How Haiku Helps

 

Reading and writing haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems help us to see more detail and say more in fewer words. Why should this matter to poets and writers?

 

Brevity

 

Many of the poems posted on the Internet go on and on, like a first draft that was never read aloud, reconsidered, or revised. With just a little more wait-time allowed after writing and just a little more listening time allowed to evaluate the sound echoes, rhythm, and musicality, each poem can go from “okay” to “good” or “good” to “well-done.”

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems remind us to be brief.

 

Clarity

 

Lengthy poems often have overlapping pictures with no clear focus. This can happen by mixing metaphors, but also because the poem has no clear direction. That’s fine in a first draft, but after letting a poem sit for a while before coming back to revise, poets are more apt to see what they and the poem are trying to say.

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems call on the clarity of a well-taken photograph or an artist’s quick sketch.

 

Beauty

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems frequently rely on a beautiful sight or insight (preferably both!)

 

This awareness of a fleeting thought, moment, or scene causes us to welcome the unexpected, be alert for the exquisite, be attentive to the profound, and be appreciative of our environment.

 

Other Features

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems are so transportable! They encourage us to keep a notebook handy.

 

These little forms help us to break free of rhymes that quickly close down thought, originality, and natural-sounding language. Also, by focusing on rhyming words, we might overlook other poetic factors, waiting to reveal themselves.

 

When we give ourselves and our poems over to the traditional 5/7/5 syllables in the three lines of haiku or senryu, we begin to think in form. If we prefer 2/4/2 or 3/4/3 or other syllabic count, that works too. Regardless, we’ll eventually be apt to count out those syllables on our fingers, activating kinetic memory, exercising creativity, and becoming more aware of the poetic moments in our lives.

 

 

©2021, Mary Sayler, poet-writer

 

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Throwing a wrench in rhyme

 

The expression, “throwing a wrench into the works,” typically refers to the effort to prevent a plan or keep something from working properly. In poetry, that wrenching can occur in wrenched rhymes.

True rhymes not only have echoing syllables at the end of each rhyming word, they have the same emphasis or syllabic stress. For instance, round/found echo the sound and also the accent. 

Conversely, singing/bring wrenches the true rhyme of sing/bring, whereas rhyming/wing emphasizes the differences in syllables – i.e., RHYming/ WING.

Wrenches can also occur by forcing the poem’s syntax (i.e., normal sentence structure or word sequence) in order to make a rhyme. For an example of such violence to the English language:

Wrenched syntax puts words in a position weird
when a poet tries to make lines rhyme-adhered.

Or to say it the regular way:

Wrenched syntax pushes words around just so they’ll rhyme – even if the phrase or sentence now makes less sense!

That said, you might want to wrench your words and rhymes on purpose for the sake of humor.

For more on rhymes, see the prior post “Good Times to Write in Rhymes.” 

For more help on writing or revising poems in general, my former poetry correspondence course is available in this updated paperback, A Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry.

For a lively way to enjoy poetry and learn more about its many forms and terminology, The ABC's of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun is now available in hardback.

 

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer, book author in all genres, including A Gathering of Poems

 

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3 ways to read a poem

If you've been reading poetry the way you read other genres in hopes of immediately understanding something interesting or new, you might have missed the vast difference in reading (and maybe writing) poems.

Taken from my paperback A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry, these three ways to read a poem might help:

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As you read the works of other poets, expect to read each poem at least three times. 

This varies, person by person, but you might read aloud the first time to hear the musicality of a poem. 

Then you might read again, noticing the imagery or anything else that makes the poem outstanding. 

By a third reading, you might begin to enter the experience of the poem, feeling as if you were there or as if it were written just for you.

Mary Harwell Sayler  

P.S. Don't buy A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry if you already have my former poetry home study course, poet's guide e-book, or earlier paperback!  Since the others went out of print, this one is almost the same.

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Mary Oliver: my favorite poet

[NOTE: The following article originally appeared on Interlitq in my column Poets Who Make Us Better: Mary Oliver.]

When I began an arduous search of poetry journals, I read so many poems I didn’t connect with that I suspected I had been born in the wrong time with too many blessings to ever be a poet. So I did the only thing I knew to do: I stopped writing poems.

