Tag Archives: Japanese Poetry

Ten Years After

Art, Crime Fiction, Fiction, Limited Editions, Linoleum Prints, Modern Poetry, Non-fiction, Poetry, Western, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2021 marks ten years since Nualláin House, Publishers, began print on demand publishing of “literature as reading entertainment” utilizing readily available digital technology and desktop design options, essentially a case of authors seizing the means of production. Over that time Nualláin House has published two genre novels (crime fiction and western), an anthology of Japanese linked verse, and six selections of poetry. Because technology changes the way one does business, Nualláin House has slowly shifted emphasis away from the production of bound volumes of poetry and fiction to the wider readership access provided by the internet. Digital media in the form of blogs and websites provide an entry for the independent artist and writer to launch shoestring operations that do not demand much more than time, determination, and a little imagination to produce and promote their work. After a decade of slogging up the steep cyber learning curve, Nualláin House, Publishers, a publishing project that focused on printed media, has had to widen its scope of what can be accomplished in the production and promotion of literary arts. To that end, along with a new easier to read WordPress theme, Nualláin House has incorporated two fresh projects available through the site’s menu bar to reflect its expanded emphasis: Affiliated Sites and Bamboo Leaf Studio. As before, synopses and approbation of previously published titles can also be accessed from the menu bar as can contact information and ordering print editions

Affiliated Sites

The New Black Bart Poetry Society blog, Parole, was launched in 2012 and was originally conceived as a calendar and events reminder for the poetry society. As the successor to Life of Crime, a more scurrilous Society rag from the 80s, Parole continues the focus on poetry, poets, and the poetry scene.  It has a worldwide readership which has grown from a couple of hundred readers a month to thousands who now enjoy its unique perspectives on modern poetry.

Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius, a fiction by Pat Nolan, was in the works several years before Nualláin House, Publishers, came into being.  As work on Ode To Sunset was occurring in parallel, the publishing tools available through the internet offered the opportunity to take a creative leap into the online publishing of the manuscript as a serial novel.  At over 600 manuscript pages, the challenge then became one of presentation over a sustained period of time.  The novel was posted over two years, 2014-2016, with yearly updates and progress reports since then.

Joining these two affiliated sites is Dime Pulp, A Serial Fiction Magazine. Nualláin House’s original concept of publishing literature as reading entertainment is being revisited with a new undertaking in the form of a serial fiction magazine posting original crime fiction on a monthly schedule.  Dime Pulp has already published its first issues featuring two original novels in serialization as well as short stories with more original genre fiction in the queue.

For the curious wishing to access the aforementioned sites, click on Affiliated Sites  here or on the menu bar and follow the links

Bamboo Leaf Studio

Bamboo Leaf Studio is an independent art enterprise by poet Pat Nolan featuring his limited edition handmade books, linoleum prints, and studio based literary ephemera. The studio page provides links to four gallery pages of representative work: Faux Koans, Smoking Poets, Women Poet Postcards, and Handmade Books & Surimono.  Click on Bamboo Leaf Studio here or on the menu bar to access the links to the galleries below the brief introduction.

What’s Next?

The events of the past year have presented an opportunity to reassess the expectations for Nualláin House as a publishing arts venture. Although the emphasis on hard copy production is no longer in the forefront, Nualláin House, Publishers, is reviewing its catalog and considering at least one more print on demand edition of creative non-fiction. As well, work is in progress to bring a new serial novel online, in addition to the ones featured in Dime Pulp. Poetry will continue to be a focus but as online chapbooks downloadable in pdf or ebook formats. Bamboo Leaf Studio with new Smoking Poets prints and assorted literary art ephemera continues to be a crucible of creativity in its unique synthesis of art and literature. With the exception of the books, prints, and some ephemera, all of these literary products are available without charge to the interested reader.  Many thanks to those who have faithfully followed Nualláin House, Publishers, over the years.  There’s always something new on the creative horizon.

