Sails is a section is devoted to presenting questions for discussion and debate on the nature and possibilities of haiku.
. . . 12th Sailing . . .
BY Peter Yovu
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Can you make just one line dance?
close to someone in the stars white seeps inward
—Marlene Mountain
moon almost new we pass through the construction of unseen walls
—Chris Gordon
their wings like cellophane remember cellophane
—Lorin Ford
In his Montage for the week of May 3, 2009 (and also as Gallery Three in Montage: The Book), Allan Burns writes:
“English-language haiku tend to be written in three lines, corresponding to the metrical division of Japanese haiku, but Japanese haiku are actually usually printed in a single vertical column. By way of analogy with this form, poets such as Matsuo Allard and Marlene Mountain began writing English haiku in a single horizontal line—and thanks to their efforts that form has become established in English as the major alternative to the typical three-liner”.
To get to the heart of things, what does this alternative offer? What can a one-line haiku do that a 2, or 3, or 4 line haiku cannot? For you, does working with (or curiosity about) one-liners come, as Allan suggests, “by way of analogy” with the Japanese form, as a kind of natural extension of it? Do you look outside that tradition, to Western poets like Apollinaire and others, who explored the one-line poem from a different perspective? Or both?
Emily Dickinson, frequently admired on troutswirl, wrote:
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
A one-line haiku might resemble a line of prose, but it does decidedly different things. What are its possibilities? Can we dwell there a while?
*******
For an ongoing discussion about looking beyond Japanese traditions for inspiration and information, please see POSITION 1.
And for more information, especially about the history of one-line haiku, and its possibilities, here are three places worth checking out:
From One-line Poems to One-line Haiku by William J. Higginson
from the mountain/backward by Marlene Mountain
The Way of One by Jim Kacian (inside Roadrunner X:2)
And also, not to be forgotten, four important print sources on translating Japanese haiku (and tanka) into one line, by Hiroaki Sato:
Chapter 6 (“Translating Hokku, Haiku, and Renga”) of One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English (Tokyo and New York: Weatherhill, 1983)
“Lineation of Tanka in English Translation” in Monumenta Nipponica (Summer 1987)
“The Haiku Form Revisited, with a Thought on Alternatives for Kigo” (Haiku Society of America Newsletter, August 1990)
“On Translating Haiku in One Line” in Right under the big sky, I don’t wear a hat (The Haiku and Prose of Hōsai Ozaki), p 21-22 (Stone Bridge Press, 1993)
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Sails
- 1st Sailing
- 2nd Sailing
- 3rd Sailing
- 4th Sailing
- 5th Sailing
- 6th Sailing
- 7th Sailing
- 8th Sailing
- 9th Sailing
- 10th Sailing
- 11th Sailing
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“What Peter does not say is that some of us think that English-language haiku is now mature enough to push away from Japanese models, stand on its own, and work out its own guidelines or even rules. Charles Trumbell.”
Well, I would hope so Mr. President, and I would also like to believe that a haiku is strong/mature enough to carry any theme and/or subject line?
It’s rare that I personally write a one-line poem, because they
do tend to screw up my three line poems.
Today, I do not go looking for haiku, so if a poem happens to
find me as a three line poem, that’s fine, if the poem finds me
as a one-line poem, that’s fine too.
Myself, I do not care for the term “ku,” other than if you are
coining a term such as Michael Dylan Welch’s “déjà-ku,” and
I tend to call a one-liner, a one-line poem or a one-line haiku.
Philip:
It’s interesting to note that James Kirkup, for all the years he was the English language advisor to Ku, was the strongest proponent of three line haiku written in 5-7-5 meter I ever encountered. He wrote a number of essays on the subjects and never deviated from his opinion that this mode was the correct one for ELH.
Seeing one of chris gordon’s at the top of this page reminded me that in a recent issue of ant ant ant ant ant he reworked some previously published one-liners in three lines. e.g.,
a love letter to
the butterfly gods with
strategic misspellings
the breakfast special
missing a few letters
not quite spring
I tend to prefer these in one line (which may be missing the point of the experiment) and wonder what others think. This could relate to Jack’s earlier point.
An incidental note, considering one-liners outside the tradition of haiku: According to James Kirkup, in his essay “Yannis Ritsos: A Modern Greek Poet with Haiku Feeling”, in 1979 Ritsos “composed his first collection of ‘fragments’ – poems of one line, under the title MONOXOPDA or ‘One String Songs’ which have now been beautifully translated into French by Dominique Grandmont under the title Sur une Corde and published by the small Editions Solin. ….. Many of these short poems are like rapid sketches drawn with a single stroke of a brush, almost in a certain style of oriental calligraphic painting.” Among those Kirkup quotes in his own translation:
The egg shining in the mother’s hand.
A mountain, two apples, three soldiers.
