haiku-usa

A blog devoted mainly to haiku and senryu and to thoughts about, and inspired by, haiku and senryu.

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Location: New York, New York

Haiku is to poetry as espresso is to coffee.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

spring visitor

You can read here and there that haiku must be about nature and its works, not about humans and their works. But it isn't always easy, possible, or desirable to keep them separated.

the mourning dove coos
from his nest
under our air conditioner

posted by Bill | 2:52 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Bill,
How nice to see such a young man involved in such a finme art as haiku!
I'd like to comment on your haiku, "Spring Visitor.
You have here a single sentence.
For a haiku to work, to be true to the basic tenets of form, yo need a pause. By juxtaposing two phrasess (with one of the elements spanning over two of the poem's three lines), the two phrases create an spark of interest. When you make the connection between the two phrases you create the sought after "aha" moment.

Example:
the mourning dove coos
from his nest
[under our] air conditioner

the last line is the aha! moment, telling us where the cooing is coming from.

Another way of writing it:

coos from under
our air conditioner -
mourning dove

hope that helps...
thanks, btw, for your comments on my blog. :>)

I'm still learning...and I'm 68!

11:05 AM  
Blogger Bill said...

Thanks for your visit and comment. I raised the two-part structure issue in a recent post, and I intend to consider alternatives later on. It seems that there is ample precedent in the work of the Japanese masters for single-sentence haiku, often with a cutting word ("kana" being a favorite) coming at the end. When a haiku evolves as other than fragment-and-phrase (in Reichhold's terminology), I ask myself if it's worth a kana. But I'm still learning, and I'm certainly grateful for a thoughtful and precise comment like yours, especially since my personal circle of acquaintance includes no haiku writers or readers.

10:21 PM  

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