Posted in 13 Moons, Holidays, Life, Poetry, Practice, Seasons, Spirituality, Wake Up, tagged 5lines, endings, gogyohka, new beginnings, New Moon, Solstice Fire, Yule fire on December 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Winter Solstice Fire, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Dark December,
the longest night—
rest peacefully, knowing
none of the prophets
are saints.
-posted on red Ravine at the New Moon on Winter Solstice,
Sunday, December 21st, 2014
-related to post: haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52
Posted in Animals & Critters, Haiku, Nature, Poetry, Practice, Seasons, Secrets, Silence, Things That Fly, tagged 5lines, Charles Anderson, dragonflies, dragonfly migration, gogyohka, Migratory Dragonfly Partnership, nature as muse, prehistoric insects, summer, the magic of mystery, The Nature Conservancy, Wandering Glider on August 8, 2014| 1 Comment »
Wandering Glider, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
wandering glider
in purple rain–
silent muse
migrating thousands of miles
to sit still in my garden
Dragonflies have existed for over 300 million years. According to the Migratory Dragonfly Partnership, about 16 of the 326 dragonfly species in North America are regular migrants, some traveling hundreds to thousands of miles each year. The major migratory species in North America are: common green darner (Anax junius), wandering glider (Pantala flavescens), spot-winged glider (Pantala hymenaea), black saddlebags (Tramea lacerata), and variegated meadowhawk (Sympetrum corruptum). Learn more about the mystery of dragonfly migration at The Nature Conservancy piece, Dragonfly Migration: A Mystery Citizen Scientists Can Help Solve, and at Dragonflies That Fly Across Oceans, a TED talk by biologist Charles Anderson.
-posted on red Ravine, Friday, August 8th, 2014
Posted in Animals & Critters, Art, Body, Bones, Poetry, Practice, Things That Fly, Wake Up, tagged 5lines, Dragonfly secrets, dragonfly wings, gogyohka, haiga, Happy New Year!, hopes for the New Year, keepers of the light, New Moon on January 1, 2014| 5 Comments »
Heartbeat Of A Dragonfly, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
New Moon, New Year—
I make no promises.
Only hope for a year filled with light,
soft shadows off the heartbeat
of a dragonfly.
-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, January 1st, 2014
Posted in Art, Haiku, Photography, Practice, Seasons, Skies, Things That Fly, Wake Up, Weather, tagged circles, diamond dust, gogyohka, haiga, ice crystals, ice halos, parhelia, parhelic circles, plate crystals, refraction, sundogs, the 22º halo, Vädersolstavlan, What is a sundog?, winter in Minnesota on December 9, 2013| 3 Comments »
Sundog Halo, iPhone Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 2013, photo © 2013 by Liz Anne Schultz. All rights reserved.
Sundog halo
in a dark world—
her crystal face, silent, skewed.
Deviant rays of red and blue,
diamond dust takes many hues.
There were two days last week when sundogs appeared on our drive to work, adding a little magic to the sub-zero skies. Sundogs, parhelia, are formed by plate crystals high in the cirrus clouds. Though all crystals refract light from the sun’s rays, we only see those that tilt their light toward our eyes 22° or more from the sun and at the same altitude (a 22° circular halo).
When plate crystals drift down with their large hexagonal faces almost horizontal, rays that become sundogs enter a side face and leave through another, inclined 60° to the first. The refractions deviate the rays by 22° or more, depending on their angle when they enter the crystal, making them visible to us. Red is deviated least, giving the sundog a red inner edge.
Vädersolstavlan, a 17th century painting of Stockholm depicting a halo display event in 1535. Cleaned in 1998. Public Domain.
Sundogs are visible all over the world, any time of year, regardless of the ground temperature. In cold climates, the plates can reside at ground level as diamond dust. The oldest known account of a sundog is “Sun Dog Painting” (Vädersolstavlan) depicting Stockholm in 1535 when the skyscape was filled with white circles and arcs crossing the horizon. The original oil on panel painting, traditionally attributed to Urban Målare, is lost, and virtually nothing is known about it. A copy from 1636 by Jacob Heinrich Elbfas is held in Storkyrkan in Stockholm, and believed to be an accurate copy.
