Frozen

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After an unseasonable October snowstorm, my mother’s power has been out for three days. She shuttles back and forth between friends’ houses and the hospital where my grandfather is eking out an existence in the wake of a heart attack he didn’t tell anyone he’d had, stopping at home every so often to check on her frozen foods buried in the snow. She tells me about her friend’s maple tree, the red leaves at the height of their beauty, the white snow setting them off in unexpected fashion. I get fixated on that image and forget to listen to what she’s telling me about her plans for my future.

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low clouds
from day to day
my bookmark never moves

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Haibun Today, September 2012

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REM Sleep

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It’s two a.m., but the nightmare’s not counting. It has no logic but it’s happy to point out the flaws in mine. The mistaken inferences I draw every time anyone else speaks. The sour smell of gullibility that clings to me like mother’s milk. The stains of the berries that are native to the fool’s paradise I live in. No reason to doubt any of it, why would my subconscious lie? It knows every thought that’s passed through my mind since the first neurotransmitters leapt the first synapses, and it’s not impressed. It’s tapping my shoulder, clearing its throat, trying to get my attention politely, but none of that’s working. Like most terrorists, it only acts out of desperation.

blank slate
every night
I erase the moon

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Haibun Today  6.3, September 2012

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Space-time

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Only a few weeks later and already we can’t agree about how it happened. How to tell the story. Who should take responsibility. Who should claim credit. What happened first. What happened next. What’s even possible. He says he’ll investigate and figure out the truth, but I have a feeling it isn’t that kind of universe any more. I’m half expecting the cat lying next to us to fade away, leaving nothing but a smile.

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first light too far from the moon to believe it

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The Shape of Water

The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined…. [S]uch odd shapes carry meaning.… They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.
                                                                    ~ James Gleick, Chaos

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

~ Shakespeare, The Tempest

We say things are shapeless when they have a shape we don’t like, that is to say an irregular shape, a lack of symmetry, a pointlessness, a want of recognizable organizing principle, an unanalyzable form, an outline that fails to substantially map to any other outline we’ve ever seen, an unfamiliarity, a strangeness, a monstrosity. We are afraid the shapeless thing will take us over, erase our edges, unbalance us, take away our sense of purpose. We are afraid we will be eaten.

you’re water step into the water

A woman is often referred to as shapeless, especially after she has borne children. She is no longer a tidy package, she has been stretched, distorted, colonized; she leaks, her boundaries are not clear. Her infant seems at times like a removable appendage, a strange growth on the body that appears and disappears, both unpredictable and grotesque. Her flesh ebbs and flows, like the sea, to accommodate the child’s appetite.

in a shadow in the pond eggs being laid

The sea, too, strikes us as shapeless, vast and mutable, mutating, mute. Its edges are untraceable and its depths unknowable, and it contains an uncountable number of other forms. Many of these we also call shapeless, because we can’t clearly perceive or define their shape. Sponges, coral, jellyfish: we say they are lumpy, blobby, bumpy—words sound like mumbling; inarticulate and undefined speech. The sea silences us and imposes its will on us, and sometimes, in fact, it does eat us, and if we are ever seen again we are unrecognizable.

in the aquarium all the things we used to be

There, on the shore, amid the wrack and ruin, the flotsam and jetsam: that’s you, a shape I can recognize and name, if not fully comprehend. You were once part of my body but now you’re part of the air. You’re moving from shell to shell, from driftwood to driftwood, touching, lifting, examining, choosing, collecting. Like everyone else, you toss aside far more than you collect. Every once in a while you look back inland, every once in a while you look out to sea. The sun is setting and your figure is melding with the darkness; I’m watching you and then I’m failing to watch. What happens to you at last? I try to draw my suspicions in the sand, but the sea rises up and reproaches me.

ocean vents the life we don’t remember

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Contemporary Haibun Online 8.2, July 2012

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Please stay on the line…

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…your readership is very important to us.

Floating around out in the Interether right now are some interesting fruits of my labor from earlier this year. Since I’m not coming up with a whole lot of new material at the moment, think of this as hold music. Only, you know, better. I hope.

