Turning Japanese

2011-11-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

Reading Murakami has lulled me into a haiku-writing frame of mind.

Autumnal twilight
Midges circle beneath boughs
Fallen apples rot

Another random gogyokhu

2011-02-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

I just knocked this out on Twitter. I have rearranged the order of the lines. I felt that the last line needed to be separated, like a turn in an Italian sonnet.

Piano fingers waltz in a daze,
Water lilies float, drowned butterflies.
My Armature is a humorous exoskeleton
To get me through the day.

Wear a beret or become a Sufi?

New experimental semi-automatic gogyokhu

2011-01-30T05:59:00.000-08:00

This is a gogyokhu I just spontaneously composed on Twitter. I have no idea what it is about or what prompted these images. What I don't like about this poem is that the line breaks are arbitrary; I wanted to write a gogyokhu, and the decision to use the form before thinking about the content seems to have resulted in my crowbarring the language into a shape that doesn't quite fit the sense of the words. It would probably work better semantically as one long line. Anyway, here it is.

Holes in the sky,
The spaces between clouds,
Make me laugh but the faces up there,
Jezebel wanderers,
Are killing me.

Throwdown

2011-01-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

I just threw this down for a Twitter #haikuthrowdown. The challenge was to use any or all of these words: morning, mercury, sedentary, hat. I cheated of course - 'morn', though a poetic word, is a synonym, not the actual word. On the other hand I managed to make a seasonal reference and the haiku expresses something personal: I am sedentary and wearing a hat!

Low mercury morn
Means sedentary fellow
Must wear a warm hat

Twitter nonsense

2010-12-20T22:20:00.000-08:00

Two more off-the-cuff haiku I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago. The first one was just a hello to my followers and the second, strictly speaking not a true haiku if the content is taken into consideration, was tweeted to @beerhaiku. Cheated on the syllables in the second haiku by doing a James Joyce and inventing a classical Greek-style compound adjective. Basho might not have approved, but Homer would.

Good morning, my Twits
Snowbound, snuggled up in bed
Sunday has arrived

Nightdark and bitter
Cold clean bite warming the soul:
Pint of the black stuff

Haiku Throwdown

2010-11-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

I just put together this little ditty for the #haikuthrowdown on Twitter. I have changed one word to avoid a repetition and the second line is adapted from a poem I wrote a long time ago.

frozen toes grow numb
I feel the cold bone-deep here:
can't escape winter

Nonsense in compact form

2010-09-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

Just some random silliness I threw out on Twitter tonight. I suppose you could call it a senryu, but that would probably be lending it a seriousness it doesn't deserve.

cowabungaface
heliotropic bunfight
post-human crabsticks

Not a Great Start to the Day

2010-08-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

Some recurring themes in this one. Managed to get a kigo into the picture, but no kireji has appeared. I wrote this around 7 a.m. hoping to capture the mood of the day's beginning. I wanted to create the atmosphere of a cold, wet summer morning in an urban setting, but I failed to indicate the time of day. Such are the challenges of working in this difficult form. Perhaps one day I will create the perfect haiku. Perhaps.

rain chills the pavements
the sky hangs a grey summer
over the tired streets

Anthology of Japanese Literature

2010-08-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

This wonderful little Penguin paperback has been in my library for some years, purchased from the greatly missed Mayflower Bookshop in Southampton. It covers many different kinds of writing from the Ancient Period (before AD 794) to the Tokugawa Period, and all the important writers and key texts, including texts originally composed in Chinese, are covered, either fully or as excerpts. There is an introduction by the editor, Donald Keene, which serves as a helpful basic guide to historical and stylistic developments. This book was first published in 1955, at which time there was very little material available in English apart from Arthur Waley's translations, but my later edition has a version of Love Suicides at Sonezaki from 1961. Presumably much more classic Japanese literature has become available in English since then, but this collection offers so many fascinating works that it is well worth having. If you don't own a copy and, like me, don't know a great deal about this literary culture, then The Penguin Anthology of Japanese Literature is an essential acquisition.

