April is the poet’s month.

This weekend’s poetry is a selection of haiku. This calls for wisdom: what you have heard called a haiku is probably not one. For example, contrary to popular opinion, the following may be amusing, but it is not a haiku:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

— David Dixon, Haiku Error Messages [sic] (1998)

You may have heard that a haiku is a Japanese poetic form with three lines in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. Actually, that’s doubly wrong. First, because Japanese haiku aren’t measured in syllables; they are measured in characters of hiragana, which correspond to morae, not syllables, and in some cases may be somewhat shorter than what an English-speaker would recognize as a syllable. Second, because haiku is only one of the Japanese poetic forms that are written in a 5-7-5 pattern. Senryū, for example, are also written in a 5-7-5 pattern; what distinguishes a haiku from a senryū is not their construction but their subject-matter. If you have a poem–especially a light or comedic poem–about human foibles, it may be a senryū, but it’s not a haiku; haiku are not primarily about people at all. They’re about nature, and especially about moments in a particular season. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the English-speaking world–grade school creative writing teachers in particular–have mistakenly thought that any three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern is a haiku, and they’ve inflicted this misunderstanding on a lot of kids who never knew any better because they figure that it will be a good way to get them started on formal poetry with something short and easy. But the double confusion causes a triple problem. First, if you try to mechanically transfer the 5-7-5 rule–and mechanically transfer rules based on mora counts to rules based on syllable counts–you’ll get a form that is actually subtly inappropriate to the English language, and also a form which encourages poems substantially longer than the classic Japanese haiku. (It’s for precisely this reason that most contemporary translators don’t stick to 5-7-5 form when they are translating Japanese haiku into English, and why most contemporary poets writing haiku in English don’t stick to 5-7-5 form either.) And second, since the students never learn the distinctive subject-matter of haiku, they may go through the whole course without ever writing a single haiku. And third, since most students are taught haiku as an easy form and aren’t taught anything about the sort of stylistic discipline that goes into writing them, they end up dashing off a bunch of silly non-haiku and spend the rest of their lives thinking that haiku poetry is trivial and silly.

Whatever the silly poetry that the students end up writing is, it’s usually not haiku. If it’s anything at all, it tends to be senryū. I suppose if you had to give a name to the homeless mongrel form that you learned in junior high school, you could do what L. does and call it gaiku (the poets who write haiku are called haijin; the people who write gaiku can be called gaijin).

All of this is too bad, because when well done, a genuine English-language haiku is anything but trivial; it can be beautiful stuff, and classical haiku, in the hands of the masters, is often absolutely stunning. Rather than expand on the quiet elegance or the sense of space or the intense presence of masterful haiku, I’ll simply shut up at this point and let the masters speak for themselves.

Spring

Teishitsu (1610-1673):

Ah! I said, Ah!
it was all that I could say —
the cherry flowers of Mt. Yoshino!

Basho (1644-1694):

even in Kyoto
when I hear the cuckoo
I long for Kyoto

Buson (1716-1783):

treading on the tail
of the copper pheasant
the setting sun of spring

Chigetsu (?-1708):

the songbird’s song —
it stops what I am doing
at the sink

Summer

Buson (1716-1783):

longing for the grass
at the bottom of the pool
those fireflies

Chiyo-ni (1703-1775):

cool clear water
and fireflies that vanish
that is all there is …

Basho (1644-1694):

a clear waterfall —
into the ripples
fall green pine-needles

Autumn

Kyoriku (1656-1715):

even to the saucepan
where potatoes are boiling —
a moonlit night

Issa (1762-1826):

grasshopper —
do not trample to pieces
the pearls of bright dew

Buson (1716-1783):

the harvest moon —
rabbits go scampering
across Lake Suwa

Winter

Suzuki Masajo (b. 1906):

no escaping it —
I must step on fallen leaves
to take this path

Basho (1644-1694):

the sea darkens —
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white

Chiyo-ni (1703-1775):

it’s play for the cranes
flying up to the clouds
the year’s first sunrise …

Like the Great Americans at Riding Sun (2005-04-05), The Jawa Report (2005-04-04), Michelle Malkin (2005-04-05), et al., I am outraged at the obvious, slavish political bias of the mainstream news photography elite. The 2005 Pulitzer Awards in Breaking News Photography are only the latest example of their anti-military agenda and their love for anti-government insurgents. I mean, check out the World Press Photo Award Winner for 1989:

Besides being very possibly staged by a reporter who was working with insurgents, this photograph also shows the People’s Liberation Army troops in a negative light. This photo portays the Chinese government as tyrannical and likely caused untold anti-Chinese inflammation. Equally telling is what the photo doesn’t show. No photos show Chinese troops rebuilding their homeland. No photos show People’s Liberation Army troops playing with kids in the street. No photos show the results of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. No photos show the thousands of freed prisoners from Imperial Japan’s tyrannical rule.

