Ghetto CreepPrecisPhil's post above offers much to think about. My post follows as divertissement, from Don's, "Claiming 'this or that' [work of art, haiku] as excellent is frivolous with the exception of amusement." Charles Bernstein might agree -- he critiques with both frivolity and amusement (though with relevance, bite and depth). My post draws on various additional statements made, for example (italics my emphasis):
"Michael Dylan Welch and others argued for promoting the work of the best haiku poets so as to reach a wider audience."
"A lot of what is published in haiku journals does not look like, or appear to be poetry. It looks like haiku."
"Sometimes one receives an actual comment by the editor for the rejection ... I don't have a way to judge good ones from bad ones."
"self-awareness [for ELH] regarding these roots is limited by circumstances"
"An excellent haiku needs to possess a certain clarity"
"I find overly intellectualized dense wordliness inscrutable as stone soup"
"haiku is at best a tiny spot on the fringe ..."
"[T]hey do not know what thought is like (Pound)"
"[Is] haiku written in historical perspective or is haiku out of this world?"
"... this last post of mine is not the kiss of death."
“ELH should take steps to break out of the “haiku ghetto” and position itself, by various means, in the larger poetry community.
"... it's a good way to get haiku out of the ghetto and into the hands of poets and poetry lovers in the mainstream."
"Such poems may solve the ghettoization of haiku, but at a cost."
Skip to this partIs haiku really in a ghetto – or is it a ghetto? It may be worth unpacking this image, tweeze out some of the thinking and assumptions behind it.
A ghetto is a place a minority group lives, especially “due to legal or economic pressure” (
wiki). Is an implied sense of oppression appropriate here? Perhaps these synonyms are more fitting: shanty town, skid row, slum. “Gay ghetto” (
wiki) is less of a stretch. We are all of a certain color (color me haiku) “with generally recognized boundaries,” yes.
Reading some of the above-excerpted posts (only back to page 2), expressed is the notion that acts of negative discrimination (ignoring, willful ignorance) rain on our parades, our notorious? bookstores and boutiques. Even if a friendly oasis (e.g. "Otoliths -- a magazine of many e-things”) or two exists, will our “difference” ever be understood, much less condoned? Will the power-hungry-money folk of city centers deign someday to stroll further than our outskirts I hear you say?
Is there lurking in this imagery of castigation and oppression a sense of victimhood, a resistant pride?
Do you want this genre to be different or not? Is to me an important question. If haiku (say for the sake of argument it exists) is a style of short-form poetry, a stylism – with its peculiarities yes, yet all told, of a piece as a province of the short form – then we have really hardly handy the stuff of identity politics. So let’s face it, the question of “placing” haiku as genuinely (generically) different, whether as a ghetto or as the rejected, lands squarely in the gaping maw of ideology, in that we are dealing with hidden biases and assumptions regarding the politics of self, poetry, art, society.
But, we do dare to be different and insist upon it, yes? Critics and pundits write about “the [haiku] tradition.” Even if ideological fallacy, this is one way identity “becomes.” Our becoming draws upon the stepping stones of cultural myth, mis-translation, a brooding even haunting sense of esoteric knowledge (as mostly Japan-feudal stories of enlightenment, purity, truth).
More, aesthetic terminology like
wabi-sabi or
yugen is assumed as central to haiku “difference.” By corollary, this means we
shall not apply such terms to other poetic genres. So who's doing the ignoring here?
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Yugen jya nai!” trans. “Yugen, NO WAY!” (Note. If you don't know what
yugen is, you can't claim to write haiku, by some accounts.) Yes we hoard our terminology. Perhaps there’s some crossover to ikebana, kyudo, some additional Japan-based contemplative arts, that's about it.
It’s odd to think of a ghetto, when it’s our own method which not only creates difference but seemingly recoils from trans-genre similitude. If there is no phobia (specific pathology) which has been named for this disorder I would suggest Generaphobia (nearly a googlewhack).
So you want to join the crowd, but also stand tall and be proud. Find haiku in
The New Yorker and also in the latest, greatest literary journals and anthologies? Best educate the masses. No, that can’t be right!? Best educate editors and critics. Poetry isn’t really popular anyway.
Let’s imagine then there is seduction and education. If haiku is “poetry with a difference” (for argument’s sake) then it must and readers must necessarily be reminded of this fact (in print). So must we then find in the general anthology a poetry section, perhaps a short-form poetry section, and absolutely a “haiku” section. Is it reasonable to expect haiku to be lumped in with (often similar) short-form poetics, when everything about our banner “THIS IS HAIKU” screams “THIS IS DIFFERENT”?
