1995-12-04

[Senna Jawa]

storm
broken window
fresh air
​

wh,
1995-12-02

 

[WickedEve]

storm
broken window
fresh air
​

wh,
1995-12-02

white shoes
puddle dancer
spin cycle


Trying to play along but can't come up with a good one like the broken window/fresh air. Darn it.

 

[WickedEve]

stuffy room.
no ceiling fan. cyclone.
no ceiling.

 

[Angeline]

tank
broken country
democracy

 

[Senna Jawa]

my first island vanished -
i am attached

to vast spaces





​

​

wh,
1991-03/21/22

 

[Senna Jawa]

Behind the wheel

my eyes fight the light -
the speeding Sun
has crushed into highway







​

wh,
1991-03-21/22

 

[Senna Jawa]

earthquake
wiped out bridges -
i walk across the streams again









​

wh,
1991-03-21/22

 

[WickedEve]

All three of the above poems are lovely and inspiring. Each one gives me clear images.


night wind
fallen pines
cones tied into a wreath

 

[Senna Jawa]

All three of the above poems are lovely and inspiring. Each one gives me clear images.




night wind
fallen pines
cones tied into a wreath

Thank you Eve, and Angeline, for your contribution to this thread, and for your kind words. I thought of three different end-lines to your haiku above, and have decided on this one:

wind's over
fallen pines --
birds in the sky

WickedEve,
extra wicked by senna
​

Best regards,

 

[Senna Jawa]

All three of the above poems are lovely and inspiring. Each one gives me clear images.


night wind
fallen pines
cones tied into a wreath

Or another variation (a fourth one):

night wind
fallen pines
moon in the sky

WickedEve,
more wicked by senna

​

Regards,

 

[WickedEve]

I like both versions. I was a bit half-hearted about the cone wreath. I like the image but it just didn't sound quite right the way I wrote it.

 

[Senna Jawa]

I was a bit half-hearted about the cone wreath. I like the image but it just didn't sound quite right the way I wrote it.

It's not about the technique. You had:

night wind
fallen pines
cones tied into a wreath

WickedEve
​

Sure, there is a minor technical difficulty: after night we have an image, and a reader may worry: can I really see that image? And still, the third line is not about technical mastery but about concepts:

• too much dwelling on the same image;
• forcing the funeral image "by hand", without integrating it with the whole poem (e.g. nobody has died in the poem); the extra funeral image sticks out;
• redundancy--you already have a very strong, sad image of fallen trees; talking more about it by imposing an extra motif, only dulls the initial effect, drowns it in words and lesser notions. A claim that actually there is a funeral in the poem would not be convincing, a funeral in this poem is not doing anything; The images of the fallen trees and of a grave wreath do not cooperate--on the contrary...;
• there is an image, which says what it says, but there is no point to it; the third line didn't make any (at least nothing interesting, nothing beyond: fallen trees are like dead people ).
• the last line turns a reader away from poetry and makes them to zero on the busy author, who works so hard to squeeze some ingenuous artistic elements into the text. (Ideally, reader should be completely immersed in the world of the poem like in the real world, without being conscientious of any "paper").

These points are strongly interrelated, and quite a bit redundant, sorry for my clumsiness.

I comment, and then I have some doubts. Every claim about poetry can be contradicted by some examples. But comments exist in the context of a given poem, and they do not apply to the total universe, or else there would be no point to making comments, no comment would survive, while we know that they can be useful.

Best regards,