Comments on: news (7.2.09)

By: Susanna Speier

Susanna Speier — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:38:29 +0000

Thanks for re-framing the macro context, Merrill. Unlike haiku, Politiku is a hybrid genre. While it adapts the structure of traditional haiku (thus, the name and the concept) and circulates it through blogs and twitter as concise political commentary. Much as I love working with poets and writers, the Apollo 11 Politiku I posted on Huffpo yesterday, was selected based on the writer’s relationship to the topic: the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing. I therefore sought out individuals with NASA affiliations. As might be expected, the posts reflected a variety of literary skills and talent. Some even deviated from 5-7-5 and I let that go, in deference to the expertise they brought to the table as well as time constraints. (Most of the publishers and publicists who helped me pull things together were astonished the contributors cooperated with the enthusiasm that they did). The outcome, I like to think, is as much historiography as it is poetry:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susanna-speier/apollo-11-politiku_b_237934.html

By: Merrill Ann Gonzales

Merrill Ann Gonzales — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:09:09 +0000

Christopher, Perhaps the question is whether or not the structure is essential to poetry or in this case haiku…or ipso jure…is the poem/haiku a thing in itself…the fact. I guess that’s what I was getting at. Once you can identify the fact, the law of the thing itself, you can then determine if it is poetry or propoganda or if it requires certain structures or not. What I was getting at was that I have always felt that a poem has its own laws.
I may not write in 5/7/5 and may find it deadening to haiku, but that is my poetry…others may require that structure to determine what the law of their poetry is and find it essential to writing haiku. The decision then comes whether or not formula becomes another class of poetry or not?
And when you come to a type of poetry that we are dealing with here, is it not yet another form of poetry… Is the motive, is the fact of a poem fine art or is it propaganda or for that matter prose poetry? We have these designations to deal with.

By: Christopher White

Christopher White — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:29:42 +0000

In response to:

“Far as I can tell, 5-7-5 resonates with English Language writers and readers alike and I have yet to encounter a situation in which it limiting the overall rigor or complexity any more than, say, adhering to the iambs of a Shakespearean sonnet would. ”

and echoing Allan Burns’ and Merrill Ann Gonzales’ above comments:

As an English language writer and reader, I don’t really feel any great resonance with 5,7,5 structure. Occasionally a good haiku is written in English with that structure but, by and large, by chance.

I think Hasegawa Kai said it best in Richard Gilbert’s interview of him: 5,7,5 is the heartbeat of the language… (or words to that effect).

5,7,5 is simply a natural, rhythmic flow which the Japanese language falls into. Sometimes Japanese haiku are not written in 5,7,5 – whenever it suits the individual poem and flow is not compromised.

5,7,5 is not a natural rhythm for the English language, it is not its heartbeat. Perhaps the English language may have a slightly broader array of natural rhythms as the sound units vary so much in length (whereas all the Japanese sound units are of identical duration as far as I am aware).

It seems as though consciously trying to write an English haiku with 5,7,5 structure is actually changing the fundamental type of poem being written – one which has a greater emphasis on manipulating language for its own sake rather than in order to enhance the poetic power of the creation.

The gist is that while an English language haiku can occasionally work in the 5,7,5 structure, it generally won’t because the languages of Japanese and English are too different, and the reasons for having a 5,7,5 structure in Japanese actually dictate a different structural outcome in English.

By: Merrill Ann Gonzales

Merrill Ann Gonzales — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:47:08 +0000

Some of these arguments attempt to shed a bit of light on a situation in all poetry – when does fine art become propaganda? and can poetry or haiku hold them both? Perhaps if we get back to the motivation behind each composition, we might be able to determine which is which and where we want to be. My own muse would divorce me if I employed a formula or tried to mess around with the meter or length of the lines. Not that that makes me any better a poet than anyone else, but possibly a happier one?

By: Allan Burns

Allan Burns — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:08:56 +0000

It’s just about impossible to translate a Japanese haiku into 5-7-5 syllabic form in English and not pad it out.

Take Eli Siegel’s trans of Basho’s most famous haiku:

Pond, there, still and old!
A frog has jumped from the shore.
The splash can be heard.

It adds a lot of stuff not in the original (“there”, “still”, “shore”, present perfect tense instead of simple present, etc.) just to squeeze out those syllables.

Harold Henderson provides the following literal word-by-word translation of the original:

Old-pond frog jump-in water-sound

That’s all the information in the original poem in eight English syllables although it’s not intended to be an idiomatic rendering into English. A good modern translation is Jane Reichhold’s

old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water

Which comes out to 12 syllables and is entirely faithful to the meaning of the original.

Also note that I never mentioned Elizabeth Bishop in this discussion; but I did cite one imagistic haiku-inspired poem by Amy Lowell.

I suggest consulting a readily available book like The Essential Haiku (The Ecco Press, 1994, ed. by Robert Hass) to get a feel for translations that approximate the duration of the originals. Some can be extremely terse:

I go,
you stay;
two autumns.
(Shiki; previously attributed to Buson)

That’s what the poem says; why pad it out? English and Japanese are very different languages.