Pageant of Seasons. Helen Stiles Chenoweth

      Introduction

      An interest in people and things Japanese has occupied three periods of my life that eventually led to the teaching of American haiku as part of work in creative writing classes.

      When I was a child my mother read Japanese fairy tales and stories by Lafcadio Hearn to me. The story of kusahibari from his book Kotto was one of my precious memories of a "tiny insect whose particular kind of singing can be heard only in Japan." Years later I read his statement that poetry in Japan "is as universal as air. It is felt by everybody. It is read by everybody, composed by almost everybody, irrespective of class and condition."

      This was a challenge to me when I first started to study the writing of poetry. One of the text books (now out of print) was used in experimental teaching of a second year high school class. First lessons were designed to write original poems in the haiku style and mood. In this experiment the pupils became haiku conscious of counting syllables as well as trying to emulate the exquisite work of the Japanese poetry in American fashion.

      The result was that a term later the first class of its kind in the eastern part of the United States was open to students of third year English and to others as an elective. The study of poetry beginning with haiku was the second part of my interest in people and things Japanese.

      The third period came when I had a class in Adult Education, teaching a group of women in the Los Altos Writers Roundtable in 1956. This was a workshop among women who wanted to write poetry, prose, and articles for publication. Prosody, the study of poetic meter and versification, proved to have its stumbling block among some of the writers who could neither apply nor relate syllables to their poetic efforts. Recalling a book I had used and its discussion of the use of haiku with syllabic content, was a directive toward promoting the study of Japanese haiku. I used haiku alone to relate the understanding and use of syllables, followed by the cinquain for meter identification in writing. The form cinquain was conceived by the poet Adelaide Crapsey who promoted its use as an American form after she had made a study of Japanese haiku.

      A dozen determined women formed a special class of dedicated haiku writers. The result was Borrowed Water (Tuttle, 1966). During this time I wrote many haiku as suggestions for class work and examples of American mood, idiom, season, and other themes for writing haiku. Most of these were preserved for Pageant of Seasons, all written in California where the actual pageantry of seasons is brilliant, ever-changing, and associated with scenes that are as unpredictable as snow on a full-blooming rosebush in February.

      I wish to thank the editors of American Haiku, Platteville, Wis., Haiku West, Forest Hills, N. Y., and Haiku Magazine, Toronto, Can., for their permission to publish haiku which appeared in their publications.

      Los Altos, California

      H. S. C.

      SPRING

      Disciplined by rain

      white crane image distorted

      in dimpled waters . . .

      Wind rage of March

      breaks the hermetic seal

      of sea's hibernation.

      Lost in the blue haze

      a solitary marsh hawk—

      rising and falling . . .

      Pampas grass

      waving directions to speeding drivers

      in wild March wind . . .

      Spring's color swatches:

      black, tilled earth, barley green fields,

      golden winter wheat.

      Eucalyptus trees

      in long lines of lashing rains—

      more trees and more rain.

      Shine of swamp grasses,

      fringe of shimmering river—

      sun frames a picture . . .

      Wind and the willow

      make their own patterns, defy

      the stream's roiled waters.

      A blue jay was loved

      though he ate every berry

      prior to our picking.

      Long line of white wash

      crayoned the air with clouds

      and one black shirt.

      A wheeling bee

      ransacks flowering quince—

      drama of defeat!

      Up high the freshet

      announces spring, then hurries

      toward the quiet sea . . .

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