More About Shift
some practicalities
2010 revision
This article examines some of the practical considerations arising from the fundamental imperative that each added verse must bear no resemblance to the verse-before-last: each tsukeku must bear no resemblance to the uchikoshi. The term 'shift' (tenji) is intended in the narrow sense of the avoidance of 'reversion to the last-but-one' (uchikoshi no kirai) or 'double doors' (kannonbiraki) rather than the more generic notion that every verse in a sequence must introduce a degree of newness.

The diagram below illustrates the relationships between verses w, x, y and z. It shows the Japanese names that apply to any given trio of verses, in this case x, y and z, and to the forces of 'link' and 'shift'. Should any of these terms or concepts be unfamiliar, context may be gained from the article 'Link and Shift, an Overview' elsewhere in Renku Reckoner.

Topic - may seem so obvious that it is not worth mentioning. The added verse and the last-but-one must be about different things. But more, they must not be about closely related things, which raises the question of what 'closely related' means.

As the articles 'On Backlink' and 'Occurrence and Recurrence' elsewhere on this site explain, notions of topic category have been central to the development of all forms of linked verse down the years. These categories are not arbitrarily arrived at. For the major part they represent the thematic and lexical groupings of the imperial waka anthologies, court poetry contests and medieval word matching games. For example the category mountains will be found to contain, amongst other things, peaks, hill, suspension bridge, waterfall, whilst the category shores embraces such things as ocean, inlet, waves and fish. In the context of any core trio of verses the principle is simple: if the uchikoshi (last-but-one) features fish not only should the tsukeku (added verse) not repeat the identical topic fish, it should also avoid ocean, inlet and waves as they are regarded as closely related, as belonging to the same category of topic.

How people writing in languages other than Japanese should approach this issue is moot. One solution is to adopt the historic categories wholesale. Whilst such an an approach is surely valid as a learning exercise it remains problematical in that it must inevitably yield mannered and artificial choices for the Serbian or Spanish poet in areas which, for the Japanese poet, are entirely natural and reflective of the cultural mainstream.

Another solution is for poets from the differing linguistic and cultural ambits to draw up category lists of their own, in much the same way that some persons are doing for lists of national or environmentally specific season words (kigo). A further approach, the one favoured by the present author, is to treat the issue as a matter of artistic judgment: if one topic feels too close to another then it almost certainly is.

The word feel is important here. Such questions should not be a matter of forensic investigation or baroque chains of reasoning that seek to expose any conceivable inter-relationship. We are writing poetry, not conducting a murder enquiry.
Narrative Perspective - was an idea heavily promoted by Hokushi, a disciple of Basho, as a way to categorise content and ensure variety at the core level of three verses. Unlike his master, Hokushi favoured the analytical method, drawing the primary distinction between place (ba) and person (ninjo), that is, between those verses devoid of human protagonists, conveyed in a neutral voice, and those which contained human protagonists or evoked a strong authorial presence.
 
Discussing the meaning of 'place' in this context the contemporary renku theorist Shokan Kondo remarks: "Place encompasses everything from geography to the site of a specific activity - virtually any stanza that does not show a person or a group of people. A caterpillar on a leaf, a basket of fruit in the market, a bird in the sky, and so on. Whether its locale is mentioned or not, any object may be construed as implying its setting, thus qualifying it (…) as place."
 
Three subcategories of 'person' were initially proposed: self (ji), other (ta), and self-with-other (ji-ta-han), to be joined in later years by a fourth: public (ashirai), a term sometimes translated as 'dodging'.
 
The fundamentally different manner in which Japanese and English convey subject, object, number and standpoint make direct equivalence between the languages a little difficult but a degree of correspondence might be given thus:

ji - first person (singular or plural).
ta - third person (singular or plural).
ji-ta-han - second person, alternatively a rhetorical or interrogative authorial presence.
ashirai - treating human activities or affairs, with no clearly discernible protagonists.
 
Hokushi proposed many and complex ideal combinations of perspective over any given trio of verses, the reasoning behind some of which is arcane at best. It should also be added that, for all Hokushi's protestations of fidelity, the evidence is that Basho frequently did otherwise. Indeed there is an amusing and salutary passage from the kasen Borrowing a Horse (Uma Karite) in which Hokushi rather plaintively objects that his master is constructing a chain of third person verses. To which Basho replies with a magisterial, "So what?"

Be that as it may, the core of Hokushi's work is valid; a good sequence keeps mixing the perspectives. And, whilst two adjacent verses in any given trio may have the same stance, we are best to avoid situations in which perspectives simply alternate, flipping back between A and C, D and F, etc. In short, added verse and last-but-one should not have the same perspective.

Location - is a relatively simple consideration. Whether a verse deals with person/emotion (ninjo) or place/object (ba) it will have a spatial location, the traditional and most basic distinction being between indoor (uchi) and outdoor (soto) locations. These are then broken down into various subcategories depending upon which authority one consults.

The principles of progression dictate that no trio of verses should have the same type of location, and, as with Hokushi's ideas of narrative perspective, though the added and preceding verses might share a similar setting, the added verse and the last-but-one should not.

Montage - became important in the early part of the last century when historic perceptions of spatial location were transformed by the emergence of a creative synergy between the cinematic techniques of Eisenstein and the imagist juxtapositions typical of the renascent renku. Both were viewed as montage and renku theorists began to consider a verse's location and perspective in terms of film 'shot' and 'angle'.

No matter how we choose to categorise our 'clips' the principle remains the same: whilst an adjacent pair may be of the same type there should be not flipping back, no reversion or alternation. Therefore added verse and last-but-one should never belong to the same type of shot.
Mood - too is required to develop, diversify and avoid simple alternation. The demands of scent linkage inevitably result in a degree of empathic consonance between added verse (tsukeku) and preceding verse (maeku) as it is the white space between the verses which generates the primary creative resonance. But once this relationship has been subjected to the evolutionary addition of a further verse there should be no major correspondence between the emotional tone of the text of the newly added verse and that of the last-but-one.

Phrasing - is a further area for consideration, both syntax and register. No language is a stranger to ideas of inappropriate usage, careless reiteration, artificiality, or general compositional inelegance. But renku places a particular emphasis on the avoidance of grammatical and morphological echoes between added verse and last-but-one.

For those writing in English, issues around the repetition of articles, conjunctions and prepositions seem to cause an inordinate amount of concern in this respect. The present author contends that the reader is largely blind to such things unless the repetition in question is grossly excessive or highlighted by some other feature such as generally poor phrasing, identical position in respect of lineation, or an additional phonic correspondence such as a close metrical echo.

Ground and Pattern - are the most common English translations of the Japanese words ji and mon. These terms, typical of early renga theory, are intended to distinguish those verses which are part of the background of a sequence (ji) from those which are relatively impressive (mon). In truth this is a rather blunt tool and it is difficult to understand why such a coarse dichotomy still has some currency in contemporary literary criticism. Nonetheless it is clearly the case that a renku sequence should not simply flip back and forth between strident and anodyne verses.
The general thrust of these arguments is clear. For whatever quality we wish to define in our poem the ideal is to ensure variety, variation, and lack of predictability. Above all we wish to avoid the situation in which any given aspect simply oscillates to and fro, where a quality reverts to type after a single clear verse. So, whilst an added verse (tsukeku) and the preceding verse (maeku) may share some characteristics, an added verse (tsukeku) and last-but-one (uchikoshi) should not.