Renga

Renga means 'linked verse' in Japanese and began in 15th century Japan as a sort of subversive activity between young poets who had been summoned to The Palace to participate in formal poetry readings. While they waited their turn to recite strict formal verse as prescribed by the governor, they would gather at the sidelines and pass each other notes with verses that were, for the time, doggerel and provocative. One poet would write three lines, the next poet would "respond" to those three lines with two lines of his own, the next poet wrote three lines in response to the two lines, and so on. Every "link" in the collaborative effort is subversively connected the prior link - in the way that a lightning bolt is connected to the thunder, yet both are perceived as singular events.

Matsuo Basho, a Zen monk, later formalized renga by making a few literary rules: that certain seasonal words must appear in certain stanzas of the renga. However, for the most part, renga's popularity grew among the common people of Japan due to its collaborative nature. Some renga of that period ended up being hundreds of stanzas long with as many contributors. In the 16th century, poets began publishing their singular "links" of a renga as something called hokku. Eventually these singular published verses came to be called haiku. And so, haiku was originally the first part of a renga. In these forms the haiku (or hokku - "starting verse") was the first three-line unit which established the mood or suggestion that could be further developed in the subsequent links of a renga.

Renga left the limelight for a long time (because it took so long to complete one - often years - and poets moved around and so lost contact with each other) until the mid-20th century when the form was rediscovered by Western poets of the avant-garde.

Links to More About Renga

We owe renga's revival in the avant-garde to a handful of adventurous poets and composers, including Jane Reichhold, Marlene Mountain, Hiroaki Sato, and the late John Cage. Cage was my mentor and benefactor for the international renga literary journal, Lynx.

See the feature story in The Daily News for more about my work as editor of Lynx, and another story in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer about my work as a renga workshop instructor.

See my review of anne mckay's book, a woman of passage, for an example and critique of contemporary renga.

See my Basho essay for more about the development of renga in the West. Go here for more about Basho.