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The Blurbs of 2018

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the thousand marvels of every moment, 
a tanka collection
by pat nolan
Fall 2018, 124 pages, $16

Tanka is the modern name for a short five line poem known throughout the history of Japanese literature as a waka.  The short poems of the thousand marvels of every moment are composed of five lines in two stanzas.  The first stanza balances on the second, sometimes precariously, to pose a distinguishing match. The break between stanzas acts as a gap for synaptic sparks to jump. It also emphasizes its call and response origins serving as a binary exchange of verbal energy.  The two last lines in these poems tend to resolve them either as parallel breaths or as a single run-on semantic declaration.

Praise for the thousand marvels of every moment

“Pointing at the moon, the finger of the poet directs the reader to the object at hand, whether it be battered wisteria, her long neck, the black cat, or the poet ‘right in the middle of scribble.’  Every day life heightened in the moment ‘not forever now/the cool green leaves’”  —Lucille Friesen, poet

“Pat Nolan’s new collection of short poems the thousand marvels of every moment is a late harvest wonder. Distilled in the key of tanka, these poems make sparks out of crumpled paper & ‘fine white rain.’ No better description of the book than from within: 

through the particle haze dance
joy and marvel of the mind”

—Eric Johnson, poet, master printer

“Pat Nolan explains, in introducing the thousand marvels of every moment that tanka historically originated in call and response agricultural chants in long ago Japan. In Nolan’s modern tanka-like poems, the echoing is within the self, or between the self and the immediate world: the yard, the kitchen, the coffee cup, the coastal hills. Words are precise and vivid. Dream transitions suggest feelings and insights. Points of view shift. In ‘TV on too loud again’ the opening stanza seems to be listening to the neighborhood from within Nolan’s house, but in the final lines reverse:

 I am a portrait in a window
the garden looks on into 

Processes of life are very subtle reverberations in this finely wrought collection of modern tanka.”
—Ann Erickson, poet, painter

“When I was a little kid, we had a summer cabin on an inlet of south Puget Sound. By a dirt path near our place was a salmonberry bush. It must have been the end of June when I found it because it was full of ripe yellow-orange berries. I harvested the bush in a frenzy, filling up a big bowl, and ate its sweet fruit on a sunny beach. It was my first wild berry feast. Pat Nolan’s new book of tanka, the thousand marvels of every moment, brought back this tasty memory. Reading his beautifully crafted little poems is like picking berries from a bush.”
—Norman Schaefer, poet, author of Fool’s Gold and Lower Putah Song

 

SO MUCH Selected Poems Volume I
Handwritten Typewriter 1969-1989
by Pat Nolan
Spring 2018, 176 pages, $16

The title of this volume of Pat Nolan’s selected poems, So Much, references the seminal (and most divisive) poem of modern American poetry by William Carlos Williams about a red wheelbarrow, chickens, and rain. The poems in this selection were actualized and finalized beyond their handwritten originals on a typewriter hence the designation of this twenty year span from 1969 to 1989 as Handwritten Typewriter. In memory of Ted Berrigan, adherent to Whitman’s maverick impulse and O’Hara’s Personism, under the guidance of Schuyler and Whalen, with a nod to early 20th Century French poets and the sages of the East, and esteem for Anselm Hollo and Alice Notley, Pat Nolan’s poems hit all the right post-Beat, California School of New York Poets, Pacific Rim demotic notational ephemerist notes.

Praise for Pat Nolan’s poetry:

“Pat Nolan is one of the poets, Ted Berrigan once said, that you have to always keep an eye on because he can do unexpected startling things that leave you eating his dust.”
— Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent A World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012.

“Descriptions of nature so translucent we can only marvel how he weaves us into them, onward, around that eternal share of misfortune, bitter realization, and expectations gone wrong. This is Nolan’s secret power.  He engages us in magical transformation and will not let us look away.”
— Maureen Owen, author of Erosion’s Pull and Edges of Water

“. . .reminded me of James Joyce in that brief moments can become long & engrossing & turn the page for you despite any wishes thoughts & warnings you may have about more . . . .”
—Keith Kumasen Abbott, author of Downstream From Tour Fishing In America, A Memoir.

