Moonlight Musings

What Shoulders Do You Stand On?
– Stylistic Influences  

Do you like your poetry strict or random, sparse or ornate? Do you have one distinct style or many? 

And have you drawn on the work of other poets to expand your range? Probably we all do that, whether consciously or not. In my case it is often intentional.

When I was a much younger poet than I am now, my poetry was lush, sensual, full of metaphor and imagery, sometimes mysterious.  

Somewhere along the way I was introduced to haiku and fell in love with the great haiku masters: Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa. (Basho is my first love, and I think many regard him as the greatest, but the others are wonderful too.) I began to want to pare my own poetry back, to find a way to write with their simplicity and transparency. I wanted my poems to be like glass, that the reader could see straight through to what I was describing, as if the words were hardly there. I wanted the words to be clean, clear windows, so the reader would not even notice the glass but see only what it showed.

I decided that the way to acquire this kind of clarity and immediacy was to learn to write haiku myself, so as to bring those qualities to the rest of my poetry. And so I began a journey which has lasted seven years so far. I don't know Japanese, so I have had to try and learn from haiku written in English, either original or in translation. In fact it's interesting to compare different translations of the same haiku master: it gives you the essence of what the poet was trying to say, somewhere beyond the varying interpretations. 

I discovered that the haiku is at once the easiest and most difficult form to write. Anyone can write three lines of observation of the natural world. It's not hard to do it with the syllable count of 5/7/5 words per line. After I read that 'syllables' in Japanese are much shorter than in English, so that our 5/7/5 haiku are unwieldy by comparison, and that many serious haiku writers in English now go for short/long/short lines instead – well it was easy enough to do that too.

But to write a haiku, a real, actual haiku – oh, that is so difficult that it often seems almost impossible. 

What makes a haiku? There are certain rules. I tend to think, now, that 5/7/5 is the least important. 

They must deal with nature. There should be a season word (a kigo) which identifies the season being written of in a way that readers will instantly understand, but which does not specifically name the season. Metaphor and simile are to be eschewed. Haiku don't rhyme, and they don't have metre. In many ways they are about as different from Western poetry as you can get. Some experts differentiate haiku from poetry altogether, as a separate and distinct art form.

There is traditionally a 'kireji', a word where the haiku makes a sort of turn. Some contemporary writers use a dash after the kireji, or even instead of it. It is often said that there should be a juxtaposition of two images. This is done without explanation; the reader is supposed to fill in the gaps. The haiku, if I understand correctly, demands the engagement of the reader. It is as if it makes a suggestion, and invites readers to find their own experience of what is suggested.

Is this getting to sound a bit mystical? Perhaps it should. Of all the definitions of haiku I've ever read, I most like Natalie Goldberg's in Writing Down the Bones where she says that it should give the reader a tiny experience of God. We could call it by a more familiar term: an 'Aha!' moment. And that, for me, is where the real difficulty lies.

I don't worry too much about season words. Haiku are international now, and different countries have different ways of denoting the seasons. In Australia, for instance, we don't see many of the cherry blossoms which, in Japan, mean Spring. If we put lorikeets in our haiku, Australian readers would know the season, but perhaps few others would. As we can't make the season universally recognisable, I don't try. Well, I sometimes just name the season, if it seems essential, or say something obvious about heat or cold. 

I do like the juxtaposition of images/ideas, though. And I hope I give my readers some 'Aha!' moments.

Haiku are very like a form of writing shared with the world by author / psychotherapist / Buddhist priest Satya Robyn: 'small stones'. Many of you will be familiar with them, but for those who aren't, small stones are brief observations of the external world, keeping oneself and one's reactions out of the picture. I embraced small stones too for several years, and still like to write them occasionally. Being a poet, I naturally put them into verse most of the time, although that is not a requirement. 

