New Yorker's Breathing

from "Ginyu" No.13 (Ginyu Press, 25 January 2002)

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the World Trade Center at dusk-
a pair of sunsets

All of a sudden, the World Trade Center of New York, which is the symbol of its prosperity, collapsed on September 11, 2001. In a whirl of the insanity and the hatred, the Japanese edition of the English haiku anthology "New York, apart-gurashi" "tenement landscapes (A Small Garlic Press, 1995), written about the lifestyle of a New Yorker before the Black Tuesday, was published by Web Press Happa-no-Kofu. Paul David Mena is the author who is a native New Yorker poet. When there is the name of a place in the title of a book, sometimes the name value of the place exceeds the contents of the book. However, his haiku does not disappoint us. Mena lightly and disconsolately described New York through the eyes of a living person, which has a population of 8,000,000, and 40 percent of it is immigrant, 60 percent is non-white and 116 languages fly back and forth in the city, with the loneliness and fear of a great city and the tender feeling of life.

having missed
the last train
fear keeps me company

Mena comments on each haiku, titled New York guide by the author, for the Japanese reader. These comments become the delightful essay on New York that we can not know it by tour guidebook and make this anthology gay and exciting. He comments on the haiku the above that Pennsylvania Station at midnight: New York, particularly at night, is a very dangerous city and the last train out of Pennsylvania Station leaves at about 3:15 in the morning-a very desolate time of the night. The following haiku impresses me by a New Yorker's blooming feeling.

I fell in love
for the second time this week
on the downtown train

Mena's anthologies are trainsongs (1997) whose themes are the commuter daydreams and the subway serenades and the brewpub chronicles (Haiku in Low Places, 1998) written about the scenes at a friendly neighborhood pub in addition to tenement landscapes. You can order these books via his Web Site. (http://www.lowplaces.net/)

The publishing form of this anthology "New York, apart-gurashi" is fresh for the Japanese reader, to say nothing of its content. Web Press Happa-no-Kofu is an online publisher and their Chapbook edition is made from the works on their web site, using on demand printing system. The book published by the author's expense with the simple and easy printing is called Chapbook. The collection of poems and the anthology of haiku written by the Western poets take this Chapbook style nowadays. The Chapbook, whose price is cheap and is able to send it with the standard-size mail, will be the model style of this kind of book in Japan. I would like to introduce this book to the Japanese haiku poets and the persons who are interested in the English haiku.

Ikuyo Yoshimura


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