Boy I feel all the joy of poetry reading all these magazines, I tell ya. Before I started this blog, I was sure that only a small slice of American poetry was linear, spoke to people in a language a comon reader could understand. Now, while I think there’s a big tent of poetry out there, a lot of styles and approaches, yet there’s a tremendous amount of straight-no-chaser poetry being written today. Good stuff, often great stuff. We’re in a golden age, folks.
Anyhoo, Paul Miller has an interesting article in the current issue of Frogpond, “America’s Haiku Frontier,” comparing and contrasting contemporary Japanese haiku with the U.S. (North American?) variety. One thrust of his essay, if I get it right, is that the magazines on this side of the water do not embrace fantasy (he also mentions direct metaphors, abstract language, and direct telling as no-nos for U.S. haiku), fantastic creatures, and the phantasmagoric (folks changing themselves) .
Well, as the author of the following two reasonably non-standard haiku, published in Modern Haiku and Frogpond, respectively, I’m thinking I have a different view.
the war
on the tv
in the background
and
Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday
Tuesday she died Tuesday
Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday
But I thought I would run through the mag itself and see how many poems directly contravene his thesis. Right off, I found the end of a haibun, “apparitions,” by Al Fogel:
old negatives
held to the light…
smiling ghosts
and another haibun’s end, “Proof,” by Judy Stoddard:
Taken, cleaned, twisted,
Colored, wound, woven, donned —
I’m getting warmer
The former of which has a fantastic element, the latter of which piles abstractions one atop the other in a heap.
Or let’s go with an actual haiku, by Klaus-Dieter Wirth, in both English and German, which starts with the one line word: “imaginary”
and ends with “tracks in cypher”
(Want the middle line? Buy the mag! I have a standard of not producing anyone’s complete work, though I grant you it gets a bit problematic to discuss haiku with that stricture, and used the excuse of the first two pieces here being parts of haibun to stretch the matter a bit). Which is enough to show there is some fantastic AND abstract woven in there.
And how do you call this a straightforward image:
“the old ache seeps downhill…”
by Mark Harris. Which, P.S. and by the way, I love as a haiku (it finishes in a most satisfactory way, too).
Anyway, I don’t want to overstate, Miller is right on the nose for 95% of the haiku in these magazines, but there are those happy little edges where the rebels can have their fun. Now how it will turn out as new editors take over, as we see happening now, I don’t know. Surely many of our markets have been less adventurous than these two. But it’ll be fun to find out, I’m guessing.
Happiness in haiku,
P M F Johnson
My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
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