The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning -- an indicator for the exact reading -- placed alongside the basic hieroglyph…From our point of view, haiku are montage phrases. Shot lists.
-- Sergei Eisenstein, pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage".
English-language anthologies of haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments. This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.
-- Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:”
Every time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the connectedness of human experience.
-- Chen-ou Liu, June 2012 Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold
L: Recently you were working with “darker themes” in your haiku. Why did you want to do this? And how did it work out for you? Do we need to enlarge the subject matter used in the Japanese genres?
CL: I've been writing a series of haiku noir on darker themes, such as sudden death, suicide, psychiatric illness, violence, homelessness, alienation, estrangement, racism, rape, …etc. I've had first-hand or second-hand experiences of dealing with most of them (Note: A haiku noir is a narrative haiku, i.e. a cinematically dark flash non/fiction in verse. I gave an in-depth analysis and examples in my “To the Lighthouse” post, entitled "
The Arranged Marriage of Haiku and Cinema" . For further information on the relationship between haiku and cinema, please read my
Haiku Reality essay, titled "
Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective").
I am most influenced by Takuboku's conception of "poems to eat." He defined them as "poems written without putting any distance from actual life,...and they are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal."
In terms of dealing with one's dark moments, the difference between poets and other people is that poets can convey their feelings through poetry. As Graham Greene stresses, “writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in [that] human condition.”
Every time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the connectedness of human experience. This view of writing about dark moments as a way of healing is well explored in Louise DeSalvo’s
Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives. My review of this book can be accessed at
http://scr.bi/owyOEI .
As for enlarging the subject matter used in English language haiku, I think there is an urgent need to do so. most English language haiku are based on a narrower definition of haiku. Professor Haruo Shirane discusses this in his famous essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:” “English-language anthologies of haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments. This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.” His essay reminds me of Shiki’s , titled “Haiku on Excrement,” about discovering -- or rediscovering -- beauty in excrement. In the essay, Shiki demonstrates that the old masters had great capabilities of producing beauty out of ugly material, “citing 41 poems (most of them haiku) on feces, 18 on urine, 4 on farts, 24 on toilets, and 21 on loincloths.” In the concluding section, he makes clear that he is not particularly fond of writing haiku on excrement; but he mainly uses this topic as an example to show how the poet can explore a wide range of themes (Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, pp. 29-30)
I identify with Shiki’s approach to writing haiku. Most of darker themes in my recent haiku are, directly and indirectly, related to urban life issues that are experienced by all of us and covered by media on a daily basis. For me, they are legitimate subject matters for haiku writing.
Selected Haiku Noir:
dark clouds gathering
a man sets himself on fire
outside the bank
a column of smoke …
last night’s distant howling
follows me
new scar on his neck
her eyes cut my question
into small talk
a bag of cherries
crushed on the dirt road
red shoes
washing an apple
over and over and again...
leaden sky
Sketchbook, 6:5, September/October 2011
shouting match...
a boy drums his fingertips
on the windowpane
first day of Ghost Month
a distant howl breaking
the moonless night
Sketchbook, 7:2, March/April, 2012
end of Ghost Month
a blue mist drifting
through the basement
lovers' lane
a baby crying
in the garbage
autumn sunset
stray dog carcass
cut in two
"Urban Haiku and Senryu," World Kigo Database, 2011
pop, pop, pop
in a dark alley
the harvest moon
Haiku Canada Review, Winter/Spring 2012
wolf moon…
with monosyllabic words
she answers the question
Magnapoets, 8, July 2011
Silent Night…
KKK snowman with dark eyes
holding a noose
Haiku News, Jan. 8, 2011
Christmas morning
my neighbor's kid cuts off
his snowman's head
Sketchbook,7:2, March/April 2012
winter solstice...
she cuts her hair off
in a hot bath
Paper Wasp, 18:2, Winter 2012
blood moon...
a scream cut off
in the middle
Sketchbook, 7:1, January/February 2012
cliff inside my head
the darkness at the end
of a winter dream
English-Romanian Haiku Anthology, 2014
rain beating on rain he cracks
Under the Basho, 2, 2014
You can read the
full text of
A Far Distant Howl: Selected Haiku Noir by Chen-ou Liu, a freebie at Scribd.
Updated, July 9:
she slits her wrist
lying down in a warm bath...
hazy winter moon
When I workshopped the haiku above at THF on September 21, 2011, all of the suggested revisions I got are various minimalist versions of my original. Only one poet noticed my employment of the emotional montage technique
Here is my reply to the suggestions I got:
The emotionally suggestive power of a haiku noir where the emotional montage technique is employed depends on the visual details and the chronological order of shots (described in the fragment and phrase of the haiku).
The juxtaposed fragment (L3) not only enhances the mood of the poem, but also can function as human emotions over/ reflection on the opening image (the phrase, Ls 1&2), bringing out the "emotional truth" in response to the fate of the "she" portrayed in the poem.
