Get hooked on haiku at the High Noon Haiku event at Dobama Theater on Fri 8/5. The competition is co-presented by Heights Arts Heights Arts Gallery (2163 Lee Road, #104, Cleveland Heights (http://HeightsArts.org) and Dobama (2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights). Open Mic is at 7PM and participants can bring three haiku to read to the audience of about 200 people. Proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross for Japanese relief efforts.
For those of you who don’t know about haiku, it’s a Japanese form of poetry of 17 segments, the most famous of which were written by Basho. In English this has become lines of 5-7-5 syllables. Japanese and English haiku differ in a number of ways—for instance, the Japanese put the entire poem on one line so they can clearly see it and use seasoned words, which differs from the English tradition.
Haiku traditionally focuses on nature and is sensory, similar to an impressionistic painting which leaves an impression rather than concrete expressions. In English, most Haiku forms have a phrase of two lines and a fragment of one line, and the two parts are unrelated, as in this Haiku from my Brown Bear Diary, part of which is shared at http://IgnitingPossibilities.blogspot.com:
“Northern Tundra”
Hare hops, Fox slithers,
Over spongy green tundra.
Crouching, we watch.
As you can see, these verses are great accompaniments to my Denali photos, but their simplicity is deceiving. The Japanese also recognize that words and pictures compliment each other, for they often add drawings to the poems to create a visual and audio art experience. Cleveland writer Geoffrey Landis posts Haiku on http://ClevelandPoetics.blogspot.com like this one from April 8:
“Cleveland Haiku # 10 of 52”
orange and blue streaks
neon lights on wet pavement
rivers flowing nowhere
High Noon Haiku sounds like great competitive fun for lovers of words. The defending champion is Kathleen Cerveny. As Marcus Bales puts it (much better than I ever could), after the music, “an eerily appropriate hush will overtake the proceedings, except for the shuffle and mutter of people taking their seats preparatory to the awesome overture, and then the beginning of the end for all but one – for there can be only one.” George Bilgere’s account of the Haiku Death Match in 2008 can be found here and Karen Sandstrom wrote about the 2009 Haiku Death Match here.
Get out to Dobama for an evening at High Noon Haiku on Fri 8/5 starting at 7PM. Tickets are available at the door or in advance from Heights Arts: 216.371.3457 or heightsarts@heightsarts.org. Dobama Theater is at 2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights. http://Dobama.org/high-noon-haiku.
Claudia Taller’s book Ohio’s Lake Erie Wineries was just released by Arcadia Publishing. Find out more about the book by going to http://OhioLakeErieWineries.blogspot.com and order it through Claudia by sending an e-mail to claudia.taller@yahoo.com.
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