April 27: After Ron Silliman wrote in his blog about picking Aram Saroyan's recent collection for a prize, he had an entry about two more collections that he thought the next two best in the contest he judged, Roberta Beary's The Unworn Necklace and Eileen Myles's Sorry, Tree. Silliman quoted three of Beary's haiku:
thunder
the roses shift
into shadow
his death notice . . .
the get-well card
still in my briefcase
mother’s day
a nurse unties
the restraints
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I like the first well enough, but don't consider it super. The wistfully ironic second is absolutely standard, however competent--likewise, the third. I don't like being negative, especially about not-bad work of a kind of poetry not ordinarily getting recognition--or a kind in this case that I myself have been pushing for years. I also realize that it is unlikely any better collection of haiku was entered in the contest Silliman judged. I wouldn't be surprised if no other collection of haiku was entered. Still, I feel it my duty to crab when a given poet's work is singled out for praise while the work of poets I consider much better continues to be neglected, severely neglected. On the other hand, maybe the best way to gain an audience for the latter is to publicize more accessible lesser work of the same kind, who knows.
Here's the comment I made today to Silliman's blog about his runners-up:
My computer wouldn't let me reply to your post about Beary and Myles till now, Ron, so Kent Johnson beat me to noting the conventionality of Roberta Beary's haiku. Your praise of it puts you in the haiku equivalent of where Iowa plaintext lyrics have been for the past 30 years or more in the more visible precincts of Contemporary American Poetry. Most issues of Modern Haiku have ten or twenty poems almost exactly like Beary's. Very nicely fashioned Wry Observations.
But you should be commended for recognizing a superior practitioner of a kind of poetry almost entirely ignored by the American Poetry Establishment.
E.mail me your address and I'll send you a review copy of my recent book, From Haiku to Lyriku. It covers haiku like Beary's but also that of much more innovative textual composers of haiku such as LeRoy Gorman and George Swede, whom others have mentioned, and Guy R. Beining, John Martone and John Vieira, as well as Clark Coolidge and other language poets, and on from them to visual and other pluraesthetic forms of haiku (albeit few in the haiku establishment would acknowledge them to be haiku, and I therefore call them "lyriku"). It should broaden your notion of where haiku by North Americans has gotten to since the sixties.
--Bob Grumman
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As for Eileen Myles, she seems a competent enough jump-cut poet. She probably deserves the pat on the back Silliman has given her. Her work doesn't zap me, but that's just me, I'm sure.
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