Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off (May 2010)

Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off
by Richard Krawiec

May 2010

One of my favorite poets, haiku or otherwise, is Roberta Beary.  Her subtle understanding of the way small gestures reveal deep moments of emotional complexity and her ability to capture through simple images the sorrow and heartbreak in a relationship is stunning.  She accomplishes more with three lines than many poets do with thirty.  Her book The Unworn Necklace achieves a coherence and sophistication because of the way the individual poetic elements resonate against each other to create a greater whole. Even so, in this book, not all of her haiku—which are probably more accurately defined as senryu—could be defined as poetry. Take a look at this poem:

Although this treads close to sentimentality, which in itself isn’t bad, what saves it, ironically, is the lack of specificity in the first line.  If she had included specific details of rain pounding the windows, pouring from the gutters or bending the tree, it would have felt heavy-handed. The particular type of specificity of detail that we strive for in poetry would have reduced this poem to a moment of overwrought sorrow.  The relative vagueness of a rainy ‘season’ requires us to conspire by creating our own images.

Her choice of words more accurately captures the theme of this poem, which isn’t about an incident or an event, but a period of emotional suffering.  The rainy season although it has a beginning and an end, occurs over a period of time that isn’t precisely defined, just as the revelation of infidelity creates a sorrow that continues through weeks and months.  The season of heartache is an ill-defined, loosely bordered segment of chronology, as is the rainy season.  This theme of continuance is reinforced by the use of the word ‘again’. It didn’t rain just once.  He didn’t tell her just once.  His repeated reassurance is as depressing as the continuing rain because the reassurance, rather than bringing about a warmer, sunnier climate to their relationship, serves only to remind her over and over again of his infidelity. The repetition of his pleas rings hollow, to the poem’s persona, and to the reader.

In public schools, children are often taught to use strong nouns, verbs, adjectives when writing poetry.  But in this poem, the ‘little’ word ‘again’ riffs the theme and provides a variation which meets it’s unresolved finish in ‘nothing’.  If she truly meant nothing, why does he have to say it again (and again and again)?  The key words in this poem are season, again, and nothing. These are held together by Beary’s precise choice of tells me and means.  Try replacing tells with says, and means with is.

Technically, this means nearly the same thing, but this version would lack the depth of sophisticated feeling in Roberta’s poem, and the precision of language which makes it a poem and not a statement.  Saying something is not the same as pointedly directing remarks at a person.

Another piece in this collection, while interesting, doesn’t quite reach the same level of poetic accomplishment as rainy season.

This is clever and insightful, and it harbors emotional complexity, with its implication that even though time has passed the narrator, while making a witty observation, is also trying to reassure herself, to herself, in regards to her desirability.

Though family picnic is insightful and truthful; is it poetry?  I’m not sure it extends beyond psychological documentation, thus in that uncertainty, I don’t think it raises itself to the level of rainy season.  It is a moment of near poetic insight, but I’m not sure it’s a poem. Perhaps, that is the basic situation with senryu.  Being more directly concerned with human nature, than haiku, their primary focus is often on that moment of insight or awareness.  Many senryu read like mini-epiphanies, yet their poetry is secondary to the insight.

Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off • Richard Krawiec
May 2010
haijinx