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1. Issue 1.1 of Multiverses has been released! I picked out all the haibun, so I really like them all. Some other really talented people picked out the haiku, tanka, haiga, and features, so I like all those too. Seriously, it’s a great selection of poetry and I’m pretty sure I’d be impressed by it even if I weren’t on the editorial staff. Go take a look.
2. Back in March Aubrie Cox featured on her blog Yay Words! the brilliant new subgenre of doodleku–she drew a doodle for every day and invited her readers to write haiku and tanka linking to it. Now she’s put together an awesome PDF called Things With Wings, containing the doodles and her favorites from among the daily submissions. I really enjoyed this collection because the ku cover a wide stylistic range and the link between doodle and poem is often subtle and thought-provoking. Also, the doodles? Adorable.
3. Also back in March, I had the honor of judging the Robert Spiess Memorial Award Haiku Competition, which is sponsored by Modern Haiku.  I shared this task with Carlos Colon (a.k.a. Haiku Elvis), so I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I had a blast. It’s a hard job reading hundreds of great haiku and choosing the best ones, but somebody had to do it. Also, it was kind of cool to be judging a contest honoring a fine editor who lived here in Madison, Wisconsin and published Modern Haiku here for 24 years.

Okay, I’m off to go for a walk and hopefully come up with some ideas for things to put on this blog that I worked on more recently than four months ago. Trust me, an operator will be with you shortly…

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Things

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swallows swooping…
a dent in my memory
that wasn’t there yesterday

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That’s a new genre up there. The YouTube video haibun. The Youbun?

Also…I know. I know. It’s been…forever. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about the little blog vacation I was going to take. That’s because I didn’t know I was going to take it. But I started a new job and my brain went, whoa. One thing at a time, buster. Whole new lifestyle. Crazy amounts of stuff to learn. Too little sleep. No blogging for you!

There’s still, you know. The newness. And things to learn. So many…things. And sleep, I must figure out what to do about that. But I missed you all. Don’t let me go that long without saying hi again.

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Instamatic

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It was just too damn easy to take pictures then and too damn hard to throw them out. All those packets from the drugstore, full of awkward poses, distorted colors, guillotined heads, red eyes, blurry faces, dim lighting. You looked at them only once—in the car on the way home from picking them up—and winced, all the joy suddenly drained from whatever occasion they had failed to adequately commemorate. But what can you do, it’s family. They’ll be in that box in the basement until you die.

my reflection
in stagnant water
…snow arriving

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last words: four myths

1.

Contrary to rumor, there are many boxes that I haven’t opened. It’s no harder for me to resist temptation than for anyone else. And honestly, I’m still not sure I’m sorry.

leaf skeleton key to an unlocked door

2.

I never expected to look back until I did. My fingers fumbled on the strings; I was suddenly afraid that she had fumbled too. Those last few sour notes still ring in my ears.

long winter evening a song in every shattering

3.

Yesterday we flew pretty close to the sun, but today we’ll fly even closer. The wax is hardening in the molds. We pace restlessly, raising and lowering our arms like fledglings who know they have wings for a reason.

in a sky full of clouds only one cloud white enough

4.

He measures out six seeds for me, six small poison pills, six ways to forget my life, six small deaths for me to die.

…and the last hum of the cicada the same as the first

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Random…

…places where you can find stuff by and about me, lately.

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“Editing Haibun and Tanka Prose: A Haibun Today Colloquium”

18 editors of haibun, including me, share their thoughts on editing haibun in the most recent issue of Haibun Today.

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THF Haiku App

There’s an app for me now. Well, okay, for me and a whole bunch of other poets. A couple of months ago The Haiku Foundation released an updated version of THF Haiku at the App Store. (I reviewed the first version a while back.) There’s a whole new selection of several hundred haiku and one of them is mine. No, I’m not going to tell you which one. You’ll have to go get the app to find out. (It’s free.) Because I’m diabolical like that.

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Sari Grandstaff’s Haiku Library (on Pinterest)

As some of you may know, I am attending library school and some day I even plan to finish. Three of my classmates there started an amazing project last year called the “Library as Incubator Project,” which aims to document and encourage artists who use libraries to inspire and assist them in their work. (That’s my summary of what they do. I hope they’d agree with me.)

Anyway, back in April, which was National Poetry Month, they asked Sari Grandstaff, who is a haiku poet and school librarian, to put together a Pinterest board about haiku. And she did. There’s a link to this blog on it, for which I feel very honored and slightly freaked out. My worlds collide.

