re:Virals 510

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.  In the host chair today is Keith. This week’s poem, chosen by Dan Campbell was:

   
chime shop
the dialects
of wind  
— Peter Newton
The Heron’s Nest, Volume XXIII, Number 1: March 2021

Introducing this poem, Dan writes:

Peter’s comparison of wind to dialects was a stroke of genius. I have always been fascinated with dialects because they foster belonging, allowing communities to hear themselves reflected in everyday speech. To listen closely to a dialect is to hear not just words, but the layered story of a culture. In this poem, the wind chime gives voice to the invisible. It doesn’t speak; it responds. Its music isn’t composed but conjured, shaped by the wind’s mood and motion.

Opening comment (Keith):

The various sounds the wind can make among natural objects are by association highly evocative to people, but in this verse we are focused on the limited range of sounds it makes in artificial wind chimes, sold commercially. As they are in a shop, does a reader assume they are silent; or if chiming, that they are on a porch outside, or perhaps actuated by an oscillating fan as part of the sales technique?

How to divine what the verse is communicating? Is it an ichibutsujitate, a one-theme or one-thing haiku (wind chimes usually marking summer), with the chime shop locating the experience and concisely introducing ‘chimes’ without the word ‘wind?’ Separating the wind from the chimes, as it were. Or, given the grammatical ‘cut’ at the end of the first line, is it a juxtaposition? That is, the shop selling man-made chimes to tame the wind into a pleasing sound, juxtaposed/compared/contrasted with the ‘dialects’ of the wind in the wild?

In either case much hangs on the word ‘dialects.’ Which also prompts musing on whether the various sounds of the wind can be compared with human dialects, at least in the ear of the listener.  I think they can.

Many like the sound of wind chimes, but they can be very irritating in a close neighbour’s garden, particularly on a warm night with the windows open, when the wind gets up (believe me!). I have occasionally resorted to language of my own at such times.

In all, plenty to ponder in this concise verse.

Pamela Garry:

Perhaps the chime shop has opened windows and opening and closing doors. Wind in all directions conducting the wind chimes. Perhaps it is an overcrowded shop in a large mall. Children of all ages blow upon the hanging chimes; or grab, swing and release — adding oohs and aahs to their masterpieces. Perhaps it is in an out-of-the-way old abode repurposed into a tourist trap where a deaf traveler might feel the music. Perhaps it’s about the breadth of dialects ever changing through nature, with and without human input.

Peter C. Forster:

I must start out by saying that Peter Newton is a fine haiku poet, but in the past few days I’ve read at least three ku featuring “dialects” in a fancy poetic way. This one, and the Haiku Foundation Haiku of the Day June 28 by Nick T, “ancient river changing dialects at the border,” and “night train / translating dialects / of snore” by Shravan in Failed Haiku just out. Kind of getting vaccinated by it!

So what we have here are different kinds of chimes hanging in the breeze in a store selling them, with their different tones as the same wind plays on them. There’s personification or maybe animism — the tones are presented as dialects of a lingo the wind has, verbal speech, to communicate. Of course, wind doesn’t communicate. It’s the human listener that imagines messages in it. There’s a whole load of humanoid sounds for it in our language, not counting wind from our digestive system. Whistle, sigh, moan, howl, rush, screech, whoosh, boom, according to its strength and what it’s in contact with. With chimes, maybe tinkle, maybe clang. Is it the wind speaking in tinkle, or is it the chimes? Is it grass speaking in sigh, the pines in moan, the reed in whistle &c.?

That’s about all the insight I get from these lines. Do they raise the question of “so what?” Does that matter? Should haiku have insight or a consequence—an “aha”—or is it enough to write what “is,” in this instance with one fancy-full word? Is the personification of “dialects” better than the more objective but also more mundane “different sounds?” I look forward to reading what others find in it.

Sudha Devi Nayak—there is no charm in a still chime:

The chime shop is chockful of wind chimes and one is entranced by the sounds that emanate as crystals of glass, metal and bell playfully clash with one another to create a happy tinkle. A wind chime in a balcony or in a drawing room oscillating ever so gently to the music of the breeze is sheer joy. Splinters and sparkles of sound almost visible soothe your senses drowning out the cacophony of cares. They trespass into your lazy slumbers of morning and the afternoon siesta, a delicate fusion of sound and wind that gives rise to dreams.

