© 2006 Annabelle A. Udo
(published in "Listen & Be Heard" weekly for January 11, 2006)
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Produced by Eileen Tabios; Edited by Mark Young & Jean Vengua
Available through Small Press Distribution(www.spdbooks.org), Berkeley; Amazon.com; and selected bookstoresLegend has it that the discovery of tea some 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, happened when leaves inadvertently fell into water that was being boiled under a tree. The alchemy so magical and the taste as equally astounding, there is no surprise that tea remains as one of the most favored drinks among poets.
With
The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, the reader seems to return to the imperial courts of lore. As this book itself reads as leaves falling from a tree, it is somewhat reflecting of the kind of inspiration that might have sparked the process for Eileen Tabios, poet and producer of
The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, to make manifest this collection of a new poetic form.
As aptly described by Mark Young, who edits this book with fellow long-time poet, Jean Vengua, one can regard
hay(na)ku as “postcards from wherever their author has touched earth.” Among the various definitions in which the word hay(na)ku is rooted, Vengua notes it to be a double entendre concocted with the scant Japanese poetic style of
haiku and the Pilipino exclamation: “Hay, nakú!” similar to the English expression, “Oh!”
Adopting a tercet comprised of one-, two-, and thee-word lines, the
hay(na)ku represented in this anthology includes writings by a global assortment of poets bringing a sense of balance and a variety of themes. The unfussy layout tends to express a kind of simplicity, but some of the more dark passages make the reader feel as if lured into a chamber a la Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Cask of Amontillado. The following excerpt from “because” by Nicholas Downing expresses this notion using a 3/2/1 pattern versus the 1/2/3 tradition of
hay(na)ku:
my neighbor wants
me dead
because
i have beautiful
hair my
mother
beat me because
she loved
me
she told me
in the
old
country her father
would kill
men
with a machete
because they
looked
at her mother
she was
beautiful
like me and
beauty makes
men
do strange things
she told
meIn contrast is the nursery-like quality of two poems written by Jilly Dybka:
Mega,
giga. Not
far enough away.
§
Facing
this way
and that. Cows.There tends to be a lot more ingenuity when a writer is given limited space—more quality than quantity, less room for pretentiousness.
The First Hay(na)ku Anthology contains a gentle rhythm with a balance of far-reaching styles—forward thinking while being rooted in something in the past. One can read something like this over and over and receive different meanings from it depending upon the experience at that moment. Nevertheless, an enjoyable read that exudes the air of a bumblebee’s haphazard flight pattern while still feeling the innocence of drinking lemonade as a child on a hot, summer day.
