Humor in Poetry

We run in some sort of problems, frustration, and indignation. Humor is the best way to drive them off in order to keep our emotional balance. There's humor in all kinds of writing, even in poetry. In Japanese short form poetry, such poems are called Kyoka, another version of tanka.

Among all my published tanka, two of them, just off the top of my head, have humor in them.

Here is one published in Fire Pearls 2:

instantly
I become a beauty
when my sister says,
"your mouth is as big as
Sophia Loren's"

In this poem, I poke fun at both myself and my sister who unwittingly mocks her own sex by embracing the idea that degrades women. In traditional Chinese culture, there's a saying, "A man who has a big mouth (its physical size and thus has nothing to do with the American idiom) will have a feast everywhere he goes. A woman who has a big mouth will eat too much to impoverish her husband." How unfair is this saying! My old-fashioned sister fails to see the sexism in it. Oh, well. She's entitled to what she thinks and what she believes in.

Here's another one published in Atlas Poetica's special feature of "All Hallow's Evening : Supernatural Tanka" :

Halloween Party . . .
wrapped in a green sheet, a foam crown
with a paper torch
I strut like Lady Liberty
who comes from Saigon

This poem is about my partaking of a company's Halloween Party. I had a lot of fun, playing Lady Liberty.

It adds another level of meaning to a poem, be it tanka or free verse, if we inject humor into our poems; the same is true to the other kinds of writing.

My Own Favorite Poems II

Again, I am posting some favorite Japanese short-form poems of my own. I have had quite a few poems published in a variety of journals, both online and in print. I'd like to reprint them here to share with you in case you don't read those journals or you read only a couple of them.

The following link is from Haibun Today. My haibun is about a former Viet Cong who had fled the unified Vietnam wrote a memoir about his life during the war and its aftermath. I believe my haibun will be of interest to those who are curious about what happened in Vietnam once the Bamboo Curtain was drawn. I hope this piece of my writing will make the reader think not only of war and peace but also of life itself.

Haibun Today

My Own Favorite Poems

I believe we writers have favorite pieces of our own writings, be they poems, essays, short stories, plays, novels, and so on. I myself have quite a few of my own published poems that are my favorites. Here are some that I'd like to share with you.

1)
illusional
dreams come and go
and hard
to hold them tight
like flowers in a mirror

(Chrysanthemum 12, 2012)

2)
a nondrinker
I don't know the joy
of Li Bai who drowned
his worries in wine . . .
I sip my second coffee

(A Hundred Gourds 2:2 March 2013)

3)
gravel path
I kick at the pebbles
so small
yet, quietly carrying
our weight

(GUSTS No. 17)

4)
Tet flower market
revives in Saigon
whose old charm
melts the Hanoi sun . . .
Dharma Wheel

(Atlas Poetica Number 12, Summer 2012)(It's part of a sequence)

5)
my pen
dips into shadows
of the boat people . . .
endless I search for words
to paint their ordeal

(Lynx 27:3 October, 2012)

6)
one drop of mercy
from Kuan Yin . . .
rain after the drought

(Haiku News, Vol. 1 No. 8)

7)
a reflection
across multiple rivers
my heritage

(Notes from the Gean 3:2 September, 2011)

The seven tanka and haiku posted here reveal quite a bit of me as I touch on a variety of subject matters.

Self-Editing

I believe that I touched on this topic before. Now I want to say some more about it since I came across an advice by a well-established writer in a writing magazine. Here is the quote:

"I thinking what you actually learn is the art of self-editing. It's that ability to look at a line dispassionately and not feel attached to it just because you've written it. It's also a matter of confidence." by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The two points that he brought up in this piece of advice are pretty good. First, I like "the art of self-editing." And, from my own experience, I did learn from self-editing. This is exactly what I mean "the writer's Aha Moment" that I posted in my earlier blogs. Self-editing is the hands-on learning process for me in haiku, tanka, and haibun writing, in plays and in fiction as well.

