I've been asked to put this up.

Haiku as Bush Poetry?

We met in a kitchen, a break from tasks.
"RMC Duntroon"; the badge on his chest
embroidered into his jumper. I asked
his vocation. 'Bush poems are the best."
He thought himself very much an expert
and having retired, gave them all his time.
I forget his name; perhaps it was Bert.
But I remembered his insistence on rhyme.
We talked about structure; I said I'd once
sent haiku to a bush poetry talk.
They'd disappeared with no comment or trace.
"Naah! Haiku are too formulaic." Off he walked.
We went our separate ways, each convinced
of the other's error; only I winced.

I pondered why I disagreed.
Were Homer's epics also flawed?
He'd thought sonnets were alright
"Not at all formulaic", but preferred
the rhymes of Gordon wedded to
Paterson's galloping metre.
Their ballads are great, but the world
and I have changed somewhat.
Now, apart from disconnected
bits and pieces of his life,
the only Gordon poem I recall
is the paraphrased fragment;
"In this life of froth and bubble, two things stand like stone;
kindness in another's trouble, courage in your own."

An aphorism
to live by, I thought. OK,
but I liked haiku;

"Haiku; distilled thought.
Quintessence of ideas
linked in one stanza.

"Classic poems of three lines
with seventeen syllables;
five, seven and five."
                        I wrote, a few years ago.

I mused "Why couldn't

"My old black billy;
soulmate, friend to my circle,
sings its lovely song.

A pear tin when new,
your handle a bit of fence;
both of us have grown.

We've both weathered much;
your trim's black but your tin's good,
old friend of great times.

Our tea and coffee
spread comfort zones far and wide
across the landscape.

                be narrative bush haiku?"
Rowan Webb, March 2010, as presented to the Friday Poet's Breakfast, 2010 National Folk Festival.

At the 2009 National I was having lunch in the Volunteers Kitchen and a bloke asked if he could share the table. "Of course," I replied. He walked very erect and wore a jumper with "RMC Duntroon" embroidered on the left chest; his appearance, his keen sense of authority and "being right" were the very model of an ex RSM. [To those not in the know RMC Duntroon was the Australian Army equivalent of Britain's Sandhurst and the USA' West Point; "Very pukka" and most definitely "a cut above the ruck". His badge has been superseded; all the various Forces' officer training establishments in Oz are now amalgamated into the Australian Defence Forces Academy, sited at Duntroon, one of the three ACT grazing properties that became Canberra after Federation. Yarralumla became the Governor General's official residence and I can never remember the name of the third.]

In conversation, your man said he had retired and become an authority on "Bush Poetry" and expounded at length on its virtues. I said I'd once sent a set of narrative haiku as an example of bush poetry to an on-line forum discussing bush poetry. They'd disappeared with no comment or trace. Your man was quite dismissive of haiku; "Naah! Haiku are too formulaic." I could feel my eyebrows elevating. "So, what about sonnets as bush poems?" I asked. He didn't regard them as formulaic at all. I wondered if Homer's iambic hexameters were too formulaic and thus similarly flawed but kept the question to myself.

But, I felt a poem about the event was worth drafting and presenting to the Poet's Breakfast at the next year's National. The result is above; a couple of sonnets and a couple of narrative haiku.

Cheers, Rowan