Japanese Forms
This will be an oversimplification of the Japanese forms. I
could spend a year or years, but I’m doing
them only on this one day. The haiku is used to that treatment. It’s
the best known and most attempted by western poets. Many writers in English know
5-7-5 and mention something about nature, meaning the three-line poem has five
syllables in the first line, seven in the second, then five in the third and
last. They also know it should include something about nature, something
profound if possible.
The haiku was originally written as a hokku,
the starting verse as the long form known a renga, written as a
group effort at a renga, or poetry writing party. Poets would have at least one,
if not a few, verses ready - hoping to be chosen to give the starting verse.
This left a lot of verses not used and eventually they were published as
independent poems known as haiku.
The old master of haiku is Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Here is
one of his most famous works:
old pond . . .
a frog leaps in
water’s sound
It doesn’t fit the 5-7-5 rule because it was written in Japanese. It doesn’t, and doesn’t have to, fit western rules. I still get a chill when I think that some of the original translators of haiku made them rhyme. Basho’s poems are collect in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Here is another Basho haiku.
Penetrating the very rock,
A cicada’s voice.
the
hot water in
the
abandoned kettle
slowly
cools
still
carrying the resentment
of
colder water
Missing Man J
Zimmerman
Mid-November after I rake the leaves I stand at Central and
First, holding the Stars and Bars. All of them died in Nam — my brother
Joe, my cousin Freddy, mom’s youngest brother Jack. Sometimes I just
have to come out on the streets and stand with my flag. There’s no parade.
The smell of
burning
could be
diesel
could be
napalm
First published in Frogpond 34:1 (Winter,
2011)
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