Category Archives: haiku

senryu

While exploring journal entries from 2007 (as part of work on the grand history of my own computer entanglements) I came across responses to a question posed by Gardner Campbell: what kind of poem are you? Here’s my response:

senryu is me
enigmatic smile wrapped in
clever doubletalk

and here’s Broot’s, much more elegant:

my weakness – senryu
wryly observing humans
skirting the unkind

Omnia disce

If I have a patron saint, it’s probably Hugh of St-Victor [12th century, author of Didascalicon], whose advice was

Omnia disce, videbus postea nihil esse superfluum
(Learn everything, you will see later that nothing is superfluous)

One can’t, alas, Know Everything, but elaborating one’s understanding of the world around has been a lifelong Odyssey, and a great joy. Sometimes the piling up of knowledge and the interweaving of threads of understanding leads to precipices, viewpoints where an unanticipated vista opens to disclose a chasm of personal ignorance. Happens all the time…

It’s a measure of something that I have read NONE of the reading list on issues of race in this issue of Harvard Gazette. I am uninformed in these matters, and forever surprised/chastened to discover vast realms of ignorance of important things I should have known about. Just now I happened upon May Jeong’s Ah Toy, Pioneering Prostitute of Gold Rush California, which considerably enlarges my knowledge of the history of Chinese immigration into California, and raises a host of other issues and questions about intersectional matters.

It’s easy to find examples of “I’m not responsible for…” with respect to evils of the past (slavery, the extirpation of aboriginal populations, anti- stances toward various Others, etc.), and indeed I’ve mouthed the formula myself in defense of one thing or another. The question of ‘responsibility’ might be reframed into a discussion of how does/should/might one take account of complicities in distant (temporally, spatally, socially…) iniquities and inequities. At the very least, one ought to be ready to inform oneself when a chasm of personal ignorance presents itself. Books like 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the works of Eduardo Galeano (among them Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, The Memory of Fire trilogy) and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States tend to blow the wheels off the wagon of complacency.

Lately I’ve been reading Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (which sports Kate’s beautiful maps) which provides a potent backstory to recent events like Ferguson (Amazon blurb: “…exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past…”). So much of our national mythos is built upon glorifications of events and people, of wilful self-deceptions under the rubrics of Patriotism and exceptionalism, of flaunted symbols like The Flag and the honored dead of glorious wars, and of notions of Progess and Victory. The Emperor’s Raiment, the thumping of tubs, demagoguery, coming to a screen near you…

A brace of haiku in praise:

moral certitude
inspires the cannon fodder
waving flags: Huzzah!!

another martyr
ours or theirs: keep careful count
a winner someday

A New Diversion

A story in the New York Times (These Mole Rats Felt No Pain, Even From Wasabi’s Burn) suggested the game of making haiku and senryu from headlines. The challenge is to add a line to complete the text of the headline, or perhaps find another way to work the text into the canonical 5-7-5 pattern. Here’s the opening salvo, in keeping with the sardonic and the mordant tone of the last post:

mole rats felt no pain
even from wasabi’s burn
try capsaicin next

(this assumes that tout le monde knows that
‘capsaicin’ is the active ingredient in the hotness of peppers)
(and marks the conceit that the torture of mole rats is Science)
(and with thanks to Nick for the capsaicin, C18H27NO3)

where DO these things come from?

I woke up this morning with the first line of a haiku waggling in my mind:

boat-namer’s hubris

and in the next few minutes the succeeding lines assembled themselves:

nautical catastrophe
Neptune’s amusement

It’s not as if I am much concerned with the naming of boats, though we’re surrounded by them here on the St. George peninsula. Perhaps I should pay more attention to this curious corner of local culture.