too many “tell-ems”: psyku lower haiku quality
My cranky alter ego Prof. Yabut often tries to be my conscience (as well as an “agent of reality” and assignment editor). He’s been griping lately that there’s a double standard at f/k/a — where we often take lawyers to task for lowering their standards (and even for taking the name of haiku in vain), but never say a discouraging word about “haijin” (poets who write short-form poetry in the Japanese tradition, such as genuine haiku, senryu, or tanka). Yabut knows that I’ve been grumbling for months about the appearance of “tell-em” haiku in alarming numbers in the very best journals and anthologies. To get him off my back, I’m finally voicing those concerns publicly. I’m looking for catharsis rather than controversy, but your comments and a collegial debate are most welcome.
The precise meaning of the word “haiku” and the contours of the genre will, thankfully, never be fully settled within the haiku community. (A couple years ago, I took a neophyte’s stab at a working definition in the posting “is it or ain’t it haiku?“.) I’m glad, nonetheless, to have discovered haiku at a time when the strident battles over such aspects as the number of syllables and lines required, the need for specific season words [kigo], and its “zen-ness,” had yielded to a fairly clear consensus among those writing haiku in the English language. Many attributes that had been been widely considered necessary for the creation of genuine haiku were rejected. However:
Each poet, editor and reader has, I believe, the absolute right to an opinion on what haiku is (or should be) and on what constitutes the best kinds of haiku. Similarly, as with any literary form disseminated to the public, we all have the right to evaluate poems, collections, schools or publications and offer criticism. After reflecting on its history, or simply out of differences in culture, taste or goals, many individuals and groups have chosen to adopt certain structural requirements or subject-matter limitations in defining haiku (e.g., the strict adherence to 17-syllables), despite the recognition that the haijin community has generally rejected the particular restriction. Others are highly reluctant to put any limitation on what is deemed to be haiku, so long as the poem is very short (i.e., “one breath” long).
Thus, I enjoy being freed from a number of proffered “haiku rules” that do not seem apt, workable or essential in my cultural and linguistic context. Nonetheless, I do believe that certain elements of haiku are too essential to discard without either straying from the genre or lowering the quality of a poem as haiku, no matter how much the resulting poem looks like a haiku, no matter who the poet may be, and no matter how interesting, insightful or ingenious it is.
Many of our best haiku poets and theorists have espoused the show-don’t-tell principle for writing haiku. See the excerpts culled in our posting haiku’s essence: “show them, don’t tell them“ (May 30, 2007), which are reproduced at the bottom of this essay. For example:
- Randy Brooks has written: “The best haiku capture human perception—moments of being alive conveyed through sensory images. They do not explain nor describe nor provide philosophical or political commentary.”
- Lee Gurga urges, “Think in images rather than evaluations. Show, don’t tell, is the haiku way. Haiku approach the subjective through the objective.” (from Haiku: A Poet’s Guide, 2003)
- George Swede concluded: “The Haiku Is a Poem which Involves Sense Images; It Does Not Involve Generalizations.”
- In his Haiku Handbook, Bill Higginson said: “If a writer captures the images of an experience that produced emotion, then the reader — if comprehending and sympathetic — will have a similar emotion based on experiencing the images provided by the writer. The haiku is the quintessence of this kind of writing.” And,
- Jane Reichhold explains: “Your five or six senses are your basic tools for writing haiku. Haiku should come from what you have experienced and not what you think.. . . Haiku do not tell the reader what to think, but show the things that will lead the reader along the path the author’s mind traveled.”
Haiku (or the best haiku) are “show-ems” not “tell-ems.” A poem is a tell-em if the author gives us an intellectual, emotional, philosophical, or epigrammatical explanation, insight or confession, rather than a depiction or description of something that we can see, smell, taste, touch or feel. Reporting what you can see or hear does not create a “tell-em.” It is stating your intellectual conclusion, or the notion or emotion that fills or crosses your mind, regarding something you are experiencing, that turns a poem into a tell-em.
