bob seger: retro-rocker or master of japanese poetic form?

 Consider these words by Bob Seger:

Woke last night to the sound of thunder. 

How far off?  I sat and wondered. 

Started hummin' a song from 1962. 

Ain't it funny how the night moves

With Autumn closin' in … ?

Haiku or not?  In the strictest definition, clearly not.  It's not even close to the 7-5-7 syllable structure that makes the haiku form so compact and elegant.  (I think people sometimes admire haiku for the same reason they admire microchip design:  Look how much you can put it such a little space!)  

Seger's lyric is closer to the five-line tanka form.  Since tanka are generally concerned with love or mortality, the Seger lyric is a good candidate (except for the syllable counts, which are way off).  And the entire lyric to the song from which this comes, "Night Moves," would be a chōka , if anything.  It's way too long for any other Japanese form.  (The reader will presumably remember the song, with its "I used her, she used me, and neither one cared/we were getting our share" challenge to feminist critiques of male exploitation.) 

That said, a seasonal reference is customary in the haiku form, and Seeger delivers.  It might be argued that he also provides a kireji, or "word which cuts."  Kireji often express wonder, and he uses that word explicitly.  Kireji can also be in the form of a question, like a Jeopardy answer.

Parts of this lyric could almost qualify as a Zen death poem, or as a premonition of death:

Woke last night to the sound of thunder. 

How far off?  I sat and wondered. 

That could be a meditation on the nature of mortal existence.

Ain't it funny how the night moves

With Autumn closin' in … ?

That really does sound like a death poem.  Would Bob Seger write something like that?  He put out a pro-Vietnam-War (and anti-peacenik) song called "Ballad of the Yellow Berets" when he was a kid. But we all mellow with time. 

Hey, am I kidding about all this?  Sure.  But that lyric from "Night Moves" really is beautiful and well-written (as opposed to, say, that other line about the young woman in question having "points of her own/way up firm and high."  That's just icky, especially coming from a thirty-something rocker reminiscing about teen sex.)  

Still, Seger's a hell of a songwriter - "Get Out of Denver" is terrific, for example, and so's "Turn the Page."  He doesn't get enough respect for his craft, and it's possible he never will.

Maybe he could write a haiku about that ...

Comments

[Athena Andreadis]

Politics aside, I think that Seger belongs to the Springsteen/Browne balladeer group. My favorites of his are Turn the Page and Against the Wind. The quiet songs of Night Moves and Nebraska are close kin. The true rebels are Warren Zevon and Tom Waits. I could list a scad of women troubadours and upstarts as well, starting with Joni Mitchell but I'll leave this as a mostly-boys post -- this once.