Great Interactive Poetry Site: Fun with Issa

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

Website: Fun with Issa
http://haikuguy.com/issa/fun1.html

How very indebted I am to Professor David G. Lanoue of Xavier University of Louisiana! It is now many years that I have used his website Fun with Issa with various levels of my elementary school children on a near daily basis as a fun, and I believe, valuable prep to our language arts lesson of the day.

How delighted are the students when I pick three children’s name sticks from the cup on my desk and have them choose a number between one and ten thousand. The number is entered in the field on the Fun with Issa homepage that I project on our screen. Then when the haiku appears, the selected child reads it aloud and attempts to figure out why this poem is special. Sometimes even I cannot figure it out, so then we click on the little frog image to see it written in Japanese (which I regrettably cannot figure out either) and often a cultural note is included that enlightens us Westerners to aspects in the poem that turn our light bulbs on to the poem’s meaning.

For example, at random I chose number 647 and came to:

a fleeting moonlit
wedding night...
frogs singing
I believe this poem’s charm is enough to stand on its own, but even more insight is available with a click on the frog in the corner where I come to another page with the poem in the Japanese and [font=Arial]rômaji (westernized) scripts, followed by a paragraph[/font] where Professor Lanoue’s careful research states:
This haiku has the prescript, cho (in Chinese, pronounced zhu) a word that literally means a "literary work." It is the title of Song 98 from the most ancient collection of Chinese poetry, Shi Jing of the Zhou Dynasty. It is written from the point of view of a young woman, and begins with the line, "He was waiting for me between the door and the screen." In Eighth and Ninth Month of 1803 Issa wrote a series of over thirty haiku inspired by poems from Shi Jung (Issa zenshû (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1976-79) 2.117-31. This one alludes to a brief but romantic night of love but comically replaces the human lovers with frogs.

Well, this is an uncommon PG-13 Issa poem, yet the collection wouldn’t be Japanese without several that include scatological humor, and children get a real charge out of it. Among Issa’s shooben (“pissing”) haiku:

hey boatman:
no pissing on the moon
in the waves!

o stand pissing
while hailstones fall...
quite a feat!

This can and has launched many a discussion about how vestiges of our own seventeenth century Puritan heritage still linger in our present mindset, no matter how disassociated we insist we are.

I always include biographical information about Issa from Professor Lanoue’s page About Issa http://haikuguy.com/issa/aboutissa.html , Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Issa , and elsewhere. Despite his evident humor, Issa (1793-1828), in essence, was a true Man of Sorrows, a Japanese Job: his mother died when he was three; as a solitary child who preferred wandering in fields, his more practical and small-minded step-mother and the boy apparently and inevitably butted heads; at age 15 the estranged boy was exiled from home by his father to find work in Edo doing menial jobs to support his studies at a haiku school. After his father’s death, Issa spent years in legal wrangles with his step-mother over his inheritance. Issa was promoted to haiku teacher, but within a year he was pink-slipped for straying beyond the imposed literary confines of the employers. Issa spent most of his life as a wanderer which I like to bring up with my students because in their inexperience many of them possess very judgmental attitudes toward the homeless on our streets. Issa did not marry until age 49, but his first three children all died extremely young, his first child--a boy--dying shortly after his birth. Then Issa’s wife died, hence the haiku:

outliving them
outliving them all
ah, the cold!

Then Issa’s house burned down and he moved to a storage shed that still exists today:

fleas fled the burning house
and have taken refuge
with me here

Toward his end, Issa luckily found love again, remarried, and a healthy daughter was born, but alas, as the pattern goes, Issa never laid eyes on her because he himself died before she was born.

I’ve often wondered why my normally antsy students become very focused when I tell Issa’s sad biography. Perhaps it is because in my school’s rural desert location, sometimes called “California’s Third World,” there are many young Issa’s in each classroom: sensitive children living in a one-parent or one-grandparent home where Dad or Tio (uncle) is locked away in one of the prisons within an hour’s drive, and/or where the fear of deportation is a normal constituent of the domestic atmosphere, and/or the parents’ work in agriculture requires them to pack up and move at least twice each year to follow the harvest seasons in the Salinas and Imperial valleys.

I am convinced that one of the very few silver linings in such tragic experience is that it can and sometimes does inspire great art. I was told that once a famous conductor (I think it was Bernstein) attended a concert as part of the audience. As a young woman began singing beautifully, hitting each difficult note with perfection, someone whispered to the conductor, “Is she not good!” The conductor responded, “She is good, but once life has hurt her, she will be great.”

It is my hope that someday Issa’s sad tale and great literary art will inspire one of my students to likewise do something great.

Professor Lanoue began his Issa website in May of 2000. I am beyond utterly impressed at his determination and constancy in creating 10,000 separate pages for 10,000 Issa poems. The thought of such a feat always brings to my mind the wonderful story of Elzéard Bouffier in the book The Man who Planted Trees, a tale about a hermit-shepherd's long and successful singlehanded effort to reforest a desolate valley in the foothills of the Alps in Provence by planting acorns throughout the first half of the 20th century-- sort of a Johnny Appleseed character, an archetype that has also cropped up in India (several times) and in other countries.

The website Fun with Issa is indeed a very fruitful and expansive orchard, freely accessible to all--rich or poor, adult or child, Japanese, Mexican, or American--who are hungry for the beauty of a simple but profound (or at least rather funny) little three lined poem. Thank you, Dr. Lanoue, for your many years of freely given labor in what often feels like a desolate cultural landscape. May your years of labor bring forth a bountiful harvest!

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