KATHY WATTS

Masters of Sabi

stronger today than yesterday street urine smell  Kathy Watts		waiting in line amazing how much people have to say Kathy Watts

 

  Kathy Watts has written short poetry and astrology for a long time now. See her chapbook In the Mountains of the Moon for some of her haiku history. Thank you, Nun Prophet Press! For astrology, see Heads Up Astrology on Facebook. She lives on the Left Coast of the United States with her husband, spinning wheel, and teapot. When possible, she avoids people but it’s hard.

Commentary

 Classical haikai distinguished itself from the stuffy court traditions, grandiloquent language and exalted subject matter of traditional waka, focusing on more immediate, proletarian concerns, down to earth imagery and content from early haiku into evolving senryu mise-en-scène. One way this manifested itself was in sensory details, which often included earthy, indecorous descriptions spanning a broad spectrum, from bodily humor to body horror. Scholars will be reminded of the memorable poem shared by William Higginson in his Haiku Handbook of Taneda Santōka’s, ‘taking a leisurely pee / in lush sprouting grass’. On a social scale the streets running yellow and brown recall the messy thoroughfares of Western frontiers at the edge of ostensible civilization, or could describe a total degradation and disintegration of infrastructure, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Roman aqueducts or latrines, and the electronic talking toilets of modern Japan. Another translation for sabi which may be applied appropriately and consistently across this showcase is ‘solitude’. Indeed, the odor described has the most visceral connotations echoing man’s isolation from his fellows, and being spiritually forsaken by the universe. Beyond just the realm of destitution and neglect, this hearkens across our lifespans from the shame of diapers and bedwetting, struggles at potty training of infancy to the incontinence of senility; the stench is also familiarly associated with accompanying grave illness and institutional settings. There is moreover something so Zen about setting her other micro poem in the supermarket queue, our contemporary breadline, which strikingly captures the Kafkaesque modern alienation of humans, even in the most densely crowded areas. Carl Jung once expounded upon how ‘loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.’  Similarly, there is an astute observation in remarking the sabi and kidai in meaningless banter, not unlike a shedding of skin or blood, the dispersion of personality and individuality into overlapping chatter, our prevailing babble of public discourse.  As William Shakespeare reminds, ‘words are but wind’, and the flood of unmoderated prattle certainly evokes Autumn, can be as readily recognized too across social media and the blogosphere where diatribes from constructive to noxious proliferate indiscriminately, introducing significant complexity to the seeker’s struggle to grasp consensus and locate needles of truth amidst veritable ziggurat haystacks of our our information age. 

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

SUSAN BURCH

Masters of Sabi

wraith the days I’m barely here  Susan Burch		#tuesdaytasting a little doomsday Susan Burch

 

  

  Susan Burch is a good egg 

Commentary

 It’s a great pleasure to be able to present poetry in this showcase offering ripe examples both of orthodox approaches to communicating sabi and also representing very innovative and groundbreaking strategies, the latter camp where one can often find Susan Burch’s stellar writing firmly situated. Famed for original and always incendiary applications of her characteristic voice and scathing cleverness across a wide range of forms in poetic prose and verse, she has distinguished herself for an especial penchant at incorporating subject matter and themes drawing from a vast and eclectic repertoire of folklore and ephemera which would make Buson proud and leave Shiki thunderstruck, demonstrating an inventive command of techniques of allusion and intertextuality, something one may appreciate further in her collaborative collection with Bona M. Santos Nursery Rhyme Haiku from Velvet Dusk Publishing. In the first of these uncanny, savvily orchestrated monostiches we find a very sabi entity described, inhabiting a limbo of sorts both in terms of perception and reality, between life and death, this material sphere and another less understood, well defined or tangible, paired with an account relating feelings of incompletion, betwixtness, dissipation, articulating a purgatory which well matches the definitive waning, sloughing, coming untethered, that prototypical ‘unweeded garden which grows to seed’ associated—beyond the state of Denmark—both with this aesthetic and autumn more generally. Next we observe a fascinating portrayal of time and space again, discussed in association with a ‘hashtag’ (#) employed via social media posting to increase reach, facilitate interconnection and engagement, in combination creating one of the most unusual and imaginative examples toriawase in recent memory. Additionally, Burch introduces the idea of flavor and sampling, how it impresses taste buds. In a sense within the Western conception of a traditional workweek, the poet has lit upon the longest temporal yard away from any weekend’s relief, the Winter solstice of soul crushing industrial labor schedule’s structuring, as ameliorated and sanitized in this surreal age unnervingly by our cheerful influencer culture, the opiates of consumption and vicarious aspirations toward various dangled carrots of luxury and anesthesia. Astutely, Susan finds a highly appropriate catastrophic expression for the sabi that precise moment entails for a gourmand, with notes of brimstone and dust unmistakable to trained palates. An acquired taste, to be sure!