When Mr. Adams said, ". . . It's also a matter of confidence. . . ." I said to myself, "Yes!" My novel that is in the cooling period has gone through numerous times of self-editing. As it is now, I have cut more than 3,000 words by my self-editing. I did the cutting with confidence. During the first few times of self-editing, though, I was not that sure I should make the cut. Later on, I was confident that those words and even scenes I had cut were unneeded; in other words, they simply dragged on. What has given me the confidence? To do it. And, the more I do it, the more I find the self-editing process enjoyable and educational.

I know it's hard to chop off a piece from our writing, especially a scene. To make our writing better, I'd like to refer back to Mr. Adams's advice: ". . . It's that ability to look at a line dispassionately . . ."

I believe I have developed that ability. It takes time. And it takes work.






was

A Second Opinion

In my first playwriting class, my professor told us "the rule of three." It is about mentioning the character's name three times so that the audience may catch it. Ever since, I have applied such rule to my submissions and other writers' opinions. What does this mean? I will NOT listen to only one person's opinion as the sole comments and will NOT take the first rejection from an editor as the final decision. We like to seek a second opinion on medical issues. Why not do the same thing to our writings? In my opinion, even the writer or editor is an expert in the field, he/she could judge our work according to his/her own taste and/or preference. So far, I have been doing quite well sticking to the "rule of three." It also means that I will give my writing a second look if three people say the same thing or reject my piece of writing.

So, you may ask, "You believe in the rule of three and a second opinion?" Yes. However, it is definitely NOT my "rule" written in stone. Sometimes, a second opinion may not help and may cause more confusion and the fourth person may say something different from the other three. Therefore, the best thing is to trust ourselves: we know what we want to say.

In conclusion: A second opinion will serve as an opener that opens our minds and eyes wider.

Here is my tanka. Its Chinese translation will appear later.

both my sister and I
love Cantonese Opera-
in our youthful dreams
she saw a loving husband
I searched for a castle

Have I found the castle? Yes. In America. My adopted country.

My Writer's AHA Moment II

Last time I wrote about my writer's AHA moment. I simplified the process quite a bit. In truth, it takes more steps to revise my haiku and tanka. In addition to dissecting the poems into two parts, I look at more things, such as the word choice, the rhythm, the sentence structure, the word order, the connection of the two parts. Because I take these steps, I continue to enjoy the AHA moment. Not long ago, I got five tanka rejected. I dissected them one at a time and examined each poem for all the things I mentioned above and revised them accordingly. Aha, they got accepted by the other journals. The joy of discovery!

Here is a tanka of mine published in red lights, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 2013 with my own Chinese translation:

new citizenship . . .
a day of joy and sadness
wrapping myself
in the outfit of a cowgirl
do I look authentic?

新公民身份 . . .
一個悲喜交集的日子
穿上
一套牛女裝
我看來有真實感嗎?

Here is the link of Jane Reichhold's haiku book in English and Chinese American Haiku in Four Seasons, 1993 by Yilin Press, Nanjing, China.

American Haiku in Four Seasons

My Writer's AHA Moment

When we write, we like to talk about the reader's AHA moment. What about a writer's AHA moment? Here it is my writer's AHA moment. For writers, rejection is one side of the coin. No one will feel happy about it, but what can I do? Since writing plays, I have developed a "survivor's mechanism." Sending the manuscript out to other places right away? Well, yes and no. For my plays, yes. However, I don't do that for my haiku, haibun, and tanka unless I am sure they are really good. What do I do? First, I dissect the poems. For haiku, I first separate the fragment and the phrase and look at each part, checking the juxtaposition. Doing so, it comes my AHA moment--I see why the poem doesn't work. The same goes to tanka. Since a tanka has the upper verse and the lower verse, I separate them into two parts. "Aha," I say to myself. "I see why it got rejected." The process of dissecting is not joyful; the discovery is. Such is my writer's AHA moment.

Here is a tanka of mine published in Lynx XXXVII: 2 June, 2012, with my own Chinese translation.

autumn approaching
yellow leaves begin to fall--
back home
what fruits are in season now?
it's been so long since I left

秋即將來臨
黃葉開始凋落--
在故鄉
甚麼是現在當令的水果呢?
我離家巳這麼久了