-posted on red Ravine, Monday, December 9th, 2013
-related to post WRITING TOPIC — CIRCLES, haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52
Posted in Nature, Photography, Poetry, Practice, Seasons, Things That Fly, tagged bees, coneflowers, end of summer, gogyohka, Great Black Wasp, happy accidents, imposters, insects, photobomb, summer in Minnesota, wasps on August 22, 2013| 5 Comments »
Ode To A Black Bee, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 2013, photos © 2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Coneflower summer—
the accidental black bee,
my unsuspecting lens.
The photobombing imposter?
a Great Black Wasp.
-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, August 22nd, 2013
Posted in Bodies Of Water, Bones, Dreams, Life, On the Road, Photography, Place, Poetry, Practice, tagged b&w photography, bluff, film photography, gogyohka, Home Ground, Kodak Tri-X film, Linda Hogan, longing, Northern California, Pacific Ocean on May 28, 2013| 5 Comments »
Footprints, California Coast, circa 1995, b&w Tri-X film, Canon EOS Rebel SLR
film camera, © 1995-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Water pools
on an aging bluff—
webbed footprints
deposit a longing
for things that never were.
_________________________________________________________________
bluff
A bluff—a high bank above a river, a headland of precipitous cliffs—is created when elements of Earth go to battle. In nearly all Earth’s processes, one element is pitted against another, and the weaker is washed away, swept off, compressed. What is weakly held together breaks down easily. Bluffs come from such processes. Such bluffs were susceptible to prevailing winds, others to movements within the Earth, others to scouring ice. Some are layered up with the sand of a long-ago sea or the pebbles of a former stream or with the fossils of animals. Many bluffs come to life when water cuts down through seams of Earth layers, creating slippage and collapse. The ocean, the ever-ongoing movement of waves against the shore, carves other bluffs, as at the edge of Puget Sound and along the California coast. Rattlesnake Mountain in Nebraska was shaped by upward sweeping winds. Nana Wyah, the sacred Chickasaw Bluffs in Oklahoma, were renamed after the Trail of Tears. Mount Rushmore, carved into Lakota sacred land, is a granite bluff. And Bluff is a little town on the banks of the San Juan River in Utah, ringed by its namesake landform. In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway writes: “The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It has lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream.”
–Linda Hogan, from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape
-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
Posted in Art, Body, Bones, Culture, Death, Growing Older, Holding My Breath, Home, Life, Nature, Photography, Poetry, Practice, Quotes, Silence, Spirituality, Wake Up, tagged blue monochrome, blue portal, blue states, cease to fear your solitude, coming home to yourself, gogyohka, haiga, In Memoriam, into the blue, John O'Donohue, Krista Tippett, my blue period, On Being, poets, poets as inspiration, silence & noise, solitude, stepping out of silence, the silence of nature on January 28, 2012| 11 Comments »
Triptych: After The Blue Rain, inspired by Irish poet John O’Donohue, original photograph: an early Winter Solstice Fire 2011, altered in PhotoShop Elements, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2012, photos © 2012 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
after the blue rain
Have you walked
the barren landscape
of the chattering wire —
blue rain runs in the silence
of a white hot fire.
-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, January 28th, 2012, gogyohka inspired by Irish poet John O’Donohue after listening to one of his last interviews before his unexpected death in 2008: The Inner Landscape of Beauty with Krista Tippett, On Being (LINK)
When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape.” — John O’Donohue from Anam Cara (In Memoriam)
Posted in 13 Moons, Animals & Critters, Body, Bones, Death, Dreams, Gratitude, Haiku, Life, Photography, Poetry, Relationships, Seasons, Skies, Vision, Wake Up, tagged Bear Moon, birthdays, black bears, call of the wild, Ely, gogyohka, January Full Moon, January in Minnesota, Jewel of the Northwoods, Jewel the Black Bear, Jewel's Live Den Cam, Lily & Hope, Lily the Black Bear, live birth of black bear cubs, MN Black Bear Den Cam, Wildlife Research Institute on January 19, 2012| 13 Comments »
January Bear Moon, Olympus Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2012, photo © 2012 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Jewel of the North Woods under the waning Bear Moon — will you birth your cubs on Lily's birthday? Or three days later, when Hope's Spirit comes to play.
