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Haiku in the West has always had a minimalistic bent. Japanese Haiku is inherently a minimal form, but it always has been an even shorter form in English because the early translators who became famous in the West presented it as being something that was both philosophically minimal in its essence and translated it into a truncated language.
R.H. Blythe translated and wrote about haiku as always being about "zen enlightenment" and Kenneth Yasuda distilled this down to haiku always being "an aesthetic moment" that presented precise imagery and nothing else. These are both Minimalistic positions because they are boiling down the whole 250 years of haiku history into only being about one style of writing. Sure, some Japanese haiku was written in this vein, but most wasn't because in Japan haiku is thought of as a poetic form, not a philosophical vehicle.
As for the language they used when translating, Blythe ignored counting syllables and spun out translations with brevity and with such a small specific focus that he ignored a lot of what was written in the originals. As engaging and gregarious as his prose is, there is no argument about him being a minimalistic writer when it came to translation.
Yasuda did write 17 syllables out, but he also rhymed the first and the third lines all the time which doomed him to have little influence how western haiku would be written on the page, but he did have a huge influence in what the poets would write about because he did coin the term "haiku moment" which came to be the defined mindset of what mainstream haiku became.
A "haiku moment" is where the writer concisely writes in the present tense about something in the world around them that they had experienced without any showing what they felt or thought about it. Hence, you just wrote clear imagery and left it up to the reader to decide what it meant. Imagery is an important part of creative writing but deeming that the only thing you can write is imagery is a minimalistic view of writing.
The avant guard in West picked up theses minimal views of haiku and, mixing them in with theories from other writers who explained the philosophy of zen, came to the conclusion that, following the Japanese, they too could only write haiku that presented imagery without any subjective emotions by the author, and also, because Japanese writers never used any, they should never employ any of the poetical devices that western poets traditionally use.
These positions were popularized and enforced by magazine editors who were either determined that haiku in English must remain true to the Japanese prototype or else committed to making sure haiku remained a minimal poetic form. A "prototype" that was a huge misrepresentation of haiku in Japanese.
The impetus for any list of haiku rules that you run into, past or contemporary, is to keep haiku scaled down so it is written to a preset mindset where how you write, and what you write about, is shoved into something that has a nominal range of human experience.
The rules on the Haiku Society of America's webpage are just a set of instructions that demand you minimalize the scope of your writing to conform to the set of conditions they've presented, and if you don't follow them, then the cry comes that what you've written really isn't a "haiku." "Pseudo haiku" is generally the term you run into. Any poet who tries his hand at writing haiku generally gets thrown into the bin of "not really writing haiku" because they don't follow the prescribed style. It's monolithic.
The problem with minimalistic writing is that it can never be more than what it already is. Once you expand your style you no longer are a minimalist. So you are always in a self made box. This is the reason why since the beginnings of it all the haiku magazine editors have fought tooth and nail to keep western poetic devices out of what they publish. They can only be ideological zealots.
The main thrust of Shirane's writing was that this unassailable position held by the haiku community that Japanese haiku poets historically never used any established literary devices like western poets did was totally false and that the “haiku moment” idea, now so prominent in the west, was something that had been picked up as a skewed version of Masaoka Shiki’s influence on Japanese haiku in the 20the century.
This sparked an existential crisis in mainstream haiku, the minimalistic approach to writing that had been established had always been argued as a true style of literature because it was under the rubric of following literary conventions from a different culture, thus making it an intellectually valid pursuit. With this cover blown away by Shirane, the question of how haiku should go forward was a hot topic. Should western haiku start allowing the usage of metaphor, allusions, etc… and was it alright if “moments” were imagined rather than experienced directly??
As Tasker puts it "we've chosen to write haiku as a kind of poetry that stands apart from other kinds of poetry....Even though haiku elude a specific definition, there is still a haiku tradition. A Western haiku tradition and particularly a tradition of haiku in the English language."
Whether or not how sound you find this argument to be, he really isn't talking about haiku per se here, he's is talking about a minimalistic tradition that must be maintained no matter how inherently risky its intellectual foundations are. Again, this is the intrinsic problem with minimalism, it can never expand into something else, it can never grow bigger, it can only shrink smaller. So it's no surprise when towards the end of the article he writes "If we need to experiment, we could experiment by writing less for a change."
