Friday, February 09, 2007

new poem: short white haiku

snow on church ramparts
black specks of birds
fly around in heaven

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another good one, Bruce. I've never tried to write haiku; maybe I should. You inspre me!

Bruce Hodder said...

Thanks, Glenn. Inspiration is low and self-confidence lower at the moment, with the poem--I think she's cross with me because I've been paying too much attention to that bitch, the money job--but I've always liked the challenge of short form. Most of 'em are so bad, after all. I registered for a daily haiku page last year, "tinywords"--they send 'em straight to your email inbox--but everything they have sent is just a dishwater dull unpoetic slavish rendering of what the poets imagine to be the classical Japanese style. I think you have to adapt it to your own language, your own thought forms, your own locale, like Kerouac did. Jack was the master of the Westernised haiku. The living master is Ronald Baatz. Read him? I will send you some samples if you haven't.

Oh, and look at Leah Hansen on my MySpace page. Hers are wonderful.

tom said...

this is a fine haiku
observation of snow on the church leads to birds in heaven

layers of meaning possible
and like all good haiku there is the poem itself and then the poem outside of the poem

applause

tom said...

this is a fine haiku
observation of snow on the church leads to birds in heaven

layers of meaning possible
and like all good haiku there is the poem itself and then the poem outside of the poem

applause

Bruce Hodder said...

Thanks Tom. Yeah, that's exactly how the poem works. Like in another one I wrote:

steady rain falling
no other sound except
a distant cow's moo

...it's not just rain and cow, two sounds reported; the cow is probably fed up because it's raining. I didn't see that but another poet pointed it out to me. In composition I think these things work subliminally, don't you?

tom said...

i believe a good haiku should interact with the reader's experiences, world view, ets and they take the poem, make it their own and see themselves/experiences/etc reflected in it

i often tell people that haiku is not a short form of poetry - that the haiku is a few words that should open up into a much larger poem of the reader's making

so yes, how i hear the cow's moo - plaintive, accepting but not pleased with the rain, but it also reflects how i feel - and how i preceive the poem might have felt -
and the other sound - the sound of rain renforces that feeling

hence, for me, a strong haiku

here is a brief two liner that came to me as i was under my table here at the vertin -

cleaning the studio floor
oatmeal and dead flies

now i don't know if i'll keep that,
change that, but it was an aha! moment for me this morning