Haiku and the traditional modern American style: on a haiku by Roberta Beary

on the church steps
a mourning dove
with mother’s eyes

—Roberta Beary


Roberta Beary is an award-winning haiku writer and someone who would be considered a potential “breakout” poet. That is, Beary seems p0ised to help establish haiku as a genre of poetry both commercially and critically. Her work, as here, is both accessible and emotionally charged. The qualities associated with, among other types of modern American writing, haiku – precision, concision, and clarity – can easily be illustrated by discussing this haiku and many others by Beary.

The public associates haiku with an objective report-- a captured moment-in-time, a sort of emotional snapshot. Here we may imagine a mourner mounting the steps of the church to attend a memorial service for her mother and being haunted by the eyes of the “mourning dove” she passes on the steps. At this moment in time, even the common pigeon reminds her of her mother! The poignance is hardly obscure; the moment happens TO the poet/speaker and by extension the willing reader. The moment is one of grief and as such must be acknowledged; only a cad would question the reality of the emotional scene from which the poem grew.

And yet, studying the poem, one may feel a slight break in the glaze of the poem – the unity that vouchsafes the poet’s sincerity – by the pun on the name of the bird. That crack may widen for some readers with strong imaginations, and/or a knowledge of this particular bird’s way of seeing and looking. Nor would this opening of questions be of the sort sponsored by the form of haiku, which is marked by “cuts” starting with the fold between the vertical – the CHURCH steps – and the base – the last two lines. The fact that such a bird is a common denizen of church steps, indeed frequently the object of attention by those who must scrub the steps, does not make the kind of use of the formal fold that is characteristic of many great haiku, though it does contain the potential note of derision, or “low” value, that is typical of the comic dimension of haiku.

It’s not that all haiku must exhibit a tension between the superposed line and the base (or narrative scene, usually in two lines), only that the tension is more than a formal figuration expressed in the diction. The tension of the major cut is that between the “vertical” or transcending dimension and the self-enclosed givens of the “horizontal” section. That is, the “gap” typical of haiku form – and only it would seem of this genre – is a “metaphysical” feature; as such it can move around within the actual verbal structure of the poem. In any event, haiku as a genre bears witness to the perplexity occasioned by the amazement of “that there is anything at all”: the wonder of being. As William Desmond says, “To live as human is always to be porous to beng struck by this astonishment and perplexity about origin” (Art, Origins, Otherness, 3). Haiku attends to the “being happenings” that characterize this metaxic view of life. Beary’s haiku certainly does seem to aim at recovering such an experience in poetic form, but it does so with perhaps too little concern for loose ends and a sense of sentimentality that makes the poem about the poet’s emotions – her grief -- rather than about anything else. Certainly not her mother or even the bird. And of course mourning one’s mother would be hard to write about (and yet Basho and Issa, and no doubt others, managed to write great haiku about just that).

In traditional Japanese haiku, the gap creates a space in which metaphor happens, analogies and proportions, and these animate the disparate parts that make up the whole poem. But, you may say, well, that’s just how our type of haiku is: it’s about the emotions experienced by the poet and “hopefully” the willing reader. To which I would say, that’s not enough to make haiku stand as a genre of world poetry; it does not distinguish haiku from a conversation, a letter, a phone call, or some other communication. And it does not reflect the artistic accomplishment of the founders of the genre. The virtues of concision, precision, and clarity are hallowed in the US by generations of stylists. Beary’s achievements as a haiku poet aside, these qualities raise questions about the conventions of the master culture; much of experience simply cannot be rendered by these stylistic qualities. Grief may indeed open up to include all of existence – even the pigeon, but then the creatureliness of mortals would be the focus of the moment. Perhaps the unintended issues raised by Beary’s poem suggest the limits of just such a model of excellence.