Hi All:
Today's Per Diem offering is one of my most favorite recent haiku, by Eve Luckring:
Words
still pink
close to the bone
To me this poem is in conversation with Emily Dickinson, but I wonder if it is so obvious to others. I'd welcome your thoughts on this, as well as offering other poems you feel might be similarly influenced by other "mainstream" poets.
j
Hi Jim,
I hadn't realised this was a nod to Emily Dickinson as I haven't read her closely. But I'm impressed with her modern take on language for that time, and how loose yet controlled, and never stifled or stifled.
I love this final stanza in A narrow Fellow in the Grass:
But never met this Fellow,
Attended or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
Emily Dickinson (1866) first published as The Snake
I'd say that Eve Luckring's haiku is not only a homage and a thanks, and an allusion, but touches on ekphrastic angles, as surely Emily Dickinson's work can be considered art, as much as a literary piece of work.
Alan
Hi Jim,
No, I must say that, though I like this haiku of Eve's a lot, find it powerful, I didn't (& still don't) associate it with Emily Dickinson's work at all. That 'narrow fellow' poem Alan has quoted is a particular favourite of mine. . . I certainly share Emily Dickinson's feeling upon meeting one of those 'narrow fellows'! and no-one has ever put the 'body shock' feeling of such a meeting so well as she does -- "zero at the bone".
Words
still pink
close to the bone
- Eve Luckring
What I get here is the power of words to hurt, to cut deeply. Knives, a knife is involved. The metaphor, 'objective correlative' or what anyone wants to call the image is that of meat, perhaps a roast chicken; cooked on the outside but when sliced into, still raw and pink close to the bone (literally). And 'close to the bone' is such a common metaphorical expression in English when something touches us so deeply that it really hurts.
There could also be an allusion to femininity in a world that is tough on women and expects them to have no vulnerable feelings in 'pink close to the bone'.
I love it that Eve has renewed this common expression 'close to the bone', bringing back it's original life and power, fulfilling William Carlos Williams dictum to "make it new!". Yes, words can have the effect of cutting 'close to the bone'.
Both poems, though, do have this in common: an awareness of the body sense, sensations. It could be (though I don't want to make any rash claims) that what Emily Dickinson and Eve Luckring's poems here have most in common is the obvious, that they are written by women , and that it's possible that women are more aware of (or just more used to expressing?) bodily sensation than human males, who are said to be more sight-oriented.
- Lorin
pink=zero . . . I'll bite
here's something that happened in my workplace. One of the guys (we are all male) in my department was given the job of building 2 toolcarts, to be shared by 4 of us. Each cart was built with 2 drawers. The plan: paint each drawer, and the tools stored inside, an identifying color. We had 4 cans of spraypaint on hand: bright orange, leaf green, sky blue, and hot pink. As Arrow (yes, that's his name) was painting the drawers, I walked by, and said, "Who gets the pink drawer?"
I think Arrow was intending to give me the pink drawer (he was the new guy, I'm 10 years on the job), but instead he gave me blue. He gave Keith the pink drawer. Keith, who is a team player if ever there was one, refused to mark his tools with pink, which undermined the project, and ultimately led to all of us grabbing a tool when we need one regardless of color, catch as catch can, as Caroline says in the Lou Reed song.
btw, we work in an art museum, are all artists of one kind or another, and have used the color pink many times, in other situations, without qualms. The power of pink.
;D ;D ;D :-X
... for what it's worth, Mark, I've never worn pink since I could speak/ yell and I wouldn't have accepted the hot pink drawer, either. I might be pink on the inside, but who wants to go around insides out? And there are other, ruder names for 'hot pink', most of them referring to anatomy... 'cat's/pig's ring pink' is probably the only one acceptable on a public internet site. The only people I've come across that truly adore hot pink are the more extroverted transvestites and cross-dressers!
But why didn't someone just get a spray can and paint the pink drawer the colour/s of their choice, even if it meant getting a couple of new cans of paint? All artists of one kind or another, after all, and hot pink is surely grounds for modification that'd stand up in court under 'work-related harassment'. 8)
- Lorin
to paint the drawer another color is to admit a troubled relationship with pink. Uneasy territory with a whiff of prejudice and/or denial. For Keith to confess he felt pink-harassed, well--you don't know Keith if you think he'd ever make such an admission.