Keiko Imaoka gave what these confirmed and committed minimalist craved: a shorter way to write haiku. There's no surprise that her argument about how whittling 17 syllables down to around 11 syllables was necessary to match the content in Japanese haiku was like manna to the haiku community. Besides arguing for shorter writing, it also told them that they would be writing "like the Japanese" as well. Why else would you argue about content per syllable unless you wanted to duplicate the original language? One stone, two birds.
Of course, this is a bit problematic. Japanese people can have trouble getting through sentences in English because their natural breathing during speech is different from English speakers, and this is more so when they encounter longer speech patterns and patterns that have a lot of diction in them.
The only way they can get through them without stumbling is to break their speech pattern into segments that use beats to mark where the speakers takes breaths. Her writing about "writing in 3-5-3 syllables or 2-3-2 accented beats" is symptom of this. It doesn't mean that if you follow this beat pattern you are "writing like a Japanese," it means you are writing like a Japanese who is communicating in English.
You only have to look at her comments in the section titled "Relative Ease In Segmentation" where she clearly doesn't understand how English speakers navigate line breaks or punctuation breaks in the middle of lines. The reason why she can't navigate the second version of the haiku with a comma in the middle of the line is because she doesn't know how to breath words into speech without having a pattern of beats running through it. This is prevalent in her prose too.
The effect that "writing less" has had on the haiku community is that it changed a lot of haiku writers away from the 17 syllables that they were writing out to produce a shorter style of haiku. Shorter haiku means that the language becomes snappier and imagery is lit up more, but when you write "in the vicinity of 11 syllables" you kill the linguistic flow of your words and you flatten out speech to the point where you can't produce diction and everyone has same the tone in their words. Imaoka wrote about how she was captivated by English language haiku and found that it was "just plain and simple language that even grade school kids could understand." Her call for shorter haiku just compounded this situation because it means longer words would be harder to include in haiku. Again, an automatic limiting that mainstream haiku writers were more than willing to accept.
Imaoka honest appraisal of western haiku as being "plain and simple" and understandable by "grade kids" is the very reason why mainstream literature has never accepted haiku as a serious form of writing. Tasker explains that “At their best, haiku are truly subversive: they question all the notions of creativity which poets hold so dear” as a salient point, but English language poets have historically been subversive and questioning about their creativity too. That's why there are different eras. It's not about being different, it's about how you use language in being different and presenting moments in grade school kid language isn't going to impress many people into believing that what you're writing is worthy literature.
By the 2010s the rise of the internet led to the situation where people from different language backgrounds could co-mingle, which has led into a giant influx of English as a second language writers into the haiku world. There wasn't much self reflection about how this was possible, i.e that the language bar was at such a basic level that non-native speakers could excel at the same level as a native speaker. So foreign writers flourished, were praised, and were published in numbers.
Given that a second language speaker only has to follow this minimal style of haiku, it shouldn't be surprising that it happened. Haiku is so short now that grammar no longer matters. If you go through the online archives of the longtime e-zines you'll see how this is true. Sentences have evaporated into simple phrasing. The reason of it: Minimalism can only go one way: simpler and simpler.
Just to show how monolithic minimalism is in haiku, some people are now arguing that Keiko Imaoka's rules are the standard of what haiku is in English and that all haiku written in 17 syllables really aren't haiku. I hope that these three essays about this subject show how these are suspect rules that deserve inspection before you accept them.
Also, I think it's important to know that all the information the mainstream haiku establishment gives you about their genre is really instruction on how to practice minimalism. It's something you should understood and the reason why, if you ever decide to write a haiku, it is OK to write any style, or any device, you want, just follow the form of 17 syllables with one break in it. This is the one true definition of haiku you'll ever need.
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Now that we have an understanding of how Keiko Imaoka only had a basic grasp of English grammar, it's time to turn to her statement of how "17 English syllables convey a deal more information than 17 Japanese syllables.”
She also relates how "many bilingual poets and translators in the mainstream North American haiku scene agree that something in the vicinity of 11 English is a suitable approximation of 17 syllables, in order to convey the same amount of information".
