Just imagine the excitement: you find it sandwiched between X-ray Specs, Improve Your Memory (never-forget-a-name-again), and an ad to join something called the Rosicrucians (not a religious order). You clip the coupon, agonise daily until the postman fears the worst, then at last, with a desperate urgency, tear open the plain brown package. It’s in your hands, flimsy, but wonderful: The Secrets of Renku – and You!

Ok then, perhaps not. I am after all a renku enthusiast, and so prone to flights of fancy. Perhaps you are a poet, tending to the serious, and you have no intention of shilly-shallying with some rule-bound farrago of a topic that quite frankly is a waste of time. Hmmn. You have a point. But if you’ll just give me a moment of your time you might find that I do too. And I might be able to indicate ways in which renku can help tighten your haiku.

Masaoka Shiki was right. By the 1890s haikai renga (the old name for renku) had become a sclerotic literature with little to recommend it. Other than for a surfeit of cabals, infighting, and random taboos odd enough to make an autistic flap. Like so much else in Japanese society the young found it stifling and irrelevant. With his proposal of the ‘haiku’ Shiki hit the button. He was pushing at an open door.

But we do well to remember that Shiki’s approach was a hybrid of cultural sensitivities. Many of the new tools in the Meiji machine shop were imported directly from the West. And it is the way of the world that when some things are gained, others are inevitably lost. Shiki wasn’t the first revolutionary to shake up a whole literature. One such was Matsuo Basho.

Basho is sometimes called 'The Father of Haiku’ but this is pretty misleading at best. His focus was less on the individual verse than on how it might appear in context. Either in conjunction with prose and prose-poem elements, as in ‘haibun’. Or as part of an alternating sequence of long and short verses - our plat du jour: ‘renku’. As most people know he was so good at this that eventually he was made into a god.

But the first secret of renku is that Basho didn’t go round laying down the law. He knew the rule books, and understood why people wrote them. But he also held that rules were for breaking. All the rigid imperatives attributed to Basho are no more than claims by this or that follower. Basho was an artist who led by example, by persuasion, and personal discourse. He talks of experimentation and moderation, of the permanent and the changing, of the higher values bound up with the low. In conflicts Basho appealed not to formalism but to artistry, honesty and truth.

The second secret of renku is that Basho liked a party. But didn’t blame everything on the boogie. The idea that writing linked verse is just a pastime comes in part from the early days of medieval renga (when it was indeed mainly a pastime) and the later phenomenon of professional ‘Haikai Masters’ running sordid drinkathons dressed up as something cultural. Basho was absolutely, fundamentally, totally committed to the concept that linked verse could be sublime. Renku can be social, certainly (and go on then: just a small one) but the fundamental drivers behind Japanese linked verse reside in Buddhist notions of loss of ego, and the creative power of the group mind. For those more comfortable with closer to home: think Charlie Parker riffing with Gillespie.

Which brings us to range. One of the things about working with other people is that they have different takes on things. And it’s surely a feature of any group mind that it drags in a whole lot of disparate stuff. At one level of course that risks being ‘garbage’. And at another ‘less than pleasant’ or ‘challenging’. On the other hand perhaps we should question why haiku sometimes doesn't seem to go to certain places.

Perhaps it is simply that solitary work inevitably involves self-selection. And, as 20th century occidental verse has shown, this can easily lead to self obsession. In renku by contrast one is driven to respond, both to novelty and to cycles of change. Some of our choices are conditioned and coloured by our ever mysterious partners.

But there is an inner secret here, which, in the West in particular, a certain bossiness has served to obscure, and it goes back to the whole issue of rules and to instinct versus intellect. Basho’s greatest revolutionary act was to major on nioizuke, a relational style which comes to us in English with the rather odd name of ‘scent linkage’. This is not about precedent and formulae; it works on empathy, holism and scope. The truth: only in clearly defined teaching situations should we analyse the innards of a link.

In scent linkage the overriding quality is not logic but feel. You enter into one part-glimpsed universe and join it to another vibrant world. You will recognise this of course from haiku technique as the ideal of toriawase - juxtaposition. Of the two elements that make up that word, most crucial is awase – which I'd probably give as 'matching’.

A defining quality of renku is that it goes forward. As verses join, the added one does not just reinforce the other. One companion does not explain the other, or simply give its setting. These are not puzzle solutions. Nor a ‘specific instance’ wryly playing off its baldly stated ‘general state’. Still less is one phrase the unfortunate stooge – a set-up for a weary old kigo. You might have read haiku theorists refer to the power of the ‘partially complete’. In renku only the last verse of a sequence, ageku, closes out the rolling changes. Renku linkage therefore tends to stay open – to admit of further possibility. And because we are talking about a many headed author that encompass a multitude of sins.