Where is the balance? Why didn’t the so-called World Press Photo Award give equal recognition to visually stunning works like these?

Is that the best the World Press Photo committee could find? Did they even bother to discuss the issues raised by The People’s Daily before bestowing the prize upon Charlie Cole? Were they ignorant of the controversy? Or did they simply decide in the end that it didn’t matter?

Update: More insurgent-loving sedition from the hate-China-first crowd can be found from Enemies of the People like feministe (2005-04-06) and Rox Populi (2005-04-06).

[Update 2005-04-08: completed a sentence I had left incomplete at the end of the first paragraph.]

Now that John Paul II has gone to his eternal rest, there’s been a lot of talk about his legacy and the direction of the Roman Catholic Church. There’s been some excellent, serious discussion going on within the Feminist Blogs cosmos over the conflicting strands of deeply compassionate witness and deeply misogynist reaction (e.g., Rox Populi 2005-04-02, Stone Court 2005-04-02 and Stone Court 2005-04-03, Pseudo-Adrienne 2005-04-04, etc.) and the Magisterium’s Consistent Ethic of Life, which for good and for ill John Paul II did more than anyone else to shape and witness through his long years as Pope. And while I think it’s absolutely vital not to forget just how bad some of his positions are for women and just how important that is, with his passing it may also be worthwhile to take a second to remind some folks on the Left about the full dimensions of those positions, and just how far both his conclusions, the reasons behind those conclusions, were from the standard-issue claptrap from the 700 Club crowd. And what that means if those on the Left are worried about the effects of the Catholic Church on our political culture.

Or, to put it another way: hey Democrats, quit wringing your hands and muttering mealy-mouthed excuses for trying to sacrifice women’s rights to control their own bodies in the name of political expediency. If you’re seriously interested in winning more of the committed Catholic vote, you don’t need to betray your commitment to abortion rights. First of all, because most Catholics aren’t against abortion or birth control. The Bishops are, but there are a lot more lay-people than Bishops in the Catholic Church. Of course, you might point out that the leanings of the Bishops still matter: they matter on turn-out, they matter to who feels confident in voicing their views within their community, and they matter because of the guiding role that the Bishops play in Church teaching. All of that’s true, but you don’t have to betray women to get the Bishops, either. Look, John Paul II’s conception of the Culture of Life, for all its deep problems, was still a lot different from the ghastly caricature drawn by the vultures and ghouls in the hard Right political class (most of whom aren’t even Catholic). You want to get the Bishops behind you, or at least get them a bit further from Republistan? Here’s what the Bishops are telling you they want:

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States plan tomorrow to launch what they are calling a major campaign to end the use of the death penalty.

The bishops, according to an aide, have been emboldened by two recent Supreme Court decisions limiting executions, and by polling that they say shows a dramatic increase in opposition to capital punishment among Catholic Americans.

Their campaign, which is to be announced by Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick at a news conference in Washington, is to include legislative action, legal advocacy, educational work, and a new website to be named www.ccedp.org, for the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty.

We think that, with a lot of work, the time will come, not too far down the road, when the US no longer uses the death penalty, said John Carr, director of social development and world peace at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Because of what we believe, and the leadership we’ve gotten from the Holy See, we ought to be in the forefront of that effort.

Carr said the bishops have been stepping up their activity in opposition to the death penalty in recent years. He cited as examples the bishops’ decision to file amicus curiae briefs in two Supreme Court cases, one last year regarding the execution of juveniles and one in 2000 regarding the execution of the mentally ill. In each case, the court issued rulings limiting the use of the death penalty, and in the earlier case the court majority cited the bishops’ brief.

…

Traditionally the argument had been that society has the right to defend itself against people who were serious threats to the common good as a whole, but the argument has developed in recent years that there are very substantial ways to protect society that don’t involve taking a life of a person who is guilty of a crime, said the Rev. David Hollenbach, a professor of theology at Boston College. This pope has taken an increasingly vigorous position in opposition to the death penalty, and that opposition is now contained within the catechism.

— Boston Globe 2005-03-20: Campaign set against executions

Check it, Democrats. Quit trying to figure out about how you can be mealy-mouthed enough on abortion to find common ground with the Magisterium. The common ground is already there; it’s just on different issues; you ought to be looking Left, not Right. So quit wringing your hands, grow a spine, and stand up for real against the death penalty, the violent harassment of undocumented immigrants, and the God Damned war on Iraq. That’s at least three things that the Church hierarchy will reward you for politically, and that you damned well ought to be doing anyway if you take yourself seriously as members of the Left. It’s true that you can’t give the Ethic-of-Lifers all they want without sacrificing principles that you shouldn’t dare to sacrifice. But if that has driven them into the claws of the hard Right, it’s because you haven’t even tried to offer them anything they want. Of course, these stances will only alienate the evangelical hard Right even further. But Jesus, who cares? What are you trying to do, win votes from the Christian Coalition?

