sandy swimsuits damp towels the long ride home —Greer Woodward, Golden Triangle haiku 2024
It’s refreshing to have a verse of this kind. It scarcely needs comment. There’s minimal disjunction. No English poetic lyricism, nor thickly-laid-on melancholy, nor emotional trigger words. Three noun elements, separated semantically by the line endings, all gently related by cumulative weariness, even irksomeness. All working together to build to a family’s wistful, flat feeling that summer is ending and the holiday fun is over. One last swim before packing up and leaving. How different the long ride home from the eager impatience of the ride to the seaside: “Are we there yet? I can see the sea!”
It’s detached yet evocative, reads rhythmically, it shows-not-tells, we can all relate to it easily, and there is toriawase —the harmonious arrangement and combination of separate but related things.
Another modern verse with multiple elements, that I like hugely, is:
in the elevator a boy, an old man, a goldfish in a bag —Peter Yovu Frogpond 45.2 Spring/Summer 2022
Space (or its limits), time and age are harmoniously related in the five noun elements. The old man and the boy ageing in the same elevator at their different stages, and the goldfish in a bag; all of whose days, we think, are numbered. We may imagine that the man has taken his grandson to the fair just as he used to be taken there as a boy. Just as the boy will become an old man, in his turn. The elevator in which they are riding, along with the prize goldfish in its bag, are limited spaces. All are moving at the same steady speed on the way to the apartment. With nary a verb nor any personal thought of the poet’s.
We are all one-way time-travellers in our limited spans.
sandy swimsuits
damp towels
the long ride home
—Greer Woodward, Golden Triangle haiku 2024
It’s refreshing to have a verse of this kind. It scarcely needs comment. There’s minimal disjunction. No English poetic lyricism, nor thickly-laid-on melancholy, nor emotional trigger words. Three noun elements, separated semantically by the line endings, all gently related by cumulative weariness, even irksomeness. All working together to build to a family’s wistful, flat feeling that summer is ending and the holiday fun is over. One last swim before packing up and leaving. How different the long ride home from the eager impatience of the ride to the seaside: “Are we there yet? I can see the sea!”
It’s detached yet evocative, reads rhythmically, it shows-not-tells, we can all relate to it easily, and there is toriawase —the harmonious arrangement and combination of separate but related things.
Another modern verse with multiple elements, that I like hugely, is:
in the elevator
a boy, an old man,
a goldfish in a bag
—Peter Yovu
Frogpond 45.2 Spring/Summer 2022
Space (or its limits), time and age are harmoniously related in the five noun elements. The old man and the boy ageing in the same elevator at their different stages, and the goldfish in a bag; all of whose days, we think, are numbered. We may imagine that the man has taken his grandson to the fair just as he used to be taken there as a boy. Just as the boy will become an old man, in his turn. The elevator in which they are riding, along with the prize goldfish in its bag, are limited spaces. All are moving at the same steady speed on the way to the apartment. With nary a verb nor any personal thought of the poet’s.
We are all one-way time-travellers in our limited spans.