Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

David Cobb

print this page

Haiku in Progress

I fancy the following haiku will raise hackles for all sorts of reasons: readers may think it is contrived, a product of fantasy, overladen with superficial metaphor and simile, the rhyming of the first and last lines may jar, they may dislike the ambiguity of ‘lie’. But in fact it was the spontaneous creation of a ‘moment’, i.e. the rhyme and choice of words are ‘as they came’, and the apparent simile doesn’t apply, because it is literally true (put it down to my ignorance if it isn’t, and then allow a little poetic licence) that the clouds billowing out of a sugar refinery (here the one at Bury St Edmund’s in December) carry some vestiges of sugar with them into the air. Allow also that it might be ‘normal’ behaviour to commune with one’s patron saint as you pass by the place where he was buried and had his shrine. Then you get:-

St Edmund, you lie
under a cloud of sugar:
winter sky

Despite all the defences in the first paragraph, and despite the colour contrast and the good sound it makes to my ear and, I still worry about this one.  Possibly my main fears are of creating bathos, or because it might lure readers into trying to divine some ‘ulterior message’, such as recording the degeneration of reverence. Any comments? Perhaps a headnote would make it more acceptable?

 

Page(s) 11

Back to top