peony petals
scattered on floorboards
Dali’s melting watch
Blood Ties and Crack-Fed Dreams, 2013
Gail Willems
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
牡丹花瓣
散落在地板上
達利的熔化手錶
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
牡丹花瓣
散落在地板上
达利的熔化手錶
Bio Sketch
Gail Willems (retired nurse)-, published -Belgium, U.K., New Zealand, and Australia, in Famous Reporter, Regime, dotdotdash, on radio, in journals, magazines, many anthologies, including an academic anthology Winner Poetry D’Amour 2013, Peel Region Winner Poetry D’Amour 2014. First poetry collection Blood Ties and Crack-Fed Dreams (Ginninderra Press 2013)
This is an example of the effective use of type II Cutting. The contrasts (the real vs the surreal, natural vs man-made, transient vs fixed, ...etc) spark the reader's emotions and reflection on one's conception of time in relation to existence.
ReplyDeleteNotes:
1 L3 refers to Dali's 1931 painting, The Persistence of Memory.
2 Below is excerpted from `To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting, which can be accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2013/02/to-lighthouse-three-formulations-about.html
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
Gail's haiku reminds me of my 2012 Spain trip, which was recorded in the following haiku sequence (Modern Haiku, 44:1, winter/spring 2013)
ReplyDeleteJourney through the Land of Melting Clocks
anything new
under the Barcelona sun
Casa Milà
a line of tapas
where does her love begin
and my desire end?
the full moon
at La Sagrada Família
unfinished me
Occupy Madrid
returning
to my mother tongue
Seville Cathedral
above a sea of heads
chirping swallow
Dante in Thought
is it possible to take
refuge in poetry
Dalí painting
on my water-stained wall
hometown memories
In Dali's The Persistence of Memory, there are one melting pocket watch & two melting clocks.
ReplyDeleteDali's "melting clocks" is better known his "melting watch."