SunWinks! June 15, 2014: Go Take a Haiku

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.

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The Mars Escort Service

The Mars Escort Service

It was inevitable. During the California Gold Rush, for example, cottage industries sprang up around the prospectors and speculators like dandelions: assayers, innkeepers, merchants, farriers…and whorehouses. Where the women came from and why, well, the answer to that is probably as old and mysterious as the profession itself. Whatever their motives, the lure of riches, the dream of meeting Prince Charming, the pioneering spirit, the ladies of the evening are there. No matter how remote or adventurous the enterprise, be it the California Gold Rush, the Alaska Oil Boom, Los Alamos or North Hollywood, the women always seem to come from somewhere.

The year was 2112. I’d been on Mars for 10 years. You know those science fiction stories in which the expeditions are co-ed, with a sustainable breeding cohort being sent to populate a distant planet? Still the stuff of science fiction. Space exploration is still a man’s world. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Sending a school teacher into earth orbit is one thing, but that’s a parlor trick compared to establishing an outpost on Mars.

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SunWinks! June 8, 2014: The Poetry of Barbados Joe Walcott

Dear SunWinkers:

We’ve been talking about a whole ‘nother aspect of the music of poetry: figures of speech, a.k.a. rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures are ways to manipulate the rhythms of speech to give your poetry or oratory or prose rhythm, momentum, and impact. I just used three of them.

“a whole ‘nother” is a tmesis: splitting a word in two, usually to put another word in between.

“…rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures…” is an anadiplosis: repeating a word or phrase from the end of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next.

“poetry or oratory or prose” is polysyndeton: using extra conjunctions (that is, “or” instead of a comma between “poetry” and “oratory”.

We can’t cover all of the 60 figures of speech described in Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982]. If you want to get all obsessive over this, I mean, if you want to make a methodical study of this topic, you can get ahold of Quinn’s book or go to a wonderful website called The Forest of Rhetoric http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ which describes many times 60 rhetorical figures.

Many of the figures we’ve looked at are repetitive figures, and I did want to cover a few more of those. The reason is that they are pretty easy to understand, and to get a feeling for how they can improve the rhythm and music of your poetry.

So far, we’ve covered these:

Epistrophe is repeating a word or words at the end of a succession of phrases: “of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! June 1, 2014: At The Risk Of Repeating Myself…

Dear SunWinkers!

Last week, we looked at figures of speech, or rhetorical figures. They included anaphora (beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same word or phrase), enallage (being effectively ungrammatical), and periphrasis (using more words than you have to).

In previous columns, I’ve talked about the music of poetry. The music of poetry goes back to a day when there was no such thing as music. St. Augustine’s De Musica (“On Music”), written around 390 A.D., actually treated the subject of what we now call poetic meter. Musical melody as we know it today came centuries later, and harmony years after that. So, meter is part of the music of poetry, not strict meter necessarily these days, but the feeling of rhythmic pulses, and meter implied, manipulated, and thwarted.

Diction and alliteration exemplify another aspect of music in poetry. The poet manipulates and takes advantage of the sound of language to make it grating, mellifluous, or narcotic, just as a composer uses harmony to make her music harsh or euphonious.

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