“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day…” Elizabeth Bowen’s apercu is worthy of the seasonal sense that suffuses haiku, though it didn’t really work for me this year. Winter went away yet I kept waiting on the soft evening with Change in the air. At least I didn’t miss this…
I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for years before I learned to clock the cherry/apple blossoms that bloom each April in Riverside Park. Thanks to the second book, “Spring,” of R.H. Blyth’s four volumes on haiku, I’ll now enter the park justified (even if I’m deflected from worthy, worldly protests on the college campus in my neighborhood)…
…In these latter-day;
Degenerate times
…Cherry-blossoms everywhere! — Issa
From Blyth’s gloss:
According to Buddhism, the world has been growing more corrupt since the death of Buddha. Yet even in such a hell on earth as this present world, every spring paradisal flowers bloom in profusion everywhere. (This is to say, Issa feels and expresses some doubt of his own creed of The Pure Land Sect, that all is vanity, this world is a dewdrop world, and the life after death the all-important thing.)
There is a trace here of Browning’s feeling…
God’s in his heaven,
All’s right with the world
Riverside’s cherry trees are concentrated in two stretches between 101st and 93rd Streets, but I never really placed them properly until my buddy, the late Douglas Cushman, steered me around the park one springtime in the 90s.[1]
Cush venerated Bashô and I wish to hell we could talk through Blyth’s haiku bibles.[2] I now twig how he was acting in the tradition, give or take a few syllables, when he appended what’s known to haiku practitioners as a death-verse in a last note to the last poem in his manuscript, “The City Among Us,” which he finished at a Bronx hospice. His last lines distanced my cancer-stricken friend from his son Matthew and his playmates.
Tossing a ball,
Matthew and Dalton and Eddie
run farther from me.
And farther still.
II
Bashô’s death verse:
Ill on a journey,
My dreams hover
Over a withered moor.
sparked (what Blyth terms) a “blasphemous and excellent” parody:
House-imprisoned,
My dreams hover
Over a prostitute quarter.
This is an example of senryu—a form of satirical verse structurally similar to haiku that developed about hundred years[3] after Bashô freed Japan’s short forms of poetry from punsters and wits even as he set the three line, seventeen syllable template. Social life rather than nature provides the subject matter for senryu. Blyth’s volume, Senryu, opens with an introduction that contrasts the higher graces of haiku’s “spots of time” with senryu’s excruciating moments, which are marked by human-centric humor…
Waiting,
…..For the next sneeze,—
…What a funny face!Christ and Buddha are here the same as Tom, Dick and Harry.
And one more that nobody can deny…
Somebody says,
…“You’ve got a bit of rice
On the end of your nose.” — KenkabôIs it possible for anybody to be told this and remain unperturbed, to be without irritation, self-consciousness, facetiousness, shamefacedness?
“Democracy” is at the core of both haiku and senryhu as Blyth insists though he’s careful about the D-word (“that nowadays means whatever one wants”). To him, it implies “two things all important to the human spirit, respect and criticism.” Haiku amplifies the capacity for reverence; senryu rolls its eyes:
From their faces,
…They are going to live
Forever. — Shimpei
Senryu are ego-busters that break through abstractions and irrealism:
Senryhu brings us back to the here and now; haiku is that “something evermore about to be.” Both are necessary for our life, the going out and the returning, but perhaps after all, life, like charity begins at home.
Though nothing is given…
Back home from the flower-viewing, —
…..Their house
Is burnt to the ground! — KenkabôThis Senryu is heartless, and yet it is poetry. Life is like this. The warmth of the sun brings out the cherry blossoms; and it dries the house, so it burns briskly. There is a sameness, but also what a violence of difference, in the flowers, their faint perfume and pinkness, and blackened stumps of pillars and posts.
Blyth’s domestic sense isn’t usually so dire.
Dai no ji ratte wagaya no aji o shiri
Stretched out at full length
…..You feel the meaning
Of home.The first line is literally, “becoming like the letter 웃”. There is always a certain amount of constriction of mind and body when we are with other people, in other places. Only at home is it possible to know comfort.
Blyth’s alive to how this next verse by Issa pulls the moon out of sky, domesticating it at table…
…..A mountain village;
Right into the broth
…..The bright full moon.The family are having their meal outside the house, and they can see the moon in the bowls they are eating from.
