Poet of the Month and Triveni Interview

 My Dear Friends and Readers:

I'm happy to share with you this exciting news: I am deeply honored and humbled to have been selected to be the Poet of  the Month at Triveni.

You can read the full interview with Triveni editors here and the following is the Q&A about how I became a tanka poet: 

2. TTH: How did you get started as a poet? What was it about tanka that inspired you to embrace this ancient form of poetry? In short, why do you keep writing tanka?

After more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to cultural studies), in the summer of 2002, I emigrated to Canada to pursue a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. After arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and wide-ranging classroom discussions, and most importantly, I was stressed by the financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays in an adopted language, English. 

After two years of striving, I published three essays but got little attention from scholars in those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of short poetry. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet. 

After a year of striving to write free verse poetry without much success, I came across three books of tanka poetry by Takuboku: Poems to Eat, A Handful of Sand, and Romaji Diary and Sad Toys. The emotional strength, socio-political sensibilities, and colloquial language of Takuboku’s tanka, a kind of poetry in the moment, appealed to me. 

For Takuboku, writing tanka was more like the emotional outburst of a mind agonized by the inner struggle and external events that shaped his life and identity. Since encountering Takuboku’s heartfelt and poignant work, I came to view tanka as a poetic diary that could be employed to record the changes in my immigrant life, a newly-racialized life of struggle with transition and translation.

Three of my tanka are selected for your reading pleasure:

I look away

from his intense gaze …

this homeless man

speaks English

with an accent like mine

Honorable Mention, Tanka Section, 2017 British Haiku Society Awards

              the dervish

              of first snowflakes …

              a Syrian

              child refugee talking

              to the foreign sky

              Runner-Up, 2019 British Haiku Society Awards

mid-autumn night …

the wind whispers to me

Chinese words

that offer me a home

in the shape of a moon

Tanka First Place, 2011 San Francisco International Competition Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay.

And you can read my 34 award-winning tanka here (including one tanka sequence, Without the Middle)

Happy Reading

Chen-ou

Note: For more about my tanka journey, please read my "Poet and Tanka" essay, which was first published in Ribbons, 12:2, Spring/Summer 2016.

Haiku Invitational Interview with Chen-ou Liu

Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live... something honest.--  Dionne Brand

It is not success or failure that matters but the struggle itself. The purpose of a writing life is the struggle of choosing the rights words, and a haiku poet’s salvation is based upon how well he or she handles this struggle.-- Chen-ou Liu 

 

(This online interview was conducted by Haiku Invitational committee member, Michael Dylan Welch)

blossom wind
my sick wife holds my hand
tighter

Top Winner, Canada, Haiku Invitational Winner 2020

MDW: Congratulations on having your haiku selected as the top winner in the Canada category in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s 2020 Haiku Invitational contest. How did you first learn about haiku, and how much writing of haiku or other poetry have you done?
 

COL: In 2009, with the aid of a newly acquainted poet friend, Brian Zimmer, I was exposed to the Japanese haiku, gendai [modern] haiku, and monostiches. Since then, I’ve studied and written haiku and related genres on a daily basis, and my poems have been published in print and online journals. In 2013, I started an English–Chinese haiku and tanka blog, editing, translating and publishing haiku, its related genres, reviews, and essays.
 
MDW: What was the inspiration for your winning poem?
 

COL: My haiku was inspired by an old Taiwanese movie scene. In it, a young couple walked out of a doctor’s office on a chilly morning. On their way home, they walked side by side, slowly and quietly. The background music of this poignant scene was their favorite song about cherry blossoms blooming on Mt. Yangming, Taipei.
 
MDW: Describe the moment when you first learned you had won.
 

COL: The moment when I first learned that my haiku had been chosen for the Best Canada category, I immediately phoned my mother, who lives in Taiwan.  She was happy for me, but her first question was, do you have enough face masks? The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted my March travel plans. My health and safety-related issues had been occupying my mother’s mind since the WHO pandemic declaration.
 
MDW: Do you have favourite books or websites relating to haiku that others might benefit from in order to learn haiku as a literary art and to share one’s haiku?

