Sails is a section of troutswirl that is devoted to presenting questions for discussion and debate on the nature and possibilities of haiku. Sails will be overseen by Peter Yovu. For an introduction to this section, see Sails.
• 1st Sailing
• 2nd Sailing
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3rd Sailing
presented by Peter Yovu
Haiku? Senryu? Something else?
You have probably noticed, under Viral 4.3 and Periplum #3, an ongoing discussion about a poem by Penny Harter, much of it centered around whether it is a haiku, a senryu, or something else. In this Sailing, I would like to continue and broaden the discussion somewhat. The central question is this: do these considerations help or hinder the understanding and/or enjoyment of a poem? In what ways?
As evidenced in the Viral and Periplum discussions, some people feel that the distinction is important. Others do not. But chances are, those who do not have studied the distinctions, and probably have even, for a while anyway, kept to them in their writing, or as guidelines for reading. Here then are two related question: how important is it for newer students to learn the distinctions and to practice them? How important was this for you?
This is an open forum of course, but I believe the most helpful approach here may be a personal one. If your imagination is best served by staying within certain bounds, it would be good to hear how that works for you. And similarly, if it is best served by testing the bounds, how does that work?
I feel it would be quite enlivening to see a poem or two which, like the Harter poem, may yield to us dimensions otherwise missed without this kind of examination. So please feel free to introduce (or re-introduce) to us such work. At some point, I may do that myself with a famous poem by Chiyo-ni. I hope looking at it in this light will be fun and perhaps instructive. But maybe I won’t need to.
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Oh, and thank you Paul for acknowledging Richard Pearse.
Boy, that is so cool – I hoped I would help by submitting two Ernie-ku (Merrill, BTW, they are both Ernie’s, the “summer” one a winner in the ASW awards this year) in response to Scott’s request for contemporary haiku-senryu … and what I get is a full-blown education. Marvellous.
Thanks so much, Paul and Allan. Really interesting.
The smile for me in:
summer
my golden retriever
rolls in it
is the third line … because we all know what dogs like to roll in, right?
Although the poem may suffer from naming the season, it very cleverly builds on that to bring us the simple joyfulness of being alive at that moment, for both owner and dog.
If everyone sees these as true haiku, then maybe there are others to be nominated as “cross-over” poems?
allan, you just blew my mind. i love facts like that.
Allan, Thanks for that info. It stirs all sorts of ideas about the biological history locked in each dragonfly.
Merrill
My reading of Ernie Berry’s “lily pad” accords with that of Paul (MacNeil). I see it as capturing an aspect of “dragonfly-ness” and as a haiku.
Just for fun–a few other favorite dragonfly haiku:
a dead dragonfly
on a dried weed stem–
wings extended
(Paul O. Williams; a particularly good one to read aloud)
spot of sunlight–
on a blade of grass the dragonfly
changes its grip
(Lee Gurga)
rustle of marsh grass
a dragonfly inches out of
its graying husk
(Jack Barry)
No one, though, it would be safe to say, wrote more dragonfly haiku than Lorraine Ellis Harr, who published a book titled 226 Dragonfly Haiku. And she also edited the journal Dragonfly.
Btw, just a quick natural history note. Dragonflies are actually quite substantially older than the dinosaurs. The oldest dragonfly fossils go back to about 325 mya whereas dinosaurs go back only to about 230 mya. So dragonflies established their holding patterns for nearly 100,000,000 years before the first dinosaurs appeared. They extended their wings during the 160,000,000 years during which the dinosaurs reigned. And they’ve been changing their grips for the 65,000,000 years since the Cretaceous-Tertiary Event, which they obviously survived, including inching out of husks in the 160,000-year blink-of-the-eye that modern humans have existed. Our brains aren’t really adapted to conceive of the ancientness of dragonflies.
I discovered something very interesting when I first started submitting drawings to magazines. I had done a whole series of abstract drawings and without fail, they were received as sexual images. They had no basis at all for being connected to sexual images except in the viewer’s perception. And the thought came to me that all that humanity does is exploring who/what humanity is. This viewer even finds a human connection between Anita Sadler Weiss’ dog and her own.. I read it as the sudden awareness that her dog has more freedom to enjoy summer than she does. Of course, that’s my reading. It may not be her intent or anyone else’s reading. So I have some difficulty trying to understand how subjectivity can get in the way of writing haiku? What am I missing?
On the other hand, to tweak Blake, (or maybe to shake and Blake) “How you know but every dragonfly that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”
I take your point, Louis, that the haiku poet writes objectively about her/his subjective perception. Readers should be aware; writers should also know their own perceptive filters. It was an Ernest B. haiku. When Sandra shared it, it became your haiku, and my haiku. It takes a 20th C. or later reader to find air traffic controller in this. Nothing at all wrong with this finding. I would still think it haiku. There is another hypothesis. Indeed Vees of geese and patterned flights of dragonflies “on patrol” were surely seen and written of before the Wright Brothers invented human flight (and a New Zealander, I believe, concurrently). What Ernest Berry is showing the reader is a part of the “little truths” of dragonfly. It is not stretching the realm of objectivity — on the surface, first reading, level — to show “holding patterns.” A close observer of most of the Odonates can tell the sex (color and behavior) of an individual. Dragonflies are always looking for a meal, but do claim a territory, defend it against other males, and try to attract females. A vast chemical exchange is underway among individuals, too. My point is that an individual one of these insects will return again and again to one place, a lily pad is easy for humans to see, take off, and return yet again. [I doubt it carries over day-to-day, but I have no way as just an observer to tell if the same dragonfly is positioned over or on a certain place yesterday as today.] Berry is not just making a flat description and telling us all about it — he has “learned” from the place and the dragonfly. This haiku has emotional depth, I posit. It is also seasonal, but diffusely so. Formal placement in saijiki aside, dragonflies (various species) are often 3-season insects quite effectively timed by genetics to hatch from their watery form when prey insects are available. The lily pad may have a shorter season and be the governing kigo in this haiku. Both are a nature reference — and despite that, the haiku is about them. They are the subject not a grafted-on special effect. What do you hear, if you open your mind to this haiku? Where is this shallow water necessary for water lilies? Do you see its flower, smell it? What of the methane bubbles from the muck the lily tubers spread in? Other insects, birds, colors, sounds of this marsh or shallow zone at water’s edge? What amazing creatures they are — surviving in fossil record since the dinosaurs. Berry is a smooth writer and a fine naturalist. It is haiku for me all the way. – Paul MacNeil
Thank you I will come back with this question. Isn’t this dragonfly haiku really an Ernest J. Berry haiku? It tells mostly about how people see things, no? relating one thing to another. I don’t think E. J. Berry went to the dragonflies to learn from the dragonflies– or maybe he did and actually learned about his own way of seeing things, and got a chuckle which I think makes this a senryu. My experience is haiku humor gives us a sad smile, and senryu gives us a chuckle which only when it is done reveals another sadness. Aren’t we all foibled by our perceptions?
By the way, I think it is important to learn about your own way of seeing things before you can see things.
Louis, Yes, please come back again. Everyone’s input so valuable to us all. That’s what’s so fun about this site…in addition to being educational…is that we all hope to explore the width and breadth and depth of haiku and can only do that with as many voices and points of view as possible.
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