Essences explores the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America
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Essence #3
(part 3)
By Carmen Sterba
Carmen Sterba’s Interview with Cor van den Heuvel
〜Part 3 of 3〜
Carmen Sterba: Does the fact that you read your early haiku in coffee houses cause you to be more dramatic in your readings? Would you like to see haiku read more often with jazz? Or even hip hop?
Cor van den Heuvel: I’m sure the way I read my work, including my haibun and haiku, has been influenced by my early experience in coffee houses. I think the haiku spirit as I usually try to follow it, with the emphasis on simplicity, can be complemented with many of the sounds and rhythms of jazz. It could be used in the period of silence between two haiku or after a passage of prose to introduce a following haiku. I don’t think hip hop would work for me.
C.S.: In understanding the roots of the haiku movement in North America, I hope to include both those who see haiku as poetry and those who see it as a Zen poem or something in between. Since 1999, when the last edition of The Haiku Anthology came out, the numbers of haiku poets have exploded through online groups, online journals, and instant news through blogs. In New York, you had such a tight knit group to meet with and write with from 1971. Do you have any advice for those whose contacts are only through the Internet?
C.V.: Only that examining how the poem means word for word and how it is structured on the page is only a beginning to finding out if it works. Sometimes the poet sees in the words what he wants to see, even if it is not really present in the poem. Getting others’ reactions is very important to finding out if the poem is really suggesting what the poet wants it to suggest. I think it is much easier to find this out in direct face to face contact then going through the web. Not only do you get a more immediate verbal reaction, you also get clues from facial reactions and other body language.
C.S.: I would be interested in how you interpret your one word haiku, “tundra”. Or is that left to the reader?
C.V.: It is what it is: “a level or undulating plain characteristic of arctic or subarctic regions.” The important things are to see it alone in the mind or in the middle of an otherwise blank page and to color it with a season, preferably spring when it is blowing forever with grasses, flowers, birds (with their nests and eggs), and insects; or in winter when it is covered with endless drifted snow. To see the vastness of it spreading out from the word across the page and across the world. And to hear the sound of it. The word.
C.S.: May I have your permission to publish the following four haiku?
C.V.: Yes.
sun
on the saddle-bags
snow in the mountains
[Sun in Skull, 1961 Chant Press]
summer afternoon
the long fly ball to center field
takes its time
[Play Ball, 1999 Red Moon Press]
a tidepool
in a clam shell
the evening sunlight
[Dark, 1982 Chant Press]
after the speeches
the honored dead return
to their silence
[A Boy’s Seasons, 2010]
(To be published this year by Single Island Press; Originally serialized in Modern Haiku in 1993)
❧
Thanks to Cor van den Heuvel for his generous interview!
It is my hope that Essences will become fluid with new voices and continue in a way that will encourage new research into English-language haiku history. To make this happen, I have already chosen my successor for 2011 from another country.
Meanwhile, I will continue with the Sixties and Seventies explosion of journals, and haiku organizations in North America, while highlighting some of the English-language haiku masters. I hope that other poets will join in with anecdotes about these times.
Which haiku poet would you like to interview if you had the chance? What are some of the interviews or articles that you read in haiku print journals or internet journals that have been most valuable in your personal haiku journey?
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Essences began as a column written by Carmen Sterba in the North American Post in Seattle, WA, a bilingual newspaper in Japanese and English. Its purpose is to go back to the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America: the major poets, the individual styles of haiku, the books, the journals and conferences as they evolved from the sixties and seventies onwards. This will be a short version, so feel free to add information and comments as we go along.
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Personally, I think of “tundra” as an ecosystem with multiple images spreading out on all sides. For some reason, I always think of the geography of Russia when I see the word tundra and that reminder adds an almost unlimited expanse in my mind. As a child of the sixties, I’d have to say, “It blows my mind.”
I think the other choices: core, plague & precipice
multiply images for a completely different reason
than in the word, tundra. There are many definitions
of core, there are many kinds of plagues and a precipice can be defined in various ways, but I doubt that these words would reverberate with poets in the same way.
In addition, “tundra” in itself can reflect seasons whereas the other selections cannot. Does this make a difference? The fact that there can be one or more seasons in “tundra” may be a major reason for it to be considered a haiku by many haiku poets who regard seasonal references as very important in a haiku. Since English-language haiku does not need to adhere to the 5-7-5 form, that almost all of Japanese haiku does, I don’t see why we can’t have haiku in a one-word form, but it would be extremely difficult to best Cor’s iconic haiku.