COL:Burton Watson’s Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems gives me a glimpse into the suffering soul and prolific life of an innovative poet. Shiki’s three poetic principles—shasei (“sketching from life”), makoto (“truthfulness”), and everyday language—help me set my feet firmly on the ground. Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō, establishes the ground for critical discussion and reading of Bashō’s poetry in the context of broader socio-cultural change. It helps me look beyond the haiku moment and debunk some modern haiku myths. Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese & English-language Haiku in Cross-cultural Perspectives creates a new poetic vocabulary for the haiku community to employ in analyzing how and why haiku work effectively, and it gives analytical categories and explanations for some innovative haiku that fall outside the juxtaposition/shasei realm.
 
MDW: Please tell us more about yourself.
 

COL: After more than ten years of struggling towards a new life vision and preparing for a major change in my field of study (computer science to cultural studies), in the summer of 2002 I emigrated to Canada to pursue a PhD and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. After arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by the lack of in-depth and wide-ranging classroom discussions, and most importantly, I was stressed by financial burden. I quit my studies and started to write essays in an adopted language, English. After two years of striving, I published three essays but got little attention from the scholars in those fields. Furthermore, I was disappointed by my inability to master English quickly. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of short poetry. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet. Now, I’m a published poet and the editor and translator of NeverEnding Story
 

I write
at the gun-mouth
of time’s barrel . . .
I live for myself
by myself
 

MDW: How does where you live and what you enjoy doing affect the way you write haiku?
 

COL: I lives in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto. It’s just a five-minute drive to Lake Ontario where I spend most of my leisure time reflecting upon and responding to books, films, and socio-cultural events I’ve read, watched, or experienced. I resonate with this quotation from tanka poet Ishikawa Takuboku: “My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems.” Like my favorite Canadian novelist and activist, Dionne Brand, I believe that “Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live . . . something honest.” And I think that it is not success or failure that matters but the struggle itself. The purpose of a writing life is the struggle, and a haiku poet’s salvation is based upon how well he or she handles the struggle.

Following the Moon to the Maple Land

Book Review by Kathy Uyen Nguyen

Here is an excerpt:

Liu's "Preface" is unlike any other prefaces I've read out there; it is a haibun that captures his sense of self-identity and reality as if they are balancing on scales. Consider the following excerpt:

My mind can't find a resting place except writing poetry - the only way I can manipulate the reality of my life in Canada.

It is evident that Liu's hometown is in Taipei, Taiwan, yet in this haibun, there is much more room for readjustment to his new life in Canada. This story is shared by many of us (including relatives and friends) who are immigrants as we know that it is a lifelong process of letting go, yet still remembering one's own motherland wherever that may be. The only thing that is constant and ironically stationary in Liu's life is his poetry writing.

Speaking of Liu's hometown, I absolutely love the diction and the continuity of the images in this following haiku:

    peeling my pear

    in a thin, unbroken spiral ...

    hometown memories

This haiku evokes nostalgia and is simply beautiful. The reader can imagine that both the peeling pear and Liu's hometown memories are all in an "unbroken spiral." I love the fusion between human nature ("memories") and nature ("pear").

Liu also demonstrates versatility and skill in one-line haiku such as the following selections:

    slowly I eat up a spring day quickly dissolving

    ***

    single married single again a rushing river

In "[slowly]," the reader can see that the speaker of the haiku is eating up "a spring day" with the first reading, but at the same time or with the second reading, it is noted as the spring day being quickly dissolved while the speaker is eating something. Either way, I love the ambiguity and gustatory experience of this one-like haiku.

In "[single]," this reminds me of tributaries that all flow and merge together to become one big river. There is irony in the human experience when it comes to relationships (e.g., divorces, breakups, marriages, etc.): we go through these changing phases of relationships as if we are small streams ourselves trying to flow into one big river in the name of love. The middle part of the haiku with "single again" works like a hinge. It could be that the speaker of this haiku is "single again" or is experiencing once "again a rushing river" as in a rush of emotions.....

Read its full text here

Lynx Interview

Here is an excerpt from my Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold

L: Recently you were working with “darker themes” in your haiku. Why did you want to do this? And how did it work out for you? Do we need to enlarge the subject matter used in the Japanese genres?

CL: I've been writing a series of haiku noir on darker themes, such as sudden death, suicide, psychiatric illness, violence, homelessness, alienation, estrangement, racism, rape, …etc. I've had first-hand or second-hand experiences of dealing with most of them (note: a haiku noir is a narrative haiku, i.e. a cinematically dark flash non/fiction in verse).

