Pecha Kucha, Low Coup, Hyperbolic Time Chamber

As a visiting teaching artist for the Poetry Foundation, I facilitated a workshop titled “Pecha Kucha, Low Coup, Hyperbolic Time Chamber,” which explored how Japanese art forms have inspired novel inventions in contemporary English Language poetry. 

It is not uncommon to find English poetry written using Japanese forms like haiku, tanka, and haibun. Rather than focusing on imitation, this workshop was most interested in how Japanese art forms have inspired experimentation among anglophone poets. 

Kwame Dawes’ philosophy on writing Jamaican haiku was our touchstone. In his essay, “And What of the Haiku,” Dawes says writing Jamaican haiku is valuable because it “forces me to ask what a reggae poem is, and what a Jamaican poem is, in the first place.” He also explains that “by working out the difference that might exist between the haiku and a Jamaican poetic, I can begin to understand and define better what that aesthetic is about.” Similarly, we investigated how, in turning to a culture vastly different from their own, American writers of color have found fresh approaches to how they write about their own cultures and obsessions. 

For example, we read some of Amiri Baraka’s “low coup.” Baraka’s haiku-inspired form is described as “no fixed amount of syllables like the classic, just short and sharp.” He describes low coup as a “homage to the long reading of the Japanese Haiku form” and an “Afro-American tribute form.” By repurposing the confines of the haiku, Baraka was able to address political concerns and distill poignant characteristics of African American vernacular. We then read further reinterpretations of Japanese forms like Chinaka Hodge and Sonia Sanchez’s haiku and tanka eulogies for Biggie Smalls and Harriet Tubman, and Etheridge Knight’s jazz haiku. 

But what I find most exciting are nonce forms created from non-literary Japanese sources. In his collection Lighthead, Terrance Hayes wrote poems modeled after the Japanese presentation format pecha kucha. This presentation model, pioneered by architects, consists of only pictures and allows for 20 seconds of speaking per photo. In the poem “For Brothers of the Dragon,” he crafts a fictional account of what happens to the loved ones of Malcom X after his death, reflects on his own relationship to family, and ruminates on the fiction genre itself in 20 stanzas that can be read in 20 seconds each. 

In her collection Ghost of, Diana Khoi Ngyuen, inspired by the traditional fish printing art form gyotaku, makes haunting elegies for her deceased brother. Before committing suicide, Ngyuen’s brother cut himself out of all family photos. Ngyuen fills those empty spaces with poems, then copies and overlaps the text so that it mirrors a school of fish swimming through water—preserving the memory of her brother the way a gyotaku artist would with a dead fish. 

For Hayes, the form presented a challenge to push to its limit. For Nguyen, it was the permission to channel her grief into beauty and meaning. For myself, Japanese shounen animation has encouraged me to imbue my poems, and life, with supernatural hope. In the workshop, I shared a few of my poems based on elements from superhero anime, like The Hyperbolic Time Chamber and Shadow Clone Jutsu, to encourage participants to find inspiration in everything. Then we created!  

Participants had two writing prompts to choose from. Option 1 was to write in a form we read during the workshop, such as haiku, low coup, or pecha kucha. Option 2 was to create their own form. Writers made poems based on comic strips, spider webs, and even Japanese fermented soybeans!

While inspiration is all around us, pulling from wells outside our everyday life can lead to innovations that teach us more about ourselves, as the poems in this workshop demonstrate. Before participants write, I remind them of Knight’s challenge: “Making jazz swing in / Seventeen syllables AIN’T / No square poet’s job!” Making it new can prove to be challenging, but the rewards are worth it!