5-7-5...?

Part of the concept of this blog (if I can say there’s a coherent concept) is brevity. I was always intimidated and fatigued by having to work through longer creative pieces. So with this in mind I wanted to explore haiku and how it’s meant to be written. Well, I found out that there is a truly “classic” form of haiku, but it’s difficult to adhere to if you’re not writing in Japanese. In the haiku history timeline, once haikus go English they start running all over the place…forms are altered, devices are modified. It’s to the point now where (alongside some traditionalist criticism of course) every new rule that’s offered is followed by a “but you can do it differently if you want” sort of phrase.

So now, attacking these three-line works has become an act of research and decision making akin to writing a short story. Not that I’m giving up the idea, but I need to sit with these potent little things for a while. In the meantime, I spent entirely too much time online gathering a handful that I really appreciated…

With his 1988 publication, Selected Haiku, Nick Virgilio introduced a form of haiku that became known as “lily and bass”. These are the two poems that chiefly introduced that concept.

lily

out of the water

out of itself

bass

picking bugs

off the moon

And another of his that I was attracted to.

my dead brother...
hearing his laugh
in my laughter

These two are from a woman named Stella Pierid who writes a haiku every single day and posts it on her blog. She’s good. : )

Moving house -
a snail and the same old
me

Just because
the sky is navigable -
thistledown

The Irish Haiku Society’s International Haiku Competition produced the following entries. Interesting how they reflect the times. (the last won the grand prize)

where the maple stood
a shroud
of sunlight

the things
we never did
undertow

recession
more tree
less leaf

memorial flowers
tied to the ash in full leaf
bowing and sighing

forty seven
and no pension
all the starry heavens

chill wind
the windowsill tomato
still warm

There are those who like to write “minimalist” haiku, and I find most of that to be crap (whilst feeling guilty for shitting on people’s art), but this one from Angie Werren works for me somehow.

snow
black crow
tea.

Juxtapositions and contrasts all over the place in that tiny thing.

And last, I was really impressed with a form of haiku developed by John Carley. Actually I’ll just paste in the description given by a dedicated and prolific haiku blogger, Melissa Allen (http://haikuproject.wordpress.com):

"At some point around the turn of the millennium John got fed up with all the squabbling about what constitutes an English-language haiku and decided to invent his own form of haiku that would be unique to English and capitalize on its special properties. You can read his essay about this yourself, but basically he got all scientific about it and crunched numbers with translations and did a little rummaging around in the basement of linguistics and ended up with this 15-syllable poem, divided into two parts, that he called a zip haiku”.

A light search revealed these two:

orange and tan | tan orange and tan
the butterflies | beat on

buoyed up | on the rising tide
a fleet of head boards | bang the wall

Love!

With regard to the classic form, I think what tends to be maintained throughout most haiku is that element of a switch or a turn-around. This “cutting”, the stimulating juxtaposition of two images or ideas, is haiku’s essence.

And with that, I leave you with this vital piece:

Haikus are easy
but sometimes they don’t make sense
refrigerator