Grasping the Vertical Axis

Cross-posted from my Substack

Welcome back to the end of week seven to returning readers, and a 初めましてどうぞよろしく(pleased to meet you) to any new readers.

This, of course, was the second whole week of my teaching senior students how to write haiku; next week, we will move on to Haibun. So, I have been able to write and work at the same time. I even managed to slip in a ginko walk with them.

I made no further progress in compiling an essay on my thoughts about kigo in English Language Haiku. Still, I did stumble upon another good episode of the Poetry Pea Podcast. In this episode host Patricia talks with Joshua Gage, another poet and teacher of haiku who has incorporated some of the lessons from Dr Shirane’s book around vertical and horizontal axes in haiku. It’s great when folks seem to be just a little ahead of you on the same road. Needless to say, Gage had some great ideas for how to use a number of prompts to explore the vertical axis in ELH.

Having listened to both Sean O’Connor and Gage, on the issue of emotional content and allusion in ELH, it occured to me that I started using allusion in Haiku at the same time I was reading heavily for my long form poetry projects. One of the Haiku that appears in my debut collection is as follows:

blistered hand

I dig with my pen instead

– after Digging

Source: Magpie Tales ©️sbwright2017

I’d always detected a bit of a divide between “Haiku” and “Literary” poets. In its worse form you have strict rule following“Haiku” poets who take haiku too seriously (and to the detriment of the poetry) and on the other extreme there were “real” poets who looked down their noses at people practising solely the haiku form and dismissed haiku as shallow or easy. 

Thankfully though, there’s been enough poets who take the form seriously, take the time to understand its original cultural context, and who see themselves not just as Haiku poets, but as poets existing within a larger poetic culture.

I think if you want to be good at writing Haiku you need to be devloping other poetic skills, and connecting to not just nature but culture. Anyway, that’s enough of a sermon.

Technical Bits

All the haiku were written in phrase fragment fashion and in that order. All the phases were, bar one, noun phrases. The haiku were predominently short, long, short in presentation with some variation – again one long, long, short haiku and one short, long, long. The avarage syllable length was 13.8 with a range of 7.

The Poems

wagtail chatter

the teens fall silent

in the shade

A result of my ginko walk with students. I wanted to contrast the wagtails chatter with the unusual silence of the teens. I think it works well as sketch from life (the particular haiku guide we were following that day). I also think that the alveolar double t in chatter is the perfect sound for wagtails, and that also contrasts well with the soft s and sh sounds.

noise cancelling earbuds

I hear nothing but the beat

of my heart

I bought some very good, and not so pricey Panasonic noise cancelling earbuds. The link to the heart and the haiku being posted on Valentine’s day was pure chance. It terms of sound quality of the lines. I like the line rythm and the repeated b sound. 

scorcher

one prayer and two full buckets

on the Japanese maple

How does one keep nature references fresh. Plumbing the depths of the Australin vernacular, that’s how. This one was a bit cheeky, which fits with the attempt to quote Austrlianisms without going the full strine. Neither the buckets nor the prayer worked. The maple is burnt.

inescapable heat

a gum branch tears itself away

from the trunk

Are you getting an idea that it might be hot? Again trying to remain fresh with the nature reference, I was able to turn the event of our gum dropping a large branch, into a haiku. The choice of the word tear was very deliberate. I wanted to contrast the sense of being trapped by the heat with the tree’s action of literally tearing itself apart for some relief

rough summer gust

the wind has forgotten

how to sing

after The Aim Was Song

Similar to last week’s ( I think it was last week) sunk to grief, I attempted here to grasp the vertical axis with reference to Frost’s, The Aim Was Song. I like the subtle chiming of rough/gust and wind/sing here. The phrase is rough in sound and meaning contrasted with the the opposite in the fragment. This is a personal favourite of mine as is the next.

withered mallee

passing, all its leaves

take flight

One of those scenes that I have witnessed hundreads of times before. Driving home the starlings often roost in the dead Mallee gums on the side of the road. It just so happened that as we passed, the entire flock took off, and until that point it simply looked like a tree with dark leaves. The lines took a little shifting about to get right. I attempted a half misdirection of meaning with passing and its comma. There’s a moment when the reader associates the passing with withered (death perhaps) before it becomes apparent the poet is the one passing.

forty plus

the paint and I

dry too fast

Forty plus or 104 °F + is hot(although we have got to 123°F), and I don’t know that I have seen temperature used as a first line (it undoubtedly has been), but I think this particular phrasing has a certain Australian phrasing to it. No vertical linkage, just a nice sketch from life to finish the week off. I also think it’s my weakest of the week.

Thoughts

It did feel a bit easier this week, but that could have been becasue I was feeling better, ie less of a physical struggle. I am encouraged that I am finding some solid material from the Poetry Pea Podcast that seems to be providing enough thoughtful matter to chew on, that I don’t seem to be flailing around in boredom and just phoning it in. 

That’s it for the week.

Til next time,

じゃあまた (See you later)