March 8: This Is Not a Haiku

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Forward

March: It’s not just about the wind.
Light from the sun reaches us
and keeps going.
Raindrops flow like glass on glass.
My son is tracing circuit diagrams
on the back of a page from Hamlet.
We all dream that way sometimes.

When you climb a mountain
it divides the day.
Spring at the bottom and
winter at the top.
I pick up the phone, put it down again.
It’s not the right season to go backward.
I wish some year I’d remember
to write down the date
I hear the first bird sing.

Once a red-tailed hawk
moved into our neighborhood
and surveyed the chipmunks for days
before deciding to move on.
Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted
to stay too long.
I’m sure there’s a song about that.

The equinox is coming:
are you equal to it?
This is when we realize
that snow is water.
That ice is light.
That every day the sun reaches us
at a slightly different angle:
March.

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________________

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So I’m really busy this week. Really. Insanely. Busy. Right now I should be doing six other things. Going to bed being one of them. Every minute for the last week I should have been doing six other things. A lot of those minutes I spent writing poetry instead. I’m hopeless that way.

At one point I guess I decided that it wasn’t enough to jot down a haiku or two in my off minutes, I needed to write a longer poem instead, one that would require some concentrated effort and allow me to put off my much more boring tasks for as long as possible. So I wrote this.  Sorry.

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December 29: Moon Marathon

nearly full moon not nearly enough

.

I went too far again a slice off the moon

.

and again I apologize for the moon

.

dead broke but there’s the moon

.

with or without you the moon

.

I fail again at trying the moon

.

all the time I’ve spent being someone else the moon

.

don’t kid yourself you’ll never be the moon

_________________

so we were driving out to the East Coast for Christmas (which takes eighteen hours) and as usual I just sat in the car and looked out the window and napped and daydreamed and didn’t read or write or talk or do much of anything else, until suddenly around 10:00 p.m. I decided it would be a good idea to haul out my little all-purpose notebook (it’s a score pad! it’s a grocery list! it’s a sketchbook! it’s a haiku repository!) and write haiku in the dark and hope they would be legible in the morning.

and the moon was incredibly cool, just off full and shooting around in and out of the clouds, so most of what I wrote was about the moon, like fifty-something haiku in just over an hour, and you know what that means? most of them were crap. but that’s okay, it was fun, and a few of them were pretty good, and several were not bad, and a reasonable number were all right in a sort of a limited way for an off night (apologies to Paul Simon), which is mostly the kind I have posted here because the ones that were better I am still trying to make even better and the ones that were worse I wouldn’t inflict on you.

anyway, as you can see, the moon makes me happy even when I am slightly depressed, so I guess it’s good that I’m a haiku poet because then no one blinks twice if I write about the moon constantly and they even patiently read all my tedious little moon poems, or if they don’t they’re too nice to tell me about it.

that’s my story. and I’m sticking to it.

December 28 (Evergreen)

evergreen
he never
believed
he’d run out
of time

___________________

yeah, I know, five lines. so I guess that makes this a tanka, or a gogyoghka, or something. or else a really incompetent haiku.

I really need to research tanka and gogyoghka. I have been trying not to pay attention to them because haiku are time-consuming enough, and also usually when I read tanka I have this feeling like, “This would be a really great haiku if you cut out two lines.” But so many people seem to swear by them, so maybe I should get with the program.

Across the Haikuverse, No. 3: Underappreciated Edition

(For no. 1 in this series, look here. For no. 2, look here.)

The haikuverse? You want to know what that is? Why, children, it’s a wonderful place, where mostly underappreciated writers toil night and day to produce a body of short poetry that at its best makes you jump out of your shoes, clutch your hair in awe, and possibly weep. Also, where other underappreciated writers explain how these poems work, and talk about the people who’ve written them, and so on and so forth. Where can you find out about some of the most interesting things that happened there this week? Why, right here, of course.

1.

Last week Rick Daddario of 19 Planets was inspired by my link to Marlene Mountain’s “ink writings” to post a similar haiga of his own, rather than save it for Christmastime as he’d been planning. Since Rick lives in Hawaii, his images of the holiday are a little different than ours here in Wisconsin. I found this pleasantly jarring, and also just thought that both the ku and the drawing were a very successful combination. Here’s the haiku, but you really should visit 19 Planets to see the complete haiga.

silent night
the grass grows taller
with each note*

Rick also celebrated his blog’s 100th post this week — I’ll let you visit to find out how. Congratulations, Rick!

*This version is slightly different from the one I originally posted here, since Rick called my attention to the fact that he had modified his ku since I had last checked on it. I like this version even better.

2.

Congratulation also to another blog which celebrated its 100th post this week — Alegria Imperial’s “jornales.” In it she recounts the story of her first “ginko walk,” which her haiku group took to obtain inspiration for haiku. In Alegria’s case I’d say the walk was extremely successful — I love the haiku that resulted from it!

hydrangeas–
the same whispers
the same sighs

3.

I really liked several of the haiku that Steve Mitchell of heednotsteve posted this week. First there was his sequence “always wind,” inspired by his visit to the apparently constantly windswept Norman, Oklahoma. My favorite from that sequence:

always wind –
rush to the south, no,
now rush north

Then there was his humorous but thought-provoking “ku 00000010,” a followup to another robot-inspired haiku he posted earlier this month. This haiku is clever, but for me it works as a genuine haiku, not just a gimmick:

> 1: standby mode
>particles/waves illume
>blossoms as they close

4.

