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From: sara@mhuxj.UUCP (TRIGS)
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: Re: Transcending Haiku
Message-ID: <365@mhuxj.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Mar-86 23:12:50 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxj.365
Posted: Tue Mar 11 23:12:50 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Mar-86 07:37:23 EST
References: <17300007@ccvaxa>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 34

> 
> This is not a poem, nor even an attempt at one. This is a request for help
> and advice. In grade 6, which seems now an amazingly long time ago, I 
> started reading Japanese poetry; since then, I have rarely been able to
> write anything longer than 6 lines. If I attempt rhyme, it sounds

One way to transcend haiku is to get in touch with the sources of
western poetry. Haiku is a specific form tailored to the requirements
of the Japanese language and is really unworkable in English. For one
thing, it requires an ear attuned to syllabic verse, and it is arguable
that all syllabic experiments in English have failed, or at least
succeeded accidently as accentual-syllabic verse. Most western imitators
of haiku do not really understand its conventions, such as the requirement
that the subject matter be natural. This would exclude, for instance,
what is perhaps the best "haiku" in English, Ezra Pound's "Station in
the Metro," which turns on a very western and ironic comparison of the
modern industrial world with the natural world. By the way, I am certainly
not suggesting that Pound shouldn't have written such a poem-- simply
that we should get over pretending that such poems are in any but a
superficial way haiku. One might compare Picasso's opportunistic use
of primative art as a source of inspiration for his own very western
productions. Haiku is in this respect the legitimate domain of the
western "culture collector." Being deceptively simple, it is easily
mistaught to grade school students. But perhaps what we need now is
more stress on syntax, what Donald Davie called "articulate energy."
This is capable, in the western tradition, of sustaining larger
structures and perhaps powering us beyond the facile "modernism"
under whose sway so many of us began writing poetry.
--Jeffery Alan Triggs
> anyone any advice on how to transcend haiku?
> 
> (You know what this newsgroup needs? Critics! Or at least reviewers.)

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