VENELINA PETKOVA, POET ON THE PATH OF HER HEART (three haiku, three rensaku and three calligraphy)

 

Dimitar Anakiev

VENELINA PETKOVA, POET ON THE PATH OF HER HEART (three haiku, three rensaku and three calligraphy)

What is haiku mastery? I asked this question to Hoshinagа Fumiо at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his work. He replied, "There are too many superficial emotions in the world around us that appeal to most poets to write about them. After fifty years of writing haiku, I think I can write every haiku from the depths of my heart ..." What is in the depths of our heart? This question is not easy to find an answer to. What are our topics that only we can specifically write about? Digging through your heart is a difficult and time-consuming author's job, but it is even harder to bring the contents of your heart to light, because it requires the author's courage. In our time, which is dominated by the spirit of competition and struggle, opening your heart and presenting the content to the public can seem like disarmament and readiness for personal defeat. The whole process of poetic work in haiku (and Japanese art in general) can be compared to the famous Buddhist allegory "Ten images of domestication of cattle" in which writing haiku with the truths of your heart would correspond to the last, tenth image, "Return to the market with folded arms".

Among all the poets I have met around the world for decades, Venelina Petkova is special for her ability to turn almost every beat of her heart into haiku. She also studies Buddhism and practices the art of Japanese calligraphy. Venelina is an extremely prolific author in whose rich poetic opus, in which various expressive styles are intertwined – from the point of view of authorial truth and authenticity– there is almost no weak spot. Extremely sensitive in the reception of the world around her, she often shapes her poetic impressions with unusual poetic freedom and lush imagination. That is why the best among her haiku аre of the highest aesthetic range and belong to the top of the world's contemporary haiku. Let's look at three examples:

tangled in my hair

a fly suffocates

in between two locks

               (translated from Bulgarian by Venelina Petkova)

This haiku invokes Yosino Akiko -a Japanese literary icon - and her most famous tanka about tangled hair, which is a metaphor for the poet’s tangled love life. However, Venelina Petkova's haiku artistically surpasses her role model. While Yosino Akiko quite directly expresses the poet's love torments using repetition as an artistic tool, Venelina elevates her poetic expression to the level of an allegory in which the protagonist is a dying fly entangled between two locks on her hair. The poet's identification with the fly makes this statement about the complexity of her love life extremely picturesque and poetically convincing. This haiku by Venelina Petkova is one of the best written in the field of "women's writing" in general.

in my old sandals

a snail has abandoned

its’ round house

                       (translated from Bulgarian by Venelina Petkova)

This simple haiku in the style of a pastoral poem like the proponents of classical haiku like to write is in fact a complex allegory built on two metaphors: "sandals", which symbolizes travel, journey, constant searching and life turmoil, and "house", which symbolizes peaceful, stationary life, life finding and commitment. The very dramatic juxtaposition of these two symbols opens up a great theme and raises the eternal question: to stay or to leave? Fly away or make a nest? Two things should be noticed here: the house is snail's, which is a constant traveler, but it puts it off (it gives up further travels!) And the main attribute which the poet uses it is "round". Not any house, but a house in the shape of a circle, a house of definitive cognition and inner peace. The house here is not only an ordinary home, but also a religious category that symbolizes the knowledge of the whole - the most important symbol of Daoism and Buddhism. However, the second attribute of the "old" which the poet uses with the noun "sandals" is not without symbolic meaning. It means "old practices and habits" and the poetess seems to want to say: "one should give up old habits and find the fullness of life". The theme of this haiku is the “crossroad of life”. It is therefore necessary to recognize the crossroad of life that bring calm and knowledge. This haiku has a total of seven words, four of which are symbols in mutual juxtaposition. This choice of nouns and adjectives cannot be learned by any art, they spring from the boiling magma of the poetic heart and only the openness and courage of the poetic heart can bring them to light with constant spiritual insight. A great poem. I usually like to call poems like this "poem-mountain".

seven times a devil and seven times a god

buttercup poison runs through the moss

along the middle line of my body

                                 (translated from Bulgarian by Venelina Petkova)