The problem with these statements is that there is no written article that shows how this true. So it is a hypothesis that really has no proof to back it up. It shows how haiku scholarship in the west has a history of taking things at face value, especially if it is a native Japanese who espouses them.
By saying "bilingual poets and translators" I think it is probably a safe bet that she means native Japanese speakers who were active in English language haiku circles. It's all well and good to listen what a native Japanese has to say about haiku written in the English language, but it's another thing to simply take what they have said without critically judging it.
Having gotten the grammatical explanation of English quite wrong, it's very possible "the translators" could have gotten the syllabic equivalency part wrong as well. As far as I know, there isn't anything in print that explains the how and whys of English haiku needing to be shorter than 17 syllables.
So for now, the only thing to do is to look at the way Keiko Imaoka translated from the Japanese into English to see if we can discover the process which shows the reason why for shortened syllable counts.
The statement of "convey a deal more information" is an extremely difficult one to prove unless you go through a dictionary. The problem with taking things out of a dictionary is that you don't get direct translations, you get the equivalent in English, which is a different thing.
Every language has it strategies and thought processes in putting thoughts and emotions into language, including different ways to express the same things, i.e. polite language, slang, implied language etc..and as varied as these can be in your own language, they will be doubly so when translating from another language where cultural differences are thrown into the mix.
Cultural differences usually mean different ways of seeing things and the translations that Imaoka uses to show how 5-7 structure is a natural act for Japanese speakers clearly shows this. The first example she gives is a slogan used during World War II to show how the populace at home is willing to accept sacrifices for the war effort:
hoshigarimasen(7) katsumadewa(5) : "we want nothing till we win (the war)"
Leaving the horrid grammar of this translation aside, slogans in English tend to be short, snappy and rhythmical in nature to catch our attention: "Want not, 'til victory's got" So yes, we naturally shorten thoughts to make it catchy and easy to remember, but this isn't so for Japanese speakers where elegant phrasing is what makes it memorable and pleasing to the ear: "We don't want anything until it has been won."
So, by using proper grammar to translate trying to catch the manner in which the Japanese actually express this sentiment, it ends up with the syllable count that only doesn't match the original because I've used a contraction in making the negative part of this statement.
Other cultures react to different language cues because words have overtones that express implications that are imbedded in native speakers.
kono dote-ni(5) noboru-bekarazu(7) keishichou(5) : "Do Not Climb This Levee - The Police Department"
The word "bekarazu" shows that the order posted on this sign is stated by an authority that has the right to issue it. So, a translation that tries to incorporate that would be something along the lines of :
"You must not climb upon this embankment: The Metropolitan Police Department"
where we end up with 21 syllables.Of course, posted signs in English never are written like this because short, direct, pithy statements are commands which we naturally expect: "Posted Property","No Entrance","No Trespassing" etc…
Aphorisms and proverbs can have the same meaning but the way of stating them are different. Because of Shakespeare we are familiar with this:
owariyokereba(7) subete yoshi(5) : "All's well that ends well"
But the sentiment in Japanese is expressed a little differently:
"If the ending comes out as you like, everything is well," which is 2 syllables more syllables than the Japanese.
This suffers from a lack of articles:
hotaru-no hikari(7) mado-no yuki(5) : "the light of fireflies, snow by the window"
"The lights of the fireflies, the snow by the window" which counts to 13 syllables.
Turning to Imaoka's haiku translations:
yuku haru-ya (5) tori naki uo-no me-ni namida (12) - Basho
spring passing -
birds cry, tears in the eyes of fish
"The passing of Spring! The birds cry, tears are in the eyes of the fish." Which is 16 syllables.
neko-no meshi shoubansuru-ya (12) suzume-no-ko (5) - Issa
sampling the cat's food -
a baby sparrow
The Japanese verb of "shoubansuru" doesn't mean "sampling" as translated above, it means "accompanying a main guest at a meal or a feast and be treated with hospitality," which usually means it's for free.
"Accompanying for free the cat at its meal! A baby sparrow." 17 syllables.
