ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Smoke drifts in the air
coloured balls click on green baize
as fifties change hands

Cues come down on heads
big blue, red blood, black eyes
sirens wailing loud

Bust many pool parlours in your career Neville? Dens of iniquity? I like your homework attempt, painted a picture for me. Lovely to see you giving it a shot Neville - Thank you.

Me too Neville. I'm not a fan of the haiku but you have painted a picture with an economical choice of words. Well done!

Heather

and that's the whole idea behind the Haiku - every word has to count because you have so few to play with.

Haiku Haiku Haiku

Sorry I've still got the flu

Bob

Thanks Maureen, Heather.

That's the idea, it's missing the point to complain about strange verse.

This is a workshop and it is a valuable exercise to workshop economy of words and getting the most meaning out of distilled language. Or as Manfred would say, rich language. This is applicable to bush ballads as much as anything else. Ballads require more words but can become tedious if they are not finely tuned with just the right words, and only the right words.

No more than required and no less to do the job should improve our bush poetry and isn't improvement what we aim for. We can practice to learn it here, off the record so to speak.


Poor Bob. We almost feel sorry for you.

Both described the scenes well Nevil.

I was thinking (probably wrongly) that yours were real life action,
while mine I suppose were more abstract, like all poetry the possibilities are endless aren't they?

I also think there is a lesson there for our normal writing and that is,
the importance of choosing your words carefully and not to clog our poems up with unnecessary ones.
It takes an exceptional poet to write an epic that can hold the reader.

Cheers Terry

Haiku is more than a type of poem; it is a way of looking at the physical world and seeing something deeper, like the very nature of existence. Because it is so brief, a haiku is necessarily imagistic, concrete and pithy.

Here’s a classic and often used example of the haiku of Basho Matsuo, the first great poet of haiku in the 1600s:

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

Rather lovely don't you think?