A “show-em” uses images of things we can experience with our senses. As the lesson “Show Don’t Tell” from In Southsea explains: “An image brings some scene, object or observation alive, and presents it to your imagination, so that you can picture it, or feel as though you experience it.” A haiku show-em usually has two sensory images. A tell-em may include such an image, but it also tacks on the poet’s explanation, reaction or confession, rather than drawing out a similar insight from the reader with the use of another image.
There are many kinds of tell-ems. Unless the poet has made no attempt at all to write a genuine haiku, each tell-em presents one sensory image — often nothing more than a “date stamp” (i.e., the name of a holiday, season, or social or meteorological event) — and then appends an explanation or mental observation. Here are some categories I’ve created to help describe and talk about the tell-em phenomenon in the context of poems structured to look or feel like haiku:
psyku tell the reader directly what’s on the mind or in the psyche of the poet; they state what he or she has concluded, is thinking about, reminded of, or feeling, or what label is being applied, in reaction to the image presented in the other segment of a haiku-like poem. As such, all “tell-ems” are “psyku” and the term applies to the entire poetic genre. [In the author’s opinion, the name psyku is more appropriate than “haiku” or “senryu” for such tell-em poems.]
wryku is a subset of psyku in which a sensory image or “date stamp” is accompanied by a dryly humorous or ironic witticism or insight, or a clever or paradoxical observation or turn of phrase. Were it not for the accompanying sensory image or date stamp, the more aphoristic wryku might be mistaken for an epigraph or a free-verse form of epigram.
sighku and cryku directly proclaim, explain, reveal or confess the poet’s regrets, sorrow, grief, anguish, woe, heartache and heartbreak, self-reproach, disappointment, loss, affliction, grief and sorrow, agony, and other forms of mental distress — often over things said or done (or not said or done), opportunities lost, or skills and traits not possessed.
byku is a form of psyku in which the implied phrase “by the way” can be readily inserted between the poem’s sense image and the tell-em segment. Byku are often failed wryku.
whyku pose philosophical or rhetorical questions that came to the poet’s mind due to a current, remembered or fantasized sensory experience. (As with other forms of psyku, one gets the impression that the “insight” or question actually occured first to the poet, who thereafter discovered a relevant sensory image.)
My reaction to tell-ems is much like that of Cor van den Heuval to the “pissed off poems” of one venerable haijin, in The Haiku Anthology (3rd Ed. 2000): “To me, most of them seem, however admirable, something other than haiku or senryu.” They may in fact constitute wonderful insights into the world, humanity, or the poet’s psyche. A few might belong in a list of the wisest epigrams or wittiest bon mots. Some readers might think they are excellent free verse poems despite their brevity. Nevertheless, psyku do not belong in our finest haiku journals and anthologies as examples of the best haiku or senryu being written in English — even if their authors are among the most respected haijin alive and the poem is structured to look or feel like haiku. Unfortunately, here’s what I found in recent editions of publications that I normally turn to for a quality haiku experience:
The very first poem in big sky: The Red Moon Anthology 2006 is a tell-em, as are at least 25 of the 165 haiku/senryu chosen by its prestigious group of editors as “the finest haiku . . . published around the world in English” in 2006.- Modern Haiku puts “sample haiku & senryu” online for each of its issues. At least six out of the 11 poems selected to represent the Autumn 2006 collection and 3 of the ten shown online from the current Spring 2007 issue are tell-ems.
- There are three psyku on the first page of the current edition of Bottle Rockets (#16), and more than a dozen in the first 12 pages.
- The current edition of Frogpond (XXX:1, Winter 2007) has about one tell-em for every two pages of haiku or senryu.
- Nisqually Delta Review places its Editor’s Choice poems online. Five of the 22 Editor’s Choice poems for the Winter/Spring 2007 edition are tell-ems.
- About a third of the three dozen Haiku/Senryu in the February 2007 edition of the Roadrunner Haiku Journal; and ten out out 45 poems in Roadrunner May 2007 edition are psyku.
- In general, The Heron’s Nest and Simply Haiku seem to have fewer tell-ems than other leading haiku publications, but their editors have also let full-blown psyku slip through on numerous occasions. For example, the March 2007 Heron’s Nest has three of them on this page.