This translation seems to me to be childlike in its construction, so let's put into an adult like phrasing:
ware-to kite asobe-ya (9) oya-no nai suzume (8) - Issa
come play with me -
you motherless sparrow
"Come along and play with me! A sparrow without any mother." 16 syllables.
uguisu-no naku-ya (8) chiisaki kuchi akete (9) - Buson
uguisu singing - (uguisu : a nightingale-like bird)
with the small mouth open
"The bush warbler shall sing! Its tiny mouth is opening….”
Base verbs usually indicate the future tense in Japanese, which is why I used "shall" in the above. 14 syllables. I could have went with "is going to sing" which would have made it 17 syllables as well and would make it more poetic in tone.
dou owaretemo (7) hitozato-o (5) watari-dori (5) - Issa
hunted mercilessly
migrating birds still
fly over towns. 15
"Even though hunted they still come where humans are, the migrating birds”which is 17 syllables.
Looking at these examples, it is hard to see anything that supports the contention that 17 syllables in Japanese amounts to around 11 syllables of information in English.
Of course, it's easy to compact down the English language down to fewer syllables because we often use condensed language for effect, but that doesn't mean English is inherently shorter than Japanese because we can express the same amount of information in longer sentences as well.
Native Japanese speakers tend to have trouble with articles on nouns in English as well as with assonance and tone because their language doesn't have these tools of expression in it. Although their language does have a conjugation system for verbs that works similar to our use of auxiliary verbs, they often have problems with the implications that come when we use them. Just because the use of such things make English seem "longer" for them doesn't really mean that it really is.
Putting things into proper sentences, using articles on nouns and various auxiliary verb usages doesn't make English inherently longer, it means it just has different strategies to present and share information and emotional responses to this information. Proper use of language also means elegant expression.
This whole "too much information" argument really isn't about difference between the language, it's is about the use of "minimal" language in English language haiku because it makes it easier for Japanese people like Imaoka to digest and experience what they are reading.
The question of Minimalism has always been around in English language haiku. It plays a big part in the reason why Keiko Imaoka's article has gained credence in the haiku community which I'll discuss more about in the third part of this essay.
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False Optics: Keiko's Haiku Rules (Part One)
In the mid-1990s Keiko Imako wrote an essay that has been influencing haiku written in English since. It is the document that informs the style of haiku that you'll find in any mainstream haiku publication either in print or on-line.Imaoka is a surprising candidate for being the intellectual leader of haiku in the west. She tells us that she had to learn Japanese literature in school, begrudgingly so, to borrow her own phrase, and since traditional Japanese were verse forms seemed boring and irrelevant she could never imagine herself ever writing in them.
Her interest in haiku started after she came to America where she found that "There was no specialized vocabulary, no archaic grammar to contented with in English haiku; just simple and plain language that even grade-school kids could understand." So, how does someone with minimal training in Japanese haiku become the voice of how it should be written in the English language?
She did it by comparing the abilities of both languages and arguing that Japanese is a much more grammatically flexible than the English language because it's grammatical particles make it possible to for word units to be rearranged in many ways "without altering its core message." This "remarkable malleability and redundancy of the Japanese language…allows for a multiple of options in expressing a single thought. In languages such as English and its relatives whose grammar are heavily dependent on word order, haiku must and will take a much different form from that in Japanese.”
This "remarkable malleability" stands in contrast to the English language which "owes much of its grammatical simplicity to the fact that the word order plays a major role in determining the relationships between words and phrases (subject, object, etc.). In such a language, words and phrases cannot be moved about freely without changing the meaning of a sentence.”
The reason why the Japanese language has this malleability is "because of grammatical particles (joshi) that are suffixed to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships, word units become independent and can be moved about more freely without altering it's core message."
Ok, but doesn't the English language have things that attach "to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships" too? We call them articles though, and we what we call particles can not only relate to nouns but with verbs as well. And we also have pronouns that mark relationships. These are part and parcel of our grammatical structure, so how does having particles (joshi) make Japanese more malleable than English?
Imaoka gives this statement sentence as an example, "Mother gave it to the kitten" and states that these "words cannot be rearranged without altering the meaning," and follows up by giving six examples of how you can do that with this sentence when it is in Japanese. But, isn't the idea that in English this sentence can't be rearranged a bit preposterous?
Mother gave it to the kitten.
