POETICKS

Anny Ballardini recently posted a haiku at NowPoetry about red cherries by Richard Wright with a second haiku about cherries under it that I took to be by Wright when I wrote about it there, and then posted that here, but which was actually by Anny.  Fortunately, I said nice things about it:

stole two red cherries  expensive in plastic baskets  under the electric light             me

Might as well say a little more about it.  I claim a haiku should try for a haiku moment, and a haiku moment should have archetypal resonance.  That brings us into subjectivity, I’m afraid.  But a critic should be able to show how a haiku he rates as effective as I consider this one to achieve a haiku moment of archetypal resonance.  Then the critic’s readers can decide for themselves whether he’s right or not.

(1) (to go through it again because Sound Practice can never be illustrated to many times!) I consider this haiku’s two images to be . . . well, it’s not that easy to sort it out; one image is a store’s expensive cherries bright lit; a second is the haiku’s speaker’s stealing two of them; but there is a third, the shoplifter all by herself, under an electric light (for me, “electric” in this crime scene, connotes the chair).  I would combine the first two–in tension with “me” because: (1) a physical act versus (suddenly) a psychological state; (2) a scene versus the tiny focal point of the scene (which I see as tinily inside the scene, the perpetrator seeing herself stealing).

(2) The tension is resolved almost instantly with the reader’s empathetic realization of an archetypal fear: the fear of being found out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about instinctive human drives lately, and one of them I’m still trying to work out an effective description of is the need for the world’s approval.  Or the need, as here, to avoid sustaining the world’s disapproval.  I consider all major human drives to be archetypal, and this one is.  It’s what makes us such conformists, even the most eccentric of us behaving like everyone else at least 97% of the time.

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