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Sunday, December 11, 2011
City at Night / Staying In Midnight Haiku
Posted by Grant Brissey on Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 12:00 AM
There are loud semi-trucks
I am not drunk but wide awake
No pizza in house
UPDATE: I concede! Our esteemed Christopher Frizzelle has proven me wrong. I'm firing myself as poetry editor.
6
You're going to get a taint-punch for saying that "fire" has only one syllable. Yes yes, the dictionary says so, but the dictionary is also WRONG. (how the balls does one use italics around here?) How the shit do you say "fire" without it being two syllables? "Furr?" "Far?" One has to sound like they're from Quilcene to pronounce it with only one syllable. Fy-er. Period.
8
Haiku isn't about the syllables. The masters of haiku like Bashō were never entirely strict about having 17 syllables and anyway the concept of syllables in Japanese ("on") aren't really the same as syllables in English. What is most important in haiku is kigo, a word that implies the season, and kereji, a word that allows the reader to contemplate a parallel or contrast.
So something like:
Loud trucks in the rain / I'm wide awake and sober / no pizza in the house
might be better, if you take rain as representing autumn, and the idea of a sober man desiring pizza to be the kereji.
RH Blyth wrote the best books in English about haiku and Chinese/Japanese/Korean literature in general, including a fantastic history of haiku that serves as a great introduction to the form. Most of it is I think sadly out of print. But there is a Penguin Classics edition of Bashō's Narrow Road To The Deep North with a brilliant introduction by Noboyuki Yuasa.
So something like:
Loud trucks in the rain / I'm wide awake and sober / no pizza in the house
might be better, if you take rain as representing autumn, and the idea of a sober man desiring pizza to be the kereji.
RH Blyth wrote the best books in English about haiku and Chinese/Japanese/Korean literature in general, including a fantastic history of haiku that serves as a great introduction to the form. Most of it is I think sadly out of print. But there is a Penguin Classics edition of Bashō's Narrow Road To The Deep North with a brilliant introduction by Noboyuki Yuasa.
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