This haiku of shocking eroticism evokes the famous Bulgarian pop song "Seven Times" interpreted by former Bulgarian pop icon Vasil Naidenov. It is also an allegory whose complexity is among the best achievements of the classics of Gendai haiku, such as Tohta Kanekо, Ban'ya Natsuishi or Hoshinaga Fumio - to name just a few. The poetess places human sexuality in a very complex ideological system: we encounter first paganism (magic number seven, buttercup, poison, moss), then Christianity (first the devil, then God), but there is also mathematics (middle line). Because of the complexity of this haiku, any one-sided interpretation would be trivial, so I leave it to the reader to choose their meaning based on their preferences: someone will emphasize the middle line, someone God, someone the devil and someone certainly the pagan dimension that is most present. The key word is "moss", the center of this poem around which all ideological and reader interpretations revolve. Basically, it’s all there and it’s up to us to choose our own approach to sexuality, which is not easy to find in such a forest of meaning. "What should I do with my sexuality?", Maybe that is the basic question that turns out.

In just three haiku, Venelina Petkova told more about a human's love life than a skilled novelist would write in a novel. Venelina reveals to us again that haiku is great poetry. Although she's starting point is sometimes the so-called "women's writing" her poetry goes beyond all limitations and reaches the universal peaks of haiku.

Matsuo Basho once said, "Each of my students can write as good haiku as I do, but my real strength comes from being expressed in chained verses." Although this statement is not entirely true in the case of Venelina Petkova, because her best haiku is not easy to achieve, it is in principle true because the chaining of verses has an additional narrative dimension, requires a poetic vision and a poet of "long breath" and good writing technique... - a real poet, then. Venelina is one of the few haiku poets in the West who writes almost every day some rensaku, or even a few rensaku a day. Here I am publishing three of her rensaku written on the topic of art (music: Debussy „Clair de lune“ ), an emotional recapitulation of memory and an imaginative journey in wildness.

QUIET EVE OF FULL MOON, rensaku

on a quiet eve of full moon

I write worse and worse

a glass of cold rakiya

quiet eve of full moon

I hear the slumber

of the young grasses

quiet eve of full moon

the gray spot on its’ guise

and in my eye match together

quiet eve of full moon

the deepening of the dark

moves the Cosmos further away

quiet eve of full moon

the ill oak to be cut

drops a leaf

quiet eve of full moon

the sounds I hear

are like illusions

quiet eve of full moon

as if the time has stopped

for me and for the earthy shadows

on a quiet eve of full moon

the oval of my face

in the bathroom’s mirror

*

FIVE YEARS GONE NOW..., rensaku

five years gone now

where is now

that shooting star crossing?

five years gone now

I've got not a single mirror

in my house

five years gone now

since the hunch of the lonely grandma

began to shrink away

five years gone now

the moon - over there

me - over here

five years gone now ...

today's the day off

of the memories' sweeper

*

ONCE THERE FAR AWAY..., rensaku

God-forgotten village

how loudly is suffering

the village doctor’s patient

Sole peg in the night -

the fog splits up over the peak

of the black mountain

boiling bean stew in the tiny hut

the grains slowly stick to each other

same as the clouds, stuck in the sky

dusk falls over the pathway

I turn back –

nobody

*

                              (all translations from Bulgarian by Venelina Petkova)

The conclusion that Venelina Petkova is a poet and artist of talent and format would not be enough if we did not notice her foundation in Japanese culture and its spirit. That does not make her less of a Bulgarian poet, on the contrary. In the past, I have expressed my own feeling in several places that "Japan is my poetic homeland." It seems that the situation is similar with Venelina ... Today, on the contrary, we are witnessing a tendency for haiku in the West to separate from Japanese culture at the same time as creating a colonial surrogate for "Japanese culture". The results in terms of the poetic quality of Western haiku are devastating. The point is that Japanese culture is essentially a “heart culture” and it is precisely this quality of “heart culture” that Western haiku poets lack. That is why it is refreshing to meet a poetess like Venelina Petkova who consistently walks the poetic path of her heart.

At the end of this brief phenomenological review of Venelina Petkova's haiku poetry, there are three more of her calligraphies and sumie made to illustrate her rensaku. The first calligraphy is a spontaneous abstraction and illustrates rensaku on the theme of Debussy's "Clair de lune“ , the second is a sumie drawing made to illustrate the rensaku "Five years gone now" and the third is a calligraphy "Haikudo":