Virals

Virals is a section in which one person chooses 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.

                                                                           —Gary Hotham

Among other things a satisfying haiku asks a number of questions from its reader. Some of them are interdependent and some of them stand alone. And not all of them can be answered, or should be fully answered. It is often this indeterminance that gives the poem some of its resonance. Its images and ideas vibrating. Never quite settling into distinctness. 

Hotham’s apple core haiku, like many of his haiku, is centered on an image-oriented experience with an obscured or understated narrative presence. Under this seemingly matte surface a number of questions are stirring. There is a tension in both the form and the potential subject matter that causes us to hover above its meaning like moths.

First there is the poem’s place in time. Its bid at social history. An ashtray in an office has become an obvious anachronism, and so refers to the time when there was less concern for smoking as a public health issue. Ads for cigarettes came with a physician’s claims for their health benefits.

Perhaps, though, we have moved on and the ashtray’s purpose has shifted to that of the generic waste receptacle. Still a familiar sight. Something no one had the energy to remove. The apple then makes its entrance as the healthy alternative. And so we get a different kind of public service announcement. But then there’s that apple core itself, sitting in the middle of the poem.

As with many of Hotham’s haiku, there’s a tangible representation of someone’s absence. A coat hanger in a closet. Warm shoes on the floor. A coffee cup in a hotel room.  One of the underpinnings to Hotham’s work and its appeal is that images of objects can be far more provocative than images of people in terms of opening up multiple narratives, even contradictory narratives. It’s as if the people in photographs or paintings keep us out. Privilege the meaning of the work for themselves. They know the story and it isn’t yours. When things stand alone we have more freedom to enter into them.

The apple core stops being merely an apple core, opens itself up, and becomes the hand that set it there. The hand of the person who perhaps just left the waiting room. To visit with whom? Social Worker, Employment Counselor, Court Clerk. A Doctor perhaps. What sort of doctor? How serious is it?

The observer of the apple, who now enters the room and the poem as well, are they waiting for this physician too? Have they merely accompanied the sick person? And so the hand that was on the apple becomes more intimate, more familiar, and perhaps more dear. Perhaps this is the office of an Oncologist.

The absent person who has left some tangible and incidental item can now signify our daily encounter with separation, loss, isolation, or even alienation in our quiet and barren institutional environments. And removing people from the poem itself has merely invited them back in in greater number.

Let’s look at the craft of the poem itself, how it facilitates its intentions.

From a distance the poem looks eaten away, eroded, a haiku with its lower left corner missing, which suites the image of the apple’s remains, the ashtray with its cigarettes, or not, consuming themselves in fire. 

The generous space before the second and third line also brings a pause, a silence that follows the quiet of line one. And finally serves to underscore the word of entry, waiting, which hangs above the empty space and seems attached to an already completed poem.

While the opening line is compact, concrete, and poetic, an already familiar grammar of the haiku, the second and third sound more like speech, or truncated speech, rendered invisible or flat with the inclusion of articles, absent from the first line. The effect is to create a further divide between the setting and the event.

The haiku diction of the first line suggests we will encounter a more traditional or familiar image to stir up our waiting room bathos, and despite the many places the waiting room takes us, we are ultimately left without a locatable narrative, the overwrought symbols of worry and difficult transitions (waiting room quiet my wife’s jewelry in my hand / waiting room quiet I unfold the letter again / waiting room quiet the water cooler adjusts itself) being absent and replaced by typical ashcan fodder, almost invisible because garbage has become so pervasive in our numerous landscapes. 

We have in fact trained ourselves not to see it, and this haiku makes us do so, because if we want some meaning and resonance from the poem, some frayed thread of a narrative to keep us going back to it, we have to find it in the ashtray.

                                                     white cotton nightgown
                                                     a cloud
                                                     on the bedroom floor

                                                               —Jean LeBlanc

I am a lover of clouds, even this one made from a white cotton nightgown.