“Reading a book of Pat Nolan poems, I tell myself to breathe, to be mindful, because everything is here, from the Zen moment that never ends to the surreal architecture we live within.” 
—Bart Schneider, author of Nameless Dame

More titles available from Nualláin House, Publishers

 

On The Road To Las Cruces
Being A Novel Account of the Last Day In the Life of
A Legendary Western Lawman by Pat Nolan 
November 2011 —$16—154 pages —paper—ISBN  9780984031016 

The Last Resort,  A Lee Malone Adventure by Pat Nolan
August 2012—$20—212 pages —Paper—ISBN 9780984031023

Hello Life, Poems by Gail King
December 2013—$16—64 pages—Paper —ISBN 9780984031030

Your Name Here, New Poems by Pat Nolan
November 2014 —$16 — 80 pages—paper—ISBN 9780984031009

Poetry For Sale Haikai no Renga (linked verse)
Keith Kumasen Abbott, Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie,
Pat Nolan, Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl, John Veglia
October 2015—$16—152 pages —paper—ISBN 9780984031047

Exile In Paradise by Pat Nolan
November 2017—$16—100 pages—paper—ISBN 9780984031054

To place your order select How To Order from the menu bar

Why Gift Edition?

Non-fiction, Poetry, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

the thousand marvels of every moment
a tanka collection
by pat nolan

Fall 2018, ISBN 9780984031078, 7×5 inches, 124 pages, $16

~The Gift Edition~

Order Now * Get Free Shipping
(offer good through December 31, 2018)

 

Facing the thousand marvels

of every moment

nothing comes to mind

I pick up the broom

to collect my thoughts

 

Why “Gift” Edition?

As a gift the thousand marvels of every moment is ephemeral and accessible, as undemanding as a tweet yet profound and universal as a meme, not only clever and entertaining but thought provoking as well. At a sleek 7×5 inches, a little larger than a smart phone, it fits easily in the hand like an oversize postcard, but as a book it is ultimately “flippable,” meaning that it is as easy to browse as scrolling through social media.  Its resonant design with trompe l’oeil stitching and decorative endpapers bestows on the book-as-gift a complimentary esthetic that is painless, instant, and memorable—as gifts should be.  An extra incentive for earth conscious gift purchasing is that the text of the thousand marvels of every moment is printed on 100% PCW (post consumer waste) at a printing plant in Minnesota operating on wind power.  Get one for yourself, buy one for a friend.

 

On the phone

outside a butterfly settles

on a leaf

her voice light

shimmering on thin wings

 

Tanka is the modern name for a short poem known throughout the history of Japanese literature as a waka.  The short poems of the thousand marvels of every moment are composed of five lines.  The first stanza balances on the second, sometimes precariously, to pose a distinguishing match. The break between stanzas acts as a gap for synaptic sparks to jump. It also emphasizes its call and response origins serving as a binary exchange of verbal energy.  The two last lines in these poems tend to resolve them either as parallel breaths or as a single run-on semantic declaration.

 

The part of myself

I tend to deny leaks out

the tip of this pen

please say “I love you”

with a neon sign

 

Pat Nolan has long been an avid student of Asian culture, particularly Japanese and Chinese poetry. He published Poetry For Sale (2015), a selection of haikai no renga (Japanese linked verse) written with a number of poets including Maureen Owen, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie, and Sandy Berrigan.  His Chinese themed poems were published as Exile In Paradise in 2017. The poems of the thousand marvels of every moment have appeared in a variety of poetry magazines as well as in collections of privately issued handmade limited editions of tanka that include Thin Wings (2004), Untouched By Rain (2005), and Carved In Stone (2013).  One notable exception is the beautifully realized Cloud Scatter (1994) in an exquisite letterpress edition of 160 copies from Jerry Reddan’s Tangram Press.  Nolan is also the author of two novels, an online serial fiction, and numerous poetry books.  So Much—Handwritten Typewriter—Selected Poems Volume I, 1969-1989, was published in the spring of 2018.

 

Seconds whiled away

or willed away all the same

original instance

desire’s rhetorical question

“how do I get more?”

