Word: haiku
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...challenging books, then has them find and lift out techniques to use in their own writing. Any kind of writing-mostly good, but sometimes bad-is fair game for Teacher De Long. One week she may give her class Chaucer, another week Thomas Hardy, another a collection of Japanese Haiku (17-syllable poems). "I want to see both good structure and an exciting use of words," she tells her students, as they buckle down to a job that has caught their interest...
...Well," said Harrison, "right now I'm working on a haiku about English sparrows. I've got a great first line but I don't know where to go from there. 'Gray sparrows sing in gray gutters...
...Professor MacLeish's third lecture on poetry that saved him. Like the Renaissance discovering the Greeks, like Goethe discovering Shakespeare, like the nineteenth century discovering nature, Harrison discovered Oriental poetry. He had run across the cryptic, ordered verses of the haiku before in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; but since he had read the novel for sex (it was disappointing) their beauty had escaped him. Now, however, he was fascinated with the idea of three line verses which did not require grammar, meter, rhyme, or even logical progression. As Harrison told his roommate after the lecture, "All you gotta...
Harrison muttered an unhappy obscenity and proceeded to his room. Once there, he began grinding out haiku after haiku in an attempt to produce the Oriental poetry equivalent of three thousand words of fiction. "Window panes are crying raindrops/Bicycles skid on slippery streets/Who will sunbathe with me?" "Japanese beetles crawl on rose bushes...
Above all, Henderson's patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries...