Yesterday I continued my discussion on the Introduction to Al Salehi and Ivy Schweitzer’s Within Flesh, Poems: In Conversation with Our Selves & Emily Dickinson. In it, the two poets mentioned that they found the Senku – a short poetic form invented by Salehi – well suited “to our frequently satirical viewpoints and ironic presentation of politics and human foibles and our striving for the compression and punchy tone Dickinson’s poems so often deliver.”
They reported, “We even found several unintentional examples of the Senku in Dickinson’s work,” and they offered this as a memorable one – and this is how it appears on the page:
I shall vote
for Lands with
Locks
Granted
I can Pick ’Em (What we see / we know somewhat)
Huh? This is an “unintentional example” of a Senku, described by the authors as a three-line blend of a Haiku and a Senyru where “the first line states a problem or issue, which is expanded in the second line and resolved – or not – in the last line”?
I was confused. I searched the online Dickinson archive for a short poem with “I shall vote” as the opening line, but I couldn’t find it. It took me a bit to realize finally that this jumble of words represented extracted lines from the poem “What we see we know somewhat.”
Below is the full poem, and I’ve also shared a copy of Dickinson’s manuscript so that you can see how the lines break to fit on the paper.
They reported, “We even found several unintentional examples of the Senku in Dickinson’s work,” and they offered this as a memorable one – and this is how it appears on the page:
I shall vote
for Lands with
Locks
Granted
I can Pick ’Em (What we see / we know somewhat)
Huh? This is an “unintentional example” of a Senku, described by the authors as a three-line blend of a Haiku and a Senyru where “the first line states a problem or issue, which is expanded in the second line and resolved – or not – in the last line”?
I was confused. I searched the online Dickinson archive for a short poem with “I shall vote” as the opening line, but I couldn’t find it. It took me a bit to realize finally that this jumble of words represented extracted lines from the poem “What we see we know somewhat.”
Below is the full poem, and I’ve also shared a copy of Dickinson’s manuscript so that you can see how the lines break to fit on the paper.
 |  Lines 5 and 6 are the uprooted lines used to represent a Senku, and in Salehi and Schweitzer's presentation, they matched the line breaks found on Dickinson’s manuscript; however, I found it confusing to say “unintentional examples” of Senku were found in Dickinson’s works; rather, they found “frequently satirical viewpoints and ironic presentation of politics and human foibles” embedded within her lines, which one could then reconfigure as Senku: |
The first line states a problem or issue: “I shall vote”
which is expanded in the second line: “For Lands with Locks”
and resolved – or not – in the last line: “Granted I can Pick ‘em”
Am I being too persnickety? I’ll admit, I can be very literal at times (is that an attribute of a Libran?), so when they said they “found several unintentional examples of the Senku in Dickinson’s work,” I thought…. Well, I suppose you know what I thought.
**sigh**
I’m easily confused. LOL. I’ve written a senku – or at least a haiku – to myself:
Literal thinking
Encounters hurdles – so jump –
Below the surface
RSS Feed
