Whoops! sorry, I didn't mean to attribute the quotation to Basho. It's a line from a Gary Snider poem (Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout), which IMO describes the flavour of Basho's writing.

Mary, not sure where you are from, but can you tell me what an "Osage" is?

Lee

Cally, i have no doubt about your order of perception, but you also have to put yourself in the reader's shoes. when you got up, you knew it was the middle of the night. the reader, however, not having been there, doesn't have a clue about when and where you are.

i would have to say that in general, the context--whether explicitly stated or not--is what you know at the beginning of the poem. whether or not the reader knows it is up to you. what i am advising against in general is the all too common attempt by the poet--and i am not blaming you specifically here--of trying to "save up" a surprise for the reader by withholding some important aspect of the experience and putting it in the third line. please, as often as you can, let the experience speak for itself. if it has meaning, the reader will find it. if it doesn't, any amount of arrangement for surprise won't save it. i hope this makes some sense--i have had a couple glasses of wine.

Whether the universal < particular > human correspond to the three lines is an important question. My experience tells me that, as much as it would simplify things for me, it is generally not so, that they overlap and often one finds parts of each in each image of the poem. take this poem for example:

midday heat:
the staccato staccato
of a nail gun

one could say that the midday heat is the universal and the sound is the particular and the nail gun is the human. but this seems a superficial view to me. how does one separate them in this poem? the heat and the sound combine to produce a feeling, and the feeling--not the nail gun--is the real human element here. if one can make a generalization, it would be that the human element is often not even present in the poem itself, but in the poet's response to the particular phenomena depicted in the poem.

Hope this helps!
Lee

David, please believe me when i say with all sincerity that we are all students here. i have been doing this for a long time and i am continually amazed at how stupid i am and how inept many of the haiku i write still are.

Lee

If you will forgive me, Chiago, i will just make a general comment here. Your haiku seem to gravitate in two directions at the same time. on the one hand are pure description, but seemingly without any clear significance. (I would put "december trees" in this category.) on the other are rather hermetic poems that may contain considerable significance, but if they do it is difficult for the reader to tease the significance out of them. (for me, "august moon" is in this category.) To repeat something that was said to me many years ago: pity the reader!

Lee

Brian, yes, your teeth will tell you!

Lee

Henie, I remember the one you wrote about the screen and plum jam. Are you still working on that one?

Lee, I'm from New Jersey-New York, but I live in the Ozarks - not too far from you, I think - where the Osage Indians used to live. As for the cold bed - I meant for there to be a pause at the end of the second line - so that the reader assumes L3 will be "body" or something, but it's just a blanket. I think the bed and kiss ones I wrote this morning drifted perhaps a bit too far away from the true form. Speaking of which, I've caught up on all the posts. My feeling about form is to learn it and follow it as closely as possible, because I believe there is so much to learn from each form. I think even Shakespeare's sonnets do not vary much from strict iambic pentameter. On the other hand, I felt the haiku opened up for me as soon as I let go of the syllable count. I read somewhere that the haiku has many rules, and who can follow all the rules? So letting go of one rule seems fine to me. In case I wasn't clear enough earlier, ahem, the brown leaf is a turd, ok, but damned if I'm inviting the world into my bathroom!

Anyhow, Lee, thanks again for your crits. I have a question for you or Steve C. What about those two line haiku? Or I've seen a few of yours with about 8 lines, maybe - skinny, with a longer line the middle. What's with that?

Chiago, thanks for your tender response. I like this one of yours:

autumn storm
coat scalloping
with wind

Cally, that's a good idea about the list of sensory experiences. I've been thinking along those lines, too, though I haven't written anything down. I just feel more aware of everything, thanks to studying haiku.

cold bed
I need another
blanket

close your eyes
this is my kiss
for you

brown oak leaf
falls on the lake
then light rain

Osage oranges
on the ground
no Osage in sight

PS: Cally, yeah, magic and love, for sure. Both, lol.



[This message has been edited by Mary Meriam (edited October 20, 2008).]

Lee,

Your thoughts make deep sense and help powerfully. I have my head on by-pass and am taking them in through the heart. I can feel the truth of what you say.

The 'nail gun' is a tremendous example. A wonderful example of synesthesia. I feel that nail of heat with each staccato. That is such a true experience. Wow. You are communicating the feel of haiku so well, and I am so grateful. A haiku snaps and floats.

I raise my wine glass to yours, Lee!

I wrote these this morning as a thank you and farewell gift to you.


honeyeaters
nip and dart
spring morning


autumn evening
burnt paper
lifts against the wind


Cally


edit back to say - So do I, Mary! I was going to say earlier that I feel exquisitely alive right now, and an extraordinary sense of reverence. It's like magic, or love.

