5-7-5

Haiku is low IQ.

My dog took a shit

Enough nature imagery?

Good. Go fuck yourself

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Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, where I sometimes make a provocative statement in return for your sending me your own provocative statements for use next week. So: I contend classic haiku is pure effete pretension, not poetry.

I apologize in advance for this, my most controversial opinion ever that is not about curry. I realized I felt this way just two days ago when a reader mentioned his skill at haiku, and I responded, immediately and without much contemplation, that haiku is not poetry. Ashamed of myself afterwards, I then dug deep into the subject and have decided to double down. I am nothing if not professionally suicidal. You are invited to attack, or, as a haiku might say:

I say haiku blows

In a field of daffodils

Good. Go fuck yourselves.

I love poetry, particularly rhyming poetry, which I think requires a disciplined voice and a competent sense of meter, and an actual vocabulary that is not straitjacketed to have to describe acts of nature in a mannered, precious way. This rhyming form, the one I like, has been popularized by noted hacks such as Chaucer and Shakespeare and Poe and T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats and Percy “Bysshe?” Shelley and Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost and y’know, even Ogden Nash.

I admit I am prejudiced, but I believe defensibly so. I was traumatized by haiku as a child in eighth grade English class, when the teacher introduced us to the form. I suspect that all eighth graders are introduced to haiku: It is easy to understand because it requires nothing but a raised pinkie finger and an adolescent audience.

In class, we were assigned to write haiku overnight and bring it in the next day, to be graded.

I spent some time on this. I was a morbid little dude. What I came up with was:

As death draws nearer

Like an eagle hunting prey

Life becomes dearer.

I was pretty proud of this poem. I guarantee you, 60 years later, that it kicked the crap out of all the other kids’ poems, which all resembled:

A babbling brook

Boy it babbles really good.

I think of Jesus.

But the teacher graded my poem harshly, and held it up as an example of what not to do. Why? First, because I had rhymed it. For some obnoxious anti-intellectual reason, haiku is not supposed to rhyme. Also, my poem had an understandable point which was depressing. Apparently, this had been a serious negative. Haiku is evidently supposed to be vague and blissfully celebratory and rely on subtle evocative imagery or some such treacly ooze. (I have not researched this element deeply for the same reason I also wouldn’t research lizard porn.)

If you happen to be a big fan of haiku, I would timidly suggest it just might be because it is the only form of supposed poetry that any semi-literate with the soul of an iguana could write. (Yourself, for example.) Well, I have good news for you. You can! The more intelligent species of insects can!

I mean no offense toward the Japanese, whom I otherwise deeply respect; in fact, many other cultures have also accepted and adapted haiku, adding their own rules and fillips, and they all suck, in my outrageous and possibly self-immolating opinion. Haikus are to poetry what “word find” puzzles are to crosswords.

I am now going to re-print four of the most famous haiku poems ever written, celebrated over centuries, considered in some corners of the Earth to belong on the shelves with Prufrock or Ozymandias. Ready?

The Old Pond” by the stupendously great Matsuo Bashō, circa 1680

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond—

Splash! Silence again.

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Are you having an orgasm over the awesomeness of that imagery?

Here is another, by the ginormously great Yosa Buson, circa 1750, using a slightly altered syllabic form:

The light of a candle

Is transferred to another candle —

spring twilight.

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This is by the gruntingly great Kobayashi Issa, circa 1810:

This world of dew

is a world of dew,

and yet, and yet.

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And finally, here is one — also breaking the original strict syllabic form — by an American, the ecstatically great genius Jack Kerouac, in the 1950s:

The taste

Of rain

—Why kneel?

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Do you have any idea what this last one means? Here is what AI says: “This haiku by Jack Kerouac presents a minimalist and enigmatic depiction of the sensory experience of tasting rain. Through its juxtaposition of the physical sensation and the implied question, it invites contemplation of the human relationship with nature and the search for meaning in the mundane.”

Is there any greater bullshit in the history of Christendom?

In my opinion, these haikus all embody the literary merit of Bernie (“But then again, no … ”) Taupin.

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Here is one of my favorite columns, er, by me — an interview with Billy Collins, in which the actually great poet laureate expresses ambivalence to free verse. And summarizes, perfectly, why.

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So, today’s Weekend Gene Pool challenge to you: What is something else that is generally revered that you think is crap? It can be in any category of thing. Send your nominees here, with explanation. I myself will now offer one more nominee: Curry.

Sorry, I had to end with that. It was required of me ethically and professionally.

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Please submit your entries here in the Questions and Observations section, and feel free to also assail my thoughts on haiku. It will be particularly effective if you savage me in haiku, but that is not required. I will not be offended by your criticism, though I might strip you naked in response, in haiku, you effete sissy goofball.

Also, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll: