Three
Poet-Editors introduce The First Hay(na)ku Anthology
(Meritage
Press / xPress(ed), San Francisco & St. Helena / Finland, 2005)
A not so tercet note
By Mark
Young
It’s almost paradoxical to be writing an essay about
hay(na)ku, a form that’s extremely simple & has few rules – “Six / words.
Three / lines. One poem.” But don’t let the simplicity deceive. It’s simple in
the sense that a wormhole that passes through the space/time continuum is
simple, &, what’s more, you’re not expected to know the physics of it.
The creation myth of the form has the serendipity
associated with all great discoveries, the right person in the right place at
the right time able to transmute the conjunction of a number of things to
produce something that goes beyond them all – a quote from a Kerouac letter
exposing itself as it fell from an elegant knee, Brautigan counting in the
background of the mind, a cultural heritage of sufficient elasticity to be able
to absorb the form, taste it & say “Haynaku! This is as easy as
one-two-three.”
& then there’s the similarity in name to the
Japanese haiku. Plus a similar structure. But hay(na)ku is an exception to the
quacking duck analogy. Haiku are hidebound with restrictions – seasonal
cyphers, seventeen syllables, the proscription on more than one strophe unless
you’re writing with someone else, bouncing verses back & forth like one of
Corso’s poets hitchhiking on the highway. & then there’s the Aha-Erlebnis, the Aha!-experience,
that’s almost mandatory for the final line.
Hay(na)ku are open. Any subject. No code. Words can be
as short or as long as you want them to be. There can be any number of verses.
The usual 1/2/3 form is expansionary both to the writer & the reader. To
quote Crag Hill from his piece a few pages on:
I’ve been attracted by the line I’ve seen in
these poems: limber, bending, stretching, a yoga, something I haven’t felt much
in the poetics of the line in poetry of the last twenty years. These lines have
hinges, armature, as well as full-ranging shoulders and hips.
Hay(na)ku
is officially defined as a diasporic poetic. Eileen Tabios, in her essay on the
history of the hay(na)ku that accompanies this, refers to the diaspora of the
Filipinos, how there are eight million of them scattered around the globe. New
Zealanders, too, are diasporic. There is a standing joke that could the last
New Zealander to leave the country please turn out the lights. & poets too,
by nature & craft, have embarked on their own diaspora even if they never
leave home.
Regard
hay(na)ku then as postcards from wherever their author has touched earth. They
can depict something as simple as a cormorant sitting on a bollard or as
complex as any painting by Hieronymous Bosch. To close with one of my own:
Hay(na)ku
are both
seed & tree.
*
The Chicken and the Egg
By Jean
Vengua
While we may acknowledge the Japanese haiku’s
traditional focus on brevity, the tercet form called “hay(na)ku” is even more
brief; it springs from the space and breath of an exclamation. The term in its
common Filipino usage registers a moment of excess, a brief venting of some
interior emotion: “Hay, naku!” The “hay” part (pronounced like a long “I”) is
an exclamation similar to “Oh!”, “Ay!”. Or “Oy!” According to the
Tagalong-English Dictionary edited by Leo James English, C.Ss.R., “naku” comes
from the term, Ina (mother) ko! (my), or “my mother!” In act, the pronoun “ku”
is pronounced more like “ko”. The synonym given in the Dictionary is “Madre
mia!” in Spanish.
On the other hand, there is the egg, or offspring
theory. Catalina Cariaga argues that the term, hay, naku, comes from the
Ilocano word for child, “anak”. Her mother would exclaim, “Hay, anak-o!” (Ay,
my child!). Luisa Igloria remembers that “the Ilocano phrases equivalent to
“m’ijo” or “m’ija” (Spanish), were indeed “anak co.” Compact, but containing
infinite potential, the egg can crack open and become many, maanak. In a brief
phrase, one can express surprise, dismay, shock or register a mild curse.
Cariaga recalls that, as an errant child, hearing thtat phrase could also mean
that she was “busted.” She insists that “hay, naku” is a term used familiarly;
that you are more likely to see it around family and friends than to use it
around strangers.
Ernesto Priego writes: “I feel the hay(na)ku is a form
that grants a common space for poetic practice in different languages; a way of
writing in English without completely obliterating one’s “mothertongue.” In an
e-mail message to me, Luisa Igloria notes that “…the word ‘naku’ occurs in
other Southeast Asian languages and dialencts, including Japanese, Indian,
Polynesian, not to mention, in some Latin American indigenous cultures.” There
are over one hundred seventy languages in the Philippine archipelago, and no
doubt, all of them have their own way of expressing “hay naku!”
My point is not to claim a precise etymology, or to
worry about which came first (chicken or egg), but maybe just to note that,
despite its brevity, the name of the form contains precious memory, especially
in those two letters contained like a yolk in parentheses, it is both
“mothertongue” and “offspring”, even as it pays tribute to the Japanese haiku
which happens to play itself out in more formal refrains. I first encountered
the hay(na)ku on the internet. In this medium, it has passed around quickly,
globally; poet-bloggers hae tried it, nursed it, tasted and tested it. I
suppose that poets will each perceive through the lens of their own locale and
language. The hay(na)ku remembers what iti
is: a product of diaspora, its seeds scatter, searching for good ground.
*
For
Nico Vassilakis, Quarrying About Hay(na)ku
By Crag
Hill
(“crag, curious about these
here hay/na/ku's i looked around for definite descript but it seems it's just
one two two three three three is that right? is there another constraint
involved? subject? length? mood? syllabic? is it a blog product? or something
that quivers herein unchecked?”)
Nico, as far as I can tell, the two primary
criteria of an hay(na)ku poem are tercets comprised of a one word line,
followed by a two word line, capped by a three word line.
A blog product? The form first caught my eye
on the As/Is blog, especially the
hay(na)ku produced by Mark Young and Tom Beckett. These poems had the immediacy
of haiku with more, much more surface and sub-surface/versive potential. Word
count shapes the line, not a syllabic, accentual, parsing (though I think
hay(na)ku is open to a variation that could include a tercet made up of a
one-syllable line, followed by a two syllable line, underlined by a three
syllable line). I’ve been attracted by the line I’ve seen in these poems:
limber, bending, stretching, a yoga, something I haven’t felt much in the
poetics of the line in poetry of the last twenty years. These lines have
hinges, armature, as well as full-ranging shoulders and hips. Check some of
Mark Young’s poems out on As/Is and pelican dreaming. They’ve got a
dance I’ve found quite appealing of late.
I’m not sure when Eileen Tabios birthed this
form, but it’s grown exponentially. Although it must not be more than a year
old, there’s an anthology in the works. I'll paste in the submissions call
which provides some more information.*
* HHR Editor’s Note: Crag was
referencing the First Hay(na)ku Anthology, which was followed by two more
hay(na)ku anthologies; for hay(na)ku information, go HERE.
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