become (haiku & transformation)

[Jack Galmitz]

Agreed, Mark.  A most concise and expansive definition I've heard yet.

[Scott Metz]

sorry for being a bit off the latest topics (Peter, your selection of Chris Gordon's ku is awesome—i really love that piece—and you're explication is as well). i contacted Hiroaki Sato concerning Kaneko Tohta's motorcycle ku and asked if he could provide another translation/version since only two could be found.

i sent him what Gabi Greve had posted on this thread.

Here is what he had to say, and many thanks to him for doing so:

"The transliteration is slightly off.

激論つくし街ゆきオートバイと化す

gekiron tsukushi machi-yuki ootobai to kasu.

The last 'kasu' should be treated as a verb. Also, properly 'ootobai' should be 'ōtobai.'

The ferocious argument exhausted I go through town transform myself into a motorcycle

Of course, options are many. For example, 'to kasu' being a bungo 文語, and this by nature an abbreviated locution, you may want to avoid the drawn-out expression 'transform myself into' and simply say 'become a motorcycle.'"

The ferocious argument exhausted I go through town become a motorcycle

[Gabi Greve]

Thanks a lot for the opinion of Sato sensei !

Gabi

[Asa-gao]

worthy discussion!  Reminded me that i read somewhere that haiku *could* be translated to mean cripple - *faints*

Adore the motorcycle ku ♥

[Peter Yovu]

As it thunders
the ears of the forest
become leaves
                             -- Mario Benedetti

Wonder if anyone likes this per diem selection as much as I? It feels true, perhaps not merely logically, but mytho-/psycho-logically. I like the idea of writing a short poem which if posted on a bus or telephone pole would be appreciated even by people who had never heard the word haiku. This may be a poem like that.

[John McManus]

I must admit I have missed a fair few of the per diem offerings, but I did spot this one and concur with you Peter that it does indeed have a wonderful mythic feel to it.

Do you or anyone else for that matter feel that there aren't enough haiku which touch upon myth?

warmest,
John


   

[Lorin]

what we breathe
in human skin
and insect parts

                       Chris Gordon

A number of poems we've looked at are about transformation. We started with Jim Kacian's

in a tent in the rain I become a climate

which gives us an outside look at something experienced, not so much the experience itself. That said, I have a lot of praise for the poem. Other poems also, including Tohta's, tell us about the author's experience, tell us that he or she had an experience, but again, there is a sense of being outside. And I love Tohta's poem as well, and other poems of explicit "becoming".

But there are ways, and I believe Chris Gordon's poem may serve as an example, where transformation is what happens within and as the poem itself, and we are led by the internal force of it, to undergo a transformation. To experience it.  

Ambiguity is one way this may happen, a place in the poem where we are forced into uncertainty, a state in which we may experience, if only briefly, a sense of another reality. In Gordon's poem there are two simultaneous senses, and maybe more, but two are primary as I read it--

     what we breathe in:  human skin and insect parts

That is one reality, a somewhat familiar, if unpleasant one. The other is this one--

      what we breathe in human skin and insect parts

or, to be clear about this:

      there are things we breathe while we inhabit our human skin and our insect parts

This reality, which has entered through the door of ambiguity, is certainly less familiar, but because ambiguity and simultaneity act as wormholes into strangeness, we feel the truth of it-- or rather, we are less defended against the strangeness. If only briefly, until the rational mind says "yes, I inhabit my human skin, but not insect parts, forget it".

But what the poem enacts is the becoming something more than human, or perhaps something more human, if we accept that yes, we are also made in some way of insect parts. It is not a long shot from Issa's empathic haiku.

The poem works from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Or it may be truer to say it works from the inside to a place deeper in, or different.

A poem like this gives me hope that what we call haiku is still alive.

"In Gordon's poem there are two simultaneous senses, and maybe more, but two are primary as I read it--

      what we breathe in:  human skin and insect parts

That is one reality, a somewhat familiar, if unpleasant one. The other is this one--

       what we breathe in human skin and insect parts

or, to be clear about this:

       there are things we breathe while we inhabit our human skin and our insect parts

This reality, which has entered through the door of ambiguity, is certainly less familiar, but because ambiguity and simultaneity act as wormholes into strangeness, we feel the truth of it-- or rather, we are less defended against the strangeness. If only briefly, until the rational mind says "yes, I inhabit my human skin, but not insect parts, forget it". - Peter

Interesting, Peter. The first (& 'primary') reading I had (catching up a little on this thread this morning) is the one you haven't mentioned.

what we breathe (is) in human skin and insect parts

what we breathe
in human skin
and insect parts


Everything you've said here confirms my feeling that this is a ku that might be better rendered as a one-liner, if we are to find ambiguity. If line breaks are to be ignored by the reader, why have them?

If what you say is right, then isn't there a deliberate misdirection by the author?

- Lorin

[lulu]

The per diem today . . .

quietly
we become
audience
- Hilary Tann

is as close to Jim Kacian's extraordinary haiku* on transformation as I have seen lately. I love the idea of transformation, and wish there were more.

*in a tent in the rain i become a climate

—Jim Kacian

(Per Diem ku for 7.22.11)

*