A round dozen haiku for writing on fans
Posted: 22 March 2019
Word Count: 147
Summary: This is a distillation of "A hundred phrases for fans" by Paul Claudel (1868-1955) which were not strictly speaking haiku, but were printed accompanied by Japanese ideographs. Claudel lived for a time in Japan.
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A round dozen haiku for writing on fans
Brown turbid water
A mallard duck is swimming
Floating bits of down
It has been raining
The lake reflects new sunlight
Pine trees drip raindrops
The end of August
Dragonflies hover in mist
Three white butterflies
The tree of the flesh
A pink-suckered cherry tree
Buds of deep purple
No longer seasick
I offer up an anchor
Encrusted with shells
Old poet seeking words
Poem welling up like a sneeze
Does he then write it?
Poem drop of water
Trembling on a lotus leaf
Restless unattached
When night starts to fall
Put your cheek to this statue
Of Buddha still hot
Thick wisteria
A plethora of blossoms
Writhing like vipers
Autumn leaves tranquil
Cluttering a calm canal
Clumps of yellow broom
Ruddy peasant face
A spotted camellia
Red blotches on snow
Hanging icicles
Fall breaking into fragments
Stalactites shatter
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 James Graham at 22:33 on 25 March 2019
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Hello Michael – Apologies for delay. These are much better than your Modern Art attempts. Some traditional haiku, for example, simply capture a moment in time and a very particular scene, and their quality depends on how memorably they do so. By this criterion your first three rate highly, I think, especially the third:
The end of August
Dragonflies hover in mist
Three white butterflies
I especially like the simplicity of this, a simplicity which invites us to go a little way below the surface and reflect on what is being said. For modern readers, for example, ‘The end of August’ can suggest modern preoccupations – our holiday in Ibiza is over, the children need new clothes for school etc – but this poem tells us that the end of August, like other times in the year, is a time to discover beauty in the world around us. Not on a large scale, not great vistas, but in miniature. Discover Nature’s cameos. Haiku are cameos in themselves, and often they celebrate little – precious – things. This haiku does all of that.
I also like the way it encourages the reader to bring his or her imagination to the poem. For instance, ‘Three white butterflies’ might, in the absence of imagination, be simply a statement of fact – ‘Oh look! Three white butterflies. That’s nice’. But in the context of the poem, especially one in such a short form, if our imagination is up and running we will surely think, ‘Three white butterflies…what about them?’ Which means we imagine what they are doing, how they move, and perhaps – if we know something about butterflies – at the end of August, how long do they have to live? A simple line is enough for us to imagine a ‘bigger picture’.
That’s how this little poem worked for me, and so why not for other readers? The first two are pretty much equally good. The second is a vivid ‘snapshot’ of a natural cameo following rain, including the return of welcome sunlight and also the aftermath of rain. The first places the duck against an intriguingly unlovely background, so that perhaps we are better reminded of the beauty to be found in the bird itself, which inspired the poem.
I will follow this up with comments on most of the other poems, some of which look rather different to those first three.
James.
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 michwo at 13:03 on 26 March 2019
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James,
I've just left a comment on "There's more to Canada than Maple Syrup" after reading "There's more to Ontario than Niagara Falls". Maple syrup is pretty much a staple part of the diet in Quebec as well.
Michael
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James Graham at 22:18 on 26 March 2019
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No longer seasick
I offer up an anchor
Encrusted with shells
No.5 is enigmatic, and I like it for that reason. It’s a workout for the brain. It can’t be literal, about an incident on board ship. It must be entirely figurative. ‘No longer seasick’ is a haiku-style condensed metaphor for ‘I have come through a difficult time, an upsetting experience, but it’s over'. ‘I offer up an anchor’ – I can now not only ‘anchor’ myself, steady myself and get my life on track again, but I can also ‘offer’ reassurance to others. This is a very good haiku because it makes a very few words do a lot of work: the first line and the words ‘offer’ and ‘anchor’ are replete with possibilities. (Someone else’s reading of this poem may be very different to mine.)
But…what do the shells signify?
Old poet seeking words
Poem welling up like a sneeze
Does he then write it?
This neatly captures two ways in which poetry can be written. Either the poet (especially an ‘old poet’) struggles to find the right words, cursing the thesaurus because the right word isn’t even there, or the poem seems to write itself. It seems to happen spontaneously, like a sneeze. Yes, he should write it.
My poem ‘Slogan’ is an example, and they way you put it in this haiku sums it up perfectly – except it was a snort rather than a sneeze. I noticed a poster outside a department store: ‘All you need for an egg-tastic Easter’. The first part of the poem came to me in ten minutes. No ‘seeking words’ was necessary. (The second part came later.)
James.
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James Graham at 22:12 on 27 March 2019
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Of the others, the one that stands out for me is
Ruddy peasant face
A spotted camellia
Red blotches on snow
for its evocative juxtaposition of the camellia with the face of a peasant. A rather stereotypical peasant perhaps, but such faces do exist. I find I’m seeing two images at once in the mind’s eye: the flowers against the snow (Camellias, some varieties at least, do flower in winter) and an old countryman with a ruddy, weathered face, walking in the snow, perhaps putting out winter feed for his cattle.
Something I’m interested to know: I’ve treated these haiku as your original work, not translations, and I gather from your introduction to the poems that the ideas are from Claudel but the wording of the poems is largely your own. Is that a correct assumption?
James.
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michwo at 15:12 on 28 March 2019
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Yes, James, that IS a correct assumption on your part.
Have you read "Elderflowers" yet?
I'm currently reading "The Captive Queen" by Alison Weir, an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
She's also written a conventional biography of this 12th century leading light which I hope to get round to afterwards.
And there's a 1992 play in modern French by Zoé Oldenbourg called "Aliénor" that I've started to translate.
I feel like I'm learning something anyway.
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