Tanka challenge 11/15/08

[gurdymonkey]

"Hush," murmur the waves.
"Hush your incessant babble,
You foolish mortals.
Like the tracks of wading birds,
Your lives are impermanent."

EDIT: 
Mini-rant.

Brevity of form
Does not mean that a poem
Should not make good sense. (LOOK! Haiku with sentence structure!)

I blame generations of misinformed English literature teachers exposed to stilted translations of Japanese poems for spreading the insidious lie that haiku should read like complete and utter nonsense.  Clearly a "She Who Sucks Least" editorial on the fact is needed - but will have to wait until my sister leaves town.

Comments

[reynardine.livejournal.com]

Looking forward to the editorial! I think another problem is that when Western writers (particularly Americans) were first exposed to the haiku (which at the time was sparsely translated), they used it as a gateway to other forms of poetry that used deconstructed language. In some ways, that opened up English poetry to a brave new world, but on the other hand, they did a grave disservice to the haiku, making it sound like nonsense sometimes.

Reading haiku and tanka in Japanese is radically different, but that's because the language is so radically different from ours.

I have more to say on this, but it's time for me to head off to Mass! Maybe I'll make a post later.