Excerpt from HNA Seattle 2011The Imagining of Japan
The history of haiku in English in terms of its use of, and approach to language has less to do with Japan, than modernist movements – haiku in English, from Blyth to the present has taken genre-defining concepts from the Japanese haiku (such as kire, ma, kireji, kigo, disjunctive compressive phrasing), but their application has always involved a transmutation and integration (for North American haiku) into the Modernist continuum. The Japanese haiku is something we imagine as a modality of and impetus for exploration and inspiration – we exist in a modern literary continuum. (Gilbert)
“… A poem isn't just some abstract letters on a page; it exists within its social environment. And not just the given historical world of jobs and states and family, but the ones we make through our writing, our publishing, our exchanges. The value of poetry is also the value of articulating specific, yet contestable, aesthetic values. . . .
[W]e tried to focus our work more on an acknowledgement of the structures of language, forms, styles, and also the relationship of ideology to syntax, you might say, ideology to grammar, ideology to rhetoric, with the recognition that language is never neutral . . .” (“Charles Bernstein Interview with Romina Freschi,” 2005)
done you know and
it comes again for a moment
you thought what was you knew
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to . . . (“The Control Voice,” Outer Limits, 1960s).
An aspect of hidden ideology for haiku has to do with value, esteem, estimation, by comparison to other genres. Negatively expressed,
generaphobia may be indicated. What is this implied demand for recognition (of haiku) based upon? Thinking normatively, critics and scholars expect to find 1) group of excellent poets with 2) excellent books 3) presented to the world. Show me the money. List these award-winning books (generally recognized as excellent, not "haiku-recognized"). Name the authors. In Japan, excellence in haiku requires of an author several books each containing minimally 200 haiku, critically reviewed and recognized, plus at least a few published critical essays of excellence (published in important journals, read by various national haiku groups and schools). One's professional reputation is based on such credentials. What does it say that we choose
not to follow Japanese haiku culture in this regard? By this high standard could it fairly be argued that haiku in English has not yet achieved much as a literature? Our critics on occasion praise books of 60 poems, only a few of which may be really fresh -- very few haiku poets are studied enough to competently publish a critical essay in the field. This comment is offered objectively, as cross-cultural comparison, I hope you take it that way. Yet isn't the standard of contemporary poetry in English more or less similar to that of the haiku world, in Japan? You may argue that a poet needn't write in prose, and yet still be acclaimed. The trouble is, over the last century it's hard to find one. (Even
Billy Collins writes essays; flat and droll as death in Kansas, that man. Collins by example presents a cogent argument against popularity and acclaim -- a one-man wrecking ball. Many haiku are "Collins ku" unfortunately.)
The question of critical standards aside, let's say haiku ideology demands that haiku be ghetto enough that the individual poem (and poet) can
never be claimed as a true center. That it takes an anthology “to make a village.” This would be an interesting approach. Pursued for a paragraph:
Haiku in English remains a tenuous proposal – it may be that some find this very tenuousness related to excellence. There was a negative comment offered previously, that a given author cannot be determined from a given haiku. An old, old story for haiku, and no myth. Haiku an extremely short form, is distinguished by its fragmentary, non-narrative nature. How can there remain
any question as to why authorality cannot be reliably determined? Who are we kidding? In rock music, one instantly knows the name of a great guitarist (singer, etc.) from one or two notes of any phrase or lick. Popular music! How much less possible for haiku. I think this will never be true for the genre. And a lick or two is really at most what we have to work with: we are calling it our song. This is a social-literary problem. There may be a phobia. A defensive resistance to the obvious. Ghetto pride?
Bernstein's literary politics, ideological arguments, nearly insane yet lucid rants, attracted a large Gen X crowd to U. Buffalo to study a new (ideological) school of writing. Some of the vaguest stuff, Language poetry (as John Cage never said, “Everything you hear is language”). His encouragement was to take back public spaces – Bernstein urged poetic radicalism, urged that the art of the poem and the desire to reform and reframe society was a relevant synthesis. Voices that speak to this issue with authority have spurred new movements in poetry for quite some time. Might we re-orient critical acuity to the question of haiku and social engagement
as a central feature of excellence.
I have little interest in
The New Yorker, regarding haiku and social presence. Rather, YouTube, public parks, subway walking tunnels, graffiti, museum eateries, penetrations of the flaccid walls of industrial ugliness, mixed media -- modes of presentation and spaces stolen from us (the
demos), by advertising and other propaganda; even LOL cats (though they are amazingly cute). How to use the power of haiku to reach those with open minds. Take back our (virtual) streets!
or as was what one was
comes rolling in
as a you and a huge !
I can’t get there, maybe you can.