Dee Evetts
Essay #6 Nov/Dec 2021
A couple of months back my sister asked me whether I had any intention of addressing the subject of humor in haiku at some point in this series of essays. This happened to chime with another project currently on the stocks, and simultaneously I saw that it could get me temporarily off the hook with regard to a rash commitment I have made to take on the themes of feminism and gender politics in haiku. It is not that I wish to avoid those topics; on the contrary, I find them profoundly interesting and relevant. As relevant as they have ever been, in fact. It is just that I feel ill-prepared for the challenge, and clearly I will need to do something about that first.
Some weeks later and with my deadline for this piece fast approaching, I found myself staring at a monster in the making: an essay about humor that had become bogged down in theory and analysis. I also realized that I was not having any fun, and this seemed a rather important indicator. The result is that the partial draft has been binned, and I must now wing it all the way to the finish line. And where better to start than at the shallow end of humor in haiku:
the elevator
descending to the lobby
with my deadly fart
There is really not much to be said about this poem. Except that I know of one eight-year-old boy who when he heard it rolled about excessively in mirth, and then for a full week regaled all and sundry with his find, having discovered that poetry can actually be about the interesting things in life.
Having started at the bottom we can mercifully only ascend. Haiku that make us laugh or smile — and sometimes wince — do so with varying degrees of subtlety and insight. By this I do not mean to suggest there is a hierarchy; what I see rather is a spectrum offering a variety of attitudes and responses. Thus we find satirical pieces that shade off into social commentary, often evoking a grimace of recognition as much as anything, as well as the more straightforward poems whose playfulness invites an easy chuckle. From among the latter I have chosen the following four poems, which are by John Stevenson, Christopher Herold, Dean Summers, and Frank Walsh:
Oscar night hothouse touradjusting the cuffs a child sticks his tongue out
of my pajamas at an orchid
before dawn on display
the Quaker Oats man her small and firm
a little too cheerful opinion of men
I think it is fair to say that the first three of these are transparent, while certainly fun. The fourth example is more complicated. I am not sure that any journal editor today would accept it for publication, given its overt suggestiveness. But one can make the case that the writer is satirizing his own attitudes by turning the tables on himself in the last line. By today’s standards, is this haiku irredeemably unwoke — or alternatively very woke indeed, in a clever and effective way? I am going to let that question hang.
The next quartet of poems can be seen as having an additional dimension, one that makes them less straightforwardly funny. This dimension could be loosely described as psychological insight; the reader is invited to consider underlying currents and motivations, often with a suggestion of some hidden tension. We owe the astute perceptions below to David Boyer, Tom Painting, Rob Scott, and frances angela.
summer afternoon sizing me upmoving my pens the jeweler measures
a little to the left her ring finger
arguing about politics garden party
dad feeds the dog light rain falling
under the table in my mother’s gin
Those readers who are also writers may find “summer afternoon” painful as much as humorous, for it is all too easy to identify with Boyer’s fussy postponement of committing pen to paper. In Painting’s poem, is the jeweler’s canniness a reality — or a manifestation of the future bridegroom’s insecurity? Rob Scott completely nails the father who comes across as principled while simultaneously breaking one of the house rules — or as it may be, his wife’s rule. And finally angela with a very light touch hints — I think — that the gin may flow a little too easily in this household.
I did a fair amount of reading in preparation for this essay — mostly trawling for suitable material to serve as examples. I am indebted to Jim Kacian for making available to me a large part of The Red Moon Anthology series, and to Tony Pupello for providing an almost complete set of the annual chapbooks produced by the Spring Street Haiku Group during its early years. The RMA volumes have yielded all of the haiku so far cited. As for Spring Street, I had forgotten we had such adept practitioners of the tongue-in-cheek variety of haiku amongst us at that time. One very distinctive voice was that of the irrepressible Mykel Board, who has given us these delights from among many others:
not showing up — exotic food place
the woman I want I pick the wild boar
to snub from my teeth
through binoculars eating oysters
a woman looking at me looking for the haiku
through binoculars in a grain of sand
The last of these four poems works on multiple levels, being more than just a play on words and associations. On one of these levels Board satirizes the preoccupation that many haiku poets have with finding the precious hidden within the quotidian — a notion that I believe does a great disservice to the genre. This poem would surely have been anthologized by now, were it not for the group’s routine of annually producing a hand-stapled chapbook, containing a selection of the strongest work from the preceding year. The poems chosen were thus ineligible for submission to mainstream journals, and as a result enjoyed a relatively small readership.
Bruce Detrick was a relative latecomer to haiku, but soon discovered his natural territory — a view of humanity that was at once realistic and compassionate. There was an idiosyncratic lightness in his work that endured to the very end of his life. (And if anyone detects a double entendre in the first poem, I would hazard the guess that he intended it.)
table for one the portly manthe waiter doesn’t doing somersaults
light my candle under water
free Sunday concert fortunately
in the slow movement only one shift of nurses
another cane falls is hearing this argument
Karen Sohne was a core member of the Spring Street group, and to our workshopping sessions brought a valuable ability to perceive what others were striving to express. In her own work she would often present a situation wittily perceptive of human behaviour:
scenic hillside the men on both sides
my daughter apologizes have taken
for the absence of cows my arm rests
androgynous stranger
winks at me
And finally, one example each from Brenda Gannam and Miriam Bourne. Their work has typically tilted towards feminism rather than humor — though these qualities are far from being mutually exclusive, as Sohne has deftly demonstrated.
colonoscopy a bad night
if only the doctor our flamenco teacher curses
weren’t so good-looking
in English
In concluding this brief visit to Spring Street, I must fess up to being the author of the elevator poem (if one can dignify it as such) featured at the opening of this discussion. At the time of its writing, it was hardly in the voice my contemporaries had come to expect — and all the more fun for that.
It would be a significant omission to end this foray into the lighter side of haiku without featuring some of the humorous haiku penned by the well-known Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Like most mainstream poets who have experimented with the form, he adheres to a five-seven-five syllable count, and in addition likes to make the last line rhyme with the first.
I’ve upset the pail Not a golden carp
in which my daughter had kept but a dog turd under ice.
her five – “No, six” – snails.
Not a golden carp.
A crocus piss stain.
“There’s too much snow in my life,”
my daughter complains.