Senryu are homey but, like haiku, they have a quality (per Blyth) “we may call transcendence.” Haiku’s transcendence rests on other-worldliness; senryu’s “is in its being beyond emotion, custom, ways of thinking, morality, religion, race, above humanity. Indeed above poetry itself.” Senryu could give two shits…
The thief’s dung∆
…..Standing there,
And looking at it.∆It was believed that if a thief left his excretion in the hall, the family would not wake.
xxx
…..Excreting in the field,
Looking at a fire in the night
in the distance. — DaitôenThis is an unusually poetical senryu. It is a cold winter night; the sky is clear and the stars are shining brightly. As he squats there in the frozen field, his mind vacant, he sees quite far away a fire, and hears the alarm-bell ringing. In this senryu there is a gradation: excreting, the field, the fire, the distance, night.
Senryu is beyond proprieties but it’s not above it all. What comes through the best senryu (like Daitôen’s still life with steaming pile and distant fire in the dark) is “some kind of human warmth…
This same human warmth…is not a commiseration or sentimentality, not the lachrimae rerum, but under and in all the sharp criticism and malicious perspicacity, that tragic integrity of mind which feels as painful but does not reject, which sees the good and the true and the beautiful, but is not overwhelmed by them.
More malicious perspicacity (with a sweet center):
Round the roast sweet-potatoes
…..Speaking ill
Of other people. — EishiThese are two of the pleasures of life. Combined, they are some of the best that this world offers to women.
Blyth on gender matters won’t do due to his essentialism and patriarchal a prioris.[4] (I was ashamed for him when he invoked lame jokes about ill-favored suffragettes in Senryu.) But he wasn’t dim about what men like him owed women…
A great work;
…..The wife
Takes in the neighbors’
…..sewing.The man sits at the table, his hair on end, his clothes untidy, a grim look on his face, writing the book of the century, the work that will set the Thames on fire. His wife meantime must earn their living by taking in other people’s needlework.
Blyth was alive to the worth of “woman’s work” and men who didn’t have much to give…
The whole of the father’s repertoire,
…..Is to throw the child
Up in the air. — IsôrôAll the father can do is to throw the boy up in the air and catch him. When this is done, he has no other means to amuse the child.
Senryu has good-enough mothers put fathers in their extraneous places…
Soeji shite tana ni iwashi ga gozariyasu
Giving the baby
……….the breast,
…..“On the shelf
You’ll find some
……….sprats.”The wife is lying down feeding the baby, and her husband comes back home late. She tells him casually that there is some fish in the cupboard. When a woman has a baby, and especially when she is feeding it, she is almighty. The woman’s language, “gozariyasu,” shows that she was formally one of “those women,” and takes some pleasure, perhaps, in putting her husband in his place.
Senryu encompass the dailiness of caregiving:
Blowing the nose
Of the child at play,
As though trying to twist it off. — KenkabôWhen we blow a child’s nose we are very often in a state of irritation, and somehow or other feel a desire to do a little more than merely hold the handkerchief to his nose. To this is added the fact that the child is trying to get away as soon as possible.[5]
Blyth wouldn’t have much sympathy for not-knowing parents who consign caregiving to the nanny-class.
Wiping away the tears,
…..And incidentally
Blowing her nose for her. — FutujinThe child cried and the mother dries the tears and then at the same time has to wipe the nose. If you have done this, you know the meaning of this senryu; if you haven’t you don’t.
Blyth wasn’t sentimental about children:
“Let’s Play! Let’s play!”
…..To the child
Who has some cakes. — MatsuoAs with Aesop’s fables, we feel keenly our wickedness and stupidity, our selfishness and slyness, when we see it in children or animals.
A line that leads me to an aside on Issa who, per Blyth, came closest to “uniting haiku and senryu.”: Issa’s knack for balancing humanism and nature is all there in this portrait of a child with a kitten:
Naku neku ni..akamme wo shite.. temari knaak
The little girl playing ball
…..Now makes a face
At the mewing kittenWhat is translated as “makes a face” is literally “makes a red eye,” by pulling down the lower eyelid, to express derision.
