The Haiku Foundation Forums

Quote from: Alan Summers on October 18, 2016, 03:06:44 AM
John W. Sexton calls his recently published poems in Rose Red Review edited by Larissa Nash, as:
"...hybrid gendai / scifaiku sequences: "All the Way Down," "The Inevitably Lost," and "Insensible of Concussion"."
http://roseredreview.org/2016-autumn/

Mr Sexton is quite witty is he not? This appealed to me:

"tundra and lightning" ...
the fridge sends
a brief biography

Also, what is your take on the haiku that was being discussed?

last night's rain
cupped in the banana leaf
a small green frog

Ferris Gilli

As I was trying to say in the previous post I feel there needs to be some connection between writer and the reader for the haiku to really "fly" ... some recognisable detail. This haiku feels very far away from the reality of my personal life. I live far from the tropics and I don't have the opportunity to travel all that much. I don't think I've ever seen a banana plant except on TV. I live in a big city. It is quite possible that the only frogs I've seen have been in zoos. I like going on bush walks but I don't think I can remember ever seeing a single frog in the wild ... does this mean it is a bad haiku? No. The haiku is probably very good but it is just that although my imagination can take me to the scene of the banana plant and the little frog ... none of the elements of the haiku have a correspondence with my own personal experience and that means that the haiku does not really "fly" for me.

Quote from: meghalls on October 17, 2016, 10:20:53 AM
Reading the latest re:Virals where Scott Mason makes some interesting comments about the nature of haiku, I wonder what other people think.

You don't say much about what you thought of what Scott wrote, so I'll just launch in ...

When I read it I couldn't help wondering if Scott was being slightly mischievous. I mean starts out by saying that he sees haiku poets as "explorers" first and "artist" or "wordsmiths" second ... but then he goes on to praise the most artistic and writerly elements of the haiku in question - from the juxtaposition - to the telescoping ("zooms in") - to the pivot. Then having started with the premise that the art of the haiku is less important that the explorations ... he concludes by saying that Ferris Gilli has: "the - dare I say? artistry of the master"!

The truth, well in my opinion anyway, is that it is not a either / or situation. To succeed every haiku needs some recognisable elements ... some reference points from the life that we all share (this is the exploration). But for the elements to touch another person - to become poetry - requires art (even if the art is just the writer exercising careful perception while "exploring" - and choosing the focus of the haiku from the things perceived).

What's your take?

I'll bite.  :)

Keen for some haiku discussion / debate. For the sake of reference I'll post this weeks edition of re:Virals here:

re:Virals 57
Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation's weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week's poem was

     last night's rain
     cupped in the banana leaf
     a small green frog

          Ferris Gilli, The Heron's Nest II:4 (2000)
Mojde Marvast is succinct:

Great!
A whole divides in parts.
Parts, which are as important as the whole.

And Scott Mason theorizes how this poem came to fruition:

As I see it, haiku poets are explorers first and "artists" (or, less grandly but perhaps more accurately, wordsmiths and reporters) second. In this worldview haiku are vessels for the sharing of personal discoveries rather than crucibles of original creation or purely aesthetic expression. An effective haiku will produce an emotional resonance and even the occasional sense of revelation, but the original source of any such resonance or revelation lies outside and mostly beyond the poem's ostensible author.

Ferris Gilli's haiku serves as a splendid example: it's not only a clear product of discovery but also a virtual reenactment of that discovery, allowing readers to share in the poet's firsthand experience for themselves. Just notice how the poem unfolds on first encounter. Line one reads like the sort of self-contained fragment used in so many contemporary haiku to establish time or place or both. But by the time we've read line two it now seems as though the first two lines form an entire phrase ("last night's rain cupped in a banana leaf"), just waiting to be juxtaposed by a third line fragment containing something from a different context or vantage. So what we actually get in line three surprises us with the startle of discovery. Instead of "cutting away" from the scene as we might have anticipated, the poet "zooms in" to reveal something that we—as she—had not quite expected to find ("a small green frog"). And only after we've read the entire haiku are we conscious of the fact that its second line works as a pivot, permitting the last two lines to function as a complete phrase ("cupped in a banana leaf a small green frog"), subtly underscoring our realization that the tiny amphibian was right there in our midst all along.

Gilli's poetic choreography here exhibits the skill and even the — dare I say it? — artistry of a master. Her poem reminds me of a favorite haiku by another master, Buson, which in Bill Higginson's translation reads as follows:

evening wind —
water laps
the heron's legs

Again we have the surprise and delight of some small miracle that was "there all along." Like many if not most human discoveries, these are not ones of new existence but of new awareness. Marcel Proust put it better: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

Thank you. Just read Black Dog / David Jacobs article on my way to work and enjoyed it very much. Will order this in. Looking forward to reading more of his work.

Well ... I must say I feel a bit embarrassed about my extended flight-of-fantasy interpretation now that you've explained that to me! *blush*

I guess this speaks to the difficulty of interpreting even the most mundane of details in short enigmatic poems across even very similar cultures. I assume that Tangerine Pyramids are a North American thing? But Spandau Ballet are a U.K. group ... at any rate Tangerine Pyramids are completely unknown here in Melbourne Australia. And even if I'd googled "Tangerine Pyramids" and come up with images like justlikeyou has posted I don't think I would have guess that was what Fay was referencing.

Thanks for your patient explainations. I'll step carefully in future ...

The phrase in the subject of this thread "sometimes the clock strikes 13" puts me in mind of the kind of haiku where the first line is surreal or seeming nonsensical or impossible and then the rest of the haiku explains (or at least gives a clue to) how the seemingly impossible is actually a normal part of every day life. How about this example from Fay Aoyagi's book Chrysanthemum Love:

tangerine pyramids
his beeper vibrates
again

Taken by itself the phrase "tangerine pyramids" is striking (almost psychedelic) but it doesn't give us enough to construct a satisfying meaning ... the first line makes us want to read the rest of the haiku in the hope that it will provide some kind of explaination. Here are some of the ideas that suggest themselves to me after I've read the whole haiku:
- on a date with a man who has an important job, possibly a doctor
- the man with the important job is distracted, his heart isn't in the date
- we might be up to the dessert stage of the meal as the beeper is going "again"
- the "tangerine pyramids" might be what the dessert at this fancy restaurant looks like? (I could be drawing a long bow here)
- as the man with the important job attends to his beeper the author looks at the vividly coloured dessert and thinks of ancient tombs in the desert (the pyramids) being painted a vivid colour by the sunset in a far away country ... and this sets off another whole string of associations ...