“Let us go then, you and I”- how seductive beyond its simplicity of phrasing but then, its author tells us, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. There are thousands of such knots into which we pour our truths, our lies, our culture, and which we recognise as retaining some portion of the original energy which forged them. If the knot is untied-that is, if we take the words out of their order, as in the list above-the energy drains away. The words come together in a specific pattern which holds the energy in. It holds weight beyond the assemblage of its constituent words. ” It has lost nothing in the hundred years since its author discovered it. the fire that stirs about her, when she stirs. Take, as an example, the following collection of words: about, fire, her, she, stirs, stirs, that, the, when.Īs a list, nothing special. It is the ability of certain combinations of words to maintain their energy over time that gives a poem durability. It is no surprise that Imagism, of which Pound was founder and theorist, is the poetry most like haiku in our tradition.Īll language carries its packet of energy, and all writers seek to encapsulate as much of this energy as possible into their work. use absolutely no word that not contribute to the presentation” and “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”. Pound said it this way: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective” and “. However, there is a tradition of poetry in the West, beginning with the Imagists and carrying through William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost to the present with Ted Kooser and Alice Notley and many others, which advocates similar qualities of diction. In fact, it is not far wrong to suggest that haiku is poetry written without what many people consider to be poetic language. So it follows that the language in haiku should be chosen with an eye toward making the expression of the experience, the haiku moment, as clear as it possibly can be.Īs a result, haiku employs a diction which is often very different from other Western forms of poetry. Anything which diverts the reader from that moment works against the purpose of the poem. That is, it is the poetry which seeks to convey as clearly as possible the actual events of an experience so that the reader may come to find the same experience in himself, and therefore share the insight which the experience prompted. Getting the words right is essential to helping others get the experience right. It is easy to forget that the moment is not the words, but that the words are only pointing to something beyond themselves. In other words, it is the language which creates content. The way this is achieved is to be as direct as possible in our treatment of the images and syntax of the words we use to convey our moment. Haiku is one way to share some of our deepest moments, perhaps even our wordless moments, in the most immediate fashion possible. And this is not a bad thing – it is human to wish to share one’s experiences with others. Does this matter? Chances are good that you would not be reading an article on how to write haiku if the private experience was sufficient to you. So it is a measure of how we succeed with language that will determine how well we are seen to be successful with haiku. Poetry, on the other hand, is about language, and poetry is the ultimate standard for haiku. ![]() All haiku is, in this sense, translation. This is true of the private experience of a moment of revelation, but it is not true of the shared experience of haiku. It might be said that the very best haiku, then, are wordless, that they don’t require words to achieve their goals. ![]() It has a language of its own, an emotive and sensuous language, and there is no very good correspondence between it and the spoken and written languages of the world. The nature of this experience may be such that it defies language, that it informs us wordlessly, or at least before we try to fit words to it. Haiku is not about language, but experience.
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