Hobbled Discourse on Poetic Forms—The Sijo

What good is a traditional poetic form outside of the tradition from which it was derived? This is a question I consistently bump my head on as I ponder the role of “given forms” in poetry. Certainly, the haiku has achieved its place as an icon among forms in English because so many have practiced it for a number of years. But I always get the feeling when I’m reading the latest offerings from the Haiku Society that something has been lost, some strange piece of foreign antiquity has lodged itself between the teeth of us moderns. Basho might cringe at how the haiku has become the object of a dabbler’s afternoon fancy.

The constraints are fun to move around in, but one always asks, why 5,7,5 for the syllable count? Why not 7,11,7 in order to appease the gambling set? Of course, Robert Kelly did become disenchanted with the form in the 60’s and started writing the lune, a form which employed syllable counts of 5,3,5 because he thought that English says things in fewer syllables than Japanese. I’ve always thought that a good mathematical foundation for the number of syllables in a line should be the Fibonacci sequence, sometimes known as the The Golden Section [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc]. This pattern is found all over the place in nature. At least it might seem universal.

I’ve also been curious why some forms that are dredged up out of other traditions seem to make it big. Others don’t. The sonnet comes from the Italians. Now every American poet is writing a sonnet . . . until he/she reaches the fifteenth line; then he/she is not [Note: Henri Cole’s latest collection Middle Earth]. To me, this seems disingenuous. You can’t just keep a couple of the formal constraints, toss others out and call yourself a practitioner of the form. If poets were divers and left out a couple of twists on their dives of 3.2 difficulty, they’d lose a lot of style points.

The ghazal is a good example of this. I was first introduced to the form by Robert Bly and some of his translations of the Persian poet Hafez. There he describes the ghazal (pronounced “guzzle” I am informed, though I have never heard anyone in the U.S. call it this) as a series of couplets that employ sprung lines (each couplet is detached from the others) that finally invoke the poet’s name in some manner in the last line of the last couplet. I may be oversimplifying, but then Bly was oversimplifying before me. If one reads a little further about this form, one sees that the opening couplet should be rhymed. The successive couplets should employ an AA, BA, CA, DA, etc . . . rhyme scheme. In addition, the radif, the two-to-three words immediately preceding the rhyme in the first line of the first couplet should be mirrored in the second line of the first couplet and every second line of every couplet thereafter. Imagine such rhyming excess. In addition, to become really fluent in the form, one should familiarize oneself with the concepts of Beher, Matla and Kaafiyaa. On top of this, it is said that each line in the couplet should have the same syllable length or employ the same metrical pattern. One has to be quite diligent to get all this down. The end result is something that would strike most American readers as more than a slight bit repetitive. Adrienne Rich invokes the form throughout her career in a way that is interesting, but it doesn’t come close to the formal constraints of the traditional form. Is this another American conceit or does Rich just understand the psychology of the contemporary American a little better than ancient speakers of Urdu?

After a while, I think we can see: why bother? The game is up.

Too many constraints? This is only part of the truth. The other part I think is marketing. Until the big name poets plug this form (and why do they do it? one seemingly can point to an answer that mixes genuine curiosity and the genuine ambition to seem erudite), there is very little attention paid by other poets, even less incentive to imitate it outside of the workshop led by the famous poet.

So in the interest of advertising for my favorite but little-known form (which has little to no value with regard to the strengths that the English language has to offer), I humbly prepare for you: the sijo (pronounced shee-jo).

The Korean sijo is an ancient haiku-like form from the 16th century. It developed at that time because the pre-existing lyrical form, the hyangga, had gone out of fashion and only the didactic “hanshi” form and the epistolary “kyonggich’e ka” existed at that time. And both of these used the Chinese hanmun rather than the vernacular hangul Korean. The sijo, like the haiku, has three lines. Each line has a major pause in the middle. Each of its three lines typically has fifteen syllables, for a total of forty-five. Each line (of the first two) is usually broken down into two half-lines of 7 to 8 syllables. However, because the form can be interpreted as somewhat elastic, a sijo can have as few as forty-one or as many as fifty. Typically, though, the most rigorous adherents conform to the formal constraint of syllable counts 7-8 (first line), 7-8 (second line), 8-7 (third line).

The first and the second lines are nearly identical in form and syllable count, but there is considerable variation in the last line. The similarity between the first and second lines is one of function and content. The first line usually declares the theme; the second reinforces it usually through a restatement or a concrete example. The second line develops and elaborates on the first. However, in both function and content the last line is quite different. The third line closes the poem by introducing a jolting twist or countertheme. Because this third line is the focus of the poem, the first half-line of the last line, may be “syllable-heavy” usually containing eight of the total fifteen in the most rigorous application of the form, but it could range from five all the way up to nine syllables.

Hangul was reserved solely for the lower ranking individuals in Korean society. Women were some of the sijo’s foremost practitioners, and they were responsible for some of the greatest love lyrics in this form.

I will break the back
of this long, midwinter night.
folding it double,
cold beneath my spring quilt,
that I may draw out the night,
should my love return.
—Hwang Chin-i, early sixteenth century

Of course, all topics are fair game for sijo—love of nature, the joys of drinking, the pleasures and sorrows of idleness.

Green Grass covers the valley.
Do you sleep? Are you at rest?
O where is that lovely face?
Can mere bones be buried here?
I have wine, but no chance to share it.
Alone, I pour it sadly.
—Im Che (1549-1587)

Night covers the mountain village;
a dog barks in the distance.
I open a brushwood gate
and see only the moon in a cold sky.
That dog! What is he doing, barking
at the sleeping moon in the silent hills.
—Ch’on Kum

Boys have gone out to gather bracken;
The pine grove is bare of guests.
Who will pick up the dice
Scattered on the checkerboard?
Drunk, I lean on the pine trunk,
Let dusk and dawn pass me by
—Chong Ch’ol (1537-1594)

In the wind that blew last night,
Peach blossoms fell, scattered in the garden
A boy came out with a broom,
Intending to sweep them away.
No, do not sweep them away, no, no.
Are fallen flowers not flowers?
—Anonymous

For my next installment on traditional poetic forms I’d like to discuss the Icelandic form of the slettabönd, a rigorous four-line verse form that has the same meaning backwards and forwards. These palindromic verses are composed by people who have been buried in an avalanche and are waiting to be dug out. The rigor required to compose such a piece is said to keep the mind active and to keep it from panicking in the face of such a calamity. If each one of us gets going on this, I bet we all could knock one off before we’re 50.