When bad haiku happens to bad peopleFeb. 1, 2001
I didn't want to write a haiku, and here's why: haiku in English means bad news. The problem with Americans writing haiku (well, one of the problems) is that they always have to put in a little punch line at the end, just to be sure you get it. So you get two lines of a cutesy nature scene followed by a heavy-handed gloss:
Cardinals feeding
On the scattered backyard seeds
Springtime has arrived
Or something like that. A Japanese poet once wrote of seeing wet bird footprints on his wooden veranda in the morning. The image kicks ass because of its economy: it contains the night rain, the texture of bird's feet on wood grain, the exquisite transience of the tiny footprints, and a great number of other things as well. Most writers of haiku in English, by contrast, choose images with all the poetry of a motel watercolor. Worse is the joke haiku, as if merely putting a statement in haiku form is automatically funny. I propose a ban on haiku written by Americans.
We should in fact consider banning all poetry. At the very least, let's stop encouraging it. No more National Poetry Month. No more public poetry projects. Reading poetry is bad enough, but encouraging the general public to write it leads to things like the Seattle transit authority's "Poetry in Motion" project. A poem on a bus in Seattle will generally feature homeless people doing things that are unexpectedly whimsical or wise. Or else it will be yet another piece of beatnik flattery offered up to the shrine of the perpetually adolescent ego. To paraphrase They Might Be Giants paraphrasing Allan Ginsberg, I've seen the worst verse of my generation printed on placards, immortalized on buses. "All bad poetry is sincere," said Oscar Wilde, and if he'd had the misfortune to ride a Metro poetry bus he would have added that we're all better off reading well-composed ad copy.
Good poetry, a venomously concentrated form of human imagination, is of course even worse. Real poetry is as far removed as is possible from the civic-minded virtues of National Poetry Month. It is more likely to treat the abject, wide-eyed terror of mortal existence. Emily Dickinson could here have been writing about the effect of great poets:
They summoned Us to die --
With sweet alacrity
We stood upon our stapled feet --
Condemned but just to see
The point I'm trying to make here is that I did not intend to write a haiku. This made all the more disconcerting the event that occurred while I was removing blackberry bushes one evening.
My state of mind may have been affected by the work. The blackberry bush is not a bush at all but a network of deeply burrowing roots and opportunistic, climbing stems that wend their way around more honest plant life. The blackberry stem is an imperious purple fading to an angry green, studded with thorns, and can achieve the girth of some demonic erection. Its nondescript green foliage blends in with that of its hosts, but it betrays itself with the dark fruit that dot its length like advertisements for evil. The sinister appearance of the blackberry bush enhances the satisfaction of its removal, as do the pricks one inevitably suffers from its thorns. It is a larger-scale version of the satisfaction one gets from removing a stubborn splinter.
It was while I was engaged in this difficult and gratifying task, and the sun had set behind a symmetrical suburban street, that I was struck between the eyes by a haiku event:
Rustling plastic bag,
white in the yellow street light,
steps, becomes a cat
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Fabulous book cover of the month