As for your reference to transvestites and cross-dressers, that's partly what I was getting at, and maybe part of Eve's thought-process. Rather extraordinary, isn't it, that a narrow range of hues in the color spectrum continues to be provocative.
I know another snake poem by E. Dickinson that begins:
In Winter in my Room
I came upon a Worm--
Pink, lank and warm--
My goodness, I don't think I've read that one of Emily's, Mark. Doesn't sound like the sort of poem one could read aloud to a year 9 class, either! Can you imagine the 'in-depth discussion'? :o
- Lorin
That Dickinson poem should come with a parental advisory sticker. I agree with Lorin that it would not go down well in a room full of curious adolescents.
As to Eve's haiku, I was thinking along the same lines as Lorin when she was saying about the term cutting close to the bone and how words have the power to do this to people. I also see the connotations between the word pink and females, in particular young females, and as we all know there are few groups who more cruel with words than small children. So perhaps this could be about a bit of playground bullying that Eve encountered?
-John
I saw "pink" as meaning "still bloody" and "still alive." I interpreted the poem as a poet "writing down the bones," getting to what is essential, the marrow, the meat of things.
My favorite Dickinson snippet:
A word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die...
(1651)
Words, in the hands of a good poet, are still breathing, still alive. If the poet can choose living, breathing words, the poem lives forever in people's hearts, is understood by all the generations that follow.
Words
still pink
close to the bone
What a wise-guy Dickinson was, as well as a Wise Woman. I'd go back and ask for a hug, if I didn't think I'd get a shock instead.
There are poems of hers, such as "the Crickets sang" which with only a little tinkering, could be a series of what we call haiku.
One thing she does with "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" is more or less disarm the reader with rather "cordial" language which at times ("Nature's People) borders on the cozy before hitting home with the weird and wired "Zero at the Bone". Was anyone prepared for that?
Maybe it takes a longer poem (than haiku) to set that up. I notice, however, that most haiku poets stay within a rather narrow range of sound, or tone, or diction, which doesn't allow the shock of surprise, or freshness.
D's leaps are electric. Her dashes (she could run a hundred yards in less than second) are like cut power lines spewing spark.
Writing about the fragments of Archilochus and Empedocles, Heather McHugh says: ". . . their missing parts (like Dickinson's dashes) are indispensable connectors".
The spaces in many haiku and in Luckring's poem are something like indispensable connectors-- like superheroes we have to jump in, grab the raw ends, and let the electricity flow through us. We are the missing part, the arc of spark, the ark connecting the present flood to the future field. "Now you're getting carried away!" all my paired creatures complain.
Certainly there are connections in Luckring's poem that remind of D's, among them the word "bone" itself, the two long Os of "close to the bone" the capitalized Words, some of which (words) Noah's animals must have taught him, leaving us to the imagine the pink reek of what the crocodiles had to say. . .
Cuts like a knife, down to the bone, what's bred in the bone, playground pink--I think all the associations offered here are valid.
Surely the first line, capitalized, is a signal from Eve to us that her poem is also to be understood on the level of the etymologies, associations, sounds, shapes, literary uses of words that individually and together invite multiple interpretations, some of which are subversive and not immediately evident.
Hi Peter, I see you've posted while I was composing. I agree. And the capitalization of Words is crucial, I think.
[edited a superfluous line]
I wondered about the reason for the capitalization of 'Word', Mark.
I've not seen that done before with the plural. The only associations with the singular I have are 'the Word', in the Christian bibles and...um... Microsoft Word. ::) Come to think of it, there are connections between these two...several! Scary stuff!
Thanks! ;D
- Lorin
my associations with Words in caps were along different lines...
if we accept Jim's notion of a reference to Dickinson's poems, which I do, then the choice of capitalizing Important Words, in the manner of the source, makes sense.
also, I had in mind the email and forum sensitivity to all-cap EMPHASIS, which might prompt the request, "please don't shout".
but Wait, eve luckring's own website has the first line as
words
is she here consenting to collusion,
is the poem as reproduced here a revision?
dunno
well, yes, the capitalization of 'important words' in Dickinson's poems , and those of lesser poets of her time, and the public announcements, shipping announcements etc of her time, but I've never taken that as being anything other than a convention of the historical period.
That's interesting that 'words' has no cap. in the version on Eve's website.
