Blues & Haiku: Big Mama Thornton & Peggy Heinrich

Over the years, Peggy Heinrich has published a number of outstanding haiku in the pages of Lilliput Review. 10 of her works were recently featured at santacruz.com. Of the featured haiku, I was particularly touched by:

holding my breath
until the cormorant
resurfaces

Peggy Heinrich

This, of course, reminds me of Bashō's cormorant poem, featured and discussed in a previous post. Here's Bashō, as translated by Lucien Stryk:

Cormorant fishing
how stirring
how saddening.

Bashō
translated by Lucien Styrk

For those unfamiliar with cormorant "fishing," the following explanation comes from that earlier post:

The verse about the cormorant fishing perhaps needs a gloss. Fisherman commonly used the cormorant to fish by tying a string around its neck so when the bird snared a fish it couldn't swallow and the "fisherman" would simply remove the fish and put the bird back in the water. Not quite fishing with hand grenades, but certainly in the same mode. What really captures the true Basho spirit here is that he is both stirred and saddened, he still sees the miracle of nature despite the appalling behavior of nature's "highest creation", man.

Peggy manages to capture the idea of being stirred, as in Styrk's version of Bashō, with a suggestion of sadness or, perhaps, horror.

Another poem that resonates from this selection seems so basic, so simple in image and execution, to approach cliché, and yet, and yet (as Issa said of the dewdrop world):

ebb tide
turning to look back
at my footprints

Peggy Heinrich

In some ways, this is a perfect modern haiku: precise, concise, a literal image capturing a specific moment that resonates mightily. There is not one wrong word here and each carries its weight. Three words are at this poems core: ebb, turning, and back. What each one of those words means individually and collectively makes the poem come together. It is something anyone whose been to a shoreline has experienced. Mixed in that experience is the cosmic feel of place, a sense of self as self, a sense of self as part of the whole, a sort of returning, a vague bit of romantic nostalgia ...

But, ah, I'm projecting and that's the point of great haiku, the interaction of reader and poem, bringing one's own experience to bear. The poem has a feeling of ending, but it could just as well be about beginning, or both.

A genuine haiku moment, so simple it might easily be overlooked, as we overlook things, ordinary things, each and every day. Haiku moments. Moments.

The now.


------------------------------------------------------------------


On to the then, to risk a trite segue. Here is a moment, courtesy of Miss Late July (who also recently posted this), that is just too good for words. Big Mama Thornton. A very young Buddy Guy.

And, because once you get something like this started you can't stop, see if this one doesn't blow you out of the water:

Ok, so three's a charm: this one's for Janis (there is a reason this link has over 6 million hits), who was a huge fan of Big Mama (turn it UP):

-------------------------------------------------


Featured this week are two poems from the archive, from Lilliput Review #143 (June 1993), to mull over:

when you say 'bird'
do you feel
your wings unfurl?

Jean Michel Guilliaumond

A Melody by Haydn

wild plums --- just --- out -of ---reach

James Magorian

And one from the master:

not giving a damn
that plum blossoms fall...
his stern face

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don