Aloha, and welcome.

My name is Eleanor Tinoco. I live in Hilo, on the windward side of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, where we get more than ten feet of rain in a year and nobody owns a car that isn't a little bit rusty. My grandparents came from the Azores to work on the sugar plantations, and I grew up in a plantation camp outside of town, and I was secretary at the same elementary school for thirty-one years until I retired in 1997.

When I was twenty, a neighbor of ours, Mrs. Tanigawa, saw me writing in a notebook on the back steps and asked what I was writing. Poems, I said. She asked if I knew haiku. I didn't. So every Saturday for two years I sat at her kitchen table while she shelled beans or folded laundry and taught me: how a short poem can hold a whole season, how you put two things side by side and let the reader feel the spark between them, how you leave out almost everything. She has been gone a long time now. I still hear her saying, "Less, Eleanor. Less."

The circle is named after the rain gauge on a post in my backyard. I read it every morning at seven with my coffee and write the number in a little book. It is the closest thing I have to a daily poem.

Renku is linked verse. It is a Japanese form, centuries old; the poet Bashō and his students wrote it in the 1600s, and haiku itself grew out of renku's first verse. It is not written by one poet but by a group, taking turns.

The verses alternate between three lines and two lines. The first poet writes a three-line verse. The next poet writes a two-line verse that links to it. The next writes three lines that link to that verse, and so on.

Here is the heart of it: each verse links to the one just before it, and at the same time steps away from the one before that. So verse four goes with verse three, but must not go back to anything in verse two. The poem never returns to where it has been. It keeps moving, like a conversation where everybody listens to the last person but nobody repeats themselves. The pleasure is in the link and the shift, the little jump from one world to the next.

The form we are writing is called a kasen, which runs thirty-six verses, named for thirty-six great poets of old Japan. A kasen has its own map:

• The seasons move along. The first verse belongs to the season when the poem is begun, and the second verse stays in that season. After that the seasons come and go. Spring and autumn usually stay for three to five verses, summer and winter for one to three, and plenty of verses belong to no season at all.
• The moon has set places, three times in the poem, and the blossoms twice. In our kasen, the moon comes at verses five, fourteen and twenty-nine, and the blossoms at seventeen and thirty-five.
• The first six verses are quiet and polite, like guests arriving. No love, no grief, no big subjects yet. Those come later, in the middle of the poem, where it is allowed to get wild.
• The last verse is in spring, and light. You end a renku the way you end a good party: everybody going home happy.

It sounds like a lot of rules. Mostly it feels like a game of catch.

We are six poets who met on a haiku mailing list in 1998 and have never been in the same room. We live about as far apart as six people in this country can.

We have a lobsterman's son, a retired librarian, a dairy farmer's wife, a potter, a tobacco farmer's son who teaches high school chemistry, and a retired school secretary. None of us has ever been to Japan.

Every Sunday morning, after I read the rain gauge, I send one e-mail to all six of us with the whole poem so far and a short note to whoever's turn it is next: what the next verse needs (three lines or two, which season or none, whether the moon or the blossoms are due) and what it must step away from.

That poet has until Wednesday to send me two or three verses to choose from. In renku the leader picks, and sometimes asks for a word changed. Nobody's feelings get hurt; that is part of the bargain. By Saturday the new verse is in, and on Sunday morning I send the poem out again. We go around the circle in the same order each time.

Because of the time difference, when I send the Sunday letter at seven in the morning, Robert in Maine has already eaten lunch. He likes to say his verses arrive from the future.

We began our kasen in May and have eighteen verses of the thirty-six, which is exactly halfway, the end of the first of its two sheets. If we keep our pace we will finish in late January.

If you write haiku and you would like to watch a renku happen, you are welcome to read along here. The verse goes up on this page each Sunday afternoon, Hawaii time.

A haiku page I visit often: red light haiku, poems written at red lights by a city bus driver in Seattle, with a new page on the first day of every season. Mrs. Tanigawa would have liked her very much.

If you have questions about renku, or a kind word for one of the poets, write to me at [email protected]. I pass every note along.