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

SHŌNIN

Masters of Sabi

burning cigarette i watch the whiteness of your breath  Shōnin		naked penny in cold air, am i really pedantic Shōnin

 

  Shōnin, pen name for Orrin Prejean, was born in Port Arthur, TX in 1981. He came to English-Language haiku around 2006. In 2013 he began writing Tanka under the instruction of M. Kei and had two collections published in 2016 & 17. In the Fall of 2021 he turned his focus completely to the history and current practices of Senryu. In 2021 he published his first collection of senryu, titled “October’s Kid” followed by “Dewdrop World.” He also collaborated with poet BA France to publish another collection of senryu titled, “Retweets.” 

Commentary

 Besides being one of the most passionate and well-versed aficionados in the advantages and strengths of the senryu, its enriching history in Japanese and English praxis, Shōnin (a.k.a. Orrin PréJean) is an outstanding exemplar at illustrating adroitly the transmission and epitomizing, through eloquent verbiage and affecting descriptors, of a moving, thrillingly fresh approach to the elusive art of sabi.  In his terrifically refined and hard-hitting recent collections from Moth Orchid and Cuttlefish the poet has demonstrated this variant sibling of the haiku’s unique qualifications for embodying this aesthetic (indeed, stretching from individual pieces collected to the titles – the latter also an allusion to a famous elegy of Kobayashi Issa’s, and Buddhist themes of prevailing transience energizing it – heading the volumes themselves) in potent customs. Professor David McMurray, acclaimed longtime editor of the Asahi Shimbun’s Haikuist Network column and poetry professor at Japan’s university of Kagoshima, in a seminal survey conducted in Charlotte Digregorio’s writer’s blog, characterizes the senryu as “city-mouse poetry”, in its dichotomy to rustic haiku’s nature and seasonal subject matter, instead implementing cosmopolitan and human oriented monographs and paradigms.  In the two pieces we share here this virtuoso channels the irrepressible zeitgeist of sabi both in the tangible objets d’art commemorated for posterity, and through the subjective responses and reflections paired with them. One would be hard pressed to submit more germane and fitting symbols of this tradition as it connects vividly to our dystopian age than the blazing cherry, oxidized coinage (specifically, in this instance of soul searching and personal appraisal, ‘honest Abe’s’ graven visage).  The evanescent character of every person’s words and impact, over the course of swift lives as we strut and fret our hours upon the stage, that fifteen minute window of recognition we each are allotted in the annals of history and human memory, and similarly our own sense of cumulative worth in self-assessment, yearnings to actualize, constant questioning and doubts as to those Erikson models which each of us confronts differently with unique results (industry vs. inferiority, generativity vs. stagnation)… All these hearty constituents make for a bubbling stew of provocative poetry, in which sabi provides a key ingredient zestily flavoring!

