Making it new will not guarantee excellence. More likely than not, it will lead to empty dazzle at best. On the other hand, making it old will guarantee the death of an art. It is therefore to be applauded that at least a few poets in our country have been unrestrainedly making it new for the past two or three decades. They've been pretty much invisible, though. Hence, hardly any of the newnesses they've been responsible for have been properly named and classified-or even described. The tiny but widely-ranging divergery that follows, and my discussion of the specimens in it, are my attempt to help rectify that situation in one precinct of contemporary poetry, the one devoted to haiku (although I hope that what I say will be much more widely applicable).

The first specimens in my divergery are a work in color by me (below), followed by a poem by Basho in the English of Daniel C. Buchanan, and a shorter poem by Jonathan Brannen.

                              Temple bells die out.
                              The fragrant blossoms remain.
                              A perfect evening!

                               Basho, trans. Daniel C Buchanan



                              Temple Bells

                              a petal
                              a peal

                               Jonathan Brannen

To spare my readers, I will not at this time taxonomize more consequentially, by techniques involved, except to say that the haiku by Basho is, using my terminology, a plaintext haiku; Brannen's poem is an infraverbal haiku; and mine is a pluraesthetic haiku.

The Basho is a plaintext poem because it is unmetrical and has no rhymes but is otherwise conventional. century. I place Brannen's poem in my infraverbal classification because it relies to a significant extent on what happens in it below the level of individual words. In centering his poem on the shrinkage of the word "petal" into the word, "peal," (subtracting not only a letter but a syllable), Brannen almost perfectly captures the way, in the imagination, a petal can shed its materiality to become a form of music.

As for my poem, it belongs to the pluraesthetic class of poetry because it depends substantially (and explicitly) for its aesthetic effect on more than one expressive modality, to wit: the verbal, the visual and the mathematical--as opposed to poems made of words only (such as both Basho's and Brannen's). It has words (some of them not easy to detect), so is verbal. Its colors and shapes, since they are more than merely decorative (or so I hope) and fused with the other matter of the poem, make it visual. That it is a long division poem, with "petal" (in cursive script) being divided into "haiku," and the results of that division, all of which are intended to evoke significant aesthetic meanings and feelings beyond what the words and graphics alone can, makes it mathematical.

My poem also contains infraverbal effects. This is in keeping with my practice of using as many different tactics in a poem as I can (when I'm not trying to use as few as I can). Here it is hoped that something of "tremble" is in the slow fade of "tempbllllllls ..." and that "dst hghwynoy" suggests a distant highway that is only barely recognized as what it is, but has a hint of annoying noise in it.

For another specimen of infraverbal poetry, let's turn to the following untitled poem by LeRoy Gorman: "onde omb ellelle." This at first is hard to fathom, but since the first word that "onde" suggests to me is "blonde" and "bomb shell" flows easily from this, I favor "(bl)onde (b)omb (sh)ellelle" for this. But the deleted b's suggest also "belle." From this comes, for sordid me, the image of a muchful quivering "bellelle" -and also, from the pun, the tolling of a bell. As for the missing letters, they suggest to me the fragmental bombshell-like nature of a male's experience of a sudden blonde: her initial moments are too dazzling to register on his mind. Which connects us to the Venus of Willendorf and Fertility--but also to the transcience of all beauty, like the fade of bell-sounds.

An excellent example of an infraverbal poem that fuses words for its main aesthetic punch is Geof Huth's pwoermd (or one-word poem, in Huthian) "shadow!" I admire it for the way the word "owl" emerges from the word "shadow" on the page to produce a juxtaphor, or implicit metaphor, for the way that what the word "owl" denotes emerges from what the word "shadow" denotes in the world outside the page: suddenly, unexpectedly, with a subtle change of atmosphere like the change in the pronunciation of the "o" of "shadow." There is more: "shadow" is an implicit metonymy for darkness/night-- and an owl is a deadly predator, so you have something passive turning into something actively evil (from the point of view of mice, at any rate). I like, too, the size of the scene's increase due to nothing but a single "!" A similarly fine specimen of a fusional infraverbal pwoermd/haiku is Brannen's "oceon," which I will not comment further on.

Karl Kempton's "far thin gale" nicely represents the the use of infraverbally breaking up workds ofr poetic effect. A farthingale is a young shoot of a tree, and is best known for its use as a support for hoops or the like that expanded sixteenth century English skirts at the hipline. Hence, with just three syllables, Kempton equates a meteorological excitement with a far-away era--and the skirts its women wore. Another first-rate specimen of the family is Gorman's weather-broken, "t rain s top spar row," which even manages to add something of a shipyard to its vividly condensed scene.

That does it for infraverbal poetry, but not for poetry that does unconventional things with language to make its point. This kind of poetry, most of it popularly called "language poetry," depends for its aesthetic effect on various "misuses" of grammar, such as variant- syntax, variant verb-use, and the like. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find any specimens of haiku based on "misused" grammar, unless we count Gertrude Stein's

                                    ORANGES

                                    Build is all right.

When requesting language poetry haiku on the Internet, though, I received the following two poems, the first by Jeff Harrison, the second by Jeffrey Jullich:

                                 The Virginia poems
                        Feared spring squeals but snow wastes snow
                                 Cupid's prospects work


                                 shod a lot of bits
                        lapse sepal alright fork craft
                                 minimum today

I believe Jullich's poem is non-representational. I decided that after he wrote me a bit about it. It seems that it, like an abstract-expressionist painting, is not supposed to represent anything, although no word can help but verbally mean. Rather--and this is my view, not necessarily Jullich's--its aim is to form a design, the way purely instrumental music does. Such poetry thus makes use of all the standard methods of verbal melody: alliteration, assonance, etc.--and infraverbality. As in music, the expressive value resides in repetition and variation, with a background of emotional tonalities provided by the sounds (harshnesses versus harmonies, etc.) and hints of the outer world. A person must dwell in such poems, not merely read them. He must flow with Jullich's shodllot assonance, lot/bits consonance (picked up again later with right/ craft), lapse/ sepal anagram, al / al repetition, fork/ craft near-reversal followed by the almost mirror-word, "minimum"-and who knows what else.

More straightforward examples of Surrealistic haiku than Harrison's are the following two poems by Wharton Hood, which I won't encumber with explications:

                      the wind shifts         barn swallows

_____________________________________________________________


                        one moment         3 A.M. from mud

                       fatal                    sleight weight
                       moon petal               of
 
                       kiss                     bell

                      (mystic tea)             (midnight prayer)