Lightning Flash

Haiku is the most mockable poetic form. It seems easy, and a lot of bad haiku gets written. The best haiku exemplifies the nature of poetry, which I have described as a “concentrated excess of language.” Reading a well-constructive haiku is like viewing a scene in a flash of lightening or under a strobe light: The scene becomes visible then instantly fades, but leaves you with sensation of glimpsing a larger story in the midst of its unfolding. The words are still on the page when you read the poem a second time, but the second reading gives the same sensation, though perhaps it unveils a little more of the life that remains mostly in the shadows.

That is partly due to the visual-art character of haiku, its capacity to communicate immediately, almost like a painting, nearly without the sequential revelation normally associated with reading. Unlike a sonnet, its flashes of insight are taken in in an instant.

Gary Hotham is a very good haiku poet, and in his recent collection, Stone’s Throw, is full of flashes. Hotham has a knack for looking at the world backwards and upside down. Like:

hauled into air

the ocean escapes

the lobster trap

Or, the title poem:

stone’s throw

the rest of north

behind us

Some evoke a cozy melancholy that somehow emerges, miraculously, from three brief lines:

missed appointment –

late morning sun spreading over

the faded sofa

Or this, which captures the difference between presence and absence:

home

for Dad’s funeral –

not the same quiet in the kitchen

A blurb on one of his earlier books stated “Gary Hotham is haiku.” He still is.

(Full disclosure: Gary is a friend, and the copy of his book came with a personal letter and a signature.)