These practices worked. While I still struggle to master haiku – and expect that to be a lifelong quest with no guarantees – my other poetry did become, as I desired, plainer and simpler. I liked this effect. I thought that I was attaining the greater clarity I had sought. For a long time I was very happy about this. Then eventually I noticed, with alarm, that my poetry now lacked metaphor and had even lost some musicality of language. The pendulum had swung too far.

Having become so immersed in this understated, subtle style, I wasn't sure how to find my way back to a richness I had lost. Then I came across the Magnetic Poetry site which functions as a random generator of lines and phrases (based on the old fridge poetry idea). What a joy! If poetry is playing with words, here's the ultimate in playfulness. You can create all sorts of music and imagery without any real meaning. Or if you do manage meaning (which is not entirely impossible) still it's a bizarre, unexpected meaning. There are all sorts of strange twists and turnings. Simple and transparent it's not. 

Playing with this opened my mind up again to magical, musical word-play, to metaphor and mystery. Even when I'm not playing with this random word generator, I think more colour and drama is finding its way back into my verse. 

Is there a happy medium? If I work it right, shall I find my way to a balanced style with just enough transparency along with just enough imagery? I do hope not! That already sounds far too dull and proper. I think it's more interesting, to me at any rate, if I have a range of styles to suit the needs of particular poems. It was one of the haiku masters. (Shiki? Issa?) who said, 'If your writing doesn't interest you, how can it interest anyone else?' (Or something like that.)

In the same way, although I prefer to work in free verse (when I'm not trying haiku) I do also like to play with form. It's good to learn from the masters, I think. When the modern master, Samuel Peralta, was hosting the FormForAll posts at dVerse, he gave us examples of all kinds of sonnets from the older masters. He made it sound easy, and so it was. I'd always been in awe of the sonnet before and thought it beyond me. It was a delight to find I could do it after all – indeed, could do various kinds. 

Some free verse poets have an enviable ear. They seem to just know instinctively how the lines should fall so as to create poetry and not chopped-up prose. And there is room for all sorts of variations of style and mode within that criterion. But for many of us it can be tricky. After the years of experimenting with haiku, my poetry had in fact become prosy! Exploring form was an obvious strategy to try and restore the balance. I haven't stopped writing haiku – nor small stones – but I don't do them so often now. Instead, I play with other forms more than I once did.

Writing tanka was a nice place to go from haiku: still Japanese, with some of the same delicacy of touch, but romantic, with room for music and metaphor. Another option I've grown to love is the haibun, that mixture of prose and haiku which Basho himself initiated. It gives me a chance to make my prose poetic, in contrast to the verse becoming prosy, another way to counteract that trend. When I'm not thinking about line endings, rhythm etc. I can pay even more attention to heightened language and perhaps get the hang of it once more.

It's a great gift to have poetry communities such as this, which, with their prompts, give us the opportunity to try different ways of making poems, adding to our tool-kits and refining our craft. The presenters often introduce me to forms I didn't know before. It's fun to try something new.

You'll note I asked 'what shoulders' rather than 'whose'. If we began to list all the individual poets who have influenced us over the years, it would surely take a lot of space. In any case, such preferences are individual and subjective. Let's not debate the relative merits of Yeats and Yevtushenko, Piercy and Plath. Some will thrill to one, some to another, most of us to a number. Let us be grateful to all who came before, to show the way and sometimes break new ground. 

[I'll give you one tip. When you find a poet you admire, copy something they've written. I don't mean parody them, though that too can be a good way of learning. No, I mean copy down something of theirs by hand, word for word, exactly as they published it. In the process you will find yourself noticing how they did it, their tricks and techniques. 

If I remember rightly, that advice originally came from Stephen King, for fiction writers.]

I wonder what styles and modes of poetry have influenced you, what ways of making poems have inspired you to want to try your hand at something similar? Do you love simplicity or ornamentation? Brevity or discursiveness? Boundaries or wildness? Or do you want the lot?


Feel free to share your thoughts.