c.e. rosenow - the senryu tradition in america

Written in the Face of Adversity:The Senryu Tradition in AmericaCE ROSENOW ?

Although the Japanese poetic form, senryu, began more than two-and-a-half centuriesago as an often bawdy form of verse focusing on human nature, it developed into a formthat accommodated many aspects of the human experience. In the early twentieth cen-tury, Japanese immigrants in the United States began using senryu to document dailyhuman activities in response to periods of cultural upheaval. In doing so, they instigated atradition that continues in English-language senryu to this day. Multiple traditions ofEnglish-language haikai, including not only senryu but haiku and tanka, exist in America,and varied traditions of senryu certainly have been sustained in order to address thevicissitudes of human experience.1 The tradition founded by Japanese immigrants,however, remains one of the most vital traditions in the American senryu of the pastcentury.

Genroku Era Senryu

Senryu was created in eighteenth-century Japan, and it is typically defined as a poemsimilar to haiku in its three-line structure but different from haiku in its focus on humannature.2 Its general characteristics include an interest in human affairs, a humorous tone,

?University of Oregon, Clark Honors College. E-mail: [email protected]

I would like to thank Margaret Chula and Michael Dylan Welch for their suggestions for this article.1Issei describes the lives of Japanese immigrants and includes many examples of their haiku and tanka.See Ito, Kazuo. Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America. Trans. Shinichiro Nakamuraand Jean S. Gerard (Seattle: Japanese Community Service, 1973).For discussions of the English-language haiku movement, see the following two books by William J.

Higginson: Haiku Compass: Directions in the Poetical Map of the United States of America. Tokyo: HaikuInternational, 1994; and The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku (New York:McGraw, 1985), 63–76. For a history of the first twenty years of the Haiku Society of America, seeDavidson, et al., eds. A Haiku Path: The Haiku Society of America 1968-1988 (New York: Haiku Societyof America, 1994).2The following are among the texts that describe senryu and often contrast it with haiku: Blyth, R. H.Edo Satirical Verse Anthologies. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1961, Essentially Oriental: R. H. Blyth Selection, ed.Kuniyoshi Munakata and Michael Guest (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1994), and The Genius of Haiku: Readingsfrom R. H. Blyth on Poetry, Life, and Zen (np: British Haiku Society, 1994); Brown, J. C., Senryu: Poems ofthe People (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1991); Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share,and Teach Haiku (New York: McGraw, 1985); Ross, Bruce. How to Haiku: A Writer’s Guide to Haiku andRelated Forms (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2002); and Welch, Michael Dylan. Introduction. Fig Newtons:Senryu to Go, ed. Laura Bell et al. (Foster City, CA: Press Here, 1993). For a book-length consideration ofsenryu, see Ohno, Shuho. Modern Senryu in English (Seattle: Hokubei), 1988. For texts that focus

Literary Imagination, volume 12, number 2, pp. 210–228doi:10.1093/litimag/imp100

! The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, andWriters. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected] Access publication January 13, 2010

an often critical point of view, an emphasis on human foibles, and as mentioned above,the early verses were often bawdy. The precise definition of the term, senryu, suggests itscolorful origins—the word itself means “river willow,” which was slang for prostitute.The word, senryu, became associated with the poetic form through Karai Senryu (1718–1790), the pen name of Karai Hachiemon, who in 1757 became a maekuzuke master. As amaster, or judge, of this verse-writing game, he provided the maeku, or first two lines,and the contest entrants wrote the tsukeku, or following three lines.3 The contests judgedby Karai Senryu became immensely popular, and an anthology of 756 winning versesfrom the contests appeared in 1765.4 The editor, Goryoken Arubeshi, omitted the maekuand printed only the tsukeku, selecting poems that could be “easily understood by them-selves,” thus beginning the history of senryu as a separate form.5

Many early Japanese senryu were written during the Genroku Era. By Genroku Era, Irefer not to the specific imperial era of 1688–1704 but to the broader cultural era thatexisted during the last two decades of the seventeenth century and the first few decades ofthe eighteenth century.6 The senryu written during this time period tend to address theeveryday practices of human beings. While some of these practices are portrayed humor-ously and others are portrayed critically, the emphasis on daily life specific to that erabecomes a defining characteristic of these poems.

Genroku culture is known for its tremendous energy, and this energy developed in partfrom the rising merchant class, many of whose members were very wealthy. These menfocused on the momentary pleasures of entertainment, food, drink, conversation, andsexual activity, often frequenting tea houses in the pleasure quarters of the large cities.Popular literature was designed for mass consumption during this era; senryu, as apopular form of verse, not only develops in this period but often focuses on thesesame subjects. Makoto Ueda, in Light Verse of the Floating World, notes that

The raison d’etre of senryu, then, lies in its value as popular literature, literature for mass

production and consumption. If it is poetry, it is the kind of poetry specifically intended to

entertain the millions . . .. Senryu was comic verse, a type of verse that gained enormous

popularity through its humorous quality, through its ability to make the reader laugh.

specifically on humor and are not limited to discussions of senryu, see Addiss, Stephen. Haiku Humor:Wit and Folly in Japanese Poems and Prints (Boston: Weatherhill, 2007); Blyth, R. H. Essentially Oriental:R. H. Blyth Selection, ed. Kuniyoshi Munakata and Michael Guest (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1994) andJapanese Humor (Tourist Library 24, Tokyo: Japan Travel Bureau, 1957).3The following texts summarize the history of senryu: Brown, J. C. Senryu: Poems of the People (Rutland,VT: Tuttle, 1991); Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku(New York: McGraw, 1985); and Ueda, Makoto. Introduction. Light Verse from the Floating World: AnAnthology of Premodern Japanese Senryu, ed. Makoto Ueda (Columbia: Columbia UP, 1999).4Ibid, 95qtd. in Ueda p. 106Although many descriptions of the Genroku Era exist, the following two considerations are especiallyuseful for concise, thoughtful overviews of the era’s arts and culture: Sansom, G. B. Japan: A ShortCultural History, (London: Cresset, 1932), 463–485; and Varley, Paul. Japanese Culture, 4th edn,(Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2000), 164–204. Donald Keene’s book on literature of Tokugawa Japan alsoincludes an excellent focus on Genroku literature. See Keene, Donald. World Within Walls: JapaneseLiterature of the Pre-Modern Era 1600-1867, (New York: Grove, 1976).

