Speaker’s corner
IWROTE of haikus some time back. Haikus are those 17-syllable fun verses invented by the Japanese. Gus Ferguson, the retired Cape Town pharmacist who is known for his comic verses, introduced me to them. Haikus date back 400 years and, Gus says, “the main mover and shaker” was Matsuo Basho. Writing haikus is very difficult because you have to keep counting the syllables. For Mr Basho to have done this while moving and shaking is very admirable.
I have since discovered that Basho, a former samurai who turned to poetry, tried to compress the meaning of life – or aspects of it – into three lines. His first haiku was: On a withered branch, a crow has alighted: Nightfall in Autumn. I don’t understand it at all but it is, after all, the very first.
Gus Ferguson, unlike most poets, hasn’t had to sit in a cold garret living off soup bones and making balls of screwed up notepaper and tossing them into a far corner wastepaper basket with practised ease. Poetry is simply his hobby, as is long-distance cycling.
In effect he writes South Africa’s most affordable books, affordable because poetry books are usually thin and therefore inexpensive. He’s published several and they are filled with the most delightful and often hilarious verses. He wrote a haiku that suggests The Independent on Saturday might come to the aid of frustrated poets: Tired of rejection? Publish your poems in our Classified Section Gus’s favourite haiku is taken from Robbie Burns’s Tam o Shanter and has a distinct Basho touch: ...like the snow falls in the river, a moment white then gone forever. My initial mention of haikus (hai = amusement; ku = fun) precipitated a small avalanche of verses. For instance, Val Brake, who is in banking, wrote to me. She began, “It has been brought to my wandering attention that the haiku which I submitted to you did not conform to strict Haiku standards which, Chambers Dictionary states, quite unequivocally, are Japanese poems ‘in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, usually comical, developed in the 17 century, incorporating a word or phrase that symbolises one of the seasons’.”
Now I didn’t know this bit about the seasons and Gus has never mentioned it. Not that one can blame him. After all, haikus are difficult enough already. As a result, Val felt it necessary to withdraw her haiku which, “even though lineally arranged as prescribed, sadly lacks any incorporation of a word or phrase symbolising any one of the seasons”. She added: A haiku is a 3-line verse with 17 syllables ... like this. Neil Bennett wrote, “If you do another column on haikus, here is a quote from none other than Sir Arthur Sullivan: I know two tunes, one is “God save the Queen”, and the other one isn’t. Michael Pohl sent me some very modern Japanese haikus that replace the formal error messages on computer screens. Windows 98 has crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams. The Website you seek cannot be located, but countless more exist. Chaos reigns within. Reflect repent, and reboot. Order shall return. Program aborting: Close all that you have worked on. You ask far too much. My favourite is: A crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone. My favourite haiku over the past 400 years is by Gus Ferguson himself: Today I took books to the pulpers but sadly they don’t do poetry. Three little words: David Zuma tells of a local dropout who made a fortune yet knew only three words of English. They were, says David, “Stick ’em up!”