hosts: Shalini Pattabiraman & Vidya Shankar
mentor: Lorraine Haig
A Thursday Feature.
poet of the month: Stephen Henry Gill (haigō: Tito)
6 June 2024
This month we have the pleasure of featuring Tito (Stephen Gill).
Stephen was born in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. He began writing haiku and haibun in 1972. He studied in Kyoto between 1974-75 and graduated from London University in Japanese Language & Literature in 1979.
Stephen spent much of the early 80s in Tokyo; in the late 80s, he worked as a radio script writer for BBC and thereafter created 21 programmes mostly about Japan, all featuring haiku/haibun. His ‘Insect Musicians’ won the Sony Prize for Best Documentary in 1989. In the 1990s he edited ‘Rediscovering Basho’ (Global Oriental) and served on the British Haiku Society Committee as national events officer. In 1995, he moved to Kyoto, working at Ritsumeikan and later Ryukoku Universities.
Most recently, Stephen has been lecturing on Haiku in English Literature and other topics at Kyoto University and lives in the now-rural ancient capital, Asuka, in Nara prefecture. He founded the Hailstone Haiku Circle, Kansai, in 2000 and launched the Circle’s website, Icebox, in 2008. With Nobuyuki Yuasa in 2012, he founded the Genjuan International Haibun Contest.
His books include ‘1 Poet on Mt. Ogura, 100 Poems in a Day’ (haiku & tanka collection) and ‘100 Poets on Mt. Ogura, 1 Poem Each’ (bilingual haiku & tanka anthology, HSA Kanterman Prize for Best Anthology, 2011). The list also includes ‘Stone Birthdays’ (in Japanese, illus. for children), ‘Enhaiklopedia’, ‘Meltdown’, ‘Persimmon’ (Eng. haiku anthologies), ‘From the Cottage of Visions’ (Eng. haibun anthologies).
Tito (Stephen Gill)
Dimension Box
Late August 1978. On a long journey, driving through Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. The great upheavals of mountain formation; the vast, echoing symphony of glaciation. I saw and heard and felt these keenly. Over the surface of a deep blue lake, a steady breeze …
The dream of all this was soon locked up somewhere in the ether …
Until, one day, almost twenty years along the way, a friend showed me a ceramic casket. Its ‘stars were in their places’.
One of Takahiro Kondo’s dimension boxes has just now opened up …
Rock sky
earth music
and accordingly …
rhythm of the lake waves
(pub. in ‘Dimension Box’, Nennendo, Japan, 1997)
SP: Where and how did your writing journey start?
Tito: Dropping out of Oxford University in early 1972 saw me spend a week or so at Samye-Ling, a Tibetan monastery in Scotland, in whose library I found a copy of ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North & Other Travel Sketches’ by Basho, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. As I had already done some hard overland travelling in the Middle East and Southern Asia and had written some poems as I had done so, I took readily to the travelogue format and to the way the haiku were used at intervals to sink more deeply into the poetic world. I was preparing at the time for another long journey and decided heretofore to try the new short four-line form Yuasa had used in that book.
An example, ‘A Visit to Ghandrung’, of the haiku and haibun he began to write that year is given here.
A VISIT TO GHANDRUNG (3 excerpts, September 1972)
1. Phewa Tal
Inspired with the desire to see the rise of the September Moon over the Fish Tail Peaks of Machha Puchhare, grabbed my blanket, pen and paper, called my dog, Gabbitas, and set off a couple of hours before dawn. With my two companions, Jon and Mick, I boarded the long dugout canoe moored at the end of the lane from my house, and we were paddled, Red Indian-style, westwards down the lake. We sat with the chill of first light on the water.
As dawn touched the snowy Himalayas—and our wake—with violet, silver and orange, I brought out the rakshi, and we drank a toast to our journey as we approached the far shore.
Bidden farewell
by the morning star:
rice wine
amongst the ripples
But, just as we were leaving the open lake, the canoe came to a sudden halt. One of our two oarsmen sprang out and began … to walk upon the water! Having just finished our wine, it was some time before we understood that we had grounded on a sandbank.
2. Ghandrung
We were greeted on awakening by long, curling fingers of cold white cloud creeping through the open door. Outside, it was still drizzling.
