Exclusive:Scots poet's 'years long' email correspondence creates 100-haiku poetry book

Glasgow-Tokyo Line, which is a hyakuin - a long form poem made up of 100 short "haiku", the more well-known form of Japanese verse - is written in a mixture of Scots, Japanese and English.

Written by academic John Pazdziora and poet James McGonigal, the pair have only met in person three times.

They first made contact more than five years ago when McGonigal was working to copy-edit Pazdziora’s doctoral thesis on 19th century author George MacDonald, which was being turned into a volume for the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature book series after the author studied at the University of St Andrews.

After discussing work, they began to include their own poems at the bottom of emails as light relief after the “dry, tangled details of editing”.

A hyakuin is a type of “renga”, a traditional conversational poem created when poets would gather together for a relaxed social event to spark verses off each other.

McGonigal said: “I’ve always liked Chinese and Japanese poetry a great deal, so we would often discuss these in a final paragraph or so, to lighten things after the dry tangled details of editing. And sometimes we’d come to include our own poems too, particularly when he and his family arrived in Japan where haiku, tanka and indeed renga poems such as the hyakuin are still very much part of the culture.

“Our email correspondence took place over years, with the focus on the hyakuin stretching over about two of these. There were often interruptions caused by work commitments or family emergencies, but we always returned to it.

He added: “One great advantage of brief forms like the haiku is that they can be fitted in to spare moments, between other tasks. We made decisions through suggestions to each other, always with a sense of commitment to the overall goal, even when we couldn’t quite envisage how it would turn out. The trust built up through our earlier editing experience helped.”

“Scots language is part of my sound-world and upbringing, and Japanese is a daily feature of John’s life. He specialises in nineteenth-century Scottish literature, so Scots language is also a feature of that. He had spent years in Fife during his doctoral studies at St Andrews, so that was always intriguing to him in linguistic terms.

“His American English and my Scottish English also co-existed in a useful sort of harmony. But people who have read Glasgow-Tokyo Line say that the mix of languages give a sense of a conversation between more than just two people, adding complexity to the work.”

He said the hyakuin, which has been in existence for 500 years, developed various conventions about key images to be introduced at certain stages of the poem.

He said: “John and I followed some of these conventions. Since he was ‘on site’ in Japan, we often discussed the haiku form and what it could achieve. We would share work with each other and react to it. Since this took place over time, across different seasons, we realised that these existing poems could be arranged and extended into the hyakuin form.”

Glasgow-Tokyo line is published by Isobar Press.