Archive for the ‘haiku’ Category
Entry 134 — Ellipsis-Haiku
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I’m still having “creative ideas” but having trouble bothering to put them on paper, even ones as easy to do that with as the ones that led to the following:
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Good ideas (inspired by Marton Koppany’s recent Otoliths book) not yet finding their best presentation, it seems to me.
Entry 133 — Somewhat Awake Again, I Think
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I simply disconnected from my blog–just didn’t think of it for about a week until a day or two ago. Then last night for some reason I started thinking about haiku and came up with the following poems that I thought worth making this entry for:
.
. early April night:
. barely a single haiku
. of moonlight in it
.
. the street’s cherry blooms,
. dazzling, yet almost grey
. besides the haiku’s
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Entry 52 — Some Conventional Haiku
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Today’s entry is a repeat of one from Christmas day, 2005, with a few comments from today at the end of it:
25 December 2005: “clenched sky.” That’s one of the scraps in the notebook yesterday’s entry was about. Circa 1983. Never got into any poem of mine but may yet. Another scrap is the start in fading cursive of a sonnet I completed somewhere else on Dylan Thomas. I was momentarily quite taken by what the word, “steepled” did to its fifth line, “by his construction of a steepled truth,” for it took a while for me to realize the word was not “stupid.”
Other highlights include the following five unpublished haiku:
rain now as loud
against the northern side of the house
as the roof
rotting log
only part of forest floor
to show through melting snow
glimpsed tanned shoulder;
thin white string across it,
tied like a shoelace
bikini-bar dancer
showing off to her boy-friend,
me in between them
far enough from the storm
nearing the color-dotted beach
to see above it
I wrote these about the time I pretty much stopped writing conventional haiku. I quite like the storm one, probably because I still vividly remember the first Florida storm I saw from far enough away to see above–and to both sides–of it. I don’t think it’s a truly outstanding haiku, though. The one about the bikini dancer is fair in the wry sardonicism vein, I think. The one about the bikini string is nearly not a haiku, for it doesn’t really provide any haiku contrast; i.e., it’s a single-image description. On second thought, maybe it’s excitement versus the mundane: girl in bikini versus shoelace.
I dunno. The other two are very standard, but I’ve tried to improve them,anyway:
the rain now louder
against the house’s north side
than on the roof
rotting log:
only portion of the forest floor
to show through the snow
The first is slightly haikuish in the way it obliquely discusses a wind; the second re-uses a very over-done haiku theme, to wit: life goes on, or–more specifically–winter snow won’t win; but the theme is slightly warped toward freshness with the use of something a reader will take to represent a cohort of winter rather than a counter to it, until he realizes the cause of rotting.
Also in the notebook this bit of High Sagacity: “The Eastern Wise Man attempts to reduce his awareness to the size of his experience; the Western Wise Man attempts to increase the size of his experience to the size of his awareness.” Yep, I’ve always been Eurochauvinistic.
From today:
rotting log;
nothing else of the forest floor
showing through the snow.
Entry 28 — Old Blog Entries 652 through 660
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
#652 had some gadgets by Richard Kostelanetz that I thought fun but trivial–4-letter words in squares, one letter in each quadrant. The gimmick is that three of the letters, in upper-case, spell a word that becomes a second word with the addition of the fourth (lower-case) letter, as in
. G O
. o D
The anti-gimmick is the fact that very few of the too words disconcealed in each specimen relate enough to each other to achieve metaphoricality, or anything poetic else. The above is the best one I could find among the bunch he sent me (and others of his literary friends). Another problem is that such words are too easy to find–although I applaud Kosti for bringing their existence to our attention because they do provide word-game fun.
Several nice poems in #653 that I got from the June 2005 issue of Haiku Canada Newsletter, including this, by John M. Bennett:
. Clou
. laem
. foam
. d
and these two haiku gems, the first by Cor van den Heuvel, the second by Grant Savage:
. end of August-- . a crinkled elm-leaf falls . and rocks once
. on the park bench . this spring afternoon . a new old man
#654 featured wonderful pwoermds from LeRoy Gorman like “marshush,” “rainforust” and “riverb”; but I complained that powermds as pwoermds rather than as climaxes in longer lyrics had become boring for me. I returned to my quest for a decent word to represent “partaker of artwork” in 655, reporting that I’d just coined “aesthimbiber” for that purpose. I seem to have dumped it soon after that but think I should not have. I like it right now.
After posting two works of J. Michael Mollohan in #656, which I put on display in yesterday’s entry, I discussed them in my next two entries. A few lazy autobiographical paragraphs on my procrastination followed. This set of ten entries (from a zine called Dirt) ended with an example of what can be done with pwoermds used as I’d like to see them used, as parts of longer poems:
Ight nowhere lignt gnight lightninght thwords now here
It’s by none other than Geof Huth, who calls it “A Series of Pwoermds.”
