re:Virals 380

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. This week’s poem, proposed by Mark Gilbert, was:

a haddock
poaching in warm milk
first light

— Alan Peat
Wales Haiku Journal, summer 2022

Introducing this poem, Mark writes:

This haiku chimed with a specific memory of mine; but then I wondered what others would make of its possibly strange image, and how they would respond to its rich detail.

Opening comment:

A gentle haiku in the traditional mode, redolent of winter (even though it appears in the WHJ’s Summer issue), and particularly of Scotland, which, among other gastronomic delights, gave the world for breakfast kippers (smoked herring), smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, and in this case, I deduce, the Arbroath Smokie.

My Perfect Dish: Arbroath smokies

A hearty dish especially for a cold morning, whether in a good country (or traditional London) hotel, or a chill peat-fired croft on the moors, the flaking flesh of a smoked haddock may be gently poached in milk to soften the tang of woodsmoke. Here we may picture the poet, or anyone up early hungry, in the moment and probably in a croft rather than the Connaught Hotel, which is little frequented by impecunious poets.

It’s a lovely, undemanding, detached haiku shared with us in plain words. It piques the appetite, full of flavours and scent, conjures up sensations of warmth in the chill of dawn; combines the weak gold colours of a smoked haddock and of the dawning sun; and, in the suffused white of the poaching milk, clouds and mist. No jangling disruption nor self-conscious poetic striving. Instead, harmony.

The choice of “first light” over the likes of “winter dawn” is for contemplation.  It’s possible that mention of “winter” was excluded because the journal to which it was submitted characteristically focuses on the season of publication.  The dish may be eaten at any time of year, and “warm” milk might suggest dawn in summer (although breakfast at four in the morning is early even for an English poet) but if you know about smoked haddock,  and read the verse irrespective of the season of publication, you have the hint of winter (the recent Poetry Pea presentation on food as kigo, by Allyson Whipple of the Culinary Saijiki, may be of interest).  Clarification of a season may be unnecessary.  For me, in the context of human and haddock there’s a hint in “first light” of the dawn of life from the ocean in our evolutionary history. “Oneness” as the haddock becomes man upon eating might be a shade too fanciful but pinks my sense of humour.

Lastly, on craft: to open with a haddock, not a word often encountered in poetry, gets the reader’s attention and possibly good humour straight away. Putting “first light” in L1 would not so arrest the attention, would upset the short-long-short balance of the three lines, would take away the focus on the foreground dish, and make the colour/warmth metaphors too obvious, in my view. The whole reads smoothly with the longish vowels in L2, and not unmusically. I like it.

Jennifer Gurney:

Alan Peat’s haiku fills me with wonderings.

Why is the haddock being cooked at first light? I don’t recall ever having had fish for breakfast. I’ve always thought of fish as more lunch or dinner fare. Although there was the time when my young son, in a burst of self-sufficiency on a cross-country Amtrak trip, opened a can of tuna from our picnic stash and ate it for breakfast. He proceeded to pretend he was a cat for the rest of the morning. And he had the fish-breath to make it convincing.

Is the fisherman simply cooking the fish at first light because early morning is the best time to fish and they want the freshest fish to eat? I am reminded of the time I got to go fishing with my dad – the one and only time I have ever fished. I thought it was crazy to get up in the dark to go fishing.

Or perhaps fish is eaten for breakfast in Wales, where the poem was published, so “at first light” simply signifies an early day meal.

And why would you poach fish in milk? I would think sautéing it in butter would sound more appealing. But I guess with fish, as with haiku, what speaks to you is all personal preference.

I love the seemingly simplicity of this haiku … that truly makes me wonder. Well done.

Matt Cariello:

Great use of synesthesia. The implied smell of cooking fish maps onto the emerging day, just as the color of the milk maps onto the daylight. The milk enhances the flavor of the haddock, so does the rising sun enhance the day. I’m not sure what haddock in milk smells like, but it evokes the calm domestic pleasure of breaking the fast. A beautiful haiku that reminds me of Blake’s line about “Eternity in an hour.”

Amoolya Kamalnath:

The ku starts with the name of a fish and so one would think it is set in some water body but the second line takes one elsewhere. So from the vast sea one now sees it in a small pan swimming in a little milk and this technique of simmering  helps retain its moisture and adds a sweetness to the flavour of the fish.

Now this has been juxtaposed with first light which indicates the time of the day when this scene is set. The juxtaposition of warm milk with first light gives a beautiful visual appeal and whets one’s appetite. One can already feel the smell and taste of the dish to be cooked just by reading this ku.

The ku certainly gives me something more than what I’ve written here but I’m unable to put it in words at the moment. However, it caught my attention the moment I read it.

Nathan Sidney:

I’ve fallen down a rabbi hole investigating the intricacies of the Jewish ban on mixing meat and milk, after focussing my attention in this ku on the last line. What at first might seem a cosy morning moment, preparing (a somewhat unusual to my tastes) breakfast, is in another reading actually a commentary on the relation between creation and religious law, first light of course bringing up for most readers the genesis of the cosmos. While it turns out that poaching fish in milk is considered kosher (correct me if I’m wrong), the obvious allusion to the prohibition on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, sets up a witty reading of this poem. At the break of dawn, preparing the day’s first meal, looking out the window at the rising sun, one’s thoughts turn to the mystery of it all, the question of how to use our day for good, a simple gratitude for natural beauty and food’s abundance. But there’s also that tension between the wonder of creation and the dogma of the religions that have it as their source (sauce). Faced with eternity, infinity, beauty, suffering, right and wrong, how do we turn our awe at existence into a set of rules to live by as specific as what foods we should and shouldn’t eat. Of course for most of history it was an academic question as we simply ate what was in season, signalling our group membership through taboos and customs, but with the rise of an affluent class, global supply chains, environmental degradation etc, once again we must ask what does creation demand of our diets and how does the sunrise ask us to move through the world so as to bring glory to it.

Harrison Lightwater — a palette of pale golden dawn:

A warm, sweet shasei-style haiku for a cold morning, its palette is of a clouded pale golden dawn.

Lightly poaching preferably smoked haddock in milk keeps the fish moist and sweetens the smoky flavour. A breakfast dish in northern European latitudes where I live. Salted herring in the summer.

A haiku for the connoisseur… I was reminded of:

    A bowl of sushi
    served under the trees
    on a wooden bench
    — Buson
    under the tree
    soup, also pickles
    also cherry blossom!
    — Basho
    sowing herbs
    the smell of fish cooking
    a little past noon
    — Issa
    the hotness, sweetness
    of potato gruel
    autumn has come
    — Santoka
    as the sun goes down
    a green melon splits open
    and juice trickles out
    — Richard Wright

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Harrison has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be as long or short, academic or spontaneous, serious or silly, public or personal as you like. All with respect for the poet. Out-takes from the best of these take their place in the THF Archives. Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems!

beyond the poems
beyond the battlefield
mother’s vacant gaze

— Arvinder Kaur
Cold Moon Journal 3 January 2023

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Footnote:

Thanks to Harrison for the work of furnishing some classic haiku in this vein. Basho seems the clear winner… And to Nathan for a completely unexpected and fascinating cultural angle on this week’s haiku.

Al Peat is a widely-published author of haiku and related forms and of longer poetry, whose details and some works may be viewed in the THF Haiku Registry. His haiku and bio were featured in the Mann Library’s Daily Haiku during the month of October 2022. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Historical Association, he was recently elected President of the British Haiku Society. Another food poem I particularly like:

mountain cafe
miso clouds
the broth
— Al Peat
hedgerow: a journal of small poems #134, summer 2021