The little girl has been playing with the kitten but has tired of it and begins to play ball. The kitten, feeling neglected, begins to mew disconsolately and tries to touch the ball as it bounces on the ground. The little girl makes face at the kitten and goes on with her play. The Zen of this in the little girl’s attitude to the kitten. She treats it entirely as another human being, another child; it is not one of the “lower animals.” She, and Issa with her, is in that state: “Where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Buddha is all, and in all.”[6]
That’s more Issa than senryu, which see through even the most humane superstitions and teases all doctrines. The following verse mocks Zen, offering what Blyth terms a “very keen and searching criticism.” (He would’ve dug Bakhtin’s rad responsiveness to nothing-is-sacred dialogic.)[7]
“All is originally emptiness”
…..Is handed over,
To the police station. — HarusameA man went to an eating-house and drank and ate his fill, and then disclosed that he had no money to pay for it. The irate proprietor hauled the man before the police and demanded him to be punished. This is the whole story, but the senryu writer reminds us of the words of Zen, that all is of its nature empty, empty in its self-nature and that therefore there is no reason for the proprietor to be angry because the man’s purse is empty.
Blyth mused there had never been a single haiku written about money, but there were thousands of senryu. (He cited a Japanese volume that collected and classified three hundred verses on money.) Friday night, just got paid:
Salary day;
…..Involuntarily
He turns the corner into the
…..street of lights. — BuhotsuHe had no intention of going into this lighted street with its bars and café’s, restaurants and houses of assignation. It was not the money in his pocket that made him suddenly turn the corner. It was all inevitable, all determined from the beginning of time.
Working: we do it for the money. Blyth’s volume of senryu includes a section on professions with indelible images — a tinsmith whose quitting time brings out the quiet in the evening, a peaceable butcher ferociously sharpening his knife, rookie cops with fresh uniforms wilting under the sun, Edo detectives acting out like Noir pricks, a kindly pick-pocket, a make-‘em-wait ticket-taker, ethical beggars, monks with fleas, a ferryman whose crowded raft carries a farting horse, a delivery boy distracted by high hopes, a “cow-man walking along cow-like,” a grumpy merchant gazing at the unmonetizable sea, a grasping old rich man gathering twigs for firewood, a clerk whose daytime face hides his libertine nights, clueless teachers, babysitters with real skills, a doctor of death…
Making known
…..At the Buddhist family altar,
That he has received a doctorate. — ShakumaThe young man’s parents worked hard to allow their son to become a doctor of literature, but died before he did so. There is a kind of tragic irony in this verse, a humour that keeps it from sentimentality.
Senryu tell how work-life traduces talent:
The genius
…..Is commiserated with
But used just the same. — KinpaThe boy in some office or factory is extremely clever, and everyone says that he is too good to be here; but he must work just the same. The verse is a satire on the apathy of people, the shallowness of their compassion and admiration.
Blyth flips that script in this example of what he calls (in his treatment of “The Humour of Senryu” – see here.) the “comedy of stupidity.”
Trusted,
…..He ended his life
As a bill collector. — IkkôThis man was honest and faithful. Everyone trusted him. As a result, he never advanced in position but lived and died a collector of money. What people really trusted was his stupidity.
Senryu aren’t dumb about money. And they’re alive to sexual urges: “nothing brings out the difference between senryu and haiku than their relation to the subject of sex, to haiku, sex barely exists; to senryu it is all-pervading.”
The man of principle;
…..Silently,
He makes many children. — HarusameThe man of integrity does not speak of women, does not visit prostitutes, is apparently quite sexless, — and yet has as large a family as the best of them.
III
While sex “barely exists” in haiku, it slips into Bashô’s origin story. His trip reports on Northern seascapes feature invocations of feminine beauty. And there’s even a touch of pictorial priapism as he takes in the miraculous beauty of Kisagata on a blue sky day (after a rain-dark night)…
I sat in a spacious room of the temple to command the entire view of the lagoon. When the hanging screens were rolled up…an extraordinary view unfolded before my eyes – Mount Chokai supporting the sky like a pillar in the South with its shadowy reflection in the water, the barrier-gate of Muyamuya just visible in the west, an endless causeway leading as far as Akita in the east, and finally in the north, Shiogoshi, the mouth of the lagoon with waves of the ocean breaking against it. Although little more than mile in width, this lagoon is not in the least inferior to Matsushima in charm and grace. There is, however, a remarkable difference between the two. Matsushima is a cheerful laughing beauty, while the charm of Kisagata is the beauty of its weeping countenance. It is not only lonely but also penitent, as it were, for some unknown evil. Indeed, it has a striking resemblance to the expression of a troubled mind…
Further on up the road after dysentery days (“exhausted by the labor of crossing dangerous places by the sea with such horrible names as Children-Desert-Parents or Parents-Desert-Children, Dog-denying or Horse-repelling…”):
I went to bed early…The voices of two young women whispering in the next room, however, came creeping into my ears. They were talking to an elderly man, and I gathered from their whispers that they were concubines…and that the old man, having accompanied them on their way to the Ise Shrine, was going home the next day with their messages to their relatives and friends. I sympathized with them, for as they said themselves among their whispers, their life was such that they had to drift along even as the white froth of waters that beat on the shore, and having been forced to find a new companion each night, they had to renew their pledge of love at every turn, thus proving each time the fatal sinfulness of their nature. I listened to their whispers till fatigue lulled me to sleep.