I am most influenced by Takuboku's conception of "poems to eat." He defined them as "poems written without putting any distance from actual life,...and they are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal."

In terms of dealing with one's dark moments, the difference between poets and other people is that poets can convey their feelings through poetry. As Graham Greene stresses, “writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in [that] human condition.”

Every time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the connectedness of human experience. This view of writing about dark moments as a way of healing is well explored in Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives. My review of this book can be accessed at http://scr.bi/owyOEI .

As for enlarging the subject matter used in English language haiku, I think there is an urgent need to do so. most English language haiku are based on a narrower definition of haiku. Professor Haruo Shirane discusses this in his famous essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:” “English-language anthologies of haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments. This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.”

His essay reminds me of Shiki’s , titled “Haiku on Excrement,” about discovering – or rediscovering – beauty in excrement. In the essay, Shiki demonstrates that the old masters had great capabilities of producing beauty out of ugly material, “citing 41 poems (most of them haiku) on feces, 18 on urine, 4 on farts, 24 on toilets, and 21 on loincloths.” In the concluding section, he makes clear that he is not particularly fond of writing haiku on excrement; but he mainly uses this topic as an example to show how the poet can explore a wide range of themes (Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, pp. 29-30)

I identify with Shiki’s approach to writing haiku. Most of darker themes in my recent haiku are, directly and indirectly, related to urban life issues that are experienced by all of us and covered by media on a daily basis. For me, they are legitimate subject matters for haiku writing....

L: What advice do you have for others who work with short form poetry?

CL: Generally speaking, short form poetry is easy to write, but it’s difficult to write well. I have only four words for them: read, write, and rewrite unceasingly. I’ve amazed by the short-lived and yet prolific life of the innovative poet, Masaoka Shiki. He read hard, wrote truthfully, and rewrote a lot.

In my view, writing is a Jobian struggle against noises and silence. The purpose of a writing life is the struggle, and a poet’s salvation is based upon how well he or she handles the struggle.

Read its full text here

Lynx, XXVII:2, June 2012

Book Review of My Chapbook

A Hundred Gourds just published Book Review: Following the Moon to the Maple Land by John McManus, British poet and Expositions Editor

The following is an excerpt:

As you can tell from the poem Chen-ou's move from [Taiwan] to Canada has left him feeling trapped between the opposing cultures of his past and his present.

the bat

flitting here and there . . .

Chen-ou or Eric

wordless

in my borrowed tongue

plum blossoms

In the first poem Liu tries to find a way out of his cultural dislocation by giving himself a new English name, but in the second poem he demonstrates how despite his efforts he still feels very much an outsider in his adopted home.

an African man

holds out his hands . . .

snowflakes

Here Liu identifies with another traveller and skilfully captures a profound moment of their experience in a land which is harsh but beautiful.

to tell or not to tell the secret day moon

See the full text here, A Hundred Gourds, 1:1, December 2011

Ripples from a Splash

My book, Ripples from a Splash: A Collection of Haiku Essays with Award-Winning Haiku, is now available through Lulu .

Ripples from a Splash:
A Collection of Haiku Essays with Award-Winning Haiku

By Chen-ou Liu

A Room of My Own Press, c2011.

Ebook, 131 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9868947-0-1

I like Chen-ou Liu’s poetry. His haiku resonates the Asian spirit, and makes use of aesthetics in a continuum of time that is permanent and impermanent; the process more important than the subjective specificity of object bias found in most Anglo-Western haiku like poems. His poetry demand to be interpreted by the informed reader. They do not tell all, are not based on an “aha” moment, and have no definitive ending. More importantly they give meaning and voice to the unsaid, the magic inherent in Japanese poetry.

-- Review by Robert D. Wilson, Editor-in-chief of Simply HaikuNote: my book can be viewed online

Simply Haiku's Featured Haiku Poet

An Evaluation and Introspective Look at the Haiku of Chen-ou Liu
by Robert D. Wilson


Moonlight
no wine, reading
li po

Anyone familiar with Tang dynasty poetry knows of Li Po. China, when it colonized the archipelago now called Japan, introduced to its people religious beliefs, writing, mathematics, medicine, a system of politics, and other things indigenous to the formation of a civilized society. Even today, China's contributions to the formation of Japan as a society are deeply engrained into the people's cultural memory.

