pesbo blog – Page 284

Everyone Loves Excitement

The scene described as Karen Solie takes home the Griffin.

endless cups of tea and friends
heard tone of voice although no words rivet
gateways of wind where touch
masses. so many claims to fame. so many ordinary men turned
into flowering
If this were a stutter
a selection of hammers
blood-tube and bone. It is brutish like fragrant pity — or
you believe me. I will abandon all feminine fear and arm
His wife, swiftseen at the window, waving him welcome;
there are doors no one will open for us
explosion: she stretches on the tips of her toes, innocently. Then she goes back, rubbing
as his descendants the bombs
of nothing remarkable
the nervous man who stammered
her attention as a fraction of his large portfolio.
an accident is a new way of knowing
This is the lap of the unknown.
Yet I found something like a heart.
*
—
*
haiku. Herb Barrett in Haïku edited by Dorothy Howard and André Duhaime
the swimming stags. derek beaulieu in with wax
reason. Faizal Deen in land without chocolate
Daphne Marlatt in Ana Historic
A line made by walking. Joseph Massey in Exit North
Help. Rae Armantrout in Versed
tanka. Linda Jeanette Ward in bottle rockets issue 11:2
Genus: Cube. Christine Stewart in from Taxonomy
She Speaks again of the Queen Fredegun. Christine de Pizan in The Book of the City of Ladies.
Louis Slotin as the Wanderer, Michael Lista in Bloom
The Sadness of Windows, Carole Langille in Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada
Semezdin Mehmedinović in Sarajevo Blues
“New Goose” Manuscript, Lorine Niedecker Collected Works
Nisei. Kevin Irie in Paper Doors
Marks on the Floor of the Ruritan Club. Mark Jackley in Lank, Beak & Bumpy
60. Sheila E. Murphy in Letters to Unfinished J.
What we learned on the Highway Near St. John’s, Jeanette Lynes in A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway
Broadcast: July 16, 1945. Sandra Ridley in Fallout.
Legacy. John Donne: Selected Poems

The Tyranny of the Specifics

A certain amount of any communication is holding the floor, phatic exchange like meercats making are you there contact growls.
Do we write whether we perceive anything new or not? Do we write by habit or by impulse when there is something to uncork? Is it stultifying or clarifying? Are we getting it right or going on flights of fancy or form? What is our practice like in terms of nailing facts?
When we write about the world around us, are we writing what we imagine we see or what we see? Raffael de Gruttola questioned whether we are at risk of reproducing some “homogenized national landscape” that leaves out the particulars of region in an effort to not exclude anyone who might not “get” some reference.
We don’t want to fudge facts so more people get our drift, do we? Misinformation officers are already overstocked. A certain diligence and meticulousness is welcome. How to balance being accurate and being overly exact?
Do we want to be transparent to the widest possible readership? Last year Emiko was talking about cultural translation of season words and how they don’t transpose to a new geography and other culture. The marks of a season are culturally embedded.
Kigo/sajiki/season word indicators came up as a discussion topic at the haiku conference. Although it is particular to haiku, the issue of how specific to be has broad applications. To rely on a kigo list is to use a word as a shorthand symbol for the season on top of or instead of describing what happens. (Moon being reserved for autumn by default unless specified as a kind of moon.)
To be as specific as possible makes the poem personal and specific and gives the strongest resonance but with the fewest people. To say cow vetch rattles will bring certain readers into a snap of focus, while for others, the picture will get hazy, being only sound without sense.
There’s a missed opportunity to educate oneself on insects and cultivate knowledge of wildflowers so we are learning the world. Having a word for something is a tool to make a distinction and to begin to observe. What if we get down some narrow throat of a flower and no one can orient themselves to our specificness?
What can we assume the reader will catch? What does it matter that one doesn’t catch? We set a word out there and if a reader doesn’t know it, maybe on next pass with someone else they will have built a hook to catch more. We can’t dumb down, nor do we want to reach for the most obscure thing as proof that we know something. That too creates gaps between writer and poem and reader.
To use the most archetypal words, bird, water, etc, reaches the widest audience without obstruction except that vague words are a kind of obstruction of abstraction and blandness.
To observe behavior of a species and know its rhythms is to be alert to the world outside of self. Would a field guide, paired with observing, be a better tool than a kigo list to fill in the requisite line about season?
Are we including unlikely portraits (like photoshop errors) to get at some “emotional truth” but messing up the biology?