As the poet says the chimes are the dialects of the wind, a thousand ways the wind can speak.The wind chimes are for brief moments perfect as long as they last like a sunset or a bird on wing, little gestures that make life happy. There is no charm in a still chime—it is only when wind meets the chime there is the symphony

Author Peter Newton:

This was one of the few poems that just dropped from the sky, so to speak. The circumstances of its writing began like this: I walked into a gift shop and there was an entire section or aisle of windchimes. It was a windy day and the breeze that I created entering the space started each of the chimes in motion–some fast, some slow. Each of their “voices” were high, low and at different speeds all “talking” at once. Immediately I thought: “dialects of wind” and the poem pretty much wrote itself.

I find that, for me at least, the best poems are not labored over. Editing is important, of course, but the foundation of the haiku, the root or kernel, is often one that I’ve been working on in the back of my mind, subconsciously. Or, rarely, a thought or phrase that just appears out of nowhere. I try to be open to all the possibilities.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Sudha Devi Nayak has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept 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.

Poem for commentary:

     
nursing home
her gaze follows 
the flight of birds  
—Refika Dedic
 Haiku Foundation Haiku Dialogue, May 14th 2025

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

The Haiku Foundation reminds you that participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior from all parties. Please see our Code of Conduct policy.

Footnote:

Peter Newton is the author of several books in the Japanese short form tradition including What We Find (haiku), Welcome to the Joy Ride (First Place in the 2014 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America), A Path of Desire (tan renga with Kathe L. Palka), The Searchable World (First Place in the 2018 Merit Book Awards from the Haiku Society of America), Part-Time Gods (winner of the 2022 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for haibun), and Glide Path which was awarded Second Place in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards for 2023. His newest book is called A Room Inside the Rain, a collection of haiku and haibun, forthcoming from Red Moon Press in the fall of 2025.

Born in Detroit and raised north of Boston, Peter makes his home in the Green Mountain State of Vermont. He has spent more than thirty summers as a staff member at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Since 2012, he has served as co-editor for the online literary journal tinywords. In 2024, he joined the Editorial Team of Contemporary Haibun Online as a Haibun Co-Editor.

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Concerning the question of insight, “aha,” and the “so what?” test raised by Peter C Forster above, some haiku poets regard it as unnecessary for a haiku to occasion insight, and maintain that a simple sketch is sufficient.  The suchness of things.  This view is also found in Zen influences, where its protagonists, for example Blyth, and Watts, maintain that “it is necessary to state with some vehemence that haiku is not symbolic, that is, not a portrayal of natural phenomena with some meaning behind them..” (Blyth History of Haiku vol 1 p13.).   Others such as Shirane contend that “Without the use of metaphor, allegory, and symbolism, haiku will have a hard time achieving the complexity and depth necessary to reach mainstream poetry audiences and to become the object of serious study and commentary.” (Haruo Shirane address to Haiku North America 1999 in Evanston, Illinois, where he supports the use in haiku of poetic devices that we think of as Western).

A few more quotes…

I must own that I’m among those who think the associations of words are inescapable, although unsubtle symbolism is best avoided.  I do expect meaningfulness, some form of insight, in haiku.  The answer to “so what?” should be something more than “so that.”  I recognise that the reader may have to provide the insight by reconstituting the poet’s experience, and a failure in insight may be the reader’s own.  And that an insight may be rational  or beyond the rational.  All of which begs the question: what counts as insight?  For me, it should offer something new, a new thought or understanding, however small, that adds to my pile.  Which means that a well-worn trope is not likely to satisfy unless it contains a novel twist.   The insight may, but does not have to be, of a philosophical or intellectual kind.  It may be one of beauty (the aah moment being the realisation of same); of some other emotion divined but not thrust at me, and preferably not larded on, nor a re-statement of some worthy, homely but threadbare sentiment.  Insight may be revelatory (oho! moment); it may be a moment of recognition, a shared experience one hadn’t thought about before ( an oh yes moment); or humour (hoho moment).  It follows that whether or not a poem has any of these sparks in it depends on the reader’s experience and experiences, and so our appreciation of poems will differ accordingly, as well as differing according to taste.