Maine has four distinct seasons: furious white winters, muddy melting springtimes, lush hot summers, chilled expectant Autumns.
Sit here in my chair for a year, and you’ll see seasons roll by the window like you’re on some kind of slow-moving train. In Maine you can travel just by sitting in one place: each season has its own unique colors, plants, animals, foods, chores, clothes, weather.
Just look around my garden and you’ll see the signs of the seasons. See those backyard storage sheds down at the bottom of the hill? It’s full of tools that we store away when we’re not using them. Winter’s snow shovels. Summer’s lawnmowers and watering cans. Fall’s long-handled rakes. The thing is falling apart, though. The shed, I mean. I’m hoping that we’ll replace it with a frame shed at some point soon, but in the meantime, it gets to continue in its role of housing our tools for one more Winter, after which it’s outta here! I would swap it for something better sooner, like one of those long lasting prefab cabins, but the Winters here can be really rough here so I ought to wait for it to warm up before doing any kind of work. There are some telltale signs when the seasons start to turn against us. For example, even the neighbors migrate at the end of summer. As soon as we get the first overnight frost, they’ll pack and run back to their home in North Carolina. They’re fair-weather Mainers. Summer people.
Come on; let’s get back up to the house.
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One of songwriting’s central challenges is brevity. Descriptions need to be compact but sensually powerful.
I think it’s fair to say that when we talk about songwriting, we’re usually talking about short-form poetry set to music. The typical lyric is maybe 50 lines long at most; it’s common to see verse sections with as few as four lines-that’s not much longer than a haiku.
Kigo
Haiku poets deal with limited space in part by using words that have strong seasonal connotations. These words are called kigo.
Here in Maine, the phrase “apple orchard” is an autumnal kigo. The sound of a lawnmower likewise implies summer. Heavy socks mean it’s winter. And so on.
Kigo are often small things, seemingly innocuous, that are nonetheless powerful because they’re connected to an entire time of year. Here in Maine, it only takes one little strawberry to tell you it’s June. Show me a strawberry, and I think of Summer.
Kigo are catalogued in reference books called kiyose. Within a kiyose, kigo are exhaustively listed in categories for each separate season. Here are the most common categories used:
- The Season
- The Heavens
- The Earth
- Humanity
- Observances
- Animals
- Plants
Haiku poets often refer to kiyose as they write. But of course a kiyose isn’t the only place to look; you can also gather kigo from life itself. Explore your memories of different places and times. Or just take a long walk, and take a notebook when you do.
Consider using what you find to write a haiku or its English counterpart, the cinquain. Try writing at least one miniature poem using kigo every day for the next month. The discipline and brevity of these little poems will sharpen your sense of how just a few carefully selected words can communicate more than you’d ever think possible.
And if you’re ever having trouble getting a song or a poem or any other chore off the ground, just go out and rummage around in the shed a bit. You’ll find something to get you started. 
fantastic apple photo courtesy of muffet
This article brought to mind two other Japanese terms that David Toop discusses in his book Haunted Weather that also resonate well in the context of music and/or crafting a piece of writing.
The first is ma, or (very) roughly, “an interval” in time and space. It’s a lot more nuanced than that, though, having much to do with a personal awareness of form–it’s more than just perceived empty space or a place-holder between structural components. I’ve heard it referred to as an “experiential place,” an element of the observer/listener’s experience of a piece of art that’s as crucial as the “things” the ma punctuate. Obviously, thinking about and applying different types of intervals is a fundamental part of composing music, but I think it’s also an important concept to be aware of when writing, too. The forms we give to our ideas and words and the “spaces” in which we arrange and suspend them can communicate as much as the meanings of the words themselves. As Ooka Makoto asks: “What does ‘ma’ mean in your work?”
The other term is shakkei, which is usually used in the context of constructing Japanese gardens. It means “borrowed scenery,” or to quote Toop, that “adjacent or distant scenery is incorporated as an integral part of the design.” It’s easy to see how this can be applied to music too, but it might also be a good concept to have rattling around while thinking about imagery and getting the most bang for your buck when your descriptive space is limited. Or when pondering ways the musical elements in your song can be employed to maximize the evocative potential of your lyrics. There’s opportunity for some subtle, profound stuff.
Wow, that’s fascinating. While I was writing this article I took a detour and wrote a short article about how a line of lyric is like a sip of wine; it really blooms after it’s swallowed, you know? I’ll post the article sometime this week or next.
And I’d never heard of shakkei. That’s fascinating–I’m going to have to research that some more.
The more I read and learn about Japanese art forms, the more interesting it gets.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write all that, Dan; that’s some really useful stuff.