25
Oct
Oct
Montage #34
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“Halloween Masque” (Montage #34) features haiku by Clement Hoyt, Tomas Tranströmer, and Ann K. Schwader.
A Hallowe'en mask,
floating face up in the ditch,
slowly shakes its head.
— Clement Hoyt
A corrosive wind
blasts through the house in the night—
the name of demons.
— Tomas Tranströmer
razored through to the void raven — Ann K. Schwader
Category : Montage / News
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Hi, Guys, Just stopped by for a moment..
Any “art” that touches us…is truly art. But each person has different things that “touch” them. I have read many haiku over the years that I thought were really good…but the ones that linger…the ones that seem to reveal something to me …teach me something about myself that I had no clue I knew… These are the haiku that I treasure. There is a diversity in haiku that I think is good and healthy as long as there is mutual respect and one of the things that make this blog so valuable…the extraordinary respect everyone goes to to try to comprehend what the other is getting at.
Hello, Dave, re the general Poetry journal
yep. Or Billy Collins or Gary Snyder or… any ‘known poets’.
Totally in agreement with your reasoning re the context of haiku definitions, too.
Recently, at a ‘general audience’ poetry event in support of the Yarra River’s Heron Island, I had time to read out one ‘long poem’ and a series of haiku (on the theme of ‘rivers’) Just as I begun the haiku series, a bloke in the second row with a very loud voice interrupted with , ‘What is haiku?’ Yikes! I only had time for about a 5 second answer! But in that context, that was all that was required, thank goodness. This is what came out::
‘Haiku, in the English language, are very short poems adapted from a traditional Japanese form of poetry. Their focus is usually on the natural world.’
(then I quickly began to read, before any more questions came)
Lorin
Just thought of another consideration in regard to the importance of haiku definitions — context. We all know this: I’m just adding a little to the conversation.
If I’m introducing haiku in English to a group of people, and I don’t want them to become totally exasperated with me, a simple definition of haiku is important.
If I’m reading a collection of poems by people who usually know what they’re doing, and the editor has deliberately included work that challenges a simple definition of haiku, a simple definition is not that helpful to me. But if i then get into a conversation about this collection and talk turns to whether a poem is a haiku or not, our respective definitions become important in the conversation.
If I am an editor of Poetry magazine, my working definition of a haiku might be “A kind of brief poem we do not publish unless the work seems to fit with the other poems we’ve selected for that issue. It might help if the work was by someone we’ve heard of, like Tomas Transtromer.”