The light of a candle
is transferred to another candle
spring twilight.
The Light of a Candle by Yosa Buson as translated by Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert
As part of National Poetry Month, I'll explore the different forms of poetry. Let's begin with one of my favorite, Haiku.
A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen
syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images
from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of
expression. Last year, one of my favorite poets, Sonia Sanchez published a book of Haiku poems. This week she published one on her website in remembrance of African American sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett. Read it here.
I found this history of haiku on poets.org. Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of
renga, an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas long, which was also composed
syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the
sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who
wrote this classic haiku:
An old pond!
A frog jumps in
the sound of water.
A frog jumps in
the sound of water.
Among the greatest traditional haiku poets are Basho, Yosa Buson,
Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. Modern poets interested in the form
include Robert Hass, Paul Muldoon, and Anselm Hollo, whose poem "5 & 7 & 5" includes the following stanza:
round lumps of cells grow
up to love porridge later
become The Supremes
up to love porridge later
become The Supremes
Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on
associations between images. There was a pause at the end of the first
or second line, and a "season word," or kigo, specified the time of year.
As the form has evolved, many of these rules--including the 5/7/5
practice--have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku
has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of
provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a
sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.
This philosophy influenced poet Ezra Pound,
who noted the power of haiku's brevity and juxtaposed images. He wrote,
"The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated
language." The influence of haiku on Pound is most evident in his poem "In a Station of the Metro," which began as a thirty-line poem, but was eventually pared down to two:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5782
