The Haiku Foundation Forums

it is a very large project, and i congratulate you for your, (near complete), work.

i am a student of the bible and consider the king james version to be some of the best prose and verse in the english language.

i think your verse are wonderful, however i do not believe you should consider that they need be haiku.

the site is good also for teaching some of the lessons the bible stories carry into the present.
i think the choice of verse form is perfect, for your purpose, because it provides for the continuity of form through the entire bible and i like the musicality of 5 / 7 / 5 , three line verse.

i only think you need not worry when someone says it is not haiku.  in my mind you are developing a new english verse form,  inspired by the brevity and musicality of haiku , used to carry a narrative in verse.

i also have written 5 / 7 / 5, three line verse over many years for much the same purpose, to condense my journal notes and thoughts into a short verse narrative form.

i have been told it is not haiku, and that is ok with me

marty

sugar she says
I think a tougher word
exists in her mind

Alan Summers

in her mind
it is winter still
- cottonwood flurry

Tracy

flurry of fingers
the argument
takes off

Nicole Andrews

off or on
the switch sparks
bad start

marty

the warning suggest i start a new topic.

anyway,
this is marty.
i have not visited the forum several months, likely 'cause of low energy.  this site requires some concentration to participate , and i am not always able.

i see many mentors here and some wonderful examples.

still i wonder ?   are the requirements named?

all suggestions seem to favor a break in the subject or view.  is length limited to x number of sounds or words?

Imaginary Haiku

A haiku about a discovery in thought. The haiku should demonstrate a specific event and the place or time the event  occurs. The event may be imagined in or about an imaginary landscape.



The bird soars above creation and is able to see the big picture. The children play in the river and lakes and ponds. The elephants are drinking water from the rivers , lakes and mud holes. The bird is the witness able to let us know the water everywhere is the same water.

the soaring bird sees
children leap into water
where elephants drink



While in my youth I read Ram Das  and Allen Watts. The thought of a creation that is connected throughout held my imagination for many years. I went camping in every mountain range I knew. The Smokies, Appalachian, Rockies and Sierra . While traveling much of my attention was given to trees. I imagined their age and the creatures they support all around themselves. I imagined the tree has self.  I imagined the tree reaching out to the small bird. Then I thought about the chaos in a creation which clicked on and off if there were not a personality to create everything in one moment to meet the expectations we have for the next moment.

bird's wing beats the air
creator's grace lifting her
to the waiting branch



Also real experience may spark the mind to imagine similar experience, to increase ones understanding and recognize characteristics such as scale, density, state of movement or stillness and other aspects. During my wandering, I often needed to collect fire wood. I discovered many characteristics of trees, wood, and fire.

One time after we had been driving all night in the rain, our captain said, "pull over here, we will make breakfast and sleep." it was my task to collect fire wood while the buddies unloaded the horse to graze along side the road. The long grass was wet so it would not do for kindling. I began breaking dry dead branches off the few scattered trees. I leaned into one low branch bending it almost to the ground. Suddenly it snapped off just at my hand. The rest of branch sprung back up, giving me an undercut to the chin that lifted me off the ground and threw me onto my back several feet away. My chin was split open and I held the small stick of the branch against my cut chin.

old tree
standing still . . .
a knock out!

Alan,

by,  ..."exercise on ambiguity,"...
do you want examples where the poet is not present in the verse?

...a tree falling with out a witness? an omnipresent voice? 

Quote from: Alan Summers on September 22, 2013, 12:47:57 PM
It would be great to see some examples here.  My essay is now to become part of a forthcoming book called Writing Poetry the haiku way.

Look forward to examples of haiku.

warm regards,

Alan

regards,
marty :)

looking for truth in any direction, stumble in the dark

old memories - beach shells on the window sill

Quote from: Alan Summers on September 29, 2012, 04:05:35 AM
Dear Rebecca,

You are a fine commentator, and I thank you for that.

