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 commoner audiences to appreciate.” ⁷ When Japanese poetic forms become the inspiration of English poetry, then translation, adaptation and differences in time and place come into play. This brief background of Japanese poetry highlights the tradition Stevenson has gone to and how he has followed and departed from it. He has blended tradition, renewal and innovation in suggestive ways. Stevenson makes use of the serious and humorous, and translates these forms into English and into a new time and context.

Windfall Apples is a full-length collection of tanka and kyoka. The tanka is a serious and mannered poem of feeling and suggestiveness, often about nature, and composed within the confines of a brief and demanding form. Stevenson uses the form of the Japanese-language tanka, but plays with its form. He treats the tanka as an experiment in images and imagistic poetry and expresses a wide array of subjects, including his life in western Canada. Kyoka, poems in the tanka form of five lines, might be called anti-tanka poems because they appear to be less serious, more humorous.⁸ With its often political and social content, the kyoka tends to be sardonic and ironic. It can parody the waka and use slang. The kyoka also echoes senryu in its thematic preoccupation with human nature. Stevenson goes to the traditions of tanka and kyoka to create his book, but the boundary between them changes as they are rendered into English.

Following the conventions of tanka and kyoka in Japanese poetry, Stevenson uses powerful images in his poems and evokes a range of feelings in Windfall Apples. The forms he chooses are compact and require grace and the appearance of effortlessness. He creates a world of the domestic and everyday:

magpie and grackle —who’s the sauciest?cats with piqued earsand quivering noseswant to know

There is a noise in these lines, a quiet listening in anticipation, and a kind of potential action on the brink of realization. Another scene shows the relation between the human and natural worlds. It leaves suspended the tension between them:

febrile web —my wife’s angry talkwith my daughtershakes the raindropsoff a branch

The readers follow the fever of the connection and wonder whether the talk could shake the branch; in a sense, they are led to accept the compact supposition of this small fictional world.

Nature is, of course, a key to the imagery in many of the most beautiful poems in this collection. There is a lightness of touch and a power of observation that lead the readers through the light, the shadow and the feel of the natural realm:

the emerald hour —that time when the grassis its deepest green,cottonwoods whisperwhat the wind knows

Another poem reaches beyond the bounds of the poem itself:

at the farthest reachof my wateringhose streama cabbage whiteflutters a while

From the “while” to the “white,” the stream flutters into space. There are a number of other instances, but I do not wish to give too much away, as part of what these short poems do is compress and surprise.

Stevenson is able to blend these moments with the frictions and potential violence, the frustrations and fascinations of the everyday. This is a poetic world of tension between the ordinary and extraordinary, the rough and delicate. This disjunction involves the reader and gives the collection part of its drama. Here, between word and action, the poetry unfolds. Taking ancient forms of Japanese literature of a time far from the democratic and popular world of the prairie and other landscapes, Stevenson gives them his own vernacular, that of the place he dwells in, the places he visits and knows. He observes and translates the daily turns of a life now into an art that connects the readers with this and other worlds.

Windfall Apples makes an important technical contribution to English-language poetry written in the Japanese style in Canada. It is versatile and the author knows what he wants to do. These poems combine a fluidity of expression with an accessible world for the contemporary reader. Richard Stevenson combines East and West in a suggestive typology. English has long been a dance of many times and places, and is becoming more so all the time. Poems in English, especially those that draw on other languages, forms and literatures, are sites of innovation and interest. Stevenson’s tanka and kyoka make a contribution to that way forward: they look elsewhere and back, to make the here and now something new and remarkable, something to look forward to.

Jonathan HartJanuary 2010