Monthly Archives: September 2012

of the new

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Ban’ya Natsuishi

/ Rhythm in the Vacuum (1986)

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“[A]n example demonstrating how haiku bring the reader toward the phenomenology of the hard problem via adumbrations of the paradoxical and hypothetical can be found in this haiku by Natsuishi Ban’ya.

“Put a period” begins with what seems a trivial action: put a period somewhere. Usually we put them on paper; yet the second line represents a left turn with “into the desert,” reversing semantic expectation. Putting a period into the desert evokes a different line of image, action and form, from what might conceivably be done with a literal, textual period. And so, realism is subverted. The sense of paradox is heightened by the imperative grammatical tone. The poem is so short that while thinking this part out I’ve scanned the whole several times. Though having read this poem some years ago, I continue to formulate possible worlds: the aspect of explaining, in fact, the “explainer” of intellect rides behind the propulsive process of reading/misreading.

Some of my hypothetical speculations: the period implies “end of an era,” death, finality, a flag (of some sort); the desert is real and inhabits the new world, or a speculative new world; is an actual place (e.g. Death Valley, the high desert of Nasca); the haiku is political, “center of the desert” represents America’s current government and its war in Iraq; the period is a wounding; the haiku is historical, relating to Columbus’s “discovery” and eurocentrism; so, the haiku is revisionist and ironic, accessing “new world” in a post-colonial manner; the haiku landscape is that of another planet awaiting discovery; an alternative universe where putting a period exactly thus makes good sense; the haiku is a surreal remembrance, a novel myth. Alternativity spawns alternativities. The period is wherever my attention is.”

Richard Gilbert / “Plausible deniability: Nature as hypothesis in English‑language haiku” & in Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese and English-language Haiku in Cross-cultural Perspective (Red Moon Press, 2008)

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beyond

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“If what can be entrusted in this short poetic form [i.e., haiku] were no more than the feelings of the seasons captured in a diary mode, that would be terrible. The sort of poem that can’t deal with matters that go far beyond the seasonal feelings—the world, the universe, and man—can go to hell. If the haiku is what in Japanese can express cosmology and humanity most acutely, we naturally need categorical standards that transcend season or non-season.”

— Ban’ya Natsuishi

from Gendai Haiku: Keyword Jiten (Modern Haiku: A Dictionary of Keywords, Tachikaze Shobō, 1990); translated by Hiroaki Sato in his speech, The Haiku Form Revisited, with a Thought on Alternatives for Kigo presented 16 June 1990 to the Haiku Society of America

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lakes & now wolves

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Pleased to say that my first collection is now available from Modern Haiku Press.

Perfectbound, 64 pages

with an introduction by Philip Rowland

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“In his haiku (one wants to say “in these creatures”) Scott Metz is both shaman and surrealist, evoking both an archaic time-before and our contemporary end-time. Word by word, these poems carry a primal charge, and one takes them up like so many amulets. He is a master of Dichten = condensare, making leaps that can remind me of Philip Soupault, Michaux and Kitasono Katue, and still these radical poems always go literally to the roots of haiku—each an embodiment of unapproachable sabi.”

john martone

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“Over the last decade, Scott Metz has become one of a handful of innovators leading the way towards a new form and style for haiku in English. The poems within represent the fruits of that labor, their depth of emotion, range of expression and creative freshness articulate landscapes of rare intimacy. Here is haiku at its best, offering a nobility of spirit and a passion for poetry—for love itself.”

Richard Gilbert

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