(a) soldier
unfolding
the scent of a letter

soldier unfolding–
the scent
of a letter

soldier
unfolding the scent of
a letter

Since the eye and thus the brain–all in a few milliseconds–entertains each possibility, the text accomplishes what Richard Gilbert says happens in good haiku. The writer has orchestrated misreadings, and in the multiple re-readings register dynamically (unfolds) on one’s consciousness.

Putting the ku into one line makes it harder to know where the flow, and flow of perception, pauses to turn. I like it.

First off, Chad Lee Robinson is one of my favorite young haiku poets. We have been publishing him for some years at The Heron’s Nest.

Scott, it is of course what makes horse races, but I disagree with a number of your points in this exegesis of Chad Lee’s poem.

Bluntly, I find the poem to be a fine inner verse of a renku (a two-line stanza), without enough internal comparison to make of it a fine haiku. I cannot split hairs of definition, it may be haiku by someone’s lights. To me it seems an element short and has not enough material for apposition or juxtaposition. It is in the space afforded by this technique that haiku can be found. I wish to enter in to the image(s) and share them through my own actual or at least imagined experience. A number of one-line haiku shown here in the Haiku Foundation’s output are fine haiku. And, before letters start to be typed to me, yes, there are single-image haiku (in however many lines), but good ones are not common and are difficult to pull off. Internal comparison seems key.

I see no doubt that it is a perfumed letter, seemingly from a wife or girlfriend to a male soldier. The figurative language of unfolding a scent is less mysterious than literal. As a letter is unwrapped and unfolded, its olfactory content escapes — more at each step of the process. It is very nicely put by the poet.

This form encourages, nay, demands a quick linear reading — right off. Nothing is folded except the letter. We must learn that directly and quickly. If nothing stops the reader (of English), one reads through at a gulp and intends to make sense of what words are tangent, and in line as a group. It reads fast — and is done. Subject, verb, object. Read and done. It must be seen this way and this quickly. I am all the way to the end of this line before Scott is contemplating the second word and who or what is unfolding. It is the way it is put to the page and the connection of word to word. It fits; it’s done; what’s next? Having a scant level of content is not disguised by casting the poem in one-line form. For me there is no hiding it. There is a man with a letter from home. The letter is perfumed. Nothing more. Just as (a different poem and circumstance) a haiku with two of its lines inverted does not make of it a fine haiku, unless it was such without the inverted phrase (which might merely make it appear “poetical”).

I imagine this practice of perfuming predates WW-2, but literature and film from that period surely shows the scented missive. I can imagine it today in wars in or occupations of Bosnia, Korea, Japan, Germany, Kuwait, Afghanistan, or Iraq — even boot camp.

I find the brevity of the opening somewhat off-putting. I wish that Chad Lee had added what the late Bob Spiess taught as those little polite words of our language. A soldier — or — the soldier. Beginning with just: “soldier” is quite abrupt, unnecessarily.

A break or no break? The one-line form works against this phrase we consider. There is no pause for me at any word’s end. That is why, as I began, it flows just as a good inner verse of renku should. That flow is meant to advance smoothly from one linked stanza to the next. This is not to say that in renku some of the three-line verses cannot be a method of slowing the flow. Variety is King and some slowdown is to be looked to.

I do not see that the one-line form allows this verse to be visual in and of itself. I see the letter and I see the soldier (uniformed and possibly armed). But above all I smell the perfume as he does. He is drawn to memory of his loved one. I find no politics, no antiwar message. Rather the obvious one of army members since Biblical or Roman times (having literature and possible mail from home) missing home, and missing their true loves. I suppose a stay-at-home husband/boyfriend could have doused a letter with his AquaVelva or cologne? But it seems less likely. The man could be soldiering in a boring checkpoint, a bivouac on the DMZ, working behind the lines stacking supplies, and not be the stuff of danger under fire — no death and destruction, just a couple separated.

– Paul (MacNeil)