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Edo townsmen amused themselves by reading and writing senryu, not caring whether it

qualified as poetry.7

Senryu, like other forms of popular literature, responded to an era of cultural change byfocusing on the activities undertaken by, and appealing to, one of the social groupscentral to that period: the townsmen.

The subject matter of early senryu reveals some of the activities in which this particulargroup of people participated. Consider the following poem:

a filial daughter

and an unfilial son

sleeping side by side8

The setting for this poem is a teahouse in one of the pleasure quarters. A daughterbecomes a courtesan in the tea house to help support her family; therefore, she is aloyal daughter. A son from another family, however, squanders his family’s money bypaying to sleep with a courtesan; therefore, he is not loyal. The setting, subject matter,and humorous critique are all characteristic of Genroku Era senryu.

The next poem also contains critical humor but it uses a different setting and subject asits vehicle:

the game of chess:

he loses two matches, before

asking for a loan9

The poem depicts two aspects of life in the Genroku Era: entertainment via the game ofchess and business. Fortunes were quickly made and lost among members of the mer-chant class. Sometimes the money was spent on seeking pleasure rather than being usedmore responsibly. Whatever the cause of the man’s financial need, the critical humorcomes in the man’s willingness to lose two matches before asking to borrow money.

The final example again centers on the pleasure quarters with its tea houses andcourtesans:

a teahouse where

the tea costs as much as sake –

she’s that good-looking10

Money in the Genroku Era is often spent on pursuing pleasure. In this case, the courtesanis so physically attractive that customers are willing to pay as much for tea as they wouldhave spent on sake at another establishment. The poem reveals that the willingness topursue pleasure sometimes outweighs common sense.

The topics in these poems are specific to the new merchant class with its interest inpleasure and its pursuit of the money needed to enjoy that pleasure. Everyday activitiescomprise much of the subject matter, and the poems are written in response to a periodof cultural change. When humor is found in the poems, it derives from casting a criticalor satirical eye toward the events of the day complete with the hypocrisy and humanfoibles that attend those events.

7Ueda, pp. 19–20.8Ueda, p. 191. This poem, and the examples that follow, were written anonymously.9Ueda, p. 249.10Ueda, p. 186.

212 The Senryu Tradition in America

Senryu by Japanese Immigrants in America

Senryu written in America follow a variation on this approach. While they focus oneveryday activities, they respond not only to periods of cultural change but also to periodsof intense difficulty. The tradition of senryu written in America begins with the first andsecond generations of Japanese immigrants. Teruko Kumei, in “Crossing the Ocean,Dreaming of America, Dreaming of Japan: Transpacific Transformation of JapaneseImmigrants in Senryu Poems; 1929–1941,” explores senryu as a collection of historicaldocuments in order to “shed some light on the transformation of Japanese immigrantsfrom ‘birds of passage’ to the Issei, the first generation of Japanese Americans.”11 Writersbelieved that a new literature needed to be developed to reflect “the new life in the newenvironment.”12 Senryu became part of this new literature. The earliest known senryureading circles in the U.S. originated in Yakima, Washington in the autumn of 1910 or1912,13 and at the first meeting, the poem awarded first rank reads as follows:

Next morning,

all sobered up. Damn.

Sake brewed brawls.14

Kumei glosses the poem as “immigrant workers come out of a labor camp on a Saturdaynight to a Japanese sawdust parlor; friends meet and have a nice chat over drink afterdrink; drunk, they have a brawl over a trifle; the next morning, they meet, feelingashamed, and apologize; ‘Sorry, it was because of the sake. Sake drove me insane.’ ”15

The setting of the labor camp, the drinking of sake, the fight, and the apologies all reflectactivities in daily life. The poem also suggests the challenge of bridging aspects of Japaneseculture, such as drinking sake, with a difficult new life in a Northwest labor camp.

In writing senryu, these poets are answering the call of Kyuin Okina, a Japaneseimmigrant writer who argued that “ ‘the goal of immigrant land literature is to recordor narrate what happened in the immigrant land. . . in the future our descendants willgrow naturally in America. We have to tell how their ancestors had struggled, what kindof life and thought they had.’ ”16 In other words, write about daily life and experiences sothat the information can be passed down to future generations. Other writers and editorsshared this focus. Isshin Yamasaki, the editor of several anthologies of Japanese immi-grant literature, states,

“we created literary works, materials of which we draw on the lives of our fellow [Japanese]

people in the peculiar immigrant land; even if our works are unrefined and poor, they should

be regarded as precious records of human beings; the records of the life every author had

experienced; the records of the unprecedented environment our people created and lived in.”17

11Kumei, Teruko. “Crossing the Ocean, Dreaming of America, Dreaming of Japan: TranspacificTransformation of Japanese Immigrants in Senryu Poems; 1929-1941.” The Japanese Journal of AmericanStudies 16 (2005): 81–82.12Ibid, 82.13Ibid, 85.14Ibid, 86. No author name was given for this poem nor for the other examples that follow.15Ibid, 86.16Ibid, 83.17Ibid, 83.

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The tradition of senryu in America begins by establishing the importance of recordingactivities from the poet’s everyday life. This project differs from that of the Genroku Eraprecisely because it is a conscious project, but once again the poems are documenting andcommenting on representative moments of life at a time of great cultural change, andmore specifically, at a time of difficulty.

The following examples represent the variety of everyday experiences that Japaneseimmigrant writers chose to document as “precious records of human beings.” The firsttwo focus on holidays:

My dear, put this money

into the pot of the Salvation Army.

