John Carley
columnist
Notes on Renku
A childhood dyslexic, John Carley is middle aged Englishman from the county of Lancashire. A long time musician and sound engineer John has lived and worked in both Italy and France. He is fluent in both languages, his first experience of translation being in the field of commercial advertising.
Working initially on state funded literary development programmes John was responsible for the establishment a number of collaborative initiatives including an early email based poetry forum The Pennine Poetry Works, and the first webmail forum dedicated to linked verse The Renkujin Palace. Experimentation with poetry in performance led to a collection of multi-authorial multiple voice poetry written with partners Christine Potter and Helen Clare: What a Performance in (Big Lamp – 1999).
In association with others in his locality he worked to raise the profile of poetry in minority languages, establishing a series of Mushairas of national significance which featured Bengali, Hindi and Pashtun as well as the more usual Urdu and Farsi. His translations from the Bangla and Sylheti of the work of the late Hagsar Mohammed Ala Miah was published as Light of Keshob Pur (Big Lamp – 2000). Throughout this time he was compiling editor of the regional poetry magazine Pennine Ink.
His developing interest in haikai led to the Young Renga project – an initiative involving school students of all ages in the composition of a simplified form of linked verse. He also responded to the fierce debate surrounding haikai prosody with the proposal of the ‘zip’ – a two line fifteen syllable stanza combining elements of fixed and free form.
In 2003 John became the first renku editor of the online magazine Simply Haiku. He has done little but write renku, and write about renku, ever since. Published poems include sequences of all types, including a number of ‘interlingual’ pieces in which parallel texts are developed in more than one language during the course of composition. Working principally in association with the poet and theorist Eiko Yachimoto, John has published a number of new translations of haikai texts, for the most part Kasen by Basho and his disciples. His Renku Reckoner web site is regarded as a useful point of reference for information on contemporary types of renku sequence.
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