A traditional spring Kasen renga by
Sue Stanford and Jane Reichhold
With comments from the authors.

**************************

hens glossy
in the spring sun
two warm eggs ..........................Sue

I had this in my mind before we thought of starting the renga. But then it seemed perfect. The (unspecified number of) writers with their two eggs.What would the eggs bring forth when they hatched?

fluffy clouds hover
packed suitcases...................... Jane

First the idea of eggs as cases for the unknown, the folded up and the easy portable sparked the idea of suitcases. The clouds, fluffy and hovering seemed the right-sized cosmic chickens. By putting the clouds first and then the suitcases, the idea of air travel evolves from the combination.

in a taxi
through Paris
it's May Day........................... s

I didn't expect Jane's link and was all of a whirl. Her clouds hovering and packed suitcases made me think of air travel. I thought of leaving an airport in a taxi and although I've had a fair few experiences of this it was Paris that stuck in my mind. But I wanted to put in a kigo to tie it down. May Day seemed perfect. There is the connection with the left and also the more ancient fertility observances. I thought that would give Jane plenty to link to.

more work to figure out
did he say he loved me or?..................... j

As a result of living in Europe where May Day was the day of celebration for workers as opposed to the idea of making and giving of baskets of flowers in America, and since we were in Paris I wanted to get "work" in there somehow, yet for me, Paris is love in springtime. I know I should not have had a love link so early and I'll take ten lashes for it, but this is renga, by starting with eggs already seemed warm and ready for love and I defending something that cannot be defended. I just went with my feelings and not the rules.

blind drunk
and affectionate --
yesterday's moon ..................................s

Faced with a question mark, I was feeling skeptical here! And thinking of the Tang poets who would drink (and dance) with only the moon as companion. This had to be a moon verse. The first stage of love is often a "Does s/he really love me???" stage. But too often it ends. Yesterday's. Drunk on "illusions" the lovers' promises last only as long as the intoxication. And yet there can have been (still be) real affection, too. Already, I'd decided I would not be able to predict Jane's area of linking and so stopped worrying about making the links open-ended. I reckoned she'd manage!

tonight even brighter
the comet spangles the sky.................... j

Sue's link impressed me greatly. It seemed so good to me there seemed no link I could write would fit or properly correspond to it. The night before I had had an incredible experience with the Hyakyutake (sp?) comet and wanted to write about it. I put up a link which I knew was not good and then a few days later rewrote it.

nights colder
10,000 years ago a visitor
from outer space ....................................j

This link also was the result of the comet, was poorly written the first time and was then corrected a few days later. It was actually easier for me to fix it once Sue went on to write her link. Her ideas acted as boundaries which forced me to be more exact. Also I had used something about a dirty snowball and later knew the comet was too grand and exciting to think of it like that.

juke box blares "Telstar"
sharing a spider .....................................s

Jane's original link contained the word "snowball", which made me think of ice-cream. Now this was supposed to be a love verse which suggested "sharing a spider" ! (Pretty spooky if you don't know what a "spider" is. [an English non-alcoholic drink] But lovers have done worse.) Spider and love suggested those nostalgic rock and roll movies where the kids sip (harmless) drinks and jive to the jukebox. I never did the real thing. If you are linking to outer space what better than "Telstar"? (Yeah, I can remember when it first came out. I'm 44. It was the first piece of music I thought I'd made up myself!)

12 year old
tickling her just to watch
her wiggle ..........................................j

Frankly the jukebox and the spider had me scratching my head. What image could connect those two? As you see, by line three, I had a connection. I felt one could think either of kids tickling each other as early sex-play or a kid teasing a spider so I got two versions from one link.

holding two snails:
"Look, they're sexing, Mum!" .............s

A direct and fairly recent quote from my daughter, aged 5. "Just to watch her wiggle", well yes, I thought, and no. I've been amazed to observe how much kids know about sex. There's no "just" involved. Feelings (excitement, attraction) and, basically anyway, how you go about it. And yet they are protected by a basic "innocence" that shields them from the adult experience. (Even if many adults are not past "tickling just to watch her wiggle".)

such fighting
members of the school board against
life and love classes............................ j

Sometimes children observe animals having sex as fighting, so I picked up with that idea and suddenly there was the memory of a school board meeting where adults got very hot and bothered about how to teach about sex. I wanted to also say with my link that I felt the child's statement to Sue showed how well she had been taught and how comfortable both of them felt handling the situation.

tired from the meeting
she takes off her bra ..........................s

Hypocrisy? Not exactly, more like a questionable sense of boundaries. Proper people, like this member of the school board who come home hoarse from fighting to keep kids ignorant of contraception, and basic hygiene can come home and spend the rest of the evening without a bra. (We needn't hate her for it.) And yet if we could get her to apply her humanness more humanely...

spaghetti straps
when my love leans over
two moons ........................................j