Marshall Hryciuk pointed out season word lists are no substitute for what you perceive.
In such a short form, every word, every syllable has to work, carry its weight to earn the right to stay. That idea of compression comes in opposition to the practice of kigo. I’ve been in discussions where we talk about what to do about the issue of kigo. Is it genuine or an aspect of desk poetry? If feels non-essential sometimes. A throwaway word may indicate season but risks over-representing, say, crickets, in the population’s perception. What’s more, to use season words as a mandate can make the poem a cookie cutter exercise and we lose something of the moment by needing to include a kigo because the form requires it? How to balance?
Are we asking the right question? Should our indicators of time’s passage be rooted in the manufactured not the natural world given how much time we spend in nature?
George Swede (Joy in Me Still and White Thoughts, Blue Mind) said there is a force of change in haiku but it is not that of cross-pollinatization from other literature so much as impact of urbanization. Barry George (Wrecking Ball & Other Urban Haiku) concurred that haiku needed to be observant not just of those bits of nature but the built environment and seasonal changes, such as homeless people’s movements and construction seasons.
André Duhaime said that we look towards Basho as a model for content of haiku, but after the bomb in Japan, everything changed. There was more social consciousness and urban elements. We mythologize the haikuists and wax nostalgic about the nature of nature. We look towards Shiki as an ideal practitioner of haiku but he himself wasn’t informed by Japan but inspired by French Impressionism. Haiku and poetry has always been cross-pollinating around the world, as de Gruttola points out, with WC Williams, Pound, Olsen, Creeley, Kerouac and Ginsberg. (Haiku does not exist in a vacuum, except in that vacuum of females, presumably. ;-)]
When we temper romantic habits and seek to state what is actually before our eyes, it can reinvigorate, refresh our vision.

Where Haiku Has Been

Part of the strength of a lot of people coming together with one shared passion is seeing the diversity in evolution in one one place. Some haiku aims for literary. Some aims away.
Some don’t put haiku as a subset of poetry but a parallel track, perhaps comparable to how biology and chemistry are not the same thing. Some are happily mixing it up with whatever — concrete poetry, music, folky conversations, or biting political commentary. Some class it as by-products of meditation or observation, more like science than the loosey-goosey fiction of Poetry.
There were panel discussions of retrospectives of what happened over the past 25 years in haiku. Some was in French, some in English, most not translated to the other. I could understand some, perhaps most of the French but not to the level of taking notes at the same time. Unfortunately as animated as Dorothy Howard’s presentation was, she spoke too fast for me and gave no handouts. (She is the editor with André Duhaime of Haiku a seminal collection of haiku from 1986.) I missed some of the other presentation. For the remaining 3 people, here’s some of what I gleaned:
Rod Willmot‘s first words were in answer to “Who first?” He said, “Let’s go right to left and hope Canada goes the same way.”

Cor van den Heuvel at Literary Kicks calls Rod Willmot (of Ribs of the Dragonfly) and George Swede (of Almost Unseen) two of the major figures of the half-century:

As English language haiku approaches the end of its first fifty years, a number of poets, other than those discussed already, have, by the quality and quantity of their haiku, emerged as major figures: Anita Virgil, Gary Hotham, Marlene Mountain, Alexis Rotella, George Swede, Alan Pizzarelli, Michael McClintock, Raymond Roseliep, and Rod Willmot.

