Friday, October 08, 2004

anonymous Hoth

The person I call He of the Heteronyms has taken a new name. Or rather has done away with names altogether. No signature now appears at The Red Dragon & The Black Beast. It's almost an oxymoron. The anonymous Hoth.

It's not surprising. He stopped posting to As/Is because he was "bored". The posts on his early blogs would quite often be deleted after a couple of days, sometimes after only a couple of hours. His hay(na)ku blog disappeared altogether, was resurrected. Then both his blogs disappeared. I've likened this coming & going to Cthulhu's Island, from H.P.Lovecraft, a writer whom it turns out we both like.

But under any name……

Let me quote from Why Hay(na)ku, a post by Crag Hill who is not only a writer of excellent hay(na)ku but an excellent writer about the form. I've included a bit more of the post than is immediately relevant because it's worth the wider dissemination.
Why me? Why now?
Every word counts. That's hard to resist in The Age of Logorrhea.
The form encourages paring, discourages padding.
Lines shaped by word count rather than syllable, engendering more rhythmic variety among poems and within the poem itself.
Enjambment abound, bounds.
Poems start small, grow taller, taller, then hunkerdown, dip, curtsy, until they build toward tall at the end. I read the sea there, gentle tides. (I'm so damned land-locked right now, I read the sea just about everywhere.)
They often arrive on my tongue before I can even locate pen or paper.
And if you've had the chance to read some of the poems found through the links above, the form's not so rigid that it breeds sameness. Mark Young's hay(na)ku do not read like Joseph Garver's.
A couple of Joseph Garver hay(na)ku.

      demons
      love men
      in such ways

      as
      to bring
      them to fire

      unquenchable
(from As/Is)

      it's
      all intermission
      it seems, tragedy

      yet
      to be,
      and always forthcoming

(from a comment box at Series Magritte)

& a recent anonymous post from The Red Dragon & The Black Beast which I'm including here because it's possible it may disappear from its original site & I'd like to record it for posterity
The
third method
of beginning a
process
is the
commonest and most
usual
one, because
it is secret.

1 comment:

na said...

"Joseph Garver" is a fabulous poet.

Just felt like saying that here.

And, hi Mark! I, too, always appreciated Crag Hill's thoughts on the hay(na)ku.