Mother, to the kitten, gave it.
To the kitten, mother gave it.
The core meaning hasn't been changed at all. We can change things around because the particle, the article and the pronoun in this sentence mark out relationships that make units which can be moved, the exact same thing that Imaoka tells us that the Japanese particles do.
As for the number of ways you can change this sentence, the English language has more articles than the Japanese so if you replace "the" with an "a" in the above you' ve now reached six ways of stating the sentence. "It" is a pronoun that can be changed because the Japanese word of "sore" (it) which Imaoka used can also be translated as the pronoun of "that," so between using the two articles and two pronouns it's now up to at least twelve ways of rearranging and maybe more because using "that" means they are more ways to rearrange the grammar than there is with "it”.
I came to Japan in late 1990, which is in the same time frame as when Imaoka wrote this article, and it was weird the way the learned class over here saw the English language. They all had studied it from junior high school through university, in same cases still after, and for some reason that gave them the confidence that they understood English as well as they understood their own native language. The general consensus was that English wasn't as sublime as the Japanese language, which is what Imaoka is really telling you when in the article she writes "more flexible", "grammatical simplicity", "more freedom", "further flexibility", and "a multitude of options in expressing a single thought.”
At first, back then I would bristle at some of that inane comments about the English language that were made by some Japanese interested in English, but in time I just started laughing at the farcical nature of it. It is very presumptuous for a speaker of a second language to instruct a native speaker about the grammatical structure of their birth language.
Of course, this was over thirty years ago and Japanese ideas about how their language is more tactful than English have disappeared and the acknowledgment that English is as sublime as their own language is widely accepted now, but this article, which still has relevancy to how haiku is perceived and written, was written back in time when there were certain attitudes that colored Japanese people's minds about the English language. The only way to react to the statement by Imaoka of "the available options in English would be "Mother gave it to the kitten yesterday," and "Yesterday, mother gave it to the kitten," is to understand it as being nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of English grammar.
The Japanese school system spends a lot time drilling formal English grammar into the students because the verb in Japanese is always at the end of the sentence, making English, where the verb is in the middle, a difficult language for the Japanese to learn. Imaoka writing that English is "heavily dependent on word order" is a symptom of this.
Having a strict "word order" makes it easier for her understand our language but native English speakers don't need as much "ordering" as she does and can and do break the rules to speak intelligently and convey meaning to others. Colloquial language and poetic license are a huge part of the way we converse and create expression with a multiplicity of meanings, things which Imaoka was limited in using.
Plus, Japanese speakers have a lot of trouble with intonation, which is how a native speaker expresses emotion into words, a thing that is naturally brought out when we invert grammar, which is the "multitude of options in expressing a single thought" that Imaoka states as our language intrinsically lacking in comparison to her own native tongue.
She also told us that "17 English syllables convey a deal more information than 17 Japanese syllables," a statement which will be examined in another essay. But, the point of this first essay should be clear enough: Keiko Imaoka didn't understand English grammar well enough to write authoritatively about it.
Learning any second language is a daunting process, but with Japanese, where the written language is so radically different than the way English speakers write, this is more so. Native Japanese speakers themselves go through a long hard mastering process, from elementary school to high school, on how to read and write Chinese characters, which makes it doubly a struggle for anyone who is a native speaker of a language that is written in a simpler phonetic script that is much easier to remember.
To mitigate this supreme obstacle, a system that is called "Romanji" has been developed to allow the international community a way to escape this roadblock of language and be readily able to experience the Japanese language accessible on the terms of the English language.
The problem with this turning of Japanese into English is that it is an imperfect solution to the problem because there are sounds in the Japanese language that an English speaker does not naturally produce.
The Japanese don't exactly pronounce vowels the way we do, so you need a pronunciation guide to be able to fit Japanese into an English language type of writing system, which is why you'll find of many online lists like this explaining the Japanese phonetic pronunciation against how vowels are sounded in English:
"a" as in "father" which is spoken as "ah" since the "t" is silent here
"e" as in "bet" which is spoken as "eh"
"i" as in "meet" which doesn't quite match phonetically
"o" as in "story" which is spoken as "oh"
"u" as in "shoot" which is another phonetic mismatch
In Romanji, every Japanese vowel is given an English phonetic value that doesn't quite match how it is spoken. In other words, it's an inexact reproduction of Japanese vowels into an English syllabary so non-native Japanese speakers don't have to struggle to comprehend it. This can lead to some confusion when you try to compare the languages when using the Romanji system.