NOTE: Jewel the black bear is in the early stages of labor (you can watch at this link: Jewel’s Live Den Cam or check out the links in the poem to see Jim Stroner’s photographs of the bears). Jewel is a wild black bear, the sister of the famous Lily the Black Bear who gave birth to Hope on January 22nd, 2010 (we lost Hope last September during the 2011 Minnesota hunting season). If I remember correctly, it is Lily’s day of birth today, January 19th. I wrote the poem before I read the Wildlife Research Institute update tonight stating that it will be biologist Sue Mansfield’s birthday on January 20th (Happy Birthday, Sue!). The mystery remains, on whose birthday will Jewel of the Northwoods have her cubs?
The photograph was taken a few weeks ago at the Full January Moon. Liz and I went out into the urban Wild to photograph the Moon as she rose. Depending on your background, the January Moon is known as the Wolf Moon, the Cold Moon, and the Bear Moon (among many other names). It’s the Bear Moon all month long, not just at the Full Moon, and is usually one of the brightest Moons of the year. Stay warm, Jewel. It’s -6 in the Twin Cities and -15 in Ely, Minnesota. We are watching your every breath.
-posted on red Ravine, , Thursday, January 19th, 2012, with gratitude to biologists Lynn Rogers & Sue Mansfield
-related to posts: haiku 4 (one-a-day) meets renga 52, MN Black Bear Den Cam: Will Lily Have Cubs?
Posted in Culture, Life, Practice, Quotes, Recall, Secrets, Vision, Wake Up, Word Of The Day, Writing, Writing Topics, tagged A Place To Stand, Abraham Lincoln, Belief & Technique for Modern Prose, beliefs, Buddha, Edward R. Murrow, gogyohka, I believe, Jack Kerouac, Maya Angelou, principles by which you live, sprints, tanka, the art of practice, the importance of words, the power of words, This I Believe, words, writing as practice, writing haiku, writing practice on January 2, 2012| 20 Comments »
| Definition: | accept as true, credit with veracity, follow a credo, judge or regard |
| Synonyms: | v. 1. maintain, assert, opine, hold, consider, regard, conceive, trust, have faith in, confide in, credit, accept, affirm, swear by, have no doubt |
| Quotes: | ♦ In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true. — Buddha
♦ I believe that every person is born with talent. — Maya Angelou
♦ The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. — Abraham Lincoln
♦ 20. Believe in the holy contour of life — Jack Kerouac from BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE |
| Antonyms: | disbelieve, distrust |
I believe…
Do you believe in the Lock Ness Monster, the Man in the Moon, Santa Claus? Do you believe in finding Big Foot, flying saucers, ghosts in the machine? Do you believe this year will be better than the last? Do you believe in yourself, your visions, your dreams? The things I believe change from year to year, decade to decade. I used to believe in the tooth fairy, the Velvet Underground, peace, love and rock and roll. What do you believe?
In the 1950s, a radio program called This I Believe was hosted by journalist Edward R. Murrow. Each day, Americans gathered by their radios to hear essays from people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Wallace Stegner, Helen Keller, and Harry Truman—anyone able to distill the guiding principles by which they lived into a few minutes. (For inspiration, you can listen to essays on broadcasts from the 1950s at This I Believe.)
What are the principles by which you live? Are they different than they were two, three, or four years ago? Do you hang around friends who share your beliefs? Or push to expose yourself to other ways of thinking. The goal of the contemporary version of This I Believe (revived on NPR in 2004) was not to persuade Americans to agree on the same beliefs, but to encourage people to develop respect for beliefs different from their own.
Get out your fast writing pens and write the Topic I believe… at the top of your spiral notebook (or start tapping away on your computer or Smartphone).
You can write a haiku, tanka, or gogyohka practice and post it in the comments.
Or you may be surprised at what you discover when you follow the rules of Writing Practice —- I believe…, 10 minutes, Go!