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“A meditation on namelessness” and “summer vacation”

On his blog “haiku and commentary and tales,” Jim “Sully” Sullivan writes commentary about various haiku that interest him. More of us should probably do this. A while back (I’m slow, people) Sully wrote about a one-line haiku that I posted on Monostich. Then more recently he wrote about a haiku I published in Kokako and also posted here. He is way more philosophical than me but almost everyone is. I enjoyed reading his commentary.

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When I Dreamed This

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In the first dream I remember — and unlike many of my stories, this one is true — Dracula chained me in my attic. I was five when I dreamed this. Our attic was a large unfinished space that ran the length of the second floor of our house, behind the real rooms where we lived our daily lives. The attic was a shadow house, full of castoff furniture and household belongings. My younger sister and I played there all the time: Hide-and-seek, House, Scare-your-sister. It was dimly lit, and not climate-controlled: in the summer you could hardly breathe there for the heat. It didn’t scare me to be there but I had a proper respect for the place, I took it seriously. I had an unarticulated feeling that things could happen there that couldn’t happen in our house proper, that it was an alternate world full of alternate possibilities.

speeding neutrinos
somebody counts
to ninety-eleven

The details of the dream are fuzzy now but I can remember being wrapped in chains in a back corner of the attic, watching helplessly as Dracula flew in through one of the tiny windows in the form of a bat, then changed into Dracula and taunted me for my helplessness. Was Frankenstein there too? I seem to remember Frankenstein. I begged them to let me go but they wouldn’t. They wanted me to stay in that attic. I wanted to go. We didn’t come to any form of agreement before the dream ended.

rainy day
the storybook’s pages
bleeding

It was a nightmare, of course — I was terrified while it was going on, and shaky when I woke. But though I was so young I took it pragmatically. I knew there was no Dracula and no Frankenstein. I knew no one would chain me in my attic. I didn’t acquire any fear of the place. In fact, I may have spent more time there than ever, now that I could see what it was really good for: It was a breeding ground for stories. Some about things that could never happen, and some about things that almost certainly did.

mousehole
a line of ants
walks out of it

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Where I See Myself (Or, The Current Political Situation)

He stopped in my office one afternoon and began asking the kinds of questions I had always hated. Where do you see yourself in ten years? Where would you go if money were no object? What are your three favorite books, your five favorite songs, your ten best memories? What do you think of the current political situation? Why do you write poetry?

moonlight my reasons unreasonable

I told him I had a lot of work to do and couldn’t talk right now. A little while later I made a trip to the vending machine to get a Snickers bar. He was standing in front of it, trying to decide between Pop-Tarts and Hostess Cupcakes. I made a face. He shrugged. “They’re both terrible, of course. But if you were starving, which one would you choose?”

“I would choose Snickers,” I told him, and retrieved my change from the little hole at the bottom of the machine. I had to ask him to move in order to retrieve my Snickers. Somehow I got my hand stuck in the flap when I was pulling it out, sort of like those monkeys who get their hands caught in jars because they refuse to let go of the banana. I refused to let go of the Snickers. But I finally got my hand out anyway.

He didn’t say a thing.

what’s in between the root and the flower downpour

Back in the office, I opened up Word and started a new document. My Favorite Books. I couldn’t narrow it down to fewer than eighty. Another one. My Favorite Songs. Oh, please. Forget it. Now that we all have iPods we all have five hundred favorite songs. Another one. My Best Memories. I could only think of four. Memories are overrated.

the way birds start singing when you aren’t even thinking about them

I gave up on the lists and worked for a while on a spreadsheet that someone else wanted me to work on. It contained no useful information, but it looked really great. Then I made some phone calls and asked some questions with easy answers. No one appreciates difficult questions, people.

Why do I write poetry anyway?

tennis the ball never occupying exactly the right space

As I left the building he was standing by the entrance with an umbrella, which I never think of bringing. It wasn’t raining, but he held it over my head anyway. “How do you define poetry?” I asked him.

“I’ve given a lot of thought to that,” he told me. “Is this your bus?”

