#bwls

Q&A with Judy Halebsky & Angela Terry of Haiku Northwest (after her lecture, “From Haiku to Collage, A Body-Based Poetics,” February 29th, 2016 at Seattle’s Hugo House)

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Angela Terry: Where I really want to start is with the whole issue of translation, and especially translation between English and Japanese because the cultures are so different. When you talk about the context and connotation--when we don't have those connotations to truly understand--how far do we have to go back? How much research do we have to do in order to really get what the poet is actually saying?

Judy Halebsky: That’s a great question because it’s such a journey, but I think we can enjoy the journey, for example, when we think of Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku, it’s very accessible--you can just read the haiku and you might not need to concern yourself with formal qualities of haiku or historical context. But should you, they can keep unfolding. That’s really rich and I think the work of trying to make that journey is valuable to us as poets and also as human beings, to see outside of ourselves. I also think there are ways in our contemporary experience that you can have a connection. I was raised, I’m embarrassed to say, by some real atheists, and I think that is part of what helps me like Basho’s work. That the corollary poetry of seventeenth-century England was really dealing with questions of the soul and I didn’t relate to those questions. But Basho’s work of attachment and impermanence--I’m dealing with that! I’m working on that--so that’s also a kind of form of connection.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS

I have a question about the connotations of language. Is that something you were told by people who are Japanese, or is it something that you developed through hearing it, or is it something cultural that you just kind of absorbed?

JH: I have studied a lot of Japanese, but most of the things I know come from reading about Basho’s writing. I can kind of look at the Japanese and affirm the parts of the translation: I can tell the order, I can know the meaning of some words. I studied modern Japanese--Basho wrote in classical Japanese--so mostly I read sources, I read detailed sources. I didn’t start there, I had to work up to it over time. And really, it’s an exciting time to be reading Japanese literature because the scholarship on Japanese literature is increasing in its depth and breadth every year, we really have some phenomenal translators that have an incredibly high level of fluency in Japanese and are beautiful writers in English. The new sources that we have coming out are just so rich.

Can you share some of your daily practice with us?

JH: Sure. I am not a poet that writes every day necessarily, but I always write in my journal. I have an academic schedule, I teach at a little college, so I sometimes write seasonally. I do have two different poetry workshops that are always meeting so I have this practice of writing in my journal, of journal writing, and I also have a practice of looking to sources for inspiration for the poems. I find that I get a poem when there is some kind of connection between what I’m writing about in my journal and something that I’ve come across. Like when there can be some kind of resonance or happenstance, then I’ve got something to be writing.

I come at this from a different side because I’m more focused on the visual arts but I actually just appreciate all of your comments about cultivating your practice and how you use your physical being to kind of integrate into your ideas. I’m very interested in the creative moment: when does it happen, when do you actually get a new idea or something that’s really interesting to put down. I wondered if you had any comments about that or whether you can recognize that moment? The other one I was thinking about is that you were talking about doing this dance and you kind of had this euphoric, wonderful experience where time was meaningless, and we know that feeling. Do you find that those moments result in some sort of creative work or is it just something that you carry with you as a part of yourself?

JH: I find that with writing, most of the time it's going badly. You know, plenty of times I’m writing because I have anxiety or something that I’m working out. I really like to try to write from a dream state, an underwater kind of state, but generally... there are two poetic moments. There’s our ‘lived experience’ where you have a moment of stillness in an otherwise busy life, and then there’s a time when the poem comes together in a resonant way. Particularly when I was writing earlier, I would try to get the poem to be a pathway to that personal experience of that moment. I’m just as likely now to write up to some kind of moment like that. I think juxtaposition is helpful in that, so I’m kind of colliding either in my life or in what I’m reading or in what I’m writing on the page--even writing something by hand and misreading it might be the thing.

How much haiku did you write in Japan yourself when you were there, and how about since then?

JH: I write very little haiku. I read Basho all the time, and I’m writing free verse poetry. I definitely went to multiple haiku kai, haiku group meetings, and always wrote haiku for those things,and did some haiku activities with them where we would go to Kamakura and write haiku in a particular place. I do work with brevity, I might have a poem that’s a line...that I’m not necessarily thinking of as haiku. I feel like that’s a disappointing answer; sorry Michael.