-posted on red Ravine, Monday, January 2nd, 2012
Posted in Animals & Critters, Art, Body, Bones, Culture, Doodling, Gratitude, Holding My Breath, Life, Mandalas, Nature, Personal, Practice, Relationships, Seasons, Secrets, Silence, Spirituality, Structure, Wake Up, tagged alotus_poetry, animal totems, anxiety, A~Lotus, BlackBerry 52 Collaboration, building community through the Arts, collaboration, creating mandalas, deep listening, ears still to the lonely wind, emotions, fear, fear & fearlessness, gogyohka, haiga, listening, meaning of Rabbit, overcoming fear, pen and ink drawing, Rabbit mandala, rabbits, the art of listening, transforming fear, universal emotions, working with fear on July 10, 2011| 22 Comments »
Ears Still To The Lonely Wind — Mandala For Rabbit – 26/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 26, July 10th, 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: Drawn by hand with a black Staedtler archival pigment ink Fineliner on Canson Mix Media XL Series 98lb drawing paper, collage paper. Colored & collaged with DecoColor Glossy Oil Base Paint Markers, Caran D’Ache NeoColor II Water Soluble Wax Crayons, Sharpie Medium Point Oil-Based Opaque Paint Markers, Lineco Archival PVA Adhesive, archival card stock paper. Gogyohka & haiga by QuoinMonkey. Photograph taken with a Samsung DROID.
It must be a plentiful year for Rabbit. I see her everywhere on my journeys across the Twin Cities. If you look to the spiritual aspects of Rabbit, she represents calling out Fear—looking it right in the eye. It is said that if we focus on people, places, and things we fear, we draw them closer to us. The very act of ruminating on what we are afraid of creates opportunities to learn the lessons conjured by those fears.
It’s a good time for me to pay attention to Rabbit. Lotus wrote the poem Becoming a Rabbit -26/52 for one of the BlackBerry 52 Jump-Offs in our collaboration. I pulled in a line from her poem that spoke to me, wrote a gogyohka, and scripted it around the edge of the circle that would become a haiga:
Sidewinding summer rain plays hide and seek with the sky. Rabbit holds her ground --- blades of mint awash in shadow, ears still to the lonely wind.
I want to carry my Rabbit fetish from New Mexico in my pocket for the rest of July; there are challenges ahead of me with outcomes out of my control. Is it on the dresser with the other animals? She was a gift from friends, hand carved, and sold at one of the pueblos. I have carried the balsa Rabbit for a long, long time. To help ease my fear.
Rabbit may signal:
Lucky for me, Fear is a universal emotion. There is not a person on Earth that has not experienced Fear. I read it in the Writing Practices of friends. We talk about it over birthday dinners. I see it at the state, local, and federal government levels. I read about it in the news every day.
Naming my fears helps to dissipate anxiety I feel about things I can’t control. Rabbit helps me remember to breathe. And to listen for answers. Ears still to the lonely wind.
-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, July 10th, 2011, with gratitude to Lotus for the inspiration
Lotus and I will continue to respond to each other’s BlackBerry Jump-Off photos with text, photography, poetry (however we are inspired) for the 52 weeks of 2011. You can read more at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration. If you are inspired to join us, send us a link to your images, poetry, or prose and we’ll add them to our posts.
-related to posts: Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Shadow Of A Dragonfly, Dragonfly Wings — It Is Written In The Wind, Dragon Fight — June Mandalas, EarthHealer — Mandala For The Tortoise, ode to a crab (haiku & mandala), Eye Of The Dragon Tattoo
Posted in Architecture, Art, Art of Rebellion, Bodies Of Water, Culture, Dreams, Family, Gratitude, Haiku, Holding My Breath, Life, Photography, Place, Poetry, Politics, Practice, Relationships, Vision, Wake Up, tagged acceptance, BlackBerry 52, BlackBerry 52 Collaboration, bridges, building community through the Arts, cities with big hearts, collaboration, compassion, Equal Rights for All, Gay Pride, gogyohka, I-35 Bridge, I-35 Bridge in Rainbow Colors, Minneapolis, Minneapolis at night, Minneapolis landmarks, night owls, night photography, Nightshots, Pride Festival, the value of the Arts, Twin Cities, Twin Cities Pride, Twin Hearts on June 26, 2011| 10 Comments »
Under The Rainbow – 24/52, BlackBerry 52 — Week 24, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, June 24th 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights
reserved. Medium: Droid snapshot of the new I-35 Bridge on Pride
weekend, June 2011 in response to Lotus Jump-Off – The Biggest Heart.