It's easy to find on the internet a lot of places that argue that since the Japanese word "Tõkyõ" is counted as four syllables in Japan, but is changed into the two syllable "Tokyo" by English speakers, is proof that there is a big different in the syllable structures of the two languages. Is this true?
If you check out the Japanese syllabus at the head of this post, you see that for the most part the Japanese count syllables as consonants with vowels attached just like we do. The vowels are different, we know, but they aren't accurately being reproduced into our English syllabary for them. So how does this effect the way they are being reproduce for English speaker consumption?
The syllabic different between the Japanese and English pronunciation for Tokyo is predicated on the difference between the two "o" sounds spoken in the word. The fact is that if you took an English speaker without any knowledge of the Japanese language and stuck them in the middle of city of Tokyo had them say "Tokyo" not many native speakers in Japan would understand them, and the same would be true if you did the same with a Japanese speaker and put them in an American city and had them say "Tõkyõ" in perfect Japanese. (Equally true with baseball player names.)
The reason why this happens isn't because there is huge syllabic difference the two languages, the reason is because the word isn't being pronounced the same. If you want to get a better sense of how the word is spoken and heard by Japanese speakers, you have to fill in the vowel sounds as explained by the list above, which gives us the word "Tohookyohoo". Now, you too are pronouncing the word as four syllables.
Of course, once you start rendering these truer phonetic equivalents into English you get a messy scrambled language which makes it very difficult for the second language reader to pick up. Let's use this famous haiku as an example:
Fooroo eekeh yah Kahwahzoo tohbeekohmoo meezoo no ohtoh (17)
Furu ike ya Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto (16)
It is certainly much easier for an English speaker to navigate through the second example than the first, the reason being that the second is putting the Japanese into a writing system that follows the set expectations of the phonetic sounds that are attributed to the letters of the English alphabet. However, that doesn't mean it is an accurate reproduction of the phonetics sounds of the Japanese language.
I'm not arguing that the phonetic style of transcribing should be favored over the Romanji system in use, but I do think that it is imperative for anyone studying Japanese literature to be aware that the current Romanji system isn't a true representation of the sounds of the Japanese language and if you want a better understand of the syntactic diction of Japanese literature it is better to start incorporating authentic phonetic renderings into your studying.
The same is true for all the loan words from English which are now in Japanese too, the reason why a one syllable word like "spoon" gets expanded into "supu-n," which counts as four, is because the Japanese language doesn't have the "sp" consonant blend and must get creative to capture how the word sounds in English
This expansion of this word into a four count might seem drastic but, as someone once explained to me, the loan words borrowed from English are Japanese words now and should be treated as such, so if we treat this as a native Japanese word and put it into its phonetic Romanji form we get' "soopoo-n" which isn't so large a difference anymore and is only a two syllable word for English speakers.
The Japanese language doesn't have "sp'" in its verbal lexicon, in fact, every word in Japanese that begins with "supu" letter combination is a loan word from another language. Plus, since Japanese is a basically a syllable stressed language where each syllable generally carries an equal time value, it also has to set up speech strategies for words that come from timed stress languages like English where syllables are both scrunched and elongated.
Speech is the use of breath to put words into the air and every language has internal standards that allow speakers to do this naturally without having to take excessive pauses for breath. When a syllable stressed language imports words from a time stressed language not only does it have to contend with sounds foreign to it, it also has to deal with being able to use it in phrases where it doesn't break the natural linguistic flow of the language. Which is why "spoon" explodes into "supu-n" when it is used by the Japanese and why they abbreviate the longer syllable words they borrow from English.
This expanding, and deflating, of words to fit lexicon is proof that there is a measure of syllabic time difference between English and Japanese by the stopwatch, but we don't count syllables by the stopwatch. If we did we wouldn't count shorter words like "a" and longer words like "scrunch" as having the same syllable count. Instead, we count by vowels informed by consonants, which is the pretty much the same way the Japanese count their "mora".
