Lees snail hehe

rusty snail one foot
lock jaw no excuse for wine
call for all the slugs

What a great photo! Just lovely. And here's one for the toilet bowl - a different outcome, but 17 syllables!!


whopping morning turd
disappears without a flush
deep sea diver


Cally

Hi Lee, if you have a chance and if they're not completely unpalatable, could you criticize these?

waiting for their friend
the midsummer moon to rise
dandelion clocks

O lovely stripper--
your skull-&-crossbone panties!
And almonds in bloom!

Daylight. Summer moon:
a wafer of muscovite
the sky shows through

Shock of love:
where the kitten bit
a welling red dot

written before class:

cold bed
I need another
blanket

close your eyes
this is my kiss
for you

~~~

written for class:

brown oak leaf
falls on the lake
then light rain


~~~
you guys are a riot!
please crit
thanks

More on 4 a.m. . . .

I'm sorry, it wasn't Akhmatova, it was Szymborska. This is from Milosz's anthology, A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS:

"Four in the Morning"

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean by the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when the wind blows fom extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.
(trans. Krynski & Maguire)

for another view of 4 a.m., see Philip Larkin's "Aubade", which begins:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark . . .


Lee

Henie, Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions! In place of the grail, i think i will stick with the center of the galaxy . . .

Lee

David, I only have one hope in my visit here--to try to help you and me to become better poets, understanding full well that many of you are better poets than i am. A haiku is a POEM, not a sweetened turd cut with a cookie cutter. Like any poem, it must stand up to scrutiny as a POEM. If it can't then poets has failed, no matter how "pure" they think they are being. Even if one views haiku as merely a form, surely there is some variation in all forms. Is there no metrical variation in Shakespeare's sonnets? Basho had the sense to know when to violate this formal norm. Why can't we?

And there is another issue, one that i mentioned briefly the other day, the difference between japanese sounds and english syllables. Here is a quote from Harold Henderson who was a professor of japanese literature at columbia university and the "godfather" of the haiku society of america:

"Suppose, for example, that it is agreed to accept the 5-7-5 form as a norm. Should we count "syllables" as the Japanese do, or as we normally do in English poetry? Is is desirable, or even possible, to count syllables in our way? And yet if we count syllables our way, making no distinctions between long or short ones, and ignoring the effect of clustered consonants, are we not being quite heedless of the norm of "duration" in a Japanese line?"

Please let me repeat: "Is it desirable, or even possible, to count syllables in our way?" This was published in 1963. Why has the "formal" american poetry community been completely deaf to this informed view for over 40 years? It is beyond me.

I hope you continue to enjoy writing (and revising!) haiku. I am not here to impose my view on any poet or poem, but as the poet, you bear the responsibility for every letter of every word in your poems. It is not a responsibility that can be abrogated because the form dictates to you.

Hope this doesn't sound too harsh!

Lee

Brian,

I will be happy to comment where i can . . .

waiting for their friend
the midsummer moon to rise
dandelion clocks

a bit fanciful for me . . . haiku usually try to find interesting things going on in the world and share them with the reader rather than invent relationships that do not. don't get me wrong--if this is your kind of haiku, i am not interested in changing it, but it is not the kind of haiku that i enjoy reading.

O lovely stripper--
your skull-&-crossbone panties!
And almonds in bloom!

i like this one much better than the first one!

Daylight. Summer moon:
a wafer of muscovite
the sky shows through

interesting

Shock of love:
where the kitten bit
a welling red dot

nice feeling, clearly stated. can you see how extraordinarily different this one is from the first one?

Lee

Mary, my pleasure! Below . . .

cold bed
I need another
blanket

as i mentioned in another posting, cause and effect are the weakest kind of link between images in haiku. that said, because it is a bed, with all that could imply, there are some interesting posssibilities here . . .

close your eyes
this is my kiss
for you

not as interesting as the first

written for class:

brown oak leaf
falls on the lake
then light rain

two images, but there doesn't appear to be much more than a weather report here. if you find significance in this please work to bring it out more clearly for the reader.

Hope this helps!

Lee

It didn't occur to me that it was harsh until you asked that question. It still doesn't seem harsh to me, but either you have me all wrong, or (more likely) I have not made myself clear.

I understand everything you said about syllabication, and have read about, thought about, and experimented with ideas about it in haiku for years. I have spent a good deal of time teaching students and other teachers the exact same things about syllabication in haiku that you have repeated here.

I have never thought that using 5-7-5 makes a poem of mine more or less "pure" than it would have been otherwise. Counting syllables that way has been a choice I've made, and an informed choice at that. What I meant to say in my post was that I no longer feel that it has been the best choice, and that the reasons for it are no longer present for me. I was thanking you for helping me arrive at that conclusion, a conclusion I may well have arrived at some other way if not through your critiques in this thread.

In any case I certainly didn't think you were imposing anything (and I am fairly immune to such impositions anyway). I also never intended to abrogate any responsibility for anything I wrote because "form dictates it to me" or for any other reason. As I said I make choices. If I am persuaded to change my mind, that is a choice I make as well.

Also, I am not sure what I have said that might give the impression that I don't think of haiku as poems, but I do, very much so.

David R.