Janitorial Worker

[Erthona]

PM wrote: "If people interpret your work in different ways helps to make it a success; that some people don't interpret the same way you don't doesn't make it a failure."

To me this is one of those ideas that people put out there without really thinking about it. Would you call and inkblot, art? Certainly there is always going to be various interpretation of anything, but the poet should do his/her best when writing to eliminate unintended ambiguity and vagueness. Many interpretations is not something the writer should aim for. 


Be that as it may and meaning aside, most responded to this poem by wanting to make it into something it was not, in that they seemed to want to punch it up. I personally find the idea of Haiku in English a totally absurd notion (that is not just some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the opinion of one of the better modern Japanese writers of Haiku through his brother-in law who I briefly taught with), however if one is going to write an English haiku, and call it a haiku, it should follow the accepted form (no matter how ludicrous it is ). I personally found the poem in general pleasing, although there is some work that needs doing on L2, and it would have been nice to have some suggestion related to that. Sad really, it's kind of like a girl who is pretty, but does not conform to what a group of people think is pretty, and so they call her ugly, telling her she needs to put on makeup, curl her hair, put on a fancy dress and then she will be pretty. I thought the thoughts of JM were interesting, that the lines were disconnected from each other. This surprised me. I would think in haiku it would be a given that the lines have something to do with each other, One of the classic Japanese senryu's goes something like,

   "The robber,
   when I catch,
   my own son"

There is nothing that directly connects the lines to each other, but we, or I assume one does, makes the connection through the progression of time. So we make the connection whether it is directly noted or not.
So I would think it is a given, whether senryu or haiku that if an event is spoken of , rather than a thought, it should automatically track linearly through time, but maybe not, or maybe that is limited to senryu.   

Thanks for your comments, I value the time you are willing to put in on this,

Thanks again,

Dale