First Fumblings With Haiku and Senryu

2010-08-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

This is my first posting, a series of haiku and senryu composed in brief moments either to amuse (I hope) followers on Twitter or to capture images that arrived when I was experiencing inspiration. My interest in haiku and senryu was sparked by the frequent appearance of these little gems of wordsmithery on Twitter, and I found that I relished the chance to write spontaneously and receive instant feedback from other cyberminiaturists. (It certainly gave me another vehicle for my love of puns and questionable jokes.) I generally find it hard to produce long-form prose (hence the rather sporadic entries on my other blogs) or poems, so composing these small ditties, apart from the intrinsic enjoyment it gives me, helps me to keep my literary creativity from drying up altogether.

Each poem in this selection strictly adheres to the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic structure often used in English haiku and senryu. In Japanese the structure is based on the on, a unit that does not necessarily correspond to a single syllable. Thus English forms tend to avoid metrical rigidity as unnecessarily restrictive for the rhythmic cadences of the language. However, I find the discipline of exact 5-7-5 useful, the challenge of it being to produce phrases that don't sound like bad translations from another tongue. I have sometimes used a kigo (nature word) and have mostly used punctuation rather than a kireji ('cutting' word - a rough equivalent of a caesura or the turn in a sonnet in its effect). While these poems conform to the three-line structure and attempt to create the unity of image typical of haiku and senryu, they mostly do not employ their traditional subject matter.

These poems span the period from November last year to yesterday morning. Most of them have appeared online as tweeted versions, and they range from random wordplay through political comment and scenic images to dream fragments and downright silliness. Each one is a jeu d'ésprit composed in a spirit of experimentation and (mostly) light-heartedness; I hope you enjoy reading them in the same spirit.

the Prime Minister
writes an ill-advised letter
what a silly twat

soft strings, gentle flutes
Elgarian melodies
Robert Kirby's gone

shrinking telomeres
at the ends of chromosomes
stop metastasis

frangipani hat
dingdong pingpong singsong sigh
gloop on a Kit-Kat

goatsucker outside
looking for a goat to suck
bad luck, goatsucker

a paradiddle
with a flimflam and a roll
make short drum solo

Banjo Patterson
Australian poet penned
Waltzing Matilda

a Giacometti
statuette’s most expensive
I'll buy Action Man

Bognor Regis beach
is horrible in winter:
seaside misery

artesian wells
do not impress handsome young
Cartesian swells

five languid fingers
draped idly on a chair-arm
suddenly a twitch

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

drink drink drink drink drink
feck feck feck feck feck feck feck
girls girls girls girls girls

Pongo played bongos
on the banks of the Congo
which annoyed people

does enjambment un-
balance the short senryu form
or is it OK?

Quote Unquote is the
best thing on Radio 4
after You and Yours

contiguity
of lonely human bodies
in need of oneness

biscuity goodness
in a bap with sausages
topped off with custard

Madame Blavatsky
Theosophist saw humans
as degenerate

banjos by moonlight
tubas farting at twilight
mandolins at dawn

hungry ghost returns
disembodied holy fool
lost as a lover

I haven't written
a haiku today - my bad
most remiss of me

Ian Lavender
played Frank Pike in Dad's Army
in a woolly scarf

progressive facade
can't disguise the wicked truth:
Tories still evil

lien on a lean-to
rusticated sneezing breeze
Bobo's big bee-beard

the snow has melted
dripping, leaving slush and muck
on these grey pavements

a handful of meat
be careful where you take aim
avoid girlfriend's hair

hurl a hard black ball
high into the golden sun
stood at a cliff's edge

in a walled garden
an ancient sage smiles at me:
"This is the answer"

moon shines in puddles
wetness glistens on dark roofs:
night hides the city

dark summer night, but
stars occluded by lamplight:
city hides the sky