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 6.5
From Here On Earth
BY Judith Christian
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that star
seems close enough
to swim to
—Diane Gillen Lynch
We are, always have been, and always will be, among the stars. It was natural enough, pleasant enough, to choose this haiku by Diane Gillen Lynch. I first heard the rhythms of language in songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and I am dazzled by the images sent by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is also easy for me to travel off into intellectual musings about our relationship to stars. Why do we travel among them? Why do we want to touch them?
Ancient Buddhist cosmology asserted the existence of multiple, if not infinite, world systems. Then, as now, the light that travels from stars is what defines, what gives us the knowledge of those worlds. Epicurus, about 23 centuries ago, wrote, “There will be nothing to hinder an infinity of worlds.” Is it that the light of our minds knows that the stars will never end, and so to be among them means that we, too, have no beginning and no end? Modern astrophysics edges closer and closer to the ancients’ belief in the coming into being and passing away of an infinite number of universes, the system itself having no beginning and no end.
But wait . . . Basho is shaking his head and warning me away from such musings. Look at the first line of this well-tempered haiku. That star . . . of course. One star, the particular (Venus?), shining in the night sky, and from its light, the coming into existence of the observer. From our position on the Earth, with the naked eye we can look at only one star at a time. We can see many, but to really look, to discern the color and brightness with the naked eye, it’s one at a time. It is that particular star, and this particular poem, we are to look at, with the same intense gaze that is required to look at the night sky.
Where is the star and where is the observer? I see the star on or near the horizon, and between that star and the observer is a lake, or more likely, an ocean; but even if there is no intervening body of water, the night sky has its own horizons, and its own endless black pool. And, yes, the star seems close enough, but to swim to? There is a longing set up by the word seems, and the wistful desire to rejoin our eternal star selves is mediated by that word. We are firmly on terra firma, we are, alas, stuck here on Earth, which is exactly where a haiku should be. There is a beautiful hesitation, a gap between the second and last line, a place of expectation. I’m hooked. I’m there gazing into the distance for a moment, until the wave comes in and wakes me: to swim to. There is a dark danger in the last line. Overcome by longing for the eternal, desperate, or just impulsive—there could be many reasons for a night swim to a star; but like a hand grabbing one’s elbow, “seems” keeps us safe. There will be no swim. There is only the wonder, the inscape, the lapping water, and the lasting light of this poet and this poem.
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As featured poet, Diane Gillen Lynch will select a poem and provide commentary on it for Viral 6.6.
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• Viral 6.1 (Metz ➝ Robinson)
• Viral 6.2 (Robinson ➝ McClintock)
• Viral 6.3 (McClintock ➝ LeBlanc)
• Viral 6.4 (LeBlanc ➝ Christian)
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Since, I’ve stepped forth, I think our difference is one that is traceable to the many art movements of the twentieth century that questioned what a painting, or a sculpture, or any object should be: I’m reminded,for instance,of some of those strange chairs that the pop artists made in the 1960s. Wasn’t the point to question what a “chair” was; did it have to be made of a particular substance and need it be in a particular shape to qualify? It was a matter of the questioning of Platonism, you might say: do things have an intrinsic essence or nature?
Of course, there are many examples of this questioning of art throughout the century, some more striking than the one I’ve offered.
Must art convey an object in its “real” shape, or was art not already a medium that made this impossible and maybe undesireable?
I bring this up because I believe the school of haiku that requires strict rules of kigo, kireji, lower-case first words in lines etc., is also a school that insists on “objective” representation of objects and shuns anything remotely “subjective,” as if there were a real separation between the two. All we need do is go back to the expressionists and impressionists to see the remarkable results in art that followed from experimenting with subjective/objective.
Since, I’ve gone this far, I might as well say that I do not believe in the definition of haiku to be found as the declaration in many of the “prestigious” haiku journals.
The question remains, then,what is haiku, or, better, what is haiku now? I don’t know that i can answer that satisfactorily. I think that is a work in progress. But, surely, we need not be limited to the knowledge of the world that Shiki had when he created the form; he was a man of the turn of the century and sketches from life was, at the time, a predominant model for the arts.
I would also add that I find it a quaint practice that many haiku poets begin their lines in lower-case; I remember reading many years ago the admonition to do this because haiku was “consciousness,” not sentences or lines. At first, I followed, as is natural for a beginner. Then, I stopped the practice because it seemed wrong to me: a poetic line is a poetic line; it need not begin with a capital letter (although I do begin mine that way), but it is surely a sentence/line not “consciousness,” as something separate from its manifest form.
