The Western Canon In Haiku

The Word from the Corner September 16, 2018 A challenge for you this week. At this past Tuesday's Frost "Hoot" at Cafe Azteca, I had some some fun with haiku. I presented my take on the great books: The Western Canon in Haiku. It can be done! Here are some of mine below. Can you come up with some of yours? Email me and I'll post. Rules of this game: - Theme: Great books and ideas of the Western Canon (as expanded in recent decades, thankfully, beyond the "dead white male" authors...and beyond the Western world...) - Loose haiku form - not restricted to the 5-7-5 rule - Try for 3 lines, max of 4, limit to 16 words (try) - Can rhyme or not - Short, punchy Jim Knowles who hosts the Frost Foundation Hoot suggested these tweaks to the form. He reasons: "The Japanese rules on syllables and topics tie into their grammar and pictographics. American English is a multi-lingual festival of thievery.....and mixed metaphor. We need a short form to celebrate that!" Go for it! What can you come up with?

The Western Canon in Haiku

All those books to read

Skip the Latin, skip the Greek

Here is what you need!

Knowledge, truth, beauty!

Here’s the Canon in haiku!

Wisdom! Brevity!

A rhyming haiku!

How many sy-LAHB-els?

Against form, the purists cringe

Haiku – it must follow form!

Even I must twinge

When I don’t say the prayer

In holy five-seven-five,

That sin I must bear

But onward we go,

For the rest won’t be rhyming

Class! Let’s start the show…

The Old Testament

In the beginning

God gave his people a land

Messiah? Still waiting…

The New Testamant

Jesus was made man

He walked on water, died, rose

Paul made the franchise

Homer’s Odyssey

Odysseus sails

Ten years pass, mom has suitors!

He’s back! Tragedy!

Divine Comedy by Dante

Dante circles hell

Not much of a comedy –

It’s a hell of a world!

The Works of William Shakespeare

Will wrote sonnets, plays –

comedies and tragedies –

yes, Will wrote them all

The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Orphan boy, cruel world

Please, sir, may I have some more?

Says Bumble: No more!

Walt Whitman

He wrote “Leaves of Grass”

He’s America’s poet

We don’t read poetry

Emily Dickinson

More than nobody

She would not stop for death

But I stop for her

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

Sad anna, sad wife

Run away with your Vronsky

A train? Now we’re sad!

(spoiler alert: yes she throws herself in front of a train)

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

Oedipus complex?

Id? Ego? Super-ego?

It’s just a cigar!

Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism

Condemned to freedom!

To be alive, we must choose!

I still don’t get it

The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Yes, one of the giants

Eventually she will be

The future knows, trust me

The dolls are the pills

Three girls seek fame, don’t find it

It sold a lot of copies

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Frodo has the ring

Sauron searches with his eye

Three movies to rule them all!

(no six! Eight? Eleventeen?)

And one more – this is by my daughter Jillian:

(caution - spoiler alert!)

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (book 6)

by J.K. Rowling

Pensieve shows the past

Horcruxes must be destroyed

Snape kills Dumbledore!

Thus ends the Western Canon

Our lesson is done

You may not know it all

But at least you know some