I believe the editors of many fine haiku publications are letting us (and haiku as a genre) down — overseeing a lowering in the quality of haiku, both by their choices and by the example that is being set for those who write and read haiku. Since they receive far more haiku than they could ever publish (and in fact usually get 5 to 15 poems from each poet whose work is selected), it’s difficult to understand how the best ones of the bunch so often turn out to be tell-ems. The challenge of haiku — the task in crafting high-quality haiku — is to share an experienced moment of insight by showing not telling. By definition, tell-ems ignore or fail that challenge; as haiku they are second-rate. By analogy, how should or would we judge quality or pick winners, if:
– a writer employs smile, frown and wink emoticons [ :-) or :-( or ;-) ] to signal intended satire, irony, derision or sarcasm?
– a mystery writer gives so many clues that all but the most dim-witted reader will be certain of the perpetrator a few chapters into the book?
– a charades player innovates and “acts out” a word by writing it on a blackboard?
If you prefer sports and competition analogies, what about:
– “creative” soccer players who use their hands to advance a ball up the field?
– an office basketball league that allows 9-foot-high hoops in the Baby Boomer division?
– the track star who emulates the hero in the song “Cut Across Shorty” to arrive first at the finish line?
When a figure skater’s required routine — by choice or happenstance — includes only a double axel, instead of the triple or quadruple versions of the jump, she can’t expect a perfect score from the Olympic judges, no matter the grace, showmanship or creativity of the entire piece. Points are deducted for failing to attempt or achieve the more difficult maneuver, and the reduction will often take the competitor out of medal contention. The same “deduction in points” should be applied by haiku poets in reviewing their own work and by editors in considering a haiku submission, whenever a poem “tells” the author’s insight or epiphany rather than showing it through sensory images. Of course, some readers might balk at using such editorial tough love, offering one or more of the following “ya-buts”:
- Definitions are for Sissies and Cretins: I’ve encountered this attitude when discussing the scope of the haiku genre with some scarred veterans of the great Haiku Definition Wars. I can’t hope to change minds, but I can quote from the version of Jim Kacian’s Haiku Primer that premiered at f/k/a in 2005, which says it better than I could: “Definitions are made not to burden us with restrictions, but to make it possible to have at the ready information which will help us know what to look for when considering haiku. . . . [A] definition can be useful and inspiring. It is an arrow, aiming us towards a target, indicating a direction that we may follow. It can be vital. It can inspire. It can open more than it closes.”
The Great Japanese Masters Wrote Tell-Ems: This appears to be true (if Western translators are to be believed), but does not prove that the Masters poets thought of such poems as stand-alone haiku, much less as their best haiku. The finest baseball hitters get on base 30% to 40% of the time, and hit home runs far less often than that. Neither every Hall of Famer’s at-bat, nor every haiku-like poem produced by a grand Master haijin, is a winner or a standard to which we should aspire. I love Issa, but there are a lot of his poems that would and should be rejected by The Heron’s Nest or Modern Haiku. Like Homer, the even the Masters sometimes nod.- You’re Squelching Creativity & Innovation and/or “Haiku has to Evolve to Survive”: See Kacian’s quote in #1 about definitions. Haiku has more than enough potential for growth and creativity within the show-don’t-tell standard. Lowering standards to stimulate creativity and innovation almost never achieves better quality (e.g., consider the nonstandard spelling and grammar allowed in middle school writing classes and the resultant impact on creativity). It can, however, give growth to a new movement or genre. Thus, when Seurat stopped relying on lots of dots, the art world didn’t call his new painting pointillism. And, wedding dancers who refuse to put their left foot in, are no longer doing the Hokey-Pokey (that is what it’s all about).
In his advice on editing haiku, Lee Gurga suggests that poets create only half a haiku when they merely “tack a comment or title onto one sole image” or use one image that simply explains or interprets the other. Haijin often appear to confuse haiku with tanka, combining half a haiku with half a tanka and ending up with a mediocre mutant version of the two. As Jane Reichhold noted in a 1996 essay, unlike haiku “the tanka form allows the addition of your subjective feelings and emotions.” She advises:
“Accept that different poetry forms grew out of different situations and therefore have a built-in stance or spirit or uprightness. Be aware of what you are feeling and chose the proper genre for it.”