I also find it odd that so many haiku lack verbs; they seem like lifeless things to me without them. And I think the lack of verbs is caused by just this insistence that we are not writing poems composed of lines/sentences, but are writing “consciousness,” wordless poems, or alternatively that a haiku is the thing itself, rather than a conglomerate of lines/sentences.
As you well know, Marlene Mountain long ago wrote convincingly about one image haiku. Haiku need not be composed of two distinct juxtaposed images.
Michael:
Rather than offer a rejoinder or alternative analysis,let me be honest with you: I don’t think haiku requires keriji. The two (at least) part structure of what you call “sentenceness” always contains some form of tension/resolvement and to me this satisfies what I feel is what is essential in haiku. On either side of a predicate are two parts engaged.
could Lynch’s poem then be seen concretely? the ku itself being “that star” and the white page itself functioning as a second part?
Jack, in response to you statement that Lynch’s poem is “broken into lines and is not a sentence,” I don’t believe that’s true. Of course it’s broken into lines, but that doesn’t remove its sentenceness. A fundamental characteristic of haiku is the two-part juxtapositional structure (this juxtaposition is both grammatical and imagistic). The original poem definitely lacks grammatical juxtaposition. And that’s because it is indeed still a single grammatical sentence. Creeley’s comment about lines isn’t entirely applicable to haiku, because haiku as a structure (in two parts, traditionally) that Creeley wasn’t addressing.
Some people ask why haiku poets often start with a lowercase letter (unless a proper noun) and omit a concluding period. Others may have their reasons, but one reason for me is because starting with a capital letter announces “I am a sentence,” and concluding with a period reinforces such a notion. By starting with a lowercase letter, the poem immediately tells the reader “I am not a sentence.” And that’s a good thing with haiku, because they are deliberately fragmentary, in both or at least one of the two parts. And yes, there should be two parts, in most cases. Lynch’s poem has just ONE part, regardless of the lineation.
Remember that poems with two parts DO still have lineation in the one of those two parts that is spread over two lines. Just as that line break doesn’t make that single part suddenly be two parts, so too a single-sentence poem (like Lynch’s) doesn’t suddenly have three parts just because it is lineated into three lines. I believe that’s a misunderstanding of what it means for a haiku to have two parts — a structure that I believe is independent of (has nothing to do with) how many lines a haiku has. In other words, a haiku may or may not have two parts regardless of whether it’s a one-liner, a two-liner, a three-liner, etc., or even if it’s concrete/visual — even Cor van den Heuvel’s famous “tundra” poem has TWO parts, in my opinion, with the white page itself functioning as one of the parts, since the poem is inescapably visual and not simply textual.
Again, to clarify, a caesura or pause isn’t necessarily the same thing as a true *juxtapositional* structure. Many (usually slight) caesuras prompt natural line breaks, which is at it should be, but those are not the same as the juxtapositional shift sought after in haiku as an equivalent to the kireji. Not all haiku require such a structure (and maybe Lynch’s poem doesn’t), but to my mind this poem (Lynch’s) does not have it. Fortunately, it succeeds in other ways, the same way that Jack Cain’s famous “the empty elevator / opens / closes” succeeds in spades despite nary a season word, but I do think it would be better off adding an additional line and more deeply exploring a two-part juxtapositional structure.
Michael
P.S. I still think “seems” is vital to Lynch’s poem. It adds a subjective element that allows doubt to enter the poem, and in that tension of uncertainty, the reassurance that *maybe* one could swim to the stars becomes even more enticing. The word “seems” puts the rest of the poem into the context of something, even if we don’t know what that context is. If “seems” is missing, then one HAS swum to the stars, and there’s no tension, no doubt, no grounding in the real world (or at least not enough), even if no reasons for doubt are part of the original poem. (But again, if the poem introduced a juxtaposition, it could suggest a context for the doubt of “seems,” which I think could greatly strengthen the poem.)
I’m reminded of what Robert Creeley once said about sentences in poetry: he said that a sentence is a duration of time spent in prison and has nothing to do with poetry. He said only lines pertain to poetry.
We are talking about poetry and poems, so Lynch’s poem is broken into lines and is not a sentence.
While we often find it difficult in English to accept a pause,a caesura separating a subject from its adjective (as in this haiku), still there is definitely a leap (what kireji is for) between star and seems close enough.
I have always found it disconcerting to demand or expect “strict” or conventional means in English haiku to create juxtaposition.
I agree with Peter. This poem contains caesura, albeit a subtle one.