Remember the spirit of the holiday.18

The American experience of encountering a Salvation Army worker collecting money atChristmas is juxtaposed with the writer’s financial hardship. He must remind himself andhis wife of the “spirit of the holiday;” Christmas is a time of giving. Even if the writer andhis family could use the money they donate, they also know that the Salvation Army willuse that money to help others in need.

Independence Day,

full of floats, but first of all,

a Japanese float.19

Instead of a winter holiday, this poem focuses on the Fourth of July. The parade cele-brating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a quintessentially Americanholiday, contains a series of floats; however, the poet emphasizes that the first float isJapanese. The poem reflects the complex negotiation of national pride in Japan and adeveloping Japanese-American identity. The reference to Independence Day infuses thepoem with irony. The holiday celebrates America’s declaration of independence fromGreat Britain and the claims to freedom that accompanied it. The celebratory parade,however, includes a Japanese float in the lead even as discrimination against Japaneseimmigrants was being institutionalized by Supreme Court decisions and the ImmigrationLaw of 1924.20

The difficulty of life in America surfaces in many poems. The following exampledepicts the experience of a Japanese couple struggling to earn money, while simulta-neously demonstrating a strong work ethic and a willingness to do what was necessary tosurvive:

The plant is alight,

my wife is there on a night shift,

earning our rent.21

18Ibid, 95.19Ibid, 95.20In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court heard and decided the case of Ozawa v. United States. The courtdefined “white” as Caucasian, specified that a Japanese person was not a Caucasian, and upheld theNaturalization Act of 1906 that decreed only Caucasians, persons of African descent, and persons ofAfrican nativity were allowed to naturalize. The court ruled against Takao Ozawa and he was not allowedcitizenship in the U.S. In 1924, the Immigration Act excluded the immigration of Asians to the U.S.21Kumei, p. 92.


The senryu documents not only the fact that the poet’s wife is working a night shift butalso includes the reason for this type of employment. It is possible that the poet is out ofwork or that the couple has to take whatever jobs are available, even if that means thehusband works a day shift and the wife works a night shift.

The perseverance reflected in the above poem also appears in other poems. The fol-lowing senryu demonstrates, in addition to perseverance, a growing connection to thenew country:

It’s harsh to live here,but hard to give up

my life in America.22

This senryu acknowledges the complex experience of Japanese immigrants who live dif-ficult lives in America that they still choose not to give up. The poem, and the one aboveit, are taken from the 15,000 senryu written between the late 1920s and the end of WorldWar II and collected by Kumei, a number that suggests just how substantial a foundationexists for this tradition of senryu written in America.

Senryu Written by Japanese-Americans Imprisoned During WWII

The tradition continues during World War II, when Japanese Americans were forciblyrelocated and imprisoned. Marvin K. Opler and F. Obayashi, in their 1945 article,“Senryu Poetry as Folk and Community Expression,” examine poems written by mem-bers of a senryu group at the Tule Lake Center for Japanese-Americans in California, andtheir examination also reveals the importance of senryu for the prisoners. Once again, thepoems focus on the daily activities and are written at a time of immense cultural changeand difficulty.

The poems from the Tule Lake Center were collected by one of the prisoners, F.Obayashi, who was a member of the Center’s senryu group. Opler, the CommunityAnalyst in the Center and the lead author of the article, acknowledges that much ofthe information comes from Obayashi, “who compiled these data [and] was a memberof the group from May to November, 1943. Without him, this article could not have beenwritten.”23 Opler emphasizes the difficult situation and high degree of uncertainty expe-rienced by the writers, stating, “Senryu poetry, then, is one aspect of the cultural reviv-alism which occurred within the first-generation age group when they realized that theirfutures might be uncertain in this nation . . .. It also recaptures Japanese cultural values ofan apolitical sort.”24 Senryu writers continue to negotiate their new identity as JapaneseAmericans as well as the instability and struggle that developed in the 1920s and increasedas the writers became prisoners within their own country.

Some of the poems generated at Tule Lake appear to respond to this struggle byfocusing on unusual experiences; however, these experiences are actually part of regular

22Kumei, p. 105.23Opler, Marvin K. and F. Obayashi. “Senryu Poetry as Folk and Community Expression.” The Journal ofAmerican Folklore 58.227 (1945): note on p. 4.24Ibid, 4.

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prisoner life and function as everyday activities rather than unusual events.25 Considerthe following poem:

Again, the fingerprints,

The old man’s

Bitter face.26

The word “again” modifies the experience of fingerprinting from something unique orunexpected and emphasizes its routine nature, thus establishing it as ordinary activity.The phrase “old man’s/Bitter face,” reflects the strain and difficulty even though, orperhaps because, the experience has become routine.

Another poem depicts the boredom and lack of stimuli experienced by the prisoners:

The Center,

Of yawning, mixed,

A day is spent.27

Not only do the yawns recur throughout the day, but also many days pass in this manner.In the setting of the Center, each day is very much like the next. Clearly, the senryu groupand the writing of poems offer a means of disrupting the inactivity of Center life, but thefact that this senryu takes inactivity as its subject foregrounds the pervasiveness of theboredom.

The final example from Tule Lake is emblematic of senryu that respond to difficulttimes by focusing on everyday experiences:

Man’s mind imprisoned and

Disturbed behind the fence,

Prepares for marriage.28

This senryu provides an image of extreme difficulty, the disturbed minds of men wronglyimprisoned, with a common experience, the ritual of marriage. The ritual itself stands outas unique precisely because it is a common experience but it is now being enacted in thedetainment center. Everyday life continues regardless of the circumstances, and the poetsdocument this continuity through senryu.

