HAIKU DIALOGUE – Foreground Focus – Obfuscation (2) & Introduction to Rooms

Foreground Focus & Introduction to Rooms

Thanks to Guest Editor Alex Fyffe for the last few weeks of changing our perspectives. Now we welcome back returning Guest Editor Marietta McGregor with more new ways of looking at things – enjoy! kj

Introduction to Rooms with Guest Editor Marietta McGregor

The month of July is about a room of one’s own, or someone else’s. Many of us spend more time within four walls than we do outside. We are born, die, sleep, eat, write, paint, sew, sing, converse, discourse, learn, worship and interact in enclosed spaces. Often we seek out or create these spaces because they provide creature comforts. Animals have rooms of their own. A bear seeks its den to hibernate. Wombats and rabbits dig to create burrows. Birds build nests. Virginia Woolf extolled the advantages of a private income and one’s own space. Rooms can be working sanctuaries, but if our enclosures become overly constricting or confining, we may feel the walls are ‛closing in’ on us, as many felt during pandemic lockdowns.

next week’s theme: Looking Out

Looking out of a room, with or without a view, watching passers-by, the sun on a sparkling sea, a lush garden you’ve made, or a blank wall; feeling tranquil or trapped, creative or blocked, happy or sad, enclosed or free. This window frames a view from the Troldhaugen home of beloved composer Edvard Grieg, in Bergen, Norway. One can picture Grieg glancing through this window as he composes “Morning Mood” or “Solveig’s Song” for Peer Gynt.

The deadline is midnight Eastern Daylight Time, Saturday July 08, 2023.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) With your poem, please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. A few haiku will be selected for commentary each week. Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

Below is Alex’s commentary for Obfuscation too:

art shop print
the spider adds a dash
to my Mondrian

Tracy Davidson
Warwickshire, UK

 

“Last Supper”
reframing
another oil

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

Davidson alludes to Mondrian’s famous lines and rectangles to amusingly observe a household spider’s addition to her print. Just as the spider is creating her own artwork on top of a classic, so is the poet. This is, after all, the effect of allusion, to take something that has come before and add on to it. Greer’s poem doubles down on this, alluding not only to the well-known da Vinci painting but also to last summer’s Just Stop Oil protest, in which several protesters glued themselves to “The Last Supper”. Greer plays on the word “oil” here in both its reference to the protesters’ cause and to the artwork itself, which is an oil painting. The double meaning of the language makes this a delightfully clever poem about our changing interpretations and understanding of art and our world.

haibun
missing the relevance
of the link and shift poem

Ingrid Baluchi
North Macedonia

Similarly, Baluchi’s poem is about art, but in this case the humor is self-deprecating, pointing out the speaker’s own inability to decipher meaning. It is a relatable experience, reading something and scratching your head in confusion – “But how…? What…? Why…?” Here, the speaker can’t understand the jump from prose to poem, how the two connect in any meaningful way. Even in haiku, there have been times the jump between the fragment and phrase has gone over my head. The speaker is obviously well-read, using the jargon of the form (“link and shift”), and so there is also a sense of frustration in the poem since the speaker is the type of person who feels like they should get it.

golden leaves hiding the hiking trail

Dan Campbell
Virginia, USA

 

buried behind
his charming smile
all of the bodies

Kimberly Kuchar
Austin, Texas

The theme of obfuscation brought out poems about things covering up other things, and these two in particular nailed that particular approach. On the surface, Campbell’s poem is a simple fall observation – leaves have fallen over a trail – but the language itself reveals some layers. The leaves are golden, as opposed to red or brown, and so noted for their beauty or sheen, and they are somewhat personified as choosing to hide the hiking trail from others. Perhaps Campbell is suggesting that Nature is just as happy or happier without Man blazing trails through it – Nature needs no trails to guide it along its seasonal journey. There is something more beautiful about the leaves than the trail hidden beneath. But in Kuchar’s take on this theme, the surface beauty is only there to mask the horror under it. We can imagine a Bundy type, someone who has learned to use honey instead of vinegar to lure people into his trap. However, the poem can also be read metaphorically, as even the most charming person has secrets they would rather not have others digging up.

