Butterfly Dream: New Year's Morning Dew Haiku by Damir Janjalija

English Original

in five-seven-five
I compact confusing thoughts ...
New Year's morning dew

Simply Haiku, 10:3, Spring/Summer 2013

Damir Janjalija


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我將混亂的想法
壓縮成五-七-五音節形式 ...
新年的晨露

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

我将混乱的想法
压缩成五-七-五音节形式 ...
新年的晨露


Bio Sketch

Damir Janjalija, aka Damir Damir, was born in 1977 in Kotor, Montenegro. He is a sailor, a wanderer, and a poet who wakes up every morning to a different now. He published a bilingual haiku book, Imprints of dreams, in 2012.

To the Lighthouse: Collage-esque Perspectives on the Syllabic Structure of Haiku

"Haiku"

First: five syllables

Second: seven syllables

Third: five syllables

New & Selected Poems, 1995

Ron Padgett

(for more information, see Poetic Musings: Ron Padgett’s "Haiku")

Haiku: A form of Japanese lyric verse that encapsulates a single impression of a natural object or scene, within a particular season, in seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables....

-- Chris Baldick,  The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3 ed.),  P. 148.

five, seven, five

I count on my fingers

deep fall

Imprints of dreams

Damir Janjalija

(For more information, see Butterfly Dream: Deep Fall Haiku by Damir Janjalija )

Hard as it was for many to take, and hard as it was to convince many practitioners of this simplistic adaptive ‘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.

-- excerpted from Anita Virgil's 2005 Simply Haiku interview with Robert Wilson:

Stop counting syllables,

start counting the dead.

Past All Traps

Don Wentworth

(For more information, see Butterfly Dream: Counting Syllables Haiku by Don Wentworth)

English words, so many of which have Latin origins, can be cumbersomely multisyllabic, and English syntax requires parts of speech that pile on still more syllables. A strict syllable count is the least important part of a haiku. Even the Japanese poets honor this rule more in the breach than in the keeping. Thousands of well-known Japanese haiku have between twelve and twenty-two syllables...

... Basho's famous crow haiku, to cite only one of many examples, is written 5-9-5...

-- Hiag Akmakjian, Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku, pp. 35 &40.

in five-seven-five

I compact confusing thoughts . . .

New Year's morning dew

Simply Haiku: 10:3, Spring/Summer 2013

Damir Janjalija


Updated, December 19

Below is excerpted from  Richard Gilbert's and Judy Yoneoka's essay, titled "From 5-7-5 to 8-8-8 Haiku Metrics and Issues of Emulation -- New Paradigms for Japanese and English Haiku Form," Language Issues: Journal of the Foreign Language Education Center, #1, March 2000

Abstract

The question of how English-language haiku form may best emulate Japanese 5-7-5 haiku (or whether it even should at all) has been hotly debated for decades. A recent trend in Japanese poetic analysis, however, interprets haiku in terms of 3 lines of 8 beats each onto which the 5-7-5 -on are mapped. This paper presents an overview of this trend, supported both by theory from metrical phonology and by observed experimental data of subjects reading haiku in Japanese. It was found that the 8-8-8 metrical pattern is indeed verifiably present in haiku reading, and that this pattern serves to map both haiku with 5-7-5 -on and other  -on counts. Based on these findings, implications for English haiku form, especially with respect to emulation, lineation, and metricality are discussed within the context of the North American haiku movement. It is proposed that haiku in both Japanese verse and English free verse may naturally fit into a similar metrical form. It is hoped that a metrical analysis, operating across both languages, may help clear up some misconceptions regarding the Japanese haiku in the West, while providing an impetus to bridge the gap between the Japanese and world haiku movements.

...

Contemporary English Haiku Examples and Issues

Just as a person may best be known not through analysis in absentia but through actual meeting, the English haiku is perhaps best met through example rather than definition or analysis. Although many authors discuss the "English haiku tradition," this tradition, traceable to the first "hokku-like" success in English by Ezra Pound (1913),[6] for the most part begins in the post-WWII era--so is a tradition barely fifty years old.[7] Variability, variation, and experiment remain rife and vital in all aspects of the poetic form.

...

my head in the clouds in the lake

-- Ruby Spriggs (1)

fog.
sitting here
without the mountains

-- Gary Hotham (4)

spring    wind --
I      too
am     dust

-- Patricia Donegan (6)

 a barking dog
 little bits of night
                                  breaking off

-- Jane Reichhold (11)

subway woman asleep
picked daisies
in her hand

-- Raffael De Gruttola (16)


Some of the main issues in contemporary English haiku are that: 1) the syllable counts and 2) rhythms in English haiku are more variable than prescriptive guidelines for emulation of the Japanese haiku allow. Also, 3) rhythmical divisions are more varied. In Donegan (Ex. 6) we have a haiku of 6 total syllables. De Gruttola"s haiku (Ex. 16) contains 12 syllables, twice as many as Donegan. Which takes longer to read in a typical reading by the same individual? We can see that Donegan, through word-spacing and selection, choice of line breaks, and punctuation, has created qualities which suggest rhythmic lengthening. Thus, total syllable counts cannot be considered apart from their intimate relation with rhythm and phrasal cadence. Donegan"s haiku is a good example of the creative possibilities of free-verse English poetry, and it is this tradition that most adequately defines the basis of English haiku, in terms of rhythmic and verse-line variation....

