pi & anne

Haiku: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship With Purpose. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new developments; to boldly debunk that what goes too far.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it, Captain.

Just trying to think this a bit through, just trying.

[sips from a cup of Earl Grey]
[leaning a bit closer]

I write haiku and its birthplace is Japan. Japanese does not know capitalisation as we do have it. So when we translate from Japanese into English it should be natural to use the grammar of the country we translate into. English grammar. Replace this with any other language. Capitalisation is used in many languages out of many reasons:

[  ] to put emphasis on something,
[  ] to mark the beginning of a sentence,
[  ] or the beginning of a line of a poem,
[  ] certain nouns (or in German every noun),
[  ] proper names,
[  ] as a polite form of address,
[  ] for easier readability.
[  ] Even incomplete sentences in novels begin with a capitalised letter.

(There may be more reasons.)

[leaning back]
[pulls the jumper down, crease-free]

Sometimes choosing to write everything in lower case offers several reading possibilities. Yet sometimes the poet just opts for one. Then there is style to consider, the optics, concrete text art, the content.

[pausing]

What I want to say is: using upper or lower case is a matter of grammar and CHOICE which has certain effects. I don’t think we can easily boil it down to a rule of “a haiku prohibits upper case at the beginning and upper case is only allowed for proper names, and not doing this results in a bad haiku or no haiku at all, [deep breath in] because haiku demands lower case”.

[deep breath out]
[Grimace]

I would reply: then write in Japanese. This is the closest possible approximation, and no capitalisation. (Sorry. That was cynical.)

Let poets write in their language with reason and effect.

    Miles
    walking side by side…
    two warm loaves

Another thing, the myth of how awful it is to repeat the same article. Or even to use any article. Or too many of them. Referring to the above: we write in English, right? So let’s write in a way that doesn’t read like someone accidentally swallowed an or all article(s). Sometimes you can leave out an article. Sometimes it sounds really weird. Articles are there for a reason in our language, and repetition can be used very effectively in poetry. ‘a’ and ‘the’ mean very different things.

[almost imploring]

Write with reason and purpose! That’s it. Just don’t write lazily or just to follow rules. Look at the poem… what does it ask of you?

[reaching for the controls]

End of transmission.