The Haiku Foundation Forums

Yes, there are many reasons why the conversation here ebbs and flows. Sometimes, as in my case recently, major life events intrude. I'm sorry to say I haven't been inspired to post here for a while, not because there's no inspiration to be found, but just because. Time, as Eve mentions, is a factor, and energy. Peter, I appreciate how you and others put yourselves out there to express ideas not fully resolved and hard to verbalize. My forays here have been, at least in part, experiments in being open, unguarded, conversational in a format that's not really conversation. I recently looked back over some of the stuff I've written, and cringed, I must admit. C'est la vie. I like to imagine we are conversing. Maybe sitting in a tavern with a scotch and a beer, and shooting the breeze.

We're not all looking for the same sorts of conversation here, that's for sure, and that's okay. To those of you who raise intriguing topics for discussion, thank you.

"Apart from The Chinese Notebook, which might be a poem... it's certainly not your average discursive essay, it has something in common with Peter's 'Sailings' ideas (propositions & contemplations)...of the various essays on Language poetry I skimmed, those by Lyn Hejinian appealed most to me." --Lorin

yeah, and here are a few lines I like from Silliman's memoir, Under Albany:

Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky.

and elsewhere on this site, a couple of years ago, I shared some lines by Rae Armantrout. We can learn a lot from her, I think.

Material for a different Sail? It might be better to take a more deliberate tack later. Whatever you all prefer--twas not my intention to blow us off course.


I'm going to have to bow out for now. A personal challenge outside this friendly corner of cyber space is demanding all my energies. I'll look forward to following along when I can. thanks,

m

Mainly, I was attracted to the language, "not routed through normative syntax" and "bundlings of self-assertion," etc., because I'd borrowed the rational/irrational language and realized it wasn't right for what I wanted to say.

I am attracted to Stein's work in the vein of Tender Buttons (a good example of vigorous language, imo) and am intrigued by Silliman's, and do think it would be interesting to explore how it relates to haiku, but I also would need to rely on someone who knows more about their work than I do.

closely reading haiku that is "not routed through normative syntax" could be another way to approach our topic. And yes, I think Andrews is talking about the kind of thing Stein did with Tender Buttons and he is also inspired by Ron Silliman, who (in)famously championed and explicated her:

CUSTARD.

  Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill.
 
I don't know if only perception is left, although questions about the nature of perception are at the root of my own haiku investigations.

You ask, "out of what state of mind (or state of self) does such (not routed through normative syntax) writing/perception arise?"

unbundling self-assertion (I like that too) would be a good starting point. I don't want to give the impression, as I may have done before, that the writing itself is unreasoned or not conscious. Gertrude Stein by some accounts was possessed of an outsize sense of self, and one could read her experiments such as Tender Buttons as assaults on normative syntax, etc. Yet, once assaulted (or guided or invited), I'm led to a wonderful world of words beyond the normative, a world of shifting perspectives. She led me there, and so must have been there, if not at the very moment of writing the final draft. To progress, usually not in a straight line, from perception to conception to translation---that's the quest.


 

are you suggesting Lucas had in mind actual faces carved into trees when he wrote his poem?

"I'm asking, because I'm not sure exactly what 'disrupting the rational' is . . . "

oh come on, Lorin, get with it will you? Just kidding, and yes please, rather that getting into a paraphrase paraphrase phase, let's dispense with this talk of the rational, shall we?

I want to share an excerpt from a text, "Reading Language, Reading Gertrude Stein," shared at a Gertrude Stein symposium in New York City. It's by a guy named Bruce Andrews, who gushing in a rather over-the-top way, had this to say (haibun-like):

Individual units of language engage their own referential excesses.
No longer routed through normative syntax, they undercut our own vantage of self-reference, slipping that anchor.
Maybe our identifications can fasten on the tiniest elements, but the leaps and gaps of the juxtapositions are too big to allow the bundlings of self-assertion.
We're always teetering on the edge of disidentification, of imagining ourselves as a result of disidentifications.

                           I do hate sentences.
                           Do you mean to please.
                           Do please me.

agreed that of the poems i cited, the one by martone doesn't quite fit in, is on the one hand about not fitting in but also encompasses dualities that could fit together if read a certain way, which is something about his writing i find fascinating--on the one hand, yes, intellectual, on the other hand not at all. The choice (or maybe there are no choices) lies with the reader. Is he perceiving the real, or an alternate reality? Either way, I believe.



[edits to correct general sloppiness]

That Jakobson is good; and yes, I'd not be disappointed to ban the use of rational and irrational from my part of this conversation. I'm not well-armed in a discussion of signifiers, although I think I see where you're going and am interested.




[name sp. correction]

hi Jack,

I don't think saying the poems disrupt the rational mind, by which I mean the part of us that wants to make sense of what we encounter in short order, is the same as saying the poems are irrational. They are rational, and rationally created. Methinks.

thanks, just modified my last post in an attempt to be more useful. I've noticed we're all on not quite parallel tracks, which is okay with me but sometimes derails the conversation

Thinking about haiku as spell, as vigorous language, as words locking into place in unexpected, sometimes inescapable ways that make their own sense, build their own worlds, resonates for me. Thanks for offering a new angle on this subject, Peter.

[edit added here] Lorin, my post was more cursory than it should have been; you might feel I ignored your point, and the poem you put forward. Will try use words now. I don't disagree with any of your observations about Lucas's haiku, and the poem works for me as it does for you, with interesting suggestions and ideas below the surface. However, the poem's face and interface use a different strategy than the ones Peter's navigations suggest to me. It points the way, for me, more with finger than body--look at how faces become visible in the trees after rain--that doesn't do justice to a fine poem, merely demonstrates how one can make sense of the words. In Lucas's poem, what Peter calls the "irrational element" is to be found in us, not so much the poem.

for what it's worth, here a few compelling haiku that also, imo, disrupt the rational mind



morning-glory folds into herself into her folds

         Marlene Mountain



one step back in the river's voice

         Scott Metz



earthworm
twists

empti
ness

how
to get
in

         John Martone



the river the river makes of the moon

         Jim Kacian

also, and although Lorin alludes to this, I think it's worth emphasizing: In Japan, where haiku is more popular that in other countries, Kaneko Tohta is a public figure. His haiku is taught in the schools, he appears on television, etc. He was an integral figure in the artistic reimagining of his country in the postwar period. As such, he can rely on his audience's familiarity with his history, and theirs, in a way that most of us could not.

Whether that's good or bad is a discussion we can thrash out. When it comes to understanding this particular poem, imo, this particular poet's relationship to his primary readership can't be ignored.


[small edit to correct a mispelling]

yes, David, composing, and reflecting on, poems often takes me out of myself in a way some might call prayer. And sometimes they function something like a spell.


wind-carved sand . . .
I crumble a bayberry leaf
to bring her back

Scott Mason 

I agree that Peter's thinking (wanting?) resembles the mammalian poetics proposed by Michael McClure, who wrote, "I wanted to write a poem that could come to life and be a living Organism."  

I recently helped install a retrospective on the art of Kurt Schwitters, best known for his collages, and also a painter, sculptor, poet, magazine publisher, and performance and installation artist. Part of the display is a parabolic speaker beneath which you can listen to Schwitters perform his sound poem, Ursonate. He called the poem his primeval sonata. It can be found on the web in various places.

"Elements of poetry are letters, syllables, words, sentences. Poetry arises from the interaction of those elements. Meaning is important only if it employed as one such factor. I play off sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter." --Kurt Schwitters, 1920

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.