While I ran into a café this week to submit two pen and ink typographic drawings to the curator of a small calligraphy show, my wife parked our car at a nearby library and waited for me. Shortly after introducing myself to the other artists being included in the show, I ran over to the library and found my wife looking at picture books to read to our youngest child. As she slowly looked over the shelves, I checked the section of books written in English to see if anything caught my eye.
WRITING HAIKU: A Beginner’s Guide to Composing Japanese Poetry
There it is, I thought. Well, maybe it’s time I start learning what this poetry form I’ve been playing with is actually about.
So I borrowed the book and have been, for the past few days, engaging in mental activities that I have never cared to do. Namely, trying to define and categorize things through questions like:
What is art?
What is poetry?
What is haiku?
And my answer to all three of these questions, at least my current answer to these questions, is that each of these things should somehow mimic and/or capture the lives we have lived and the experiences we have had, both collectively and individually.
Life is sometimes ugly and messy, so art, poetry, and haiku should sometimes be ugly and messy.
Life is sometimes soft and beautiful, so art, poetry, and haiku should sometimes be soft and beautiful.
Life produces strange and powerful emotions within us. Sometimes we understand these emotions and sometimes we don’t; so art, poetry, and haiku should sometimes attempt to describe these emotions, both in solid, concrete detail, and elusively.
Life is lived in moments, some of which stand on their own, seemingly connected to nothing, while others are neatly tied to moments in the past. So art, poetry, and haiku should sometimes capture a single moment in time, and other times they should hint at or tell deep stories.
When it comes to stories, the stories in our lives and our shared experiences sometimes advance in a perfect flow of causation from beginning to end and at other times meander without start or finish, seemingly disconnected from any true form of narrative at all, and so our art, poetry, and haiku should sometimes mimic each of these patterns, sometimes telling stories that are straight and causative, connected by anchor points, with clear causes and effects, while at other times only hinting at the possibility of a narrative amidst a strange arrangement of images and language.
So art, poetry, and haiku should mimic these things. They should signal to us beauty and ugliness, mystery and awe, complete stories and partial stories in the same way that the world around us does.
In the book WRITING HAIKU: A Beginner’s Guide to Composing Japanese Poetry, I have found rules for writing haiku, rules that, over the past six months of writing tiny poems, I have broken again and again.
-avoid adding “-ing” to your verbs
-be careful of including/writing about past events
-don’t overuse the pronoun “I”
-don’t use your imagination to stir up emotion
-avoid figurative poetic expressions like metaphors, similes, and personifications
-don’t have three images in your haiku
-haiku is not a little drama
-avoid sentimentality
And so on …
My takeaway is that, in playing with the form of haiku, I have sometimes written poetry that fits within the boundaries of the haiku described in this book; I have more often written poetry which would be labeled as senryu, and I have occasionally written short poems that probably fall more in the realm of micro-fiction than poetry.
At any rate, I’ll keep doing the writing, and I’ll gladly leave the classifications to anyone else who cares to do that kind of work.
from pink to green to red to
bare
is there a pattern
in a place that smelled of pine
I returned to her
the river of sky
between tall buildings
hanging from a string to dry
a man with patience
sometimes a cloud
sometimes your lover
written about fallen leaves
still the same world