Poems like this seldom get the essay, short or long, that is due them. They touch on the mystery of things and the deeper reflections within the human heart. They defy paraphrasing and resist any kind of satisfactory exegesis; they cannot be explicated by traditional Western means involving the surgical examination of segments and parts, inspection of phrasal structuring, investigation of allusions or close probing of metaphor.

In most haiku, nature dominates the imagery and is the thing we attempt to experience directly, without distraction or intellectual noise. This haiku is obviously different from that norm. Every object in it—the entire scene—is an artifact of human life. That cloud on the floor, for all its likeness in weight and form to a cloud of the air, is a white cotton nightgown. Things are only what they are, yet what they are depends on other things around them: This is not philosophy but how the mind experiences the world of objects and phenomenon, and how it “feels” emotion.

A poem of contrasts and likenesses, this haiku belongs to a tradition that runs as a strong thread through the entire literature. It is not a haiku about nature but human nature, and exhibits the same kind of subjective reality out of which the old masters, using imagination and the faintest, most attenuated form of metaphor, crafted these poems:

     Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
     Of the warrior’s dreams.

            —Bashō

     Scooping up the moon
In the wash-basin,
     And spilling it.

            —Ryuho

     The temple bell dies away.
The scent of flowers in the evening
     Is still tolling the bell.

            —Bashō

     Reluctantly
The willow leaves the boat
     Far behind.

            —Kito

     Every year
Thinking of the chrysanthemums,
     Being thought of by them.

            —Shiki

[translations by R. H. Blyth]

In the LeBlanc poem, it is that (metaphorical?) leap from nightgown to “a cloud” that leaves the intellect behind, and that at the same time opens up for the heart-and-mind a universe of endless possibility and potential within the simple framework of the poem’s imagery.

What is the emotion we feel here? The sensuous, experiential dimension is delicate, intense, very immediate. Hence, it is “real,” meaning solid. There is not one emotion but many, and they shift over time and with each reading. An immediate, subjective reality reels its objects and impressions through our psyche: motion in stillness, urgency in quietude, a cloud out of a nightgown. One thing becoming another, the endless fecundity and beauty of things: it is useless and perfect.

With each reading, between the poem’s first word and last, a kind of portal opens through which our stream of consciousness may pour, like water through a sluice gate. There is a rich and complete story here, to be sure, but what is the story? For me, it is as ever-changing as any cloud in the sky.

Re-reading the poem—at different times, in the day or at night, in different seasons, in different moods and personal circumstances—the poem seems always to tell me a different story about the owner of the nightgown, about the person who sleeps in that bedroom, or who remains awake on top of the bed in the stifling heat . . . Who is about to take into their arms a lover on a cold winter night or, perhaps, with a last kiss, has just let the lover go, to sneak over the wall in the garden . . . Or who, disappointed in love, gazes in sadness at the nightgown tossed lightly upon the floor, all anticipation deflated and a lonely night ahead.

In this poem, the implicit works more deeply on the mind than the explicit. The emotional content is huge, but unstated. The poem’s eroticism is delicate and as much spiritual as physical. While on first reading one may be arrested by the absence of human beings from this bedroom, all that passes in the glimmer of a moment. When reflection begins, we realize that LeBlanc has made a poem in which the presence of human beings is the more powerful and immediate for their absence!

Endlessly various in its possible interpretations, in what it conveys in feelings and experience to a reader, this is one of those quiet, stunning pieces that can shut our mouth and still the chatter in our brain.

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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 5.4
THE GARDEN
By John Stevenson

When offered the chance to write about a haiku I admire, it seemed as if every haiku I’ve ever read vanished from my memory. I knew that I could pick up almost any issue of the journals to which I subscribe or any of the haiku anthologies and find poems that would inspire admiration. But I decided that it would be more interesting to wait and see what poems came to me spontaneously, in their own good time. Ruth Yarrow’s was the first to arrive in this way.

The poem speaks for itself. I shall now proceed to gild the lily.

The poem says that, after the garden party, there is / was / will be the garden.

Viewed as experience—a party at 27 Sycamore Street—it might suggest that of a hostess, or a child of the household, a neighbor, or a gardener, caterer, or a musician packing his instrument.

