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Gogyohka (五行歌 literally, "Five line poetry") is a form of Japanese poetry founded by Enta Kusakabe (b. 1938). Gogyohka comes out of the tradition that includes both Tanka (or Waka) and Haiku, but unlike these forms, Gogyohka does not have any syllable requirement for its lines. The only hardfast rule of Gogyohka is that the poem should be five lines long, although the lines should remain brief in keeping with the tradition of Japanese verse.

Enta Kusakabe

Kusakabe was born in 1938 in Dairen City, Manchuria , which was under Japanese control at the time. He moved to Kusakabe, Kagawa Prefecture, in 1947, and later attended Tokyo University, graduating with a degree in Western Literature.

During this period Kusakabe came under the tutelage of Japanese Tanka poet Samio Maekawa and began avidly writing Tanka. He soon became frustrated with the form of Tanka, however, feeling as though its structure produced the same melancholy tone no matter what the subject matter In 1957, at the age of 19, he wrote his first Gogyohka:

I want to hide
her finger
in the gentle
swell
of the flower's petal

From there Kusakabe went on to publish numerous collections of Tanka with a few Gogyohka sprinkled in throughout the volume. Though his teachers frowned upon the form generally, no one publicly objected to the inclusion of these poems.

In 1994 Kusakabe, who had by then been writing Gogyohka for 37 years, established, with 30 volunteers, the first Gogyohka Society and launched the periodical, Gogyohka. Currently there are 4,000 members of 150 local chapters of regional Gogyohka Societies in Japan. In addition, there are 500,000 people in Japan writing Gogyohka, including 150,000 children . These are membership-based organizations that offer monthly workshops (Uta-kai), lectures on poetry, and the chance to publish Gogyohka, commentary, and reports from workshops in Gogyohka, published monthly from Gogyohka no Kai, Kusakabe's central Gogyohka Society in Tokyo.

Differences between Gogyohka and Tanka (Waka)

Gogyohka, essentially, is free verse Tanka. That is, Gogyohka does not have a strict syllable count for each line. It also does not require the inclusion of a season word, or kigo, which are needed in Haiku. Further, Gogyohka encourages the use of vernacular, rather than "poetic" language, as well as open expression of feelings in poetry. This, in turn, opens up the range of subject and tone for Japanese short poetry.

Consider the difference in tone between these Tanka translated by Kenneth Rexroth in his One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and a few sample Gogyohka:

Will he always love me?

I cannot read his heart.
This morning my thoughts
Are as disordered
As my black hair.
--Lady Horikawa

In the mountain village
The wind rustles the leaves
Deep in the night, the deer
Cry out beyond the edge of dreams.
--Minamoto No Morotada

If only the world
Would always remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the river bank.

--Minamoto No Sanetomo

Kusakabe explains,

In Tanka there are strict rules determining the number of sounds in each line. If you adhere to this structure, you can only create one effect, a kind of wistful melody. Over the past 1400 years, Japanese people have used this form as their standard poetic medium. Regardless of what feelings they are trying to express, the end result is invariably melancholic.

The aim of Gogyohka is to get away from that longing, melancholy tone in Tanka so that the content doesn't match the form over and over and over again ad nauseam. Gogyohka is looser, in any language.

Submerged in the bathtub

mother is secretly
crying
thinking about me and my sister
who lost their breasts
--Garubo

dancing with my son
on his wedding day
waltz time
one-two-three
and he's gone
--Kathleen Cochran

how strange
to hear my parents
tell me
“I love you”
only after they got divorced

--Tim Geaghan

It may be said that while Tanka deals with "if only," Gogyohka treats "what is."

Gogyohka's range extends not only to tone but subject matter. In his English book Gogyohka, Kusakabe explores Gogyohka written about love, life and death, husbands and wives, parents, children, poems by young mothers and cancer patients, and poems about the world. Gogyohka, in advocating free expression, also allows direct confrontation with political subjects otherwise considered taboo. One example of this is a poem by Kusakabe himself:

It wasn't the Americans

who dropped the bomb
it was the consciousness of the era
If Japan had had the bomb

we would have dropped it too

Central Axis

Because of its emphasis on free and open expression, Gogyohka has been shown to have a therapeutic effect on a wide range of people, from cancer sufferers and aphasia to regular people suffering from isolation, depression, and anxiety. Kuskakabe explains the emotional benefits through the metaphor of a 'central axis':

When I write five-line verses, I am able to gather together my thoughts on matters that are occupying my interest at the time. This process allows me to observe myself; I can look at my heart objectively through other people's eyes, and thereby constantly reassess myself and improve my way of thinking.

The single most important thing for people is their central axis - the part of them that constitutes their very essence - and the most important thing for the self is to recognize and understand that inner, central axis. Once you are aware of what is most important to you, then you are able to build your own system of values in relation to it. This allows you to create a standard by which you can judge the relative importance of the various aspects of your life and the world around you.

When you are able to do this, the stress in your life naturally falls away. This is because stress comes from the inability to distinguish between what is and what is not important; if you treat everything in your life with equal importance, then you become upset when, inevitably, some things do not go as well as you would like them to.

