Contributor for re:Virals #93

re:Virals 93

(Full article here:https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/06/23/revirals-93/)

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week’s poem was

     the daisies
     you paint full
     of philosophy

          — Geraldine Clinton Little, Modern Haiku 19.3 (1988) 

     My take on this poem was the following:  

“If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.”

The above is a quote by Picasso that has followed me around since I wrote my BA dissertation on music many years ago.
This quote resonated with me profoundly because I felt that good art should be more than academic or technical, and I was investigating the mystical origins of art, which seems to have been born out of a need to see the world through a filter, to give the world’s mysteries their myths, or philosophies.
This poem offers us a portrait of the still-life artist. It is an ambiguous portrait of the artist and his art because we don’t know exactly what “philosophy” is hidden behind those daisies.
All we know is that the painting offers more than a pictorial representation.
And yet we cannot see this representation, so it would seem that this poem is more like the micro-theatre that is senryu, and that we are sharing in a very human drama. True, one may imagine the very real daisies being painted and, therefore, could happily treat this as a haiku. But to me the physical daisies are absent in my mind’s eye: all I see is the poet looking at the painting, and possibly the painter too, who I imagine is in their studio. (I also imagine that the painter is someone the poet admires and has some kind of relationship with, a relationship I sense is affectionate. Of course, much of this is not explicitly in the poem and yet nevertheless these are the images the poem provokes in me.)
Perhaps a key question to ask would be this:
Is it right to use poetry — words — to describe another art form, in this case painting?
Frank Zappa once said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
So maybe it is equally futile to write about painting?
Whatever the case, here we have a series of words that describe a painting of daisies that are more than daisies, and yet we know not what.
What we do know is that we are “looking” at art — and by extension the artist — concerned with more than what’s on the surface, so to speak. And that, I hope, is something we can all relate to. Because painting daisies without some kind of philosophy would be futile. If you just want daisies, look at daisies! So, although Bashō said to learn of the pine we should go to the pine, this poem seems to be more concerned with humans than flowers. So we could maybe say that if you want to learn about us you should look at our paintings, our art, to see the world when it has undergone a transformation and become more than what is being represented. That is to say that, like Cézanne’s apples, there is philosophy behind those daisies.

                                                                                 *

I was asked to select next week's poem for discussion and chose this 'ku by Scott Metz.



the only sound that’s come out of me all day firefly

— Scott Metz, a sealed jar of mustard seeds (issue 9 of ant ant ant ant ant, 2009)

haiku "green fields..."

Link to webpage: http://tinywords.com/2017/06/21/23849/

monoku:

green fields flooded the train passing a station without stopping

Haiga "end of the year..." (NHK Haiku Masters)

(Included on NHK Haiku Masters Gallery for episode 11)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/haiku_masters/gallery_ep011.html

Haiga from NHK Haiku Masters

long summer night
sound of children
hiding, seeking

or




hiding, seeking
long summer night
sound of children



(Included in the NHK Haiku Masters Gallery, April 2017)


https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/haiku_masters/gallery201704.html

Contributor for re:Virals #91

This week's poem was

the space
between the deer
and the shot

— Raymond Roseliep, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013)


To which I responded with the following:

"The end of the first line in this poem creates the first space, with the word “space” itself. We pause like patient hunters of poems, waiting for our prey to come into the line of fire — except we are not yet aware that that this is a hunt, and that we are part of it. We are, as readers, unsuspecting deer — momentarily suspended. Now, at the end of the second line, we become deer. Then we reach the climax in the last line, which artfully falls (like many great Japanese haiku) on the very final word, “shot,” which sends us now back to relive the moment, to watch the story unfold with a new objectivity. We have become the hunter. And the deer.
And we become everything in between.
We can observe the space — both physical and temporal — that separates the hunter and the animal.
The tendency of Japanese haiku to hinge on the last word is partly linguistic, as Japanese can easily form sentences where all the elements that come before the final word are modifiers. (It is noteworthy that many great translations of haiku invert the line order, so that what typically appears in the last line of a Japanese haiku, is generally moved to the front in the English translation.) This poem is not an example of that linguistic piling-up, but it does, however, take up that structural feature — so frequent in haiku — of saving the key element until the very end, and in this way makes us active participants in the unfolding of a drama.
Great haiku are like world-activating devices, giving birth to the so-called 10,000 things of the Tao Te Ching, usually by focusing on very specific moments, fragments, which nevertheless give us a sense that we are glimpsing a mere part of some unified whole. And so every time we read this seemingly unsentimental poem, set in what may be an indifferent universe, we are giving birth to the 10,000 things, and we can imagine the myriad sights, sounds, and sensations that go unnamed — in the space between the deer and the shot."

