Sails is a section of troutswirl that is devoted to presenting questions for discussion and debate on the nature and possibilities of haiku. Sails is overseen by Peter Yovu. For an introduction to this section, see Sails.
. . . 10th Sailing . . .
Making the Break
BY Peter Yovu
October loneliness
two walking sticks
—vincent tripi
on the wind somewhere a
child, crying
here
—Martin Shea
pond ripples
moving the clouds
moving the sky
moving
—Gary Hotham
It seems that poets who work in the haiku tradition, or whose short poems are inspired by it, have many choices, more perhaps than standard guidelines would allow. One choice, of course, is to stay within those guidelines, or within guidelines which one has discovered to be fruitful. Haiku plays within limits, does it not? Or is it truer to say, it plays with limits?
What determines the shape a poem takes? This question has been with us a very long time, has been explored, answered, argued, mooted and booted countless ways, primarily between two poles: free verse and formal verse. Perhaps where one lands on this question is as much a matter of disposition as anything else. Haiku is vulnerable to the same considerations, which for me is encouraging: it tells me that it is not a backwater but a stream, a tributary adding volume and force to the braided river it enters.
Among numerous elements, some of them subtle, which give a haiku its shape, the two most obvious are the number (and length) of lines employed, and how those lines are broken. That’s the territory I’d like to sail toward this time.
How do you determine how many lines your haiku will be? Formalists might say three lines are optimal, seventeen syllables, seven of them stressed, that such a structure will be magnetic to poetry, as an orchid is magnetic to its bee. Others might take a less patterned view, allowing the content, a sandpiper’s erratic running for example, to determine the form, including the number of lines. The question is not which is better, but how does this work for you? Does working from an established form give your imagination the support it needs and the freedom to unfold? Does your imagination require that you be open to something unforeseeable? (I am using imagination here to include every way by which experience may be embodied in language).
Line-breaks. How important are they to you? Do you honor them—that is to say, when reading a poem out loud or to yourself, do you pause at the end of each line, giving each line its moment? Do you feel there should be a reason (not necessarily intellectualized) that each line ends where it does?
A lot of questions. A lot of choices. What may be most useful here (and fun) is choosing poems which you feel demonstrate strengths inherent in some of these choices. Can you show us a poem which had to be written with two lines? Three? More? How come? Do you know a poem whose line-breaks amplify its meaning(s) and perhaps surprise us? Or one which you would simply like to present for exploration?
I realize it will be tempting to bring one-line haiku into this discussion, but I’d like to save that for the next Sailing.
I look forward to hearing from you.
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Sails
- 1st Sailing
- 2nd Sailing
- 3rd Sailing
- 4th Sailing
- 5th Sailing
- 6th Sailing
- 7th Sailing
- 8th Sailing
- 9th Sailing
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sailing is funstuff, i wish i could afford a fast sailing boat’*:
Line break caesuras and (if you really must) enjambments are all that are needed when laying out a true haiku. Readers aren’t stupid, let them scan the words without superfluous decorative interruption! If some form of kire-ji punctuation is really necessary (rarely) then use what you would use if you were writing an informal letter to a close friend. When speaking your haiku, speak naturally – don’t show off your acting skills! Again, as in the writing, let the haiku simply and clearly do it’s invocation/evocation job, by speaking simply and clearly and in a pleasant (though not obsequious) manner.
— jp
http://www.facebook.com/haikucrossroads
“When a poem is recited, we hear the reader’s voice and, quite often, this illuminates that reader’s view of the poem as something quit other than one’s own. Sometimes commitments have to be made in recital over matters that the silent reader would be happy to hold as unresolved” John Stevenson. . .
John does have a point here. When you are giving either a
reading or a performance, as the performer, you do not give
an audience a chance to read the work. Am not sure if “trick”
a good description, but, the performer pretty much tricks an
audience into hearing said work the way he/she wants the
work to be heard. You can use different devices including
music, but it can be handle just as well by expression within the
performer/reader’s voice. And, there is always body language.
Dear Adelaide,
Thank you so much for this beautiful explanation of why this four line haiku works. "waiting
for a Bengal tiger… " — one more of mine:
a sacrificial goat
bleeds
. . . the Kali temple
at the rivulet
Presence # 39
It is almost like the Kali temple itself 'bleeds' and the rivulet is red with this blood of an inhuman act.
But as three line haiku, I found the subtle hint was lost. So I changed it to a mid-line caesura: It didn't seem good enough – the sadness I felt when seeing it, wasn't there, somehow. With each line that dropped – my heart seemed to sink with it and I wanted that:
But as a four line – it seemed to say everything I wanted to say . . . This was from my trip tracing river Ganga from her source at Gangotri in the Himalayas to where she joins the sea at Calcutta. Autumn 08
_kala
I just received Sonia Sanchez’s Morning Haiku.
the two poems below struck me in relation to this Sailing discussion.
They are each verses that compose part of larger “haiku” sequence:
5.
(Fannie Lou Hamer)
feet deep
in cotton you shifted
the country’s eyes
from 9 haiku (for Freedom’s Sisters)
and
Did you hear the galvanized steel
thundering like hunted buffalo?
(verse
from haiku poem: 1 year after 9/11
Alluding to earlier discussion around… The Haiku Anthology. I would have preferred:
An Haiku Anthology
The humour in Allan’s title, ‘Montage: The Book’, lies in that it alludes to the time-honoured ‘Hollywood movie’ promotional style…you know the sort of thing, ‘Pride and Prejudice: The Movie!’.
Well, I’d imagine that the humour and the nod are deliberate, anyway, since montage is a film technique and I noted the film strip on Ron’s cover of the book. Also of course, in reverse to the film industry’s penchant for making films of popular books, Allan’s ‘Montage’ was first an on-line production and subsequently, ‘Montage: The Book’.
A witty title.
Looking forward to my copy, which is most likely wending its way across the Pacific to me right now. (Unless the planes take the long way around, heading out over the Atlantic)
Here’s a 2 liner from Bob Boldman (the first line should be indented about 10 spaces)–
jan. 1
the corpse of a crow whitens the snow
This can be found in Montage The Book,
a wonderful production renewing my gratitude to Allan Burns. My one quibble is this: shouldn’t it be–
Montage A Book
FYI: Just got an email from the Poetry Foundation beginning this way:
“No jokes about April being the cruelest month for us! Yet something else T.S. Eliot famously said resonates for us in the current issue of Poetry: “poetry can communicate before it is understood.” That may be true . . . but most readers want to understand exactly why poems look the way they do on the page, because the choices poets make in a poem can seem bewildering. In our editorial meetings, we find ourselves focusing on particular lines or stanzas in just the same way that—as we can tell from our letters to the editor—you do…”
Btw, the discussion on line breaks, punctuation, capitaliztion, etc., continues under Viral 6.5, which is annoying to me, because I get a penny per post (a ppp if you must know) but only for what appears under these Sailings, so I’m losing money on the deal.
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