Compassion —
learning to accept
what we don’t understand;
a city with a big heart
knows how to hold its differences.
-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Lotus and I will continue to respond to each other’s BlackBerry Jump-Off photos with text, photography, poetry (however we are inspired) for the 52 weeks of 2011. You can read more at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration. If you are inspired to join us, send us a link to your images, poetry, or prose and we’ll add them to our posts.
-related to posts: haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52, Berth Of The Night Owl haiku, Marriage Equality In Maine & The Catholic Church
-related links: I-35W Bridge To Glow In Rainbow Colors For Pride Festival, NY Becomes 6th State to Legalize Gay Marriage, NY Birthplace of Gay Rights Movement Fetes New Law, Pride Parade Celebrates Passage Of Gay Marriage
Photos: Bridge Light, I-35 Bridge In Rainbow Colors For Pride – 24/52, BlackBerry 52 — Week 24, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 24th 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: Droid snapshots of the new I-35 Bridge on Pride weekend, June 2011 in response to Lotus Jump-Off – The Biggest Heart.
Posted in Animals & Critters, Body, Bones, Family, Haiku, Holding My Breath, Life, Love, Photography, Place, Practice, Seasons, Things That Fly, Wake Up, tagged BlackBerry shots, break from the rat race, call of the wild, celebrating Mother Nature, celebrating Mother's Day, change of seasons, continue under all circumstances, don't be tossed away, feathers, gogyohka, haiga, Hope is the thing with feathers, images of ducks, make positive effort for the good, Mallard ducks, mallards, Molther Mallard, Mother Nature, Mother's Day, not being tossed away, rain or shine, respect for Nature, the human race, things I learn from Mother Nature, Wheel of Life, World Labyrinth Day on May 7, 2011| 10 Comments »
Mother Mallard, BlackBerry Shots, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, April 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Day in and day out
humans race from place to place;
nature sits rain or shine, not tossed away
for that one wild chance — ducklings on Mother’s Day.
NOTE: I’ve been checking on Mother Mallard every day since I first saw her little nest of eggs (see Nesting & Resting) in a high traffic area near an industrial complex. She sits patiently through volatile storms, human insensitivity, rushing wind and rain, days when the Sun warms her nest. She never wavers. I learn from her, as I often learn from Mother Nature — don’t be tossed away.
-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, May 7th, 2011, World Labyrinth Day
-related to posts: WRITING TOPIC — LIGHT AS A FEATHER, haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52, MN Black Bear Den Cam: Will Lily Have Cubs?
Posted in Art, Body, Bones, Doodling, Dreams, Haiku, Holding My Breath, Life, Mandalas, Personal, Poetry, Practice, Quotes, Secrets, Vision, Wake Up, Word Of The Day, tagged albatross, alotus_poetry, alter-ego, alter-ego etymology, BlackBerry 52, building community through the Arts, Bukowski, Charles Bukowski, collaborative art, community, creating mandalas, difference between life & art, divorcing ourselves from ourselves, following the Muse, gogyohka, haiga, life imitates art, meaning of albatross, mirrors, Never (Found Poem), poets as inspiration, self-identity, self-image, self-portrait on March 5, 2011| 17 Comments »
Alter-Ego Mandala: Dreaming Of The Albatross – 8/52 (Gogyohka), 8/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 8, February 27th 2011, scan © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: Drawn by hand with a black Ultra Fine Point Sharpie & Sharpie Peel-Off China Marker on Canson Mix Media XL Series 98lb drawing paper. Colored with Faber Castell 6 PITT Artist Brush Pens, DecoColor Glossy Oil Base Paint Markers, Portfolio Water Soluble Oil Pastels, Caran D’Ache NeoColor II Water Soluble Wax Crayons, Sharpie Medium Point Oil-Based Opaque Paint Markers.
A second self, a trusted friend. Or a dark half that emerges when we least expect it — in art, writing, and poetry. When I viewed Never (Found Poem) from Lotus, inspired by Charles Bukowski’s work The Continual Condition, these were the lines that resonated for me:
Our problem is
that we divorce ourselves
from ourselves
howling
and scratching their bellies,
and dreaming of the albatross.