Other forms of poetry also responded to these difficult experiences, and given thestructural similarities between haiku and senryu, an examination of selected haiku writtenby prisoners at Tule Lake provides a useful contrast to the senryu written there. VioletKazue de Cristoforo collected haiku from several camps, including Tule Lake, and pub-lished them in the anthology, May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology ofJapanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. The term kaiko means “crimsonsea” and it refers to the kaiko style. Ippekiro Nakatsuka founded this style in 1915 inJapan and chose the name “after the crimson-colored flowering quince” around hishome.29 As de Cristoforo explains, the style allows poets to “deviate from the restrictiveexpressions of scenery and objective subtleness associated with the earlier classical

25All of the senryu in this article are written anonymously.26Opler, p. 8.27Ibid, 8.28Ibid, 10.29de Cristoforo, Violet Kazue. May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese AmericanConcentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), 23.


haiku.”30 Furthermore, she notes that “love and observation of nature, vivid and youthfulexpression of detail and elegant usage of words correlated with the season” becamecentral characteristics of the style.31 In other words, Kaiko-style haiku can encompass adifferent range of subject matter and be more subjective than classical haiku.

The inclusion of a seasonal reference characterizes one key difference between thehaiku and the senryu written at Tule Lake. The following poem demonstrates the cen-trality of the seasonal reference in many of the Tule Lake haiku:

Flower of anemone

motherland seems so distant

when one is ailing32

Neiji Ozawa

The poem conveys the feeling of homesickness and alienation experienced by one of theprisoners. Geographically, Japan is far away from the camp in Northern California. Thedistance, however, appears to increase when the prisoner is ill because illness often makesone feel more isolated and helpless. The poem also suggests a contrast between the lack ofcare administered by the United States toward Japanese Americans through forcedimprisonment and the memory of feeling cared for by the motherland, Japan. The sea-sonal reference to an anemone provides the first image of the poem and leads into thereflections that follow in the concluding two lines. The contradictions expressed by thepoem—the reality of physical distance between California and Japan as opposed to thefeeling of increased distance brought about by the illness; a lack of caring by the U.S. anda memory of caring by Japan—are also encompassed by the physical immediacy of theanemone flower and the contrasting memory of flowers in Japan. This contrast heightensthe sense of separation experienced by the writer and contributes to the internal com-parison in the poem between the different types of closeness and distance.

The role of suggestion functions as a second key difference between the haiku andsenryu written at Tule Lake. As Makoto Ueda clarifies in his foreword to the anthology,“Haiku is short in length, but it speaks through its silence, through what it does notexpressly state.”33 This emphasis on what a haiku “does not expressly state” applies to allof the poems in May Sky, including the previous poem by Neiji Ozawa and the followingpoem by Kazue Matsuda:

Afternoon sun shining

this year’s moss-rose

reverted to single petal34

Kazue Matsuda

30Ibid.31Ibid.32Ozawa, Neiji. May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American ConcentrationCamp Kaiko Haiku, ed. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), 215.33Ueda, Makoto. Foreword. May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese AmericanConcentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, ed. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), 10.34Matsuda, Kazue. May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese AmericanConcentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, ed. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), 233.

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Each element in this haiku gestures toward the passage of time. The afternoon suggeststhat the day is passing. The phrase “this year’s moss-rose” emphasizes that this is not thefirst year that the moss-rose has been seen in bloom but that it has been seen blooming inprevious years, as well. The moss-rose is the seasonal reference in the poem, and theacknowledgement of the season is another example of time passing. Finally, the image ofthe single petal also indicates that multiple years have passed because, as the editor’s noteexplains, “Moss-rose reverts to single petal after a time, thus showing years spent incamp.”35 The internal comparisons between the time of day, the season, and the singlebloom all reinforce the idea that the poet has spent a considerable amount of time impri-soned in the camp, but the poem never states this fact directly. In fact, this type of sugges-tion is the primary difference between the haiku and senryu written at Tule Lake. Senryuare muchmore explicit as opposed to the silences that operate between the images in haiku.

George M. Oye also acknowledges the importance of writing senryu during his time asa prisoner in “ ‘America’s concentration camps’ ” when senryu groups developed amongthe prisoners.36 In his book of original senryu, Nameless to Nameless, Oye explains:“Because of our desolate feelings of helplessness in the unpleasant surroundings, Ilooked forward to the weekly gatherings of fellow poets under the leadership ofShimizu Kicho. It was like an oasis in the desert.”37 His poems, however, don’t specificallyaddress his experience of being imprisoned but reveal the impact of that experience on hislife after imprisonment. He published his collection of senryu in 1981, long after WorldWar II. The book presents poems informed by his previous experience primarily throughtheir focus on compassion and peace as seen in the title poem:

Nameless to nameless

The gentle hand of mercy

Reaches those in need.38

They also address the lingering presence of war:

Because the H bombsAre available to all

Peace talks now commence.39

Other poems take as their subject matter difficulties experienced by American culture ingeneral, as demonstrated by the following examples:

Emerging from the nuclear shelter –

How do you intend to live

In the world alone?40

How tense the border

After the presence of oil

Has been discovered.41

35de Cristoforo, p. 233.36Oye, George M. Nameless to Nameless. Media, PA: np, 1983.37Oye np.38Ibid, 4.39Ibid, 6.40Ibid, 4.41Ibid, 5.


Oye’s book, while beginning with a reference to his initial encounter with senryu in theinternment camp, actually offers a response to the cultural concerns at the time when thecollection was published. The use of senryu to address the threat of war, whether nuclearwarfare or battles waged over oil rights, reflects a shift in subject matter consistent withother senryu written during the second half of the twentieth century and reveals a newphase in the tradition of senryu written in America.

The “Senryu” of Etheridge Knight

Several books, including R. H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku, appeared in the 1940s and ‘50sthat generated a wider interest in the haiku form. Although haiku was still not consideredmainstream American poetry, poets such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch,Philip Whalen, and Richard Wright wrote many poems that in some cases adhered to,and at other times diverged from, traditional haiku. One poet in particular, EtheridgeKnight (1931–1991), made distinctive formal innovations in order to address a variety ofexperiences and concerns including prison and racism. The changes he makes to thehaiku form, and the fact that the poems are clearly written in the face of adversity,suggest that many of his poems are more accurately defined as senryu and belong tothe tradition traced in this essay.

