HAIKU IN THE TRADITIONAL MANNER
The first day
of Rod’s murder trial—
autumn wind
While Trinidad’s Peyton Place haiku often parody the plot lines, characters, and actors of the series, the haiku collection pays tribute to many haiku masters and modern poets throughout. Trinidad’s haiku come not from dubious conceptions of Japanese culture and traditions, but instead, like Ashbery and Sedgwick’s, a traditional Japanese form reconfigured for a new purpose altogether. Trinidad’s inventive syntheses of melodrama reveal that the traditions of camp and haiku are surprisingly similar: both require internalizing decades (even centuries) of artful gesture, performance, and representation, in order to recast them into highly compressed, personal, and historically-resonant art works. And what more ambitious journey could a queer haiku writer undertake than a 514-episode arch of Peyton Place?