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Daily Notes on Poetry
31 July 2004. My essay for today is also one of my "Score Reviews, this one no 31:
NOTES FROM THE HAIKU FRONT
In 1989, my little xerox company, The Runaway Spoon Press, published a
collection of otherstream haiku by Wharton Hood called House of
Cards. Interested in what the knownstream might say about it, I sent
a copy to Robert Spiess, the editor of Modern Haiku, a good but
conservative haiku magazine. He was kind enough to run a review of it by
Wal1y Swist in the winter/spring, 1990, issue of Modern Haiku. It
was an honest review that quoted 6 of Hood's haiku, and fairer than that
you can't get. But, alas, it was also an obtuse review. So I fired off
the response which, in slightly modified form, follows:
"Peculiar and, in the very least, anti-aesthetic," is the way Swist
characterizes House of Cards. He also refers to "the pre-school
scrawl that does little to enhance the appreciation of Hood's haiku,"
and describes the book's illustrations, by Richard Beland, as
"distastefuL" He thus seems to me to miss much of the point of Hood's
book.
Yes, the haiku in it are printed in a kind of "pre-school
scrawl"--because my aesthetic opinion as publisher was that
Hood's printing, among other things, would underscore his haiku's nature
as uniquely personal understandings slowly, perhaps painfully, wrested
from a consciousness rather than standard reactions prettily flowing out
of some typist's fingers. As for the illustrations, I gladly included
them as appropriately macabre, sometimes comic, usually city-sinister
"side-tones" for Hood's pieces.
Those pieces themselves, moreover, are far better than Swist credits.
them for being. Take one of the "poetaster-level" specimens that he
quotes:
one moment 3 a.m. from mud
True, it at first seems odd. After all, what in the world can be meant
by "3 a.m. from mud?" Although that gave me a jolt of
satisfaction when I first read it, I must admit that I needed quite a
while figure out why. Distance, I decided, is the key--the
moment spoken of is somehow a distance of 3 a.m. from mud!
Still enigmatic? Well, to pursue it further, "3 a.m." must represent the
dregs of a day. As for mud, that has much to do with springtime--and I
think of springtime because haiku are, as much as anything, season-poems
(and we must remember that it is a haiku, however unorthodox, that we
are discussing). So, if mud is spring, 3 a.m. is . . . the winter
of a day. The poem, then, is about a moment as distant from happiness as
winter is from spring, and 3 a.m. from daylight--and rich with a sense
of the different sized inevitabilities of men's and Nature's cycles. As
I write all that, I worry that I may be about as far off from what Hood meant
by the poem as could be--but the point is that the poem has the capacity to
propel a reader plausibly into perhaps idiosyncratic but rich
interpretations. If a poem does that, what more can be asked of it?
Spiess did not publish my piece but did take the time to reply to it, focusing
on my defense of Hood's haiku. He said that the phrase, "one moment," was
superfluous because, "unless otherwise indicated, a haiku is itself a moment--it
is defined, in part, as 'the essence of a moment keenly perceived.' So we
are left," he goes on, "with '3 a.m. from mud'--which actually could be a good
line, except that it is but half a haiku; it needs something to juxtapose with
to make it a genuine haiku. As it is. it is much too abstract. The reader must
use his/her imagination to put something in or with it. A haiku is
concrete, precise, definite. . . ." Later he claims that haiku should not be
written on "an intellective, cognitive level that requires thought or
imagination."
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Concerning Spiess's first point I claim that Hood's poem needs something to
indicate what it is that is "3 a.m. from mud." Not a place, in this case, or an
object, but a fragment of time. And it is a fragment of time the poem deals
with, not something for which some fragment of time is merely acting as a
container: the poem is concerned with the essence of a moment as a moment, not
with the essence of something inside a moment.
As for Spiess's second point, perhaps the poem might have been even better if it
had more concrete particulars--but I suspect that Hood would argue that he
wanted to express the feel of an isolated moment which occurs nowhere-in-
particular--and for no clear reason. To me, Hood's concern is
concrete, precise and definite, his moment vividly particularized and
there for us. Thus I felt it, sans thought, when I first read it; it was
only my attempt to explain that feeling which was guilty of extensive
intellectuality. In any case, all poems are in the final analysis intellectual,
for they deal with words, which are concepts. The intellectual
part of their comprehension is second nature for adults, so discounted, but
it's still there. Imagination is also unavoidable in haiku, and is what allows
one to re-experience all that any good haiku implies, and good haiku, I think
Spiess would agree, imply more than they state. Why anyone would want a poetry
genre to exclude the intellectual and the imaginative--or any other facet of the
full human existence--is beyond me, anyway. It also seems to me not very
important whether Hood's poem is a legitimate haiku or not; in the final
analysis all that counts is whether it is a good poem or not.
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