I was just hanging in there with the boobs. And yet I had a moon verse. Oh, well, here we can have two moons if the lady leans over far enough.

in his nostrils
delicate hairs..................................... s

I was a bit embarrassed by Jane's link. I kept seeing a not especially flattering image of two buttocks. Leaning over he didn't have a head. I decided my train of thought best sublimated into nostrils. Some nostrils are moon-shaped.

ripe peaches
their heaviness tips the days
into summer ......................................j

Hmm... It is now very interesting to see what Sue was really thinking! I was a little shocked at Sue's verse because I thought she had advanced a couple in lovemaking down to well... I thought I would cool the scene off abit by moving the camera outdoors, letting those delicate hairs be on the peaches which I felt would be ripe and juicy enough to connect to Sue's verse without being so overt about it. Truthfully, I was not uncomfortable with the sexual undertone as it had developed here. As I said before, this renga started out that way (as I read it) and nothing actually said yet offended my concepts on the subject.

Arima hot spring
after the mastectomy .........................s

From one of the few long discussions Jane and I had while writing the renga: Here are my reasons for linking hot springs and mastectomies and peaches and summer. From the psycho-social point of view, the exposure. Summer often involves physical exposure and for some people this can be distressing. From the medical point of view, hot springs heal and produce well-being - counterbalance to the exposure theme. Exposure can be healing. From the cultural point of view, peaches are a symbol of longevity, mastectomies mean a brush with mortality. Such an experience can result in an increase in zest for life. From the kinesthetic point of view, the experience of unbalance, balanced by the buoyancy of the water. The peaches "tip". From the seasonal point of view, hot springs are often visited in the summer in Japan. From the aesthetic point of view the heavy peach has a similar shape to a heavy breast... By this stage in the renga I was beginning to discover that I was interested in breasts. Ah, interesting, I thought. I didn't know that. (I didn't wean my younger daughter until she was three - but that was because SHE enjoyed it so much!) Renga as self-discovery? Renga as...therapy?

strange shape
the passion flower
and its legend ....................................j

Because Sue's link did not entirely come across to me, and I felt it would need some work on it, but I did not want to get into "correcting" her, I just worked off the word 'mastectomy'. Recently there was a picture in the paper showing a woman wearing a specially designed dress that had a cut-away so the scars of her mastectomy were as bare as her arm. The site was a shock to me and then the next day comes Sue's verse on the same subject and here I had the darned flower verse and could not really expose my feelings. If you have seen a passion flower, it has an unusual shape of pistils and stamens which look like purple stitches on white skin. There is a legend that the flower was *designed* like this to remind people of the crown of thorn on Christ's head during the crucifixion.

crossroads
the traffic lights are broken ...................s

The legend of the passion flower is not known to me but I guessed it had something to do with the Easter Passion. So I thought of crosses. The passion flower has a cross-shaped stamen (or something!). I'm not Christian so haven't many easy links to this. What was supposed to direct Western culture morally and spiritually has (for me and many others) broken down. "We" are at a crossroads - facing many difficult choices and decisions.

swallows
negotiate nesting space
kindergarten ..........................................s

So to get through the crossroads, especially when there is lots of traffic (and no police) we have to negotiate. When I was living in Japan, I used to watch swallows negotiating nesting space - one swallow sitting to hold the chosen place (while the mate returned with the first beakfuls of mud?). Territorial behavior is fairly universal. Most people hit this in a really big and challenging way at kindergarten, if not before. And after that?

the playground bully
looks just like one .................................j

My earliest playground memories are of being afraid of the one kid who made it hell for the rest of us. By leaving the second line so open the reader could decide whether the bully looked like a bully or a swallow.

a TV make-up artist
strokes the naked face
of power ..............................................s

The playground bully, lusts for power and, if successful, becomes a politician. (Maybe that's just slick thinking on my part.) Anyway, a politician can't afford to look too much like a playground bully. A make-up artist helps.

with a blink of an eye
the weather changes.............................. j

Again Sue's verse knocked my socks off. She did it so right. She moved the bully from a child to adult, picked up and amplified the idea of a bully's need for power and yet she shifted the interest to the make-up artist working on the bully. She also has a nice pun in there with 'make-up' or to stop fighting. Because I have the two-liner, I felt I wanted to stay with Sue in the TV studio and simply elaborate on her image as a way of saying how good I thought it was. So I moved the man on camera giving the weather report. He is someone we pay a lot of attention to, but is really not powerful at all in himself. He just reports power.

"Happy Birthday, Grandma!"
a snowstorm
in a ball of glass..................................... s

This had to be a winter verse. The weather changing in a "blink of an eye" made me think of those glass ornaments that have "snow" in them that falls when you turn them upside down. For the old it seems as though time has passed in a blink of an eye. Grandma with her memories, from season to season, changing as rapidly as thought. By being born her grandchildren have given her the gift of old age.