As this week’s winner, Danny gets to select the next poem, which you’ll find below.


Nightfall,
boy smashing dandelions
with a stick.

— Jack Kerouac, American Haikus (1959)

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/06/09/revirals-91/

Photo-Haiku for NHK Haiku Masters

Available for viewing here: https://www.facebook.com/dannyblackwellauthor/posts/433493333697465:0

Contributor for RE:VIRALS #71

Analysis of a haiku poem as part of the Haiku Foundation's re:Virals section:

Poem:

the b-flat 
fades from her piano . . .
 autumn wind

          — Maya Lyubenova, Under the Basho (2014)

Commentary: 

 Maybe a gust of wind caught the musician’s attention and the music faded
 as they switched their focus to the outside world, or maybe it was the 
last note, and as it fades they notice the sound of autumn wind — the 
two sounds blending to create a third “thing”, much in the same way 
haiku juxtapositions often work, or Brian Wilson orchestrations, where 
his unique blend created new “instruments”. The Greeks left behind 
interpretations of the way in which musical modes affected listeners, 
and many people nowadays would say that certain keys make them feel 
certain ways; the key of this piece, however, is not defined — we simply
 have one note in isolation, but that in itself can provoke a certain 
melancholy, and while it may seem like petty semantics, there is no 
doubt something subtly more sad about a flattened note than a sharpened 
one . . .

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/01/20/revirals-71/

 

Contributor for Re:virals #88

Analysis of a haiku poem as part of the Haiku Foundation's Re:Virals section:

Poem:

whale song
I become
an empty boat

          — Michelle Tennison, Michelle Tennison 32 (2015)

The power of haiku, like much poetry, often lies in its power to strike us with the sensation that there is meaning that lies beyond the words, and that the poem warrants work on the readers behalf — the reader, then, becoming an “accomplice” (to use Cortázar’s term). When the reader is active and becomes an accomplice to the poem, that is to say “activates” the poem, we are entering the terrain of the spiritual, philosophical, or existential — we are “entering” the poem, so to speak, and entering the position of the poet-creator. At their best, the haiku that occupy this Zen-like territory allow us to become the poet who has lost herself, or himself, and thus we become this absence, or interpenetration of subject and object—of poem and life. I happily confess that I don’t know exactly what this poem is saying. I hear the whale song and I am on the boat, and upon hearing the whale song I become the whale, and on becoming the whale I leave the boat, and I leave the boat empty.
But what if the whale is the empty boat? And, if so, why is it “empty”?
Upon considering these alternatives, the Pavlovian response kicks in: But what about those unwritten (yet endlessly discussed) “rules” about avoiding metaphor in haiku? And while I generally agree that clichéd metaphors are a waste of time and, more often than not, metaphors of any kind have a tendency to jar in haiku, that is because we are, understandingly, on the guard for something inauthentic. But when experience is metaphorical there is nothing more inauthentic than not giving into metaphorical thought and expression. And so, while I will continue to become the poem, and become the whale, and become the empty boat (or, better yet, to become “an-empty-boat-of-whale-song-me”), the meaning of the poem — if we can truly speak of “meaning” — will nevertheless continue to be the following:

whale song
I become
an empty boat

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/05/19/revirals-88/

Work Place Haiku (various)

(All entries written as part of the Haiku Foundation's ongoing Workplace Haiku section)

"The Office Retreat"

picnic table discovering the person opposite you


https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/06/07/haiku-in-the-workplace-the-office-retreat/

"Bring Your Child To Work Day"

bringing her son
to work
for therapy

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/05/24/haiku-in-the-workplace-bring-your-child-
to-work-day/


working late
the cat
at the taco shack

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/06/21/haiku-in-the-workplace-working-late/

an insect 
plays dead 
for a living 

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/06/28/haiku-in-the-workplace-a-job-well-done/

getting fired by the future president 

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/07/12/haiku-in-the-workplace-getting-fired/