It’s only a month until the Haiku Canada Weekend in Montreal. I’ve been reading How To Haiku, edited by Bruce Ross.
It’s good to brush up since the brain drifts off models. It’s easy to slip off down short-cuts or along interesting sideroads. I have a mental habit of insisting on wedging in playtime. Word play is fun but in haiku one tries to keep the sense of playfulness to the pique of the comic moment seen rather than the games of one stage of disconnect of being intellectual. One can pun but it’s not the central concern of haiku. It’s an experiential awareness more than linguistic.
It’s easy to punch up the haiku into drama. There’s that built in structure of two images and kireji shift that suggest contrast and pivot. That seems to align with drama and drama is made from imagination but that’s a fast train carrying the form away into becoming spark-fiction, micro-narrative.
It’s one moment, an awareness, not a plot. If it is people-centric you might be working out a senryu or a tanka. In haiku the camera pans back with one cut. It is one is pause inside one moment, but not get too effusive there. To make a mini-lyric is to nudge it away from ideal.
One can make allusions in haiku but it’s a balancing act. You want to imply not thwack by being too leading. One tries to make it unmediated experience.
You feel something, but you don’t make feelings or self forefront. You are present but it’s not first person point of view in view.
To capture a haiku in the wild requires being present and presenting that present to someone else to evoke an analogous feeling without telling them what to feel. It is showing not telling and explaining, but it is not flat description either. There’s evocativeness in a concrete image. It is about something that matters without falling to too emblematic nor symbolic. You don’t want it to smack of gimmick but to be a humble sharing among equals.
One wants beauty but there’s a sweet spot in the use of language — subtle, not pared back so much as to be telegraphic and not indulging in sentimentality nor the poetic devices of western poetry. Nothing is to distract from the content. Slant rhymes can draw attention to themselves over the content. An alliteration can distract from the moment into the artifice of words.
To have an ambiguity over which line the middle line goes with, the first or last line, seems to be a popular permitted device to provide a sweet morsel of surprise and shift for the reader. A haiku is to appeal to the reader with something worthwhile sharing. It’s a range of stylistics for how and what.
One writes of what is, not fanciful things. A make believe personification can squeak by. On one level there is straight description and no implication except that the mind is an insistent story-maker. Take this case of comic haiku, or tragi-comic.
garter snake
and her ten suitors
pass the lone thistle
By constrast the thistle may seem as a plaintive singledom flower that one identifies with as being like a person. That is left for the head of the reader to make connections, and the comparison of forlorn or ample in love is not put in the poem directly. Is it necessarily implied?
When you have tight constraint, it’s easy enough to make up things to fit the slot but part of the goal is the mental stance as much as the product. It’s to be a synthesis of mood and observation, but not feel synthetic. One can smell contrived or knock-off, a mile off.
Haiku is a form of meditation and secondarily communication and as tertiary function, literature.
One can start at literature and work your way into falling thru communication into the word and into the moment. An asked, “When we do use technology as a shield against intimacy, and when is it a bridge?” To spin that, when do we use haiku for shield or bridge? We write haiku as a mental act but share a haiku to beckon someone over to look at something cool. When we are occupied with the idea of working a good poem, we can lose sight of the impetus and the world risk being a shield of structures and rules and effects and techniques and consensus and what have you.
In all poetry, I could argue that each character space has to bear the load and do work and the poem would lose something if it were eliminated. In this short form, there’s no where to hide or let slide deadwood of a word. Even punctuation has to be weighed carefully so as not to overwhelm the delicacy of the content.
To say it is delicate is not to say haiku is traipsing about maudlin as a petulant teen among field mice, heaving great sighs, any more than the long lyric form is that.
Haiku can be humourous or earthy, grief, convivial, urban-set or urbane but the aim is for that clarity of mind, minimalism of framing.
seed-heads sway
in the long grass
— mouse forages
There would be an implicit break even without the explicit dash. It dabbles towards using poetic device with so much sibilance suggesting an echo of the sound of autumn grasses. I’m not sure if I could get away with that degree of cross-pollination of tools.
There is no narrative advancement. There is an awareness of motion, a setting of tall field grasses and the awareness expands to the source. Does one see the mouse or figure out what the motion must be?
Is a feeling evoked? Does one eep or awwww? Does the opening of the haiku build a mystery to be solved after the break? Is some attitude towards the mouse implied? It doesn’t tell the reaction or add slanted language to label the mouse as pretty or ugly or fearsome or old. That would be telling how to feel rather than letting the readers come to the poem bringing their worlds.
The mystery of the motion in the grass is solved and no further action is needed. One can observe and lower guard. By giving the mouse a verb rather than ending with “a mouse!” one can assume that all is well with the world and the mouse in it.
As Pinball Playing Man says in the movie, “There’s only one instant, and it’s right now. And it’s eternity.”
For another example,
beside the paved path
the wreath — and sparrow
plucks a ribbon
That one is like a sonnet with a misplaced volta but I show it to illustrate the idea of haiku humour as gentle comedy and irony and the minimalism in content.
There are two images: trail with the wreath is one image of stillness and quiet and the activity of the bird hops within the image. Man versus nature. Memory versus the practicality of moving on. Where people placed a wreath last season to mark some runner’s heart attack, and see reminder of mortality, the sparrow just sees opportunity for nesting material. The grief and the cheer are cheek by jowl. The sparrow making nesting material acts as a nod to the connection to the season.
It succeeds as a haiku in being plausible. It fails to be haiku in the sense that it isn’t true. There is a trail with memento wreath and sparrows nearby. I didn’t witness the scene happen, so it is desk haiku and contrived.
Do the ethics of form allow for a likely story if it might have accurately happened?
As in any writing or speech or portrayal, one must get your facts right and don’t miseducate people as to the behavior in the world. Even if it is satire, paranormal, surrealism, comics, there is something that doesn’t ring true but kinda clangs. It’s like being a cartoonist who gets shadows wrong, or a photoshopper who evidently has never seen a human body before. If writing is going for emotional truth, rather than a cherry-picking of actual truths, does that hold true for haiku? Depends on the writer. It can be an assemblage like painting a portrait of a face when the facial expression was just like that moment, except removing the clutter of the awkward shadow that conceals unnecessarily.