Blog | Received and Recommended–Noon 4 |
Yet another beautifully produced offering of short poems from Noon. Among the many familiar names, pride of place goes to John Parsons–a new name for me–for this untitled poem that smacks a little of Samuel Menashe:
two
buzzards
grappling
spiral
down
together
he stops
to stoop
retrieves
her
falling
feather.
I think I would have changed “her” to “a,” to maintain the objective feeling of the piece. Parson’s use of a strategic rhyme takes this poem to another level of structure and complexity compared to the faux haiku that comprises the majority of the work featured in this issue. The sly allusion to Whitman is nice too.
Lots of other interesting work. Contact noonpress[at]mac.com for information about subscriptions and submissions.
November 5th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Thanks, Jesse, for recommending Noon 4. I like your observations on the Parsons poem. I also want to mention–to be pernickety for a moment–that less than half the poems in the issue could possibly be labelled ‘haiku’. Your phrase, ‘the faux haiku that comprises the majority of the work featured in this issue’ seems a little misleading in that respect. The contents are more diverse than that. I know you’re impatient with the notion of haiku in languages other than Japanese, so also want to point out that there are a number of Japanese (avant-garde, perhaps, but hardly ‘faux’) haiku in this issue.
Best,
Phil
November 5th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Sorry Philip, I didn’t count pages, and no longer have a copy of the latest Noon to refer to. (It’s on its way to my U of Maryland archive where the rest of the Noons have gone.) I did count most of the short-shorts, including the one-liners, as faux haiku. There were lots of prose-poems as well, I remember and perhaps their number skews things in a different direction. Once again, I didn’t go through the issue and compare numbers of pages devoted to prose poems and faux haiku. I didn’t at all mean to be misleading, though,–chalk it up to being in a rush and the lateness of the hour of writing, perhaps– and yes, using the tag “English language haiku” is (at this moment) less interesting than using the tag of “English language short poetry,” which is a more accurate way of talking about this kind of writing, I think. I was just being ornery with the “faux.” Jesse