Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2013

Is, Is not, Is, Is not, a Haiku. Is, Is not. Is.

The haiku was virtually unknown to English writing before the twentieth century. Some readers see haiku in William Blake, William Wordsworth and many others, but if they are haiku they are there by accident rather than design. It is today the most common form of English poem, unless you define free verse as anything without end rhymes. Peter Porter was the first person I know to raise complaint about there being too many haiku, his words turning into the usual ker-plop of the frog into the pond of despond. Porter’s complaint was probably based on the judgement that there is too much bad haiku circulating about, and possibly that it is too easy to produce such stuff. Porter was anything but a curmudgeon, no scrooge muttering bah humbug at haiku. His expectations for poetry were always high, even with the lowliest of forms. His own poetry, for example, is a result of the Audenish belief that the forms exist to make something new, surprising, and different. Auden himself went

Australian Love Poems 2013

This review first appeared in Eureka Street in early November: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=38369#.UnoPOhBvqUk Saying we love someone can take all our courage, all our wisdom, all our foolishness, and often we don’t know how to say it. When we do get to say we love someone, sometimes we reach for the pitch known as poetry. Of all the art forms, poetry and song relay love most immediately. A book of all new work (Australian love poems 2013, edited by Mark Tredinnick. Inkerman & Blunt Publishers ISBN 978-0-9875401-0-2) shows how poetry can stretch the message to screaming point, or say it all in a few seconds. Poetry allows us to say just how silly we feel or can make of a simple admission, something sublime. Michael Sharkey asks profusely The sky that falls in children’s tales, the tide that ebbs, the moon’s Swiss cheese, Nijinsky’s dance. Stravinsky’s Flood ; what if I said you’re all of these. While Petra White forces a needful perspectiv