I was thinking about the idea that Basho would go to a place and write about that place and that kind of reminds me of the heart-to-heart transmission of now. Is that something that you use in poetic practice--going to a place, or you know, the idea of this physical  something that can be passed on through place?

JH: What I find useful is being out in the elements, hiking, walking, running--particularly if I’ve already started writing something and I’m kind of carrying it with me and doing something else. And I’m often doing hiking trips. I like to do day-to-day hiking trips where you take a backpack and you stay at a youth hostel overnight and keep going. I do not write that many poems on those trips--you would think that I was going to write poems--but I keep a little journal and I walk and I feel that I am cultivating a poetic practice, but I don’t have a lot to show for it.

When you write your poetry, do you visualize it as text or are you creating it for an auditory audience?

JH: It’s very important to me how it looks on the page. I’m doing a lot of work with where it is on the page and the space on the page, particularly with space on the page as a timing mechanism--so that the layout and the distance on the page [function] as breathing space or silence.

You mentioned the poems that were frequently collaborative [Renga]--I don’t know too much about Butoh, but I was wondering about the connection between dancing with other people and writing with other people?

JH: I think it’s really interesting that collaborative writing was so big in multiple cultures and such a social activity and we today have so many social groups for poetry but we don’t write together, you know? You get together and workshop what you’ve written. But that’s the tradition that I come out of, you write alone and then share your work later, so that’s what I’m comfortable with. Even though I would love the idea of a haiku party, I don’t know if i could live up to it! But I would try to get together and make a collaboratively-engaged poem. When I was in Tokyo, I was in an art gallery show, and we composed a group poem of free verse Renga together. It was a fun social activity but, like--don’t reread the poem.

Angela Terry: One of the things that you mentioned, one of Basho's teachings, was to write down the idea instantly, while it was still fresh and then consider revising it later. Especially for those of us who write haiku, what do you think in terms of how far you can go in the revision process before you’ve lost the immediacy of the image and the idea?

JH: I think our poems are fragile, but I was really surprised to read [Haruo] Shirane’s book, Traces of Dreams, and really hear about Basho revising his work, and I wonder...haiku was popularized in the 20th century due in large part to Masaoka Shiki, and he was influenced by--he was writing in a time when there was European literature and western thought coming into Japan, and I wonder about our stress on haiku as “one moment” and maybe how that was more stressed through a Modernist lens on haiku. So that’s one part of that question. But yeah, I do think that haiku are fragile and you know, when you’re writing haiku and you’re writing a lot of them and you’re picking one, that’s a kind of editing: you write 100 and you choose one. That’s another kind of revision.   

Angela Terry: Would you be willing to give us an inkling of where your poetry is headed next?

JH: I’m writing a book called The Sky of Wu, and as Basho leaves for his narrow road journey, he’s taking off to the “Sky of Wu,”--which, in Japan in his time, was some distant faraway province in China or some remote place, but I’m writing the “Sky of Wu” as contemporary life in California--from both this interior and other perspective, and in some of the poems, Li Bai and Du Fu come to California. I’m also working with a visual artist on a season marker project (she is a gardener and does drawings).

Do you have an internal mechanism of knowing which poems are the ones and which are the ones to be put aside, to be reworked?

JH: Well, most of them are to be put aside. But I think one of the things that’s really helpful in writing is a wild optimism. I think to go and do this through love and passion and just believe that it’s possible, you know? We’re always going to have these voices that say, “this isn’t working, this is stupid, you’re never going to get it done.” That is for tomorrow, that’s for next week--right now I can be here with this poem.

Do you come across times when you’re writing in English and an image or an idea is more easily expressed in Japanese? How do you overcome the language barrier?

Seattle Lecture & Poetry Workshop: Thurs. April 21 & Sat. April 23

      April 21, 2016 Hoa Nguyen gives a talk on teaching poetics, the meaning & purpose of creative writing classes. Q&A to follow. » Hugo House, Seattle, free. 7pm.   April 23, 2016 Hoa Nguyen will offer “Hunting the Song, Hurting the Song: A Poetry Workshop.” » Hugo House, Seattle. 1-4pm. » Register for the workshop, here.   Read an interview with Matthew Zapruder on the Bagley Wright Lecture…