Then during a trip to New England I meandered into a quaint bookshop and saw the glossy green cover of White Pine, a poetry book by Mary Oliver. Confetti could have fallen! Or, more likely, rose petals, bird feathers, pine needles, and beach sand….

Her poems not only spoke to me as no one else’s had done, they called me to observe intently and search attentively for THE precise word. For instance, the opening poem “Work,” hung on these lines:

“All day I work
with the linen of words

and the pins of punctuation…”

We talk about words being “silken” – smooth, soft, sleek, and often shiny – the kind of things I had aimed for in writing poems, but no. In the very first poem of my very first introduction to Mary Oliver’s work, she tells us she’s looking for linen – a fabric that can be coarse or crumpled and in need of ironing. But, with strong fibers woven from the flax plant, linen is a natural material to work with in writing poems.

How unlike the synthetic poems I had been reading! How observant! And see  how precise the poem becomes in the line, “the pins of punctuation….” Isn’t that exactly what punctuation does?

What I’d often looked for, however, in the poetry I’d been reading were lines that carried insight to readers in a plum-delicious way. Consider, for example, Mary Oliver’s poem, “Yes! No!”

“How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste, but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out….”

Did you notice the poet’s skill in enticing us with lush, unexpected descriptions before injecting flat statements into the poem?

For another example, look at “I Looked Up,” and see how a ‘thick bird” with “a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders” prefaces these flat but startling statements:

“What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.”

The more I studied the poems in White Pine, the more the book hooked me until I wound up buying everything of Mary Oliver’s I could find. I also read and re-read A Poetry Handbook by this highly acclaimed poet, who had already won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Then I discovered Blue Pastures with its poetically written essays on poets, poetry, and Oliver’s own writing life.

The wisdom, beauty, insight, exactitude, and down-to-earth practicalities of those books invite me to read them again, making new discoveries with each reading. In Owls and Other Fantasies, for example, the “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard” has a beak that “could open a bottle” while the eyes with “their soft lids” –

“go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder –
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.”

One might say the same for the soft lids of Mary Oliver’s eyes as evidenced by “The Uses of Sorrow” in her book Thirst:

“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

In both an experiment or a trial, evidence can confirm a claim or prove it, so it’s not surprising that one of Oliver’s books is called Evidence. The title poem includes a line that exhorts us (perhaps, like an Old Testament Prophet?) to “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

Published by Beacon Press, Evidence contains the persuasive poem, “I Want to Write Something So Simply,” which shows the poet’s consistent aim in her work.

“I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it….”

until

“…you will realize –
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.”

That refreshing goal made her poetry exquisite yet accessible and unique and established Mary Oliver as a poet who makes us better as poets and people too.

Bio:

Mary Harwell Sayler recently collected almost all of the prayers in the Bible from many English translations and paraphrased them into everyday English for the Book of Bible Prayers. She also released the prayer book in the King James Version only as the Book of KJV Prayers then collected poems from her previously published work into A Gathering of Poems.

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Find poems to love in anthologies

Every now and then, poets who are ready to step up their level of poetry-writing ask me to recommend poems they might study and emulate. No, not to mimic someone else’s voice or style, but to discover their own preferences and improve their use of technique.

Art students do this all the time. i.e. They typically study and copy the masters in order to find out what works and why. Then, having discovered a wide assortment of useful tools and techniques, they go on to find their own creative methods of working.

Conversely, I’ve found that many poets give little thought to poetry forms, styles, techniques, tips for revision, or precision in their choices of words. Worse, many poets don’t read poems by other poets, which handicaps them without their knowing it as they have few options except for what comes to mind.

Since we have centuries and centuries of beautifully expressed poetry to draw from, you can find all sorts of anthologies that collect poems around a central theme, subject, or form. Also, The Norton Anthology of Poetry aims to put together as many poems in English as possible.

To give you other anthologies I recommend with poems worth studying and enjoying, here’s a list of ones I’ve reviewed in the order shown:

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry 

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 

Saint Peter’s B List 

Villanelles anthology 

Joy: 100 Poems 

The Soul in Paraphrase 

As publishers send me new copies of poetry books and anthologies to review, I’ll let you know of engaging poems and anthologies I’ve found that connect well with readers - including you and me!

Remember: We're first readers of poetry. Then, Lord willing, we become poets prepared to write poems that other people will want to read.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019, poet-writer

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