The very first poem in the Bridges 2013 Poetry Anthology (Tesselations Publishing, Phoenix, 2013), Michael Bartholemew-Biggs’s, “Taylor’s Theorem,” which I’ve been invited to review, bothered me because I thought he was calling it a haiku.  Here it is:

If we knew it all
for just a single moment
we’d hold the future

I was going make my standard point about 5/7/5 not being required for a haiku, and not being enough to make a text a haiku when I reread Bartholomew-Biggs’s title for the sequence of which “Taylor’s Theorem” was just one of seven poems and saw he was calling those poems “quasi-haiku.”  In any event, I liked it and the rest of his sequence, particularly a sort of quasi-haiku diptych, “Ill Conditioning”:

Catastophists say
one butterfly’s wingbeats can
switch drought to monsoon.
Catastrophe spreads
through some computations from
one decimal’s doubt.

I’m quoting these partly because I like them, but also because they and many of the other poems in the anthology strike me as what I’m calling “idea-poems” as opposed to “image-poems,” which I consider an interesting division to ponder, and will, with results to show you eventually, I hope.

 

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