Haiku Pensées 3:
Taking a Language Break from Zen
‘John Donne was a poet of transition, whose ‘America’, whose ‘new-found-land’ was the discovery of techniques for keeping poetry in contact with new ideas and vital rhythms of expression.’
The Language of Renaissance Poetry ACPartridge
In Pensées 1 (BS11/1) I focussed on the difference between the ‘moment’ experienced with insight and the transformative consequences of language; now I put forward the proposition that ‘everyday’ language, conventionally the only tool used to produce haiku poems, is, in some circumstances, inappropriate because less effective than new words and word/sound combinations.
Characteristics, criteria and ‘rules’ that determine ‘convention’ as a sub-category of ‘tradition’ and ‘orthodoxy’ are, for practical purposes, sometimes regarded and treated as immutable truths. Very little, if anything, can be treated thus.
Language distorts and changes ‘moments’. Whether a personal pronoun is used or not is irrelevant. Authors cease the moment language exists. Each and every reader changes the moment. Speaking the poem changes it. There is no criterion for effecting time-synchronicity between lived-insight-’moments’ and the strategies of language. Poets can take as long as necessary to relate to the ‘moment’, modifying words, sounds, diction, rhythms and other relevant linguistic devices in the process (see overleaf). The tool of language is not an instantaneous instrument. Tools are made blunt by overuse and misuse. Used bluntly the results are bluntly dull.
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The connection between subject and object is language-facilitated; language veils both subject and object behind the apparent certainty of naming. Surface familiarity is taken as read but is a facet of word illusion. Poetic language opposes the crude simplicity of everyday language. Better that haiku language is emotionally comprehended in a way similar to what is needed for responding to Cubist painting: freed from the illusion of the ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ of perspective, they can be realised only in their own terms. Connected to the stimulus experience, they withdraw from it into another reality where ‘object’ (‘everyday’ content) is the canvas surface and ‘subject’ the limitation of space in an illusionary depth field. Content was repeated to emphasise the revealed and described revolutionary awareness till it could be said no more without inflicting the banality of over-use.
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What about haiku submitted to a kind of Cubist revolution? A haiku poem in which one word is shaken into two, three or even more alternative bits, such as G(R)AS(P) might cause paralysis in the human psyche, nightmares at the prospect of such haiku language usage, whereas it would be accepted by the computer with non-anthropomorphic equanimity.
Early learning of language notation remains the primary tool of social communication. Unquestioned, and with little creative development, it is transferred to the manufacture of haiku poems. But any number of ‘news languages and forms of language exist from which the poem producer can select in order to make the linguistic pattern most responsive and equivalent to experience.
For example, using ‘beyond belief’ technology, 20,000.000.000 examples of TXT MSG’s were written and recorded in June 2001. Presumably they were understood when received. Then there’s the language of shopping receipts: are the 2 for 1 WHT THK SLCD BRD and LTTL GEM LETT correctly priced?
Perhaps following these examples of language created to suit specific needs in specific contexts is one that is organically integral to the form and needs of a poem, one that consists of invented, constructed word sounds. Formed for a precise purpose, they rely on careful visual cognisance transcribed into sound rhythms. Not a ‘difficult’ language, in context it is both simple and simply the best, because most effective, use of sound interconnectivity to inform the moment/form/content symbiosis, integration and clarity, which is the over-riding consideration. Maybe many insights of the ‘moment’ are too insignificant to be transformed into words, but drawing the reader’s attention to methods of creative processing is more important than any haiku poem produced formulaically.
we making mingles
inveigle fondle and slonk
unstilll the funsets
This unusual poem uses language precise and necessary for the content BUT being of a nervous disposition and wishing to go on living a life only slightly wild, dangerous and anarchic, it dare not designate itself a fully grown ‘proper’ senryu. Love here is intimate, soft, passionate until tired or replete, natural change occurs. With the sun setting and after a long time, the togetherness, the fun is stilled with hints of ‘removal-from-the-state-of-stillness’, ‘until’, ‘distil’, and ‘stop-the-still’ but never ‘not-still’. What then happens is unsaid and unstated; it hints at the transience of common experience. Words, sounds and syntax are ‘simple’ because appropriate to the experience, though some of the words are not in common usage.
Page(s) 21-23
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