READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

The frog fell into the pond drop-ker-plop. Frog made little impression this instance. Pond was out of its depth and all surface. Ripple scarcely made a ripple on top. Daily world continues serenity Sky sheen water abstracts green seeded scenes That night unblues to show world’s harsh careen Through high-tailed stars, black hole uncertainty. Drop-ker-plop. Clearly the subject is sex. Or gravity. Or levity. Theories abound. Theories splash down into a pond of texts. Concerts concern us, keyboards’ defiance Choral symphonies, the copies of sounds That reach our ears daily. Then, silence.

The haiku was virtually unknown to English writing before the twentieth century. Some readers see haiku in William Blake, William Wordsworth and many others, but if they are haiku they are there by accident rather than design. It is today the most common form of English poem, unless you define free verse as anything without end rhymes. Peter Porter was the first person I know to raise complaint about there being too many haiku, his words turning into the usual ker-plop of the frog into the pond of despond. Porter’s complaint was probably based on the judgement that there is too much bad haiku circulating about, and possibly that it is too easy to produce such stuff. Porter was anything but a curmudgeon, no scrooge muttering bah humbug at haiku. His expectations for poetry were always high, even with the lowliest of forms. His own poetry, for example, is a result of the Audenish belief that the forms exist to make something new, surprising, and different. Auden himself went ...

Some notes on Peter Porter’s poem ‘Frogs outside Barbischio’ Barbischio is part of Chianti in the heart of Tuscany, as is evident from the descriptions in the poem too, so we are in the Porter ‘paradise’ of Italy. As well as being about frogs, the poem has certain humans who are frogs, frogs who are engaged in the activity of art, and in particular writing. In my view, the grandfather frog is PP wistfully looking at his younger self, the frog who writes his anatomy of melancholy. Once more, 17 th century England meets 20 th century Italy: ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (1621) is a famous work by Robert Burton. I am in absolutely no doubt that Basho’s famous haiku is behind this poem, even down to the inference at the end that the grandfather frog has also gone kerplop into the water, only his stick still floating on the surface. I would say it is a reading of the Basho, and to appreciate the Porter it helps to know what Basho’s haiku is doing. Haiku is a form that evolved fr...