See thousands of egg hens packed twelve to a cage,
So cozy they can’t spread a wing.
To keep them from pecking each other to death,
We’ve burned off their beaks. (Bet that stings!)

Come laugh at the piggies who can’t even walk.
Their legs can’t support their own weight.
Because of growth hormone, they stagger and slide.
Ain’t the chemistry business great!

Come gawk at the cows as they hang by one limb
On our slaughter assembly line.
If a cut throat don’t kill one, the scalding tank will.
(Come on, they’re just cows, so it’s fine.)

Our house cafeteria serves only meat,
And gelatin (made from the hooves).
So dig in with gusto, and bon apetít;
It’s all USDA approved!

—Lester Smith

Despite a long personal history of online activity—starting with BBSs during the 80s, way too many hours on GEnie during its heyday, and Web surfing from the first wave—I’ve had a reluctance to submit creative works for publication online. After all, I’ve made a career (since 1984) in print publishing. And though I have a passion for ebooks (preferring an electronic copy of pretty much anything over having to lug around a paper copy), that’s not really online publishing, as in posting work where anyone can access it freely.

So I’ve had this Neanderthalic bias against online publication. Recently, however, I’ve had a refreshing bit of water splashed in my face. Which is to say I’ve had a couple of poems published online, and I can finally see the benefits—such as sharing them with anyone who’s willing to follow a hyperlink. Here you go:

“Who-Sunnit?” (a “cozy mystery” sonnet)
“Night Musings” (in Protodimension issue #3)

Please give them a read, then come back here and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Passing the seventh floor, he mooned a board meeting.

She chided him, “Show some decorum.”

He laughed. No, he hooted, exhilarated.

“You’re not taking this seriously,” she said. “God will judge you in the end.”

He considered: If he’d had a “do-over,” he’d have chosen someone else to jump with.

This—for those who told us we would fail,
Who said we’d never last. How they must feel
Today. Another year now stands in file
Of witnesses against them. And we foal
One more to prance our fields, a happy fool!
This, to them who never held a leaf
Together—but for money spent a life.
This, to them who never tore a loaf
To share. To those who sliced theirs thin, aloof.

Red sun falls behind
as I flee the black castle.
Church in the distance.

But I’m not entirely satisfied with that last line. The first two have such stark visual impact, and then the last just flatly states “church.” Originally I had been tempted to go with “bells,” but I wasn’t sure whether readers would make the connection. Here’s the poem again with that change:

Red sun falls behind
as I flee the black castle.
Bells in the distance.

What do you think? When you hear “bells” (not literally, you wag), what does that conjure in your head?

Anyone who comments by Oct. 23 will be entered in the Vampyr Verse drawing, by the way.

Thanks!

Lately, I’ve been using Twitter to post a daily lune (like haiku, but shorter; see this poetic forms post for more info) and am finding a growing community of good online poets, as a result. Today a post from wx1gdave led to a Boston Globe article about soji, a Korean form something like haiku, but longer, and with perhaps a stronger twist. Here’s a a 14th-century sijo mentioned in that article:

The spring breeze melted snow on the hills then quickly disappeared.
I wish I could borrow it briefly to blow over my hair
And melt away the aging frost forming now about my ears.

Isn’t that awesome?

Looks like it’s time to do some further research into this form and try my hand at some soji of my own.

Not that I’m abandoning the daily lune or haiku; soji are too long to Tweet.

And so I tried to write free verse instead,
Which left me feeling somewhat loose and sore
As if, instead of a four-poster bed,
I’d slept in random rags tossed on the floor.

Up next, I thought maybe my talents tended
Toward more sentenced verse—the prosy poem.
But how to tell when such a thing was ended?
If there are secrets to it, I don’t know ’em.

So back to fourteen lines my hand has come,
And five fixed feet remains my rule of thumb.
 
 
—Lester Smith
 
 
(Originally appeared in WFOP Museletter, summer 2009.)

could lure my feet
across the spongy soil
its brittle, weedy carpet,

into the stippled shadows
where the fellowship of empty branches
could brim me over
with shimmering melancholy.

