Dee Evetts
Essay #2 March/April 2021
Let me be the first to say that the title of this essay (which was to have been simply ‘Politics in Haiku’) is cumbersome. There is a reason for this, which I would like to explain without getting bogged down in semantics, if I can manage that. To commence with a digression is not usually advised, but neglecting to define your terms is also hazardous.
In 1930 the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann gave a speech in Berlin titled “An Appeal to Reason”, in which he denounced the growing Nazi movement. It was on this occasion that he famously declared: “Everything is politics.” Except of course that he didn’t. Since he was speaking in German, he said “Alles ist Politik”. Hence the problem. The word “Politik” is generally translated into English as “politics” — which the dictionary supports. Nonetheless Mann’s declaration occasionally shows up in English as “Everything is political”. It is widely agreed that Mann meant there is literally nothing we do that cannot be regarded as a political act. (Certainly an extreme view, and in my opinion difficult to rigorously defend.) Coming back to our title, my dilemma has been that in English we generally understand “politics” as referring to all things patently to do with governance: lawmaking, elections, parties and platforms and so forth — the civic process. Whereas “the political” is much broader in scope, encompassing potentially anything from equal rights to environmental issues — an almost endless list. And ironically, this is much closer to Mann’s actual position. So to cover all the bases I have on this occasion chosen to use both terms in the title.
We are overdue for some haiku upon which to hang these abstractions (in a good sense of course). Things get much simpler to talk about when we look at the two poems below, by Bill Cooper and Sandi Pray respectively.
after voting turtles slip
grandpa hoses down from a crowded log
his tractor election year
In both of the these we find ourselves in the area of straightforward politicking. (Is there an oxymoron there? Probably.) Pray’s turtles offer a satisfying analogy with the gradual dwindling of candidates, who disappear from view in no predictable order. While Cooper’s tractor haiku at first reading seems equally benign, the satire is pointed and starts to show through. We can easily guess how much time this farmer has for politicians. Even hosing down the tractor feels like something other than business as usual, as if he were flushing away more than one kind of mud. He may well be unconscious of this himself, but the poet-grandson has picked up on it. All this is speculative, I know. But a quite unassuming haiku can reveal layers of potential, and as readers we get to enjoy them as we please.
Making a significant leap, following are a pair of haiku that differ from each other greatly in tone and style, while both treat the challenging subject of sexual identity and preference. These are by Karen Sohne and Damir Damir.
androgynous stranger a river enters a river gender neutral
winks at me
The first of these reflects an experience that Karen had on the New York subway. As she described it later to our Spring Street Haiku Group, this was for her a moment of complicated — though not unpleasant — confusion. What was that wink conveying? Was this flirtation, or simply a mischievous delight in teasing or testing her? (A bit of both, was her conclusion.) By contrast Damir’s poem is almost didactic, though being at the same time surreal it is rescued from that fate. It appears to pose the question: at what point does a tributary become the river? We call watercourses by chosen names, just as we give names to our own genders and orientations. While all the time water is just water, and humans are just humans.
as she fills my tank between the inbound
we chat and outbound lanes
about endangered species a slice of woods in bloom
During a casual stop at the gas station, Marco Fraticelli almost sells us the non sequitur. Just as we are about to ask ourselves, “So what?”, the irony comes home. While “chat” is the perfectly chosen word, serving as the fulcrum for an original as well as consciousness-raising poem. As we often see, it is the touch of humor and self-awareness that lift it out of the ordinary. Meanwhile the success of Bruce Detrick’s haiku depends in part on its central ambivalence. There is a suggestion that we are close to a major city (“outbound/inbound”) even though at this moment the poet is driving through woodlands. What remains unstated is whether he is regretting the trees that were sacrificed for the highway, or rejoicing in this strip that was spared. Having known him well, I can say with confidence that it was both. Though mostly the latter (for he had the knack of being easily heartened).
I plan to revisit the above themes in future issues of tsuri-dōrō, besides addressing some others not featured today — including the topic of war, which will be central to my next essay. Which is to say: not only glimpses of the battlefield (for not a few haiku poets are also veterans) but also observations regarding the far-reaching consequences of armed conflict — including the threat of it — for humankind. To conclude for today, and by way of a preview, here are examples of work by Barbara Tate and Lorin Ford:
battleground museum war games
cavalry uniforms a boy weighs the bantam’s egg
smaller than imagined in his palm
[I wish to thank Tony Pupello and Hugh Pidgeon for several conversations that have helped me to explore and develop some of the ideas in this essay.]
