Dear SunWinkers!

Happy Father’s Day! I just want to say that it’s been an unalloyed privilege to live with my four children for the 28 years from when I married Nevada’s mother to when Hannah moved out. They are four of the sharpest, brightest, most beautiful and interesting human beings I’ve ever met. Yes, they could be infuriating. Yes, the challenges were overwhelming at times. But I treasure every single second because all of that made those children the people of whom I am so deeply proud and admiring today.

 

I’m on a new kick right now, taking pictures and writing haiku to go with them. Did you notice? This is not my first haiku kick. Actually, I think it’s my second. During my first poetry phase (c. 1998-2001), I wrote one haiku, and that was a spoof. My first haiku kick was less than a year ago—you can see them in my new book, Papa Doug’s Light Book of Little Verse.

Kick #2 started a week ago on a bike ride. I was greeted with an extraordinary sky as I was coming out of Value Village thrift store. I was greeted with another stunning vista halfway home. Thanks to my smartphone camera, these became SkyKu 1 and SkyKu 2. I love taking pictures because it’s such an undepressed thing to do. You have to have a sense of inquisitiveness and wonder, and to want to capture the image for future enjoyment and reflection. For me, it’s not just a pleasure, it’s a bellwether.

Going back to a picture, especially one I took myself, and writing a haiku, exploring the mystery and wonder of what I was looking at, is an additional pleasure. In fact, I have little interest in writing haiku about a picture I did not take. The point of haiku is to reflect on one’s own experience, on one’s own tiny movement of the soul produced from one’s identification with the natural.

On that bike trip home from Value Village, I was carrying a book I’d just bought: The Classic Tradition of Haiku, edited by Faubion Bowers [Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996]. This very interesting little volume includes a knowledgeable introduction, oodles of informative annotations, a very good anthology of the great Japanese haiku poets, and, most interestingly, a transliteration of each original Japanese poem, so we can have some idea of what the poem was originally intended to sound like, and often, several different translations of the same haiku.

Here’s an example of one of the most well-known haiku ever, by Basho, in several translations, ending with my favorite, which happens to be by Allen Ginsburg:

 Old Pond—frogs jumped in—sound of water

+++

A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps…
Apart, unstirred by sound or motion…till
Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.

+++

The quiet pond
A frog leaps in,
The sound of water

+++

old pond…
a frog leaps in
water’s sound

+++

frog pond…
a leaf falls in
without a sound

+++

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in. Kerplunk!

I like to hold myself to the discipline of writing in the 5-7-5 syllable scheme. Some authors on poetry (I’ll call them teachers) say don’t add syllables just for the sake of the scheme. If it sounds like I did that, then I keep working on it until it doesn’t. The great modern poets in English generally disregard this idea altogether…

bass
picking bugs
off the moon

Nicholas A. Virgilio

the old woman holds
lilac buds
to her good ear

Raymond Roseliep

…and with good reason. Japanese haiku is the descendent of the hokku (literally, “beginning verse”), which is the opening stanza in a collaborative poem called a renga. (Centuries ago, Japanese poets would get together and have renga parties.) The syllable scheme of renga, which can be thousands of stanzas long, is 5-7-5, 7-7, 5-7-5, 7-7, etc. Coming over into English, this means next to nothing. For one thing, those Japanese “syllables” aren’t syllables as we know them; they’re more like phonemes. So a Japanese haiku is the equivalent “mouthful” (that is, about as much trouble to say) of twelve to fifteen syllables in English.

Consequently, other teachers will say, if you want your haiku to sound like a haiku, write three short lines, make the second line a little longer than the other two, write about nature, avoid abstractions, and keep adjectives/adverbs to a minimum.

Haiku allows very little room for metaphor, is generally confined to direct sensory observations, which is to say, imagery. Rather than mere description, however, there should be an element of irony, a subtle change of point of view, something that, in a small way, relates the nature being observed to human nature.

Haiku should be just
small stones dropping down a well
with a small splash

James Kirkup

The Prompt

Take a picture (or find one you took) and write a haiku about it. Post the haiku with the picture. Try not to just write a little poem that describes what you’re seeing with words that sound pretty. Begin by relating to the scene with your inner poet (or your inner child—same thing). Try to get a little of that into your haiku, but without coming right out and saying it.

(Here’s one teacher’s example of what is not a haiku:

Now that our love is gone
I feel within my soul
A nagging distress   )

Post your response to your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. Or put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to. Then comment to this post with the link.

Additional sources:

X.J. Kennedy: An Introduction to Poetry, 5^th Ed.; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982.

Ron Padgett, ed.: The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms; New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1987.