Sherry Chandler

The wrecking ball swings

Haiku is a poetry form that escapes me.

Even after more than a year of more-or-less continuous practice of writing haiku-like (haiku-ish) micropoetry, I wouldn’t say I hit more than one time in ten producing anything I’d call poetry, let alone a haiku. Though my readers sometimes express appreciation for posts I’d call complete failures.

Which leads me to wonder whether there’s something I just don’t get.

I would quote about the same odds for haiku I read — about one in ten hits, fewer than that are really powerful defined by the Basho standard.

But even classic haiku sometimes leave me feeling a little so what. Issa’s famous radish haiku, for example:

Harvesting radishes,
he points the way
with a radish

It’s a small charm, like a feather. Maybe I want something heavier, something to chew over like a mouthful of taffy.

I also sometimes have problems with reading collections of haiku, whether a one-author book or a journal. It’s somewhat like eating rice cakes. (There are some notable exceptions.)

All this established, I will now tell you that I read Barry George’s Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku (Accents Publishing, 2010) with considerable delight.

I am willing to entertain that it is the urbanity of these haiku that give them an edge — you are free to read that statement at least two ways.

Maybe the urban landscape of homelessness and politics offers a fresher field.

Nevertheless it takes a keen intelligence to find turns like this:

Labor Day rally —
the candidate turns toward
the glare of autumn

followed on the facing page by

autumn field —
two sides of the same flock
taking off, landing

These two poems stand alone well enough but I love the way they play off one another. I don’t know, maybe that violates the nature of haiku but for me, it adds depth.

And, in fact, though the haiku in Wrecking Ball don’t all relate so directly one to the other, they nevertheless resonate with one another to create a portrait of city life.

Barbara Sabol interviewed Barry George at Public Republic, and I found his discussion of the form helpful. He talks about his process and the ways in which his poems both are and are not haiku.

It amazes me, sometimes, how much controversy can rage among people who write haiku about what is and is not legitimate. For myself, I don’t think I’ll ever actually try writing something I define formally as haiku, but my encounter with George has helped me clarify a bit what is going on with me when I write the micropoems.

I will give him the last word:

our culture’s appreciation of haiku has been hamstrung by the mistaken idea that their primary characteristic is seventeen (5-7-5) syllables. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese and English languages are so different that most writers and translators of haiku in English (and other Romance languages) don’t write according to any fixed syllable count.

Instead they – we – emphasize haiku’s brevity, immediacy, imagistic language, and intuitive quality as distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, the fact that haiku’s power lies in its subtly and suggestiveness – in apprehension by intuition rather than through logical explication – makes it easy to discount in an academic culture that tends to celebrate intellectual and linguistic brilliance. What I think is probably most important, though, is a misperception that real haiku – as opposed to 5-7-5 Internet spam – is merely a highly specialized form of meditative nature-poetry. In short, people don’t realize the range of subjects, experiences, and emotions haiku can express.

As the “pioneering” haiku poet in the [Spalding MFA] program, I knew in advance that two of Spalding’s faculty members valued the Japanese short forms, but feared the rest of the faculty and my classmates might not take my work seriously. To my delight, what I encountered, instead, was a great deal of interest in and support for what I was doing. In fact, the response I received most often was something along the lines of Wow, I didn’t know that you could do so much with haiku; I didn’t know that it was such a contemporary form.

I may also dwell among the converts.