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Simply Haiku: An
E-Journal of Haiku and Related Forms Haiku Clinic #1 Below are 'draft' poems that have been submitted to me for comment and revision. The poets are kept anonymous. I have gone through the poems, writing parallel draft verses on different subjects based in my own experience. (By "parallel verses" I mean verses that attempt to duplicate some aspects of the originals' grammar, poetic structure, and psychological force while shifting the specifics into other times, environments, and subject matter.) I have sorted the resulting drafts into groups based on the problems I see in them and I have tried to rewrite them into the best haiku I can make on those experiences. Below are five types of problems that I wish to consider for this first haiku clinic. Problem #1: Unriddling the Riddle --DRAFT--
deepening night A number of the "hai-kai" verses of early Western experimenters looked like this: a slightly mysterious description, followed by the revelation of what had been described. Such poems often resorted to metaphors in the description, which does not happen here, thankfully. But the setup and delivery mode, or riddle and solution, a kind of logic, still doesn't work very well in haiku. Fortunately, this is not a disastrous first draft, however, and can pretty quickly be fashioned into at least a passable haiku. Note how the revision below still maintains an air of mystery and resolution toward the end, but by breaking the second line after a word that asks for more information ("tips" of what?) instead of stopping dead before the last line, the surprise is more subtle, less of a setup. The result is at least a pleasing combination of mystery with a bit of a chill, though the poem still might not make it out of my notebook. --FINAL?-- deepening
night Some editors would reject this as a haiku because it lacks a clear syntactic break. This could easily be fixed by making the first line independent with a slight revision of the second, thus: "deepening night / the shadows on . . ." (making "shadows" a noun instead of a verb)--but I like the more fluid movement above. Perhaps it would make a good renku stanza at some point. Problem #2: The Perils of "-ING" --DRAFT-- eating
a cookie Those
pesky "-ing" verbs without grammatical subjects show
up all over the place in our haiku, even though nothing like
them ever shows up in Japanese haiku. The notion of omitting the subject of
a verb in haiku when it happens to be the first person "I" does not
come from Japanese, but from some erroneous ideas about haiku introduced by
translators.
What "-ing" verbs usually seem to be indicating, aside from
the author's misguided desire to avoid stating the first
person openly, is the "present progressive" tense (sometimes
called "present continuative"), indicating that the action
continues through the present into the future.
So, taking both of these problems into account, I can
rewrite the draft either of two ways:
--REDRAFT "-ING"-- I
am eating a cookie --REDRAFT NO "-ING"-- I eat a cookie (I added the period at the end just to satisfy that demon in
me that demands a stop at the end if there is a capital at
the beginning.) If either of these is a haiku, well, I'll
leave it to you to figure out which version is best!
(Personally, I'd probably scratch it out of my notebook, so
no one could read it, ever.)
Here's another "ING" example: --DRAFT-- Memorial
Day This gets
to the nitty-gritty of the "-ing" problem.
Let's try fixing the verb:
--REDRAFT "-ING"-- Memorial
Day Hmm, that
won't do. (I wonder how many people thought this was what the original
draft
meant, even for a nanosecond,
before they corrected themselves. If anyone did--and I
certainly did--then the writer needs to be warned forever to
avoid this construction: noun + "-ing" verb, unless the noun
is in fact the grammatical subject of the verb!)
OK, I guess what I meant by that draft was that "I" am
marching along, or someone else is. Even if it was me in the
first place, it might be better to give the action to
someone else, like this:
--REDRAFT NO "-ING"-- Memorial Day-- Still
not a great haiku, but at least the image and the grammar are clear. Actually,
I'm
not fully satisfied with "they," and want to put myself back
in here, but note that if I move to the plural, "I" is no problem:
--FINAL-- Memorial
Day-- Also, getting rid of the visually enticing "pavement" (looked like good form, but made the line very long in the mouth/ear), and allowing the three strong beats of "we march along" to carry the line lets the poem approach a more ideal haiku rhythm in the ear, even though the eye sees a seemingly longer third line. Say the poem out loud, and you'll find that the last line is actually shorter than the second. As Bashô said, "On your lips a thousand times"--referring to how to revise haiku. Problem #3: Unwarranted Emotions Nothing kills a haiku faster than false or unwarranted emotions. Here are a few drafts that really bother me, so I'll have to do a little digging to figure out what's really going on in my head, as well as in the world. --DRAFT-- Two
ducks are flying, First
of all, there's a real time problem here. We cannot have a duck simultaneously
flying and "welcomed to the
table"--whatever that means. Oh yeah, I remember, I was
thinking how good that duck would/did taste to someone at
dinner. But really, getting back out to the sky where the
ducks are flying, haven't I skipped something? Have to shoot
it down before someone can eat it. (In haiku we usually
focus on one event, not two or more.) And what's this
"disappears" about? Is it a bad thing, the duck getting to
go on and live its life normally, while its wing-mate dies
to feed a human? Somehow, I think that shot-down duck would
prefer living to die a natural death, rather than sitting on
a platter at someone's dinner table. At the same time,
humans need to eat, so what to do? I can see a couple of
paths to take with this draft. 1) Focus on the killing of a
duck and its consequences. 2) Let both ducks live. Let's
tackle the latter possibility first. At least it seems more
pleasant for the ducks.