To the Lighthouse: To Be or Not to Be a One-line Haiku?

                                        before after and inside me snowflakes drifting

                                       or

                                       before after
                                       and inside me
                                       snowflakes drifting


The standard meter of classic Japanese Haiku is 5-7-5 sound symbols. In English language haiku, the common practice is to begin a new verse line after each metrical unit. However, as early as 1971, in Haiku Magazine, 5:2, Michael Segers published, arguably speaking, the first one-line English language haiku, "in the eggshell after the chick has hatched." 1 Praised for its pleasurable ambiguities, this "aesthetically innovative" form was later advocated by translator Hiroaki Sato and talented poet Marlene Mountain (Allan Burns, Montage, August 30th, 2009). Sadly, today there are only a handful of articles about one-haiku; among them, Marlene Mountain’s  "One-Line Haiku," William J. Higginson’s  "From One-line Poems to One-line Haiku," and Jim Kacian’s "The Way of One" are, relatively speaking, widely read. However, none of them deals with this issue from the perspective of the employment of cutting, except for a brief mention in Kacian’s article (“A third way Western languages can exploit the one-line haiku to novel effect is through the use of multiple kire, or cutting words. Certain critics, such as Hasugawa Kai, feel that kire is the most critical poetic technique exploited by haiku”). 2 Marlene Mountain’s article mainly talks about the issue in the context of the aesthetic evolution of her writing career, showing a lot of her haiku examples. William J. Higginson’s resourceful essay gives a historical view of monostiches in the Western poetic tradition (mainly the French one), and then proposes a typology of one-line haiku, which is based on the degree of the smooth flow of a poem or on the number of (forced/marked) pauses. In “[his] efforts to regain something of what is attained by the original Japanese practice, “ Jim Kacian “has discovered some effects that, for a variety of reasons, are not available in Japanese: ‘one line - one thought’, ‘speedrush’ and ‘multistops.” In his article, Kacian says nothing about how to distinguish one-line “haiku” and other “one-line poems.” Most importantly, there is a big gap/structural issue completely neglected in all these articles: for the same poem text, why does a one-line haiku work better than its three-line twin? 

Below is an in-depth review of a one-line haiku, which demonstrates how to make this aesthetic and structural decision (Peter Harris, ""In a Sea of Indeterminacy: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Haiku," A Companion to Poetic Genre, pp. 285-6):

More rain the sisters slip into their mother tongue

Modern Haiku, 37:3

Scott Metz

Metz employs an unbroken line here in a way that generates velocity and a sense of simultaneity that is in tension with its subtlety. But if it were broken into three lines --

More rain
the sisters slip
into thier mother tongue

-- the pun on slip would have dominated and diminished the poem. As it stands, the single line puts the focus the elusive implications raised by the poem as a whole. What has the rain to do with the sisters returning to their mother tongue? Does it liquidity induce a fresh access of native fluency? Is the rain metaphorical, some fluid quality of language that increasingly permeates their intimate conversation? Is the "mother tongue" metaphorical, implying the sisters are like the drops of water dissolving in their origins? Are the sisters slipping rain into the mother tongue as one "slips" a drug into a cocktail? Though there is no way of proving it, one is tempted to say that this degree of semantic openness becomes more likely if, as Metz does, one focuses exclusively on the haiku form.

Notes:

1 In his essay mentioned above, William J. Higginson emphasizes that it's van den Heuvel who first published the one-line haiku in a small letterpress chapbook called EO7 in 1964.

    a dixie cup floats down the Nile.

"This is certainly one of those poems that goes by so fast the reader hardly notices it, until, stopping short, one grins at the irony of the discarded cup and the great monuments of ancient Egypt juxtaposed, and laments the follies of humankind. I would almost call this a one-line senryu, rather than haiku, except for the bite of that river carrying us into deep time."

2  In his essay, William J. Higginson does briefly discuss the use of cutting. However, like most English-speaking haiku poets, he understands a cut as a syntactic break through the use of punctuation. For more information about cutting, see To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting (in the classic Japanese haiku tradition),To the Lighthouse: Cutting through Time and Space (new/the fourth formulation about the use of cutting), and To the Lighthouse: Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting .

Poetic Musings: Ron Padgett’s "Haiku"

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.

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. "