Biographical Notes
on contributors to the Renku Home web site
Available biographical notes include:
Hayat Abuza
Brenda Gannam
William J. Higginson
Kris Young Kondo
Tadashi Shôkan Kondô
Kenkichi Yamamoto
Hayat Nancy Abuza
Brenda J. Gannam is an Arab-American poet, artist, and writer. She is currently (2003) the North East Metro Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, and was a member of the organizing committee for the Haiku North America 2003 conference held in New York City, 26-29 June. She is also coordinator of The Spring Street Haiku Group in New York. Her longer poems, haiku, and related poems appear in numerous print and online journals. She also writes nonfiction on a variety of subjects and has work appearingin many magazines and business publications.
Gannam has her own consulting firm in international banking, and formerly served as a vice-president and international lending officer for two New York-based banks--Manufacturers
Hanover Trust and Kredietbank. She holds a BA in French Language and
Literature from the University of Georgia, a Diplome d'Études Supérieures
from France's Université de Dijon, and an MA in Middle East Studies and U.S.
Foreign Policy from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Kris Young Kondo
The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words
Kris Kondo grew up in Canada and the US, and studied Japanese art at the Kaji Aso Studio in Boston, Massachusetts. Her interest in things Japanese led her to move to Japan at an early age, and she has lived most of her adult life in the Tokyo area, making her living as a teacher of English and painter of Japanese-style brush paintings. Her interest in Japanese haiku and related poetry also began at the Kaji Aso Studio, where she published a collection of haiku. Today she is an established international renku poet and leader of renku sessions involving foreignors and Japanese in Japan. She helped organize and lead the Renku North America tour of 1992, when six Japanese renku masters and poets toured the United States, and helped develop renku materials for use by the English-speaking poets with whom the Japanese worked in six different cities across the US.
Kris is a past president of AIR--The Association for International Renku--and has published "Renku in the Classroom: A Case for Introducing International Renku into College English Classes in Japan" (1996). She has written renku under the direction of a variety of Japanese renku masters, and with many haiku and renku poets of North America and a number of other countries. Most recently, she was a judge for the linking competition held as part of the Global Renku Symposium, October 2000, at Kokushikan University, Tokyo.
Tadashi Shôkan Kondô
Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku
Composition
Shorter Renku
Tadashi Kondô grew up in Miyazaki, Kyûshû, Japan, and graduated from Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. While an undergraduate in the early 1970s, he was personal assistant to Shiranshi Kudo, 11th master of the Rakushisha in succession from Bashô. As Master Shiranshi's assistant, he attended renku sessions held at the "Cottage of Fallen Persimmons" (Rakushisha's meaning). Also in Kyoto, he met the American poet Cid Corman, who still lives in Kyoto. On learning of his interest in haiku in America, Corman put him in touch with William J. Higginson.
A little later, Kondô lived for a few months with Higginson in the latter's Paterson, New Jersey loft, before attending Columbia Teachers College, where Kondô took a master's degree in teaching English as a second language. During their time in Paterson together, the two worked on a number of projects, most notably the first English translations of Bashô's haibun, "Record of Rakushisha" and of Buson's "Poems of the Avant-Garde", both published in the special renku and haibun issue of Higginson's Haiku Magazine in 1976. Kondô also served as secretary of the Haiku Society of America that year, and one of his poems written in Paterson was later published in the second edition of Cor van den Heuvel's Haiku Anthology of 1986. During this same period, he and Higginson visited composer and author John Cage to give him information on the formal structure of Japanese renku, which he used in his score "Renku".
In the early 1980s, Kondô hosted international renku gatherings at his home outside of Tokyo; one of the renku written then, "Eleven Hours", appears in the Higginson and Harter Haiku Handbook. In the late '80s, he joined the Jigensha Renkukai in Tokyo, led by Master Ryûkan Miyoshi. Master Ryûkan was very interested in Kondô's international activities, and despite being a wounded veteran of World War II, encouraged Kondô to expand them. Thus Higginson and Harter were introduced to Master Ryûkan and came to write renku with Jigensha.
Kondô received his artistic name, Shôkan, from Master Ryûkan in 1989. In the same year he helped initiate the English-language division of the annual Master Bashô Festival Contest conducted by the Master Bashô Museum of Iga-Uena, Bashô's hometown. He has been a judge and translator for the contest every year since.
Encouraged by Master Ryûkan, Kondô co-directed an American tour by a number of Japanese renku people. "Renku North America" took place in 1992, when six Japanese renku masters and poets visited Carmel and San Francisco, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and New York. The group met and wrote renku with American and Canadian poets in each city and the surrounding area.
