Week two.....Haikus!

Hello again world,

So, obviously since my blog is called Haiku Hopscotch, I have to write a post about haiku! For those of you who don't already know what a haiku is, it's a Japanese poem of around seventeen syllables - arranged over three lines of five, seven, and five - traditionally evoking images of the natural world.

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We have been looking at Edna St Vincent Millay, an American poet who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. Millay liked using traditional forms to both explore both new and old ideas:

I will touch
a hundred flowers
and pick not one.

In this haiku, which does not follow the 5-7-5 arrangement, Millay uses very concise and basic language to convey a natural but ambiguous message about our relationship with the world around us.

We, in turn, attempted to do this in Poetry Society, as we write as well as read and reflect. My haiku doesn't exactly follow the five seven five pattern either, but that's ok, as haiku doesn't necessarilly need to!

This week we have also been studying a certain concept in poetry called objective correlative. This is when the language in a poem is contrived so as to evoke a certain emotion. The aim is to create an emotional reaction in the reader by using imagery, description, or objects.

Rain on concrete
birdsong audible
the first crocus

My haiku is intended to evoke a feeling if hope: I used the imagery of rain on concrete as a nostalgic, slightly sad image, before birdsong promises something more positive; the final line serves as a coda, and brings the two ideas together in one image: a blossoming of nascent life.

Haikus for me really are special because they set off a spark of emotion, and to be able to just do that is magical. Have you ever come across a phrase or sentence in a book, or play or poem anywhere that evokes a sense of nostalgia within you? I love that. At their most effective, poets are able to filter their thoughts down to a short simple nugget of language strung together like beads on a neclace.

By analogy, we might use whiskey to desrcibe poetry. Whiskey is distilled from one great amount of substance (thoughts in context), and then it is very carefully distilled into its final stage, producing a lesser amount of more valuable liquid (such as haikus), which is extremely flavorful and has a powerful effect upon the drinker (the reader). For me, I just love expression in small amounts of words as it gives me taste of a bigger picture left for my imagination to picture freely. Lewis Carrol said as much when he claimed:

"Imagination is the only weapon against the war of reality".

So true.

Here are a couple more haikus that I wrote:

The clouds float by
at the pace of my heart,
my footsteps follow.

The silence of snowfall
the brightness of your eyes
your smile is contagious.
So, to finish things off, don't ever neglect your imagination. You can do some pretty amazing stuff with it.

Dream on, world.

A.H🐝