I've just googled. Though I haven't found a website, I've found a pdf of Eve's selected haiku. The poem appears there without a cap. at the beginning of word', too. There is also what appears to be a related one-liner:
sticks and stones. . . in the beginning was the word
- Eve Luckring
Modern Haiku Vol 41.1, 2010
There is a note, too, that the ku we're discussing here was among her haiku in that issue of Modern Haiku
"all of the above (some in slightly different form) from Modern Haiku Vol 41.1, 2010 "
...so perhaps 'word' had a cap. in the version published, but was subsequently changed?
- Lorin
modified: added from "I've just googled" on.
Hello everyone.
I cannot locate the source from which I originally found Eve's haiku; I have emailed her to get clarification as to whether I simply transposed it incorrectly with the capitalization of the word "Words," or whether I did, indeed, see such a version.
I saw the Modern Haiku version which uses lower case, but this is not the original cite of the poem.
We'll see when I get a response from Eve herself.
I have much to say about the subject itself, but will refrain as my only endeavor right now is to truly reproduce the haiku we publish following the author's intentions.
Okay, folks, the mystery has been solved.
I received the citation I originally listed for Eve's haiku and the first word "words" should be in lower case.
I will not get into the subject of case in haiku because I frankly don't see it as a sine qua non of the form; I'll just say that for a group to write "free verse" haiku to make so much of case is somewhat paradoxical to me.
I remember getting into a lengthy discussion, somewhat heated, in the past about this and I don't want to re-explore it. I would just add that for "modern" writers to write "free verse" haiku and continue to write in the "pastoral" mode of "seasonal references" is another paradox to me (see Richard Gilbert on the subject-he is an authority).
Personally, I would have capitalized "Words" if I were writing the poem, as my reading is far different from those offered.
More important to meaning to me than the case of the first word is the extra space Eve placed between the first word and the remainder of the poem; this has meaning. Let's say hypothetically that "words" or "Words" are reifications that's why the word is floating, detached from the rest of the poem; and it is only when words retain some of their visceral physical nature and origin that they remain true: flesh, to the depths,close to the bone.
Call me old fashioned or out of touch but the characteristic now moment of awareness (Spiess), present moment magnified (Heron's Nest), moment keenly perceived (McClintock) still holds sway for me. As much as I love the second part of Eve's piece, and the resonance it achieves with the first, both parts persist as pure abstraction. I don't experience a moment so much as hear a statement.
Added: It's easy enough to find inconsistencies with this preference (have at it). Why for instance don't I have a similar feeling about 'sticks and stones'? I am able to experience that one and could give reasons why, though I realize they may not be convincing to everyone.
Perhaps that's the intention of the poem; perhaps that's why "words" dangle, suspend, are not directly proximate to pink flesh and bones.
I have to say my friend it is not a matter of being out of touch; I would be the one who would be considered out of touch. But, I don't believe in the haiku moment and all the expressions in that vein.
You have words, which the moment you observe something and formulate it in words, the thingness retreats, you are in another world, the world of language not of "reality." Experiment with it and see if you can feel the retreat of the "object" as you begin to think of "words" to express with. I feel it immediately.
But, as I said earlier, there's no reason to quarrel or seek resolution or a "rule." I think that only hinders uniqueness and creativity.
You prefer one convention over another. That's your perogative. But, in reading Eve's poem you have not only experienced a moment and been in one, but you have experienced what the English language school calls a speech act: you have been engaged in an action.
Sticks and stones are as arbitrary signifiers, unmotivated, as any words; it is the "realist" movement that you prefer, the literary/artistic illusion that there is actually a direct correspondence between word and thing, a transparency. Again, I have no qualms with that; I write like that myself sometimes. My only objection is that it be propounded as a rule, a sine qua non. Funny thing is though, just when you've created a rule that everyone adheres to and has for 30 years, no one remembers that it was an agreed upon "reality," which only has conventional truth, and is quite distant from contemporary language theory.
So, let's be friends my friend. NO reason to insist on anything; let's be poets and enjoy the different approaches our contemporaries take.
Hi Jack,
I have little interest in rules either. It's just a personal preference to be able to enter into an experience. And language is wonderfully capable of achieving just that.
It's not an open and shut case for me either. I sometimes do self referential things and wink at the camera in my own work. But since the preference persists for me (and for most people judging from what's being written) I wanted to throw it out there for discussion.