George Swede said that talking about what poetry is and isn’t is like trying to pick up quicksilver.
In such a global picture of tens of thousands of voices and dozens of languages, getting a general picture of practice might not be doable.
At the same time one can look at what has happened in written collections in English or in French and tell anecdotes of what we recall of being dominant ideas.
Swede took 8 anthologies or magazines as source texts from 1980 to 2010 and did a count to see what we practice. In 1980 over 90% of haiku were 3-lines and in 2010 counting samples of Frogpond (2008, 2010) Modern Haiku (2009) and White Lies (2009) he found the rate hovering around the same

one liners: 7.93%
two-liners: 1.13%
four-liners: 1.13%
not left-aligned: 5.4%
less than or equal to 10 syllables: 16.61%

(Interesting that nearly 1 in 5 are under 10 syllables.)
He found that haiku with nature-content only dropped from nearly 23% of haiku in the survey of 1986 and 1992 samples to 10% in 2010. Those with a mix of human and nature dropped less than a percent. Haiku with human-only content nearly doubled from nearly 16% to nearly 30%.
There has been a shift to senryu and perhaps, as suggested by a couple people in the audience, to reflect the increasingly urban lives of the population. Most poets don’t seem to play with space and left and right justification as much as they might to use the potential of the physical page.
Janick Belleau quoted Maurice Coyaud who argues for using poetic device in haiku by saying you effect you can do with metaphor and personification in 2 words, it would take you 5 words to do with nature alone.

Belleau took 9 French anthologies spanning 1998 to 2009, from France, Belgium, Quebec and Canada and looked at which ones included which aspects of form and spirit of haiku.
The most standard traits of form were brevity, being in the present moment, with season and nature being referred to.
The strongest traits of spirit of haiku were: perceptions/emotion, sensorial experience and relating to existential reality. Less frequent characteristic aspects were relationship of nature to humans, link with the universe and relationship of the poet to the reader.
Maurice Coyaud’s Chevaucher la Lune diverged most with only half of the traits while the haiku represented in 4 of the anthologies (Haiku anthologie du poème court japonais by Corinne Atlan and Zéno Bianu, Anthologie du Haiku en France by Jean Antonini, Dire la Faune 1, Dire la flore 2 by Robert Malançon and Dix vues di Haiku by Serge Tomé) generally adhered to 10 out the 10 form and spirit constraints.

A light moment in the talk.
What is the mood or purpose or tone of haiku? Is it peace, or play or observation? Is there to be not just a cutting word or punctuation of shift but to make a cutting effect? Is its role aesthetic like flower arranging or as a forum for raw emotion?
Willmot said that in the 80s there was the debate in haiku of what to do: seize the moment? Or is anything really lost by putting things in the past tense?
The same debate is ever cropping up by those who reflexively change everything to first person present tense, sentence case with the intention of creating clarity and immediacy.
His feeling is that haiku is about feelings. Poetry can transfer an intensity of experience. Or it can fall to aphorizing and sentimentalizing. He aims for “letting a semi truck grow out of a seed”.
He felt that haiku went in and out of mainstream popularity for a while based on what society needed. For a while Canada, and its component citizens, had a thirst for long expository lines, such as Dennis Lee was doing in English Canada with his Civil Elegies and Gaston Miron was doing in French Canada. The spirit of the time was outwards, a thoughtful consideration of what the nation could be. What is the hallmark of now? We turn towards individuality more and hobbies interests rather than civic concerns.
What would be a way forward in haiku? Haiku can be in opposition to mainstream without the trappings of authorities and rules, exploring risks of what might work and might not and putting it out there. He said when he was 17, in 1965 he hand-calligraphed books and sold them on the street corners to American tourists fresh off the bus. They had no preconceptions of what constituted literary. It worked or didn’t. The establishment, then and now, have a reverential attitude towards rules; rules can obstruct meaning.
For a while, until the 80s, haiku was rooted in North American soil and since then there was born a nostalgia to try to transplant haiku back into the soil of Japan, an equivalent to Neoclassicism or Chinoiserie. People venerate the Japanese like Trekkies at a convention. Haikuist wanted to expand the hobby to exoticism of clothes, objects, paintings and Buddhism. That is a legacy of Blythe and others, a selective reading of Japanese literary arts because there is also the school of haiku in Japan where every haiku is a stab
There comes what he calls a “luggage moment” as when in an airport when you’re carrying your bags from the carousel and something comes over you and you drop all the bags and just walk away.