I am not at all surprised that you won an award for your haiku.

brief lives
today the cherry blossoms
seem more permanent

It is completely in keeping with the respect that the Japanese hold for cherry blossoms because they are so brief and fleeting.

It's one of the best ever haiku I've read over twenty years on the subject of fleeting lives, and of cherry blossom.

Alan

Quote from: whitedove on September 28, 2012, 07:54:02 PM
I'm late coming to this link, but I've enjoyed it immensely.  Thanks to all of you for your wonderful thoughts and poems.  Like Chase, I bought a book of Japanese Death Poems, and I very much enjoyed reading it. @ Chase—your poem is marvelous, but don't ever take that road. My husband's cousin, a gifted cardiovascular surgeon took his own life a few years ago. For others, the grief never ends.  I don't know if the poem I wrote could be considered a death poem, but I wrote it when I was battling breast cancer and entered it in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku International.  To my surprise it won a Sakura award.  I didn't think it had a chance when I read after I'd submitted that the theme of the contest was the joy of sharing cherry blossoms.  My poem explores themes of fragility and impermanence, and after I wrote it I thought it might make a good death poem.  The poem is:

brief lives
today the cherry blossoms
seem more permanent

Thanks again to all who contributed to this interesting discussion.  Rebecca Drouilhet

this is marty,
Rebecca beautiful poem

i love this topic.

i almost invite death,

now i am only 62 yrs, and as people i know disappear from life i wonder what is lost more and more,

i may be very selfish, i have become to feel what i lose is part of myself, (i am a reflection of your vision of me)

who knows me, who shared intimate moments with me, now they are gone, only a few people have gone someplace with me, and when they are gone only my memory is left. i fear i am becoming an archivist, all the past is left for me to collect.

and often it feels burdensome.
then i invite the present to overcome me. but am left confused.

my dad died in 2002, and my mom died this december past. i am collecting they're things and then i remember, i have my own things, who will i burden, what can i leave my children that will help them forget me, forget the past. then i wonder about all of culture, and the (maybe), misguided cycle of recording and keeping each moment ever experienced,

Blake overcome me,
"does the winged life destroy" ? 

i have been writing (haiku), on the subject of losing people.  i am not satisfied with any yet,

when my dad died in April i was struck by the crocus beside his door,

my dad's crocus
breaks ground at his door
he exits

but i like one i wrote about a photo of him more.

faded photograph, dad in his boat at full sail, always smiling


anyway....   these are the thoughts i have been oppressed by mostly the past few months.

also i wanted to spend more time with (the dying) caring for a person...  my mom did it, i waited with her for my dad to leave but she cared for him, i thought i would be taking care of her for the next few years, but she left on her own, by herself, still walking until collapsed.

her last steps
here i remove the gate
where she fell

as i began.... i love this topic, it is difficult to stop.  so on, and on....... til death

confession moon—
how many secrets
does a seashell hold?

John

hold of the ship
full of elephant tusks
Ivory coast

marty

roller coaster
the screeching voice
of an icy wind

Adelaide

wind blown hair
my favorite photo
of her and her horse

marty

ritual flower
the student delivers
symbolic devotion

marty

devotion
the carpenter's calluses
at confession

Alan

confession moon—
how many secrets
does a seashell hold?

John

hold of the ship
full of elephant tusks
Ivory coast

marty

playing safe.

I am not certain that writing a poem is ever safe. when the ego is invested in the effort.

When I write haiku like poems I do not worry about risk. I write to please my own sensibilities.

I guess now I am interested in writing some poems which convey eternal themes. I am trying to perfect the form, but I do not feel any threat or failure.  I find the thread interesting. I just don't perceive risk.

also, fear of failing the form never imposes itself on children when we ask them to write or paint. yet they often create the freshest verse naturally. 
marty

Don said,
Interesting you mentioned this ... I was pondering a similar thought last night - the reader's importance in relationship to the poem's meaning ... and also, what era the poem was written versus what era the poem is read ...

