Barry George’s Contemporary Haiku
My elementary and middle school teachers superimposed the concept of 5-7-5 formats and a required subject of nature, but since entering this haiku class I feel like I’ve learned of a new style of haiku creation each week. Each author seems to have a completely different way to write the Japanese short poem, making for an incredibly varied art form that can accommodate to any writer or reader. Barry George, professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, presents haiku that take on a modern, and almost cinematic quality, providing for a very unique reader experience. They also leave the concepts of metaphor and emotion entirely up to the reader. George’s haiku are well-designed for the reader’s of this age: modern enough to peak our interest, and requiring participation from the reader.
The most clear example of this contemporary and cinematic quality is in the title poem from George’s book, Wrecking Ball and Other Haiku.
floodlit sky—
the wrecking ball swings
in and out of darkness
George, Wrecking Ball, 29
While many other haiku authors focus on including a seasonal reference, a kigo, George uses that extra syllabic space to insure that the reader gets the full scene that he is attempting to paint for us. The colors, sounds, and shapes that George creates all have a very modern feel. The poem uses a minimal number of colors, only the black wrecking ball and the dark blue of night. The floodlights create a gradient outwards from the focal point of the pendulum-like wrecking ball, similar to that of an ending scene from a movie that fades to black.
This haiku also leaves a generous amount of room for reader participation and imagination, another trait of George’s. Other than providing and imagery which could be used for reader relation through similar memories or for metaphor, George doesn’t hint at what feelings he wants the reader to experience. One could think of the wrecking ball as someone swinging in and out of a steady place in his or her life, leaving a path of destruction every time it veers from the life. Fortunately, the laws of gravity would suggest that the wrecking ball would eventually settle in the light. On the other hand, one could simply imagine the picture without metaphor as a modern bit of beauty, courtesy of the night and a construction team.
George is from Pennsylvania. He was raised twenty-seven miles outside of Philadelphia in a town called Doylestown. After graduating from Franklin & Marshall College, Duke Law School, and Spalding University’s MFA in Writing program, he moved back to Philadelphia— but this time to the city, not the suburbs (“Barry George”). George’s experience living in both a semi-rural area and a massive city provide for well-diversified haiku. For example, George writes:
winter stars—
only the sound of the neighbor
wheeling his trash
George, Wrecking Ball, 30
The suggestion of being able to see the stars and only hearing a single sound would suggest that this haiku is about George’s time living in Doylestown. Granted, the haiku is in a book that labels the writing as “urban” haiku, but this one seems to break from the pack, at least in my opinion. This haiku seems to call attention to the drastic difference between the beautiful cosmos and the silly (albeit, dangerous for our planet) actions of the creatures on this planet.
heat lightning
a second jackhammer
picks up the pace
George, Wrecking Ball, 5
This haiku follows that same modern (or urban, as the title would suggest) feel that George’s haiku tend to take up. This haiku also evokes multiple senses to participate in the imagery. The break before the last line emphasizes the worried feeling of the construction workers. The beginning provokes a visual of lightning, and the end: a sound of jackhammers, quite similar to the sound of thunder (which always follows lightning). Like he does in the two aforementioned haiku, George paints his picture and steps away for the reader to decide what it means to them.
George works as an English teacher, which seems to be the perfect position for a haiku author like himself. In my experience, English teachers love presenting hundreds of new meanings for poems. George’s haiku are generally very open to many unique interpretations, an English teachers dream. George does stray occasionally from his open-ended form, like in this poem:
the stylist
rinses away
the sound of her voice
George, Wrecking Ball, 26
This haiku relates easily, and nudges the reader towards the general concept George wants them to imagine. While the reader can decide exactly what the altercation between the stylist and the consumer was that caused the stylist to need such a therapeutic moment, George does provide the feeling of tension, agitation, and eventually release for you. This haiku is certainly the odd ball of George’s haiku, as he generally gives the reader full control over what emotions they visualize and undergo while reading.
In this way, George’s haiku seem most like imagist poetry to me. Haiku and imagism are very similar: both are brief poems that provide a flash of a moment for the reader to relate to. George’s haiku are closer still in that they literally only provide you with an image of brief clip encapsulating a moment. One of George’s better poems to use as an example for his imagist quality is:
downtown hotel—
an old gull stalks
roof puddles
George, Wrecking Ball, 11
This haiku creates an incredibly vivid image, even for a Iowan who hasn’t seen many cities. As aforementioned, with this haiku George paints a picture for the reader, and then steps aside for the reader to take a part in the creation process. After reading this haiku, I imagine an aged hotel that still seems characteristic of the 1940’s, but has clearly been refurbished many times and made to seem like it once did. The old gull saunters from puddle to puddle in search for a quick drink before taking flight to the next old building. The use of the word stalks gives the gull an angry demeanor that reminds me of a curmudgeon, miser character like Scrooge or Moliere’s Miser, searching for what he wants with no interest in anything around him but his pursuit.