The only difference in counting is that the Japanese have the bare word ending sound of "n" without any vowel that they count as one, whereas we always count "n" as being connected to a vowel, and they also count double consonants as one, which we never do, which is insignificant in the overall scheme of the two languages.
Once you get over the inherent obstacle given by Romanji's inability to give the true representation of vowel sounds in the Japanese language you see that both syllables and mora do weighed equally by the same scales of counting. Only now do have the correct values to question what syllable length the Japanese poetic forms, i.e. haiku, tanka etc, should be when written in the English language.
The idea that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poem to the melody of the traditional American folksong “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is an old saw. Everyone has heard it, repeated it and generally believes it to a be true.
The standard explanation for this is that Dickison usually wrote in hymnal or ballad meters, which makes her easily adaptable to singing aloud in well known melodies structured the same way. But if it is just a matter of form, then why don’t we also find this true for other American poets who wrote in these forms as well?
If you look around on YouTube, you find that there a lot of other renditions of her poetry into other song melodies as well. Why is it that? I’m going to take a leap and argue that the dashes splashed through out her poetry turn her diction into something that is easily rendered into song because it forces a natural vocalization into her words.
The people who don’t sing can having trouble realizing there is a distinct but separate relationship between the music of a song and the lyrics of a song. Usually, there is direct one to one correspondence between one quarter note of music and one syllable in the words that being sung, but the sung melody of the song lyrics never can perfectly fit the rhythymical beat structure of the music because both the singer and the musicians playing melody need rest pauses, unlike the rhythm sections who can play indefinitely.
Thus, songs will have places where the melody will elongate syllables to fit a beat structure, and there will be pauses where the melody stops so the singer can get more air, which also gives the lead musicians playing along with the singer the ability to finish their phrasing and reload for the following bars of music they will physically play.
This line from a famous Beetle’s song is an example: the line of “Yesterday all my toubles seemed so far away” is a phrase of 12 syllables, but when the Beetles sing it the third syllabble of “yesterday” and the second syllable to “away” are elongated to half notes which expands this phrasing out to 14 syllables, since the rhymical time of this song is 4/4, that means there still is a space of two quarter notes where the singer pauses to let the music fill out it’s natural 4 bars of 16 beats.
The best way to understand the effect of all the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry is to read her poems by ignoring them. In doing so you’ll find that her cadence will run quicker, is a bit more choppier, can turn a bit sing-songy at times, and her end rhymes bang together a little more harsher than they do when you read with the dashes as she wrote them.
So, the use of dashes are conscious inclusions to modify and buffer the language by making the reader elongate words in the same way that a singer on a stage or in a music studio does. It’s gives the poems a lilt and a pace that is not in the words themselves, which is the art of signing.
Indeed, now with the internet giving everyone the ability to see Dickinson’s manuscripts, the dashes that are in the printed books really aren’t dashes because they don’t lie half-way up the words they are placed between. Rather they are place at the bottom of the words which make them seem more like dots that you’ll find after musical notes to indicate where you hold the note a little longer than normal.
I’m not saying that Dickinson wrote her poems to be sung aloud, but the dashes create spaces that make the poems read in a natural sort of way as if she was across the desk from you saying her poetry aloud. This immediate presence of personal voice in her poetry is a quality which makes her unique.
And, linguistically at least, the use of the dash makes her a modernist for she is writing in the language of common speech that do“create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moodsand does create poetry where“a new cadence”does “mean a new idea; quotes taken from an article written by Amy Lowell 29 years after Dickinson’s death.
The dash allowed Dickinson to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” and “In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music”and come out with poems where “Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning;”quotes being advice that Ezra Pound proffered in explanation of how to write a new 20th century style of poetry.
Pound’s “sequence of the musical phrase”is different from Dickinson’s because he was taking inspiration from instrumental music rather than vocal music. Pound was infamous for being tone deaf and a terrible singer, so he would never have had an understanding of the breathing patterns you need to sing. But, being someone who studied music, he did understand how instruments make rhythmic lines.
An “musical phrase”( a riff, a solo, etc.) is a musical expression that ends with a musical punctuation called “cadence”. Cadence is the place where the phrase ends being played. Pound wrote his poems to musical cadence, meaning he made most of his lines either end stop or have breath pauses at the end of them.
