Word: haiku
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...current model for many younger poets is Robert Creeley, 45, a onetime colleague of Olson's at Black Mountain. Creeley writes poems of a haiku-like brevity, petering out on an exhausted breath, sometimes fixed in the senses by only the faintest suggestion of an image. One poem-on poetry-goes like this...
Strenuous Responsibility. "Clean" is the adjective Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings constantly invite: clean as a bone, as a desert rock, as a haiku. She refutes the idea that discipline is masculine. O'Keeffe may, in a special sense, be the most aristocratic artist America has yet produced. This quality has nothing to do with a grand manner. It lies in its antithesis: her aloofness and precision, her refusal to make any gesture for the sake of effect. Every work in this show, from the earliest calligraphic wash drawings to the recent ones, like Road Past...
...produce a surplus. The dispossessed farmers cram the cities, and the cities have been woefully shortchanged. The "Tokaido Corridor," a slender, 366-mile coastal belt running along the Pacific from Tokyo to Kobe, was long celebrated for its beauty in misty wood-block prints and delicate, 17-syllable haiku. Today, with 50% of the population crammed into the corridor, it is a smog-covered slurb...
...spoke also of the extinction of ego, the ability to lose yourself into what you're writing poems about, to become like the haiku artist-the bursting of silence, the frog into the night pond, the sound of one hand... And all of this in an age of writing focussed so compulsively inward! In the tradition that extends from Eliot to Lowell and those between, most poets write of themselves, in a style which Bly calls the reporting of "news of the human mind." Involved, ego-centered, almost embarrassingly self-aware, many contemporary poets seem to live to reveal...
Some complaints were more sentimental. For centuries, the Japanese have celebrated the annual Night of the Full Moon by composing haiku. In Tokyo, one poetaster objected: "Now that the poesy of it is all gone, what can one do -commit hara-kiri?" In Vietnamese legend, the moon is represented by Hang-Nga, a beautiful maiden; "Now she is no longer a virgin," a Saigon intellectual lamented. Tel Aviv's Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren offered a 20th century amendment to a 12th century Hebrew prayer on the eve of the new moon. For 800 years, it has read...