Like senryu, tell-ems need a name of their own — perhaps “psyku” — to distinguish them from haiku. Acknowledging tell-ems as a separate haikai category would signal that they aim to serve a different function than haiku or senryu, offering a different challenge to the poet, and a evoking a different kind of interaction with the reader. [As with senryu, it’s difficult to delineate the precise boundary between haiku and psyku; although some poems are clearly tell-ems, a few will be quite hard to classify.] At the very least, following such examples as “post-Modern Art,” “PeeWee Football,” and “Junior Scrabble,” tell-ems need an adjectival modifier when they are presented in circumstances where the audience expects to find genuine haiku. The name or modifier would signal that the poet and the editor know the difference, which would edify and mollify many readers.
When I turn to a “haiku publication”, I’m not looking for bon mots, aphorisms, or tiny confessional poems that happen to be written by haijin. The more of them I find, the less I enjoy the haiku experience or want to return to that publication. At best, tell-ems make me appreciate the art and craft of creating genuine, high-quality haiku. That effect could also be achieved, however, by throwing in a few of the oft-ridiculed pseudo and parody haiku, many of which — let’s face it — are difficult to distinguish in principle from psyku. My preference is to avoid the agita and keep both pseudo-haiku and psyku out of our preeminent haiku publications.
Crafting the right juxtaposition of sensory images to evince the insight the haiku poet wants to share is not always easy, even for the best haijin. That’s actually my point: doing it right can be difficult, requiring special skills, creativity and focused effort. Taking the shortcut of direct explanation makes the poem — however else it might succeed — a second-rate haiku. The temptation to take the easier route may be great, but we need to heed Jim Kacian’s warning in his Haiku Primer:
“But there are some things which do not constitute haiku content: they are not about the poet, what the poet feels about or how he interprets the content of his poem. These are the greatest dangers to writing good haiku, the urge to interpret, to think logically, to draw conclusions: to interpose our selves and our words between the experience and the reader. It takes faith to let the images of our moment stand on their own, and to let the reader come to these images and intuit his own understanding. But this is exactly what we must do. Because, at the last resort, it is not the content of haiku which is essential to us: it is the growth in feeling, perception and connectedness which the content permits us to experience. And so we must not interfere with the things which allow us this growth. In the end, we are best advised to let things speak for themselves, and they will speak well for us.” (emphasis added)
Lawyers and judges worry about slippery slopes — about setting a precedent or adopting a principle that leads to increasingly undesirable future corollaries, decisions or results. Poets and editors should, too. Equating tell-ems with the best haiku, by accepting psyku into our leading haiku publications, appears to be the kind of unwise choice that could readily lead to an avalanche of junk poetry masquerading as haiku.
If only to spare themselves the pain of reviewing the ever-rising flood of wryku and sighku by the less talented among us, editors should draw the line and exclude (or segregate) tell-ems. They shouldn’t be shy about returning a poem to its author with a note saying “nice idea with good potential; please see if you can convert this psyku into a genuine haiku by substituting a sensory image for your explanatory phrase.” If it happens often enough, haijin will submit fewer tell-ems and produce better poetry — and our journals will contain noticeably better haiku.
Follow-up: See our “you tell-em: hold the anchovies” (Dec. 29, 2007)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
AfterWords: For many reasons, I did not want to use this Essay to point at particular poems that I consider to be tell-ems, or to mention their authors (many of whom are not only friends of mine but among the finest haiku poets I know). If you need some examples of tell-ems (and aren’t willing to cull through recent periodicals to test your hunting and evaluation skills), here are a bunch that I wrote myself over the past couple of years. Some even fooled an editor or two and made it into publication.