Any musician knows rhythm means cadence because they are counted by beat patterns that automatically have end points, and musicians who can play lead are well aware where rhythmic phrasing will take them to, the art is in how you get to the end and what you do with it at the end as well.
It’s that performance that makes the music come alive. That, in essence, is what Lowell and Pound put into their poetry, by knowing that each line will give a breath pause at the end of itself, they are able to build up rhythm to cadence in a single line and then create off that with following lines.
Amy Lowell was less sublime explaining it: “By ‘cadence’ in poetry, we mean a rhythmic curve, containing one or more stressed accents and corresponding roughly to the necessity of breathing”which is technical explanation of how to run out breath at the line of a line.
She evens goes to openly write “Cadence is rhythm,…..Modern vers libre, far from being non-rhythmical as some people have supposed is entirely based upon rhythm. Its rhythms differ from those of metre by being less obvious and more subtle, but rhythm is, nevertheless, the very ground and root of its structure.”
Pound and Lowell’s revolution in poetics turned poetry into an act of oration, by having end cadence built into almost every line the reader/speaker unconsciously understands that they already have a reservoir of breath to spend and can play with coloring and accents within the line because you rarely have to breathe outside of it.
Pound’s poetry has such a strong sense of rhythm that he didn’t do much vocal coloring while reading his poems aloud because the internal beat of his lines are constant, but Lowell’s isn’t so regular so you’ll see people who recite her poems make many self determined adjustments to build up poetic tension that doesn’t exist within the words on the page. This is true for any poetry reading you attend where the poet on a stage will gussy diction up. Louise Gluck is an excellent example.
This is the opposite of singing, a singer knows how to control breath flows and is able to elongate and navigate through lines without having to come to complete stops at the end of them which unbinds them from “rhythmic curves” because they are never truly square to one from the get go.
To go back to the Beetles’ song “Yesterday, if you just read the lyrics aloud you naturally you will make pauses at the end of each line in the song, but singing them means you can change how you navigate the ends of lines because you’ve changed your breathing patterns.
This is a video spotlighting Paul MaCartney singing “Yesterday” on stage making it easy to see how he actually sings this song. He starts by singing the first line to cadence by taking a breath pause at the end of it and repeats this same pattern with the following next seven lines, exactly as you do when you speak these lines aloud.
But coming to the four line chorus, McCartney changes the pattern and instead of stopping at the end of the first line he breathes through it, thus breaking cadence, to take the expected end of line pause at the end of the second line. Hereafter his breathing really escapes cadence.
Going on, he breathes through the end of the third line and when he comes to the end of the fourth line, rather than pausing as you would expect, he breathes through it and sings right through into the first line of the next stanza where he finally takes a breath pause at the end there. So, in a single breath he was able to get in three lines that spanned two stanzas.
I don’t know if you would call this escaping cadence, or creating a new cadence, but it is an understanding of cadence beyond what Pound and Lowell knew of it.
Emily Dickinson mainly wrote in stanzas of four lines, even when she didn’t structure it on the page that way. Just by checking to see how she dealt with cadence, it easy to see what effect the dashes have on it: they make you read all the four lines of her stanzas without a pause in a single breath.
To say as much as possible with as little breath as possible is the whole idea behind natural speech patterns in any spoken language. Which is why her poetry speaks to the reader as if she was in conversation with us.
If you want to understand the true genius of her use of the dash just start consciously putting them into Pound’s poems as you read through them. Instead of the thrumming to layered cadence in the original lines, you are able to glide through all the end pausing quite easily and there are times when you seem like you are actually singing.
We know Dickinson studied singing and playing piano when she was a young teenager, and since her personally collected binder of sheet music (every musician has them) still exists we can see she had a wide repertoire of styles. Let’s just say that she was more musically inclined than Pound or Lowell.
As for“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” it’s a song of four line stanzas where each line has two phrases to it. The word at the end of every phrase gets elongated, there are some variations of course, but this structure makes it very adaptable for poems that have a lot of elongated words in the middle of, and at the end of, lines. So, sing away!!
The Haiku Experiment 