Windfall Apples

Richard Stevenson

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781897425893
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

The venerable tanka and her upstart cousin kyoka mingle with Kerouac's American pop haiku in five-liner imagist poems and linked sequences. In Windfall Apples, Richard Stevenson mixes east and west with backyard barbecue and rueful reflection.

Introduction

Tradition, innovation and playfulness are an important part of poetry. Poems express a range of feelings in multifold forms that might try to overturn time or misfortune, or chase away tedium and make the spirit more nimble. Richard Stevenson combines tradition, innovation and playfulness, and reaches back through the centuries and brings the Japanese poetic forms of tanka and kyoka to life in twenty-first century North America. He translates these poetic forms through time and space and gives them a contemporary feel.

As Richard Stevenson is using Japanese forms in his poems in English, it is important to say a few things about the established and later forms of Japanese poetry. Tradition is a key to established forms. The waka flourished in the Heian period, when the aristocracy ruled and were composing waka with enthusiasm, about the time the Tale of Genji was produced, and before the samurai came to power. This waka is the thirty-one-syllable form now referred to as tanka, which is arranged in five lines of 5-7-5-7-7.¹ Poems in Japanese came to be written by the samurai and many others as in time more people could read and write and produce literature.

This continuity and change in Japanese poetics is something that Stevenson draws on. In Japanese poetry, new poetic genres came into being during the Edo period (1600–1868). These forms were popular linked verse (haikai renga, which included the hokku, later renamed haiku), kyoka (wild Japanese poetry), kyoshi (wild Chinese poetry) and senryu (satiric or humorous seventeen-syllable poetry).² Kyoka were Japanese poems that did not conform to the prescribed norms of waka imagery and diction. Kyoka had existed since the eighth century, but waka purists often turned up their noses at them. Still, kyoka were increasingly popular in the late medieval period (sixteenth century).³ This trend continued into the Edo period, which involved a keen interest in kyoka during the late eighteenth century and the publication of many kyoka collections. The kyoka of the Edo period may be viewed as the unorthodox and unconventional counterparts to waka, and a similar relation existed between kyoshi and kanshi (Chinese poetry) and between senryu and haikai (haiku).⁴ Kyoka poets of the Edo period came from a wide range of social backgrounds, including aristocrats, samurai and urban commoners.⁵ According to Haruo Shirane, “[t]he humour of kyoka derives from placing something vulgar, low, or mundane in an elegant Japanese form or context.” ⁶ In this sense, kyoka exemplify the tendency in the Edo period towards the juxtaposition of high and low culture. This technique often veered into parody. As Shirane says, “[i]n contrast to senryu, which flourished at the same time as kyoka and remains popular today, kyoka as a genre did not last into the modern period. Although in the late eighteenth century it eventually spread beyond the sphere of educated samurai and aristocrats to commoners, it still required a knowledge of the classical poetic tradition, which made it difficult for c...