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At Haiku Society meeting, the syllabus is syllables
Appeared in THE HERALD-SUN - Thursday, January 6, 2005
HILLSBOROUGH -- It's not every group whose members hesitate to distribute driving directions because they're embarrassingly verbose. Welcome to the world of haiku.
The North Carolina Haiku Society held its monthly workshop Wednesday, marking the start of the group's 27th year. The Triangle-based group promotes the efficient Japanese poetry by reading and commenting on members' haiku.
A few members have had haiku published, but most are recreational poets. Many members are fairly new to the craft.
"I just joined this summer, so for me the meetings are quite instructional," said Maria Tadd, a medical writer form Chapel Hill. "I get very valuable feedback."
Meetings alternate among members' homes, with Wednesday's gathering in the Hillsborough residence of Ron and Hisano Bell. Five poets sat around a coffee table with their shoes off, as is the custom in the Bells' home. The empty white walls aided the sense of Zen, but the looming TV and purring Playstation did not.
Sipping tea and nibbling on homemade Stollen cake, members took turns reading poems with few syllables. Hand gestures communicated line breaks, as each person jotted down the spoken poem on legal and steno pads. Members considered the haiku for a silent minute, then asked questions, commented or offered constructive criticism.
The group spent about 10 minutes on each three-line poem, often debating individual words like "winter" versus "winter's."
Richard Straw, a technical editor from Cary, read one of his poems. "Furnace kicks on/for the last swig of beer/bending back," said Straw.
The haiku sparked a typical exchange. "So the last two lines, you're ? ?" asked Dave Russo, a technical writer from Cary.
"Getting the last drop, even though it's just a Miller," said Straw.
"It celebrates the mundane," commented workshop host Bell. "It's also very American -- the words 'swig' and 'kicks on.' "
"It's borderline redneck," acknowledged Straw, prompting laughs.
Society members, and most American poets, don't follow the widely taught rule that haiku must have lines of five, seven then five syllables, because English words have fewer syllables than Japanese words.
"Using 10 to 12 syllables or six to eight words is a better way to make English haiku more like Japanese," said Bell, a retiree who lived in Japan for 28 years.
In de-emphasizing the syllable rule, the group focuses on other traditional parts of haiku -- the poems all have three lines, convey two images and invoke a sense of season or time.
While the phrase "poetry group" conjures images of dour urbanites dressed in black, the N.C. Haiku Society is a jocular bunch. After one haiku that featured a train platform kiss, Straw joked, "I'm glad it's a kiss at the end, not a push."
After a chuckle, Bob Moyer, the haiku's author, played along. "It could be new genre: homicidal haiku!" said Moyer, a high school drama teacher from Cary.
Many of the haiku read Wednesday focused on a traditional subject, serenity, like Straw's: "Sweeping leaves/out of the garage/another gust."
Others, however, had a surprising kick. Witness Ron Bell's: "Three-year-old/puddle-entranced/jumps in, dances."
The roughly 25-member group is an eclectic lot. "The neat thing is that there's no background or profession that dictates whether you're going to be a haiku writer," said Jean Earnhardt. "The variety of people in the society is tremendous. There are teachers and professors of course, but there are also computer engineers."
While haiku practitioners are professionally diverse, they are mostly male. There were four men and one woman at Wednesday's workshop, which didn't surprise Tadd, the evening's lone female.
"It's interesting that men are drawn to haiku," she said. "Because it's so expressive, you'd expect to see more women."
In addition to serving as an emotional outlet, writing haiku is also beneficial professionally, Tadd said.
"I do a lot of writing for medical advertising and you want to be as minimalist as possible," said Tadd, a first-year member. "Haiku is good training. It gives discipline -- less is more."
Rebecca Ball Rust founded the NC Haiku Society in 1979 and the group always welcomes new members. They meet the first Wednesday of each month. The highlight of their calendar, however, is the Haiku Holiday, held each year at original member Earnhardt's place west of Carrboro.
The April 30 event features lectures, workshops, and a ginkgo -- an inspiring, image-gathering walk through Earnhardt's 120 acres.
For information on the North Carolina Haiku Society, visit nc-haiku.org.
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