solstice
standing still
for the full moon
.
scheduled to post at 5:38 p.m. CST, when the sun stops and time starts running backward and history repeats itself and … oh, that’s not what happens? never mind, then.
standing
November 13 (Mountains)
mountains
standing in the way
of the hills
August 1: 1-3: Three of one
1.
I can’t remember where I got this scar, or that one, or that one.
2.
streetlights switch on the child runs away from his mother
3.
Cassiopeia she refuses to stand next to her lover
*
Over at Troutswirl right now there is a great discussion about one-line haiku.
There are links to several other discussions of the subject, and several enlightening comments. Among other interesting points:
- The late, great Bill Higginson seemed to think that if there were spaces in your one-line haiku, it wasn’t really a one-line haiku (because you were indicating, apparently, where a line break could go, and so why not write it in more than one line). To me, this seems to ignore the visual advantage to displaying a ku all in one line — it can be scanned more rapidly by the reader so gives more of a sense of wholeness or urgency, yet sometimes you still want to give a visual cue as to where a pause should occur.
- Marlene Mountain has a page where a number of her ku are displayed both as three lines and as one, so you can decide which way you think works better.
- Jim Kacian categorizes several of the effects that can be achieved by English one-line haiku (“one line–one thought,” “speedrush” and “multi- stops”). (Click on the big X:2 on the linked page to download the issue of “Roadrunner” this essay appears in.)
- Charles Trumbull, in a July 29 comment, makes the sensible observation (I say it’s sensible because it’s what I think myself) that “[b]ecause of the internal rhythm of the material, sometimes one line works best. Period.” (He is slightly cranky about people imitating Japanese poetry or referring to historical precedent to justify their one-liners.)
I keep finding more and more that if I am having a great deal of trouble with a ku, transforming it to one line frequently instantly solves my problem. This is when I say that the ku “wanted” to be one line.
Also, I think I am still treating American sentences and one-line haiku as more or less interchangeable, though they’re not, really. I mean, number 1 above seems clearly to be an American sentence to me; the other 2 one-line haiku. Must think more about this …
June 19: 1 (Four Orbits)
found haiku:
four orbits of the Sun
as though
standing still
June 11: A story in eleven haiku and one photograph
Through the screenless window comes
a bird.
I watch it disport itself.
The house fills with wings.
The hearts of birds beat
more rapidly than our own.
I inquire of Google
what to do.
The response is dissatisfying.
The Russian story of
the Firebird.
A keen, glittering eye.
Many versions
of roast chicken.
I choose the most savory.
Dancing, I lift up my skirts
for the bird to pass
under.
The oven is still hot.
I stand beside it,
flapping my arms.
I don’t dream anymore
I can fly.
I have scraped my mind of such stuff.
I trap the bird in the closet.
When you get home,
it will amaze you.
I am reciting famous poetry
silently.
I am petting the cats.
The cats are hot, they breathe
rapidly. Wait, I say,
you will be rewarded.
*
I was feeling a little claustrophobic yesterday. Haiku seemed too small. Even the most wonderful of them — just a blink! I had a novel-lover’s need for extended narrative.
But I do love the haiku form and the challenge of containing an entire experience, a full impression, in just a few syllables. Several things I’ve been thinking about lately began to come together in my mind, things I’m hoping to write more about in the next few days — gendai haiku, renga. Unconventional ways of writing haiku, and ways of linking them together to create a larger picture than a single haiku allows.
I wondered what would happen if you piled a bunch of nontraditional haiku on top of each other to form a narrative. I wanted each haiku to be able to make sense separately on its own, and also to form a part of a coherent story. This photograph I’ve been thinking about for a few days entered the mix; a bird began to fly around in my head.
Writing this was a lot of fun. I’ve begun a couple other similar narratives, and I want to try more. This kind of structure seems to work the way my mind works — I’m really only capable of brief bursts of attention, but I also hunger for depth of character, for details of setting, for continuity of action.
(A bird really did get into our house through a screenless window a few years ago; but the rest of this is fantasy. In case you were worried about its fate at the paws of the cats.)
June 4: 4-7: The Technique of Narrowing Focus
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
“This is something Buson used a lot because he, being an artist, was a very visual person. Basically what you do is to start with a wide-angle lens on the world in the first line, switch to a normal lens for the second line and zoom in for a close-up in the end.
“the whole skyin a wide field of flowers
one tulip”
– Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
Me:
ten thousand runners
I stand alone
and look at my feet
on the horizon a freighter
with a box
with a man inside
reading Anna Karenina
once again
finding that sentence
forest full of
maple saplings
guessing which one will live
Found haiku: Gerard Manley Hopkins
I’m still feeling under the weather from semi-collapsing at the end of a half-marathon I ran on Sunday in 88-degree weather (it’s Wisconsin, and it’s been a cold spring, so no snickering from you Southwesterners). Pretty much confined to the couch, since standing up for more than a few minutes makes me dizzy. There are worse things, I guess. I’m surrounded by all the books and magazines I put off reading all semester, not to mention the omnipresent, time-sucking Interweb.
I’m having a hard time following a train of thought even long enough to write a sub-seventeen-syllable poem, though. So at the moment I’m taking it easy on my fried brain by resorting to found haiku, mostly from prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, better known as a poet — one of my all-time favorites. The first couple haiku are from poems. The rest are from his journals, which every aspiring poet should read. The man minutely observed and described everything he saw; whole paragraphs read like poems. I can’t help thinking that if he had known about haiku, he would have tried his hand at it.
I may repeat this experiment at intervals, mining the works of other poets and prose writers for haiku-like material (full credit to the original authors, of course). I agonized briefly over whether this exercise was a) cheating, or b) meaningful, but then decided I didn’t care. I enjoy it and it’s my blog. And I do think I’m learning something from this about what writing is haiku-like and what isn’t.
I’ve taken the liberty of haiku-izing Hopkins’s words by arranging them in three lines and removing some punctuation, but otherwise these are direct quotations, with no words removed or added.
So…here’s Gerard:
the moon, dwindled and thinned
to the fringe of a fingernail
held to the candle
*
this air I gather
and I release
he lived on
*
mealy clouds
with a not
brilliant moon
*
blunt buds
of the ash, pencil buds
of the beech
*
almost think you can hear
the lisp
of the swallows’ wings
*
over the green water
of the river passing
the slums of the town
*
oaks
the organization
of this tree is difficult
*
putting my hand up
against the sky
whilst we lay on the grass
*
silver mottled clouding
and clearer;
else like yesterday
*
Basel at night!
with a full moon
waking the river
*
the river runs so strong
that it keeps the bridge
shaking
*
some great star
whether Capella or not
I am not sure
*
two boys came down
the mountain yodelling
we saw the snow
*
the mountain summits
are not the place
for mountain views
*
the winter was called severe
there were three spells
of frost with skating
*
the next morning
a heavy fall
of snow
*
at the beginning of March
they were felling
some of the ashes in our grove
*
ground sheeted
with taut tattered streaks
of crisp gritty snow
*
thunderstorm in the evening
first booming in gong-sounds
as at Aosta
*
I noticed the smell
of the big cedar
not just in passing
*
the comet —
I have seen it at bedtime
in the west
*
as we came home
the stars came out thick
I leaned back to look at them
*
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W.H. Gardner
Red Dragonfly 