Still having to take it steady I read haiku, loads of haiku – learning about the fragment and phrase, use of space, juxtaposition, kigo and cutting words or kireji.
One book stood out, not because it was a weighty tome on haiku, but because it was about birds in haiku – ‘Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku’ by John Barlow and Matthew Paul, published by Snapshot Press. I knew about birds, their songs and behaviour their jiz – what made them tick as it were. So this became my go to book for all things haiku.
easy listening
a woodpigeon croons
an old favourite
But it was Paul Chambers the then editor of the Wales Haiku Journal, and award winning haiku poet, who took my very naive, gawkish first attempts at writing haiku and helped me work them up into something worthy of publishing. Here they are …
red skies—
from wind-tossed trees
stormcock sing
drifting snow
shattering the silence
a wren sings
If I’m writing at least half-way credible haiku today it is because of his patience, encouragement and ultimately belief. I can’t thank him enough.
Hyper-focussed now on finding out all there was to know about haiku, I also read about haiku techniques by the late Jane Reichhold – sense switching, the use of metaphor and simile, wordplay and the above as below technique.
And then a light bulb moment I read the Poetic Spell by Martin Lucas (1962 – 2014),
founder and editor of Presence, and a friend and colleague of John Barlow and Matthew Paul. A fellow birdwatcher he has had a lasting influence on my haiku writing …
squally showers
sweeping the saltings
the peewit’s cry
What did he mean by poetic spell.
…. words that chime; words that beat; words that flow. And once you’ve truly heard it, you won’t forget it, because the words have power. They are not dead and scribbled on a page, they are spoken like a charm; and they aren’t read, they’re heard. You can hold them in the light and turn them about and watch each of their facets gleam. They begin and end each reader’s unique reflection …
first light the pink of chaffinch in the cherry
And finally back to Bashō and his concept of karumi. Like so many of Bashō’s critical terms, karumi defies easy definition. Essentially meaning a lightness of touch, stressing simplicity and leanness, relaxed, rhythmical, seemingly artless expression leaving a space for the reader to become an imaginative participant. It also implies rhythm and attention to the poetry of the ear, especially those sound patterns that generate emotional connotations.
Heavily paraphrased from ‘Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō’ (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998, by Haruo Shirane).
Not every haiku will have this but it’s worth striving for. In the end some poems just work …
waking up the sounds of the day waking up
It’s very much your poem – wherever you lay your head!
