Word: haiku
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Like some Michelangelo who carves peach pits, or a Shakespeare whose medium is the haiku, Harmonica Virtuoso Larry Adler has found that there are grave drawbacks to being the best of a rare breed. His tongue-twisting technique and feathery phrasing have dazzled concert audiences for more than a quarter-century; but purists still dismiss his performances of classical music as gimmickry, akin to playing horn concertos on a length of garden hose. Now and then, such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Darius Milhaud have written pieces for him, but the repertory for harmonica remains woefully thin; most...
Told in vignettes as agile and fragile as haiku, She and He lacks the substance of genuine tragedy, but Director Susumu Hani, a onetime documentary film maker, has given the picture a sense of on-location authenticity that transcends its simplistic symbolism. His casting, an amalgam of amateur and professional actors, is flawless. The blind girl literally lives her role; she is truly blind. The ragpicker (Sachiko Hidari), a painter who never acted before, is as narrow as a rice stalk, so emaciated that he sometimes seems to have two profiles in search of a face. But Hidari radiates...
...classes, Mrs. Finley starts by having her students read a haiku together, clapping in unison with the syllables, and then individually describe the images the poem conveys. To set them off on their own haiku, she gives them the first two lines, asks them to supply a third. The responses often reflect the down-to-earth quality of children's imaginations. Once, for example, she gave her daughter the lines
...eight-year-old girl, asked to compose a haiku about church, wrote...
...seek synonyms to fit the rigid line scheme, stretching their vocabularies. To keep them searching, she bans such overworked words as fine, nice, pretty and good. Mrs. Finley is not alone in trying to teach writing in 17 hard syllables: the National Council of Teachers of English reports that haiku are turning up in classrooms throughout the country. Creating a haiku, teachers have found, expands a child's imagery, provides a quick sense of accomplishment because of its brevity. But the basic appeal of a haiku, says Mrs. Finley, is that "it is poetry, and children love poetry-they...