In 1960, Etheridge Knight was arrested for taking a woman’s purse, convicted of armedrobbery, and sentenced to ten-to-twenty-five years in the Indiana State Penitentiary inMichigan City. He served eight years of his sentence before being released on parole.42

While in prison, he began writing poetry and his first collection of original poetry, Poemsfrom Prison, appeared in 1968. Even as he expanded his topics and themes in subsequentpoems, he acknowledged that “My major metaphor is prison,”43 a claim substantiated bya reading of Knight’s collected works. He elaborates on this metaphor, explaining that“art is ultimately about freedom, the celebration of that freedom—whether it’s individualor general.” 44 Prison, for Knight, “is the ultimate in oppression. And as with black peoplein the larger prison outside, the keepers try to hold the black inmates’ minds in chainsalong with their bodies by making full use of a white educational system, a white com-munications system, a dead white Art, and the white Law.”45 In other words, prisonmetaphorically represents the oppression of black Americans both inside and outside ofliteral prison walls.

While incarcerated, Knight took up haiku at the suggestion of Gwendolyn Brooks, whofelt the form would help Knight write more concise poems.46 As Michael Collins pointsout, Knight’s early poetic efforts, including his first haiku, coincide with “the black-power

42See the first footnote on p. 21 of Hill, Patricia Liggins. “ ‘Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy’: EtheridgeKnight’s Craft in the Black Oral Tradition.” Mississippi Quarterly 36.1 (1982): 21–33.43Price, Ron. “The Physicality of Poetry: An Interview with Etheridge Knight.” New Letters 52.2-3 (1986):167–76.44Ibid.45Knight, Etheridge. Preface. Black Voices from Prison. By Etheridge Knight and Other Inmates ofIndiana State Prison, (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 946Although this fact is often mentioned briefly in articles on Knight, a more developed discussion ofBrooks encouraging Knight to write haiku appears on p. 18 of Tracy, Steven C. “A MELUS Interview:Etheridge Knight.” MELUS 12.2 (1985): 7–23.

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and black-arts movements and their project of redefinition and counterhegemonic com-munication.”47 It is not surprising that taking up a relatively “new” form in Americanpoetry such as haiku and adapting it would appeal to Knight nor is it surprising that hewould find this form suitable for addressing power imbalances and the injustices thataccompany them.48 Consider Knight’s statement that as “a black male, I’m always onestep away from jail.”49 Consider also that, in a list of instances where the law was deter-mined by whoever held the most power, Knight includes Admiral Perry forcing Japan toagree to trade treaties with the U.S. under the threat of military action:

Power equals Law equals Right as defined by whoever has got the guns and tear gas. Long

before Mao Tse-tung came on the scene, the Man’s game was tight: Commodore Perry sailed

his gunboats into the Sea of Japan; Teddy Roosevelt swung his Big Stick throughout the

Caribbean; Mayor Daley occupied Chicago; four days ago, one tier above me, young black

men were tear-gassed and beaten while already locked in solitary confinement.50

Given that haiku was even more closely associated with Japanese history and culture inthe mid-twentieth century than it is today, Knight may have found in haiku a form thatitself was a touchstone for Americans with power using it to control those with lesspower.

His adaptation of the form to address his own experiences of power imbalance withinU.S. society does not negate the form’s use as a touchstone even as it connects it to theblack-power and black-arts movements’ interests in redefinition. As Knight claims, “TheBlack artist must create new forms and new values.”51 Using haiku would have been newenough to writers in the 1960s. Knight, however, continues to adapt the form to hissubject matter. For example, while he uses a 5-7-5 syllable count, he focuses on specif-ically human situations, employs similes, and often truncates words or sentences so thatthe rhythm of the poem is choppy rather than fluid. These changes to the haiku formallow him to address his larger concerns which are specifically about oppressive humansituations while maintaining the intense focus on a specific moment that is part of thehaiku tradition. The resulting “senryu” depict specific moments of cultural upheaval andtremendous difficulty—a use consistent with that of other senryu writers in America eventhough Knight did not have the senryu form itself available to him at the time he wrotehis poems.

Examining a selection of Knight’s “senryu” reveals just how closely his poems adhereto the American senryu tradition. The following poems best represent Knight’s earliest“senryu” about prison life. They form part of a nine-poem sequence titled “Haiku”published in Poems from Prison.

47Collins, Michael. “The Antipanopticon of Etheridge Knight.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 580–597.48Although Japanese haiku has existed for hundreds of years, the form enters American literature in theearly twentieth century through the work of Ezra Pound and other modernist poets. In the mid-twentieth century, interest in haiku began to increase but haiku only begins to flourish in Americanpoetry in the last few decades of the twentieth century. The Haiku Society of America, for example, wasonly formed in 1968 right around the time when Knight was writing haiku.49qtd. in Collins, p. 581.50Knight, Black Voices from Prison, 951qtd. p 115 in Hill, Patricia Liggins. “ ‘The Violent Space’: The Function of the New Black Aesthetic inEtheridge Knight’s Prison Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 14.3 (1980): 115–121.


1

Eastern guard tower

glints in sunset; convicts rest

like lizards on rocks.52

The first line presents a dominant image of the guard tower. Formally, the image hoversover the rest of the poem just as the guard tower hovers over the prison and continuouslyreminds the prisoners that they are not free. This constant surveillance contributes to thedehumanization of the men suggested by the simile describing convicts resting like lizardson rocks. Knight himself describes the effect of being imprisoned: “There’s so much painand brutality and oppression that you want to encapsulate yourself. . . Just to be aware ofyour existence when you’re in prison, man, is painful.”53 This experience, brought aboutby in part by the oppression convicts experience in prison, can create the dehumanizingeffect Knight describes in the poem.