“I’ll just take the next one,” I said. “If money were no object, I would go on a tour of all the major mountain ranges of the world.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “I think you write poetry as a substitute for mountains.”

ten times ten is always one hundred secrets you never meant to keep

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Misdirection

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It’s winter dusk — a faded, in-between sort of time — and my mother and I are standing in a wallpapered hallway — a faded, in-between sort of place — accompanied by a large man who is wearing a dark suit and fluttering with apparent anxiety. We can’t take long, he tells us, and shows us a trolley on which is lying something human-shaped, covered with a sheet. His implication seems to be that this is my father, but I’m not fooled by this story; it’s the usual magician’s patter, a way to distract us from the sleight of hand being performed. I’m curious, though, about what will be there, exactly. A raft of rabbits, a drift of doves? A float of pink carnations? A thousand bright silk handkerchiefs?

in and out of winter ready or not

Abracadabra! — pulling back the sheet from my supposed father, we find him transformed into a doll, a puppet, a cold and eerily motionless replica of himself. The likeness is astounding. The things they can do with mirrors! I put a hand to his cheek. It feels as if it were made of some very soft, pliable sort of clay. Magician’s clay, perhaps they call it. I picture the page of the compendium of magic tricks in which this one is described. The Victorian illustrations, the magician wearing a handlebar moustache and a cravat. The diagram of the secret panel behind which the living man is concealed. The rotation of the chamber to present the mock man to the audience. A flourish of the wand.

lily stamens
reading a thin pamphlet 
about the future

Through the hall window the sky has deepened to navy and the moon has begun to shine dully. The features of the father-doll recede and blur. The magician flutters at our backs. It’s time to go, he says, the show is over. This, too, doesn’t deceive me. The grand finale has yet to come — the restoration of the living man to the stage. We allow the large man to draw up the sheet, to push the trolley into another room. Soon he’ll bring it back and let us pull away the sheet again. My father will climb smilingly down; we’ll all applaud while the dark-suited man bows, no longer anxious but proud of his skill at concealment and misdirection.

last bus out of town ice moon

We’ll all walk together out of the hall and out of this stiff, formal building, discussing magic and its mysteries. Perhaps my father will tell us how the trick is performed, or perhaps he has been sworn to secrecy. He’ll smile at us mysteriously, tell us we should volunteer ourselves someday, agree to be replaced and then restored. There’s nothing frightening about it, after all, he’ll say. A little boring, maybe. You just lie there for a while, listening to voices and sensing the growing darkness. I might have dozed off for a while there, he’ll say. But I enjoyed the rest, I admit. In fact I don’t see why you had to wake me at all, he’ll joke, looking up, as we leave the house, at the first bright star in the blue-black sky.

morning star
a blaze consumes
what’s left of him

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Haibun Today 6.1, March 2012

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Across the Haikuverse, No. 28: The On Beyond Zebra Edition

Sometimes 26 letters are not enough. Dr. Seuss fans will know what I’m talking about.

Anyone who writes seriously at all, I’m guessing, is frequently frustrated by the inadequacy of language to express the full range of things there are to express in the world. There aren’t words for everything. There aren’t even combinations of words for everything, although one of the things that great writers (and sometimes even we lesser writers) do is find new combinations of words to express things that haven’t been expressed before, or that have been expressed before but are in need of refreshing.

On my journeys around the Haikuverse that’s chiefly, I believe, what I’m looking for — people saying things in ways that are new, or new to me. I read a lot, I always have, so it’s not that easy for me to find words I haven’t found before. But it happens, still, many times each month. It’s one reason to keep going. There are others, but I keep coming back to words. I think language, for me, might occupy roughly the same space in my brain that religious awe occupies in the minds of many. We are endlessly finding new things to describe and inventing new ways of describing old things, as individuals, as a species; this seems like reason enough to believe in some form of eternity. Thanks to everyone who’s given me some reason to believe this month.

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Haiku

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just
kidding

you’re
not

alive -

morning rain

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driller
kun

du
lever

ikke -

morgenregn

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger

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Dear Malvina,
It’s been a long time since we It’s already autumn here . . .
lonely evening

— Rafael Zabratynski, DailyHaiku, 12/21/11

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うごけば、　　寒い　　　　　橋本夢道

ugokeba,        samui

if I move,                  cold

–  Mudo Hashimoto, trans. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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Slime trail—
glancing back at
the glinting

—Don Wentworth, Tinywords

(Also, you should read this lengthy interview with Don from Christien Gholson’s blog.)

