tundra
The Window-Washer’s Pail , 1963
Cor van den Heuvel
Commentary: Cor van den Heuvel’s historical one-word haiku “tundra” stands out as unique with its image having a seasonal reference and its juxtaposition to the surrounding page. Tundra is a biome where tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra means “uplands, treeless mountain tract.” Cor van den Heuvel experimented with his much-debated poem “tundra”— written slightly below the center of a blank page in his 1963 book the window-washer’s pail. It is a two-syllable word. He candidly says of the poem “One may say that a one-word haiku is naming, but one could add that it is the exception that proves the rule. All haiku are descriptions except one-word haiku.”
In an interview with Carmen Sterba in the blog Troutswirl, van den Heuvel said:
It is what it is: a level or undulating plain characteristic of arctic or subarctic regions. The important things are to see it alone in the mind or in the middle of an otherwise blank page and to color it with a season, preferably spring when it is blowing forever with grasses, flowers, birds (with their nests and eggs), and insects; or in winter when it is covered with endless drifted snow. To see the vastness of it spreading out from the word across the page and across the world. And to hear the sound of it. The word. 7
He commented elsewhere further on the form as a whole:
I began to think of one-image and one-line haiku as a part of my approach to haiku. There is almost always something else in the experience of the reader that will resonate, if only sub- consciously, with a single image—if that image is striking and evocative enough. One may think of it as an invisible metaphor. 8
-- excerpted from To the Lighthouse: Experimentation with One-Word Haiku by Pravat Kumar Padhy
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