Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
Light ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #319
Dancer’s wooden mask:
leather hinges swing open.
Drum throbs; shaman chants.
~ ~ ~ ~
Hinges swing shut as dance ends:
hidden face; revealed spirit.
Photo © Trustees of the British Museum
~ ~ ~ ~
Khan Academy | Transformation Masks
Smooth outer layer.
We see rough inner layer
when the light changes.
~ ~ ~ ~
Layers nest like Russian dolls,
when science shows us atoms.
Layers ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #283
Better Than No Chance at All
Helicopter seed
lands on shiny new asphalt.
No chance to grow here.
I walk away, then go back.
I move it to damp bare dirt.
Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
I considered posting my photo wordlessly, with the post’s title as a hint that I have something beyond a nice image in mind. Too subtle. Compulsively explicit, I wrote a haiku. Then I expanded the haiku to a tanka.
I hesitated. The tanka’s last 2 lines might be too preachy. Then I read the Gandhi quote in a great collection of images and quotes: Our Beautiful, Broken World (curated by Mitch Teemley).
Thanks, Mitch. The time for subtlety is long gone.
The challenge is reblogged (in effect) below. I was jolted by the clash between the serenity of the image and the political interpretation of a phrase in the poem.
In the ebbing radiance
Of a world slipping into darkness
The light is most vivid
Capable of magiks
Unknown to daylight
© Patrick Jennings | Radiance ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #243
Radiance and Darkness
In sure and certain hope
that light returns tomorrow,
sky’s radiance fades.
But slipping into darkness
is not serene for nations.
Bare Branches
Some go to grayscale
when form is “all” that matters.
I keep azure skies.
My world will gray soon enough.
I keep color and press on.
If somebody chooses to emphasize form and texture in a photo of bare branches by going to grayscale, I am likely to disagree with (but respect) that choice. So far, I have always wanted to keep color in my own photos, often with minor adjustments in my photo editor. Here are some examples where grayscale would be goofy:
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While I have no qualms about really needing color in most of my own photos, there is more to be said about the ways various photographers have used color or grayscale. Some examples follow.
A somber poem with grayness as a metaphor has been illustrated by a photo of a mostly gray scene. But it is a color photo, and rightly so. The subtle color is a reminder that the grayness is there in the scene, not an artifact of how the image is displayed.
Of course, I admire the photographic pioneers whose images were compelling despite then-obligatory grayscale. Some classic photos are best left in grayscale anyway, and contemporary photographers may choose partial desaturation. There are even a few photos that benefit from going all the way to true black and white, where every pixel is either pitch black or stark white. Scroll down from the header image in Choices to see an example.
Carpe Diem #1378 Finally … Enlightenment
The Silk Road was a hard slog, as is the path to enlightenment. It might help a little to consider some of the unobvious ways the images in this post are alike.
Oneness Beyond Color
Glass ball and blossom:
so unlike yet so alike.
Enlightenment glows
beyond breakage or wilting;
beyond illusions of death.
With what I hope is the usual wry humor, we consider how categorizing things is intrinsically simplistic but sometimes useful. Or not. We start simply and then go up, in importance as well as complexity.
I like watermelon but am far too old to like spitting out the seeds. Of course, I buy seedless watermelons. But what is that off-white speck on one of the chunks of watermelon in my bowl of fruit? A closer look at the chunk shows that it has lots of seeds. Did the supermarket cheat me? No, those seeds are small and soft and immature forever. They will be unnoticed on the way in and on the way out. I wish the body politic could so easily excrete a POTUS that is small and soft and immature forever.
As “may contain occasional seeds” on its produce label hints, a “seedless” watermelon may well have a few serious seeds. They are large and hard and nasty to eat. But they are also large enough and dark enough to be easily seen when on or near the surface of a chunk. I hardly ever let one slip past for an uninvited tour of my extensive collection of tooth crowns and fillings.
Putting watermelons into little bins with the labels [seedless] or [seeded] distorts the literal truth but is easy and useful for my purposes. Plant breeders would need more detail.
