First: five syllables
Second: seven syllables
Third: five syllables
New & Selected Poems, 1995
Ron Padgett
I once said jokingly that in writing "Haiku" I had hoped the kill the haiku form. Mainly, though, I guess I wanted to make fun of the syllable counting that some people insisted on even though, I'm told, our concept of the syllable is different from that of the Japanese. The whole question is minute, one that would interest only literary specialists. Meanwhile the haiku tradition has continued to move along undisturbed by hairsplitting. The best haiku really are marvellous.
-- an excerpt from Ron Padgett’s The Other Room interview:
Genricallly speaking, Padgett’s three-line poem is a meta-haiku, one that involves self-conscious commentary on the poem's genre or on the process of creating the poem. Technically speaking, he skillfully makes a structural allusion to the haiku form. Thematically speaking, the subject of his haiku is the form itself, as each line indicates and contains the required number of syllables for a haiku -- the form becomes the content. And most importantly, this meta-haiku reveals Padgett’s postmodernist compulsion to treat form as form -- to challenge it, dismiss it, parody it, ..etc.
The following poem, written by Don Wentworth and posted on February 2, could be read as a response haiku:
Stop counting syllables,
start counting the dead.
Stop counting syllables,
start counting the dead.
Past All Traps, 2012
Note ( added March 30):
Below is one of my replies to Don's sociopolitically conscious poem:
Read in the historical context of the English language haiku poetics, Don's poem gives a timely, clear and straight to the point answer to the question -- counting syllables (5-7-5) -- raised in "Anita Virgil's 2005 Simply Haiku interview" with Robert Wilson:
"Hard as it was for many to take, and hard as it was to convince many practitioners of this simplistic adaptative ‘solution’ to writing haiku in another language (and, unfortunately, to this day in the American educational system it persists!), it meant moving away from the dictum of 17 English-language—and later foreign-language—‘syllables’! Throughout the book The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth Yasuda, the top of every page all the way across reads: 57557557557557557557. And at the back of the book where he had his own haiku in English, he wrote them in 17 English syllables. How is a beginner to ever shake this off? Talk about subliminal messages! Yes, to the Japanese it had relevance, but to some of us outlanders, it was not the whole story. It was rarely applicable when writing in English.
In critiquing the poems of that era, it was not too difficult to see where the writers in English added words SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF MAKING THAT 17-SYLLABLE COUNT. It was referred to as “padding.” In most every instance, these ‘extra’ words were no more than redundancies. They did not add to the poem. To the contrary, they weakened the impact by dragging it out, repeating the same idea. Since the greatest beauty of the haiku for me is their power of concision with which one can open up worlds of implication, suggestion—if one selects only the essence of the moving experience that gave rise to the poem, this verbosity was a real handicap. In the main line poetry circles of those days (and still today somewhat) American haiku was totally disdained. Ignored. Not published. Dismissed. "
For more information about Ron Padgett's poetry, see Clay Matthews on Ron Padgett, http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-6/clay-matthews-on-ron-padgett.html
ReplyDeleteAnd read my detailed comments on Don Wentworth's haiku, http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2013/02/butterfly-dream-haiku-about-dead-by-don.html
"The comedy and imagination of a poet like Ron Padgett represents not an answer to whatever it is that is the postmodern condition, but a possible means of survival. And though I’m as tired of the term postmodernism as the next guy, I’m using it frequently here as a loosely historical period because I believe that Padgett is an historical poet, one for the books, as they say. This is also to say I want to speak in the language of a critic about a poet who deserves more criticism in my opinion than he has been afforded.
ReplyDeletePadgett’s poetry never takes itself too seriously but deals with serious issues. He picks up on the old game of consciously working with a language that isn’t always working, and through his poetry he achieves (or allows we the readers to achieve) pleasure through sometimes painful circumstances, and in this regard his work culminates in an example of the postmodern sublime. "
-- an excerpt from Clay Matthews on Ron Padgett
who's counting
ReplyDeleteseed-syllables
any way
Hi! Ed:
ReplyDeleteMany thanks.
Ron Padgett's "Haiku" was published in 1995.
Below is one of my replies to Don's sociopolitically conscious poem:
Read in the historical context of the English language haiku poetics, Don's poem gives a timely, clear and straight to the point answer to the question -- counting syllables (5-7-5) -- raised in "Anita Virgil's 2005 Simply Haiku interview" with Robert Wilson:
"Hard as it was for many to take, and hard as it was to convince many practitioners of this simplistic adaptative ‘solution’ to writing haiku in another language (and, unfortunately, to this day in the American educational system it persists!), it meant moving away from the dictum of 17 English-language—and later foreign-language—‘syllables’! Throughout the book The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth Yasuda, the top of every page all the way across reads: 57557557557557557557. And at the back of the book where he had his own haiku in English, he wrote them in 17 English syllables. How is a beginner to ever shake this off? Talk about subliminal messages! Yes, to the Japanese it had relevance, but to some of us outlanders, it was not the whole story. It was rarely applicable when writing in English.
In critiquing the poems of that era, it was not too difficult to see where the writers in English added words SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF MAKING THAT 17-SYLLABLE COUNT. It was referred to as “padding.” In most every instance, these ‘extra’ words were no more than redundancies. They did not add to the poem. To the contrary, they weakened the impact by dragging it out, repeating the same idea. Since the greatest beauty of the haiku for me is their power of concision with which one can open up worlds of implication, suggestion—if one selects only the essence of the moving experience that gave rise to the poem, this verbosity was a real handicap. In the main line poetry circles of those days (and still today somewhat) American haiku was totally disdained. Ignored. Not published. Dismissed. "