White Lies: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2008
Jim Kacian, Editor-in-Chief
Red Moon Press: Winchester, VA, 2009
ISBN 9781893959804
182 pages
Review by Lyle Rumpel, Queenswood Library volunteer
Jim Kacian has edited and written for an annual publication of haiku, related forms, and essays about this genre, since the first Red Moon anthology published in 1997.
As many know, the origins of haiku are Japanese. The tradition is for these short poems to contain seventeen sound bites, which correspond to fewer than seventeen syllables in English. Modern English haiku typically have three lines and no formal structure. They are not intended to be conceptual or aphoristic, but rather experiential.
In the Red Moon collections are poems that inevitably suggest much by saying little. Quiet. Poignancy. Evanescence. Humour (in senryu poems which are about human nature). But these are conceptual descriptions, and haiku most commonly use words that refer to the natural world, words that show rather than tell, and yet leave the reader to listen and feel beyond the picture. Haiku give us, as pointed out in the title of the 1999 Red Moon anthology, snow on the water.
Haiku speak in the present tense, whether they contain a verb or imply one. For example, one may experiment with something like:
curbside refuse
the doll’s eyes
fill with rain
chocolates
slowly
the ribbon
White Lies, like some but not all other books of haiku, enhances the immediacy of the present by leaving more space between poems, placing only two or three on a page. As with paintings, this can provide an open window through which wind and wonder may enter. In positive response to this white space, word objects breathe, are fresher, more alive.
White Lies swings the window open even wider by including international contributions. Noting the poet’s country with each entry adds the fragrance of the earth’s garden. There are poems from Bulgaria, China, Mexico, Austria, Canada, Serbia, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and the U.K., Sweden and Scotland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands. Poems are chosen for inclusion in the Red Moon anthologies by a team of editors who glean from a variety of world-wide journals, books, and internet sources, automatically including the winners and honourable mentions from contests. Final selections, taken from the editors’ anonymous listing of poems, are those that receive at least fifty percent of the votes of a group of judges.
There are many forms of Japanese poetry related to the haiku consciousness, and the inclusion of some of these further deepens the hues and tints of this book. A tan renga is written by two poets and is made of a haiku plus a second (or first) part of two lines. The second part relates and responds to the first. If the five lines were written by one person, the poem would be what is called tanka. To avoid revealing the only tan renga in White Lies, I’m attempting the following example by writing both parts (making it, technically, a tanka), at least to illustrate the form:
cold snap
her question lingers
in the air
between the running lights
of passing boats, green, red, green
Another form, haibun, combines a short piece of prose, typically journal-like, with a haiku in a kind of response voice, most effective when not simply an echo of the journal piece.
The 2009 Red Moon edition, like its predecessors, contains a wide range of essay topics. This year’s contributors consider the use of metaphor in haiku (the rule not to use it, and the exceptions), how to discern, appreciate and write quality haiku, some possible links between haiku and short (non-haiku) poetry, and a call for experimentation and creativity with the haiku form.
All of these aspects of White Lies, and the Red Moon anthologies generally, give a felt sense of the haiku invitation, its continuing salt and scent, wind and chimes.
