Haiku Rebellion Studio

Plan your writing time for Spring 2018 with The Poetry School's new list of courses. I'll be leading Haiku Rebellion Studio again, an online course that runs over three to four weeks next April with lots of opportunity to practice and receive feedback on your own haiku. It sold out last time so book early!

In the meantime, here's some background to my haiku practice and the course.

Small is the New Big

I started this blogpost with the question, How do you write a poem like a haiku? And then really wished I hadn’t. Because the next question that popped out of my brain was, How do you catch a moment on the page? No? Nothing? I’ll give you a clue: ¯¯How do you solve a problem like Maria? ¯¯ Apologies for the ear-worm.

Our minds are full of patterns. Habits, even. And while habits and repeated actions can be comforting, like reading the Sunday papers in bed or summer sunsets, the unconscious repetition of habits in our writing, a continued reliance on what’s familiar, what we know or what we think we know, can lead to stasis, inertia, a lack of growth for us as writers and a bit of a big yawn for readers.

My discovery of contemporary English language haiku happened at a time when I was reflecting on my own writing practice. It was after my first collection of poetry, Learning How to Fall, was published in 2005 and there’s nothing more effective at highlighting writing patterns than trapping poems between the cover of a book. Not just favourite (over-used?) words, or images (I loved water, a lot!) but approaches too. And I was very (overly?) fond of an extended metaphor.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t embarrassed or disappointed by the collection. I was proud of it, and still am. They’re well-crafted, image driven poems with sharp attention to line-break. But the recognition of my reliance on extended metaphor made me question my practice. And haiku provided one of the answers.

There is no space for extrapolation within a haiku. Rich figurative language risks showing off rather than the illumination of an idea. Haiku force you towards economy, straightforwardness: the bare, but shining, bones of your language.

bare bones

Unfortunately, the (deceptive) simplicity of haiku combined with Twitter’s 140 character limit has given rise to a whole new form on the net that people refer to has haiku and I‘m tempted to call shit-ku but that would be insensitive to the people who tweet them sincerely, and not so sincerely. So I’ll call them no-ku, as they are devoid of any poetry.

Segue into a paper I delivered a couple of years ago at the PALA (Poetics & Linguistics Association) Conference in Canterbury, entitled, Haiku: A Poetry of Absence or An Absence of Poetry? Because, how do you manage to make a little clutch of words read, and feel, like poetry?

Haiku Rebellion Studio will prove to you that this short form can contain all the poetry you need to make you feel and think. Both in the published work of current haiku practitioners and in the haiku you’ll write during the course. It will be challenging and thought provoking. And at times frustrating. But mostly enjoyable as we discuss English language haiku by poets in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand, and share our own work too.

And in the spirit of wonderful coincidence, as I come to the end of this blogpost, the postman has just delivered my copy of The WonderCode, Discover the Way of Haiku by Scott Mason (Girasole Press, Chappaqua, New York 2017) who opens Chapter 1 with a quote from Virginia Woolf:

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

We’re going small but we’ll explore the whole, wide, messy, beautiful, comical, heart-rending and often contradictory world we all inhabit and share. Small is the new big.

ant shadows

haiku commentary ~ Paul Miller

spring foghorn . . . 
cormorants spilling 
from an over-crowded ledge  

Paul Miller, Called Home (2006)

Sound, sight and movement, and texture. These are the explicit physical senses through which the haiku speaks to me. But there must be more haunting the images and the spaces between the lines to produce an element of unease in me.

There’s warning in the sound of the foghorn. Spring tides (despite the natural response of ‘joy’ that we have to the idea of Spring) can be dangerous and have stronger than usual rip currents. The company of black birds spills into the air like a ragged cloak of wing and cry. There’s a sense of danger, or risk, implicit in an overcrowded ledge. 

The ellipsis at the end of line 1 indicates hesitation and uncertainty. spilling/ at the end of line 2 also allows the reader to experience that sense of falling into the white space on the page. Line 3 ends gruffly with the definite thump of a single syllable: ledge,

Twice in the last two days I have read the closing line from e.e. cummings’ poem, ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’: it’s always ourselves we find in the sea. And the sea envelops this haiku. But while cormorants are creatures of

the sea, mostly able to withstand its capricious character, the fate of human beings is less certain.

If I am honest I do not want to face what this haiku has engendered in me: people spilling into a dangerous sea from an overcrowded raft, their (Spring?) hopes drowned. But at the same time I am unable to turn away from it. it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Of course my interpretation may not be remotely close to what Paul Miller had in mind when he wrote this poem. But all the proof is on the page to assure me that my response is valid. 

First published on Troutswirl, The Haiku Foundation Blog

Review ~ Paul Chambers

This Single Thread

Paul Chambers

£10 available from the author and Alba Publishing 

things I have witnessed/ but failed to notice until/ this moment, here, now

I have seen them in the orchard’s long grass – contour, flight, down – from magpies or wood pigeons, and once, the tawny remains of a buzzard. I have slipped them in my pocket or frozen them in a photograph. But now I am watching them move in my memory as dusk begins to shift towards night:

evening wind

a feather trembles

in the grass 

(p.11)

And on those late train journeys home from London, lights from the back windows of terraced houses glittering past, wafers of smoky clouds shifting across the night sky: 

overnight train

a handprint

smears the moon

(p.68)

Paul Chambers talks about haiku as ‘the art of noticing’ and each haiku in this collection is a quiet and precise record of the small moments that are common to us all. Or, if not common, convincingly true:  

pylon hum

the twitch of fibres

in a horse’s shoulder

(p.27)

Our lives are, naturally, a tangle of threads. We are all pulled in multiple directions: work and family, obligations and responsibilities. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by complications, contradictions and challenges. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a level terrain, one that makes sense, provides a plateau of calm. But moments of smooth connection do exist; moments when we feel the beauty of travelling along a single harmonious thread. This collection reminds me of that. Reminds me too, to quote another poet:

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

(William Wordsworth, from ‘Leisure’.)

My life is richer for Paul Chambers noticing:

white mist

the wing and the wave

almost touching

(p.90)