Haiku...

by Roberta Beary, a runner-up for the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award, and a word about the current state of this ancient form:

"In addition to being a finance attorney in Washington, D.C., Roberta Beary is a haiku poet. As in publishing almost exclusively in journals and anthologies (and calendars!) devoted to the form from publishers like the Haiku Society of America and Red Moon Press. As in having 21 poems in her collection, The Unworn Necklace, that received some kind of honor in various haiku competitions. “thunder,” just to pick one, received the Grand Prize of the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition in 2005 and that same year was a runner-up in the Haiku Calendar Competition:

thunder
the roses shift
into shadow

If slam poets & visual poets go around thinking that nobody takes their genres seriously as literature, haiku poetry has been off the map altogether – a genuinely popular literary art form that receives no attention whatsoever from what Charles Bernstein would call Official Verse Culture unless it is for a new translation of one of the classics, or work by a poet, such as Anselm Hollo, already widely known and respected for writing in other forms. The whole idea of all these contests – not unlike slam competitions – is to create its own alternative institutional universe.

A poem like “thunder” might tell you a lot about a poet like Beary, but almost nothing about this extraordinary book. For one thing, she’s not a fundamentalist on haiku form – this piece has only ten syllables, seven shy the standard 17. Further, with the reiteration of an opening sh right after the caesura of the second line & the start of the poem’s last word, she’s a writer who likes subtle formalities. Finally, and this is sort of traditionally the point of haiku, she likes specificity of detail. As far as this little poem goes, it does very well."


--Ron Silliman