Every second, a tree, a bird, a chimney, a woman.
Big proletarian moon over the sleeping town.
Outside the locked house, winds, smoke, chairs.
Kirkup goes on to say that “this is the type of poem which I started experimenting with in the early 1970s, under the influence of Gyomindo Ikehara’s one-line haiku magazine ‘Shikai’”, and “I have rarely passed a day without getting into shape for the writing of longer poems by practising some one-liners.” He also writes that when he was “Englishing” Ritsos after his “own fashion”, he found many of the one-liners falling into a 5-7-5 “disposition of syllables”. One of which:
A slim crescent moon.
The heroes urinating
at the street corner.
Those two poems are good examples of how single line haiku are effective, Sandra.
Hmm, I see that this message format won’t allow the vertical poem to appear as it should, with all the following lines centred under “the thrush”.
Sometimes the visual component of writing in a single line (across or down) is an active part of the poem.
I offer examples of a horizontal and a vertical haiku that use their layout to add to the poem:
gunshot the length of the lake
- Jim Kacian
the thrush
just
part
of
the
old
fence
post
- Margaret Beverland
I find something of the purposeful asymmetry of haiku lost in one line haiku.
Japanese poems, and their antecedents in China, were written in lines that went from top to bottom, sometimes from bottom to top, sometimes from left to write and sometimes the reverse.
If I were going to write a modern Psalm, for instance, I wouldn’t try to write it from right to left the way the original Hebrew was written.
I prefer three line haiku as it conforms to our poetic tradition.
I’ve read the recommended sites Peter introduces and certainly something can be said for one-line haiku. On the other hand, the imbalance of either one line then two or two lines then one juxtaposed seems to keep the poems moving. Just a preference, I suppose. Some works do well in one line (although I have to say that they seem easily realligned in three lines.
Interesting question and one that I think about a lot.
What Peter does not say is that some of us think that English-language haiku is now mature enough to push away from Japanese models, stand on its own, and work out its own guidelines or even rules.
The early practitioners of one-line English haiku, Matsuo-Allard and Marlene Wills/Mountain, DID consciously employ an analogy to the Japanese one-vertical-line arrangement of the text—I seem to recall that these two poets explored this notion in the 1970s in correspondence that I read on Marlene’s Web site (but can’t find now). There was a lot of imitation of all aspects of Japanese classics going on in the early years of American haiku, and it still dogs us and can lead to bland, even cliché haiku.
The gendai movement in English is hardly less imitative, however. It consciously patterns English-language haiku on Japanese models, modern this time to be sure, in terms of structure, mood, and content. I doubt, as Peter suggests, that haiku poets look to Appolinaire and others (or even our own Ginsberg or Ashbery) when deciding to write one-line haiku.
I know I don’t. When I write I try to have “form follow function.” Because of the internal rhythm of the material, sometimes one line works best. Period. Nothing to do with Bashô or Kaneko Tôta, much less Hiro Sato or Marlene Mountain.
This is taken from the haiku writing center blog:
Notes on Scott Metz “certain now” (Modern Haiku, vol 14:2)
Scott Metz’s single line poem — he prefers the word “ku” — published in the summer issue of Modern Haiku (p 62) is a good example of what can be done by/with a one-liner. Published in a haiku journal, this poem draws on haiku tradition in certain respects– for example, a focus on the impact of the life of non-human nature on human consciousness. As a series of juxtaposed “cuts” or units (often syntactical but also topical) it is extremely efficient and fiercely focused on just this “that.”
Here it is:
certain now i am somewhere among the dawn [2 spaces] bird [two spaces] notes
The English language haiku tradition of three parts is acknowledged by the graphic spaces (I had to indicate these with brackets for this blog); overriding that is the energy of the line itself – a line of words, after all; and these words gather a “certain” momentum that is all to the point.
What I especially admire is the tension in the unfoldment (I almost wrote funfoldment!) of the syntax: “certain now” is followed by the arch (a nod to e. e. cummings?) lowercase first person (which itself is a misnomer). The lack of certainty in “somewhere” further erodes the first theme.
The sense of dispersion of the ego takes flight, as it were, in “among the dawn” (Hart Crane?)where the misuse of the noun pushes the reader deeper into the text and finally, with expressive gaps between the nouns in a noun-on-noun phrase, into the full emptiness of “bird notes.”
In one line Metz recaps the Rimbaud theme “I is another” and the meaning of that paradox is given sensuous significance in the blast of dawn songs from ambient birds.
So, yes, a bit of ecstasy as fine as any hyper-romantic modern, but sweetly skillful in its proportions, which skill undercuts the egotism of the expansive romantic ego. The flow from “certainty” to the bubble burst of the ego (source of such certainty) is both high wire and high comedy.
A haiku or what-you-will, Metz’s one-liner is a gift worth circulating!
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