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

ARVINDER KAUR

Masters of Sabi

walking till the last lamppost rhythm of temple bells Arvinder Kaur		fireplace smoke we breathe in the moon’s aura Arvinder Kaur

 

  Arvinder Kaur specializes in English literature and Media Studies. As a poet of the Japanese short forms she has been published in many haiku journals of national and international repute. Her first book of haiku ‘Nimolian ‘written in her mother tongue Punjabi was published in 2013. Subsequently’ dandelion seeds’, a bilingual presentation was published in 2015. She introduced cherita to the readers of Hindi and Punjabi when she translated ai li’s cherita from English to the chosen vernacular and the book is entitled ‘under raintrees’. ‘Fireflies in the rubble’, a collection of haiku/ senryu came out in 2022 and has been published by Red River Press, Delhi. Arvinder Kaur lives in Chandigarh with her family.

Commentary

Arvinder Kaur provides a true treat with these two verses, transporting, translating sabi powerfully into the dominions of the senses, demonstrating spectacularly with finesse and brevity how this idea may be variously felt (from the hard ground with one’s weary feet), heard (in the bells’ plaintive chime), seen (with the moon’s lonely halo), smelled (through the dense smoke), tasted (on the night air). A sumptuous banquet of impressions meticulously cataloguing the complex feelings, some less pleasant, endured while inhabiting our frail and fragile, fallible mortal forms. As we see elsewhere in this showcase flame and immolation are an effective source of sabi, reminder of transitory configurations which is lent additional consequences being harnessed by an Indian author in a milieu where cremation is a popular final disposition method, and the funeral pyre a familiar and time-honored sight with far reaching associations. The motifs of the fireplace and lampposts present a sort of trajectory and direction, leading in the first composition to music, in the other toward the heavens, two sides of a parallel coin which one could conceivably relate to ascension, epiphany, sartori, or moksha potentially. A phenomenally polished and classical set of pieces which pack an almost astonishing quantity of diverse information into a few words, this work makes a resounding testament to Arvinder Kaur as poet and wordsmith, whose writings could equally charm the haikuists of earlier halcyon eras. We’re very lucky to be cohabiting this flourishing period for English haikai, and a digital age where missives can travel from the Midwestern united states to Chandigarh instantaneously! One should also note the sometimes fatal suggestions of bells tolling, most famously immortalized in a certain proverb, and reiterated through a Hemingway novel it informed and inspired. Still, a harmonious sound... 

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

Adele Evershed

Masters of Sabi

late fall the bay nuts too ripe to enjoy  Adele Evershed		autumn rain the mountain trail suddenly a river… Adele Evershed

   Adele Evershed was born in South Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. Her prose and poetry have been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies such as Wales Haiku Journal, Prune Juice, Modern Haiku, Shot Glass Journal, and Hole in the Head Review. Adele has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry, and the Staunch Prize for flash fiction. Finishing Line Press will publish her poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places this year and her novella-in-flash, Wannabe, was published by Alien Buddha Press in May.

Commentary

 Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell have posited that a shared unconsciousness may exist, which can help explain commonalities perceived among the dreams of disparate populations, patterns and models (e.g. the mandala) exhibited throughout the artwork of ancient cultures at the furthest distances from one another, who had never come into contact. Unlike some methods of writing and artwork which demands personalization, where specificity and precision augment and support objectives, haikai is peculiar in how leaving things vague and undefined, permitting mystery (yûgen) and ‘dreaming room’ (or ma) can in fact truly enhance and elevate a micropoem.  From tanka to senryu universality become a prized asset, with the benefit that translated into our tongue court waka of the forebears may still resonate with modern readers today, and we can hear a stanza about a drenched wayfarer in olden Kyoto and completely empathize and identify with our own soggy travails. The ‘haiku moment’ Adele so aptly depicts may as plausibly have been experienced by Li Po, the nun Chiyo or Akiko Yosano. It’s fascinating to conclude this showcase in a circular fashion of sorts with bookends, and that two of the most captivating talents at sabi of our broad literary circle, possessing very different sensibilities and attributes, would find themselves on secluded roads making their way to a sea. Déjà vu is a common experience in short form poetry composition, for these moments which strike a chord are visceral, recurrent and seem to transcend individual actor, time, or space. Antiquity’s most prominent masters of yore traveled the same pilgrimage routes generations, centuries staggered, even at times describing literally or in homage identical scenes from different viewpoints, with complementary lenses. Matsuo Bashō himself famously quipped that ‘those who have no traveling experience along the Tokaido [the old inter-city highway] are quite unlikely to become good at poetry’. If days of trekking illuminates the poet, sabi may be detected in the layers of accumulating film. Skillfully utilizing purely natural imagery in these two verses Evershed nonetheless broaches highly recognizable, profound sentiments about maturing, obsolescence, expiration dates – in a horticultural produce sense, and also in the case of fate’s unexpected submersion of our byways. A wu-wei acceptance of destiny, whether weather or the life cycle of agriculture, going with the flow and following the Tao (or Way) these pieces speak to a perceptive understanding of the universe and our unique respective places in it we can all admire and learn from