A pair of watery eyes
belonging to a buffalo
gaze calmly at …
an autumn morning
Woodsmoke lingers, blue
amongst the willows:
in a drift, pretending
not to notice
We took refuge from the falling dew and watched a team of Indian carpenters, up from the plains, at their work of making beds, chairs and tables. It seemed they were as irritated by the weather as we were, for they all wore long faces, which only broadened when we asked if they were all related. Of the eight, it seemed, six were brothers.
3. Birethanti
In Birethanti, I met an old man from Madras. A bright toothy smile, long snowy hair bound into a topknot; a kind and wrinkled face illumined by fiery eyes. He invited me to stay the day. He was returning from a pilgrimage to Muktinath, and there were many places I had previously been of which he had stories to tell. But the longest bridge was still to cross, followed immediately by the steepest climb, so bidding him safe journey, I hurried along after my friends.
Remembered how rotten was the wood of the suspension bridge, how it had leaned at a drunken angle, and how dubiously in the middle it had sagged. Finding it in even worse repair than expected, I was thus very surprised to see the young mastiff, Boromir, already quietly watching my friends sipping tea on the far side! When I got over, I was told that Jon had started to run with the dog on the rope before they had turned the corner onto the bridge, and that by the time the lurching wolf had realised where he was, he was already more than halfway over.
As if to remind me
of the leagues above the mist,
my friend now wears
a shirt of azure
(written Nepal, 9.72; published in ‘Genjuan Haibun Contest Decorated Works 2012-2014’, Hailstone Haiku Circle Publications, Japan, 2015)
Footnotes:
(1) ‘A Visit to Ghandrung’ was SHG’s first haibun, written as ‘Tito’ (his nickname, as well as haigō), in Nepal within a year of having read NY’s Penguin translations of Basho’s travel sketches!
(2) Gabbitas: the name of a small b/w Tibetan dog traded earlier that year for Tito’s rucksack.
(3) Jon & Mick: two British teachers living, as Tito was, in Pokhara, beneath the Annapurna Range, of which twin-peaked Mt. Machha Puchhare (7,000m) is the nearest.
(4) rakshi: Nepalese clear rice wine.
(5) buffalo: a water buffalo—rather surprising to find one in this village at almost 2,000m altitude!
(6) Muktinath: a remote Hindu pilgrims’ destination at 3,700 m, famed because both water and flame miraculously emerge from the ground at the same place.
(7) Boromir: a huge black Tibetan mastiff puppy of almost one year, just purchased by Jon and Mick, but whose appearance was already quite fearsome!
SP: I am fascinated by the four-line haiku you have composed in these haibun. Could you share some more details about the four-line haiku, its prevalence and use, and its aesthetic form?
Tito: There have only been a handful of haiku poets in Japan who have intentionally lineated
their Japanese haiku as four lines, rather than as one —Takayanagi Shigenobu (1923-1983) and, more recently, Hayashi Kei (b. 1953) for example — but I was influenced by neither of them, receiving the form without second thoughts back in the early 70s from Nobuyuki Yuasa's 'Narrow Road' (Basho) and 'Day of My Life' (Issa) English translations.
I think both Yuasa and I felt that translating into four lines allowed more variety of break (1:3, 2:2, 3:1, as opposed to 2:1 or 1:2 for the three-line form); and also, that drawing out such a brief expression over four lines often allows for a one- or two-word line, which can heighten poetic effect and slow down the reader's experience.
Today, Yuasa only translates into 5-7-5 three-line form, and I too have always thought that 17 syllables in English roughly corresponds to the amount of information to be gleaned by Japanese readers from their 17 moji (kana letters). Unlike Yuasa, however, today I still use the four-line form (I call it 'haiqua') almost as often as I use the three-line one.
I sincerely believe the West has got it wrong to cut back English haiku poems to an average of only 10 syllables or so - too short! To be able to write well in ten syllables is extremely difficult and most do not need to aspire to do that. I also believe that cadence (the sound of the words) is important in haiku, and, in that respect, haiqua have the potential to be more musical.
Prompt: This week's prompt invites you to seek a box. Think of its shape, its texture, its weight in your hands and write about what it might reveal if it is opened. Take your mind to out of the box places! The box could be metaphorical too!
Haibun outside this prompt is welcome too.
Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!
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PLEASE NOTE:
1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt. Please put your name and country of residence under your poem, it makes the editors' work easier. Thanks.
2. Share your best-polished pieces.
3. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written.
Let it simmer for a while.
4. When poets give suggestions and if you agree to them - post your final edited version on top of your original version.
5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.
We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished haibun (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly journal.