It’s too easy to make the play of
d
o
w
n
or
d
r
o
p
t r ip and f a _ _
are still all redundant in a way, the verb or adverb enacting itself. Marlene’s looks elegantly simple and hard to do. While people in scrabble turn cow into cows or cowed, hers is more like the shift to scowled or picowave.
Looking at Marlene Mountain’s frog poem, p. 107 in How to Haiku, it’s a transformation, a level deeper than usual. No wonder it is called out as exemplar.
Like Position of Sheep (I) by Steven McCaffery, it’s disquietingly simple. Ok, I wanted to say deceivingly simple but spellchecker may be more right with disquietingly. How does she arrive there?
It’s quite compressed but doesn’t feel pressed. The placement of nouns, or parts thereof become the actors in motion without anything more added. [Like a sobject?]
Her subject word helps with its nature of sound the f in isolation being wind-sound, flight and g being a sort of heavy earthy landing. It’s an onomatopoeic word in itself. If it were a toad hopping instead, it could work but the initial t is abrupt and a click doesn’t fit the same. And misses all the resonance of the frogs. And toads are more characteristic for sitting than for hopping.
If you multiplied the number of fffs and rrrs to open with and extend the sound, would the piece be better for it? Or just longer? It would seem fussier somehow. It doesn’t need more to convey what it does of the stretch and collecting itself again compactly. The word seems tucked in shorter than its normal length after the leap. Which makes the word be seen new again in a different way. Funky trick.
A minimum number of words, minimum number of letters and maximum thought beforehand and something to chew on afterward. Proven further by my trying to do and iterations of fail.