Viral 4.2

Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.

When I go to online haiku sites the first thing I notice posted are one-line haiku. Sometimes I’ll re-arrange a word or two in my head. If it seems there’s only that one haiku, I often don’t open the post. I know that it’s really a three-line haiku bunched up. For some authors I’ll click on just to see.

Of course I look at content. I look for the personal relationship between poets and their subjects. If the poet has a personal closeness, then I can get closer. Especially to a haiku that one has to want to find out what’s there. Way back in the time of The Wordless Poem (1969), Eric Amann wondered why two-line and one-line haiku were rarely written. The latter clicked with me. Yet over these forty years or so, one-line has not been taken very seriously. Some poets would give it a try, but there must be something safe or cozy about the three-line. In the late 1970s, Clarence Matsu-Allard wrote haiku one had to reach into.

Some haiku unearth one-line. Some one-line unearth content. Well, some one-line haiku unearth our minds too. The internet opened new friends with individual views. One particular poet/painter is Sheila Windsor in England.

Did you feel a bump in the line? What happened? If anyone knows what the haiku is and/or means please don’t tell me. I love it as is. Will it “work” as a three-line. It won’t—the marvelous bump would be lost. It’s an unearthing one-line.