I've loved poetry all my life, a little strange since these days its a bit of a minority interest. I remember telling an amused friend that I sometimes used to spend the odd afternoon at a nearby park with a glass of wine and tatty version of the The Penguin Book of English Verse. At that time (senior high school) I was not a little in love with Keats and Coleridge (what a modernist, I!), a phase that took me a while to pass through. By uni I was reading Tennyson, a poet much out of favour, Shelley and Wordworth. Later tutors introduced us to Emerson and Whitman and I almost reached the 20th Century by the time I decided to drop English in favour of Theatre Studies.
As a high school teacher, I had little choice but to become acquainted with the modern era, especially Australian poets like Slessor, Dawe, Murray and Harwood. Wonderful poets all! And my own meanderings took me across time and geography to the likes of TS Eliot, Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy. I didnt even know Hardy wrote poetry! A seminal influence on my own verse (few as they are) was the British poet Philip Larkin, who quite reasonably argued that even modern verse could benefit by structure.
As an English teacher, I often had students (reluctantly) write poems from a range of structures and starting points, of which the haiku was one (Finally, you get to the point- ed.). I dont want to bang on about the properties of the haiku, only that, it is one of the most beautifully succinct ways of expressing a feeling or moment that I know. I leave you with this one by the 17th century poet, Taniguchi Buson, translated by Harold G. Henderson.
The piercing chill I feel
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel.....
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