I looked in the mirror. I started drawing. An outline emerged, a person I vaguely recognized. The longer I drew, the more familiar the image, the less it looked like me. An alter-ego. I went to the studio, pulled out the Royal typewriter Liz bought for me at a garage sale (turns out, it’s French), and while Jimi Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge played on the stereo turntable, wrote a gogyohka:
Rock, Paper, Scissors – 8/52 (Gogyohka), 8/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 8, February 27th 2011, scan © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: typed on Crane paper stock with vintage Royal typewriter. Scanned as TIF, saved as JPEG.
I’ve long been a fan of Charles Bukowski’s work. He was the kind of poet that didn’t pull any punches. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, lived hard, knew how he would die, wrote about the veneer that crumbles over the steely hardness. He wrote to the end, died of leukemia on March 9th, 1994 and is buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, near his home in San Pedro, California.
It is the honesty in his work I am drawn to. After I read Never (Found Poem), I saw that a reader had left a link to all things Bukowski. I was surprised to find a whole page of his artwork, dotted with self-portraits. Bukowski’s portrait paintings and Never (Found Poem) from Lotus sparked the mandala. The quote stoked the fire:
The difference between life and art is art is more bearable.
— Charles Bukowski
-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 5th, 2011
-related to posts: Best Of BlackBerry 365 — First Quarter SlideShow, BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, Waning Moon (Haiga), The Void — January Mandalas, ybonesy’s self portrait (part of her Farewell To red Ravine)
Lotus and I will continue our call and response by posting a BlackBerry photo for the 52 weeks of 2011. Feel free to join us if you wish (learn about the project’s beginnings at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration).
Posted in Body, Bones, Gratitude, Great Places To Write, Haiku, Life, Nature, Poetry, Practice, Relationships, Seasons, Silence, Skies, Spirituality, Structure, Vision, Wake Up, Word Of The Day, Writers, Writing, tagged Basho, celebrating the seasons, collaboration, collaborative poetry, Enta Kusakabe, gogyohka, haibun, haiga, haiku (one-a-day), haiku as practice, haiku poets, haiku practice, how to write haiku, poetry the length of a single breath, renga, Renga 52, senryu, tanka, the power of poetry, turning of the seasons, writing in community on January 5, 2011| 521 Comments »
Forgotten Winter Snows, BlackBerry Shots, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, April 2010, photo © 2010-2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
New Beginnings, New Moon. It’s a good time to start projects and yearly practices. The tradition of haiku on red Ravine began in January 2008 with the piece haiku (one-a-day). It is a practice born from reading Clark Strand’s Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey during a year-long Writing Intensive with Natalie Goldberg in Taos, New Mexico. The response from our readers was so great, that we continued the practice with haiku 2 (one-a-day), adding the poetic forms of tanka and renga, and creating a community haiku practice that would span two years.
Thanks to our faithful readers and haiku poets, January 2011 will jump-start our 4th year of haiku practice on red Ravine. haiku 4 (one-a-day) granted me the opportunity to do further research on the history of Japanese poetry and led me to the forms of gogyohko, haibun, and haiga. This year’s challenge is to continue to co-create and build on the poems of other haiku writers with tanka and renga, while exploring the additional forms of gogyohko, haibun, and haiga. [Note: For our new readers, I am reposting information on haiku, senryu, tanka, and renga. For the three new forms, scroll down to gogyohko. Makes the post lengthy, but worthy of a whole year of poetry!]
Along with haiku practice in 2011, I’m doing two collaborations with A~Lotus, one which we call Renga 52. (The other is a BlackBerry 52 practice which I will write about later.) In Renga 52, we are going to keep one renga going in the comments on this post for the entire 52 weeks of 2011. We will each add to Renga 52 at least once a week. You are welcome to participate. Simply jump into Renga 52 in the comment section anytime you wish. Here’s to health and prosperity in the coming year!
haiku & senryu (part one)
Haiku uses simple, direct language, words that evoke a season, and usually incorporates a cutting or pivot word, so that one half of a haiku seems to speak to the other. According to Patterns In Poetry, haiku is closely tied to the Japanese aesthetic of Yugen and the spirituality of Buddhism. It is written in a 17-syllable form (usually three lines of 5-7-5) that looks deceptively simple. Yet if you read the work of the masters like Basho, Buson, and Issa, wandering poets who lived during Japan’s Edo-period (1600-1868), it becomes clear that the practice of haiku can take years to master.
