Comments on: Viral 3.5

By: Lorin Ford

Lorin Ford — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:20:40 +0000

I had wondered about the origin of THF’s blog’s name! A mystery solved.

No problems with new word coinage when, as ‘troutswirl’ does, it shows exactly what it means and so well that I instantly recognised what it was, but now that I read the haiku, how right it is in context. John Wills has the eye of a fisherman, knows things by their signs or traces. As Cor says, there is a difference to the patterns of water purling around a log etc. , a kind of repetition if watched for a while, and the pattern made by a living thing. That (unseen) fish has just fed, and on something dislodged from the log by the rain or brought down to the river surface by the rain. For a very short time, the traces of the trout’s dynamic activity , the trout’s ‘signature’ are written in the water. Similarly, the signatures of eels, turtles, small school fish and other living things can be identified by their different effects their movement has on the patterns of water. We probably learned how to do this from fishing birds, originally!

ah, this haiku makes me feel like dusting off my old rod and heading to a river right now!

The word I stumbled over was ‘deadhead’ until I read Cor’s explanation, so my guess is that it’s a regional word. (Until now, I only knew the verb, as in ‘deadheading the roses’, or the uncomplimentary slang noun which designates someone you don’t think is very bright) I’m not sure if there is a word in usage for such ‘old logs in the river’ in Australia, apart from ‘a diving log’ or ‘a snag’. There might be, but I’d guess they would vary over the regions, here, too.

By: Adelaide B. Shaw

Adelaide B. Shaw — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:41:41 +0000

When the Troutswirl was set up I looked up the word in four different sources. Nothing, so I concluded that the meaning was what appeared obvious: a swirl of water in which a trout was swimming. I probably read this haiku of John Wills’ years ago, but until now had forgotten it and didn’t know the association to this blog. If an explanation was given when the name was announced, I missed it.

It is an apt word to convey how my mind works when composing a haiku. Perhaps, composing is too conscious. Often the images, the experience, the words are as elusive as that trout swirling in a rush of water. There and gone. The composing part is in trying to remember and capture what I think I just felt.

I’m glad to see this haiku again.

Adelaide

By: Allan Burns

Allan Burns — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:28:14 +0000

Excellent to see the blog’s eponymous haiku show up in the Virals series–and to have Cor’s penetrating analysis of it. Certainly, it’s one of my own all-time favorite English-language haiku, and I like it that much more after reading all these remarks. Wills took a great number of aesthetic risks in his work and usually pulled them off brilliantly, as with the unique Joycean neologism here. Cor’s word “elemental” seems inescapable in discussions of Wills’ work. Great stuff, which never seems to lose its incantatory power.

By: Mark F. Harris

Mark F. Harris — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:03:09 +0000

“Although it is basically about the single moment of the “troutswirl,” to experience the haiku’s full resonance one should also be aware of the several states, or conditions, of water that precede and accompany the moment.”

As Cor points out above, Wills’ haiku is about a moment of perception, and also the nature of perception. For me, it is also about the moments just after the troutswirl, an elusive and ephemeral phenomenon often accompanied by the question, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”

A swirl of water and bubbles, maybe a flash of color and maybe not, and then a long stare at the water…

By: Tom D'Evelyn

Tom D'Evelyn — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:56:23 +0000

I’d only add to Cor’s exemplary digest of perceptions that well up from the wildness at the heart of the poem a delightful sense of play, of equivocal dissemination, that flashes forth in the interesting “word” at the end, which is also a new beginning. That strangeness is a token of a unique coming-to-be; it communicates the stretch of art and even the artificial, the gaudy frame-breaking of imagination. “Let be — it’s cool, it’s good!” A sort of idiotic stuttering, no, in the face of that which transcends us? A good poem always seems to implicate “us” in an awareness that says “yes” to “transcendence as other” — something good, and good for us, which we can’t explain or describe or even categorize except through this kind of metaphysical chit-chat, for which I duly apologize.