When, on the following day I stepped into the road, I met these women again. They approached me and with some tears in their eyes, “We are forlorn travelers, complete strangers on this road. Will you be kind enough to at least let us follow you? If you are a priest as your black robe tells us, have mercy on us and help us learn the great love of our Saviour.” “I am greatly moved by your words” I said in reply after a moment’s thought, “but we have so many places to stop at on the way that we cannot help you. Go as other travelers go. If you have trust in the Saviour, you will never lack for divine protection…” As I stepped away from them my heart was filled with persisting pity.
Under the same roof
We all slept together
Concubines and I
Buck-cloves and the moonAs I recited this poem to Sora [Bashô’s student-companion], he immediately put it down in his notebook.
On this score, though, Issa was Basho’s truest soul mate…
Tama-arare .yotaka wa tsuki ni .kaerumeri
Hail-stones on the ground;
The “night hawks” come back home
In the moonbeams.Night hawks were the lowest kind of prostitute in Edo. They appeared after dark, carrying straw mats. Issa is sleeping alone, in the cold, and hears them walking by or talking. He also knows what cold and hunger and suffering mean and the softness of the language he uses, kaerumeri, shows his compassionate feeling
IV
Senryu writers talked straight about the world’s oldest profession. Blyth took their lead. (“Ripeness not morality is all.”) While he acknowledged public prostitution, “like war and slavery and racial discrimination is indefensible and should be abolished,” he adopted the attitude of senryu writers (which is “that of God”). Beyond condoning or condemning, they were interested in what happens in brothels—“it is tragic, it is comic, it is so…the grievous, the humorous and the inevitable enter into all the best senryu on this subject…”
Blyth’s brief history of the place of the Yoshiwara in pre-Westernized Japan, underscores how Confucianism tended to make domestic life extremely formal and stiff. Prostitutes bent all the rules:
Even when the courtesan farts
…..She does it
As a favorWhen the courtesan makes a rude noise before her guest, she turns it into a kind of compliment, saying they are more intimate than husband and wife.
Blyth noted that women in sophisticated Yoshiwara were often able to pick up knowledge their “virtuous sisters” missed, but they had to be careful…
Shiro o shiru to sezu towarete shirinsen
Being asked if she knew,
…..Not acknowledging she knows,
“I don’t know.”The language of this, shirinsen, “I don’t know,” belongs to the courtesans of the Yoshiwara. Many of these women had more education and accomplishments than the average man. However, no man likes a woman better educated than himself, and so when asked, for example, “Who is the painter of that hanging scroll?” they would answer, hiding their knowledge, “I don’t know.”
Not every courtesan was perfectly not-knowing:
Buying a prostitute
…..That told no lies,
I felt lonely.She must have been a novice at the game, and had not yet acquired the habit of giving her clients the answers they would like to hear.
Blyth limns the commingling of art-life and sex-life…
First of all,
…..The beginning of dissipation,–
Cherry blossoms at night.On the Yoshiwara-zutsumi, or bank of the Yoshiwara, fine cherry blossoms bloomed. The people of Edo went to this noted place to see the cherry blossoms at night; which are in themselves things of pure beauty, but lead the mind toward other things, and places close by.
Blyth was a modern. He knew from Freud and Darwin[8] though he didn’t let the great de-mystifiers rob him of laughs or the world’s enchantments…
When the hand-cart puller
…..Sees a girl,
He puts on a spurt.This is, after all, Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” and “Descent of Man,” in seventeen syllables and the humour thrown in for nothing, the humour which is perhaps the meaning of the universe that Darwin left out.
V
Blyth ended his introduction to Senryu by proposing that a passage from a letter by R.L. Stevenson[9] amounts to the “best (unconscious) advocacy of senryu ever written.” Stevenson, ill (as ever) smiles through his latest bout with the bad lungs that would do him in…
…My view of life is essentially the comic…And to me these things are essentially good; beauty touched with sex and laughter…Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it does, it does so by heroic illusion; the anti-masque has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our steps in life, and sits by our death-bed, and certainly redacts the epitaph, laugher has been lost from these great-hearted lies. But the comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life…embraces the greatest number of elements of fate and character and tells its story, not with one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth.