The conceptual range of how tightly links should synch is also a live issue in renku – some being tight, whilst others are loose, or multi layered: axes vertical. All tenors and tones are there to be employed; as with topics it’s a question of range. And, Wiki knows, the diction is remarkably broad. It can sometimes get a little bit coarse.

But look, we’re friends now and you haven’t read all this way to be appalled at the mere mention of a 'mud snail'. Any moment now we’ll get to the good bit – the dark and grimy truth. First though, given that it’s just had a mention, let’s probe around the dreaded ‘season word’.

Kigo is made up of ki and go – ‘season’ and ‘word’. But it isn’t. Or wasn’t. A word that is. Not when Basho was writing. The irony is that Basho’s revolution junked so many linked verse must-do’s that the night-soil men and fishmongers we now call ‘academics’ had to turn their attention elsewhere. The place they turned it to was seasonal reference, with the inevitable result: ever bigger books of ever smaller gradations of how to do right from wrong. By the time the great man had become mostly worm, the worms had learnt how to coin new words. And money.

Now, renku makes use of sensitivity to season, as individual verse context, as part of interlocking circular structures, and as a guarantor that all things natural tend to appear at some stage. And a run of verses can build on subtle modulations of awareness of the stages of a season. But it doesn’t do painting by numbers. And it doesn’t do Give-Us-a-Clue. So it doesn’t do Season Words, capital ‘s’, capital ‘w’, with all the blunderbuss brutality of a mechanical tick-box on heat.

Because that wouldn’t be poetry would it?

So far so reasonable. You probably think there’s nothing really shocking in anything I've said. Which makes it high time to lift the sticky lid on the really dark secret of renku.

Renku… is made up… of more than one verse. Yes of course you know that. No, I don’t think you’re stupid. But unless you’ve spent time writing renku, certain obvious effects are no such thing.

We’ve already observed that renku is relational literature – an amazing array of ideas and subjects brought to bear on each other (if it’s good). And we’ve also touched on how scent linkage between verses is akin to the juxtapositions found within haiku. As a consequence, when verses are chained together, we have to decide if each should carry an internal ‘cut’ - (in Japanese a kire) - in addition to the suggestive space created by the links between the verses themselves. 

The text book answer is ‘No, not at all. Only the hokku, the first verse is haiku’. In other words, the internal verses of a renku sequence are not put together in two parts. 

If we’re thinking in terms of end-stopped lines, punctuation and a strong sense of turn then that answer is no more and no less than as good as God’s own truth. Yet there are more ways than heavy contrast to turn a verse’s content – up to including what feels like run-on syntax. Renku majors on types of verse construction that involve much subtlety, subterfuge and double vision. Skill with these less direct types of internal comparison can be a boon when fed back into haiku.

But no, that’s not it either. Not the grubby secret. Take a deep breath then. Here it is. 

Renku isn’t just the poetry of meaning; it is not just an assemblage of thoughts. The relational tools that the poet uses go beyond the mere surface of the words.

After decades of mostly fruitless argument over issues of language and form, haiku in English have fallen by default into a more-or-less three line, more-or-less free verse, more-or-less anything goes. At one level this is perfectly reasonable. Everyone can cite Santoka. And haiku are by very definition short verses which stand on their own. Who cares about the number of lines, or syllables – if the poem seems to work, it works.

But the Basho school of linked verse most certainly were and are concerned with form – with the cadences of verses, the transitions between them, and the structure of extended passages. The alternating pulse of long and short verses, the meshing of metrical proportions, these are crucial tools that the poet can use to create a sense of cogency. When used effectively the allegedly prime 'hard content' - the meaning - can plumb ever greater depths. At word level too relational techniques are used to boost expressive power. The writer using this phonic glue to emote, and bind the reader in.

This isn’t the place to start prognosticating on precise matters of form, on accentual patterns, or on how much assonance and alliteration it takes before a verse becomes 'poetic'. But it is the place to point out that, when it comes to writing renku, the poet has to develop a sensitivity to issues that can otherwise get more or less ignored. In renku you have to listen, and you have to respond, at the level of the whole poem, with your best artistic judgment.

So there you have it: aesthetic values, the shared psyche, scope, linkage, structure, diction, and an overall insight into form. These are things which a feel for renku can bring to your practice of haiku.

If I was really as glib as I sound, I'd claim renku as the senior art - heir to some gnomic purity that modern haiku has lost. But that it is rubbish. Basho, as much as Shiki, was a universalist – every bit as prepared to draw on the future as to hark back to the past. Whilst the little green men have yet to be published the genre has at least gone global. Anyone, anywhere, can write renku. It's your heritage - check it out.