Senryu is similar to haiku but strays from seasonal or nature themes. According to Simply Haiku, senryu focuses on people and portrays characteristics of human beings and foibles, and the psychology of the human mind. Senryu can express human misfortunes or the hardships of humanity, and even when they depict living things or inanimate objects, human attributes are emphasized.
What both haiku and senryu have in common is that they derive from a form of Japanese court poetry called tanka.
tanka (part two)
Tanka, the oldest Japanese poetry form, was often written to explore religious or courtly themes and had a structure of five lines with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure. One person would contribute the first three lines (5-7-5) of the tanka, and a different author would complete the poem by composing a 7-7 section and adding a pivot point such as in this tanka from George Knox at Aha! Poetry:
in the check-out line
a worn face ahead of me
turns tentatively. . .
realities of desire
fade in final reckoning
-tanka by George Knox
Characteristics of tanka:
renga (part three)
Renga (linked elegance) is a form of linked poetry which evolved from tanka, the oldest Japanese poetry form. In renga’s 800 year history it has gone through many ideological changes. (And it was Basho who, after 500 years, snipped off the first three lines of renga to form haiku.)
In renga, one person would often contribute the first three lines (5-7-5) of the poetic chain and a different author would complete the chain by composing a 7-7 section. Then another author would build on the previous 7-7, with another 5-7-5 passage. This chaining of verses or renga, could sometimes add up to hundreds of linked tanka.
The first part of the poem, called hokku or “starting verse,” frequently sets the tone for the rest of the poem, and the authors of hokku often earned the respect and admiration of their fellow poets. By the 19th century, largely through the work of Masaoka Shiki, hokku began to be written and read as individual poems. From the word hokku derives our word haiku.
_______________________________________________________
gogyohka (part four)
Gogyohka is a relatively new form of Japanese short poetry founded and pioneered by Japanese poet Enta Kusakabe. In 1957, at the age of 19, Kusakabe developed the concept of Gogyohka in order to create a freer form of verse. According to his website, The Gogyohka Society, gogyohka is pronounced go-gee-yoh-kuh (the “g”s are hard as in “good”), and literally translated means “five line poem.”
Gogyohka is five lines of free verse on any subject matter. There is no set syllable pattern or requirement for the length of its lines, but they should be short and succinct — governed by the duration of a single breath. The goal is to practice self-reflection and contemplation by distilling an idea, observation, feeling, memory, or experience into just a few words. I am new to the form, but here is an example by Rodlyn Douglas at The Gogyohka Society:
Have you loved enough
to know the taste
of blood on the tongue
of one who has been bitten
by betrayal?
-gogyohka by Rodlyn Douglas
Characteristics of gogyohka:
haibun (part five)
Contemporary haibun is a combination of prose and haiku poetry sometimes described as a narrative of epiphany. What makes the haibun electric is the contrast between the prose and the haiku. According to The Haiku Society of America, haibun is a terse, short prose poem in the haikai style, which may include light humor as well as more serious elements. A haibun usually ends with a haiku. Most haibun range from well under 100 words to 200 or 300. Longer haibun may contain haiku interspersed between sections of prose, but the connections may not be immediately obvious. The haiku may serve to deepen the tone, or take the work in a new direction.
Japanese haibun is thought to have developed from brief notes written to introduce individual haiku, but soon grew into a distinct genre. The word haibun can be applied to longer works, such as the memoirs, diaries, or travel writings of haiku poets. According to Contemporary Haibun Online, haibun is the Japanese name for 17th Century monk Basho Matsuo’s travel journals. Basho’s view of haibun was haikai no bunsho – “writing in the style of haiku.” His best-known works, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling, were poetic prose, studded with haiku. Saga Nikki (Saga Diary) documents the day-to-day activities on a summer retreat with his disciples. Here is a contemporary example of a beautiful haibun from Contemporary Haibun:
By The Bay
Dusk turns the water into a fire opal.