Can you think of ways to craft a genuine haiku winner out of some of the following haiku-looking verses?
a favorite tree
reflected in the river -
made me look again
visiting mom and dad –
faces and refrains
gettin’ old
even lovelier
naked
backyard elm
the stale air
of an old man’s home –
opening my front door
sleepless night
she won’t stop
leaving me alone
waking, the agnostic asks
who dried the dishes
and hung that sun?
leaving her place –
a hug
you’d give a friend
fallen blossoms
soon
just another tree
the river’s back
within its banks –
her disappointment
March snow
wanting more
not wanting more
I’m not embarrassed to have written the above verses. Some are pretty interesting and got a smile or two from friends. But, I am in retrospect a bit disappointed in myself for not taking the time to make them real haiku — or, really good haiku. These days, I would not submit any of them in their current form to a haiku journal. Also, I now pledge that I shall no longer (unless under some form of deadline or topical duress) post such poems to this website, whether written by myself or our Honored Guests.
______________________________________________________
- Excerpts on Haiku and The Show Don’t Tell Rule (originally posted as haiku’s essence: “show them, don’t tell them”, f/k/a, May 30, 2007) -
Randy Brooks wrote the following in his essay What Is Haiku?:
“The best haiku capture human perception—moments of being alive conveyed through sensory images. They do not explain nor describe nor provide philosophical or political commentary.”
Lee Gurga’s article “Writing and Revising Haiku” (Haiku World, June 2003, which is a chapter from Haiku: A Poet’s Guide, 2003) says:
“Write about whatever you experience. This includes what is going on inside you as well as what is going on around you. Senses include what you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch as well as what stimulates your mind. You can write about what you are experiencing at the moment or memories of past experiences may trigger other images.”
“Think in images rather than evaluations. Show, don’t tell, is the haiku way. Haiku approach the subjective through the objective.”
“Avoid half a haiku. Can you identify two full images in your haiku? Maybe the haiku is merely a single image chopped into three lines? Have you tacked a comment or title onto one sole image? Have you come up with a great image, then merely added a ‘date-stamp’ to serve as your second image? Is your haiku an equation, with one line nothing more than the sum of the other two — i.e., a + b = c? Does one image simply explain or interpret the other?”
Gurga ends his section of “guidelines for editing haiku with words of caution: “Finally, please remember that haiku is
- About discovery, not invention
- About what is essential, not what is entertaining
- About sharing, not persuading
- About showing, not showing off”
In addition, while discussing types of perception, Gurga says (at 93) “We must distinguish between finding things in nature and projecting our feelings onto the world.” He notes that “Michael McClintock has coined the term ’subjective realism’ to characterize haiku that go beyond the simple recording of experiences. The poet’s response to the scene is neither objective nor subjective but involves a third type of perception.” After giving a few examples of haiku that display subjective realism, Gurga muses (diplomatically):
“When we record or subjective responses in haiku, are we being receptive or merely projecting our wishful thinking? Are we being sensitive or merely presumptuous? The search for answers to these questions can engage poets for a lifetime.”
Christopher Herold offers “some qualities we find essential to haiku,” at The Heron’s Nest, including:
“Implication through objective presentation, not explanation: appeal to intuition, not intellect.”
William J. Higginson, in The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku (1985) said:
“When we compose a haiku we are saying, ‘It is hard to tell you how I am feeling. Perhaps if I share with you the event that made me aware of these feelings, you will have similar feelings of your own’.”
“. . . We know that we cannot share our feelings with others unless we share the causes of those feelings with them. . . Stating the feelings alone builds walls; stating the causes of the feelings builds paths.”
“In the rest of this book the word ‘image’ means words which name objects or actions that cause sensations from which we form mental images, or the mental images themselves.”
“If a writer captures the images of an experience that produced emotion, then the reader — if comprehending and sympathetic — will have a similar emotion based on experiencing the images provided by the writer. The haiku is the quintessence of this kind of writing.”
Jim Kacian’s Haiku Primer (as presented first at f/k/a), offers many insights. It states:
“Typically, a poet who chooses haiku to express his moment strives to place his reader directly at the scene, not so that he may tell of the experience, but so that the reader may experience it directly for himself. The attentive reader will find all the input to recreate the moment–a setting, the conditions of the moment, the senses fired, the action, the entire packet of information–so that, through the act of close imagining, the reader may actually relive the moment, and arrive at the realization himself. The poet’s reality is mapped onto the reader’s, like an overlay, and when there is a sufficient overlap, the experience is shared.”
