Simply Haiku: An E-Journal of Haiku and Related Forms
September-October 2004, vol. 2, no. 5

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Reprint: Jim Kacian, "Looking and Seeing: How Haiga Works."
Previously Published in Haigaonline

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Page 18: Non-Representational Iterative Haiga

Stepping, a painting by Susan Frame, poem by Jeanne Emrich, approaches non-representational iterative haiga.

Only small portions of the art are recognizably representational, a hint, if you will, but it is enough to ground the picture.

What to make of the blotches and blurs of the rest of the painting is left for the poem to explicate:

"stepping / into the woods / the moon follows".

The moon seems to be missing from this painting, but the round shapes which Frame finds in this neck of the woods is sufficiently suggestive of it.

It is truly difficult to find a totally non-representative iterative haiga. Almost by definition, if the painting and the poem are going to treat the same subject, the painting must be sufficiently representative that we can know that it is the same theme.

A painting that was completely beyond interpretation in some literal sense would also play randomly against any poem paired with it, and so it is unlikely any poem would seem inevitable in such combination.

However, it is possible to move pretty far afield toward this unreachable endpoint. Two strategies seem particularly rewarding. Both rely upon suggestibility for their effect. The first is abstract expressionism.

In this haiga, art by Wilfred Croteau, poem by Raffael de Gruttola, the painting considered by itself seems to be primarily about painting, that is, about lines and planes and masses.

But in the context of the poem which reads,

"cracks / of wet stones the / water chain / drips / and / drips,"

we see that the one has a substantial intersection of content with the other. Which is not to say that the vertical lines are waterflow, the dark masses stones.

But it is useful to know that the art was produced in response to the poem, and so certainly informed the sorts of choices the artist might make in creating a finished product.

The calligraphed poem flows down the page in the same fashion water might take, and so reinforces the visual element of the work. The one, in other words, suggests the other, without necessarily being the other. This requires a sense of restraint and control over the material at hand.

This sort of suggestive interrelation is the most successful means of arriving at a completed work which is not dominated by one element or the other, but realizes a satisfying and harmonious balance.