 

 

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You won’t find Nualláin House titles for sale on Amazon unless they are through a second party.  With the exception of a few bookstores locally, Nualláin House titles are available exclusively through the publisher and this site.  There is also no shopping basket or convenient checkout payable with a credit card.  Both listing on Amazon and through point of sale accounts such as PayPal involve a second party interface which requires a fee (or operation tax, if you will).  If Nualláin House, Publishers was truly a business then perhaps it would absorb these fees as a cost of doing business, but it is not.  As a publisher of poetry and fiction Nualláin House is more of a boutique press.  The books published are print on demand editions offered at a moderate affordable price whose sole object is to cover production costs. Any ‘profit’ is reinvested in publishing future Nualláin House titles. When shipping is charged, it includes the cost of materials (labels and envelopes) and postage.  If more than one book or title is ordered, as per our policy, shipping is free (US destinations only, otherwise international rates apply).  Your personal info is not entered into a data base to be sold or mined which would happen if we used Amazon and/or point of sale software.  Rather purchase of Nualláin House titles can be thought of as a personal exchange, a donation to support the press.  A check, money order, or cash payment (plus stamp & envelope) is a minor inconvenience to stay out of the clutches of the corporate data mining overlords. You can order by email at nuallainhousepublishers(at-sign) gmail(dot)com. If you are a repeat customer (donor) we will invoice you with the title(s) ordered and trust that you will make payment upon receipt. If you are new to our press, your order will be shipped upon receipt of payment. Thanks in advance for your support.  See How To Order for more information.

The Thousand Marvels. . . . Free Shipping

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the thousand marvels of every moment
a tanka collection
by pat nolan

Fall 2018, 124 pages, $16

Order Now * Get Free Shipping
(offer good through December 31, 2018)

One In A Thousand

Tanka is the modern name for a short poem known throughout the history of Japanese literature as a waka. The pre-modern word, waka, finds its source in ancient oral tradition of call and response agricultural chants as well as those accompanying communal efforts in indigenous Japanese villages.  In its lineated form, the tanka consists of five lines.  In its non-lineated form, the tanka has the syllabic rhythm or pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. 

The courtly love culture of medieval Japan adapted the folk tradition as the exchange of verse between courtiers requiring a cap or response to bring the poem to a subtle esoteric often erotic resolution. Eventually the practice transformed into a unified singular verse, the waka, a poem of two minds as the literary affectation of one mind.

The short poems of the thousand marvels of every moment are composed of five lines.  They also take into consideration the 5-7-5-7-7 patterns as a phonetic rhythm although they do not necessarily conform to the syllabic count.  The succinct directness required of the form lends itself to this rhythm. The first stanza balances on the second, sometimes precariously, to pose a distinguishing match. The break between stanzas acts as a kind of caesura, a gap for synaptic sparks to jump.  It also emphasizes its call and response origins serving as a binary exchange of verbal energy.  The two last lines in these poems tend to resolve them either as parallel breaths or as a single run-on semantic declaration.  Sometimes they function as a pedestal for the preceding stanza, the bass line for its melodic pretext, sometimes as a bowl or receptacle to contain the original intent, or as a decorative garnish to the entrée (think California cuisine), and sometimes at its most basic, the response to the call.

I hesitate to name the poems in this collection tanka as that would presume the mastery of a complicated set of rules and conditions.  They do not observe many of the accepted tanka conventions although they do seek a synthesis and accommodation brought about by translation into a radically different language and culture.  The poems actually owe their method more to the intricate multi-voiced play of a related Japanese verse form, haikai no renga, also known as renku or linked verse.  That similarity is especially true in the relationship between stanzas or the rhythms of 5-7-5 -7-7.  There is, in fact, a term for a linked poem composed of only two stanzas, tanrenga.  As accurate as that may be I am uncomfortable with the label. Tanku, a word of my own devising, would seem to accommodate the Japanese nomenclature (haiku, hokku, renku) but still doesn’t fit my sense of the poems.  Ultimately I find myself preferring tanka as the logical and sentimental favorite of what this type of poem might be called. I do so well aware that the designation is a borrowed one.

