Across the Haikuverse, No. 31: Election Edition

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Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, which you knew already unless you’ve been living under a rock in Antarctica the last couple of months, in which case I’m profoundly jealous of you because you have probably been having a way better time than most of us here in the U.S. Since I do my best not to expose myself to any form of commercial media and I close my eyes while driving so as not to see billboards, I probably have not suffered quite as much as my fellow Americans, but I live in a battleground state, so I’ve suffered enough.

I think I’ve responded to five polls so far. I respond to all polls I’m invited to respond to because otherwise I suspect the opinions of middle-aged lady poets who like to live in their own private world instead of attending rallies and yakking to reporters all day long would go largely unrepresented in this race. I certainly never hear anyone talking about this demographic.

Mostly I’ve coped, though, by trying to go on with life as normal, which in my case largely means reading vast quantities of everything that is not news. Here’s some of my favorites of what I’ve come across lately.

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daybreak–
a whitefish, whiteness
one inch

— Matsuo Basho, artwork by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here

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A blackbird,
his anvil call
striking I, I, I

— Marie Marshall, Kvenna Rad

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around dusk a stone offers me its free will

— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Monostich

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the growing
impatience of the queen –
autumn deepens

— Alison Williams, miso soup

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シーソーのかたへに秋の来てゐたり　　　金子　敦

shîsô no katae ni aki no kiteitari

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to the opposite side
of a seesaw
autumn arrives

— Atsushi Kaneko, tr. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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ils ont encore rasé
une parcelle du bois
j’ai encore maigri
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they’ve cut down
another patch of forest
I keep getting thinner

— Vincent Hoarau, La Calebasse (very bad translation: me)

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Both of them in the long grass, the haiku poet and the frog he feels compelled to ignore.

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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dark
the TV ignores
everything

— John Stevenson, R’r Blog

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evening sun
helping my dad
tend the cosmos

— Helen Buckingham, tinywords

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fish
the worm
heron
the fish
me
the heron
– glancing behind

— Bill Dennis, Last Resort Gallery

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Not long ago I was doing a thorough investigation into the history of English-language haiku and I discovered the following by John Ashbery, which I had inexplicably never encountered before.

37 Haiku

Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon

Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year

Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic

Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel

And I think there’s going to be even more but waist-high

Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer

You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit

You nearly undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing

That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now

And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove

Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance

Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

He is a monster like everyone else but what do you if you’re a monster

Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car

The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it

What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises

Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there

In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there

You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now

Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country

A pencil on glass—shattered! The water runs down the drain

In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer

A child must go down it must stand and last

Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms

Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking

There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book

The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?

In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity

The box must have known the particles fell through the house after him

All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates

I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare color

 — John Ashbery

I was originally going to quote only part of this, but I love, love it so much. The pieces of it are not really separable from each other. (Although, “You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now”? I’m just going to lie down now and roll around in that sentence for a while. Don’t mind me.)

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And while we’re talking about stuff I can’t believe I didn’t know about before, here’s a really spectacular introduction-to-haiku website by the British Haiku Society, who apparently have a graphic designer extraordinaire on staff. I mean, look at this thing. .

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There’s a slide show, too, so if it’s your turn to give a presentation at the next meeting of the Well-Meaning But Not Necessarily Well-Informed Literati of Calaveras County Club, and you’ve just about had it with explaining to someone different every month that no, haiku do not have to have seventeen syllables…here’s your chance to blow their minds.

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And while we’re on the subject of appealing visual design, and the British Isles…Tzynchromesh is the latest venture of Colin Stewart Jones, poet and artist of Aberdeen. It’s a journal that will publish works of fusion..two or more art forms meshed together. Poetry, prose, painting, graphic art, photography, film, music, sound or spoken word. Go.

Colin has also started a Facebook page for people to share their fusion art, appropriately called Fusion. And while I’m on the subject of Facebook, I’d just like to mention for anyone who doesn’t spend much time there that there is a huge, thriving community of haiku poets on Facebook. I probably belong to twenty or thirty Facebook haiku pages, way more than I can possibly keep track of, let along contribute to, but there is a fascinating range of styles and approaches represented there. The granddaddy of them all, of course, still going strong with daily prompts provided by a different poet every month, is NaHaiWriMo. I like Free Haiga and One Line is new and exciting. Gabi Greve has just started Translating Japanese Haiku, which should be fun. Facebook: It’s not just for cats and politics anymore!

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So there we go: I’m back on the subject of politics. I got here via a circuitous and sneaky route, not unlike the routes that politicians take when, say, debate moderators ask them their position on the turmoil in the Middle East and they manage to turn the subject back to taxes and how bad it is that people have to pay them when they could be doing more interesting things with the money, like buying entire cities of Chinese laborers to build new and better widgets to entertain the restless American masses. I am thinking of running for office myself soon and I hope you’ll all support me, since my platform consists mainly of the sincere desire that people should spend way more time reading poetry, if only to keep themselves from spending time thinking about how they and their friends don’t have enough stuff and everyone else has way too much. God or, you know, whatever, bless America. God knows she needs it.

 

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november dawn more matter with less light

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