Since Master Ryûkan's death, Kondô has become associated with the Nekomino Renkukai led by Master Meiga Higashi, the leading renku master in Japan today. Kondô also co-founded the Association for International Renku (AIR), and was the group's first president. The AIR group meets monthly in the Tokyo area to compose renku in Japanese and English. He has led renku workshops for the Haiku Society of America, the Boston Haiku Society, Haiku Canada, Haiku North America, the Hot Springs [Arkansas] Art Festival, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy. He also led a renku group in Concord, Massachusetts, where he planted cherry trees at the Thoreau Institute.
Kondô invented the concept of "renku performance", a multimedia performance centered on a renku written by the performers themselves and including music, dance, and photography, and has led performances of same in New Jersey and the Boston area, most recently at Lowell Hall, Harvard University, where he was a visiting scholar 1998-2000.
Kondô has also done graduate work at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he took up the study of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. His scholarly paper, "Principles of Universal Haiku Grammar: A Semiotic Study of Haiku Creation" (Meiji Gakuin Cultural Studies, 1991) applies Peirce's principles of semiotics to international haiku. (The Lowell Hall at Harvard, where Kondô mounted a renku performance in February 2000, was the scene of Peirce's lectures on semiotics a century earlier.)
In 1997, From Here Press published Red Fuji: Selected Haiku of Yatsuka Ishihara, selected and translated by Kondô and Higginson, with an introduction by Kristen Deming.
A professor of English at Tokyo's Seikei University, Kondô recently assisted Prof. Masahisa Fukuda in organizing the Global Renku Symposium held at Kokushikan University, also in Tokyo, on 7 October 2000.
William J. Higginson
What is "Linked Poetry"?
Shorter Renku
A Personal Introduction to Renku
A Renku Bibliography
"Renga" and "Renku"
The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words
The Traditional Seasons of Japanese Poetry
Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku
Composition
Bashô-Style
Linked Poems for Kids
William J. Higginson was born in New York City and raised there and in nearby New Jersey. After attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years, he joined the U.S. Air Force, and was assigned to Japanese language graduate school at Yale University, which he completed with honors. He served two years in Japan, where he began his study of poetry and translation. After returning to the U.S., he completed his undergraduate studies, taking a B.A. with honors in English at Southern Connecticut State College in 1969. He leads a multi-faceted life as a poet, translator, writer, speaker, teacher of writing, administrator, and literary press and Internet author and editor, editing and publishing Haiku Magazine (1971-1976, successor to Eric W. Amann's Haiku, founded in 1967 in Toronto) and From Here Press books, including titles by Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, and Ruth Stone. (Here is a personal narrative of Higginson's associations with Japanese renku. Here is his interview on Amazon.com.)
Higginson has received a number of grants, awards, and other recognition including:
1. Books and Chapbooks (12 of ~30 titles)
2. In Anthologies and Reference Works (12 of ~70 works)
3. In Periodicals and On the Internet (15 of ~300 appearances)
(For Non-U.S. publications location is shown with date.)
Kenkichi Yamamoto
The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words
Professor Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907-1988) was the mid to late twentieth century's greatest scholar of Japanese haiku and related literature. He made a particular study of the development of the system of seasonal topics and season words, and single-handedly compiled the most reliable haikai saijiki (haikai almanacs) and kiyose (season word guides). They are all still in print today and widely used by renku as well as haiku poets. (Unlike many such books, Prof. Yamamoto's guides always indicate the parts of the seasons, an important feature for renku poets.)
In Japanese scholarly publishing, senior scholars are often called upon as supervising editors over large, complex projects edited by teams of younger scholars. Among other projects, Prof. Yamamoto served in this capacity for the ground-breaking six-volume Eigo Saijiki / An English & American Literary Calendar (1968-70), which examined our literature through the lense of the Japanese season word system.
He was a senior editor on the five-volume Nihon Dai Saijiki ('Japan Great Saijiki', 1981-83), an encyclopedic, fully color-illustrated work that still sets the standard for such books. He also wrote a five-volume series called Yamamoto Kenkichi Haiku Tokuhon ('The Kenkichi Yamamoto Haiku Readers'), published posthumously. The individual volumes have titles like 'What is Haiku?', 'A Haiku Commentary Saijiki', 'The Modern Haiku Poets', 'The Heart and Laws of Haikai', and 'The Haiku Environment', each exploring its subject clearly and thoroughly.
To comment on this site, suggest additions, request information on books or other resources, or share your experience of writing renku, you are welcome to contact Bill Higginson by e-mail at: wordfield-at-att-dot-net (replacing "-at-" with "@" and "-dot-" with a period.
Copyright © William J. Higginson 2000–2006. All rights reserved. Page last updated 10 January 2006.
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