Or both

[This message has been edited by Cally Conan-Davies (edited October 20, 2008).]

Mary I cant even remember it off hand as images and poems come to me I scribble them down
I often look at them much later ; scratch my head and wonder who wrote it.
but it is good to get a heads up early on what nearly works – Now I will need to go looking for it --??
It’s my way of improving/learning to overload my system until I get one right,

and sad to say I have had very little time to read all the links and lessons just now-- the older I get the more work I am finding to do.

have I missed a post. has lee left? oh poo, I was truly enjoying his posts as well.

ah well, if he pops back in

a big thank you Lee; it has all been a real pleasure- glad you took the time to come share--

maybe we can kidnap Stephen.. his auction is still in the works. come on Mary offer him an inducement - apple pie he might bite on that. even so we can still play in this thread can't we?

Hi Joan, Cally, Everyone,

Joan: Yes, I think Lee has "retired" for the night . . . but he has said that he'll be back tomorrow for a grand finale (no pressure, Lee!), so don't despair. Apple pie? I much prefer pumpkin.

Anyway, as for the question of playing in the thread here, or starting a new forum, I can't see any reason why we shouldn't continue this thread after Lee has escaped our clutches--at least, not until the next Distinguished Guest event begins next month. However, I don't think it would be appropriate to keep bumping this thread up once a new discussion starts getting underway.

More generally, your idea of a dedicated forum is interesting. If you mean a whole new board, like Met, TDE, Non-Met, etc.--that would involve a change to the site's (Eratoshpere's) overall plan, and that's a decision for Alex and Maryann to make. But if I understand you correctly, you're not looking for a "Post & Crit" arrangement like the other poetry boards anyway, right? After all, we've always had a place for haiku on the Non-Met board; it's just that the workshop model there is different, with one poet and many critters, and none of the freer sort of back-and-forth that we've had here. And frankly, I think that we shouldn't disturb that model; it's part of what makes this place work. People should have a place to go for really searching critique and comment--the sort of stuff that can only happen when poems are given intensive, individual attention. Besides, it would probably be rather annoying after a while to have a thread like this popping up and hogging the top of the Non-Met board all the time.

So here's an idea: "Drills and Amusements." Sure, I know it sounds like we're trivializing a subtle and vibrant art like haiku to relegate it to D&A. But what's in a name? There's nothing to stop a committed group of haikuists from keeping up a sophisticated, instructive discussion on D&A, where poets can share ideas and new work, critting freely as the mood takes them, but without feeling constrained by the post&crit workshop model of the other boards. Anyone can open a thread there (unlike DG . . . I had to get special clearance, and I turn back into a pumpkin at the end of the month!), and there are no "unwritten rules" about quoting or showboating or whatnot.

And lest that model be so open-ended as to degenerate into mere random thread-sprawl, there's a good precedent in Japanese practice for keeping things interesting. In Japanese haiku clubs, there typically is a monthly get-together in which poets bring work to share and discuss, all writing on one or more season topics agreed upon in advance. The benefit of such an arrangement is that it avoids the problem of too much "apples and oranges"; people can see how others have approached the same problem, and compare. The process doesn't need to be competitive, and not all poems need be restricted to the agreed-upon topic, but by imposing a little order on the chaos, the "set drill" makes for a real spur to creativity and learning. In other words, our Japanese cousins do Drills & Amusements too; nothing undignified about it.

Naturally, season words may be problematic given E'sphere's multi-latitude community, but we could just as easily run things on a system of key words: food, memories, milestones, love, hate, you name it. Someone can start a thread with a couple of key words in the subject line, calling for haiku and discussion, people can join in, and then when the discussion seems to have played out, someone can start a new one. It seems worth a try.

Cally, you might be amused to know that my original idea for the Open Mic thread was to call it "The Sandbox." But I didn't want people to feel I was trivializing the process, or that I was being condescending in any way, so I changed it to "The Warm-Up." In retrospect, though, I probably shouldn't have worried, eh? The sandbox spirit is precisely what I was hoping would emerge here.

Anyway, reading your 4 am poem reminds me of another "cats in love" piece I wrote years ago.

cats in love . . .
and here at home, steam rising
from my Cup Noodle

I'm glad that you kept at Lee with your questions concerning context; his comments about the problem of "surprise" are really illuminating. If and when we open a new forum for haiku play around here, we might consider framing them and putting them over the door.

Hungry? Cup Noodle!

Steve C.






[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 20, 2008).]