General Common Room
WHR June 2016
GCR(General Common Room)
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Essay: A Brief Defense of the Neo-Classical Form by Bear Jack Gebhardt
scifaiku sequences: by John W. Sexton
(i) Restless Nights
(ii) A Silence This Profound
(iii) The Other End
(iv) Soft Circuitries
A Brief Defense of the Neo-Classical Form
By
Bear Jack Gebhardt
Not surprisingly, as one gains the vocabulary of wine tasting— terms such as off-dry, light bodied, muscular, velvety—this vocabulary enhances the direct experience of wine tasting. This wine tasting vocabulary brings greater awareness to one’s tongue, revealing the subtle distinctions and effervescent emergences of the fermented grape which might otherwise be easily overlooked without possession of the vocabulary. Yet whether one has or has not the vocabulary, one can still appreciate the flamboyant edginess of the third bottle of Mogen David shared among new friends in the alley behind the bus station.
Similarly, when one gains the vocabulary of haiku—terms such as event, season, caesura, kireji, internal comparison, syllabic duration, haibun, haijin —such terms allow one to more deeply appreciate, experience and share the deft vision and emotion of the haiku artist, be she contemporary Westerner or hundreds of years in the Oriental past. Trained with the vocabulary, one’s poetic senses are no longer confined to the Mogan David 5-7-5, threeline taste. And yet . . .
I have a friend whose son is one of the nation’s leading ”electronic noise” musicians, if musician is indeed the term. Perhaps artist is a better description. He travels to various cities and events to perform, “randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, feedback, static, hiss and hum, with emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy continuous pieces.”
“Electronic noise” is an art that one must be trained to both appreciate and practice. When one is so trained, the nuances and skill of my friend’s son apparently become apparent. Alas, if said son actually had a day job, he would not yet be able to give it up because of his electronic noise successes.
I confess I enjoy and mostly prefer to write classical 5-7-5 three line haiku not only because this is how we learned it as children but also because it feels some of the contemporary haiku I now encounter appear to have “evolved”—please forgive my Mogen David cowboy taste-buds-- to the level of random “noise” –e.g., static, hiss and hum. Yes, I have indeed acquired the vocabulary and most often do in fact appreciate the subtle nuances of such hissing and humming haiku, and yet . . .
I am passionately dedicated to rescuing poetry itself from its academic kidnappers (poem-nappers), who have for so many decades kept so much poetry behind academic walls. Many of these poem-nappers insist that we must be trained in the poetic arts before we can even read it, or understand it, let alone appreciate it. And for God’s sake, we dare not practice such arts before we are so trained!
With the dawning of our global age, with the challenges of ISIS and rising oceans and falling borders, comingling of cultures and human creatures, the times insist we return poetry to the mainstream. The mainstream certainly needs it. Poetry was once an art that could be enjoyed, and even practiced, by ordinary, every-day milk truck drivers and truck stop waitresses. Classical three-line, seventeen syllable Haiku is often the first—and just as often the last—form of poetry “ordinary” kids ever encounter.
The existentialist philosopher Colin Wilson observed that the human mind “. . .seems to operate on a basic hunger for form.” The form of haiku that ordinary people know is the classical form. Here are the rules we learned as kids:
Five syllable line
Then seven, then five again.
End with a grin spin!
Of course there are many more dimensions—the season, the turn, the image-- that training and practice reveal. Still, let’s not give up the classical form, or dismiss its usefulness. It acts as a bridge, between the classes, between the sexes, between the oceans.
Such tiny bridges
Transport our ancient footsteps
--new hearts, hands, eyes—touch.
scifaiku sequences
by
John W. Sexton
Restless Nights
in the maths question
a dawning of certainty
... god ate my homework
the rich go hungry
these gold eggs
are hell to scramble
her back a cloak
of her wrinkled skin
her face tied up in a knot
the gossip’s head
in a black cloud … the flies
from the wall report in
her restless nights ...
feathered of moonlight
it nests in her mind
emptiness gruffly
displaced ... the telekinetic
passes us by
owl unknown to itself
dropped the shatterbox
… who?
oh the gristle mice
of his knuckles ...
Mr Rattle raps twice
piloting
the Montgolfier boulder
… we descend into sea-silt
knave of kidney stones
& queen of bladders …
king of cisterns for a flush
suddenly my love
in a dun-coloured dress …
the drape worm
A Silence This Profound
circles within circles
of perfection ... the button
in the poor box
vocabulary of fire …
surprisingly
a word for ice
unlucky under
the moonbeam ladder ...
his shadow splits at his feet
barely there
to the naked eye … distant stars
long alive, long dead
with feathered hands
wrings out an ounce
of your mind
a shaking of light …
how many moth’s lives
are you worth?
a princess made
of the finest silk … oh put her on,
my ugly
another deceptive tune ...
the one hundred secret names
of blackbird
the stringless harp
only a silence this profound
will call them
The Other End
mocks the king’s counting house …
the moon spends itself
then earns itself
toe-deep in the puddle …
the trafficked mermaid
finds comfort on the street
smelling our skins
with their piked tongues ... skink-maids down
at the husband market
mouths on her fingers
mouths on her toes … the princess rides
a cockatrice horse
the compassionate, the merciful
... our children
tread out the stars
your majesty overwhelms ...
Lord Bluebottle's tower
of excrement
she opens
the bottle of birdsong …
we brim with daylight
on the other end
of the telephone ... the sky
bemoans its distance
Soft Circuitries
speed of light …
the cosmos enters
the naked eye
a leather sofa
sewn to a whale’s back … lost
in the fathomless house
speaking
to our antiselves … all our answers
are questioned
seated in the hating room …
nurse nails us under
the NO JOKING sign
the scrabble board
tried to tell us …
he pock her lips
sawing into our minds
… the crickets fill us
with crickets
the sky came down
and tuned us out … soft circuitries
of snowflakes
in her dead womb
a spectral foetus
comes to term
a cambric shirt seamed
with golden hair … the wearer
swift as a blown kiss