Bindii Zoom Meeting May 2020

On Sunday May 23 we assembled for another Zoom meeting. Just four of us attended: Julia Wakefield, Steve Wigg, Stella Damarjati and Lynette Arden.  We were all much more confident this time with the technology and the meeting was quite prolonged!

The topic was Haiku sequences and strings, and our theme was Winter. We began by defining the terms: a sequence usually has a theme and takes us on a journey, sometimes through time, sometimes through a landscape, and often it does both at once. A string, on the other hand, can be loosely bound by a theme.

Janice Bostock’s Free Wheeling is described as a sequence on the Dangerously Poetic website https://dangerouslypoetic.com/poetry/freewheeling-haiku-sequence/  but Lynette Arden pointed out that the haiku which appears in the centre of the poem

pregnant again…

the fluttering of moths

against the window

comes from a genuine sequence which was published in Bostok’s anthology, Amongst the Graffiti, whereas Free Wheeling is simply a string of loosely connected haiku. On the other hand, it was agreed that Adelaide B. Shaw’s the Dust Bowl http://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2012-issue35-2/sequence.html is a powerful sequence.

We briefly discussed the idea of trying a renga or a rengay, based on the information that Maeve Archibald had sent us,  http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/rengay.htm#form2 , but we decided that we would have sufficient challenges working with strings and sequences, either as individuals or as a group.

We then all reviewed each other’s recent attempts, and Lynette showed us a sequence, Changing the Unchangeable that she had had published in her poetry collection, Travelling through the Unexpected (Gininderra Press). There is a repeated word ‘moon’ in all but one verse, which establishes the theme, while we journey through time from birth to death.

We will spend the next month working on our own sequences, plus we all agreed that we would set a theme for a group string – ‘Sound’ (which doesn’t exclude ‘silence’). We will all try to produce at least three haiku on this theme, and at the next meeting we will first choose the best haiku from each person and then decide the order in which they should be placed. The exercise may even result in an effective sequence, but at the least we should achieve a pleasing string.

We will have the next Zoom meeting on Saturday June 27 at 4pm.

                                                                                                                                      

  Julia Wakefield