Categorization is not always so easy as when buying and selling watermelons.
There are situations where useful categorization is hard. Friend or foe? Right or wrong? We must often proceed despite the knowledge that such tidy-looking categories are misleading.
Happily, some of the problematic contexts (where it is hard to decide which little bin “should” receive something we may feel an urge to categorize) are also contexts where putting things into little bins is a waste of time. Compare something to other things in the same big (and obviously appropriate) bin; do not fret about little bins and dubious claims that things in the same little bin are importantly alike in some ways.
For example, consider the problem of deciding whether a little bin labelled [haiku] or a little bin labelled [senryu] is where a short poem (written in English, not Japanese) belongs. The metaproblem of deciding whether this problem is meaningful is a step up from whether we should categorize watermelons but not so difficult (and steeped in nastiness) as deciding when (if ever) it is meaningful to put people into bins with labels like [black] or [white].
Imported into English from Japanese for good reasons long ago, the English word [haiku] does not mean exactly what the Japanese word [haiku] did mean in Edo Japan or does mean in modern Japan. Most words do not even have exact meanings. Different groups of speakers use the same word in different ways, with varying degrees of similarity.
To me and many other speakers of American English, any poem in haiku form is a haiku (tho not necessarily a good one). For now, we need not fret about what “the” haiku form requires or what is recommended (and often beneficial) but not required. Whether a poem is a haiku (or a quadrille or a sonnet or …) does not depend on its content. The poem’s form alone indicates whether it is a haiku. Tho common, this usage is not universal.
For both [haiku] and [senryu] (as English words about poems in English, with several nods to Japanese usage), the Haiku Society of America adopted the definitions and notes quoted below in 2004. We consider [haiku] first.
HAIKU
Definition: A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.
Notes: Most haiku in English consist of three unrhymed lines of seventeen or fewer syllables, with the middle line longest, though today’s poets use a variety of line lengths and arrangements. In Japanese a typical haiku has seventeen “sounds” (on) arranged five, seven, and five. (Some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about twelve syllables in English approximates the duration of seventeen Japanese on.) Traditional Japanese haiku include a “season word” (kigo), a word or phrase that helps identify the season of the experience recorded in the poem, and a “cutting word” (kireji), a sort of spoken punctuation that marks a pause or gives emphasis to one part of the poem. In English, season words are sometimes omitted, but the original focus on experience captured in clear images continues. The most common technique is juxtaposing two images or ideas (Japanese rensô). Punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break may substitute for a cutting word. Most haiku have no titles, and metaphors and similes are commonly avoided. (Haiku do sometimes have brief prefatory notes, usually specifying the setting or similar facts; metaphors and similes in the simple sense of these terms do sometimes occur, but not frequently. A discussion of what might be called “deep metaphor” or symbolism in haiku is beyond the range of a definition. Various kinds of “pseudohaiku” have also arisen in recent years; see the Notes to “senryu”, below, for a brief discussion.)
I applaud the way the HSA keeps the definition of haiku form very short and broad, then discusses some formal details lucidly in the notes. Apart from the ominous last sentence, the notes will be helpful to anybody puzzled by the multitude of formal considerations to which various people attach various degrees of importance. But I have 2 concerns about the definition.
SENRYU
Definition: A senryu is a poem, structurally similar to haiku, that highlights the foibles of human nature, usually in a humorous or satiric way.
Notes: A senryu may or may not contain a season word or a grammatical break. Some Japanese senryu seem more like aphorisms, and some modern senryu in both Japanese and English avoid humor, becoming more like serious short poems in haiku form. There are also “borderline haiku/senryu”, which may seem like one or the other, depending on how the reader interprets them.
Many so-called “haiku” in English are really senryu. Others, such as “Spam-ku” and “headline haiku”, seem like recent additions to an old Japanese category, zappai, miscellaneous amusements in doggerel verse (usually written in 5-7-5) with little or no literary value. Some call the products of these recent fads “pseudohaiku” to make clear that they are not haiku at all.
