art-images and photos on each page. When, this month, I selected Cindy's poem
for merit and comment, I pulled the book from the shelf, turning to the first
page of text. It begins with the words,
While Matisse was studying under the painter
Gustave Moreau, the latter surveyed Matisse's work and commented, both
admiringly and prophetically, 'You will simplify painting.' Then, after a
moment's reflection, he added, ' But you won't simplify Nature to that extent,
to reduce it to that. If you did, painting would no longer exist...,' and
finally: 'Don't listen to me. What you are doing is more important than anything
I am telling you. I am a mere teacher. I understand nothing.'
Néret goes on to say that few painters have
been as misunderstood and treated unjustly as Matisse, beginning with his
Fauvist works. Matisse's art does not fit neatly into any box of classification,
while he was able to express himself diversely in, and move freely from, one
style to another. His work was the brunt of much criticism. I'll venture to say
that similarly, when a poet who practices in the academy of traditional forms
(particularly in genres which originate in cultures foreign to one's own)
experiments and adapts and applies those forms in new or different ways than
expected, s/he will probably not win a popularity contest amongst most peers.
Cindy is one of those writers, for me, whose
poetry often seems to rise up and stand out from the crowd. She doesn't
generally write "like everyone else." This selected series of poems,
while not one of the poet's more radical departures from "traditional"
form or content such as her "my
town, your town, usa," haiku series, (also published in the short
verses column), it is nevertheless "different" in that the tanka
inspired from another visionary's artwork are also written as a responsive
series. Perhaps these certain poems are not that unusual, for in a sense,
the allusion to masterpieces is similar to allusion to literature or visual arts
in classical Japanese waka, modern tanka (and haiku). The elegant waka, grounded
in nature, savored beauty. Matisse also savored nature and beauty, choosing to
commit himself "to the transcription of the beauty of the world and the joy
of painting."
Interestingly, Cindy seems to include her
musical interests, either purposefully or unconsciously, through the selections
of paintings represented in the series. Here, she works lyrically within a
five-line, non-syllabic English-language structure of tanka, classically
juxtaposing the "landscape of [painted] environmental Nature and
event" with the "inner human landscape" of emotion and thought.
She weaves Matisse's perceptions of beauty with her own. Cindy makes use of a
tanka technique, the "pivot" verse", characteristic of the
Japanese form. In English, this translates to the third verse of the poem acting
as a hinge to the upper and lower pairs tying them together through meaning
and/or imagery -- in essence, one could read the lines one, two and three as one
poem, and then again, lines three, four and five as another poem, yet all
segments are interdependent as one tanka. Often, in tanka, the top segment is an
observation of nature, and the last two lines, the author's emotion and/or
thoughts which, as in the related renga/renku and tan-renga, link to the first
segment, but shift away by means of setting, scene, imagery, thought. I believe
I've discovered which paintings Cindy is writing of, and if so, I also discover
that she links to the image, then as she shifts to her own thoughts and
interpretations, she creates a completely new dimension out of it through the
association of her words, and in some cases, shifts the emotional tone to a
different one than the painting evokes -- as might skillful renku stanzas.
I'd like to comment on each tanka in the series
with a kansho, but I will select only one. I hope that readers might examine the
other five by "kansho" (appreciation) to look more deeply into the
poems' structures and the feelings or memories that they evoke. For me, Cindy's
last poem employs the personal pronoun, "you," in an unusual way, as
to make the sense of the phrase ambiguous: is the poet directly addressing the
flowers or does she refer to a woman's face appearing over, through or near the
short-stemmed bouquet? Might there actually no human model painted on the
canvas, but rather could "you" be a reference to the sensuous,
passionate and non-conformist Fauvist (the applied term means "wild
beast") period paintings of Matisse? Are the wildflowers with stems
"cut short to make you fit" a hidden metaphor for the free-flowing
artistic or poetic spirit which must be "cut to fit" a bit of a
canvas, a musical movement or such a short poetry form as tanka -- the artist
and/or poet even "stealing" Nature from it's life-source, to transpose
it to the medium -- making Nature fit the purposes and whims [pitcher] of
humanity? Is it a metaphor for Matisse, himself versus the neatly defined
"surgical cut" of academic art? Is it metaphor for the poet, herself?
Or is she simply making an observation on the subject of a painting? Using the
pronoun "you" as a direct address, while leaving the identity of the
subject ambiguous, might bother some, particularly if it anthropomorphically
speaks to the wildflowers in the manner of the haiku master, Kobayashi Issa.
While such vagueness might not work in a lesser tanka, in this particular
instance, because of the questions it poses in relationship to the artist, the
poet and the series as a whole, I think it is a bit of tightrope-walking
courage, akin to the skillfully controlled "wild spirit" of Matisse's
paintings.
Cindy's series includes a byline quote from the
artist:
I
don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
(Henri Mattise)
Haiku, tanka and other
Japanese arts are simplifiers of art, mastering "what is unsaid", the
implied or suggested, the space between things...the difference between things.
It is the difference that enables us to recognize the similar. Cindy doesn't
tell us to which paintings she is responding; rather, we are given intriguing
clues to a mystery -- which we might like to try to solve
for ourselves by noticing the differences. (To respond to Cindy's
"challenge," click "solve"
to have a look at a few of Matisse's famous paintings). I'd bet there might
be some visual word-play between art and poem going on, if one finds the
paintings! Although written responsively to artwork, every one of her tanka can
stand alone, apart from the others, as well as independent of the paintings. The
imagery is strong and emotion is present or strengthened by "that
unspoken" within each poem. Here are her flowers too, for those who wish to
see them.
After chancing a guess as to which paintings
each poem inspired, you might enjoy reading Susumu Takiguchi's "Editor's
Choice" selection for haiku, and then try to discover which paintings
he had in mind when comparing his haiku selection's pictorial quality to the
visual imagery and emotional tone of some paintings by three other modern
masters, one of whom, recognizing the
artist's particular genius, considered Matisse his greatest rival.
| Cindy
Tebo: "Tanka series from a series of paintings by Henri Matisse
" |
"I don't paint things. I only paint the
difference between things."
~ Henri Matisse
a certain bareness
in autumn fields
but in the dry rustling
of what remains
there is music
splotches of people
passing on a bridge
this morning's blur
I never knew smoke
could be so blue
with starched white collar
and choker necklace
the piano teacher
plays each note precisely
like a surgeon
in the polish
of your eyes
another night
what fire there is
burns inside you
a sensuous garden
with all the lushness
of life's green
I would love to compose
just once such a thing
stems cut short
to make you fit
in a pitcher
all the wildness of flowers
stolen from the fields
Cindy Tebo
References:
Matisse, Gilles Néret; publ. by Benedikt
Taschen Verlag GmbH, 1999, ISBN 3-8228-5535-4; pp. 7-8
Read
more tanka including another by Cindy Tebo
Read
Cindy's "my town, your town, usa" a haiku sequence
Read
Editor's Choice Haiku
Read
More About Tanka at Aha!Poetry
Read
reviews about two new books of tanka
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