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Monday, July 21, 2014

ProetyPlace Blog 59
When Less is More and More is Still More

   I’ve been thinking.
    (Not so unusual as you might suppose.)  About my writing. About my next book. About this blog.
    I’ve been writing.
    Poetry. Mostly haiku. Several longer pieces. Some memoir too. Scraps and pieces, disjointed.
    I’ve just about decided.
    I want to meld some of my writings for my next book. The title of this blog, ProetryPlace already suggests some combination of prose and poetry, but I’ve always kept the various genre separate. Now I want to mix them, blend them in some aesthetically satisfying form. Not quite sure how that is going to take shape, but here are some thoughts after doing a little research on the concept.

    First off, my bright new idea of mixing poetic and non-poetic forms of writing isn’t all that new. Been around maybe a millennium or so, in a variety of forms.
    Maybe you’ve read The Divine Comedy written in the early 14th century. It’s an epic piece by the poet Dante, written late in his lifetime. I read it in college and loved it. Well, Dante wrote an earlier work called La Vita Nuova (the new life) when he was a young man to express his love (at incredibly great length) for the lovely Beatrice. This work (I’ve read only snatches of it) is built around 25 sonetta (sonnets) and a few other poetic forms. But Dante uses, often quite long, prose narratives to explain his poetry. Proetry.
    Also from medieval times, a French literary form called chantefable was performed by alternating sung verse with recited prose narratives.
    Probably more familiar, and in English: the plays of Shakespeare. The Bard freely combines prose and poetry in his plays using a variety of techniques to suit the situation.
    The Japanese have been mixing prose and poetry since ancient times. Haiku started its life as a short introduction in verse (non-rhyming) to a much longer essay (renga or renku). The famous Japanese poet, Basho, who wrote in the mid-17th century was probably the most renowned leader in the art.
    Sometime during this period, a form called haibun appeared. and more recently it has been adapted into English. Haibun in English combines relatively short, sometimes lyrical, sometimes matter-of-fact prose followed by one or more related haiku.

An example titled  Sweetgrass from Hortensia Anderson’s collected haibun, The Plenitude of Emptiness:
(available from Lulu Enterprises, Inc., Raleigh, NC)    

    She shows me how to weave blonde baskets with a light hand.
    As we braid the oval reeds with sweetgrass, their delicate but rich
    green runs through the wicker like rivulets after rain.

         darkness woven
         through the tangled leaves—
         summer evening

    I am drawn to haiku by its imagery, its brevity, its difficulty and by the unexpected, sometimes perplexing, turns it takes to shake and enliven my perception—seventeen syllables that stand alone to tell a story or awaken an emotion. Hortensia Anderson’s haiku in her haibun, Sweetgrass, does that, but the brief prose that introduces it enhances and adds dimension to the imagery.
    I respect the ancient roots and traditions of haiku, but have often experimented with the genre in form and content. I am not alone in doing so. Modern haiku in English more often than not tends to be even more brief than the traditional 17 syllable form, sometimes with good effect, sometimes not. A well-known example of English language haiku (by Cor Van Den Heuvel) that still provokes imagery through extreme brevity is the single word

tundra

centered on a blank page.
    It is not necessary to know what was in the poets mind as she wrote to appreciate any poem. It is not necessary to experience the same emotions that stirred the poet’s soul when reading her words. Still, poetry, more so than prose, does attempt to communicate those thoughts and emotions in condensed, intensified or elevated way. Especially haiku.
    I shall continue to write haiku as well as other poems as suits my thoughts and emotions, but I am intrigued by the possibilities of haibun and how the best qualities of both prose and poetry can be further enhanced by their juxtaposition in a single composition, a fusion of the forms into one entity, call it haibun or call it proety.
     Now let me get to work.

Richard Allen Anderson     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com     20 July 2014

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