4 February 2004. This is only my third entry, but already I'm sputtering out. I had a couple of topics in mind to write about and even spent some thought on the one I've chosen for this entry. Still, it was difficult for me to get coherent. It has to do with the difference between poems whose words only tell and poems whose words do things. Since just about everything that can be told by poets has been told, I much prefer poems whose words do things. I suspect that's a primary reason I took a while to re-hook to the haiku I discussed in my previous entry. Their way of telling old sentiments is subtle and effective, but their words do nothing beyond telling.

The latest issue of Modern Haiku (Volume 35.1, Winter-Spring 2004) has very few poems whose words do things, but two of them are by none other than Geoff huth, whose name I spell that way to get back at him for spelling E. E. Cummings's name as "e. e. cummings." One of them consists in its entirety of the word "star" with a drawing of a standard five-pointed star in place of its "a"; the word, "m( )n" below it; and the word, "w nd," making up its third line. Its words tell, of course, as all words must, but they also do: "star" emphasizes its brilliance with a transformed vowel; "m( )n" is missing its two vowels but lets us know that with parens; "w nd" is emptier, for its one missing vowel's absence is unsignalled. The three words, by the way, are all hand-lettered, very uncalligraphically, so look like something on a grade-school teacher's chalkboard.

What Geof's words do, of course, tells, but it is a second telling, so, in a manner of speaking, allows the poem to double-tell. Because what it does is still unconventional, though not unique, it has the additional virtue of freshness, which should perk up the non-Philistine. Alas, I'm only mildly enthralled by what it double-tells. Still, I like it much more than I would have liked "star/moon/wind," and more than most of the single-tell haiku in the magazine.

I like Geof's other contribution to the issue much better. It has a title, its first line, although he would deny that. It is, "o'cloud," printed, as the rest of the poem is, in typed script. The four lines under the first are, respectively, "nest," "wind," "bird" and "forth." But I've misspelled them, for the last two letters of each of these words are much smaller than the words' other letters, and act as superscripts the way they would for "1," "2," "3" and "4." The ingenuity of the first pun and super-ingenuity of the second, are charming, but what I most like about the poem is the way it concludes in a kind of Absolute Rightness--three mangled words that nonetheless depict a bird's adventure ending in a word treated the same wrong way the other three words are but in this case properly so treated!

Now, I'll do something horrible: I'll suggest an improvement. I would have "zest" instead of "nest." That would put the bird in the air from the beginning instead of spilling him a little too cutely, for me, if I'm reading the poem right, into the air. But the new narrative doesn't really work; it would have to be "wind," "zest," "bird," "forth," which would kill the main value of the poem. Maybe "mist?" Yes, I like that better.

Well, I've said more than I expected to be able to in this entry. Make that, "I used more words than I expected to be able to in this entry." I don't feel I said what I wanted to very well or thoroughly. Oh, well.

One last comment: A person is a Philistine to the degree that he cares about what a poem's words tell--and a decadent to the degree that he cares about what its words do.