This style of presenting a picture and allowing the reader to do what he will with it is not George’s alone. As stated earlier, early Japanese poets wrote in a similar fashion—although they included a kigo, and George does not. Several other poets today create similar contemporary image-based haiku, including Wally Swist, author in The Haiku Anthology.
dewy morning
the logging truck’s load
sweating sap
The Haiku Anthology, Wally Swist, p. 218
Which could be compared to George’s haiku:
winter morning—
the sound of a board
hitting the pile
George, Wrecking Ball, 23
The first line of both poems immediately shows where the poems are similar and where they diverge. They could practically be written from the exact same point of view, but at different seasons. I imagine two different loggers, one from Canada, and one from somewhere in South America, writing about the same morning from different sides of the globe. Swist’s final line, “sweating sap,” almost sounds like sap sliding down a tree with it’s alliterative ‘s’ sounds and the ‘sw’ sound. I like that George’s poem is sent during winter and focuses more on sound, whereas Swist’s seems to be more focused on the feeling of humidity. In the winter there are no active critters or bugs to provide the constant background sounds of summer, so the smack of a board hitting a pile would be much more pronounced and noticeable. I’m sure there were many boards hitting piles in Swist’s haiku, but the sound wasn’t as prevalent with the many sounds of summer and the sweltering heat and humidity to preoccupy the loggers’ minds.
George’s haiku also strike many similarities with Matsuo Basho’s haiku. These haiku from George’s book and Makoto Ueda’s collection of Basho’s haiku, entitled, The Master Haiku Poet Matsuo Basho, match together quite well:
The scorching sun
Flows into the ocean
With the Mogami River.
The Master Haiku Poet Matsuo Basho , p. 54
fall night—
the moon at the window
of the space museum
George, Wrecking Ball, 20
Both of these poems focus a view of the sky and its spectacles, but Basho’s approach is much more traditional, and George’s is more modern. I enjoy that both poems concern the location that light from these solar bodies is being cast. In the second, I imagine the light gleaning on artifacts from prior journeys into space. Due to the recent NASA funding cut, I’d imagine that most who read this haiku are somewhat saddened by the thought that we no longer continue to explore our vast and amazing universe. However, I’m sure the haiku was intended to point out the beauty of the moonlight, the impressiveness of our achievements thus far, and the great lengths we have yet to go before we can truly understand even our own solar system. Basho’s haiku also connects the earth with the sun, comparing the river flowing to the ocean with the sun flowing onto the earth.
park statue—
the French general bowing
to dandelions
George, Wrecking Ball, 3)
This haiku is yet another example of George’s use of an image to give the reader a chance and a focal point about which to imagine. Most of George’s haiku provide images of greys, whites, and blacks, with only splashes of color: the faint yellow of floodlights, the blue glow of the moon, the blue-brown of the rooftop puddles. The above haiku, and the rest of George’s haiku, use this singular color as a focal point. In this haiku, I am drawn to the idea of a man of war bowing to a beautiful and dainty object, respecting an object generally symbolic of peace, which every general should aim for.
Barry George creates haiku that expertly combine the imagistic technique of the original Japanese haiku and the modern approach of other art forms today. His lack of kigo tends to provide more syllabic space for George to paint the picture we read. His rural background and current urban lifestyle provide for a wide variety of scenes. His current urban environment provides for especially unique haiku. Neutral colors with splashes of yellows and blues focus he poems well, letting the reader know what they should notice the contrast between and spend the most time considering. Frankly put, George’s haiku are very much written for the reader. They take place in contemporary settings, have clear focal points, and leave a great deal of space for the reader to imagine in. The haiku that Barry George creates are far from the 5-7-5, nature focused haiku of my youth, but in the best way. They are haiku made for, and vicariously by, the reader.
Works Cited
Barry George. The Haiku Foundation. 2013. Web. 2 April 2012.
George, Barry. Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku. Lexington: Accents Publishing Spalding Series, 2010. Print.
Swist, Wally. “dewy morning.” The Haiku Anthology. Ed. Cor Van Den Heuvel. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1999. 218. Print.
Ueda, Makoto. The Master Haiku Poet Matsuo Basho. Japan: Twayne Publishers, Inc, 1982. Print.
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