The image of the prisoners like lizards, however, is presented through a simile and nota metaphor. It therefore emphasizes that these convicts are still men and are nothing lessthan human although they may at times feel that way and may also be viewed as less thanhuman from the occupants of the guard tower and others holding power within theprison.

Knight addresses the reality of this surveillance and its effects in longer poems, as well.In “The Antipanopticon of Etheridge Knight,” Michael Collins argues that “Knight’spoetry tabulates panopticism’s costs” and utilizes “the strategy of cleansing what is writ-ten on the human heart of its layers of panoptic prescriptions—by exchanging words,letters, and publication contracts along routes and styles of communication and inter-pretation that escape the view of a central authority.”54 Although the brevity of senryudoesn’t allow them to formally enact the strategy Collins describes, the thematic concernthat accompanies this formal strategy is clearly central to the above senryu, as well.

Finally, the division of the two main images right at the center of the middle linecreates a sense of surprise typical of haiku but here functioning to emphasize the expe-rience of the convicts. The first line and the first hemistitch of the second line present theimage of the tower in sunset. Day is ending. The second hemistitch of the second line,“convicts rest,” initially suggests that the men are resting because it is the end of the day.The third line, however, presents the surprise description of men like lizards and theunexpectedness of this description as the final line of the poem makes the impact of thedescription much stronger. Prison does not afford rest and relaxation. It oppressesthe prisoners.

The third poem in the sequence uses different imagery and a slightly different structureto achieve a result similar to the above poem.

3

Morning sun slants cell.

Drunks stagger like cripple flies

On Jailhouse floor.55

52Knight, Etheridge, Poems from Prison, (Detroit: Broadside, 1968), 18.53Price, p. 168.54Collins, pp. 582, 59555Ibid.

Ce Rosenow 221

Once again, the poem uses a simile and compares the imprisoned men to somethingnonhuman, in this case “flies.” The description goes a step further, however, by notingthat the men are not just compared to flies but to “cripple flies.” The men resort toalcohol to temporarily numb their feelings and escape the experience of being impri-soned, but instead of blocking out their dehumanizing experience, the drunkennessresults in their being even less like dignified, autonomous human beings. Knight himselfstruggled with alcohol and drug use, and he acknowledges that his drug use developedduring the Korean War: “In the Army I went to Korea, saw people and some things, and,also, got hooked on drugs . . .. Then I fell and went to prison in 1960 for armed robbery toget some money to get some drugs.”56 Knight also notes that he used drugs as a way toblock out his experience of the war: “I was trained as a medical technician, and I wasusing morphine, because it would kill the fear and the psyche. Narcotics does to thepsyche what novocain does to the pain in the tooth. It kills the pain.”57 The choppynature of the first line formally mirrors the men’s drunken staggering. It also establishesan unbalanced relationship between the natural world represented by the sun and theunnatural world of the prison cell. The “unnatural” environment of the prison cell isfurther emphasized by the fact that the prisoners are compared “cripple flies.”

Knight publishes haiku, including the above poems, in his other collections. Five haikuappear in Belly Song and Other Poems (1973). The first four comprise the sequence“Haiku 2,” and the fifth poem appears on its own later in the book as “Haiku 1.” Ofthe five poems, only the first poem in the sequence relates to the particular senryutradition of poems written in response to difficult situations:

1

Outside, the thunderShakes the prison walls; inside

My heart shakes my ears.58

This poem shares qualities with both haiku and senryu. While continuing to use a 5-7-5syllable structure, Knight also employs an internal comparison between the natural worldvia the thunder and the human world via the prisoner’s heart pounding so loudly that itshakes in his ears. The comparison is consistent with haiku; however, in this case, theinternal comparison is more explicit than in many haiku that gesture toward the com-parison without stating it directly. The overall emphasis on the human experience ofprison is more characteristic of senryu than haiku. As with the two other senryu pre-viously discussed, this poem constructs tension between the natural world of the thunderstorm and the unnatural world of the prison where the walls shake from the thunder andthe prisoner’s heart pounds in his ears. The result is an emphasis on the convict’s physicalexperience of prison, including the fear and anxiety suggested by the loudness of theheart’s pounding, and the unnaturalness of human imprisonment and its impact on thehuman body.

In Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Knight intersperses several haikusequences and single haiku among the other poems. He reprints the “Haiku” sequence

56See p. 973 of Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview With Etheridge Knight.” Callaloo 19.4 (1996): 967–980for Knight’s discussion of his time in Korea and related drug use.57Tracy, p. 2058Knight, Etheridge. Belly Song and Other Poems (Detroit: Broadside, 1973), 24.


from Poems from Prison and “Haiku 1” from Belly Song and Other Poems.59 He also addsthree new sequences: “Indiana Haiku,” “Indiana Haiku – 2,” and “Missouri Haiku.” Thepoem, “Indianapolis War Memorial,” is representative of Knight’s “senryu” that aren’tspecifically about prison but still address difficult circumstances. In this case, the poemfocuses on war.

“Indianapolis War Memorial”

Young boys play in pairs,

Touch the War weapons: tanks, guns,

Dreaming blood and Death.60

It is difficult to read this poem and not think about Knight’s own experience of war.Decades after Knight’s time in the service, he describes joining the army as a teenager: “Iwas a boy. I went in the army when I was sixteen and I lied about my age and put it up toseventeen . . .. I became alienated. I became split in myself. Because it’s insane. War isorganized insanity.”61 The tension Knight creates in the poem between the boys playing atwar, the reality of the veterans honored by the memorial, and the knowledge of thespeaker describing the scene resonates with his own comments about his experiencesin the Korean War.

As a poem, this senryu is particularly innovative in its use of time. The boys playing atthe war memorial are in the present moment; the title of the poem establishes the warbeing remembered as something in the past; and the dreams of the boys suggest that waris inevitable and will happen again in the future. The poem directs the reader’s attentionto the omnipresence of war in American history and culture, even in times when an actualwar is not being fought.

