Haiku Exchange, Sept. 9, 2007 [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Sunday September 9, 2007

David Shapiro to David Lehman

Subject: I had vertigo? Lins says hello to you Why we gone from JA (events kana)

Now I even read
the poor translations
of the wonderful haiku

I even like lines  / like this all stretched out condensed / oh ugly haiku

when I was fifteen
my friend now dead said David
too much in your head

He enjoyed Moby
Dick and said first he read parts
then fell into space

the real space between
the letters – he slapped his sister
with a Tagore book

in jail for stopping
at a green light– He said in
jail he thought up deaths

Varieties of
suicide – he had talent
now dead in a cave

Krishna consciousness
you may find it funny, but
it’s real as his hair

I had lots of friends
become priests – they wrote
lots of poor haiku

Jack Kerouac wrote
his American car strophes
now I'm the old man

they say common joy
is only in rock, sports, sex
But friends say: Haiku!

Oh it’s national
but more like the family
Haiku won't hurt you

My friend's father was
in a group where the copy
was always better

Better than what? Think
better than the original
little objects

I'm against rhyming
haiku because it’s too ruled
I like split insights!

I never could write
the perfect haiku sestina
even a pantoum!

I failed everything
like Du Fu in his exams
or even his tears

What's a haiku? sonnet
condensed to even smaller
nuns than Wordsworth

I don't know if you
don't know what makes a haiku
Spurt up like moon sex

Love Buson, Issa
one has good eyes for music
one loves bugs so much

Kenneth saddened me once
by saying flowers and fish
in haiku are false!

all those cherry trees
were often just poetic
Horrifying, yes?

I find Basho real
So maybe his trees, roads, fields
are true in real ways

Just because Borges
had dream tigers don't think that
those tigers don't bite!

You were a dream once
and you were a dream tiger
Imitate and die

That sounds too extreme
but the death haiku are that
haiku for doctors

– David Shapiro

September 9, 2007

Extending the exchange plus an excursus

From dclehman 
To dajoshap

An exchange with you
of haiku by haiku in
honor of life, death.

Friendship is two old
talkative monks sitting
on top of a mountain.

Two old monks atop
a mountain discuss the gold
standard in Koch’s play.

Is there no room for
cherry blossoms and the white
eye of a brown owl?

Your definition
of haiku (sonnet condensed)
is sweet though untrue.

I, too, love moon sex,
dream tigers, split insights, and
spiritual puns.

Spiritual puns
are coincidences, said
G. K. Chesterton.

Can haiku do the work
of a spiritual pun?
Strangers meet on train.

One kills the other’s
wife and wants his own father
killed by the other.

Or the survivor
sleeps with the victim’s widow
after killing him.

Both Alfred Hitchcock
and Sophocles believe in
spiritual puns.

Rhyme in haiku seems
contrary to the spirit
of the Eastern mind.

That must be why I
do it though of course you’re right
I shouldn’t. And so night

falls as it must on
us all, and to bed must I
go, to sleep, to dream,

and not to die. O
friend it pleases me to write
these haiku with you.

-- David Lehman

 

Comments

[Dave Read]

Another example of the Ugly American(s), this time appropriating from Japan a poetic form reserved by them for ecstatic utterance. That you can count all the way to seven, with stops at three and five, is what qualifies you for your current role as gatekeeper to sanctioned poetry, where it's all about the Benjamins!

[Dave Read]

Haiku is not to sneeze

Each of us, thank goodness, can sneeze -
but the genius of the Japanese Haiku is
the discipline and devotion it demands,
which are, sad to say, Occidental rarities.

p.s. Anglophones are well-advised to study the epigram, instead of pretend to an ancient sensibility produced by a culture antithetical to their own.

[Marissa Despain]

Hey Dave! My radar is up: I can spot the anti-Semitic code in "all about the Benjamins!"a mile way. If every poet who writes in an ancient form is guilty of "appropriating," we wouldn't have any poetry, dumb ass. Marissa Despain

[Tony Paris]

Dave, what you say about the Occidental epigram versus the Japanese haiku is interesting and worth elaboration. Ther "ugly American Comment" is beneath you. Which Benjamins? Ben Jonson? Ben in Hebrew means son so "Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry" is an even greater line in "On My First Son."

[David Lehman]

David Shapiro's haiku stanzas show the quickness of his mind and reflect the rhythms of his conversation. Aren't these lines good:

My friend's father was
in a group where the copy
was always better

Better than what? Think
better than the original
little objects

I'm against rhyming
haiku because it’s too ruled
I like split insights!

I never could write
the perfect haiku sestina
even a pantoum!

I failed everything
like Du Fu in his exams
or even his tears

What's a haiku? sonnet
condensed to even smaller
nuns than Wordsworth

[Dave Read]

Thanks Tony, if you aren't aware of "The Ugly American," an established literary trope with particular focus on American crimes in southeast Asia, please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American

And "benjamins" is the current synonym on every street in the land for the "c-note" of my idyllic youth - no less an avatar of all that is right and good, AOC, also has taken heat from the caterwaulers of the world of the ancient "belief systems."

The Hebrews know me and my present interlocutors as "Beloved."

Mr. Lehman may claim Aristotle for his avatar in his quest to keep natural poets, not only out of the marketplace - but out of the republic itself. But, my view is that Aristotle is like Jerry Garcia and David Grisman - Old and in the Way.

[Tony Paris]

Dave, you probably know more about it than I, but I fail to see any relation between the critique of American policy in Vietnam in the early 1960s, as articulated in "The Ugly American," to the state of US poetry today. Again I don't know Mr. Lehman's philosophical allegiances, but I am certain it was Plato, not Aristotle, who banished the poets from the Republic.