(from the introduction to the thousand marvels of every moment)

 

from the thousand marvels of every moment

Fall, 2018, the thousand marvels of every moment

Non-fiction, Poetry, , , , , , , , , ,

the thousand marvels of every moment
a tanka collection
by pat nolan

Fall 2018, approx 100 pages, $16

Pre-orders now being accepted

 

Tanka is the modern name for a short poem known throughout the history of Japanese literature as a “waka.” The pre-modern word, “waka”, finds it source in the ancient oral tradition of call and response planting and harvesting songs as well as those accompanying communal efforts in indigenous Japanese villages.  In its lineated form, the tanka consists of five lines.  In its non-lineated form, the tanka has the syllabic rhythm or pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.  The short poems of the thousand marvels of every moment are composed of five lines.  They also take into consideration the rhythmic patterns of 5-7-5-7-7 although they do not necessarily conform to the syllabic count.  The poems in this collection also do not observe many of the accepted tanka conventions but seek a synthesis and accommodation brought about by translation into a radically different language and culture. 

from One In A Thousand

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So Much, Selected Poem, 1969-1989
“Descriptions of nature so translucent we can only marvel how he weaves us into them, onward, around that eternal share of misfortune, bitter realization, and expectations gone wrong. This is Nolan’s secret power.  He engages us in magical transformation and will not let us look away.”
—Maureen Owen, author of Erosion’s Pull and Edges of Water

 

Exile In Paradise
“Reading these poems, I feel like I’m walking down a village lane somewhere in China, beyond the reach of the emperor’s minions, and every door I walk by, someone invites me in for a cup of wine. At this rate, I don’t think I’ll ever make it out of here, and why should I?”
—Bill Porter (Red Pine), translator, author of Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets from the Past

 

Poetry For Sale
“Poetry For Sale is a fantastic collection.  Anyone interested in the interaction between Japanese and English poetry needs this book.  And anyone interested in renga should definitely get it.  It is an immensely pleasing collection: entertaining, surprising, sometimes sharp and witty, sometimes introspective, sometimes descriptive, the renga unfold with great skill and elegance.”
 —Jim Wilson,  author of Microcosmos, The Art Of The Solo Renga (Sebastopol, 2014)

 

Your Name Here
“The poems glow with insight and wit as they simply monitor the flow of a mind steeped in Chinese poetry, bebop, the Russian River, the beats, the birds, Heraclitus. . . .  [Nolan] in his own words, is an alphabet male.  And despite the breadth of his learning and thought, is always just talking from right here.  It’s a hell of a book.”
—Eric Johnson, poet and master printer at Iota Press

 

Hello Life
“Reading Gail King has always been one of my great poetry pleasures. Her inimitable voice narrates the world with humor and tenderness, a world of beauty and occasional sorrow. Her work has healing effects.”
—Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and author of So Recently Rent A World

 

 

The Last Resort
“Pat Nolan’s The Last Resort puts his gun in the right hands–a woman’s–with authority and harmful intent.  Get ready to hit the deck!”
—Barry Gifford, author of Imagining Paradise and Wild At Heart

 

 

On The Road To Las Cruces
“On the Road to Las Cruces takes us on a twilight journey through frontier history.  Nolan’s adroit and stylish prose intertwines death, betrayal, greed and conspiracy as each claims its victims.”
—Keith Abbott, author of Downstream From Trout Fishing In America

 

 

 

 

Holiday Bargains

Art, Crime Fiction, Fiction, Linoleum Prints, Non-fiction, Poetry, Western, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy 2018

Now Available from

Nualláin House, Publishers

Purchase two or more titles
and get free shipping
anywhere in the US
(see How To Order for details)

Also available through our partnership with
Bamboo Leaf Studio
Linoleum Block Prints
from the Smoking Poets series

and the Faux Koan series by Pat Nolan

Order two or more prints
get free shipping
and receive a bonus broadside of
the limited edition
Dylan Thomas print accompanied by Pat Nolan’s
Advice To A Young Poet
Free!!