The above poem is best defined as a senryu for two reasons. First, the treatment of timeand its importance for the poem rely on an intellectualization consistent with senryu.Second, the entire poem focuses only on the human experiences of war and boys playingat war. This focus also foreshadows the war senryu written by later generations of poetsthat will be discussed later in this essay.

In The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986), Knight reprints all of the haiku and “senryu”from his earlier collections and adds a new, much longer haiku sequence that is also titled“Haiku.” The seventeen poems are primarily senryu and, as they address topics rangingfrom personal relationships to music to racism, not all of them fit into the traditionexamined here. As an example of Knight’s senryu from this sequence that do fit thistradition, consider the following senryu with its indictment of Apartheid in South Africa:

Woe South Africa!Bullets, bones, fires of Apartheid!

My bowels won’t move.62

This poem adapts the haiku form in ways that are innovative for senryu, as well, althoughthe adaptations are in service of the poem’s topic and that topic is consistent with senryu.

59Many other poems from Knight’s earlier collections, and not just his haiku, are included in thisvolume.60Knight, Etheridge. Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1980), 42.61Tracy, p. 2062Knight, Etheridge. The Essential Etheridge Knight (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1986), 101.

Ce Rosenow 223

Specifically, the quantity and variety of punctuation is unusual for haiku and senryu;however, the punctuation helps establish the relationship between Apartheid in SouthAfrica and the speaker’s bowels not moving. The exclamation marks at the end of the firstand second lines create a parallel between the speaker’s degree of woe for the people ofSouth Africa and the scope of the oppression and suffering. The period at the end of thethird line creates a parallel between the direct, unemotional statement and the mundanephysical condition experienced by the speaker. The commas in the second line structurethe list in that line but also fulfill another important function. Bones are included in thelist and placed in the center of the line offset by two commas. The placement formallyrepresents the fact that the bones connect Apartheid and unmoving bowels because theyforeground the centrality of the physical body. The body suffers on a large scale becauseof bullets and fires and on a smaller scale because of the unmoving bowels. Finally, eachend stopped line suggests curtailed movement, which is consistent with the lack ofmobility both physical and in terms of individual agency under Apartheid and withthe speaker’s bowels not moving.

Even though the amount and variety of punctuation is different than that typicallyused in senryu, the poems’ subject matter aligns it with senryu. Both Apartheid and thecondition of one’s bowels are part of the human world and this senryu connects forms ofhuman suffering on two different scales. Knight, as a black poet, relates to some degree tothe suffering caused by Apartheid, even though his experience is of racism in Americaand, in this poem, his bowels.

Ultimately, Knight’s poems resist being defined as part of the senryu tradition traced inthis essay because Knight did not know about senryu nor strive to write it in response tohis experiences. Instead, he took a poetic form that was somewhat new to Americanwriters, the haiku, and adapted it to convey a variety of challenges and difficultiesincluding prison, war, and racism. The fact that Knight had only two options available,haiku or adapted haiku, explains why the resulting poems are sometimes haiku, some-times borderline haiku-senryu, and sometimes senryu. Had he known of the senryu form,he may have chosen it specifically or, more likely, he may have adapted that form, as well.Of the poems he did write, those most clearly defined as senryu are, whether Knightintended it or not, consistent with decades of American senryu written in response todifficult situations.

Early Senryu in English

The first English-language haiku journals contain some of the earliest attempts by thenascent haiku movement to write senryu as well as haiku. These poems, though few innumber, are consistent with the tradition established by Japanese immigrant writers, asseen in the following examples:

At the street corner –

he with banjo, she with tin, –

arm in arm they stand.63

Ethel Green Russel

Hippie writing verses

63Russel, Ethel Green. American Haiku 2.1 (1964): 55.


as long as his hair and

just as dirty.64

Elizabeth Gregg

The poems clearly address cultural change. If writers had pursued senryu more rigor-ously, they might have used the form on a larger scale and in a way similar to that of theimmigrant writers. Certainly, the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and ‘70s would haveafforded ample subject matter.

Poets, however, did not adhere to this approach. The senryu included in the earliestsenryu section of Frogpond, the journal published by the Haiku Society of America, reflectvery different subject choices. Frogpond first includes a separate section for senryu in 1982before merging haiku and senryu into one section, and finally, in 1998, placing senryu ina separate section again. When haiku and senryu are blended within a single section andthe senryu are not distinguished from the haiku, it is at times unclear which poems areintended as haiku and which are intended as senryu. The first distinct senryu section,from the fifth volume of the journal, contains one page with three senryu. These poemsrepresent what the poets and editor consciously defined as senryu. Here are the threepoems in their original order:

gently awakened

by an argument

in 3- B65

Dan Liebert

barbershop floor:

my hair mingles with father’s

and grandfather’s66

Nick Virgilio

years of the dog:

waiting for the new year’s feast,

my stomach growls67

Jerry Kilbride

The poems convey humor and focus on human experiences. Clearly, however,English-language writers are not yet turning to senryu consistently as a way to addressa difficult time in their culture. That shift does not take place until the early 1990s.

Contemporary Senryu

Etheridge Knight’s poem “Indianapolis War Memorial” and the concerns about warfareraised in George M. Oye’s 1981 collection foreshadow the next phase in this senryutradition: senryu as a response to war. The Persian Gulf War (1990–1991) and the“war on terrorism” (2002–present), including the war in Afghanistan and the war in

64Hood, Elizabeth Gregg. Modern Haiku 1.2 (1970): 35.65Liebert, Dan. Frogpond 5.2 (1982): 35.66Virgilio, Nick. Frogpond 5.2 (1982): 35.67Kilbride, Jerry. Frogpond 5.2 (1982): 35.

Ce Rosenow 225

Iraq, emerge as a recurring focus for contemporary senryu written in English. Whilesenryu also address other situations of extreme difficulty such as the aftermath ofHurricane Katrina (2005), the majority of poems documenting daily activities during adifficult cultural moment focus on living in a country at war.