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

JOHN HAWKHEAD

Masters of Sabi

autumn’s return spirals of old gold in dad’s whiskey  John Hawkhead		lighting a torch at the longbarrow entrance a flame’s echo John Hawkhead

 

  John Hawkhead is a writer from the South West of England who has published over 1600 haiku and senryu all over the world and has won many international contests. His book ‘Bone Moon’ placed third in the 2023 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards and follows his 2016 publication ‘Small Shadows’ – both from Alba Publishing.

Commentary

 We’re overjoyed and elated that the inimitable John Hawkhead was able to share his singular, trademark blend of sabi, prized and esteemed the world over, in our showcase here today.  Occupying an often eerie liminal space between the distant past and our contentious present, radiating mystique and pulsing with stirring feeling, these are poems which encompass both the highly private and the unanimously identifiable, revealing astounding technique and dexterous range. Few practitioners possess such a perceptive eye, track record and propensity for discovering the magical in everyday places, portraying the otherworldly features both in arcane minutia and sprinkled across otherwise ordinary backdrops. In the pieces above Hawkhead creates stunning contrasts with a color scheme of yellows, oranges and gloomy gradations of black, achieving multiple hues of melancholy for the reader to infer sabi both in the territory of nature (leaves’ shifting, fire catching and waning) and civil (sediment swirling, ourselves and elders aging in succession). The very notion of precious metals, hard currency in this period of fiat and electronic variations, ever fluctuating understandings of value and worth to economic systems and the modern citizen, present interesting opportunities for consideration and pontificating. The haijin’s invoking of the long barrow, most aged timber or stone constructions to be discovered on the planet, tracing back as far as the neolithic, makes for a compelling metaphoric panorama, which conjures to mind everything from Dante to Orpheus, Hercules to the Athanasian Creed – descendit ad inferos. John’s magnificent wabi and sabi, with its numinous English character, reminds of the exciting overlaps between Eastern traditions and pagan animism, Arthurian and Roman visions of creation and destruction, the supernatural and divine and their byzantine and unpredictable relationships with your run-of-the-mill person. Similarly, there is certainly a perceptible element of sabi to be grasped in the idea of generational transition, whether in the more adversarial Greek and Freudian understandings (of Zeus and Cronus, Oedipus and Electra) or the more benign and uplifting conceptions summarized by the wisdom in well-known Chinese maxim, “One Generation Plants the Trees, and Another Gets the Shade”. 

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

JL HUFFMAN

Masters of Sabi

crumpled doe traffic victim vultures kettle JL Huffman		burn barrel ringed with louche men shooting drugs, guns JL Huffman

 

  JL Huffman, a retired Trauma Surgeon/ICU doctor, has published four books of poetry-Almanac: The Four Seasons (2020), Family Treasons (2021), Voyage: Vista and Verse (2022), and KAR-KU (2023. She is a 2023 Touchstone Award for Individual Poems Nominee (x3), and was also a 2021 Pushcart Prize (Poetry) Nominee. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals at home in the US and abroad.