 

Exile In Paradise FREE SHIPPING

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Praise for Exile In Paradise

“Nolan has given Solitude, itself, a voice in this rich lyric of nature.  A luminosity of flickering bursts pause and magnify now moments of being alive.  His quotidian soaks us with its presence.  His lines trace the air.”
—Maureen Owen, author of Erosion’s Pull and Edges of Water

“Reading these poems, I feel like I’m walking down a village lane somewhere in China, beyond the reach of the emperor’s minions, and every door I walk by, someone invites me in for a cup of wine. At this rate, I don’t think I’ll ever make it out of here, and why should I?”
—Bill Porter (Red Pine), translator, author of Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets from the Past

 

The poems of Exile In Paradise are derived from a lifelong appreciation of classical Chinese poetry. This selection by Pat Nolan marks an almost fifty year creative engagement with Asian literature in translation. Chinese poetry is image rich and largely dependent for its overall effect on the juxtaposition of these images in a discontinuous thread that is not unlike the successive frames of a film. Each of the poems finds its origin in a line translated from an ancient Chinese poet. Although removed by degrees of separation from the originals in time and language, their impulse remains the same: to call up the perceptual as a song of celebration in sacred engagement with the world.

Pat Nolan has lived in silent cunning exile along the Russian River in Northern California for over forty years.  His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in North America, Europe and Asia.  He has worked as a bartender, rock band manager, trail crew grunt, radio DJ, janitor, preschool teacher, and emergency dispatcher.  The author of three novels and over a dozen poetry books, he is also publisher of Nualláin House, Publishers and maintains this literary blog.

Failed in Letters Happy in Life

“Cherishing my ineptness I’m carefree to the end”
enjoying a little peace cup of herb tea cold
attentive to the sound of the eaves overflowing
after a rush of late winter rain passes through
where I have gone wrong fills many notebooks
file cabinets bulging with personal hyperbole
here mistake after mistake accumulates like dust
documents of my timeless imperfection

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Exile In Paradise
November, 2017
$16.00~paper~100 pages~6×9~ISBN 978-0-9840310-5-4

is only available from the publisher
Go to How To Order for details

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(made payable to ‘Pat Nolan’)
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ontheroadfront300ON THE ROAD TO LAS CRUCES; Being A Novel Account of The Last Day In The Life of A Legendary Western Lawman
by Pat Nolan

 Pat Nolan’s first published novel, On The Road To Last Cruces; Being A Novel Account of The Last Day In The Life of A Legendary Western Lawman is the story of youthful bravado and an old man’s regret, and as much a dusty tale of buffalo hunts and shoot-outs as a politically driven “whodunit.”  November 2011 ~ 154 pages

 

THE LAST RESORT
A Lee Malone Adventure
by Pat Nolan

Pat Nolan has written a fast paced, tongue-in-cheek, pun filled comedy of errors, misunderstandings, and faux intuition in the mode of a 1930’s pulp thriller.  Instead of the typical splinter-jawed, broken nosed, tobacco breathed tough guy hero, Nolan upends the stereotype by introducing a gorgeous internationally famous former fashion model whose super power is her beauty.
August 2012~ 212 pages

 

 

HELLO LIFE
Poems by Gail King 

The poems of Hello Life achieve their freshness in the particularity of experience. The poet surrenders herself to the moment and tenders that subtle cognition as a delighted welcome to life. The ease of her expression in dealing with the everyday communicates an uncommon wisdom. The poems present, through playful understatement and sly humor, the immediacy of spontaneous impressions.
December 2013  ~  64 pages

 

 

 

Your Name Here
New Poems
by Pat Nolan 

The poems in Your Name Here revolve around that quantum axis with seemingly random discontinuities that do not pin down meaning but are left to mean themselves. Nolan’s poetry enacts a sub-vocal monologue that is like the murmur of cosmic background radiation, noticeable only in its cessation or as pauses when the mind registers the sum of discrete moments in an instant.  November 2014 ~ 80 pages

 

Poetry For Sale
Haikai no Renga (Linked Poetry)

Introduction by Pat Nolan
The eleven haikai no renga included in Poetry For Sale were written over period of nearly thirty years by Pat Nolan and his renku collaborators, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie, Joen Eshima Moore, Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl, and John Veglia.  In these pages haikai no renga is synthesized as a brief, highly suggestive, well spoken, maddeningly ambiguous, read-between-the-lines kind of poetry tuned to a common understanding.  October 2015 ~ 152 pages

Poetry For Sale Now Available!

