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 Sound of Music 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. And 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.
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| bare bones |
Unfortunately, the (deceptive)
simplicity of haiku combined with Twitter’s 140 (now 280) character limit gave rise to, and continues to breed, a whole new form on the net that people refer to has haiku but which I call no-ku, as so many of them are completely 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.
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| ant shadows |
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