that look
as he abruptly slid
his phone into his pocket

Holly Brennan
Massachusetts, USA

 

a lone sunflower
among the weeds
all his promises

Lori Kiefer
UK

These poems also deal with deception, this time in the form of betrayal. Brennan expects her readers to know “that look,” and everyone will have their own version of it – a sheepish grin, a wide-eyed forced smile, a side-eyed glance. The man is eager to hide whatever is on his phone, and texts to someone else are clearly implied. The use of the verb “slid” is particularly effective here, as he hopes to slide right past any inconvenient questions, perhaps feeling more suave than he really is. Kiefer’s poem effectively juxtaposes the natural imagery of a sunflower surrounded by weeds with the fragment “all his promises,” forcing us to look again at the imagery as a metaphor. To the speaker, the man appeared as a bright, tall, beaming sunflower, but over time all of his words have gone to seed. The speaker discovers that her sunflower is all talk, and now her garden is full of weeds that will take time and effort to pull out again.

marrying
the handsome prince —
ignoring the webbed feet

Lafcadio
USA

The obfuscation prompt brought out a few “red flag” haiku, and I appreciated Lafcadio’s take on that theme, which in this case deals with self-deceit. Using the imagery of fairy tales, she twists the happily ever after into an omen of marital strife. The frog prince may have changed enough to win over the bride, but not enough to be fully human. Interestingly, the bride knows this going in, but perhaps she believes she can love him forever, warts and all, or that she can change him even more fully – she convinces herself things will work out despite the warning signs. This wilful blindness foreshadows not the fairy tale ending she insists upon, but instead a doomed romance.

waiting room
an X on the seat
beside me

Sue Courtney
Orewa, New Zealand

 

candlelight …
how the room
reshapes itself

Annie Wilson
Shropshire, UK

Courtney’s poem took me back to the fall of 2021 when I reentered education after taking a year off and every other desk in the classroom had a big X in blue tape. There is something striking about the image, these distances we enforce for health and safety that also create these strange physical absences that may or may not have been there before, but which now we are forced to confront in the form of these signs that surround us. Wilson’s poem also visualizes the way physical spaces are transformed, how the flickering of a candle moves the shadows around and makes us aware of our constantly shifting sense of reality.

peace or war
your underwear choice
says a lot

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa

Like a talented comedian, Jacobson’s word choice and timing are spot on. Juxtaposing the serious, weighty topics of peace and war with the unexpected appearance of underwear is already amusing enough, but that final line cinches it. On reflection, this poem could possibly be read several ways: a satire on modern advertising using social issues to sell everything, including undies; a commentary on how the things people conceal from the majority reveal their true natures; or simply an observation on how people’s undergarments, in times of peace or war, always reveal something about their identities. But no matter how you read it, it’s funny.

the dry ice
plays a song I recognise
for the encore

Mark Gilbert
UK

We know there must be a classic rock band somewhere behind all of that dry ice, perhaps an ‘80s hair band, but for all the speaker can see, the music might as well be emanating from the vapor itself. Increasing the humor of this senryu is the fact that the speaker recognizes the encore song, meaning he has probably had to sit through a ton of new songs the band wanted to play before they finally gave in to playing one of their big hits of the past.

a squashed
church kneeler –
now an agnostic cube

Ann Rawson
UK

Another comic poem, this one manages to say a lot about classification and identification. What once was an object made exclusively to be used for ritualistic purposes in a church setting has been tossed and transformed into an object of indiscernible use. Of course, this also mirrors the journey of many people who are raised in a religious household but whose beliefs change over time until they no longer believe that they were made for a purpose, like the church kneeler, but who identify now with the unknown, the geometry of agnosticism. All the elements that made the church kneeler are still there, but it can no longer function as a church kneeler, and all the things that make the person human are still there, but they can no longer perform what once held meaning for them.

school rush
pausing to gawp at
a rainbow

Louise Hopewell
Australia

Sometimes the hustle and bustle of daily life can obscure the wonders of the world around us. The speaker is in a hurry to be where she is supposed to be, but even so, she takes a moment to look at a rainbow with childlike wonder. Hopewell’s poem reminds us not to let the gray mundanities of the world paint over our sense of awe.

Join us next week for Marietta’s selection of poems on the theme of Looking Out…

Guest Editor Alex Fyffe teaches high school English in the Houston area. His haiku and senryu have been published in various journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Failed Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. Some of his favorite short form poets include Issa, whose work he discovered in the intermediate Japanese textbook he used while studying in Hikone, Japan, and Santoka, whose writing introduced him to the liberating concept of “freeform haiku.” Currently, Alex uses haiku in the classroom to ease students into poetry and build their confidence as readers and writers. Alex also posts haiku, including translations of contemporary Japanese haiku, on Twitter @AsurasHaiku.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. A novice haiku poet, she lives in New York City.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She is Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

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