Commentary

While surely not unique to North America, the ubiquitous roadkill sightings across long stretches of back road or freeway do have a distinctly Americana flair, and have become a popular subgenre of haiku and senryu in and of themselves, no doubt pursuant at least in part to the oozing sabi permeating, so central to each grim vignette.  Huffman has previously treated this phenomenon memorably in her recent collection Kar-Ku, and here does not disappoint in the slightest.  Her stellar choice of verb ‘kettle’, perhaps alien to the average laymen, has become common knowledge in the world of civil disobedience, where it generally connotes ‘when the police contain protesters in one place for an extended period by surrounding them and not allowing them to leave.’ This deft touch in effect personifies the carrion birds, individually and as a unit, lending further significance, imbuing larger meanings and import on this suggested spectacle and episode.  The fiery barrel in the second piece, whether operated for warmth or the disposal of evidence – perhaps even remains! – is also an especially appropriate prop for this showcase, and indeed the very act of incineration, the limited expectancy of a bonfire, a candle, a match makes for highly sabi article of scenery or set dressing, furthermore amplifying its quintessential autumnal ambiance.  Having an intense and at times harrowing vocation which brought her into direct and immediate close contact with some of life’s messiest displays and most radical characters, this poet has hard earned and come to acquire a commendable gift for depicting our polity’s rougher edges and complex situations with remarkable authenticity and compassion.

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

Stephen J. DeGuire

Masters of Sabi

businessman’s pink slip pocket square… rough sleeper  Stephen J. DeGuire		homeless camp fire neighborhood watch turns vigilante Stephen J. DeGuire

 

  Stephen J. DeGuire, born with the birth defect Spina Bifida in Santa Monica, is a proud Angeleno. He has lived half his life in the same small apartment where he reads, writes, watches and listens. A life-long interest in Japan led to writing haiku and senryu which he has widely published in journals, newspapers and contests. His ideas come from both real life and the totally imagined, but the actual writing and inspiration comes when putting in his earbuds and listening to his favorite Japanese singer-songwriter Tate Takako

Commentary

 A quotation often attributed to Gandhi goes as follows: “The measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.” So many of the verses collected in this showcase speak to one another in a riveting sort of dialogue, and it seems very apropos in our running conversation to follow JL’s poem about the seedy underbelly along the fringes of society with a despairing vision of a comparable cast’s alternate, inverse probable character and role as vulnerable at-risk victims, not just of their own weaknesses, excesses and predations, but of the violence of those better positioned and empowered, with a monopoly on sanctioned arms and execution, along with their close cousins and informal vanguard the angry mob. Sabi again functions as the signifier of implosion and debauch, the symptom of a planet riddled with late stage capitalism in its death throws. Throughout an era frighteningly grounded in the ideologies of Malthus and Ayn Rand, who envisioned the elderly, sick, disabled, neurodivergent and unemployed as drains on communal coffers, whom leadership would as soon get rid of, one often realizes how small and logical a step it can be for conservative attitudes toward rationalizing and championing outright population control, sterilization, eugenic purges, involuntarily euthanasia, ethnic cleansing. DeGuire as well gracefully implicates, raises clamorous alarms, and introduces a brilliant solidarity and chilling reminder with the time honored redundancy icon (sabiest of totems) that every homeless wanderer in a haiku and senryu was once, under different circumstances could still be a hardworking contributor to society, and through bad luck, injury, automation, free trade, what have you they have fallen upon hard times. Like the Greek tragedies, it makes for a sobering realization to comprehend we and them are never so very different, and there but for the whim of fates mercurial go any of us each given day. Stephen’s wry wit, incisive knack for observation, and unflinching courage to advocate empathy and demand decency makes his amazing poetry and generous helpings of sabi something the literary community is very privileged to be edified via.

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

KIMBERLY A. HORNING

Masters of Sabi

changed to Buick graffiti art  Kimberly A. Horning		in aspic Park Ave tulips Kimberly A. Horning

 

  Kimberly A. Horning is blessed to live by the sea. A former actor and filmmaker she feels that she has found a new home in writing ‘ku. Kim is a total bookworm and an avid old movie nut. Favorite books include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Great Gatsby, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and anything by Salinger. Kim adores films by Sidney Lumet and John Cassavetes, but also loves popcorn movies. Dog walking and cat sitting are other favorite pastimes. A true beach bum/aging hippie, Kim’s dream is to die by the railroad tracks like Neal Cassady.