Matsuo Basho was conversant and literate in Chinese as was any serious poet of his day. His poetry, both overtly and covertly, sometimes include references, legends, quotes, and religious beliefs held by Chinese poets during the Tang dynasty. He was an avid reader and obviously had access to ancient Chinese scrolls. Basho also relied on the oral transmission of Chinese poetry because public libraries were non-existent in Imperial Japan, as written scrolls were reserved for the elite to read and study. Matsuo Basho most likely copied some of the poems written in these scrolls for future reading, study, and reflection; and like most people in Japan do today, committed much poetry to memory.

Says Chen-ou:

"As an individual, Li Po was free-spirited. He took an unusual path in life and career. Well-traveled at a young age, he didn’t bother to take the Chinese civil service examination which was viewed as the only way to elevate one’s social status and guarantee their prosperity. He dared to challenge authority, and loved a good bottle of wine and making friends. His nonconformist personality characteristics continue to stand as a model for me to emulate.

As a poet, Li Po is one of the most loved Chinese poets and his poems are widely taught in schools, memorized by children, and constantly recited on all sorts of occasions. The first poem I ever memorized was his “Thoughts in Night Quiet,” the best known of all Chinese poems, especially among Chinese living overseas:

Seeing moonlight here at my bed,
and thinking it's frost on the ground,

I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,
then back, dreaming of my old home.

-- translated by David Hinton

When I was six, my father recited this poem to me with watery eyes. At that time, he hadn’t seen his family for two decades since he came to Taiwan in 1949, with the defeated Chinese Nationalist Army. I memorized the poem and didn’t fully reflect upon its meaning in my heart and mind. Little was understood about the suffering endured by my father and his generation due to the Chinese Civil War. It was not until the seventh year since I emigrated to Canada that I’d experienced this pang of nostalgic longing explored in Li’s poem through the moon imagery – a symbol of distance and family reunion – portrayed in simple and evocative language. Since then, every time when I thought of my parents, my family, and my hometown, I recited “Thoughts in Night Quiet,” which is not only Li’s poem but also mine.

More importantly, some of the recurring themes in Li’s poems appeal greatly to me, such as dreams, solitude/loneliness, and the passage of time, and they become the key motifs of my work. His skillful use of language, his great sensibility toward imagery, and his deep insights into the human condition through a Taoist lens capture nuanced human experience, which is the main goal I want to achieve in my writing."

Regardless of the language a haiku is written in, be it English, Rumanian, or another, it's imperative to understand the perspective of the cultural memories one's poetry emanates from. Poets build bridges to carry us across the chasm of morning fog. The chasms below are filled with the ashes and petrified feces of pseudo ideologies the insecure sculpt to build mirrors that tell the witch in Snow White what she wants to hear and bullies the weak and naive to believe.

Chen-ou is an avid learner desirous to learn from whatever source of knowledge he can glean from, regardless of geographical origin, aware that truth is international and interpretative.

seeing Fitzcarraldo...
I go around for hours wearing
the actor's face

Learning today is not limited to books. Fitzcarraldo is a German movie based upon the true life story of an Irishman named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald portrayed in a 1982 film.

Wanting to be a rubber baron, Fitzgerald, an Irishman known as Carlos Fitzcarraldo in Peru, had to pull a steamship over a steep hill in order to access a rich rubber territory to obtain his dream of becoming a wealthy rubber baron.

One of the joys of reading good literature is the mental ability of a reader to enter another dimension, to become, momentarily, the person he is reading about... a metaphysical journey into what the reader perceives is the mindset of another.

Regardless of where a poet travels and studies, he or she cannot escape one's roots and the influences that paint illusions from their upbringing.

Chen-ou, when introduced to haiku, felt a bond that shared common philosophical and spiritual belief systemics indigenous to China and Japan. Li Po and poets like Basho had beliefs in common. One day, Chen-ou's name appeared nowhere in English language haiku circles; then like a rabbit pulled out of a magician's top hat, the Taiwanese writer, through study and dedication, developed a unique, fresh haiku voice that only now is getting the recognition it deserves. The timing is also right. People in the world want to see, feel, and understand Japanese poetry from perspectives other than those propagated by the West. In the Greek language, for example, there is a greater variation in word definitions. In Vietnamese, definitions are often determined by musical tone; and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that cultures vary in their understandings of words and actions. Haiku is a Japanese genre that is not dependent upon Western interpretation to earn a wider international audience. It is a genre, as Chen-ou wisely understands, that requires practice, study, and a deeper understanding.

