Sunday, August 18, 2019

Poetic Musings: Bits of Night Haiku by Jane Reichhold

a barking dog
little bits of night
                            breaking off

Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku, 1993

Jane Reichhold

Commentary: ... Reichhold’s haiku extends the idea of kireji past the breaking point, to create a broken-off fragment — the concrete disjunction pulls the image/line fragment back into the poem. Beyond the obvious orthographic pun, the broken‑off third line has a sonic dimension as “breaking” has assonant rhyme and similar rhythm to “barking,” so it seems the broken night is, at the same time, the “bark bark” of a dog. This is emphasized by the circularity of the poem, which knits together the broken fragments of both “night” and the third line...

-- excerpted from Richard Gilbert's groundbreaking essay, "The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A Study of Disjunctive Method and Definitions in Contemporary English‑language Haiku," World Haiku Club, 3:2, 2003

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