More Silence

I write this as the Bloomington sanitation guys vacuum the leaves of summer that stood sodden and crusty in yesterday's snow. Not only that but roofers are pounding and scraping my neighbor's roof: bang, bang, scrip, scrape.

Maybe that's why haiku is such a difficult 21st century art to engage in for it's truly hard to slow down and really experience what you are thinking and feeling in our noisy, brash, far too-busy world. This short poetic form, I believe, requires both emotion and thought.

In researching the aspect of silence in relation to haiku, I discovered Canadian doctor and haikuist Eric Amman who wrote an essay in 1978 called "The Wordless Poem." Amman brought both his medical practice and training and his belief in Zen Buddhism into his poems and said in this essay that "The haiku is a point of intersection between man and nature."

In her analysis of Amman's work, critic Kathrin Walsch said that "Haiku poetry, like Zen, transcends words." Of course for someone whose bread and butter--take that back--soul food are words that's a hard concept to master, but she goes on the say, "Haiku focuses not on what the words mean in an abstract sense but rather the image the words are able to create... Zen practices hold that words are limiting and can be a distraction from which one should detach oneself."

And this discussion leads me to night, especially these long late-autumn nights when one is more likely to experience quiet and to reconnect with both nature and oneself:

night sky
the flaming silence
of stars

Haiku Silence

abandoned parking lot
perched on the barbed wire
one sparrow


OK, to be honest, I don't understand the role of silence in a haiku. I know it should be an integral element, but how to incorporate silence within a haiku is a difficult art to learn. Does it occur in the pauses between lines, in the interstices between words?

Or does silence resonate from the time before the poem existed to the time after? Is it the hidden stitching behind the haiku?

Perched in the Land of Trees

tree leaning into tree--
an old couple negotiate
the rainy sidewalk

In Speculation #241, American haikuist Robert Spiess said that one of the 'lesser reasons' haiku are so brief is that in them inheres the truth that if words are good, words nevertheless are a rupture of silence which is better still."

Of course, all writing--drama, novels, songs--involves the breaking and returning to silence, but in poems as short as haiku, the silences weigh so much more than in longer pieces.

I love the vivid word rupture; it originally meant to break but from a bursting inside. And it's related to the words abrupt, corrupt and interrupt. However, interrupting the silence does not convey the abrupt change from silence to sound that rupture gives.