"pancho villa..." (Modern Haiku 48:2)

1-line haiku:



pancho villa's trigger finger in an el paso pawn shop winter

(first published in Modern Haiku 48:2)

cover art image:

Eric Guchee, "Emergence C"

Commentary for re:Virals 98

atop the town flagpole
a gob of bubblegum
holds my dead brother’s dime 

          — Nick Virgilio, Selected Haiku of Nicholas Virgilio

In Sean Dougherty’s video Remembering Nick Virgilio we can listen to the poet’s brother, Tony, recall the event that inspired this haiku in honour of Larry Virgilio:

“Before Larry was going off to boot training he was in the square with his buddies, and he shimmied up this enormous flagpole, and he took a piece of chewing gum and a dime, and he stuck it on the top, and he said: ‘When I come back I’m gonna go up and get that dime’.”

The tears that follow make it clear that Larry never came back from Vietnam.
Nick Virgilio described haiku as “a record of a moment of emotion keenly perceived that somehow links human nature to all nature.” And he said that we should aim to “become more conscious of our feelings and to share these with other people.” We constantly find that the more specific narratives are — the more based they are in the minutiae of other people’s lives — the more keenly we relate to them, irrespective of how distant to our own realities those narratives may be. It is a commonly repeated piece of advice among writers to write about what you know, and be as specific as possible because it is precisely this specificity of human life that is so universal. Nick himself says: “You explore this provincial you and you become universal,” you become “a tight little package of humanity,” and this poem is without doubt a tight little package of provincial humanity that is universal.
In the video, Nick talks about his belief that we all have haiku experiences, and that we should try to express them in “the least number of words possible,” starting with “the big scene first, then the little parts of the big scene” in order to create an effective “word painting.” (We could also consider haiku in cinematic terms. For example, the technique of this poem is akin to a zoom, or a series of cuts with each cut honing closer in on the key object of the scene.)
Nick definitely practiced what he preached — well-ordered, concise poems that detail very personal moments in honour of some universal humanity — and his command of the form was the result of a notoriously strict, almost monastic, work ethic. I have long been one of those poets that admittedly feels a bit snobbish about 5-7-5 haiku, and yet Nick’s 5-7-5 are sublime, and show no evidence of being in any way forced or contrived. He was also not afraid to use rhyme, which is often considered bad form in haiku. Here are two more haiku (both in the 5-7-5 metric and one of them rhyming) about his dead brother:

sixteenth autumn since:
barely visible grease marks
where he parked his car
on the darkened wall
of my dead brother’s bedroom:
the dates and how tall

The flagpole poem uses neither rhyme nor a 5-7-5 syllable count, but what is interesting is it’s syllabic symmetry: all three lines are of 6 syllables. I doubt that he went in with the intention of writing a 3-line poem of 6-syllable lines, but I’m fairly sure that he would have been aware of the syllable count, and that he would have been conscious of the poetic effect of every word, sound, and rhythm. Haiku can often be quite anemic because writers are striving for some Zen simplicity, or intentionally un-poetic declaration (in keeping with the generally held belief that haiku is a non-poetic form, or at the very least a genre that eschews unnecessary poetics in favour of presenting things in their essential unadorned is-ness). This is true to a degree: overly poetic haiku often do suffer as a result, but that doesn’t mean that a good haiku shouldn’t have poetry. The cadence of this poem, the alliteration, the order and presentation of its constituent images, are all masterfully presented. The images may be of inanimate objects, and this still-life poem has no direct human subject acting in the poem (except retrospectively), but the result could not be more human . . . could not be more emotive.
Here’s one more haiku by Nick, who says it all better than I ever could.

adding father’s name
to the family tombstone
with room for my own

For your service, Nick, we thank you.