The fragrance of fresh earth merges
in the air with white flowers.
Waves seem to whisper through the
western windows of the cabin my grand-
father built for my grandmother.
“Love poems” she once told me.
As I hold you in the dark, I recall her
wistful sighs on the porch, rocking to
the rhythm of the sea.
summer dawn –
I rinse the sand
from the sheets
-haibun by Hortensia Anderson
haiga (part six)
Haiga (Hai means comic and Ga means painting) is a style of Japanese painting based on the aesthetics of haikai, from which haiku poetry derives. Traditionally, haiga combined a haiku poem (written in calligraphy) with a simple painting and was based on simple, but profound, observations of the everyday world. In Haiga: Haiku, Calligraphy, & Painting, Poets.org describes traditional haiga as haiku’s more visual cousin. Some of the early masters were Morikawa Kyoroku, Sakaki Hyakusen, Takebe Socho, and Yosa Buson. Contemporary haiga often adds digital imagery to haiku poetry by the juxtaposition of a photograph to a poem. Or by overlaying the poem on to the image. As we have found on red Ravine, there is a natural inclination to combine haiku poetry forms and digital photography. At Daily Haiga, you can see examples of blended poetry and photography.
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haiku practice
Feel free to drop a haiku into this space anytime, day or night. Or join the word play and collaborative effort of tanka and renga. I’m excited to explore the 5-line form of gogyohka, and have already started writing haibun in my Journal 365 practice this year. I thought it would be fun to continue to explore these ancient forms of Japanese poetry, and see where the journey takes us.
Also, it’s okay to experiment, break form, and move out of the traditional structures. English syllables translate differently than onji. And according to Richard MacDonald (from his essay What is Tanka?), Japanese poetry is syllabic by nature and not metrical or rhymed, because like the French language, the Japanese language lacks stress accents.
There are different schools of thought about how rigid one should be in counting syllables. From what I have read, it is a matter of personal taste whether to stay close to the Japanese model, or stray from it for personal reasons or aesthetics in order to incorporate Western heritage into poetic work. The most important thing is to relax and have fun with it!
Option 1 – haiku
Option 2 – tanka
Option 3 – renga
Option 4 – gogyohka
Option 5 – haibun
Option 6 – haiga
DEFINITIONS:
bridge — word, or words leading the reader from the nature image to the statement of emotion
cutting (kireji) — Punctuation mark or word that divides a haiku into two parts. A cutting can be a hyphen, ellipses, colon or a word.
gogyohka — 5 lines of free verse on any subject matter, each line the length of one breath, no set syllable pattern
haibun — terse, relatively short prose poem (100-300 words) in the haikai style, usually including both lightly humorous and more serious elements, ending with a haiku.
haiga — combining a haiku poem (written in calligraphy) with a simple painting. Contemporary haiga combines digital imagery, photographs, other art forms with haiku.
haikai — short for haikai no renga, the popular style of Japanese linked verse originating in the 16 Century, as opposed to the earlier aristocratic renga. In both Japanese and English, the word haikai can also refer to all haiku-related literature.
hokku — first part of a renga, hokku is a “starting verse” that frequently sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Authors of hokku earned the respect and admiration of their fellow poets. By the 19th century, largely through the work of Masaoka Shiki, hokku began to be written and read as individual poems. From the word hokku derives our word haiku.
kigo — A seasonal reference in haiku. Usually a kigo has accumulated resonances and associations with earlier haiku and Japanese aesthetics about time.
onji — Japanese syllables. The language differences between Japanese and English are vast and complex. Converting onji to syllables may not always be a one for one process.
pivot word — A word in a haiku poem that changes, or turns the direction of the poem
renga — Japanese poetic form made up of linked tanka verse; the word renga means “linked elegance”
satori — A moment of insight or reflection that emerges in a Haiku poem (usually around the cutting or pivot word)
tanka — Japanese poetic form that is made up of 5 lines with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count. Haiku derives from tanka.
yugen — Japanese term for beauty that suggests mystery, depth and a tinge of sadness
RESOURCES USED IN WRITING THIS PIECE:
-posted on red Ravine at the first New Moon, Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
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