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crow watching –
the unseen tree branch suddenly
seen

— Angie Werren, feathers

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dusk at the beach
a stone and I
touch each other

— Dietmar Tauchner, International Second Prize, The 15th Mainichi Haiku Contest

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冬蜂の死にどころなく歩きけり　　村上鬼城

fuyu-bachi no shini-dokoro naku arukikeri

a winter bee
continues to walk
without a place to die

– Kijo Murakami, trans. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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dark
the TV ignores
everything

— John Stevenson, ant ant ant ant ant’s blog

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cave mouth
a scream beyond my range
of hearing

– George Swede, Mann Library Daily Haiku

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first
snowflakes

like me
made to last

till
they’re

gone

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 3ournals and frags

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Tanka

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hour upon hour
a veil of simple snow
falling without reason
I feel an urgency
to risk everything I know

— William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society

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trailing my hand
through the water
for a moment
more river
than man

– Paul Smith, Paper Moon

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Haibun

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Another grey day has fallen as a pall on the new calendar as if what makes a difference really doesn’t. Only the ticking clock and the distant squawking of a crow or better yet, complaint, as well as the deep sigh of engines passing by tell the trudge goes on. I look on the cypress with a creeping sense of sorrow. The deep cold has darkened its twigs.  Gifts piled beside it now holiday debris. A black garbage bag rests folded in the bin. I gather the cards. The wishes slide off my fingers. A bag of pebbles waits to be planted on the vase. Like wishes that might take root, I would have to water them each day. But for now

blue notes waver under the lamp

– Alegria Imperial, jornales

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No, It’s Not Japanese Short-Form Poetry, But It’s My Blog And I Can Do Whatever I Want

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Almost Ready

five forty five a.m.

very cold

I move
close to a heater

night like wind

forming

itself

By god
I hear
a rooster

Crow

I had
only heard
a rooster

Crow

In the movies
before

this

To think
of the beautiful things

Your memory
has led me
into

And this poem

Almost ready!

— Aditya Bahl, dipping butterflies

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Essayed

Gene Myers, the blogger over at The Haiku Foundation, asked a bunch of poets in December what their hopes were for English-language haiku in 2012. One of my favorite answers to this question, part of which I’ve quoted below, came from Scott Metz:

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“One of my hopes is that the aesthetics and techniques—the poetics—that have become traditional (classical?), and entrenched, in English-language haiku (with all its wonderful and creative misreadings, limitations, misinterpretations and ahistorical stances) continue to flourish and intensify, and deepen. With an emphasis on transparency (and directness) of language, simplicity, plainness, literalism, direct experience, season words, and ‘ordinary reality,’ a remarkable, timeless foundation has been created.

“Another one of my hopes for English-language haiku is that it will continue to diversify and evolve; that poets will continue to play (the hai in haiku) artistically (with language, modi operandi, imagery, structure, culture, media, history, literature), go where they need to go—go where they must go—and continue to question and resist. …

“I look forward to the craft and artistry and invitations in everyone’s poems: all the doors and windows left open and/or cracked, all the lights on in the attics, all the latches and locks left undone. I hope for more of all of it and thank everyone for sharing it.”

– Scott Metz, Hopes for English-Language Haiku in the New Year

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Linked

Alan Pizzarelli and Donna Beaver, the team behind the haiku-podcast goodness of Haiku Chronicles, have once again teamed up with the astounding Anita Virgil to produce something amazing: a video exploration of the many dimensions of modern English-language haiga, narrated by Anita and set to music. You need to spend half an hour watching this: Haiga Gallery.

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Journaled

ant ant ant ant ant 12

Contact Chris Gordon at mrcr3w@yahoo.com for a copy of the most recent issue of his intermittently-published and mind-altering journal, featuring the poetry of the great Jack Galmitz. [Apologies to Jack for leaving his credit off the original version of this post. All I can say is, I need new glasses.] I highly recommend the ant ant ant ant ant blog too.

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The Heron’s Nest

just how
to hold you
paper kite

— Dan Schwerin, The Heron’s Nest, Dec. 2011

Amongst the usual THN goodness in the most recent issue was this haiku? senryu? which was discussed at length at the most recent meeting of (one of) the real-life haiku groups I attend, during a session on senryu led by the great Bill Pauly. The author, Dan, a wonderful person and poet, is a member of our group — he drives two hours each way to join us every month, which makes us all feel very lucky. This poem of his is so light and deft and well-constructed that it reminds me of a paper kite; I keep expecting it to lift into the air any minute.