Blyth’s (and Stevenson’s) will to look upon all things with “pity and mirth” helped me see through master-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s unillusioned eye. Without Blyth (and senryu), something about Kore-eda’s modest masterpiece, I Wish, would’ve been lost on me. I couldn’t figure out why the youngest of the two brothers in the movie wears a permanent smile.[10] These two boys — around nine or ten years old — Ryu (!) and Koichi, are played by real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda (from whom the director got perfectly natural performances). Their parents have broken up; the mother has returned to her hometown with Koichi; Ryu is still in Osaka with his dad who plays in an indie-rock bank (and does temp jobs to get by). At one point slacker dad articulates a senryu-esque skepticism of penetrative “spots of time”: “There’s room in this world for wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You’d choke.” The smiley boy, Ryu, will end up helping his older brother learn to resist choking kinds of love and depth – though, early on, his mug bugs Koichi who is desperate to reconstitute their family. (Per a Guardian review: “The film is about the powerful imperative of family unity, but also about the inevitability, and even desirability, of families finally disintegrating and allowing everyone involved a painful kind of freedom.”) Ryu misses his brother and mother but, having endured scenes from his parents’ bad marriage, he’s ready to let the past go.
First, though, he hangs with his brother when Koichi hatches a fantastic plan on one of their mobile calls: Koichi has heard that two newly built bullet train lines generate a supernatural force at the point where the trains blow by each other. If the boys skip school, get to this nexus, and make a wish, their family can be restored. A bunch of their wishful friends come along for the ride, which turns out to be a glad trip, though miracles aren’t happening on the track (outside of Koichi’s half-reconciliation with the reality that life will roll on even in the absence of his gone family).
The journey’s focal point, here, is on point. Happiness, after all, being no more nor less than the road by which it does seem possible truly to get there from here.[11]
VI
I got happy the night after the winter day I started reading Blyth and realized there might be an essay in it. In dreams, I headed off for Central Park after midnight – lately I’ve liked hopping the iron fence and sitting by the reservoir, just me and my moony shadow. This time, though, C.P. seemed more like Morningside Park in the 80s, with forbidding hills and prospects. Maybe I like a challenge? I came to an encampment — homeless people… Nope, more like vacationers. Dawn was breaking and a road came into view, but I wasn’t in Manhattan anymore…I went up to the tenters, (were they the charcoal burners from Swallows and Amazons!?[12]) asking for directions back to the city…but my respondents weren’t sure…I woke up – checked the time – and fell back into my dream – I was walking in the Village now, up the stairs to a party with serious martinis, then back out on the street searching for a cab to a Kore-Eda flic showing somewhere in Brooklyn. Not my borough, but somehow I knew where I was going…
VII
I think I’d already seen I Wish (though I hadn’t read Blyth on senryu and Ryu’s smile wasn’t poetry to me yet). I’d bet Kore-eda would’ve enjoyed Blyth’s unimperial company. Kore-eda almost missed his calling because he assumed he needed to be more forceful. In a Q&A, he noted he once saw a short documentary with footage of Kurosawa directing Ran and Kagemuska:
He was on set with a megaphone shouting at the crew…I thought that was how a filmmaker had to be…and that I would be totally unsuited for it…
But he was made to direct as is apparent in his first movie, Maborosi, which you can watch here for free. More haiku-y than senryu, Maborosi has a seasonal arc. It’s the story of suicide’s widow who must find a way to live forward, striking out for a coastal town where she’s arranged to marry again and make a new blended family with her son and a new stepdaughter.
The kids come together in a scene for the Ages. Spring is on screen as they leave the hills where there’s still snow, heading around a pond into the trees and down to the sea…
The kids’ shadows on the pond are as clear as Issa’s reflective verse…
…..Even my shadow,
Is safe and sound and in the best of health,
…..This first morning of spring.
Blyth’s gloss: “The shadow is felt, as once by primitive men, to have an independent existence that is nevertheless vitally and fatally related to that of men.” In Maborosi, the wife’s shadow gets ill. As vital spring sensations on the coast fade away in the heat, the widow can’t shake doomy thoughts of her late husband’s suicide and prior traumas rooted in her childhood. Her despairing movement of mind comes to a head in November (“the month without God” in Old Japan’s mythos). She comes through, though, and the movie eases out with her watching (from a distance) as her new husband teaches her son to ride a bike…
…..