Look, folks, this isn’t rocket science. It’s not like the Catholic Church has been shy about its stance towards the Bushists’ love affair with bombs, guns, and lethal injection. If you want to show people how the Left can work with the Jesus vote too, then quit letting Randall Terry and Pat Robertson dictate to you what the Jesus vote means. The 1,000,000,000 Catholics in the world have at least as much weight in that decision as the most obnoxious wings of fringe Protestant fundamentalism.

We are talking about low-hanging fruit here. Stand up straight and pick it for once.

DED Space 2005-04-01 reminds us that April is National Poetry Month. A lot of the literati these days seem to think that contemporary poetry is a lost cause. I don’t know that that’s true at all; but even if it were, it would, at the most, be a good argument for promoting the poetry of the past until our contemporaries get back up to speed again. Just because something’s out of copyright doesn’t mean it’s not good anymore, and just because something’s new doesn’t mean that it’s therefore more worth running in your journals and lit mags than something old.

So, in honor of the event, the Ministry of Culture in this secessionist republic of one will be reprinting poetry throughout the month. Since Yazad reminded me how good it is just a couple of months ago, we’ll begin today with Ozymandias (1818), by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Enjoy:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Quick review.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and several other senior government officials in the U.S. and U.K. told us that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. They told us that they were actively trying to find nuclear weapons. They told us that they had connections with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and that therefore Iraq posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States. Therefore pre-emptive war was necessary, and nothing short of regime change would do.

They lied. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told them that their evidence for claiming that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weapons was a forgery, they kept citing that completely spurious, forged evidence in public statements. When the U.S. intelligence apparatus was not giving the answers that they needed to justify their policy, they didn’t change the policy; they set up a new intelligence office to give them the answers they wanted. Questions were left unasked and intelligence was cherry-picked and sexed-up and those who offered cautious, qualified, or dissenting views were were marginalized by the
gang at the top and their political appointees at the top of the intelligence agencies. Needless to say, the caveats and doubts were completely erased in the governments’ public declarations and policy statements. Mysteriously enough, somehow or another, the attitudes of the mad-dog bosses at the top created an environment where groupthink flourished and even though the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq (Washington Post 2005-03-31), not one word of this evidence made it past the policy gate-keepers in the President’s cabinet. In other words, they had a goal, they looked for evidence to support that goal, and when they did not find good evidence they repeated evidence that they were informed repeatedly ahead of time was questionable or completely spurious evidence, and they shamelessly bowdlerized the data to in order to hide these opportunities for doubt and hype their war.

And it turns out that what they claimed on nearly every point was false.

Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Iraq had no connections with al-Qaeda.

Iraq was not any threat to the United States whatsoever.

Or to put it another way: they lied through their fucking teeth and, as a result, some 10,000-100,000 Iraqi civilians were murdered, thousands more were brutalized and tortured, and over 1,500 British and American troops have died in a rudderless, pointless bloodbath.

Dead wrong indeed. You fucking assholes.

Now that the latest report on intelligence failures–even while piously avoiding unauthorized inquiries into questions concerning the political use of intelligence in driving war policy, of course–has reiterated these sorry facts yet again, it seems that our august media and government officials are finally turning to serious questions of responsibility and policy, to make sure that something like this never happens again.

For example, The New York Times’ Op-Ed page indignantly blasts the Administration for encouraging the credulous use of shaky testimony from unscrupulous interested parties.

Meanwhile, Kit Bond tells us it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault..

And the commission’s report and Bond and the rest of the blowhard brigade have got an answer. Here it is:

The commission’s report said the principal cause of the intelligence failures was the intelligence community’s inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.

…

The single most prominent recurring theme of its recommendations is stronger and more centralized management of the intelligence community, and, in general, the creation of a genuinely integrated community, instead of a loose confederation of independent agencies.

The panel urged Bush to give broad authority to John Negroponte when he is confirmed as the director of national intelligence.

— CNN 2005-04-01: Report: Iraq intelligence ‘dead wrong’

The problem, you see, is how decentralized intelligence-gathering in the United States is. We’ve got to make sure in the future that we can avoid the politically-driven manipulation of data, that we can prevent dissenting or cautious assessments from being filtered out by hard-charging bosses, that decision-makers get all the information and analysis that they need to make a balanced assessment. And the best way in the world to do this is to consolidate and centralize as much of the intelligence apparatus in the United States government as possible.

Because nothing ensures a wide range of opinion and the integrity of data like making sure that it’s all filtered through a single directorate before it reaches decision-makers.

A single directorate under the control of one all-powerful political appointee, who answers directly to the President.

And that one political appointee should be John Negroponte.

All of this would be really depressing. I’m just glad that it’s nothing more than one sick fucking April Fools’ joke.

Right?