--REVISIONS PER #2-- Two ducks are flying That is
not an impossible amount of time for a haiku to deal with. But I notice
that the
five-seven-five structure is
making things a bit wordy, given the rather simple
observation here. Let's trim it down a bit, and consider a
better word than the over-heated and under-sensed "glorious" in
the process.
Two ducks fly
across the blue sky into the distance. Well now, there's a plain prose statement for you! Can I try
to relive the experience in my mind and come up with
something to leaven this rather flat loaf? Well, even if I
bring in some other detail and get rid of the trite riming
of fly and sky, I doubt I can ever get this one beyond a
so-what. Let's try another tack.
--REVISIONS PER #1-- Two ducks are flying, This, at least, has a bit of a story going for it. But wait, is it not the one shot down that "disappears"? Maybe the last line should read "and one gets away." Now that I have the story straight, I seem to have lost the haiku here, not an uncommon problem when the original draft is based on false or unwarranted emotion. For the moment, at least, I'll give up on this one. Another example of unwarranted emotions: --DRAFT-- without
a song, A nice touch, the musical connection (song = music; daffodil = trumpet), but daffodils do not usually sing, so the fact that they are not doing so now does not really mean anything, despite the appealing allusion to a popular show tune. More important, however, I must look at the language of the rest of the poem. Does "sink down / into their beds" seem a little like anthropomorphism? A bit more emotionally colored than actual physical description? Is that really the way daffodils behave? Well yes, maybe, over the course of an entire season. But I doubt that they think about "their beds", even though we casually use that phrase to describe where we plant them. Stripped of irrelevant allusions and unnecessary verbiage, this draft reduces to "the daffodils die down"--and there seems to be no haiku here, either. A third example of unwarranted emotion: --DRAFT-- Chapel
walk-- Ah, having
been through a couple of these, this over-emotional word "smother" jumps
right out at me. Since the problem seems mainly to be with that one word,
let's see
if replacing it with something less emotionally charged helps.
--FINAL?-- Chapel
walk-- Now I
may be able to understand what I was trying to say. Do the papers on the
walk, evidently
in a disorganized mess,
point to a story? Telling a story in a haiku usually does
not work. But pointing to a story, one the reader can fill
in, often does. In this case, perhaps the papers--class
notes, tests, term papers?--were discarded or dropped
accidentally by some distraught student. Now, instead of
worrying about the potential for suffocating bricks, or
wondering why I used such a charged term where it cannot be
factually true, the reader gets to see the campus
environment and the particular building involved for what
it is. Had I said "Dormitory walk" the poem could easily be
mistaken for merely an observation of student carelessness.
But setting the poem on the chapel walk suggests someone
seeking help--now that nothing heavier-handed intervenes.
The occasional over-strong word, laden with too much
emotion, can often be corrected. When it is, we can usually
then see if anything else needs to be done to allow the poem
we saw and felt at the time blossom in our language and the
reader's mind something like the way it originally did in ours.
Problem #4: Too Much Detail? --DRAFT-- summer
at last Naming
the season always has a certain amount of risk associated with it, and
adding the
emotional "at last" here
increases the room for failure. But the image is evocative,
if a little overdrawn. (Remember, haiku are best a bit like
sumi-e, sketchy rather than filled in.) How about slightly
simplifying it, making it a little less wordy and improving
the rhythm, thus:
--FINAL?-- summer
at last This way,
the "glint" is
suggested and the rhythm of the final line lightens up.
Problem #5: Too Much Ambiguity? --DRAFT-- purple dawn I suppose this could be very moving to veterans who were
there, giving them an opportunity to recall things they saw,
heard, touched, and so on. But after the first line, we have
only a vast geographic region named, so it's a little hard
for other readers to enter into. Sometimes a simple detail
bringing an image into focus can help, like this:
--FINAL?-- purple
dawn The visual
image connects the last line with the first, but is general enough to fit
many
different specific scenes. And
the word "eddy" by itself suggests, perhaps, a bit of a
lull, a slowing of the pace of things, a rest. Also, since
most people have seen an eddy in a river or stream somewhere
along the way, just about every reader has an image to
visualize in that purple dawn.
Your Turn Do you have revision suggestions that you think might improve the poems discussed in the most recent clinic? Or a way that might improve the "final" versions offered beyond where I got them to? Pick one specific poem from among those in the current clinic, and tell me about it. If I like your suggestion, it will appear in the next installment of "Haiku Clinic" along with your name. Write to me using the email address, "wordfield-at-att.net", with the subject line "Haiku Clinic". Note that you will have to substitute "@" for "-at-" in my email address--this prevents the spammers from finding my real email address, but I hope it won't prevent you from taking your turn. (Please, only one poem to a customer!) For a more detailed introduction to the haiku clinic, please go to the haiku clinic introduction. - Bill Higginson Copyright
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