The final chapter, “Life,” of Blyth’s Senryu opens with a bike-rider (and a charming sketch that, unfortunately, isn’t scannable).
On a bicycle
…..Lifting up both legs,
Through a puddle. – ShukeiThis has a purely pictorial value, and yet it registers an experience as looking at the cherry blossoms, and one which, because physical, has its own particular meaning.
I’m thinking about the particulars of my own son-on-wheels. His first bike-ride was in…Cherry Park. Prepped by scooters, he got his balance quickly. While he still likes to bike, he’s more of a skater. (I remember one bad Xmas that was saved by his first board. He was shaky when he tried it out on the walkway in the center of the Columbia campus, but suddenly he was off and rolling.)
Our college boy often calls home as he’s riding in Hyde Park now. On the phone, I hear the sound of his wheels and (sometimes) the wind from the Lake…He’s coming home to his mom and me soon, which will make our springtime in New York. Yet he’ll be on the road again soon…
VIII
…..A flower-bed
Where morning-glories are being sown, —
…..Loneliness already! — IssaHow delicate the mind of man is, especially that of a poet, elated and cast down with the veriest trifles and mere fancies. By the association of ideas, morning glories—autumn—loneliness—the planting of the seeds in spring brings up the recollection of their fated decline and withering so soon as bloomed. So with our children, when they say “Look papa! I can reach to this place now!” our pleasure is a sadder one than theirs, for it is tinctured with the feeling of time, the friend and enemy of mankind.
IX
The fall of spring is always melancholy. But there’s nothing you can do but…keep punching? I’m looking backward (and forward) to an October day in a New England wood (where I may have walked again in my Central Park dream)…
Amid a red and yellow riot
…..One green tree,
Fall is my season.
…..
Part 1 here.
…..
Notes
1 We started our walk at the public garden.
The Community Garden
Thistles just opening suggested a wild field.
Hidden beneath them, paths led symmetrically
to a central ring.
Everything in the garden was fit to the design.
Close by, along the sides of a walk,
lots were each assigned a gardener.
At first all had been utter dishevelment.
Colors in commotion, tall cleone stole light
from cymbalaria sprawled on the ground.
But one woman would plant her garden
in reply to another’s,
and the whole began to take its form
through conversations among themselves.
I visited with an old friend
enjoying the unfinished design.
— Robert Douglas Cushman (From “The City Among Us”)
I doubt I’m the old buddy in Douglas’s poem. But it could’ve been our witty mutual friend Rob Chametzky who schooled me on how cutting words in haiku are deployed, usually after the 5th or 12th syllable, to turn the verse around.
“Me, make any jokes?
They would need to have punchlines—
Or some kirejis.”
2 And Ruskin on Gothic Art?
3 “The immediate origin of senryu was Maekuzuke, which arising in the Genroku Era, 169-1703, continued into the Temmei era, 171-9, spreading among the people, and appealing to a still greater number than did haiku, which had seen the beginning of its flourishing period a hundred years before with the advent of Basho, 1644-1694, and Onitsura.”
4 When it comes to gender, Blyth was a man of his time though his easy, un-self-conscious responsiveness to the gay poet James Kirkup hints he was ahead of it too.
5 This passage had placed me at the kitchen table. I’m seven, my mother has been in the hospital for a long stretch, and I’m watching my harried father futz with the stove-and-sink. I surely wanted to get away from the room where it wasn’t happening – back to my mom!
6 Blyth puts his Eastern spin on a biblical verse, Colossians 3.1. Not 2 Corinthians, but perhaps Trump and Lee Greenwood will commission a MAGA translation.
7 Some Bakhtinian must explicate the relation between senryu and Menippean satire (and the rise of the novel).
8 He appreciated this senryu:
Losing his job
…..he tries reading
Marx.
The sketch of the desperate and confused reader that accompanies this verse in Senryu nails it. (Though I’m not out to shut the gates of Marxism.)
9 One of Blyth’s favorite Victorians.
10 There’s another boy who smiles through excruciation in Kore-Eda’s newest movie, Monster. Kore-Eda didn’t write the script for this film and he noted in a Q&A that if he had, he might’ve given the scarifying material about homophobia a slightly more humorous slant.
11 AKA the Billies…Young Billy, who treats Roger for a sprained ankle in Swallowdale, is over 70 and Old Billy is 94.