Right after the definition limits senryu to being about foibles, the notes rescind the limitation. Maybe an aphorism is a senryu? Maybe a serious short poem in haiku form, like the wistful classic
© Alexis Rotella
Just friends: …
he watches my gauze dress
blowing on the line.
is a senryu? Maybe yet another poem in haiku form is something else, neither a haiku nor a senryu? Maybe we should rummage in a Japanese/English dictionary for words like [zappai]?
Maybe we should speak plain English.
Importing the Japanese word [haiku] into English gave a good name to a new kind of English poetry inspired by Japanese poetry; importing [senryu] helped discuss the history of Japanese poetry. But we already had plenty of words for saying that the mood of a poem is humorous or inspirational or philosophical or wistful. We still have them, along with plenty of words for saying what a poem is about and why we like or dislike it. We do not need special words for saying such things when the poem happens to be in haiku form. Barbarians like me are not the only ones who prefer to use [haiku] broadly. As Jane Reichold argued in 2010 with allegorical apples, [haiku] versus [senryu] is becoming a distinction w/o a difference.
That haiku forms are good for naturalistic subjects is beyond dispute. Some of my favorite haiku (among both those I have read and those I have written) are indeed naturalistic. But I also push the envelope of haiku subject matter and am far from alone in doing so. A classic by Alexis Rotella has already been mentioned. This section has more examples of pushing the envelope (not necessarily of being classics) and closes with a takeaway tanka.
Page 104 of the 2003-01 issue of the magazine Smithsonian had a collection of humorous haiku ranging over the entire history of our little blue planet, with more detail from the 18-th century onward. An image of the whole page is available on the web. Back in 2003, I read the page in hard copy. The haiku were mostly amusing w/o being memorable, but I liked one dealing with the 20-th century so much that I memorized it spontaneously, w/o trying:
© Spike Gillespie
One World War follows
another. Rosie rivets.
Patton rolls. We win.
OK, it is not a great haiku. Excessive devotion to the 5-7-5 rule leads to awkward linebreaks. A tiny rewrite yields a better haiku:
Apart from the linebreaks, Spike nailed it!
One World War follows another.
Rosie rivets. Patton rolls.
We win.
While Brits and Russkies could object to the Yank-centric viewpoint, the haiku is a remarkably concise and accurate poetic summary of major aspects of World War 2 and its roots in the bungled ending of World War 1. Neither war was a moment in nature. Neither war was a mere foible. While I needed Google to recover the author name and magazine date, the haiku itself just stuck, somewhere between my ears. Maybe such stickiness was part of charm of poetry in preliterate societies. Maybe it still is, even for those who are literate and online.
As there is already more than enough grimness in the real world, I usually dislike grim art. An envelope-pushing haiku by Poet Rummager is so good that (despite its grimness) I reblogged it with my own grim haiku. As with all my posts, the Comments section will remain open as long as my blog stays up. (I overrode the WordPress default.) Anybody who wants to criticize any of my haiku is welcome to comment, unless they want to quibble that my haiku is “really” a senryu or a pseudohaiku.
While I have not yet written a haiku about pizza, duct tape has been a subject. The table below links to some of my other posts with haiku on outside-the-box subjects. While some of my haiku are weird and/or knowingly silly, most do have a serious undercurrent about the human condition. So does this post.
| becalmed sailors | bereavement | |
| Buddhism | Genesis | |
| Hildegard of Bingen | history of biology | |
| Jane Reichold | music | |
| Platonism | quantum physics | |
| sadness | silliness | |
| Taoism | time travel |
Some lines are better left undrawn.
Haiku or senryu?
Lumping form with content hides
what poems can be:
salutes to whatever is
true and good and beautiful.
Tho originally written in response to a challenge on a blog other than CDHK, the tanka here can also respond to Carpe Diem #1214 dawn because it uses the word dawn and has fragment/phrase structure on 2 levels: between the haiku and the rest of the tanka as well as within the haiku itself.
