Everything I learnt about about good poetry, I learnt from haiku. As many of you know haiku is word for a three-line poem form introduced into the literary lexicon in the 19th century by Masaoka Shiki. He was not the inventor of the form, though, as it had already existed, if only in the form of the first stanza in a renga (which merits its own separate entry).
My own interest in haiku poetry started way back in the early 1990s when I came across a volume containing the most famous Japanese haikus translated into Polish (my native language) by one of the most important poets and a Nobel prize laureate - Czesław Miłosz. I immediately fell for this brief but no insignificant poems and started digging up everything I could about this poetic form, which was not easy in times before the Internet. It was by reading more and more of poems like these that I learnt what I appreciate in poetry in general and what makes good poetry in my opinion.
Here are the 10 things I learnt about good poetry from haiku:
- Good poetry presents a unique perspective on something mundane and commonplace.
- Good poetry is rather brief than long.
- Good poetry presents an image through many senses, not only through the eyes.
- Good poetry has contrasts and juxtapositions.
- Good poetry contains conundrums and paradoxes.
- Good poetry has form but is not rigid.
- Good poetry is related to other forms of artistic expression.
- Good poetry is universal rather than occasional.
- Good poetry uses language both as a tool and a mode of expression.
- Good poetry stays with you like an afterimage on the retina and expands into many layers of interpretation.
My today's haiku:
a summer noon -
an abandoned high heel shoe
lying in tall grass
{I'm not completely happy with it - the repetition of a / an in lines 1 and 2 annoys me but its a start... I'll walk you through my process of this haiku in the next post.}