Commentary for re:Virals 97

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

     first frost
     keeping pace
     with a stranger’s cane 

          — Alexy Andreev, Bones 

And Danny Blackwell once again had a lot to say about his own choice:

It is generally considered good practice in haiku to avoid, where possible, any explicit reference to the poet (the first-person “I”) who is narrating and, to a certain degree, to avoid personal pronouns in general. This stems from a linguistic trait in Japanese, in which people are loathe to name themselves or others directly, as a matter of courtesy and good manners. Of course there are exceptions, both in ordinary conversation and in haiku poetry — Kobayashi Issa, for instance, frequently refers to himself, in both 1st and 3rd person. In English, however, the omission of the personal pronoun is generally more problematic — primarily for linguistic reasons — and, as a result, we are not trained in the kind of ambiguity so common in Japanese. A good example of this tolerance for ambiguity is the fact that Japanese tend not to distinguish between singular and plural, although they have the linguistic tools to do so, should they want to be explicit. The famous poem by Basho about an old pond and a frog, for example, makes no specific reference that allows us to know with any certainty whether there is a single frog jumping or numerous frogs jumping.
(If I’m not mistaken some haiku poets didn’t even decide themselves whether they were writing in plural or singular! Sadly, I cannot recall the details of the poem but I distinctly recall reading about the haiga of a particular poet — I have a sneaking suspicion it was Buson’s poem about crows perching on withered branches at dusk — where the poet illustrated the poem in two different versions: one with a single crow and another with various.)
In regards to the use or omission of personal pronouns in English haiku, I believe the practice of striving to achieve some kind of equivalency with Japanese haiku has been fruitful and has allowed us room for manoeuvre as readers. I mention all of this because this particular poem allows us plenty of ambiguous space. The haiku follows a traditional format. It begins with a seasonal reference (“first frost”) followed by a line-break, which functions, to all intents and purposes, as a kireji. (It should also be noted that the “first” this or that — 初in Japanese — is very much a trope of traditional haiku).
The second half of the poem juxtaposes this seasonal phenomenon of first frost with an image of two people, one who is using a cane and the other who has slowed their pace, possibly as a result of the icy ground. What is masterful about this poem is the way that neither of the subjects is explicitly referenced — they are merely implied (by the cane, and the person “keeping pace” with the cane). The absence of personal pronouns not only adds to the haiku concision we have come to value, in lieu of any hard-and-fast syllable count, but also creates doubt around the very idea of Subjects themselves, and of individual identity. This blurring of the line between subject and object is undoubtedly linked with the eastern philosophies that so influenced Japan, and it is here where the art of the poem lies because it is precisely a poem about empathy, and about the blurring of lines between “You” and “I”. We can, furthermore, consider the first line as personifying the frost, as if it was The First Frost itself that accompanied the person with the cane. (A person we instinctively perceive as a vulnerable figure, possibly an old man or woman.) Add to this our metaphorical instinct to personify Winter as an old man and we are left in no doubt that this “first frost” is a harbinger of the winter to come for the narrator, and the “winter” age of a person being represented by the slow pace of the cane (a great example of the power of objects to signify something way beyond the object itself.)
I should add that the element of personification of the first frost is much more a possible reading than a direct result of the text, and the poem functions perfectly without this extra layer. Nevertheless, it is clear that in haiku there is generally something more what we are presented with and that, as a rule, we tend to go beyond the poem in order to discover a profound sense of connectedness, be it with nature or with the products of nature, such as people and plants, and so on.
But it is not only in recognition of hardships and suffering that we are united, the same also occurs in moments of shared beauty. A counterpoint to the poem under discussion would be the following haiku by Issa:

花の陰赤の他人はなりけり

Which Blyth translates thus:

Under the cherry blossoms
None are
Utter strangers.

In summary, this poem — for me at least — is that of a poet-narrator, who is keeping pace with an old man or woman on a frosty day, and enters into an empathetic relationship with the “other”, and is consequently awake to the realization that we all grow old. Further to this, the poet enters into an empathetic relation with the season itself, and by extension with the universe as a whole.
And if that isn’t what a good haiku is all about then I don’t know what is.

As this week’s winner, Danny gets to select the next poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be as long or short, academic or spontaneous, serious or silly, public or personal as you like. We will select out-takes from the best of these. And the very best will be reproduced in its entirety and take its place as part of the THF Archives. Best of all, the winning commentator gets to choose the next poem for commentary.
Anyone can participate. A new poem will appear each Friday morning. Simply put your commentary in the Contact box by the following Tuesday midnight (Eastern US Time Zone). Please use the subject header “re:Virals” so we know what we’re looking at. We look forward to seeing some of your favorite poems — and finding out why!

     atop the town flagpole
     a gob of bubblegum
     holds my dead brother’s dime 

          — Nick Virgilio, Selected Haiku of Nicholas Virgilio