Photos: © Miranda Gavin, 2008
The gentle art of haiku and senryu poetry and their potential in art practice was explored in two workshops led by Japanese artist Hana Sakuma, who once divided the letters R and L into two separate piles from a bag of alphabet-shaped pasta for her work Diffelence (2002).
The sounds R and L are notoriously difficult for Japanese people to form as they don’t exist phonetically in the language and for Hana, 'There is an implicit desire that I want to "eat" the problem as I would eat the pasta.'
After giving an overview of the cultural and historical backgrounds of haiku and looking at the earlier forms hokku and haikai, for example those written by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), as well as the poems of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who gave the short poetry form the name haiku, Hana asked the workshop participants to create their own 17-syllable poems. Some people were interested in 'Japanese sensibility and the use of words in art', others were 'attracted by the discipline' of the form and one participant summed up his interest in Haiku saying: 'I love very efficient poetry.'
After giving an overview of the cultural and historical backgrounds of haiku and looking at the earlier forms hokku and haikai, for example those written by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), as well as the poems of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who gave the short poetry form the name haiku, Hana asked the workshop participants to create their own 17-syllable poems. Some people were interested in 'Japanese sensibility and the use of words in art', others were 'attracted by the discipline' of the form and one participant summed up his interest in Haiku saying: 'I love very efficient poetry.'
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