I love predetermined form in poetry - whether in sonnets, rhyming couplets, villanelles or whatever - and the way it can generate an exhilarating tension between prescribed confinement and imaginative freedom, but for the life of me I've never been able to see the point of the haiku, that mini-poem invented by the Japanese.
Yes, I know it takes a kind of ingenuity to devise a line of five syllables, followed by a line of seven syllables, followed by another line of five syllables, and to fashion from the three lines and seventeen syllables something striking, but all I can think is: why bother? And, come to that, why three lines and seventeen syllables? Why not five lines and twenty-six syllables?
No, unlike the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet, which offers to the eye, ear and mind a pleasing sense of rhythmic and rhyming rightness, the haiku has always seemed to me an irritatingly arbitrary form (I have much the same problem with the clerihew, which is like a stunted limerick, and usually not a tenth as funny).
Yet one person's aversion is another's passion, and there's no doubting Gabriel Rosenstock's love of the haiku. Indeed, writing in the current issue (Volume 8, No.4, no less) of Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society, Gabriel waxes very lyrical on the haiku writer's calling:
"Our craft is spiritual. You can argue about syllables, rhythm, season words, the influence of Zen and so on, but the fact remains that haikus are being written today in dozens of languages, which elate one, which chill one, which bring one back to the awful mystery of being and our relationship to natural phenomena."
You can buy this issue of Blithe Spirit, which is crammed with haikus of every kind and shape (not all of them adhering to the seventeen-syllable rule), for £3. Gabriel, meanwhile, is down in Heinrich Boll's Achill Island house getting some writing done, which may or may not include a haiku or two.
Last Thursday the Irish Writers' Centre began a series of interviews with Irish writers when Evelyn Conlon chatted to poet and novelist Leland Bardwell. Next Wednesday in the same series Gerald Dawe talks to playwright Thomas Kilroy, while on March 25th Michael O'Loughlin is in conversation with fellowpoet Paul Durcan.
All these sessions take place in the Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square, they begin at 7.30pm and admission is £3.
I see that Penguin have branched into the music business, teaming up with Polygram to bring out a series of classical CDs with booklets featuring appreciations from a variety of writers.
Thus, Seamus Deane recalls listening to The Four Seasons in an airport, D.M. Thomas remembers listening to Mozart's Requiem while his wife was dying, and Jane Smiley finds a link between Mozart and short-story writing.
The idea is pure gimmickry (give me an informative linernote by a seriously knowledgeable music lover any day of the week), but if it serves to introduce a few people to great music it won't have been in vain.
AS you can gather, publishing ain't what it used to be, and thus I'm not surprised to learn from Jeanette Huber in Minneapolis-St. Paul that Penguin in the US are now also in the soft drinks business. Along with such other big publishers as HarperCollins and Doubleday, they're offering excerpts from forthcoming and best-selling books to anyone who goes along to the local supermarket and buys a twelve-pack of Diet Coke.
Maeve Binchy's Tara Road, Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Sudden Change of Heart and Elmore Leonard's upcoming Be Cool (obviously picked for its title) are among the books chosen for the promotion.
And the rationale behind the wheeze? Speaking for CocaCola, Diana Garza declared with a straight face that the company was making "a concerted effort to get to know the consumer on a deeper level" and that researchers had discovered that typical Diet Coke drinkers have "inner lives." I never doubted it, Diana.
JUST a reminder that Friday week is the deadline for the essay competition organised by An Chomhairle Leabharlanna in association with The Irish Times.
The theme is "If I were in charge of the library". Entries for both under-14s and under-18s should be no longer than a thousand words, and the judges are librarian Rosemary Hetherington, poet Thomas McCarthy and novelist Mary Morrissy.
Send your entries to your local public library or to An Chomhairle Leabharlanna, 53-54 Upper Mount Street, Dublin 2.