Poetry for my peeps
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, Poetry
Just posted a couple of little poems for your reading pleasure in the poetry page. They’re both SF themed haikus.
The haiku is a Japanese form of verse that found great popularity in the West, mainly America, from around the 1920s onwards. In English the traditional form is 3 lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables. Of course in its orignal Japanese the haiku is simply a column of characters running down the page, but with the 5,7,5 morae.
Ezra Pound was a big fan of the haiku (and other Easter forms of poetry) and the similarities between haiku and some of the Imagist poems is evident: the compression, the distilling of an image into as few words as possible. Pound also had a real thing for Japanese and Chinese ideograms because they mean the thing that they represent (this isn’t the place to start talking about language and the limits of representation, but he has a point).
It is taken almost for granted that Western haikus don’t compare favourably to the original Japanese ones. Indeed many Western haikus (my own ones included on the poetry page) don’t adhere to the Japanese “rules” such as nature imagery, a seasonal representation (e.g cherry blossoms = spring) and so on.
Nonetheless they are a fun form of poetry to write, and if taken seriously can be very hard to write well. I don’t claim that my own are anything special but I enjoy them anyway. Hope you do to.
Bye.