It could be that of a guest who has returned in search of something lost or misplaced. The list can go on in this fashion until overtaken by exhaustion. In a similar vein, each of these observers has a range of potential responses to this encounter with a post-party garden and each of those responses may be in the form of thought, intuition, and/or visceral reflexes involving memory, present experience, or anticipation. So, for each trunk there are branches and for each branch there are twigs and leaves of potential experience and attending resonance. And yet the thing is so simple.

Alternatively, the poem could be looked upon as projecting a scene without a human participant, without a self as witness—after the expulsion from Eden, what is Eden? After one’s own death, what is the life that goes on in this world? The garden behind 27 Sycamore Street might be contemplated for an instant as a strange place, that is, a new place. What is it then? Not “what is it like” but what is it?

Or the poem might be about words. It contains six of them, two of which are repetitions. Iteration, inflection, and seasoning. It might be about words, words, words.

I believe in the twenty-seven ways. There are more than twice as many ways of looking at a haiku as there are of looking at a blackbird. Each of them is a way in which a haiku might be an effective poem and none of them is THE way.

One of the ways that I enjoy looking at a haiku is to notice how it embodies a correspondence between things depicted (there and then) and my experience as a reader (here and now). These “Virals” columns, like all of our discourse on haiku, are a virtual party. They can be great fun. They can be something to dread. They can be a social vehicle of career advancement.

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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 5.1 (Metz ➾ Lyles)
• Viral 5.2 (Lyles ➾ Chang)
• Viral 5.3 (Chang ➾ Stevenson)
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                                                          end of summer
                                                          the rust on my scissors
                                                          smells of marigolds

                                                                                  — Margaret Chula

Penny Harter’s write-up below on Margaret Chula’s haiku (above) is extracted from a review she wrote for Chula’s collection, The Smell of Rust, in Kyoto Review. Harter’s commentary on Chula’s haiku, though short, gets to the heart of things: finding the metaphor and linking the rust to our own “livingdying.” It was orignially my intent to add my own thoughts directly to Harter’s words. I’ve decided to keep them separate, however, in hopes of letting Harter’s words stand and shine alone.

So, a few things that that draw me into Chula’s haiku.

The first is the way colors are conjured without being entirely present. The marigolds blossom in the mind, for me, simply through the mentioning of their scent: life and color clinging, yet blooming, out of the rust, into another living thing. An interesting weave of life, death, and dying. In effect, a kind of world of experience, habit, tradition, and duty are created.

I like the decision to use “my” instead of “the”: “my scissors”. Not “the scissors.”

I feel that’s important because, as a reader, it makes me care more. It creates a sharper world for me and makes the overall effect richer. The idea that the scissors are, in a sense, the poet becomes more deeply felt.

And so the haiku becomes a creation where the past, present, and the future are interwoven. The scents are alive and lingering, a year is recalled, while at the same time the reader is left with a world to linger on and ponder. What will come and how will one handle it? Major themes are aging, and memory, but also the sense of being alive and, always, moving on with it all.

What do readers think of this haiku and what can you add to Penny Harter’s commentary and thoughts? What other angles do you see?

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Oxidation
By Penny Harter

                                                        end of summer 
                                                        the rust on my scissors 
                                                        smells of marigolds

                                                                                              — Margaret Chula

This poem appeals to several senses: visual, tactile, and olfactory. From shades of brown in the rough texture of oxidating metal, to a sharp and bitter odor. Rust does smell—of time, of oxidation, and, ultimately of transformation. Chula’s image of the sharp odor of marigolds lingering on rusting scissor blades moves beyond the expected. We are all rusting as we move through the seasons of our lives—free radicals oxidating our cells, especially as summer ends and we move into the deeper seasons of autumn and winter. Yet we take what we can from summer into the coming cold.

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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 4.1 (Metz ➾ Mountain)
• Viral 4.2 (Mountain ➾ Windsor)
• Viral 4.3 (Windsor ➾ Harter)
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