stray dog carcass
cut in two
"Urban Haiku and Senryu," World Kigo Database, 2011
Note: Below is an excerpt from my June 2012 Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold:
L:
Recently you were working with “darker themes” in your haiku. Why did
you want to do this? And how did it work out for you? Do we need to
enlarge the subject matter used in the Japanese genres?
CL:
I've been writing a series of haiku noir on darker themes, such as
sudden death, suicide, psychiatric illness, violence, homelessness,
alienation, estrangement, racism, rape, …etc. I've had first-hand or
second-hand experiences of dealing with most of them (Note: A haiku noir
is a narrative haiku, i.e. a cinematically dark flash non/fiction in
verse. I gave an in-depth analysis and examples in my “To the
Lighthouse” post, entitled "The Arranged Marriage of Haiku and Cinema" . For further information on the relationship between haiku and cinema, please read my Haiku Reality essay, titled "Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective").
I
am most influenced by Takuboku's conception of "poems to eat." He
defined them as "poems written without putting any distance from actual
life,...and they are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food
indispensable for us in our daily meal."
In
terms of dealing with one's dark moments, the difference between poets
and other people is that poets can convey their feelings through poetry.
As Graham Greene stresses, “writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I
wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to
escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent
in [that] human condition.”
Every
time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I
feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I
connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in
doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the
connectedness of human experience. This view of writing about dark
moments as a way of healing is well explored in Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives. My review of this book can be accessed at http://scr.bi/owyOEI .
As
for enlarging the subject matter used in English language haiku, I
think there is an urgent need to do so. most English language haiku are
based on a narrower definition of haiku. Professor Haruo Shirane
discusses this in his famous essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment:
Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:” “English-language anthologies of
haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though
ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments.
This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on
the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.” His essay
reminds me of Shiki’s , titled “Haiku on Excrement,” about discovering
-- or rediscovering -- beauty in excrement. In the essay, Shiki
demonstrates that the old masters had great capabilities of producing
beauty out of ugly material, “citing 41 poems (most of them haiku) on
feces, 18 on urine, 4 on farts, 24 on toilets, and 21 on loincloths.” In
the concluding section, he makes clear that he is not particularly fond
of writing haiku on excrement; but he mainly uses this topic as an
example to show how the poet can explore a wide range of themes (Makoto
Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, pp. 29-30)
I
identify with Shiki’s approach to writing haiku. Most of darker themes
in my recent haiku are, directly and indirectly, related to urban life
issues that are experienced by all of us and covered by media on a daily
basis. For me, they are legitimate subject matters for haiku writing.
