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      June 22, 2015Midday Heat: A Twenty-Stanza RenkuDebra Kang Dean, Jonathan Weinert

      Summer 2012

      [1 Front]
      jw
      dkd
      midday heat stands still
      a far siren by the lake
      we go on dying
      to be touched by some coolness
      to be perfect reflections
      of the open sky
      in the mail today an empty box
      from no one I know
      tough enough to keep mustard seeds,
      washed-up shells, and shadows in—

       

       

      [1 Back]
      dkd
      jw
      you moonlight ladies
      at ease on a coverlet
      of fresh scarlet leaves
      remembering how I held you
      in early dark that last time
      as the plane lifted
      through fog I inhaled deeply
      a scent still fading
      from my raveled right shirtsleeve
      and the far end of the world
      windswept grains of sand
      spiraling counterclockwise
      before scattering
      as we do, as we will do
      in the story’s second half

       

       

      [2 Front]
      jw
      dkd
      when fresh snow outlined the grapes
      and healed the tattered
      vine leaves on the gray stone fence
      cold company we made, friend
      Moon, my shadow and me
      across a low field
      some movement in the windbreak
      half-expected cry
      of the owl, who replies—
      question, is it, or answer
      to the question posed
      by love’s abiding absence:
      how do you go on
      beyond magical thinking, what
      remains: scents on a pillow …

       

       

      [2 Back]
      dkd
      jw
      so strange, rain drops here—
      among billowy clouds this one
      sprinkling above me
      as fierce green whorls breach earth
      having no alternative
      you wait, sipping on
      rosebud tea in the presence
      of blighted blossoms
      signifying renewal
      or something like renewal

      from #47 - Spring 2015

      Jonathan Weinert & Debra Kang Dean

      Jonathan Weinert: “I had no experience with renku until my co-conspirator and teacher, Debra Kang Dean, approached me with the idea of writing one over the summer of 2012. This required some studying on my part, to familiarize myself with the rules of the form. I’ve long been fascinated with how formal restrictions can exert a pressure on the language and imagination, forcing them into unexpected channels. Renku adds requirements on content to the usual structural rules: the moon must go here, a blossom must go there. There was a surprising freedom in following these rules. Surprising, too, was the way that spilling our two voices together produced a third, the voice of an unknown other with a history and a way of seeing that are neither Debra’s nor my own. A renku’s links, it seems, reach both out of the poem as well as across it.”

      Debra Kang Dean: “I date the start of my serious engagement with renku to the mid- to late-’90s, when Tadashi Kondo invited me to participate in several renku writing sessions. He described it as being like a mandala that included all parts of experience. In Taiji, there is a phrase—borrowed energy—that suggests one of the pleasures of writing renku. What I particularly delight in is the way it affords an ongoing challenge to think in terms of closing and opening simultaneously, which, in the language of renku is called linking and shifting. The rules of renku are complex, and I don’t pretend to have come close to mastering them, so I approach each chance to write renku as an opportunity to learn by doing. There is a strong sense of call and response about renku but without repetition—that is, something calls out and one responds, and that response calls forth another response, and so on. Therefore, to work with different partners is to have the opportunity to expand the range of one’s responses.”

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