 

Commentary

 In the natural world lichen, cherry petals, corrosion, overgrowth, decay convey and underline the passage of time, neglect, and abandonment. In our teeming metropolises the modern equivalencies and indicators of sabi, telltale signage of social and political unrest or collapse may as constructively be evinced and discerned through broken windows and spray painted tagging! Just so can the waning of a civilization or empire be readily gauged by increasing inequality, creeping accretion and monopolization (Horning was kind enough to include this illuminating headnote: ‘All of us are allergic to change. The very rich are immune’… Highly recommend you to perform an image search, but for those unfamiliar aspic or ‘meat jelly is a savory gelatin made with a meat stock or broth, set in a mold to encase other ingredients’) of finite resources, space and influence by smaller and smaller privileged few sections of a population, as the Autumn season itself may by read and understood symbolically in different allegoric contexts, as a fall from grace and utopian settings, leaving protective paradises, surrendering round tables and splintering from heavenly hosts, foregoing freedoms and compromising integrity, desecrating the sacred and corrupting pure hearts and virtuous institutions with insidious tendrils of profit, hegemony and subjugation!  This brings to mind an evocative passage by Matsuo Bashō in his Narrow Road: “When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive.”

 

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry

Bryan Rickert

Masters of Sabi

withered leaves the dusty trail to the riverbed  Bryan Rickert		early sunset I pull into the darkness of home Bryan Rickert

Bryan Rickert, current President of the Haiku Society of America and has been published in many fine journals. He is the Editor of Failed Haiku Journal of Senryu and edits The Living Senryu Anthology. Bryan has two books: Fish Kite (Cyberwit Publishing) and Dust and Stone, co-written with Peter Jastermsky (Velvet Dusk Publishing). His work was selected for inclusion in A New Resonance, Volume 12. He was also the recipient of the Touchstone award for individual poems in 2023. 

Commentary

Across an extensive body of work, in countless formulations with deft brushstrokes and a painterly palette, few practitioners of our day have managed to capture the distinctive tone and character of sabi as expertly, consistently, and recognizably as the incomparable Bryan Rickert. These superlative entries demonstrate his prowess and command of the intricacies of the style and its rich lexicon of concrete harbingers from our vaults of universal human experiences observing nature and change, canonized and codified formally via saijiki in a continuing collective effort to refine language’s figurative capabilities to communicate and describe the passage of time and the ephemerality of our existence on this material plane. Different images and tropes, through general usage and agreed interpretations, have evolved and coalesced to assume, and when adopted impart rich deeper spiritual and erudite meanings both in their original Zen and Shinto contexts, and more recently in our apocalyptic war-torn, climate devastated present throughout Western societies. These two verses dramatically articulate the atmosphere of sabi and together encapsulate its many attempts at pinning down… What better instrument than desiccated foliage to express William Higginson’s handbook translations, of a nostalgic ‘patina… beauty with a sense of loneliness in time.’ Rickert’s relatable fragment image of the proverbial sun setting (prematurely, too soon!), an inky veil as ultimate terminus, echoing his arrival or return into a primordial state of nothingness in the accompanying phrase, similarly constructively evokes Donald Keene’s description of ‘something aged or weathered with a hint of sadness because of being abandoned’.  There is an undertone very metaphysical in possible readings of this piece, which are applicable across faiths, even into purely pragmatic conceptions of our individual mortalities.  The ‘pulling in’ to one’s earthly residence or final resting place and his other tableau of a nomadic seeker or omniscient viewer following loose trail to a stream like a tributary concluding at the ocean mirror one another and emulate our fleeting lifespans, naïve searches for meaning and vainglorious gallivants, with incredible vision and delicacy. 
 

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Setu, December 2023 :: Urban Decay: Micropoetry