Entry 23 — An Old Haiku of Mine
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Today was another bad day for me (because both my bikes had flat tires so I had to walk to where I had an MRI for my bad back, then walk to the bicycle shop two miles from there to get tubes before going on home, another two miles, so I’m just going to post one entry from my old blog, #631, in its entirety–because it’s one of my best entries for the general poetry public, I think:
24 October 2005: Well, we lost electricity in my neighborhood for seven or eight hours due to Wilma, but we got through it with minimal damage. Naples, to the south, didn’t do so well. Sad for them, but someone had to lose–and one good thing about the outcome is that the weather people seem to have been on top of things all the way through, which is certainly reassuring. In my ideal world there’d be hurricanes–but the land to persons ratio would be so high no one would have to live anywhere near places like Naples. There’d still be places like Naples, but they would be staffed by commuters, and lived in by vacationers. (Down with over-population–which in my book is anything over ten million–for the whole world.)
Okay, the poetry-related subject of this entry is the following poem:
. 2 children’s
. rained-around dry quiet spot
. within forsythia
This, or something like it, was in my first book, poemns. After selling some of the copies of the book, I found something wrong with one of the other three poems on the sheet it was on, so removed the whole sheet from the remaining copies of the book. I think the printers failed to make a line in one of the poems go off the edge of the page as I’d intended it to. I should have a copy of the four poems somewhere but it’d take me a week to find them if I tried to, I’m sure.
I’ve used this poem elsewhere since the book, I believe. I want to discuss it here cbecause I consider it a near-perfect example of what I try for as a poet, which is simply to render, in as few words as possible, an image that will cause others as much pleasure as possible. This one accomplishes this through its (1) subject matter, which is (a) quotidianly likely to elicit most persons’ sympathy, (b) pretty, children generally coming off as cute, and forsythia as beautiful, (c) peaceful, the rain having to be little more than mist not to be getting through forsythia branches, and, most important, (d) archetypally resonant by representing Shelter and Companionship, as well as Spring (rain and forsythia, and human beings in their spring); and its diction, which includes the wonderful rained/round rim thyme (but, not, I’m sure that’s not original with me), the with/syth near-=rhyme and the dry/qui aft-rhyme (or whatever it is I’m calling traditional rhymes). Only now, by the way, did I realize that the latter rhymes were near- or full-rhymes. The poem is also effectively concise, and it draws on its being a haiku, for that adds haiku-depth to it (via what it picks up from the tradition, and all haiku before–and after–it).
To me, one of its points of greatest interest is in what it does not have, mainly, manywhere-at-once, or equaphorical layering. In a way, this is a virtue, for it clarifies it into a moment of particular intensity. Amusingly, that emphasizes its being a pure haiku–albeit one without quite the right syllable-count. I do consider its lack of equaphors (or metaphors and the like), in the final analysis, a defect. I continue to believe the very best poems express two or more simultaneous images. But poetry as a whole would suffer consequentially if every poem were equaphorical.
Real life did inspire the poet, by the way. The forsythia in it is from the yard of the Hyde House, as it was known, on Harbor View Island in Norwalk, Connecticut, that I lived in between the ages of 7 and 12. It actually formed a sort of hut, though I’m not sure they could have kept out even mist. I played in it from time to time but most remember my sister Louise, a year younger than I, playing some kind of queen’s court game in it with her friends Ellen and Cindy.
Ironically, just the other day I learned that the Hyde House I’ve been reminiscing about is no more. It was leveled to make way for two condominiums that have to be devastating the ambiance of the shabby-genteel little clump of mostly vacation homes on the island. Progress triumphs again.
note: the large print is stupid, but I’m using it to indicate large blocks of quoted material because I haven’t been able to figure out how to indent at this site (other than use periods as with the poem quoted within my quote–which would take too long to get right for long prose passages).
Entry 9 — Poetry Employing Irrational Language
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
I have always wondered why anyone would make much of most Dada works. It was evident that a good number of reasonably intelligent, sensitive people have, though. Including friends of mine who have shown themselves quite capable of fashioning works I think vastly superior to their Dada works.
Then I came upon Geof Huth’s
. the car I didn’t notice isn’t there
in the recentest issue of Haiku Canada Review. Not Dada, but certainly nonsense, or so I at first thought. I would now term it nearsense. As
. the crab boils filge at blargets in the goamy fludge
it would have been nonsense, or a literary work which uses irrational language in order to amuse (in the view of most knowledgeable people encountering it). As
. car didn’t (e time)s into bleep blegg bllllg you
it would be constersense, or a literary work whose textual matter seems chosen for no other purpose than to cause consternation–by seeming to be nearsense but ultimately not making sense, or proving amusing.
Then there’s temporary nonsense such as Joyce’s “cropse,” which at first seems either nonsense or constersense (and will always seem constersense to Philistines) but, given time, will quite rationally if poetically say “corpse” and “crops” simultaneously in succinctly sum up all the important cycles of human existence.
I have more to say about this, particularly about why the poem by Geof Huth is nearsense, but I’m too worn-out from another tiring day to do so until (I hope) tomorrow.
“What most makes the poem a good one, though, is its freshness–the unexpectedness of its infraverbal twist.”
A superb statement of haiku impact, Bob. And I, too, happen to see the haiku potential in pwoermds, especially of the Huth variety. Geof has a genius for them, and some of them have hit me with the same force as the very best haiku.
And thanks for promoting the Canada haiku scene: we usually get lost sometimes in the transborder discussions
Thanks for the kind words, Conrad. I do think I’m pretty good as a haiku-commentator. And I’m always glad to publicize LeRoy Gorman’s excellent haiku review, which seems to me the best periodical around for haiku and haiku-related poems.