Madagascar

It is to the credit of the African Union that it has refused to recognise the coup in Madagascar and it is right that the USA has suspended non-humanitarian aid. The swearing in of the coup President is illegal. It is in breach of Madagascar’s own constitiution and has not been endorsed by any authority outside the country. It is unacceptable that the usurper claims he will hold elections within two years.

There must be an immediate return to legality and democracy. Until that happens, the international community should cut off aid and all diplomatic support. The AU has an opportunity to show that Africa is not a complete basket case for proper government by isolating this illegal presidency in Madagascar and then facilitating a peaceful return to legitimate government.

What The Haiku?

I was reading AA Gill in the Sunday paper today and his coment about haiku “I’ve never got the point of. Aren’t they just limericks which don’t make you laugh?” got me thinking that it was about time I said something about haiku rather than just making the odd comment from time to time.

First of all Adrian they are nothing like limericks. Despite the name giving the impression that they are Irish, limericks are actually a very English metrical form. When well done they can be very engaging and I am all for well delivered humour. The form does lend itself to atrocious pieces, but that is not a reason to discard what is good.

Haiku is a different matter altogether. Haiku is a Japanese poetry form associated with Zen Buddhism. It has variations in type, but mostly it is short, nature related verse contrasting two elements. It is not possible to place the first English haiku, but it was around the late nineteenth, early twentieth century in north America and Britain. At that time it was linked to or evolved from a French symbolist school.

Harold G Henderson who is considered to be a major authority on English haiku said “It seems obvious that we must build our work on Japanese norms, as any too great deviation from them would result in poems that were not haiku. And, yet to accept these norms in their entirety is literally impossible.” Yes, quite Harold. What exactly are English haiku writers trying to do? Japanese is a tonal language written in characters vertically down the page. English is none of these things. It is not possible to translate the Japanese concept of syllables into English quite apart from questions of the number of lines being incapable of transfer and breath points being centrally important to Zen, but usually having no significance to English writers and readers. Actually, for many Japanese it isn’t possible for anybody to write haiku without a sensai or haiku master.

With their ideas of brevity and ‘objectivism’, haiku (or hokku) appealed to Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound with their Imagist movement. This is also one of the strong origins of the ’show don’t tell’ mantra that is so commonly repeated, but that is another subject. Since them there have been a host of movements, schools and societies trying to set rules for haiku in English. Their outpourings are pretty similar to medieval theological disputes on how many angels could balance on the head of a pin. Like the inquisition, the sooner they all disappear up their own arses the better it will be for poetry. Anyway what I really think it amounts to is that if you are interested in poetry rather than achieving transcendantal bliss you can forget trying to mimic any Japanese style and get on with writing good stuff in English.

If you want your poetry to be short that’s great, but there is absolutely no point in restricting yourself to seventeen syllables, or three lines or any other constraint. There is nothing magical about any of these rules and they really don’t have anything meaningful to do with Japanese haiku either.