Reprints: Jim Kacian on the Haiga Form

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

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

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By definition we should not expect the art to repeat the theme of the poem; however, we should expect there to be some sort of linkage between the images of the one and the other. Otherwise we would be back to the random pairing of images, and the looking would not lend itself to an inevitable and resonant seeing.

I start with Stephen Addiss's simple and evocative broom.

The pairing is felicitous, and somewhat cause and effect. This too is nicely gauged, since we experience the broom first, and the poem second: it feels right to come to discover the sunlit motes after having enjoyed the perkily sketched broom.

The airiness we feel from this work is one of its chief characteristics, befitting a celebration of flying dust motes.

Contrast that with the weight of this next work, sesame oil by Arizona Zipper.

Working with pencil and magic marker, the artist fills up the available space, and we feel a snugness, which is not oppressive, partly because we can view the lines of the drawing beneath the fill, which have not been adhered to in a very strict fashion.

The image, a bird at the birdbath, is refreshing itself. In just the same way, sipping a cool draught from an unexpected source, the poet enjoys a moment of humor in the midst of his life,

The slight smile from the oddity of another's expectation is the contrasting lightness to the heaviness of the painting, and paralleled neatly in the lightness of the bird.

Almost to the brink of non-representational tangential haiga is Angelee Deodhar's painting, to one of my poems, rumble.

It could be argued that the painter actually visualizes a completely different scene, but one which is contiguous to, or even contained in, the poem.

You might expect snow falling in a picture of this poem, but the artist here actually dispenses with it, and instead posits a moon to permit us to see into the depths of a perilous ravine. It is the present snow which permits us to see how steep and precarious it is. And the rumble? Surely a rumble in such country would mean avalanche. So the one conjures the other, and perhaps might even precipitate it.

Quite a nice redefining of the locus of the center of attention, with a consequent enlargement of the possibilities of both images.
At last we reach total non-representationality with this final haiga, Zolo's something I'll never find.

The image is a blur of activity, with some strong features emerging from out of the maelstrom. It is impossible to be certain where we are or what we are looking at: hairs on the skin, our vantage point some extreme close up of a living body? Or else somewhere in an odd wood where the trees have been burnt-out?

So we could be in the woods, but more likely we are in the interior spaces of the artist's mind, and this is some figurative version of hell, a hell where the only certainty is that of frustration.

There is no shortage of possibility in haiga, but there are ways which work more successfully than others in uniting graphic, verbal and audience elements into a pleasing whole.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing these pictures as much as you have enjoyed looking at them.

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