Haiku as Response Poetry: People Plus Place Equals Politics

• In Event: Response Abilities: Generating Arts-Based Research With Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King

Abstract

Haiku is often employed as response to a season, a moment, or an emotion. Working with the contemporary three line haiku, as described below, I will create haiku responses to public art.
Resisting the implied didacticism of narrative, by contrast haiku situates the self in place and time through metaphor. In the first line, haiku presumes the ordinary and conventional in some world—it describes the state of the world as it is perceived, what Bruner (2005) calls a “stable ordinariness” (p. 56). The second line of a haiku introduces tension, bringing a human being into that stable ordinariness. What results is a questioning of the taken-for-granted state of things—for whenever there is a person situated in history, there is an implied politics of meaning. The third line attempts resolution, but always partially, for there is no returning to the original undisturbed state. In haiku, as in life, meaning is always advancing through difference.

Author

• Sean P. Wiebe, University of Prince Edward Island