Christmas gifts in white tissue
mountains covered with mist ..................j

Again I chose to amplify Sue's verse by simply showing another side of the day. I moved the birthday from Grandma's to Christ's, combining the mountains of gifts on that day with the mountains which will often, when snow-covered, mist over so they look as if they are wrapped in tissue paper.

breath clouded
stepping on pine needles
with bare feet .......................................s

The excitement and slight feeling of disorientation/wonder just before (or after) making love in the woods. The link was with the mountains and the mist.

the imprint of your body
our child so like you ............................j

I know the imprint one gets from making love on pine needles. The one on the bottom. I carried that idea to the reality that in lovemaking our bodies do assume a shape due to the other shapes of two persons pressed tightly together. Then I drew out that imprinting to show that it remains and manifests even more when a child is created and has characteristics of both parents.

no iconography
for girl-child and father
and yet... ............................................s

The manifestations of genetic inheritance is a fascinating thing. Many times I have seen one of my daughters sitting/standing even on their father's knee looking, both so beautiful in their similarity and difference. We have lots of images of mother and son (with Mary and Jesus) but and some secularization of this mother and child theme, but very few images of father and daughter within the compass of Western (and Eastern) art. The misogyny of the past will be left behind. We hope.

he teaches her fly-fishing
calm as a trout pond........................... j

How to explain this without getting kicked off the net. There are two meanings in it, the second one I only realized while reworking the renga. The link was written in all innocence and yet it comes off like this. This is not a personal experience. I read too much.

harvest moon
the whale feels the tug
of her suckling calf .............................s

The pond is calm. Like the moon. (This is a moon verse.) The sea even when calm is subject to such enormous tidal forces. The fish, the enormous whales must feel these forces. And the other forces of life. For us mammals that includes the tug of breast feeding. And we already had such a lot of breast 'ku, I thought why not have another. The moon is the harvest moon (autumn) the whale calf is also "harvesting".

gaining a pound an hour
the river ices over................................ j

The link to Sue's whale is the fact that the calves gain a pound an hour which often seems frightening (could that happen to me if I ever ate all I wanted?). Having that image, there needed to be something else that also gains a pound an hour. Ha! the river icing over.

fog-bound morning
sleep upon an eyelid
a pearl's roundness ............................j

And oops, it was my link again. Usually I give a bit more planning to the double-up links because here are two places where a partner can exert the most pressure in directing the renga in mood or subject. By slipping up on this one, by writing the first link without considering that I had the next one also, I was stuck with the situation. I thought I could let Sue get us off the ice and then I had to do it. The best I could do was to equate the newly iced over river with the thinness of an eyelid, let the water create a pearl and show these two images as having a connection with the delicate feeling of fog and morning.

the sound of a liner's horn
rolls across the water ........................s

The river (and still the sea). I traveled twice as a child between Australia and England by liner. The sound of the liner's horn is especially evocative for me. The sound rolls through the fog, echoing the roundness of a pearl on an eyelid.

Hamburg Germany
people waving different words
with their good-byes .........................j

Here we were both aware of the need to speed up the action at the end and a time-honored way is to use the names of places to jerk the images around on the globe. Hamburg, being a seaport, being my home for 17 years, my problems with German! and the many good-byes I said there to my three children as they shuttled between USA and Europe each summer: enough for one link.

returning home
I skip along the flagstones ..................s

Leaving a country...and returning home. I left England at 16 when my family emigrated for the second time to Australia. I was desperately homesick and saved all my money to return "home". Back in London at 21 I was so happy that I even found the paving stones beautiful. And yes I did skip. The flag in the flagstones was supposed to create a distant link with the "wave" in Jane's verse.

blue iris
pool rippled water
in the leaves......................................... j

When I was growing up, everyone called irises 'flags' plus, I think of a pool somewhere in my memory with a flagstone edge and the flowers growing at the edge. Just now the wild irises are blooming on the sea meadows. Due to the way they multiply, they form great circles. The leaves are more shiny than the other plants, and a bit longer, so that when the wind blows the light reflects off the moving leaves just as it does on the sea. When the flowers bloom thickly they become the blue water above the watery look the leaves have.

a feather;
she closes her book............................. s

The eggs are hatched. The omelet made. The book is finished and we can close it now. Let's use the tail feather of a chicken found caught in the leaves of the iris as a bookmark. Life and art. The "natural world" calls us and we close our books. Without it we may find it hard to open them again. (A small tribute to - well if you'll let me stretch a term - to kigo!)

A perfect closing by Sue. She hooked her link back to the beginning in a very gentle way and she was able to complete the circle image that the eggs were our ideas and products and out of that we created something readable! To which I agree. I missed the connection between the shape of an iris leaf and a feather. Glad to be shown that one.

More about renga .