Masters of Wabi
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icy breath
line forms outside the
city mission
Aaron Bowker
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abandoned house
moonlight shines through
ice covered windows
Aaron Bowker
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Aaron Bowker, based
in the United States, is a super self-critical Virgo, walking a path between
worlds while dabbling in art, photography, and poetry. Poems and art have been
featured in Failed Haiku, Cold Moon Journal, The Wombwell Rainbow, Heterodox
Haiku Journal, The Hooghly Review, The Wombwell Rainbow, Medusa’s Kitchen and
Black & White Haifa/Haisha. He especially thanks Jerome Berglund for being
his mentor and pushing him to limits otherwise unexplored.
Commentary
Buson purportedly maintained (as related by Sawa
Yuki in Kyoto) that “the essence of
haikai is to use ordinary words and yet to become separate from the ordinary”,
which he was of the option might be abetted through the inspection, probing and
appreciation of Chinese poetic precepts. Like that iconic maestro Aaron Bowker
is also no less capable with ink and papyrus (or lens and viewfinder) of
sketching representations of moments and their emotional temperament in wholly visual
terms as he is rendering incidents with semiotic verbiage. Just so do the poems
of this haikuist possess a distinctively artistic character, demonstrating a sharp
eye and a studied sense of balance, proportion, symmetry, and their obligatory
subversion in order to achieve the ends of disseminating wabi in sleek packages like his two tempestuous verses contributed
magnanimously to this investigation. These works splendidly highlight the
symbiosis of wabi-sabi which can be
achieved through collusion, very effectually too across that coldest season,
and with extra credit merited for simultaneously channeling both the rhetorical
and the practical senses of poorness in highly refined, timeless writing which
could be situated in any time or place beyond the equatorial regions, wherever
homesteads are lost or abandoned, and the underprivileged, lowborn seek aid and
succor en masse. The creeping cold,
materialized through breath made visible, encasing portholes and obscuring
vistas not unlike the verdigris from which its name is derived, similarly evoke
sabi, as does the time-honored motif
of beggars amassing, reminiscent of soup kitchens of the great depressions, our
modern day tent cities, and the patronage and charity which are particularly
invaluable in a nation where outdoor blankets and pillows are criminalized,
churches are prosecuted for putting up homeless during brutal winter nights.
America being the worst country in terms of paid vacation entitlement, public
programs and healthcare, hours and satisfaction of employment, with Japan ranking
close second, it’s not difficult to understand the commonality between our Dharma
Bums and their wandering swordsmen of old, the American nightmare with its
workaholic gig economy and that driven culture of kar├╢shi (‘overwork death’) and seppuku
(‘cutting the stomach’). Bowker is a stirringly skilled emerging voice in
the ELH field I can’t recommend enough that arbiters pay attention to, and
these odes would make excellent addendums for a dictionary entry on the
technique of wabi worth immortalizing
for posterity!
