when my gendai world was flat I kept falling off
the text horizon
Notes from the Gean, 19, May 2013
kjmunro
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我的現代俳句世界是扁平時，我不斷地從文本地平線
摔落下來
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
我的现代俳句世界是扁平时，我不断地从文本地平线
摔落下来
Bio Sketch
Born & raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, kjmunro moved to the Yukon Territory in 1991. She is a member of Haiku Canada, and volunteers with The Whitehorse Poetry Society. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript.
kjmunro's brilliantly-crafted meta-gendai-haiku gives me a good laugh.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, she successfully alludes to the myth of the flat earth:
"The Flat Earth model is an archaic belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century... excerpted from the Wikipedia entry, Flat Earth.
Lesson 1: please stretch your imagination when reading gendai haiku.
Secondly, a subtle simile is established between the myth of the flat earth and the interpretative realm of gendai haiku.
Lesson 2: the haiku can be greatly enhanced by the skillful use of figurative language.
Thirdly, her haiku extends the idea of kireji (cutting word) past the breaking point to create a broken-off fragment -- the concrete disjunction pulls the image/line fragment back into the poem. Her placement of the poem is thematically and emotionally effective.
Lesson 3, it's time to "[Re-examine] the Concept and Practice of Cutting," http://goo.gl/yikEE
Finally, please read Paul Miller's Frogpond essay, entitled Haiku's American Frontier (http://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2012-issue35-1/essay.html), to enrich the understanding of gendai haiku
One more comment:
ReplyDeleteThe use of the past tense indicates that the interpretative earth of gendai haiku where the speaker now lives is spherical.
Lesson 4: a good haiku depends on the thematically and emotionally effective use of the verb tense.
The note from kjmunro:
ReplyDeleteit was inspired by a quote in the essay 'Song of Himself' by Scott Mason (Frogpond 35:2 - 2012) - "Excellent haiku evoke coherence beyond the text horizon." - Dr. Richard Gilbert.