The challenge of Gogyohka may be the same thing that is appealing about it--namely, its simplicity. Because any subject matter is game, and the only rule is that the poem be five lines concentrated for meaning, it can be said that it is very easy to write a Gogyohka, but very difficult to write an exemplary Gogyohka. In the preface to his collection of American Gogyohka, Text Messages, Peter Fiore writes, "working on Gogyohka is a meditation on the spontaneous challenge of the moment."

This moment may be rooted in something very simple and directly personal:

if you do good

you feel good
and
that's the way
you get along

--ripple

Or metaphorical, and expressed in the more abstract terms of a poet like Emily Dickinson:

Destiny

is an arrow
we do not
feel until
it strikes

--Linda "La Musa" Voss

Or take as its central axis the world itself:

with all the living

with all the dead
the lovely earth
is floating
in a dark universe

--Aidu Taro

Breath and Line Breaks

Instead of syllable count, Gogyohka relies on the concept of breath for line breaks. Kusakabe explains how he arrived at this idea of breath:

When we make an utterance of any kind, we cannot help but breathe out. Our vocal cords expand, constrict, lengthen and thicken, and by passing our breath through them, we can alter the sounds we make, producing our voice and words.

In the case of poetry, we are aiming to create words with a greater degree of intensity than those that we use in everyday conversation, and so the breath with which we are producing the words takes on a greater significance.

He goes on to say:

Having read Shakespeare, Goethe and works by many other poets, I found that there were occasionally phrases formed into "breaths" in the same way as Gogyohka, and I have since become convinced that is is possible to write Gogyohka in any language.

Some examples Kusakabe gives are from Shakespeare's Hamlet

To be

or
not to be,
that

is the question

and Whitman's "Song of Myself"

I celebrate myself,

and what I assume
you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me

As good belongs to you.

The breath is individual to a particular speaker and their language. Consider the difference in breath and tone between these two school children, the first, Takahiko Ri, Japanese, and the second, Catherine Cooke, American:

If only

all the people in the world
could
sleep together
on one giant futon

I wish
that the
whole world was like
a teddy bear and

just be able to hug it when you're sad

The second poem has two hard enjambments, between lines 2 and 3 and between lines 4 and 5, which generally is discouraged in Gogyohka. But here it works well, as it conveys the breathless excitement of the poem's speaker.

The breath of a given writer varies greatly, and Gogyohka can accommodate long lines like "just be able to hug it when you're sad" above, or incredibly short lines. Some Gogyohka have only one word for each line:

odds

defied
married
forty
years
--Dorothy Saraceno

November--
finally
no
more
crickets

--Peter Fiore

Gogyohka's compatibility with any language allows non-speakers of Japanese to compose Japanese poetry. Japanese as a language relies on sounds, rather than syllables, which are of different lengths than syllables. So Western languages especially do not translate well when given sound requirements such as those in Haiku and Tanka. In short, sound and syllables do not correlate in a 1:1 ratio. For example, the word "New York" in English is two syllables long. But in Japanese, it is 5 sounds: "NI-YU-YO-O-KU". So even Haiku written in English syllable patterns of 5-7-5 are at best a rough translation of the original Japanese form. In fact, it can be argued that all Tanka written in English, since they do not absolutely adhere to the Japanese sound requirements, are Gogyohka. English Tanka may separate itself along different lines, however, by defining rules regarding season words, restricting tone, and breaking lines by a principle other than breath.

It is this discovery that Gogyohka lines could be patterned along the breath of any speaker of any language, since all languages contained breath, that led Kusakabe to begin his mission to bring Gogyohka to the entire world. As such, he has made a number of trips to the United States since 2006, lecturing and giving workshops at various schools, libraries, colleges, and public venues.

The American Gogyohka Society

In the Fall of 2008, Kusakabe met Elizabeth Phaire, her husband Joseph Gesick, and Linda Voss in New York, and together they formed the American Gogyohka Society, with Phaire as the Director. In the same time frame, Phaire, Gesick, and Voss attended the first World Gogyohka Conference in Japan, hosted by Kusakabe.

Kusakabe continues to visit the US to offer workshops and give lectures, with his next visit scheduled for April 2010. Through the American Gogyohka Society he has already participated in a number of events, ranging from the Kiku show at the New York Botanical Garden and Sakura Matsuri at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to workshops at the Princeton Club of New York in midtown Manhattan and public libraries in Westchester County.

In November 2009, Tim Geaghan and Peter Fiore created link Gogyohka Junction, a social networking site dedicated solely to writing, sharing, and learning about English Gogyohka. It counts among its members a number of Japanese Gogyohka poets, including Kusakabe himself, and works in tandem with the Gogyohka International BBS to promote the widespread availability of Gogyohka in all languages.

References

Kusakabe, Enta. Gogyohka. Tokyo: Shisei-sha, 2009 [2006]. Trans. Matthew Lane. Rev. Elizabeth Phaire.

Fiore, Peter. Text Messages. New York: Mushroom press, 2009.

External Links

•Gogyohka International BBS

•Gogyohka Junction

•American Gogyohka Society

•Gogyohka No Kai (Japanese, with English version page)