shades of blue …
the deer’s remaining eye
cradled by bone
Third Place, 2012 Robert Speiss Memorial Contest
Susan Constable
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
深淺不一的藍...
一隻鹿的頭骨支撐
它剩下的一個眼睛
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
深浅不一的蓝...
一只鹿的头骨支撑
它剩下的一个眼睛
Bio Sketch
Susan Constable’s haiku and tanka appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has both won and judged several international contests and is currently the tanka editor for the international on-line journal, A Hundred Gourds. Susan lives with her husband on Canada’s beautiful west coast.
This poem is more jarring than the others. It starts with the shades of bluebonnets and azure skies and word and word becomes deeper and darker. The solitude of nature is interrupted by a gunshot, which destroys a deer's face, leaving only one eye dangling in the socket. The judges were sickened by the resonating image, yet we had to marvel at the skill of the poet. The word "cradled" was especially poignant and evoked a mother as she tenderly holds her dying child.
ReplyDelete-- excerpted from the judges' commentary, Modern Haiku, 43:2, Summer 2012, p. 7
This poem is "more jarring" than the others. It starts with the shades of bluebonnets and azure skies and word and word becomes deeper and darker....
ReplyDeleteThe type of cutting Susan effectively employed in her haiku belongs to Type II: a discrimination/confrontation set up within a hokku between a "this"/Yin opposed to a "that/Yang."
... 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 ...
For more info., see "To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting," http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2013/02/to-lighthouse-three-formulations-about.html
Highly arresting indeed!
ReplyDelete