However,
I am expected elsewhere,

and so a paler shade of feeling
must sustain.
 
 
—Lester Smith
 
 
(Originally appeared in Woud You Dance?)

counting sylllables
mentioning cherry blossoms
this is not haiku

(from Zen Rampage, back cover)

Haiku

Everyone knows what a haiku is, right? A poem in three lines, with seventeen syllables divided five/seven/five.

That’s the commonly accepted definition of a haiku in English, but to understand how we got there, it’s worth knowing a little bit about haiku in Japanese. You can look up the history yourself: I’d just like to point out a few standard features of a Japanese haiku.

• It has seventeen syllables.
• It has a conceptual break after either the fifth syllable or the twelfth.
• It includes a seasonal word to ground it in nature.
• It is not metaphorical.

The conceptual break explains why English haiku are commonly divided as they are: Five/seven/five includes both possible breaks in thought—depending upon where your poem puts its emphasis. This format also explains why so many English haiku are simply bad: It isn’t enough to divide your lines; each line also needs to be a complete mini thought in it’s own right; and one of those breaks must create an interesting shift in perception if the poem is to have any power.

Senryu

Note the haiku’s traditional requirement for a seasonal word, and it’s avoidance of metaphor. In Japanese poetry, if you write seventeen syllables with a break like a haiku, but without a seasonal word, that’s a senryu (pronounced like “send you,” but with an “R” instead of a “D”). Senryu are often humorous, frequently feature people, and may be metaphorical or otherwise more self-consciously contrived.

For most English-speaking people’s purposes, however, this is just a wasted word. If you write something with a haiku’s syllable count and breaks, you might as well call it a haiku, because pretty much everybody who reads it will call it that.

Tanka

A related form (in that it developed from the same historic roots as haiku and senryu) is the tanka. In English, this is thirty-one syllables in five lines, divided five/seven/five/seven/seven. Obviously, with nearly twice the syllables of a haiku, a tanka can treat a slightly larger subject. Here’s an example (also from Zen Rampage).

“Eighty-two years old!”
The stranger’s bony finger
prodding my shoulder.
How am I to understand
the meaning of his bared teeth?

I hope it’s evident that each line carries its own bit of meaning, like individual building blocks contributing to a five-block structure.

Lune

It’s worth noting that Japanese words have more syllables on average than English words do. So in effect, seventeen syllables in English can carry more meaning. In a way, English haiku are cheating.

To better represent the sparsity of thought in a Japanese haiku, a literature professor named Robert Kelly invented the lune, a thirteen-syllable poem divided five/three/five. He named this form the lune, because the right side of most examples creates a crescent shape, like a crescent moon.

Here’s an example I posted to Twitter and Facebook a few days ago.

if not for the birds
I’d not know
that I cannot fly

(For what it’s worth, the lune is probably my favorite form of poem. And considering how much I love the sonnet, that’s saying something!)

Another fellow, named Jack Collum, was teaching this form to children, and slightly misremembered it. Instead of five/three/five syllables, he thought three/five/three words. This being somewhat easier for children to count, the form has stuck.

Note that because “lune” is an English word, two or more of these poems are “lunes.” By contrast, more than one haiku, senryu, or tanka become “two haiku,” “five senryu,” or “seventy-nine tanka,” for example.

Final Words

I hope that this brief overview of these related forms has inspired you to write some of your own. Just remember to make each line stand at least somewhat on its own, rather than seeming like a sudden U-turn in the street, simply because you’ve run out of syllables. And try to have a significant change in thought, some measure of surprise, in one of the breaks. Your readers will appreciate the effort!

—Les

He frosted it with filigrees of color from
countless vermilion sunsets
shining on sapphire
seas and ochroid sands.

Inside, a feast of worms.

He set it on a plate decorated
with images of doves and
dying children.

“Make a wish,” He said,
with a smile
                 of expectation.

I could not meet his eye.

“Really,” I said, “You shouldn’t have.”
 
 
—Lester Smith
 
 
(Originally appeared in Woud You Dance?)