(Jack, I wrote this before reading your last post. I'll just add that I don't know why stating an aesthetic preference raises red flags about "rules")
Quoteit is the "realist" movement that you prefer, the literary/artistic illusion that there is actually a direct correspondence between word and thing, a transparency. -Jack
I'm also fond of translucency. Opacity of language, not so much :) but there is plenty of room in haiku to accommodate all manner of purposes, forms and aesthetics imo.
PS- Not that Eve's piece is opaque.
Well, Chris you are open-minded. There are many who are not, who have wrirtten in stone what haiku requires to be deserving of the name, that's why the idea of aesthetic preferences raises red flags about rules for me.
Just for instance, Chris. In earlier posts some people were discussing capitalization of words in haiku as if was a practice that belonged to an earlier age, historically bound. If you look at contemporary poetry, I don't think you would find this to be the case. It's just something that was adopted many years ago by the haiku groups and became a near rule.
But, as I said earlier, really these same people write what are for the most part pastorals and yet they do not aver that pastoral poetry is outmoded and was a product of a time in the West when societies were essentially agrarian.
and there are those who defy rules by borrowing from other conventions. Capitalizing the first letter of every line, for example. Beware the Hybrid...
thanks, Jack, for getting to the bottom of the Case of The First Letter, which was also a great Sherlock Holmes story, if I remember incorrectly.
The contrast with Luckring's usual practice of leading with the lower case, and our talk of Dickinson poems, made me more than usually focused on the word Words as it appeared in per diem. I hope you don't feel I was being critical of you in my previous post. That was not my intention.
you wrote:
QuotePersonally, I would have capitalized "Words" if I were writing the poem, as my reading is far different from those offered.
More important to meaning to me than the case of the first word is the extra space Eve placed between the first word and the remainder of the poem; this has meaning. Let's say hypothetically that "words" or "Words" are reifications that's why the word is floating, detached from the rest of the poem; and it is only when words retain some of their visceral physical nature and origin that they remain true: flesh, to the depths,close to the bone.
yes, I think that's right.
Well, Mark, I'm glad the question of capitlization was raised, because I see it as my responsibility to transcribe just what the author intended and I would not have otherwise noticed. I already fixed it in the archives.
And, you are right that other forms of literature rely on conventions, too, just as realism did in its day.
Generally, I write with capitalized letters of words beginning each line. It is a preference and I really can't see how it denigrates the poem. I don't see that beginning haiku with lower case gives the reader a sense of a before anymore than a capitalized word (it seems to me the capitalized word emphasizes the particular time sequence or sequences within the poem, whatever they may be, quite well). I also don't feel that haiku is about a moment necessarily, present tense necessarily; I recently wrote a haiku that contained past, present, and future and it won the Kusamakura Grand Prize; it also happened to have been written, unintentionally, or unconsciously, in 5-7-5.
I did feel a bit umbrage at what was being discussed, but only because it reminded me of some unpleasant interactions in the past about case in haiku.
Would you mind, Mark, explaining what you mean by Hybrid, because it seems to me that you are presuming haiku has an accepted form and a variation, such as capitalizations of first words of lines is mixing a practice from another form of poetry and is thus hybrid.
I have to run out to a doctor's appointment, but I want to respond quickly now and maybe less so later. I was free associating, and thought of Hybrid Paradise. If you click of the web link next to my profile, you'll see my intro there goes into a little more detail. Haiku is a genre, and not imo defined by any form.
also, your practice of capitalizing the letter of first line is fine by me. I think we'd all do well to at least attempt to accept an artist on her own terms. Sometimes that's a case of take it or leave it, but rarely so for me. best,
m
Okay, Mark, I now understand what you mean by hybrid and yes, given its ancestry it is hybrid by necessity. I like, admire, your work very much. In fact, I chose one of your haiku for Per Diem; perhaps, Jim Kacian hasn't notified you yet and requested your permission to publish it.
Best,
Jack
although I know a few people must read my poems, verification always brings a thrill. I enjoy Per Diem, and would be grateful to see my poem there, thank you.
It's my pleasure to publish it and see it show-cased! Well-deserved.
All the best,
Jack
before the warm glow wears off, I'd like to turn the discussion back to Eve Luckring's poem, and a thought I had reading through the earlier back and forth--
I think it's possible, and Luckring does this well, to subvert (metaphorically--she might prefer to say question) tradition without being disrespectful, to create a poem with layers of meaning, different points of view, even competing conventions, without contradiction.
