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viernes, 22 de diciembre de 2017

re:Virals 118: Haiku commentary

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

 
     and now . . . 
     passing through me
     into eaves

          — Robert D. Wilson, A Soldier’s Bones: Hokku and Haiku (2013)

Danny Blackwell is spaced out:

This week we had no comments submitted, so it falls upon me to say something about this haiku.
I have to confess that it wasn’t a poem that really spoke to me and, upon trying to say something about it, I’m not even sure what it is about. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many haiku defy easy assimilation on the first reading and truly benefit from further philosophizing, so the question is whether the problem is the haiku or the reader—in this case, me. Maybe I’m not up to the challenge?
The first line “and now . . .” doesn’t really give much information, and I find myself asking whether it is redundant to state “now” in a haiku. What gives me pause for further consideration, however, is the use of the word “and.” One cannot help wonder what came before it. Beginning in medias res can be an incredibly effective technique. I’m reminded of the opening to Lorca’s La casada infiel, for example, which intentionally starts on the second line, leaving us with a sense of something unsaid, which could either be a reference to what the narrator is omitting, or it could be taken as a reference to the oral romance tradition that often left us with fragmentary texts. (The epic Song of My Cid, for example, is missing the opening.) In this case, I’m not sure I can unravel the reason behind this “and now,” other than to create an enigmatic ambiguity for its own sake. Again, I reiterate, I may not be living up to my expectation as a critical reader. The first line doesn’t give me anything to work with in order to (re)construct the poem, or the poet’s experience. But maybe that is the intention.
As regards “passing through me/into eaves”, we don’t know what is passing through the narrator. The word eaves might suggest rain but, if that were the case, how does the rain pass through the poet and then into the eaves?
One reader asked me to clarify if I had published the poem with a typo. (The email simply read: “leaves?!”) So maybe I am not alone in feeling at a loss.
I could conjecture a variety of readings but I feel like I would be potentially clutching at straws.
The poet has good credentials and the collection this haiku is taken from features introductory comments by David G. Lanoue and David Landis Barnhill.
“Open your mind and expect the unexpected,” says Lanoue of these “wonderful, jarring, delightful, and provocative discoveries.”
Maybe this week’s selected poem is intentionally jarring or provocative, I don’t know, but I’m left feeling like I didn’t quite get it.
“They are full of the pause of ma,” says Barnhill, and talking about the way in which Wilson “cleaves” his haiku to create juxtapositions (“three periods acting as his kireji or cutting word”) Barnhill says that the poet “creates a space for the reader, not to “fill in” that space but to be filled by it.”
For me personally this poem has too much space—and while I would be able to construct a poem from the materials I have been given, I doubt it would bear much resemblance to the experience that provoked the poet to write it. One has to be honest: one either feels something or they don’t, and this poem left me without any real emotional or literary reaction, although I will say that the words are beautiful enough . . . and maybe they are in the right order. Maybe the problem is also one of genre and I am not reading this, as I should, as an experimental haiku. My failure to be moved is no value judgment on the author’s work, only on one person’s (possibly faulty) reading of one poem.
There is no doubt that the poem is able to provoke something in others because it was selected by a reader last week for commentary, so I will leave the comments section open this week and hopefully others out there can give their belated reactions to Wilson’s haiku. (Those of you that wish to comment on the haiku I have selected this week please use the contact form as mentioned in the submission instructions below.)

Last minute addition:

I was fortunate enough to be able to contact Robert D. Wilson, the author of this week’s poem, and he was kind enough to elucidate with the following:
“The now, the moment, is passing through me into the eaves that represent the past. All is static, all is in a state of becoming, the now is a passersby.”
These comments included a caveat: “How I interpret my hokku (. . .) is unimportant. Each reader subjects it to his or her own interpretation. No two interpretations are alike.”
Wilson also clarified that this poem, taken from his collection of “hokku and haiku,” is not a haiku, as I had referred to it, but a hokku, and went on to define his hokku as “action biased,” as opposed to “object biased.” Wilson has some articles online for those that wish to read more on the subject—just click here.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/12/15/revirals-118/

re:Virals 114: Haiku commentary

Haiku poem under discussion:

     quietly
     we become
     audience
  
          — Hilary Tann Frogpond 27.1

Danny Blackwell ponders sound and silence:

