a girl, wheelchair-bound ...
the sound
of falling snow
KO, 30:4, 2015
Susan Mary Wade
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
一個女孩, 坐在輪椅上 ...
雪花飄落
的聲音
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
一个女孩, 坐在轮椅上 ...
雪花飘落
的声音
Bio Sketch
Susan Mary Wade is a member of The Japan Tanka Poets' Society, Tanka Society of America and Tanka Canada. In June 2016 she received a Certificate of Merit from The Kadokawa "Tanka" Editorial Department at the 8th International Tanka Festival Competition in Japan.
This is a fine example of cinematic haiku where the Poundian technique of "super-position" is employed. The auditory image of the sound of falling snow effectively enhances the emotionally suggestive power of the visual image of a wheelchair-bound girl.
ReplyDeleteNote: "A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better to keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku… The "one-image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence 1:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough."
-- excerpted from "To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position," which can be accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2013/03/to-lighthouse-haiku-as-form-of-super.html