Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.
• Viral 4.1 (Metz ➾ Mountain)
• Viral 4.2 (Mountain ➾ Windsor)
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Still Rocking by Sheila Windsor
broken bowl
the pieces
still rocking
— Penny Harter
I won’t attempt to define this brilliant haiku: that would be a kind of vandalism. Haiku, when it truly works, is the depiction, the encapsulation, of a moment that could not be expressed so perfectly in any other way. A moment caught in passing, overlooked by a million others and oneself, a billion times. I will though, attempt to express a little of what this particular haiku does for me: it conjures the interconnectedness of the All. We have ’bowl’ as thing, as person, as humanity, as magnolia tree in bloom. It speaks of brokenness en route to somewhere else, a new form, new movement, next stage. It honors, in the simplest, absolutely briefest of ways, life, in all it’s marvelous manifestations and processes. My sincere thanks to Penny Harter for this haiku and many others, it was hard to select just one. My thanks to the countless other haiku writing kindred spirits, personally known to me or not, from all parts of the globe and from a variety of times: selecting one was next door to impossible, yet I have enjoyed the challenge immensely, for it has required me to immerse myself in haiku and that’s a place I love to be.
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“broken bowl” was first published in In the Broken Curve (Burnt Lake Press, 1984)
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As featured poet, Penny Harter will select a poem and provide commentary for Viral 4.4.
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To the the degree to which we can agree on the meaning of words, we create and partake of a collective power. In the arts, it is the kind of power that Robert D. Wilson describes above. The effort to achieve this in the arts and in all other human endeavors will never end as long as there are human beings but it can never succeed completely. It is human nature to both seek and resist others. Our myths and our history tell us that it has been that way and experience tells us that it goes on in that way.
between people,
a glimpse
of the second tower
So we will have our discussions about defining haiku. We will benefit and suffer from them. We will strive to define “we.”
One reading I had of this ku is an archeological take. That a broken bowl from an ancient civilization has been unearthed. The wind picks up, a breeze passes, and the shards, still close to one another, move. Something that’s been immobile for perhaps a thousand years is suddenly, to the human eye, moving again.
This is probably too fanciful, but this reading reminds me that the bowl is made of clay, and is essentially made of earth. This leads me to ponder numerous creation stories from all over the world about humans and animals having been created from earth/clay.
And I think, perhaps, this is why the bowl is so much more profound than, say, an egg. Since the beginning of humankind, people have been making and creating bowls, thus being intricately and spiritually linked to the earth, and dependent upon t for survival. Bowls hold sacred things that sustain us (water, wine, rice, porridge, cereal, blood).
The bowl Penny has written about is sacred. It has spirit. It is a god. Her ku is an act of worship, and she immortalized it. Whenever we come back to it, it will always be moving.
First of all, I like Penny Harter’s poem.
As for caning labels and calling all poems simply poem, that’s as anti-intellectual as anything I’ve read or studied in Literature. When we take off labels, remove genres, we in turn lose rules, identity, historical foundation, aesthetics, and metrical schemata that makes each genre what it is. On the other hand, without identity, one has carte blanche to do and write whatever they want without criteria to say if it is a good or bad poem. A haiku is a haiku, a tanka is a tanka, and they come with defined rules metrical schemata, aesthetics, conceptualizations, etc. that make them what they are. Many westerners rebel against this and many call three lined poems of any metrical schemata, a haiku, with or without a kigo with no intelligent ground to base this upon.
A sad day when we can label Ogden Nash poems, haiku.
*sorry, perhaps “philosophical” is a better term to use than “metaphysical”.
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