Montage #26 & #27

Paul,

Apologies if my manner of expression was misleading. I didn’t mean to say you spoke *for* the journal but only that you speak *as* someone who is an associate editor of the journal. I think you’ll agree you don’t stop being associate editor when you post, and in some sense you represent the journal, in an ambassadorial capacity, wherever you go. Your opinions do help shape the journal’s policies — in consultation, as you note quite appropriately, with five others. I was really only pointing to two facts: You are associate editor of the journal, and the journal does not accept (or has not in the past accepted) one-liners. This was just one sentence out of a number of rapidly typed paragraphs, and if the emphasis seems “off”, I regret that.

Best regards,
Allan

For me, the most significant thing about one-liners is that they offer an option. Each poet must judge for herself or himself when (if ever) it’s the best option for what is being expressed. The ambiguities a one-liner can create are sometimes part of the point; but the conventions of cutting make them comprehensible to the initiated most of the time (e.g., I don’t feel I share Paul’s difficulties with Stuart Quine’s “bolted and chained” or Jeff Stillman’s “cold moon”…and I could address that in more detail if necessary). As Mark Harris notes, the conventions of unpunctuated three-liners can certainly be enigmatic to the uninitiated — which is part of why some still advocate the use of strong punctuation to indicate cuts in three-liners. For others, with eyes that have made certain adjustments, such punctuation seems superfluous. One-liners sometimes push the boundaries (for the initiated) further, and to me that is always something at least worth trying.

English is written horizontally, so the horizontal one-liner is a Western analog of the Japanese vertical haiku. That’s pretty straightforward, I think. Of course, it’s also possible to write vertical haiku in English. John Martone is well-known for this approach — and his fans (I am one) may be interested to know Red Moon Press has just published a new collection of his work, Ksana. Here’s one ex. of what I consider to be a very successful English-language vertical haiku, by John Barlow:

down
the
leafless
beech
the
voice
of
a
nuthatch
(Acorn 18, 2007; reprinted Wing Beats)

I have regarded that as a masterpiece of English haiku since I first read it, and it’s a fairly rare case in which a haiku imprinted itself on my memory on first reading. Note the first word. Note the assonance. Note the seasonality. Note — esp. if you know nuthatches — the rightness of “voice” (as opposed to “song” or “cry” or whatever). Note also that a nuthatch is a bird that spends its life moving vertically up & down trees.

The point, for me, is that options and variety enrich our haiku and expand our creative possibilities. I am for creative freedom. I am certainly not against three-liners.

Paul speaks as associate editor for a major journal that will not accept one-liners. I have no complaints about that. Each journal must decide its policies, and as long as there are options and we all know where we stand, all is well. And Paul well knows I have the deepest regard for The Nest. The number of haiku I have drawn from The Nest for Montage, the number I have published there, and my annual contributions (all of which are matters are public record) attest to that. But if you do want to publish one-liners, as I sometimes do, you can try Acorn, bottle rockets, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Presence, Roadrunner, South by Southeast, Wisteria, et al. — they all do accept them. And I think that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt they are very much part of the contemporary mainstream.

And, again, one-liners are hardly new. As I’ve pointed out previously, Harold Henderson advocated experimentation with this form in 1970, almost forty years ago and just seven years after the founding of American Haiku. Michael Segers published one in 1971, and the crucial advocacy for this form came from Hiroaki Sato, Marlene Mountain, and Matsuo Allard back in the mid-70s. It may have been a “radical” approach then, but it is hardly so now.

Finally, on a different subject, I did not take your remarks about the “California Dreamin’” gallery, Adelaide, the wrong way. I just felt that after you and Christopher White posted I should try to state my own intentions regarding this latest edition of Montage. I certainly appreciate how you took the time to read the gallery carefully and to post your comment.

Glad to see all this discussion!

Interesting ramble, Paul. Your comment toward the end, “no puzzles please”, is a key to this question for me. When I was new to haiku, Quine’s “ebb tide” would have been a puzzle to me whether in one line or three. I might, for instance have read

ebb tide
a thin rain

as a chunk of language and been confused, possibly irritated. As haiku poets, much of what we write is a puzzle to newcomers. If we can recognize a break (or cut) with or without a line break, then for me other factors become more important.

A successful oneliner, for me, flows. My brain takes in multiple ideas, images, words, and then rearranges them without worrying at them. Conversely, three line haiku, which I have mostly preferred in my own writing, can sometimes be too leading.