4 minute read
Naomi Beth Wakan and Michael Dylan Welch Curing Poetic Loneliness with Rengay
Sherman Alexie once said, “Writing is a lonely business.” Poetry too. We wander lonely as clouds in rooms of our own, the muse seeming to visit only if we lock ourselves up in our isolated garrisons. This approach may often be effective, but another choice, at least occasionally, is to write in collaboration. One way to do that, in poetry, is with rengay. Garry Gay invented this responsive poetry form in 1992 and named rengay by adding his name to the end of the word “renga.” Renga is a Japanese collaborative poetry game with a thousand years of history. Some renga had 36 verses by two or more poets, but others had 100, 1000, or even 10,000 verses. Haiku poetry grew out of extracting the starting verses from these renga as independent poems. Garry’s update shortened this collaboration to just six haiku or haiku-like verses focusing on a theme, which renga usually avoided as it sought to “taste all of life.” Garry and I wrote the first rengay together in 1992, and now rengay is published in haiku journals around the world.
The rengay pattern for two writers is A3, B2, A3, B3, A2, B3, (letters represent the poets and numbers indicate the number of lines in each verse). For three writers, the pattern is A3, B2, C3, A2, B3, C2. A theme, such as baseball, times of day, or varieties of flowers, could be set at the start, or one poet might offer a haiku he or she has written recently and the other poet could pick an aspect of that poem to develop thematically. The latter is what happened with “In Praise of Idleness,” presented here. Naomi sent me her poem at the end of an email message. I liked its lazy subject and responded with a two-liner of my own on that theme, inviting her to write a rengay together. This was a rewarding way to focus a bit of our correspondence. Many haiku poets also write rengay together in person, as a social act that hopefully has literary possibilities. Sharing verses and perhaps discussing technique and voice can also help to hone your craft with immediate feedback—and help you get to know the person you’re writing with. For me, rengay is a social sort of poetry that makes writing a much less lonely business.
Learn more about rengay at http://www.graceguts. com/rengay-essays and see numerous examples at http://www.graceguts.com/rengay.
In Praise of Idleness
clouds move across the skylight I drift along too
lazy day in the La-Z-Boy
my list of things to do as my bookmark
writer at work stretched out in his hammock
even when supper calls my unmoving husband
beach weather . . . our frisbee still on top of the cooler
DEAN DAVIS PHOTO ELI WAKAN PHOTO Naomi
Michael
Naomi
Michael
Naomi
Michael
My people came down from the mountains, brittle ghosts armed with blades and hacksaws. They were big eared, small-footed and had red-knuckled hands. They carried no expectations. The men were tough and canny, ready with violence, religiously upright, but secret drunks. The women bore the men, bruised and joking.
They were hard and selfish people, except perhaps one great-grandfather. Imagine a small man, balding, ears akimbo, wearing a clean white shirt. He has an accordion strapped to his chest and his small feet count measures as his fingers fly on the keyboard, the bellows wheezing.
He had three daughters and he taught them all to dance. When he finished teaching the girls, he taught the rest of the town to dance as well. He taught the loggers, and the fishers, and the women who served the coffee and made waffles from scratch at the pancake house. Dancing his way to respectability, the town eventually named an avenue after him.
You can still travel to this northern town, back up over the mountains, and down again to the valley floor. His town is on the Skeena River, where the Canadian National Railway meets the Yellowhead Highway. Following the strains of that ancestral squeezebox, you can find the street named for him, in gratitude for his gambol and sway. Standing beneath the street sign you will see the road goes nowhere.
His daughters--three sisters-- chose different lives. One stayed put, dutiful. Two left town, travelling up over the mountains to new small towns in remote valleys where highways meet rivers. Of these, one found a husband, settled down, and did the normal things. She kept a clean house, raised good children and had a way with African violets. The third sister was lost. She was the broken one. A nurse called Fanny, she loved to work, was forced to marry, and could not stay away from the bottle. Why? Not necessarily a useful question. Perhaps as a child, she was made to dance against her will.
Eventually she drowned in her sorrow. There are not enough words to fill the emptiness she left behind. Like her father, she played the accordion, and while she lived, she tried to pass the love of this peculiar instrument on to her grandson. This, like so many other things, failed. Her progenies are hopelessly unmusical.
I am of the granddaughters and grandsons, descendants scattered like streams and creeks moving away from the fault lines in the mountains to some greater waterway. Living by my wits on the shore of a mighty sea, I make poems and fill my pockets with round stones gathered at the water’s edge. I awaken when the moon is full; listen for ghosts, check for saw and blade. At times, I am seized by the uncontrollable urge to dance. Always, I am careful with my feet.
“My People Came Down from the Mountains” was the winning story in the BC & Yukon Flash 2020 contest.