Is there a one-word haiku contest in the future?
Wil:
I like your one word poem; it’s both clever and somewhat brilliant.
precipice
I think that one-liners like “tundra” and “core” come to the heart of listening to the word. They force you to enter and explore the tactile and many layers one word can hold. So often I feel that haiku can skip over the depth haiku can bring and I appreciate these bringing us back to the heart of the matter. Whether or not you label them as haiku??? I expect each will make up his/her own mind on that matter. But I think they are more that witty and humorous…although that too.
To me, John Stevenson’s ‘core’ is a humorous and witty take on Cor van den Heuval’s ‘tundra’, a kind of ‘in joke’, and ‘tundra’ in its original context of word echoing in white space is a good example of a combination of concrete-sound poem. Such were popular here in the 1960s… I recall one:
vortex
in the shape of a vortex, perhaps a comment on Vorticism (Pound, again) which was *primarily* a movement in the visual arts, with the off-shoot of ‘concrete poems’.
Despite Michael’s sensitive and imaginative reading and despite the impact that one word, one image, in the right ‘frame’ can have, I feel that ‘tundra’ might be more clearly a ‘concrete-sound’ poem’ than a haiku. Though undeniably there is an image and as Pound had it, the image is primary in poetry, the image (as Michael observes) is juxtaposed ” with the field/space around it”. It is unqualified by any other word or image. It inhabits a space, both as image and sound, like a first thing, without relationship. It is word as creative potential.
Is it important to anyone that ‘tundra’ be seen to be a haiku? If so, I wonder why. I’m serious…I don’t understand. I would *like* to be convinced that it could be, but so far I’m not. Perhaps it was an experiment to see how minimal haiku minimalism could go? As such, I find it interesting and I like Cor’s statement above in answer to Carmen’s question: “It is what it is”
I grew up in a small country town where the pub and the service station generated their own electricity, and the only outside light to be seen was the big HELL sign glowing in the darkness above the service station…one letter had ‘died’ & the locals thought it was funny, or an appropriate comment on the town, or a way of amusing passers-through, so it stayed that way for a long time. It may well have been a ‘found’ concrete poem.
I could write:
ULURU
in red against a sky-blue background. It has been there a very long time, was part of a sea-bed in more ancient times than tundra was, is resonant in every sense and ‘teases us out of thought’ (Keats)
But why would I call it a haiku, rather than something else?
“are these haiku?
exquisite minimal poems?
pretentious bullshit?
Scott”
That is quite a list of options !
furu-ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
tundra
.
Re: tundra, core
In both cases so much depends upon the visual placement, in the middle of the page, in the middle of the book, that they are akin to concrete poetry in that regard. ‘tundra’ wouldn’t work so well for a haiku reading for instance (though you could give it an aural space), and ‘core’ not at all (relying also on allusion, visual and otherwise). But in their visual contexts I’d say they do what haiku do.
P L A G U E
i’m curious as to what others think about Cor’s one word poem:
tundra
(from *the window-washer’s pail*, New York: Chantpress, 1963)
do you consider it a haiku? why or why not?
any takers?
William J. Higginson called it “the ultimate one-line haiku”.
As as extension, John Stevenson recently published a one word poem (an homage?):
core
(*Live Again*, Red Moon Press 2009)
And then there’s also Robert Grenier’s two word poem:
two trees
(*Sentences*, Whale Cloth Press, 1978)
are these haiku? exquisite minimal poems? pretentious bullshit?
Very interesting to read your comments, Cor, on the “tundra” poem. I’ve always felt it to be an early spring poem, with the word itself being like the first dark rock that emerges in springtime amid a vast expanse of snow (the white page) just starting to melt. The poem juxtaposes the word with the field/space around it, it’s seasonal (at least to me, interpreting the white page as snow just starting to melt), and of course it uses objective sensory imagery (the name for the tundra). And it leaves so much that’s unstated. So to me it hits several of the primary targets for haiku — and I do mean that it’s a haiku. To think that any single word could be put on a page and be tossed off as a haiku is to misunderstand the rightness and genius of treating this particular word in such a way. This poem may be on the edges of haiku, using at least some techniques of concrete poetry as it does, but to me it is definitely a haiku — and one of my favourites. Whatever the case, though, as you say, Cor, it is what is, and I’m very grateful for it.
Thanks once again for conducting the interview, Carmen.
Michael
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