Haiku is the descendant of renga, a form of collaborative
poetry. In a kind
of peotic party game, the first verse, known as a "hokku,"
is presented by
one poet. The next verse, written by another poet, is connected
to the first
in some fashion, and so on. Each verse is short, and sometimes
humorous.
During the height of the renga as an art form, during the
13th through 16th
centuries, renga of 50 to 100 stanzas were very common, and
1000 stanza
renga were not unheard of.
In "The Haiku Handbook," authors William Higginson
and Penny Harter write:
"The point of renga writing is not to tell a story in
a logical progression.
Each stanza must move in some new direction, connected to
the stanza just
before it, but usually not to earlier stanzas. When reading
a renga, we . .
. zig-zag over the different imaginary landscapes of the
poets' minds, much
as a spaceship might flash now over ice and snow, now over
teeming cities,
now over green forests, ultimately to splash down into blue
ocean. As
readers we should enjoy the flow of sights, sounds, and insights
as they
tumble past. Indeed, 'enjoyment' is a key word in early descriptions
of
renga by the first poet to codify the rules of the game."
The SciFaiku renga experiment started with my hokku. I'd
been toying with
the image of a lonely robot, lured to its death on the sunny
side of Mercury
by a stray radio signal.
From the sun-side
siren-song lures the probe:
silicon melts.
The amount of information I wanted to convey was almost too
much for a
haiku, but I eventually knocked the thing into submission
and proposed it to
the SciFaiku list as the opening hokku of a renga.
Lee Hauser
lhauser@sprynet.com
Lee Hauser lhauser@sprynet.com Copyright 1996, Lee Hauser
This is the renga that was begun on the SciFaiku Mailing List:
Mercury
From the sun-side
siren-song lures the probe:
silicon melts.
(lhauser@sprynet.com)
Songs whisper leylines
Media static whites out.
Signal to noise..........flare/dreams.......
(MMSerpento@aol.com)
As diodes die, the last image
shows the smooth silver face
Shredded by the storm
(rob@kirschccc.com)
Technology feeds
fiery metabolism
with metalurgy
(kddid@anet-stl.com)
At Mission Control:
baffled by eerie music
...deciphering the code
(brinck@umich.edu)
Mothership, darkside
synchronous:
bereft of her rover.
(lhauser@sprynet.com)