The Gulf Within anthology, edited by Christopher Herold and Michael Dylan Welchand published by Two Autumns Press in 1991, presents fifty-eight poems written inresponse to the Persian Gulf War. Some of the poems in the anthology are haiku whileothers are senryu, and all of the poems involve the presence of the war in daily life. Thefollowing examples demonstrate that many of the poems are written not about events athome but about events taking place in Iraq:

on a clear night

these stars, all can be seen

from Baghdad68

Christopher Herold

strings of bright beads

crossing the green sky:

Baghdad by night69

Richard Goring

The poems, however, are still representative of everyday life in America because theimages they present come from the television, once again emphasizing the ongoing pres-ence of the war. The poets’ experience of watching their country at war on TV permeatesthis collection. Many poems, such as this senryu written by Helen J. Sherry, directlymention the television itself:

on television

sounds of the Gulf War –

I dust and redust70

Here, the poet juxtaposes an act of peaceful domesticity, dusting, with the sound of warcoming from her television. The domestic images of television and dusting contrast withthe image of war and yet simultaneously suggest how the war, by appearing constantly onTV, has become a regular feature of American life. The poet’s emphasis on dust andredusting resonates with the dust of the desert, the “dusting” of human lives when peopleare killed, and, as with the act of dusting furniture, the inability to completely removeboth the furniture dust and the presence of the war.

Eleven years after the Persian Gulf War, America begins its “war on terrorism.” Senryuthat address this war focus on living in a culture at war, a culture concerned with

68Herold, Christopher. The Gulf Within, ed. Christopher Herold and Michael Dylan Welch (Foster City,CA: Two Autumns, 1992), 10.69Goring, Richard. The Gulf Within, ed. Christopher Herold and Michael Dylan Welch (Foster City, CA:Two Autumns, 1992), 13.70Sherry, Helen J. The Gulf Within, ed. Christopher Herold and Michael Dylan Welch (Foster City, CA:Two Autumns, 1992), 16.


terrorism, and a culture divided in its response to these situations. The senryu presentedhere appeared in Frogpond between 2005 and 2007:

talk of terrorism . . .he rearranges the fruit

in the bowl71

Marilyn Appl Walker

boys in the park win the war in Iraq72

R. P. Carter

back from Iraq

my former studentremembers freshman year73

John S. O’Connor

driving eighty

in these days of war

all defiance feels good74

Michael Ketchek

All four poems operate in ways similar to Helen J. Sherry’s poem, “on television/soundsof the Gulf War – / I dust and redust” in that they each locate very ordinary experienceswithin the context of the war. The poems also reveal how the war permeates so manyaspects of daily life including family discussions, children’s games, employment, educa-tion, and driving the car. They resonate with the first senryu written in America becausethey often include the writer’s feelings about the activity, such as Michael Ketchek’sacknowledgement that, for someone against the war and feeling powerless to stop it,even the small, defiant act of driving above the speed limit causes the writer to feel good.R. P. Carter’s poem, while formally quite different in its one-line structure, also recallsEtheridge Knight’s “Indianapolis War Memorial” senryu. The different responses to thisconstant presence of war suggest that while people in America experience the war col-lectively, they also experience it individually. In this sense, too, they are consistent withthe poems from The Gulf Within and with the poems written by earlier generations ofsenryu writers.

Conclusion

For almost a century, senryu have been written in America. The poems cover all mannerof subjects, including those common since senryu developed in eighteenth-century Japansuch as love, death, greed, and jealousy. Two characteristics, however, distinguish senryuwritten in America: senryu are used to respond to moments of cultural change and dif-ficulty, and they respond by focusing on daily activities and experiences. Together these

71Walker, Marilyn Appl. Frogpond 28.2 (2005): 31.72Carter, R. P. Frogpond 29.1 (2006): 28.73O’Connor, John S. Frogpond 30.3 (2007): 36.74Ketchek, Michael. Frogpond 29.2 (2006): 29.

Ce Rosenow 227

two characteristics allow senryu to act as the “precious records of human beings” thatIsshin Yamasaki described. Contemporary English-language senryu are part of this tradi-tion.75 In fact, senryu seems particularly appropriate for constructing this record becauseof its ability to hone in on individual moments while focusing on human nature. It differsfrom the related form of haiku which, while also conveying a single moment, typicallyemphasizes the natural world or the relationship between people and the natural world.Senryu’s focus, by its very existence, emphasizes the value of human experience, evenwhen the perspective on that experience is humorous or critical. When its focus centerson human activities during times of great difficulty, senryu offers moment by momentreiterations of human persistence in the face of adversity.

Early- and mid-twentieth-century senryu poets constructed a tradition based on abelief in the value of recording this persistence, and their belief has been adhered to bycontemporary poets, as well. Anita Virgil, a poet who has long argued for the importanceof senryu as a poetic form in English, states in her 1990 interview with Vincent Tripi,“[senryu] are wonderful because they shoot from the hip. In today’s world, with all theugliness and painful material that at last is out in the open, the poet feels impelled to writethis way – if he is to be true to the world in which he lives. . . the new direction for haikupoets of this era is naturally going to be senryu, at least part of the time.”76 Those senryuwritten during the last two decades as responses to some of the momentous challenges ofthose years, and especially the poems written as reactions to the two wars, suggest thatVirgil was correct. Furthermore, in turning to senryu, the “poets of this era” are parti-cipating in, and continuing, an established tradition of senryu in America.

75It is worth noting that contemporary Japanese senryu have also been used in a similar way. Forinstance, after the Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin gas in 1995, many thousands ofsenryu were published in newspapers in response to the attack. See Gardner, Richard A. “ ‘The Blessingof Living in a Country Where There Are Senryu!’: Humor in the Response to Aum Shinrikyo.” AsianFolklore Studies 61 (2002): 35–75.76Virgil, Anita. Interview. By Vincent Tripi. On My Mind (Foster City, CA: Press Here, 1990), 16.


c.e. rosenow - the senryu tradition in america

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