HAIKU KAI REPORT
RENGAY WORKSHOP
November 12, 2011

The rengay workshop held November 12 was a rousing success. Guest speaker Garry Gay provided an entertaining history of the accidental development of the rengay form. While attending a poetry conference with Japanese renku masters, Garry and his fellow American writers felt constrained by the arcane rules and hierarchical approach of the traditional form.

Garry created a simplified renku of 6 linked haiku to be written by two poets alternating writing order, as indicated below:

Poet A (3 lines) Poet B (2 lines) Poet A (3 lines) Poet B (3 lines) Poet A (2 lines) Poet B (3 lines)

The new form rapidly took on a life of its own, helped by the advent of email in the early 1990s. Soon, partners working in different continents (even different languages) were creating rengay.

In response to Janet Schroder’s suggestion that we try writing a rengay as a group effort rather than break into pairs, we attempted the first-ever group rengay. All of us wrote a 3-line haiku. By group vote consensus, we selected Mary Joyce’s haiku to be the thematic lead poem.

From that point forward, once a haiku was selected, only the others’ poems were considered for the rengay, so that the largest number of participants could contribute to the final work. Our practice was to listen closely, to respond to the language and themes of the previous contributor.

The resulting rengay poem captured the sounds and colors of Autumn:

Next meeting: January 28, 2012