The following poem by Chen-ou reminds me of Basho's famous haiku about the frog jumping into the sound of water.

It's been said the poet's job is to write a poem and the reader's job is to interpret it.

This is one reader's well thought out interpretation.

one by one
frogs make holes in the pond...
starry night

Chen-ou is not one to follow formulas or subject himself to the narrowness of only one master's teaching. Here he makes use of European surrealism Chinese/Japanese yugen:

my mind
between crescent moons...
mother's scent

Composing a quality haiku, which necessitates a minimum of words, is a great challenge. The use of yugen (depth and mystery), ma (dreaming room), the unsaid, and other aesthetic tools are aides to help the poet work within the limitations of a short form poem, giving what western painters call 'white space,' a voice that says more with less. It is this white space, the room to ruminate the poet's hints, to evaluate light and illusion that separate the poor from the good in haiku.

my mind
between crescent moons...

As an experiment, write your own third line:

. . .

Poetry is the world's conscience, a collectivity of emotions that refuses to be silent as evident in Chen-ou's poems about Tiananmen Square.

his gun...
fascinated with
snowflakes

Chen-ou told me, "I was glued to the TV, watching the events unfold… first shocked, angry, then anxious over the lives and safety of the protesting students, later turned to frustration and helpless feelings. The following day (June 5), when seeing a young man, then known as Tank Man as well as Unknown Rebel, stop the advance of a column of tanks..."

he stared down tanks –
eyes opened for Beijing
Olympics

"I just cried out loud for minutes. Later, I turned off the TV and sat quietly in the living room. A sense of calmness emerged. This image, which embodied the demonstration of Confucius’ ideal of courage (“Looking back at oneself, if one is upright, one advances even against thousands upon ten thousands of men!”), has since been etched on my mind."

cherry petals
fall upon cherry petals
shadows apart

Offers Chen-ou, "As one who is an English learner as well as a struggling poet, I feel that writing poetry is to experiment with being -- functioning with relative freedom in an unfamiliar world of the alphabet to strike out toward the unknown, to make myself up from moment to moment. Most of the time, I feel I fail in creating a new personality through fresh language and evocative imagery.

For me now, being a poet means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with voices whispering, 'we all know you’re a failed poet.'"

Good Friday
deep inside his mouth
no more "why?"

"Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence."

Autumn 2010 issue of Simply Haiku


Note: The following are featured haiku chosen and reviewed by Robert D. Wilson

moonlight
no wine, reading
li po

seeing Fitzcarraldo...
I go around for hours wearing
the actor's face

Japanese Translation by Hidenori Hiruta

「フィッツカラルド」を観た後．．．
何時間も歩き回る
俳優の表情を浮かべながら

one by one
frogs make holes in the pond...
starry night

my mind
between crescent moons...
mother's scent

his gun...
fascinated with
snowflakes

he stared down tanks –
eyes opened for Beijing
Olympics

cherry petals
fall upon cherry petals
shadows apart

Good Friday
deep inside his mouth
no more "why?"

Japanese Translation by Hidenori Hiruta

良い金曜日
彼の口の内側深くに
もう「なぜ？」はない

Autumn 2010 issue of Simply Haiku

Simply Haiku Interview

An Interview with Chen-ou Liu
by Robert D. Wilson

“My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems.”

– Ishikawa Takuboku

“I feel the pain and I see the beauty.”

– Masaoka Shiki

RDW: Seemingly, out of nowhere you appear in the haiku world like a jack-in-the-box, your haiku is getting attention. Most people writing good haiku today have been at it a long time, some for decades, and are, of course, well known. Few, however, are Chinese, and fewer are those who were born and raised in Taiwan and come to North America to earn a living, and compose quality haiku in a language, like Chinese, that is considered one of the hardest languages to learn. And as I learn more about you, I see that you’re an individual who puts his all into everything he does, some call it perfectionism. You literally become one with your art while composing.

What brought you to North America? ...

Read more...

Summer, 2010 issue of Simply Haiku