The Haiku Foundation Forums

I was reading a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca. 1050-1150 and came across an interesting discussion of the waka-related term "soku," which refers to a "distant" or "fragmented" link. I started playing around with the notion that maybe a new kind of haiku could be written that was really soku. In other words, you take the idea of juxtaposition to the extreme limit, just as Richard Gilbert did with "disjunction," and write poems where the link is distant and dissonant rather than close and consonant. Of course the trick would be to have something that held the poem together even so. In linked verse this is not as much an issue, but with a short poem on its own, there would have to be some effort spent making the poem work without becoming a puzzle for the reader.

There are examples of recent haiku that seem to use disjunction, but people have not connected it to soku as far as I know. For instance, Peter Yovu has a poem in Roadrunner that goes

the cold of a question
stars of eight legs
dangle

I'm not sure if it's the best example to start with, but it does serve the purpose of showing that the juxtaposition truly is just that, two separate things placed in relation. The poem doesn't break apart under the pressure of such a distant link; it is made all the more eerie. The poem uses metaphor liberally to help the overall effect, with the words "cold" and "stars" as sort of mini-disjunctions.

I wonder when people decide about juxtapositions, what the general thought process is and if the idea of a distant link ever comes to mind.

This topic is large, but I did that intentionally so see what people might want to bring up.  One of the things I'm interested in is how there is an interaction between the writer and the reader that could be said to co-create the experience.  That haiku is a kind of open form which places lots of demands and trust in the reader to enter the poem and fill in the blanks, thereby creating the poem upon reading.  The writer has, in this kind of poetry, to resist being too explicit.  Not that there is a puzzle, but rather that there's an effect that is better conveyed by activity on the part of the reader instead of passivity.  I'd be interested in examples of poems that do this, but also I'm also interested in how people approach reading and writing haiku in their own experience.