Regarding juxtaposition or internal comparison as Henderson called this inclusion of two ideas:
I see it here. The star, existing in time, we know not how many years, nor how many years it will be in the sky before it burns itself out; the years, light years, it has taken that star to be visible to the poet; the distance to where it is in space and the impossibility to reach it(at least in our lifetime); as compared to to poet who has lived so few years in comparison; the ability of the poet to close the space from place to place on earth by plane, bus, car, etc.; the immense vastness and endlessness of the heavens as compared to the circular area of the earth.
I didn’t think of these things at first. It was the quiet image that attracted me, but more thoughts came with subsequent readings. As far as the word seems, I think it anchors the poet to this earth. She is taken by the beauty and mystery of what she sees and feels at that moment, but is still aware of reality.
Adelaide
A few thoughts following Michael’s: for what it’s worth, I’ll say that in offering a different version of Lynch’s poem, ideas about juxtaposition were not in the fore. I wanted to test out how it might feel without the word “seem”. I still hold to my earlier comments: “seems” removes, for me, some of the vividness the poem might otherwise have. It will be implied, anyway, for the reader who requires it.
More to the point is the matter of line-breaks, something which deserves greater exploration, I feel. I appreciate Michael’s attention to juxtaposition, which may be considered as the overlap of perceptions/impressions, one replacing (but not necessarily annihilating) another, the overlap creating a third space to be filled or vacated by the reader. We know many ways this can be and has been done, and Richard Gilbert, for one, has written about it extensively.
If one is going to write a haiku (or poem inspired by haiku) using 3 (or 2 or 4) lines, there must be some reason for, or value in doing so. No? (Many poems seem arbitrarily lineated, but I’ll leave that aside for now). If one honors the line breaks, and you know whether you do or don’t by how you read the poem out loud, then each line offers its own perception, to be replaced, altered, and juxtaposed with the next. Different readers will do so differently.
In the version I offered, which I only use because it is close to hand, I read “a star” as its own unit of perception—I pause after reading it. I don’t know initially if it is going to shine there alone in its sky (or mind or body/ of water); I don’t know if it is going to connect to a memory, or to imagination, or what. It would not be distracting to add a dash here. Might help. The second line—“close enough”– acts as a perception of not knowing, or anticipation, and the final line “to swim to”, brings home the surprise, brings home the realization that a star is, well, maybe not what we think. All this is present in Lynch’s poem, and one could argue whether it needs something more or different, which in different ways, Michael and I have spoken to.
So lineation, honoring line breaks, can be a subtle way of juxtaposing when skillfully employed. Says I. Seems like a good subject for a “Sailing”, especially if we include the exploration of one liners. Wudja think?
that star
seems close enough
to swim to
—Diane Gillen Lynch
In response to Diane’s poem, Peter Yovu offered a suggested revision:
a star
close enough
to swim to
Perhaps Peter’s impulse to do this stems from the fact that the original poem, as lovely as it is, reads as a single sentence, and thus lacks the pause or kireji that we customarily expect in traditional haiku. Yet Peter’s version still reads as a single phrase, so that seemingly wasn’t his motivation.
Whether to say “that” star and whether to say “seems” or not strikes me as the poet’s choice — and would be intertwined with his or her voice and perspective. I’m okay with saying both — and feel, actually, that “that” is essential, because it emphasizes a personal connection to a particular star, which I think is part of the poem’s point. On the other hand, I can also see the virtue of a slightly tighter/briefer presentation, which Peter was getting at.
But neither version gets at the two-part juxtaposition that is so often effective in haiku. Does every haiku need that structure? Not necessarily, and maybe this poem is one that doesn’t. But I must confess that my first reaction on reading the poem was to be aware that it was a single sentence with no cut or juxtaposition, and thus that it might have missed an opportunity to go further. Off the top of my head, what about this:
divorce final–
that star seems close enough
to swim to
Obviously, this is a very different poem, and other first lines (or possibly last lines) might be explored. My point with this suggestion is to ask whether the poem could go further, even though I already like the distance it already takes us. Indeed, a good juxtapositional structure can take us deeper than haiku without it. By employing an effective juxtaposition, employing images or contexts at right-angles to what’s right in front of us, haiku adds, quite literally, another dimension to the poem.
I came for a swim tonight, to watch the star dust poets twinkling in my darkness…you are all so far but I swim to each of you on your words…the patterns of light across the night … This haiku is wonderful in that it brings out so many facets of our thinking…so many planes on this diamond in the sky.
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