Yes, I think that's true of her work. I just received an email from her and she said she sometimes does write with capital letters beginning poems and she was still considering the differences, nuances, that the capitalization meant to the poem (as it initially was posted at THF).
She said she was looking forward to the discussion of the work, so I quite agree, she is open, original, respectful, artistic and capable of subversion without intended harm.
Not to change the subject, but to broaden it perhaps if others feel like joining in.
I gave some thought recently to the basic differences amongst the art forms, especially music, writing, and dance.
My feeling was that all embraced playing with time as space. Music was spatialization through changes of notes, tones (when played) and musical scripts have figures, but the figures represent only sound. Dance was the exploration of time by arrangement and rearrangement of figures without sound (necessarily) and certainly without meaning (modernist dance).
Writing was different in that its figuration had meaning in itself and it displayed time as space by changes in both figurative language and sound changes. So, I thought poetry should be keenly aware of its mission:figuring time as space by attention to its own particular attributes: figure bearing meaning and sound; and couldn't we say that that's what Eve's haiku is, not what it's about?
Quote from: Jack Galmitz on April 12, 2011, 01:53:34 PM
Just for instance, Chris. In earlier posts some people were discussing capitalization of words in haiku as if was a practice that belonged to an earlier age, historically bound. If you look at contemporary poetry, I don't think you would find this to be the case. It's just something that was adopted many years ago by the haiku groups and became a near rule.
But, as I said earlier, really these same people write what are for the most part pastorals and yet they do not aver that pastoral poetry is outmoded and was a product of a time in the West when societies were essentially agrarian.
Hi Jack,
It's morning here, so "Good Morning". :) And thank you very much for taking the time to look into it all.
That was me who mentioned that the capitalisation of what someone called 'important words' was a convention in Emily Dickinson's day and not just in poetry. It undeniably was. Not every poet capitalised 'important words' in those days, but in was common in eg hymnals, as well as in the shipping news and advertisements of various sorts. It was a convention that Emily Dickinson adopted and adapted. But what I said was in context of and in response to the idea that the capitalised 'Words' had special significance in that it connected Eve's haiku to Emily Dickinson's work. I didn't make that connection of special significance, myself. It seems to me to be drawing a long bow. Perhaps if a word beginning with a cap. appeared in the
middle of a poem it might remind me of Emily Dickinson's work, but not at the beginning.
To me, all the conventions of style are just that...conventions of style. In using all lower case in his poems, E.E. Cummings adopted a style which was not the norm for his day and many followed. In my 'long' poems, I've adopted various styles of presentation, depending on what I felt suited the particular poem.
As you must be aware, it doesn't bother me one bit that your haiku begin with a capital letter or that someone else's doesn't, but I don't attach special significance to the first word of your haiku because it begins with a capitalised letter, or discount significance to the first word of someone else's haiku because it doesn't. These sort of choices, surely, remain with the author of the poem.
I believe one must work with the whole poem, but differences in printing/ writing/ presentation style are not of the essence. What haiku has inherited from the concrete poem, the graphic aspect, can be interesting, but that doesn't mean that every poem or every haiku benefits from being rendered in a fashion after the concrete form. What began as an idiosyncrasy, the rendering of some common words in abbreviated style in poetry (yr for your, ths for this etc.) became much imitated in the 60s and still can be found in some poets work today. It's sometimes said that it helps convey a sense of informality and immediacy... perhaps, but I'm not so sure. It identifies these poets in a lineage, that's the major thing it does after it's been used for a while, and it's a stylistic convention as much as any other.
- Lorin
Hi, Lorin.
Thank you for your explanation/explication. Frankly, I never thought of Dickinson when reading Eve's haiku. It seems I misunderstood what you meant by capitalizing "important" words; you're absolutely right that that was a nineteenth and earlier convention.
But what do you think of my last post and explication of her poem as meaning/sound/figure as her version of time as space, as her expression of what poetry is? Doesn't this make that floating "words" detached from the flesh and bone reification and remind us that the abstraction of time-our experience of the poem-is only real when we are, when the figure(word) is both sound changes and meaning changes inseparable? It is a body of meaningful sound, otherwise "words" float away.
You're also right, Lorin, that capitalization of words within the body of the poem are more Dickinsonian than capitalization of the first words of a line.