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bottle rockets #26

pinwheel –
as if a second thought
starts to turn it

– Satoru Kanematsu

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Booked

One day in December when I was feeling very gloomy Peter Newton’s new book showed up in my mail, with a cover illustrated by Kuniharu Shimizu and an interior designed (oh, and written, of course) by Peter, with the kind of attention to detail that one normally associates with the finer still-lifes of the Flemish Old Masters. Or, you know, something like that. What I’m trying to say, in my usual pretentious way, is that this book is a lot of fun to hold. And page through. And look at. And read. Plus, there aren’t enough orange books in the world.

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_____________________________________________________________________________

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on my ceiling
the untraceable wanderings
of an ant
someone’s words carved deep
on a tree in my mind

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Measuring

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Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

four stars form something that isn’t quite square winter clarity

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every Christmas

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everyChristmas everyChristmasisthesame lights strung to evade the unavoidable dark, pine sap coating your fingers and the angels and the spun glass balls, paper keeps piling up on the floor and you begin to worry that something is lost beneath it but no matter how hard you look you can’t find anything but boxes with nothing in them and dry pine needles and the day moves toward dark no matter how many lights you light or how many fires you feed with paper and pine needles, thin dissatisfied fires with thin music circling them, and no matter how little you get you can never give away enough to make you feel better about it, and then you remember that something was born.

the morning after
you get what you want 
empty stocking

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bang and whimper

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Very very slowly but also very quickly. That’s how the world ended and always will.

first day of winter –
is glass a solid
or a liquid?

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Multiverses: Ready for Launch

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Hey everyone,

Every once in a while someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse. This happened to me not long ago when John Hawk, who is a wonderful poet whose poetry I have featured in the Haikuverse, asked me to become the haibun editor of a new journal he was starting, called Multiverses.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to take on this challenge. Haibun have a special place in my heart because I started out as a prose writer and have been wrestling with that craft for so long, and then along came haiku to become my new obsession. Combining the two forms skilfully, imaginatively, and artistically is a goal I have been working toward for quite a while now. (You can read some of my efforts on my “Site Archive” page, in the “Haibun” category.)

I love to read what other people are doing to shape the relatively new form of English-language haibun and I’m looking forward to being part of the process of putting some of that work out there in the world. I’m also looking forward to working with the great crew of editors that John has assembled from around the world (see below). Send us what you’ve got, we can’t wait to read it!

_______________________________________________________________

Here’s John’s announcement:

It is my honor to announce the launch of Multiverses, a new online journal dedicated to publishing modern English haiku and related forms of Japanese poetry, as well as to make an initial call for submissions for our first issue (due out in Spring of 2012). From our editorial statement:

“Each moment of our lives is a haiku waiting to happen. The unique way in which we experience these moments creates an authentic and personal reality known only to ourselves—our own little universe, so to speak. Yet we are all part of the same sum. By sharing our individual experiences and observations, we gain perspective and insight into the world of others, therefore becoming better attuned and more intimate with our own. It is with this idea in mind that Multiverses happened into existence.”

We are so excited and pleased to have an incredible team of editors, including:

Paul Smith, Tanka Editor
Melissa Allen, Haibun Editor
Alexis Rotella, Haiga Editor
Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Features Editor

Please feel free to share this post and spread the word about our launch. For more information about Multiverses, including details on submitting your work (deadline for our inaugural issue is February 15!), please visit www.multiversesjournal.com. We’re all looking forward to reading your work!

John Hawk
Founder, Haiku Editor
Multiverses

Across the Haikuverse, No. 27: Okay, So I Lied Edition

I know, I know. I said I wasn’t going to do this again for a while. But I’m so used to it! I keep reading haiku I love! And then I cut and paste them to a document and then I paste them into WordPress and then I fiddle with the formatting a little and then I press “Publish” and you get to read them. It’s not really that hard. No, really! It’s not! I totally can do it… at least one more time. Right? Please?

…Thanks!