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OCTOBER 2015
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Offer Good Through October 15, 2015

P4sale15tjPoetry For Sale

Haikai No Renga (linked poetry)
Introduction by Pat Nolan
Haikai no Renga with
Keith Kumasen Abbott,
Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym,
Steven Lavoie, Joen Eshima Moore,
Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl,
and John Veglia.

The eleven haikai no renga included in Poetry For Sale were written over period of nearly thirty years by Pat Nolan and his renku collaborators, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie, Joen Eshima Moore, Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl, and John Veglia. This collection of linked poetry presents a fascinating excursion in comparative literature by a cross-section of exceptional, widely-published American poets.  What these poets bring to the collaborative linking of stanzas is a visceral sense of the poetic that transcends two disparate languages and the gap of centuries. In these pages haikai no renga is synthesized as a brief, highly suggestive, well spoken, maddeningly ambiguous, read-between-the-lines kind of poetry tuned to a common understanding.

October 2015 ~ 152 pages ~ $16 ~ paper ~ ISBN978-0-9840310-4-7

click on the How To Order tab for more information

from HARDLY STRICTLY HAIKAI
—An Introduction—

Haikai no Renga is collaborative poetry of Japanese origin normally written by two or more poets linking stanzas of 17 syllables and 14 syllables according to specific rules governing the relationship between stanzas.  Haikai collaboration can be as complex as chess, as multi-dimensional as go, and as fast-paced and entertaining as dominoes.  It is as much about the interaction of the poets as it is about what gets written.  The forward progress of its improvisation is akin to that of a tight jazz combo. Haikai composition has also been compared to montage in experimental film where the discontinuity of images and vectors achieves an integral non-narrative expression.

Haikai no renga is known variously as renga, haikai, renku, and linked poetry.  Generally the term renga is applied to an older, more traditional style of linking poetry practiced by the aristocracy and the upper echelon of medieval Japanese society.  Haikai no renga means “non-standard renga” though it has often been translated as “mongrel” or “dog renga” which places it in the literary hierarchy as common entertainment.

In the introduction to her seminal study of Matsuo Basho’s haikai no renga, Monkey’s Raincoat (Grossinger/Mushinsha, 1973), Dr. Maeda Cana offers a further explication of the word haikai.  “The main characteristics of the haikai are partly discernible in the kanji or Chinese characters which make up the words haikai and renku: hai denotes fun, play, humor, and also actor or actress, and kai friendly exchange of words; ren represents a number of carriages passing along a road one after another and has the meaning of continuing to completion while ku is expressive of the rhythmic changes in speech and denotes end or stop.”

Renku is a literary game of high seriousness valuing cooperation and rewarding intelligence as well as intuition.  A poet’s erudition and sense of language are called upon to clear paths and build bridges that will meander through the landscape of a literary garden.  Its cooperative result, a balance of unpredictable language gestures as insubstantial as smoke but possessed of a palpable humanity, is what is important.  The echo of the response, its relationship to the previous stanza, and how it extends its meaning, poignantly or allusively, is the esthetic ground for this kind of poetry.  The linking process, in renga, and in haikai, allows a sequence whose subtle oscillation of playfulness and gravity walk the tightrope of language’s built-in ambiguities.

“Generally speaking, haikai is steeped in the wit and banter” as Dr. Cana explains, and “it has a brilliance that shocks.  Such brilliance is continual and amazes. . .at every turn.”  Poets are under pressure to produce the unpredictable so that the possibilities of cleverness are continually exploited at a tempo that is swift and witty.  The haikai poets of old delighted in word play, literary allusions, double entendres as well as displays of authentic sensibility. The completed renku is as much a certificate of cooperation as it is a multi-page poem and a sequence of short poems.  Its literary value is in its effervescent spontaneity and transitory nature, a quality much appreciated by the Japanese.

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