I wonder....  is the old pond timeless?   
conveying a sentiment that can transcend culture and ages is a lofty goal for a poem.  if it is possible, it will be about the relationship between nature and humans, so haiku is the form for the job.   


btw.   i am not using the quote function correctly. help.

Don, & Gabi,

I agree, writing haiku is to lose ego and merge self with nature even. I think personality is different from ego.  I am suggesting the poem or, (experience),  may begin with the personality of the poet.

marty

Kigo is challenging for me being a north american poet.  i like haiku, i like the tradition of the form, i also like western english verse. sometimes i feel that haiku poets need to expand the list of kigo to international language and temperate zones of the globe. i think if i write english language poems of l s l form with a seasonal word recognizable by contemporary readers it is modern haiku. 

here is an essay of my personal relationship with haiku and poetry.
i have revised my poetry book and changed the name of it, but only the original version is on line at this time.

Haiku thoughts, gripes, and loves...
All about mystery.
Part of my artistic sensibilities is to break conventions. I don't really have a position on the rules of form and I don't really want to convince anybody I am right. Yet I do desire recognition for being a serious artist outside these arguments about form. I love haiku. I do not understand the rules. I know the rules and most of them are broken almost always. In my mind poetry begins in a personal place. Poetry is almost all about personality. So in my personal relationship with poetry, haiku and, "little lamb who made thee" and Huckleberry Finn all entered my young imagination the same time in life. Without concern for anything beyond the plain joy in sound, rhyme, and adventure of imagination I forged an adolescent emotional relationship with the thought of haiku.  As well as western forms, and church hymns and psalms. I had no prejudice against choosing freely from these influences and mixing them in whimsy. In university I knew more and understood the way art and reason are categorized into disciplines. Also my contemporary influences were rebellious to institutional regulation on thought or art, sex and politics. I subscribed to my peers value to remake poetry as well as society.
When I heard the argument that the Japanese use of sound is markedly different from English syllable parts, so English haiku should be of only 11 or so English syllables too reflect the truer brevity of the form, my feeling was why try to force haiku into other languages. The Japanese form never cared for rhyme or meter. It was never meant to employ complex rhymes, narratives, or poetic images.  The things I chose to use from haiku were brevity, the visual beauty, line length and meter. I just wanted to marry the values I loved in the English language with the visual and musical qualities I felt haiku demonstrated. I chose to use the 5/7/5 form so that I could compose work in a consistent style over a number of years.
My method was western, I am from Ohio, I wanted my writing to be truer to western literature than worry about Japanese classical form.  The reward in working my ramblings into a 3 line form, composed of a 5/7/5 syllable count was that I learned to reduce the most important event into its most basic parts consistently.  The practice trained my poetic mind over the years. Finally after 30+ years of practice I perceive the most basic elements first, most clearly from my experience. My poetic mind converts experience into language. I love to paint pictures with language.
After self publishing my work I began to share it with other poets in Toronto at readings and art festivals and on the internet. Mirco poetry and rap and such contemporary short forms have general acceptance with North American poets.  Still short form poetry is the least popular.  I found my poetry very difficult to present. People who don't know what haiku is say, "very nice, is that haiku?" and haiku poets say, "you missed the point of haiku."   I changed the name of the second edition of my book to "passionate creation, illuminated poems by onecloud". 
Now I have spent the last two years listening to haiku poets and learning on line by joining many of the groups and submit some work for publication in haiku journals. And I find the community of haiku poets online interesting, talented and courteous. I enjoy the playfulness on many of the groups also. I just feel a rose smells as sweet by any other name. 

http://www.docstoc.com/profile/martysmith1

Quote from: chibi575 on March 01, 2012, 09:03:12 AM
Kigo and its use is analogous (to me) like making fire.  There are many ways to make fire and over the years the refinement of technique has given us the match.  Saijiki to me is analogous to the match box.  So now, if one wants to ignite their words...

(I can imagine going back in time to meet Bashou, perhaps, walk a spell with him on his journey to the interior, enjoying the perplexing look he would give to you if you mentioned, "haiku", "kigo", and "saijiki".)

ciao...  8)