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    Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku
    Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku
    Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku
    Ebook159 pages39 minutes

    Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku

    By Gerald Vizenor

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    About this ebook

    A collection of original haiku from a preeminent Native American poet and novelist.

    Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.

    The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes, "calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders," and "cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto."

    Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku. "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception," he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. "Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation and an ironic manner of creation. That sense of natural motion in a haiku scene is a wonder, the catch of impermanence in the seasons." Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 14, 2015
    ISBN9780819574336
    Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku
    Author

    Gerald Vizenor

    Gerald Vizenor is a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. In his career, Vizenor has written over 40 books in a variety of genres, including 16 novels and innumerable essays. His novels, poetry, and short story collections from Wesleyan University Press include Waiting for Wovoka, Satie on the Seine, Native Tributes, Treaty Shirts, Favor of Crows, Blue Ravens, The Heirs of Columbus, Landfill Meditation, Shadow Distance and Hotline Healers. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the American Book Award and PEN Oakland's Josephine Miles Award. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace prize 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award, for his work as a professor, writer and scholar on discussing peaceful resolutions to cultural differences. Vizenor was also awarded the 2022 Mark Twain Award from The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, which recognizes extraordinary work and contributions to Midwestern Literature. He was a delegate and principal writer for the White Earth Reservation Constitutional Convention, ratified in 2009.

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    • 2/5
      Most of these poems are not true haikus, despite the subtitle. Haiku are three line poems of five syllables, seven syllables, and a concluding five syllable line. Vizenor's poems are three lines each, but with 2-3 syllables in the first line, 5-6 syllables in the second line, and 2-3 syllables in the final line. The poems are generally about nature, which is the traditional theme for haiku poetry. The poems are lovely in themselves, however they are not haiku as advertised. I purchased this book because I wanted to read multiple examples of haiku, to inspire my own writing of this poetic form.

    Book preview

    Favor of Crows - Gerald Vizenor

    NEW AND COLLECTED HAIKU

    Gerald Vizenor

    Wesleyan University Press    Middletown, Connecticut

    WESLEYAN POETRY

    Wesleyan University Press

    Middletown CT 06459

    www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

    © 2014, 1999, 1984, 1964, Gerald Vizenor

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

    Typeset in 11pt Arno Pro

    Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

    The paper used in this book meets their minimum

    requirement for recycled paper.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Vizenor, Gerald Robert, 1934–

    [Poems. Selections]

    Favor of Crows : New and Collected Haiku / Gerald Vizenor.

        pages  cm.—(Wesleyan Poetry series)

    ISBN 978-0-8195-7432-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

    ISBN 978-0-8195-7433-6 (ebook)

    I. Title.

    PS3572.I9F39 2014

    811'.54 — dc23        2013037645

    5  4  3  2  1

    The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the illustrations by Robert Houle.

    Cover illustration by Rick Bartow, Crow’s Mortality Tale, pastel on paper, 2001.

    Courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR.

    In Memory of Six Poets and Teachers

    Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa

    Ezra Pound, Eda Lou Walton, Edward Copeland

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

    Petals on a wet, black bough.

    In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound

    I would be free of you, my body;

    Free of you, too, my little soul.

    Beyond Sorrow, Eda Lou Walton

    The first to come

    I am called

    Among the birds.

    I bring the rain

    Crow is my name

    Song of the Crows, Henry Selkirk

    Haiku Scenes

    An Introduction ix

    Spring Scenes 1

    Summer Scenes 33

    Autumn Scenes 65

    Winter Scenes 97

    AN INTRODUCTION

    The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and original moment. Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation, an ironic manner of creation, and a sense of motion, and, at the same time, a consciousness of seasonal impermanence.

    Haiku scenes are tricky fusions of emotion, ethos, and a sense of survivance. The aesthetic creases, or precise, perceptive turns, traces, and cut of words in haiku, are the stray shadows of nature in reverie and memory.

    The original moments in haiku scenes are virtual, the fugitive turns and transitions of the seasons, an interior perception of motion, and that continuous sense of presence and protean nature.

    Haiku was my first sense of totemic survivance in poetry, the visual and imagistic associations of nature, and of perception and experience. The metaphors in my initial haiku scenes were teases of nature and memory. The traces of my imagistic names cut to the seasons, not to mere imitation, or the cosmopolitan representations and ruminations of an image in a mirror of nature.¹

    PINE ISLANDS

    Matsushima, by chance of the military, was my first connection with haiku images and scenes, the actual places the moon rose over those beautiful pine islands in the haibun, or prose haiku, of Matsuo Bashō.

    Much praise had already been lavished upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima, Bashō writes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. "Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that

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