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Haiku

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brittle moonlight
self-immolations
drawn on a map

— William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society

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hiding their faces well snowflakes
.
de skjuler deres ansigter godt snefuggene

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger

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change of seasons
I catch myself talking
to the wind

— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-doodle

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a break
in the clouds
how small we are

— Alegria Imperial, jornales

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in the second-hand book shop, the purr of the three-legged cat

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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千の矢の描く千の弧師走空　　青柳　飛

sen no ya no egaku sen no ko shiwazu-zora
.
one thousand trajectories
of one thousand arrows—
December sky

Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World  (her blog’s 1000^th post)

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目をつむりセーター脱げば剥製です　　　渡部陽子

me o tsumuri seitaa nugeba hakusei desu
.
taking off a sweater
with eyes closed
I am a stuffed specimen

— Yoko Watabe, tr. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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platelets—
the trip we were planning
to plan

— Roberta Beary, Tinywords

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itallcomestogether in the darkness for the owl

— Johnny Baranski, Monostich

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longue recherche
des lunettes pour mieux voir
le brouillard

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a long search
for glasses, the better to see
the fog

— Vincent Hoarau, La Calebasse (dubious translation by me)

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Haibun

she envies her her boyfriend that never fools around and her cherry-red convertible that never needs repairs and her outfits (complete with shoes and accessories) that can be had for less than ten dollars and the perpetually-shining plastic sun outside her practically-immaculate plastic house but most of all she envies her her god-damn nearly-perfect never-faltering ability-to-smile . . .

she says
“we can’t help who we love”
to no one
in particular
“all guys are assholes”

— Eric L. Houck Jr., haiku

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Haiga

Kindly click on the links to see the haiga that are not posted here.

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mouth of the cave
we enter as eagles
exit as sparrows

— an’ya, DailyHaiga

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opening emergency door,
head-on spring moon

— Kikko Yokoyama, with haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here

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— Aubrie Cox, Yay Words! (Click on the image [or the link to Aubrie's blog] for a larger, more legible version)

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Essayed

Chen-ou Liu posted a great essay recently on his blog Poetry in the Moment (originally published in A Hundred Gourds 1.1) about the phenomenon of “deja-ku”: “Read It Slowly, Repeatedly, and Communally.” Here’s a sample, but please go read the whole thing, it’s fascinating and there are lots of great examples.

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Today, high poetic value placed upon originality remains ingrained in the Western literary culture. This fear of unknowingly writing similar haiku or the reluctance or disuse of allusion proves that Thomas Mallon’s remark still holds true: the poets live under the “fearful legacy of the Romantics.” Could those poets or editors who are constantly worried about “not being original or fresh” imagine that a poet deliberately using a direct quote as the first two lines of his haiku can achieve a great poem?

– Chen-ou Liu, “Read It Slowly, Repeatedly, and Communally”

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Hey, thanks for indulging me. I feel better now.

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bitter night
I keep reminding myself
I’m a poet

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What Was His Is Mine

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The desk I work at was once my father’s desk. In my father’s desk there are many drawers. In the drawer where I keep my passport, he kept his cigarette papers. In the drawer where I keep my secret chocolate, he kept his canceled checks. In the drawer where I keep my unfinished novel, he kept his very well-kept ledger books. In the drawer — the top drawer — where I keep everything else, he kept everything else. Throughout my childhood I opened this drawer regularly, to inspect its nearly unchanging contents.

subclinical
waiting for the rain
to start

There were pencil stubs in here, matchbooks, old business cards, and various office supplies that were more or less interesting. But what I was most drawn to was an old pair of glasses, black and squared-off: old-fashioned, discarded eyes that my father never looked through anymore. I sometimes took off my own glasses and looked through them for him. I didn’t think the world looked much different through those old glasses, though. A little bit smaller, that’s all, and a little bit farther away.

distant thunder
tobacco isn’t what got him
in the end

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Haibun Today, December 2011

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Across the Haikuverse, No. 26: The Z Edition

So: number 26. If I’d been lettering these editions instead of numbering them, I’d be up to Z by now. And Z, as we all know, is the end of the alphabet. This is convenient for me, because circumstances are such in my life right now that I am afraid I must put the Haikuverse on hiatus indefinitely. The blog, too, will probably be seeing far less frequent postings for a while.

