My Dear Friends:
NeverEnding Story contributor
George Swede
published his first collection of micro haiku, titled
micro haiku: three
to nine syllables. The 101 haiku in this book range from three to nine
syllables, culled from Swede’s decades-long published work to “show how
the world's most brief poetic form can succeed when shorter than the
typical English-language haiku which ranges from 10 to 14 syllables.”
About the Author:
George Swede's most recent collections of haiku are
Almost Unseen (Decatur, IL: Brooks Books, 2000) and
Joy In Me Still (Edmonton: Inkling Press, 2010). He is a former editor of
Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America (2008-2012) and a former Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives (2008-2009).
Selected Haiku:
leaving my loneliness inside her
divorce papers falling leaves
snowflakes bricks
from where the leaf fell a star
the holes in my thoughts fill with stars
spring morning grave digger whistling
fisherman reeling in twilight
eyes closed
open to what's
inside
training bra
on the clothesline
half moon
spring thaw
wings beating inside my skull
trout river
my shadow
has gills
autumn wind
cells falling from
my body
willow
conducting
the storm
town dump
i find a still-
beating heart
creek
cricket
creaking
bridge
at both ends
mist
nightfall
the demons
on time
alone at last
I wonder where
everyone is
Note: Below is excerpted from Aubrie Cox's book review, which was first published in
A Hundred Gourds, 3:4, 2014:
snowflakes bricks
Admittedly, the haiku above makes me pause, but I want to explore it. It has a season (snowflakes = winter), it juxtaposes two images and it has a kire/cut between the two words. Are these not all facets that most poets would consider essential to haiku, happening between these two words? I can certainly envision the snow coming down and landing on a walkway, or maybe against one of the many brick buildings on the campus where I work. The snowflakes settle onto the rough surface before fading into the crevices, leaving behind a small wet mark. The space between “snowflakes” and “bricks” feels like the moment before the two make contact. It’s so brief, just like my experience would be in noticing the moment. The before and after are almost simultaneous. Any more words would disrupt and only distract the reader from the moment. They’d tell too much....
... although these poems are micro on the page, off it they are just as, if not more, full as any haiku.
it juxtaposes two images and it has a kire/cut between the two words.
The type of cutting employed in George's haiku above belongs to Type II Formulation: "Buson and Shiki," pp. 410-11
…The more complex uses of kireji that come into prominence later on break down this linguistically confined structure of the sentence unit in favor of freer poetic play across the gap made by ya, other cutting-words, or syntactic breaks which cleave the poem in two …
Later in the seventeenth century when Danrin poets formulated their ideas about kireji, the discussion might be presented in terms of Yin-Yang metaphysics or simply in terms of a discrimination set up within a hokku between a "this" opposed to a "that." A work from 1680 put it in a refreshingly slangy way:
The kireji is that which clearly expresses a division of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang mean the existence of an interesting confrontation within a poem (okashiku ikku no uchi ni arasoi aru o iu nari). For instance, something or other presented in a hokku is that?-no, it's not that but this, etc. 46
Eisenstein, circa 1929, would have replaced Yin with thesis and Yang with antithesis and cast the whole matter in the mold of his peculiar dialectic, but he would certainly have gone along with this Japanese poet's notion of arasoi, "confrontation." "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell -- the shot?" he asked himself in "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram." "By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision." And the phrases of hokku were, he insisted, "montage phrases," and hence they generated their meaning by a like dynamic process. 47