My tanka responding to a challenge posted by Patrick Jennings is a riff on the splendid photo he provided, with hills that seem to go on forever in both time and space.
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
For sailors on the open sea in the past, to be becalmed was always a hardship and sometimes a disaster, as described in Goethe’s poem Meerestille (or Calm Sea). I got the image and English translation dislayed in this post from a website celebrating German Romantic literature. U can read another English translation of Goethe’s poem here.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language.
Becalmed in Olden Times
Viking longships moved
with oars pulled by aching arms.
Oarless ships stood still.
Oarless crews waited for wind,
while food and water ran low.
As the photo and poem in the challenge so aptly illustrate, to be becalmed can be a pleasant experience nowadays. Admire the crescent moon and furl the sails. Start the engine and head for home. Be confident of getting there.
My tanka expresses yesterday’s fears in today’s language, lest we forget how high we have climbed and how far we could fall, in technology if not in poetry.
Like the conflict between living in the moment and planning for the future, abstract/concrete (or general/specific) is a conflict that can only be managed, not avoided or resolved. Trying to be 100% one or the other does not work. We must muddle thru, preferably with awareness that what works for one person at one time will not work for all people at all times. This post muddles thru the abstract/concrete conflict with a mostly abstract tanka inspired by excerpts from the mostly concrete poetry in 2 posts by others.
Consider the first of 4 stanzas posted in {underground (20170523)}:
© Crow
i have learned the hard way
that just because something
has been buried does not mean
it’s dead
It could stand alone as a fine short poem. It also inspired the fourth of 7 short stanzas posted (along with an interesting biographical sketch of the 17-th century painter Caravaggio) in {Caravaggio Dreams}:
© Poet Rummager
Do you not see what I’ve buried deep,
has dug itself out to find me?
Maybe it’s because of my math background that I felt these excerpts were more powerful standing alone than in their original contexts, with concrete details about zombie cannibals and Norse gods (Crow) and a dream encounter with Caravaggio (Poet Rummager). While I do prefer cremation to internment and do appreciate Caravaggio’s pioneering of expressive chiaroscuro, I found all those details distracting. I was moved by the quoted stanzas despite what went with them.
One of the virtues of haiku poetry is that there is scant room for anything irrelevant, so I tried putting my takeaway into a haiku. But I found that format a little too restrictive. What happened after whatever was buried deep had dug itself out? My haiku left open the possibility that it might have just toddled happily away, w/o the ominous implications of the first line from Crow’s stanza and the last 3 words from Poet Rummager’s stanza. Wanting my poetry to be forthrightly ominous rather than ambiguous, I extended the abstract haiku to a tanka with (as it happens) concrete imagery in the 2 added lines.
Empty Grave
I buried something
that was not already dead.
It dug itself out.
~ ~ ~ ~
It shook like a wet dog and
followed my scent to find me.
Tho a uniform level of abstraction might be nice, I can live with the muddle. At least in visual art, the distinction between abstract and concrete is somewhat muddled anyway (and not just because of photography).
Originally posted by Patrick Jennings in
[Evanescent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #89]:
Seize the Sunrise
Evanescent dawn.
Do hills endure forever?
No, but long enough.
~ ~ ~ ~
Art subverts time with pixels;
the moment also endures.
© Adjei Agyei-Baah
ancient road…
the trails of the masters
absorbed in fallen leaves
© Mellow Curmudgeon
Footprints fade but insights shine,
lighting the path forward now.
In some ways, a century ago is already ancient. Photography’s pioneers worked with nasty chemicals in darkened rooms to produce grayscale prints. Modern photographers can (and should!) honor them by pressing forward and building on their work in our digital world of colored pixels, using grayscale (or partial desaturation) only as appropriate for specific images.
As my earlier post in praise of dandelions noted, the same spunk that frustrates prissy gardeners also thrusts green and gold into the grayest and grimmest of our cityscapes. I like that tradeoff, so I am glad I can respond to
Mellow Curmudgeon 