I will miss you guys. Spinning around the Haikuverse, taking in the sights, shooting the breeze… it’s been fun. I’m not planning on disappearing completely, but I have things to tend to in other corners of the universe at the moment.

Stay in touch.

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underneath
the ice
of the poem
an imaginary frog
slows its heartbeat

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haiku

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the closest
I’ll ever be
to sentimental
a room full of hats

— William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society

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spring cleaning . . .
the rhythmic sound of her
sharpening pencils

—Kirsten Cliff, DailyHaiku

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lark’s song -
in an old landscape
I part my hair to the left

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lærkesang –
i et gammelt landskab
laver jeg skilning i venstre side

– Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger

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Turning on the light I become someone alone in the house

— Sam Savage, ant ant ant ant ant’s blog

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autumn leaf already i am attached

:

without permission part of me starts to bloom

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winter day barely one language

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winter night she knowingly reveals another arm

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another day of snow my jurassic layer

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the only sound that’s come out of me all day firefly

:

at this point i just assumed they come alive at night

– Scott Metz, ant ant ant ant ant’s blog

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he thinks again of turning leaves her hands

– Angie Werren, Tinywords

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autumn days     straying from the text to marginalia

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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人ひとに溺れることも水澄めり　　　　保坂リエ

hito hito ni oboreru kotomo mizu sumeri

.

a human wallows in
another human…
clear autumn water

– Rie Hosaka, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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swollen rosehips
if you found God
in your body you’d die

– Anonymous (“Jack Dander”), Masks 2

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on 60 televisions the scissors hesitate

– Anonymous (“Bridghost”), Masks 2

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haiga and other art

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dog star
the origin
of poetry

— Aubrie Cox, Yay Words!

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two red butterflies
play strange attractor
in the garden

— Kris Lindbeck, haiku etc.

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– Rick Daddario, 19 Planets

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tanka

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if we had known
this would be
our last winter
when we professed
our love for the bomb

snow swirls
into light at the end
of the tunnel
echoes of the conductor’s
last call

postscript
for the apocalypse
countless years
from now — a cherry tree’s
first blossoms

– Aubrie Cox, Yay Words!

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hand in hand
a teenaged boy and girl pass
a cigarette
back and forth on their way
to being twenty

– David Caruso, DavidHaiku

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haibun

Revisit

I thought I had been sucked into the past. That sort of thing happens from time to time. I sat on the train on the way to the big city – well, as big as they come in Denmark – when a hippie-looking guy boarded with his monstrous Big Dane dog. My thoughts went in two directions. I thought: now, there’s a weirdo, knowing very well that in this part of the country many “off-siders” have found a cheap place to live as it’s rather poor. And I thought: great!!! Nice to see a flash of the past, and my nose replayed all kinds of smells associated with the early -70′s. Patchouli, sandalwood, fenugreek, hashish and wet and dirty “Afghan” fur coats, which was a bit of a turn-off, that last part. After having put his corn-pipe away he sat himself down in a very upright position: straight back, both feet on the floor and looking us, the other travellers, straight in the eyes. I nodded. He nodded. Dog said nowt. Then he padded the seat at his left side (he’d taken the window seat) and the dog, big as half a horse, jumped up and sat perfectly cool beside him, straight as a statue. The dog had a colourful tie as leash. We bumped on while I was listening to Incredible String Band.

straightened stream
a mirrored swan
asks twice

– Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 3ournals and frags

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Dead Tree News

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Some gems from the most recent edition of the always stunning Acorn (No. 27):

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enough said…
the moon rises
out of the sea

— Francine Banwarth

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isolated showers —
the genes that matter
the genes that don’t

— Michele L. Harvey

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never touching
his own face
tyrannosaurus

— John Stevenson

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all night love
the candle
reshapes itself

— Jayne Miller

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dad’s shed
a ladder folded
in the shadows

— frances angela

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full moon
from each shell
a different ocean

— Mary Ahearn

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autumn quarry
the feel of a dozer
going deep

— Ron Moss

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starfish…
to feel so much
of what we touch

— Peter Newton

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spring melancholy
I cut my tofu
smaller and smaller

— Fay Aoyagi

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Hey, seriously, I meant that about staying in touch. Drop me a line. Send me a poem. Tell me how your day went and where your life is going. I’m interested.

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away from the window
hearing the rain
trickle down the window

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