Kacian explains: “Haiku is a poetic form, and does hold some things in common with other poetry. However, it has developed, over its 400 and more years of practice, techniques specific to itself, a sense of how language best works within it, and several theories of poetics. We will examine these elements which make haiku unique among all the poetic forms of the world.
. . . . [W]e will want to acquire an understanding of what haiku has been, but also what it is becoming, and what it might look like in the future.” As for definitions:
“Definitions are made not to burden us with restrictions, but to make it possible to have at the ready information which will help us know what to look for when considering haiku.
” . . . On the other hand, a definition can be useful and inspiring. It is an arrow, aiming us towards a target, indicating a direction that we may follow. It can be vital. It can inspire. It can open more than it closes.”
“A haiku is a poem . . . which records an experience . . . Haiku always begin with an experience. . . .
“[W]hile haiku may explore interior space, they are not by nature personal. Haiku are not poems we write about ourselves, not another form of confessional poetry; in fact, they are moments when the poet loses his own self-consciousness because of an identification with his subject.”
. . . “So, finally, what is the content of haiku? Haiku are about all the things we encounter in the world each day, and what they tell us about the world, and ourselves. They contain some reference to nature, but nature in the broadest sense. And they are about the present moment, the moment in which we are capable of experiencing new revelations.”
David G. Lanoue offers many insights About Haiku at his Haiku of Kobayashi Issa website, including:
How should it be read? Issa, a master of the form, invites his readers to partake not of abstract ideas but of experience—palpable, wondrous encounters with life: a swallow flying out the nose of a great bronze Buddha, cows moo-mooing in thick autumn mist, a butterfly resting on a dog curled to sleep. One does not read such poetry in a greedy rush to understand a theme, a point, or a concept. Rather, we do best by Issa if we open ourselves to each haiku with the same non-grasping attention we might pay to a bird warbling in a tree. After all, the poet insists, birdsong is haiku:
like warbling pure haiku
mountain
cuckooLike a bird twittering one-breath improvisations deep in the summer cedars on some shady, fathomless Japanese mountainside, Issa creates vivid, non-intellectual expressions of life on a living planet. The haiku moment awaits the reader who patiently allows words on the page to register as deeply felt reality.
Jane Reichhold, in Writing and Enjoying Haiku (2002), said:
- “Your five or six senses are your basic tools for writing haiku. Haiku should come from what you have experienced and not what you think.”
- “[I]nstead of presenting the idea of a thing or using the concepts of what something means to us, the author simply presents the thing as it is.”
- “Haiku do not tell the reader what to think, but show the things that will lead the reader along the path the author’s mind traveled.”
In her 1996 essay “Another Attempt To Define Haiku,” Reichhold explains: “By being concrete — using only images of things we can see, smell, taste, touch or feel — the haiku writer avoids those traps of Western poetry: abstract ideas such as love, hate, sadness, desire, honor, glory, of which we have had enough. Haiku demands you use your bodily senses instead of your intellect. Forget what you have been taught; write of what you experience with your body. Check your haiku. See if you can draw a picture (at least in your mind) as result of reading each line.” She also describes “the real challenge of haiku”:
To express an image or two so well that the reader “sees” them in his/her mind and then! you add another image that demands a leap or twist so the two previous images are seen in a new relationship (maybe even your metaphor, if you are lucky). An additional twist is to have images plus leap which reveal some deep philosophical truth or ideal without having to speak of it. Poetry is written vision. You have to show new ways of seeing things to be a real poet.
She notes that the tanka form “allows the addition of your subjective feelings and emotions. Accept that different poetry forms grew out of different situations and therefore have a built-in stance or spirit or uprightness. Be aware of what you are feeling and chose the proper genre for it.” Reichhold concludes:
“Writing haiku is a discipline and if you are interested in haiku you are seeking more discipline in your life. Go for it. Make rules for yourself and follow them exactly, or break them completely, outgrow them and find new ones. We are all students and no one ‘really’ knows how to write a haiku. That, however, does not stop us from trying…”
George Swede’s “Towards a Definition of English-language Haiku” (originally published in