While preparing this week’s re:Virals I learnt, as did some others who have contributed comments, that the author of the haiku under discussion is a musician, and I just noticed that each line has 3 syllables, and the haiku has the effect of sounding, to my ear at least, as a run of triplets. Even taking into account the possible pauses between lines, the lines still tend to have a feel of triplets because of the natural rhythms and stresses of the English language. This is not, however, something I noticed during the many readings I made of this poem, and only occurred to me when I decided to take on the potentially odious and pedantic task of analyzing it, and it may be that the meter is of negligible import in comparison to the content, and that the rhythm arises accidentally, as it were, from the message the poet wanted to convey. (Passing from musical to poetic terminology, the meter of this poem would be mainly considered as consisting of dactyls, although one might consider line 2 as a molossus or an anapest—meaning, in layman’s terms, that the stress is placed equally on each syllable of “we become,” or with a stress falling on the final syllable.)
But syllable-counting aside, I wonder if the poem speaks to the phenomenon of the musicians, before or after performing a piece, as they listen to the applause of the audience, and therefore become the “audience” of the audience, paying witness to the sound of the public, turned performers with their sonic applause. (The resulting paradox being that the poem could explicitly revolve around the word “quietly,” while implicitly being about the noise of a grateful audience.) Or maybe the musicians become one with the audience in the reverent silence between songs, which unites the musicians and audience as one collective “audience,” all performing a truncated version of John Cage’s 4’33’’.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/11/17/revirals-114/

re:Virals 109: Haiku commentary

Haiku for discussion:

 pig and i spring rain


          — Marlene Mountain, Frogpond 2:3-4 (1979)
Danny Blackwell wonders if the personal is political:

What a great haiku. It is hard not to feel compassion for the players in the scene. Sadly, it is also hard for me not to think about the pig’s destiny, which is likely one of suffering for the benefit of humans. For the most part pigs are not companions, like dogs or cats. Pigs are, more often than not, destined to be food. In fact, unless we work on a farm or in the countryside, we rarely see a living pig. Like many great haiku it is what isn’t said — what is implicit — that really resonates with us. The pig in this haiku will probably end up on someone’s plate, and one has to reflect on what that means. Upon reading this poem by Marlene Mountain I cannot help but recall an interview that I read not long ago, and which colours my reactions. While not a vegan myself, I recently stumbled across a pamphlet of resistance against speciesism, and I was particularly captivated by the opening interview with an individual named Rob, who served in the military during Desert Storm:
“I was out of the military for some time already, and I was struggling with PTSD (…) you see, when I was in the military I saw the most horrible and ugliest things, I saw innocent people die, and I saw these videos of animals, and noticed there was no difference in how humans and animals die, there was no difference in the bloodshed, the fight for life, and their subsequent death.
My eyes were wide open, and saw that we were the actual terrorists, we were the ones creating chaos and murdering innocent people for their resources, we had no right — as we have no right to take the lives of innocent animals — to invade or enter into those countries. Meanwhile, here at home, we people of color were being terrorized for years by the police. The lies we’ve been told about people in other countries, the environmental destruction humanity takes part in, the unnecessary killing of animals for food, imprisonment in zoos and aquariums, torture and murder in test labs. Why do these things resonate so much with me? Because as a black man, we also suffered these injustices and were marginalized in much the same way animals are . . .”
After reading this interview, I wonder how relevant the following comments by Marlene Mountain are:
“We have been ‘taught’ alienation and it seems imperative now that we seek that which affirms the common ground of all organisms.”
I was hesitant at first to include parts of the interview from the vegan pamphlet, as I don’t wish to misuse this space for political commentary, however, after reading up on Marlene Mountain, I feel that it touches on some issues which the poet has dealt with in her work, and that it gave me a springboard from which to see the poem in a winder context.
(It may also be worth bearing in mind that a great many of the haiku poets who defined the genre were Buddhists, and went to great lengths to not harm other living beings, and this, in turn, greatly influenced haiku culture. Though Marlene Mountain may have issues with such a Nippon-centric take on haiku, as in the essay they don’t shoot horses do they? she states: “those who champion the Japanese Spirit and its complex paraphernalia for North Americans are under considerable delusion.”)
As regards the topic of war, Marlene Mountain also has various haiku that tackle the topic explicitly. Take, for example, the following one-line haiku:
 
a live update the men's war brushes off more 'collateral damage'
Is not the death of a pig for human consumption another example of ‘collateral damage’? In the aforementioned essay the poet is critical of anthropocentrism and authoritarianism, and at one point asks: “Must we continue to be subjected to hierarchical concepts which separate us from all other organisms?”
The comments I selected from the pamphlet, which touch on a variety of political topics, may shed little light on the poem in a strictly textual sense. And, if I’m honest, when I read the haiku I see little more than the image of a person and a pig, sharing in the spring rain. And it moves me. It has a restrained pathos that is representative of the best of haiku. But when I stop and think about the haiku — that is to say, not simply participate in the haiku moment — I cannot help but wonder about my own conduct and how political my personal decisions are.
One thing I know for sure: the spring rain falls on pig and person alike.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/10/13/revirals-109/