This is a summary of the presentation that I gave for the Haiku Down Under event last weekend
My aim was to outline various creative strategies for using haiku as ekphrastic, either in responding to other media or being an inspiration for new material.
The presentation outlined opportunities to incorporate poetry into exhibitions, collaborations, music and other approaches to art.
I introduced the work of Garlo Jo and Marco Sebastiano Alessi with discussion of an interview with the former and was joined by the latter for the second half of the presentation.
One benefit of exploring activities like those I promoted is to raise the profile of poetry and help a wider audience gain those benefits familiar to each of us as writers of short reflective works.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn prose!
The title from my session came via self-described “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s an energy which reflects my gonzo approach to haiku: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
It led me to give a quick word about definitions, particularly my looseness with them, as I am kinda brash and move fast, so some ideas and definitions tend to get broken along the way — which is a character you’ll see that I’ve embraced in my practices.
I work quickly and don't get too caught up with following rules.
However, early on in the discussion I saw a message from Amelia Fielden in Zoom's chat that kinda derailed me, as she commented that I shouldn't pluralise haiku as haikus because that wasn't how the Japanese would do it.
"Please stop saying haikuS. The word haiku is both singular and plural and does not take S at the end (for plural)"
I explained my approach is probably American and reflected on Kerouac's statement:
“The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don’t think American Haikus should worry about syllables because American speech is something again."
Not sure if it helps, but my parents were both born in North America so maybe that's part of my heritage.
Introducing Garlo Jo from Bourdeaux
I met Garlo more than a decade ago when he contacted me on Facebook and asked me to contribute to his Vent de Guitares project.
If you own a guitar, it’s a technique that worth trying — use an open tuning and allow the wind to vibrate the strings. It’s a generative approach to music.
Garlo was invited to develop a project in Japan during the mid-90s using this approach and it was there he became interested in haiku.
“In Japan I understood the importance of haikus. A Kyushu newspaper had a haiku each week-end and before the concerts we organised a haiku contest. Maybe haikus is a way to feel nature, even in a big city like Fukuoka, you can listen to the wind by means of bamboo, flags and furins… and haikus.”
A haiku competition was developed to complement his musical project and I think that's one good strategy to incorporate poetry into other events.
Garlo followed the project in Japan with the development of his CD 99 Haiku.
“On the CD, each haiku is related to the haiku before by its evocation or by the music. You can listen to my progression or make your own progression.”
This is a good generative idea, a kind of choose-your-own-arrangement. It’s something I want to highlight here as a theme.
“I focused on French and Japanese. I think that the ideal way of listening to this CD is to have one and only one haiku each day for 99 days. A radio station in Kyushu broadcasted the CD that way. It has 99 haikus because 99 tracks is the limit for CDs."
Introducing Crossing Streams
Next I discussed my first experience using haiku in an exhibition for Crossing Streams, which was a collaboration with Marco and the Naviar Records community.
Local writers were invited to contribute to the three-week event in Narrandera during October 2017 and contributors ranged from age eight to eighty-something.
I ran workshops to help develop this material and then illustrated the submissions with my photography.
Working with Marco we selected five poems to be shared with the Naviar Records community and the result was over five hours of original music that was played in the exhibition.
One of these was my first recording using Garlo’s vent de guitar technique in response to a haiku by Peita Vincent.
Also exhibiting was a project developed by Dr Greg Pritchard, who shared his collaboration with weaver Kelly Leonard and also ran a workshop as part of the program of events.
Poetry as a micro-journal
My interest in writing haiku began in 2001 after I moved to Wagga Wagga and got my first mobile phone.
The Short Messaging Service (SMS) function led me to start broadcasting short poems to friends as a way of sharing my observations about living in a new city.
This foundation was based on the seventeen-syllable approach suiting the 140 character limit of SMS.
The microjournal approach developed further in 2016 when I made a new year's resolution to write one each week, then increased from 2017 when I began writing one each day.
These were published on a blog.
It was a creative practice that became useful for generating content.
A body of content provides material you can utilise in a variety of ways, and I’ll outline some ideas that I’ve used.
One idea is rensaku, which I believe is the term for a sequence of haiku.
This was the approach used in my poem River Of Time that was published in the Poetry for the Planet anthology.
These kinds of sequences are also interesting to capture the mood of a year, which I’ve done a couple of times by selecting examples from my microjournal and stringing them together.
Another approach was using haiku with photographs as part of an exhibition at Griffith Regional Art Gallery in 2019, which I also published as the book Earthwords.
The book that developed from an idea that was irresistible to me, incorporating the Cut-up Technique to invite the reader to cut the pages to generate new poetry, either through deliberate selection or random collisions of phrases.
As a writer I liked the way that sometimes so much can be achieved just by swapping the last and first lines.
For more about cut-ups and their history.
Introducing Bassling
Bassling is my musical pseudonym and haiku have played a role.
The cut-up idea was one I used for a performance at a book launch, which I also recorded for the Naviar Records prompt that week.
One more approach to using haiku is the lyrics for Ghostly Melody.
Haiku can require editing to sit into music as lyrics, but can offer great raw material to work into a song.
In conclusion
Haiku and other forms of poetry offer benefits in terms of being a reflective writing practice and it's worth raising the profile of these activities to engage an audience.
There are strategies for stimulating writing, such as adding haiku competitions to other events.
The material produced through writing haiku can lead to a variety of outcomes, whether exhibited or edited into other formats.
My examples included stringing haikus together to make rensaku-style pieces, as well as using the Cut-up Technique to create new material from existing phrases or as a performance.
I have also used haiku as raw material to become song lyrics.
