password

It’s been a while (okay, YEARS) since I posted here with any regularity, but I realized recently that I was feeling a little homesick for this blog. Because Red Dragonfly, in some ways, is more my home than any actual home of mine ever has been. I started it literally the same day I started writing haiku, and I used it to figure out what haiku even was and what I thought about it and whether I could do it, and also who I was and what I could do in general. That’s a lot of things to figure out.

I was pretty confused in a lot of ways back on that April day in 2010 and now I’m…well, okay, I’m still pretty confused in a lot of ways, but at least I have some glimmer of what haiku is and what I think about it and whether I can do it, and there’s a whole community that I feel like a bona fide part of. And all that is because fourteen years ago I thought, almost in desperation, “I wonder if I could actually manage to write every day if the ONLY THING I had to write was a tiny little insignificant poem.”

Because by the time I figured out that haiku, although arguably in some sense tiny, were not actually insignificant, I had apparently become a haiku poet and knew all the other haiku poets and they knew me and we were all hanging out, sometimes arguing about haiku with each other and sometimes swooning over it together. And that is what I’m calling having a home.

It’s easy to wander away from home, though, and sometimes not as easy to get back. My life has swerved all over the place in fourteen years, and sometimes it’s swerved in directions that took it pretty far away from haiku, or at least made it hard for me to see haiku from my current vantage point.

But a couple of years ago it occurred to me that the way I feel most like myself is when I’m writing haiku, and that maybe I would feel better if I felt more like me. So I started sidling back toward haiku, at first eying it dubiously, the way we do the things that are good for us when we’ve forgotten that the things that are good for us are also the things that make us happy.

Then this happened and that happened, and the next thing I knew I was starting a journal, called Password: the journal of very short poetry.

I’m not sure I was aware I wanted to start a journal until I actually started it, the same way I wasn’t aware I wanted to start a blog or write haiku before I actually did either of those things. I did know that I had become increasingly interested in trying to figure out how haiku was different from very short poetry more generally, or if it even was different, at least by the generous and flexible definitions of haiku that many of us are currently working with.

I had a suspicion that many of the “rules” that evolved around English-language haiku evolved precisely because they were useful guidelines for making a poem work when there is barely anything there for it to work with. I set up the journal not as a haiku journal, but as a journal of very short poetry (25 syllables or fewer), because I was interested in finding out both what haiku poets would do when they weren’t officially constrained by the haiku rules, and also what non-haiku poets, who hadn’t been taught the rules, would do with drastic syllable constraints. Would they come up with new ways to make very short poetry work, or would they just end up rediscovering the techniques that haiku poets have discovered?

I can’t say I’ve derived any groundbreaking poetics of very short poetry from my editorship of the two issues I’ve published so far, but you never know. In the meantime, I’m discovering several other things: how many people are, mysteriously and thrillingly, willing to entrust their work to me; how exciting (how fun, really) it is to read that work, in all its variety; how much I enjoy assembling a publication from that work–tracing the themes that appear seemingly out of nowhere, deciding what pieces belong next to each other, cutting and pasting and swapping and just generally getting messy with words.

Thanks to everyone who’s been part of the Password experience so far–I hope more of you will join them.