The wonderful online journal “tinywords,” curated by d.f. tweney, features a new haiku or piece of micropoetry every weekday (there are submission guidelines here, if anyone is interested). My favorite this week, by Janice Campbell:

amid fallen leaves

a business card

still doing its job

 

5.

Aubrie Cox’s personal website is well worth a look for her varied portfolio of haiku and other short-form poetry and critical writings. Since I’ve been thinking so much lately about how this blog is in some ways a collaboration between me and my community of readers, I especially enjoyed reading her essay “Writing with the Reader as a Co-Creator.” An excerpt:

“The inviting audience is ‘like talking to the perfect listener: we feel smart and come up with the ideas we didn’t know we had’ (Elbow 51). More importantly, however, is that the inviting reader can have an active role within the exchange between writer and reader. By doing so, the writer is not relinquishing all power back to the reader, or giving in to the tyranny, but merely developing a partnership. The reader can be the writer’s partner in the writing process if there is a mutual trust and cooperation, if the writer lets the reader become a part of the meaning-making process.”

Aubrie goes on to discuss how she sent one of her haiku to several acquaintances and asked for their reactions; their interpretations of its meaning were for the most part nothing like her own, but she points out that they were no less valid for all that — something I constantly have cause to remember when I’m reading my readers’ comments here.

6.
At Issa’s Untidy Hut this week, the Sunday Service is on hiatus for a week, but Don Wentworth has given us instead an insightful review of Silent Flowers, a short volume of haiku translated by the person who perhaps did more than anyone else to popularize haiku for English speakers: R.H. Blyth. Silent Flowers, published in 1967, was apparently excerpted from Blyth’s legendary 4-volume compilation of translations and critical study of Japanese haiku.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Don’s review — an Issa haiku and Don’s commentary on it:

Just simply alive,
Both of us, I
and the poppy.

Issa

“There it is, folks – doesn’t get plainer or simpler or truer or more beautiful than that.   After you read a poem like this, time to shut the book and get back to life.”

7.

Somehow I just managed to discover this week the Mann Library’s Daily Haiku site. Each day they republish a previously published haiku by an established haiku poet — each month is dedicated to the works of a different poet. The archives are a treasure for anyone exploring the world of contemporary English-language haiku — name a well-known haiku poet and they’re likely to have some of his or her works represented.

Here’s one of my favorites from this month’s poet, Gary Hotham:

time to go —
the stones we threw
at the bottom of the ocean

8.

Following up on my interest in foreign-language haiku: On the Haiku Foundation’s website, Troutswirl, last week, the regular feature “Periplum” (which is dedicated to haiku from around the world) was devoted to the work of a Bolivian poet, Tito Andres Ramos. Although Ramos’s first language is Spanish, he writes his haiku first in English and then translates them into Spanish. One I especially like:

sunny winter day
my packed suitcase
under the bed

dia soleado de invierno
mi maleta empacada
bojo mi cama

9.

Gene Myers of “The Rattle Bag” blog (and also the administrator of the “Haiku Now” page on Facebook) recently wrote about the chapbook of his haiku and other poetry that he put together on Scribd. (You can download the PDF here.) This looks like it could be a nice way to distribute collections of poetry without killing trees or inflicting boring design on people. I’m thinking about it myself, though I am also still attracted to the idea of the limited-edition dead-tree chapbook on handmade rice paper with custom calligraphy. But this is probably faster. 🙂

One of my favorite from Gene’s collection:

Moth between window and screen

I’m tired

 

And so am I. It’s exhausting, traversing the Haikuverse. Going to bed now. See you on the flip side …

Pseudohaiku: Search strings

what dives
in the water
red as a cardinal

 

 

 

usual syllables
haiku
for venus

 

 

 

haiku monastery
seen because flowers
have gone

 

 

folding knives
and pockets
in france

 

 

 

antique geisha screenprint
missing
left hands

____________________

It’s the end of a long, draining week. I thought we (at least we here in the U.S.) could all use some entertainment, and an opportunity to take ourselves not quite as seriously as usual.

So: The thing all these haiku have in common is that, clearly, they are not haiku. They are some of the eccentric search strings that have led people to this page from Google. I like to entertain myself by trying to imagine what was going through people’s minds when they entered these searches, and by what tortured logic the search engine directed them here in a vain attempt to fulfill their information needs.

I have a large collection of other search strings, most of which do not lend themselves so easily to being converted to pseudohaiku. Some of them are quite beautiful, though. Some are thought-provoking, probably in a way their author did not intend. Some I’m thinking of using as writing prompts in the future. (“Poems about bad wolves”? Yeah, I would read a poem about bad wolves.)

Here are a few of them. Enjoy. And take a few deep breaths this weekend.

the dragonfly land on you will they bite me or sting me

garden, fog, crescent moon, and stars

full moon and sleepless nights

haiku dragon shy rock

poems about bad wolves

why are the dragonflies red

why was the moon red last night

meaning of seeing a red dragonfly

“anxiety” “rustling leaves” “simile”

snowboarding villanelles

caterpillar incense cedar sphinx

November 2: The Front Yard, After the Frost But Before the Snow

1.

echinacea flowers making the best of things

2.

indigo seed pods any excuse to break things open

3.

tomatillo husks the emptiness of my hunger

October 27: 1-5 (Listening Wind)

1.

spending time
the way the wind
spends breath

2.
this catalog of breezes
making a distinction
between the air

3.
don’t stop blowing
wind
keep turning my pages

4.
my lips chafed
by the wind
I stop trying to explain myself

5.
inside the cyclone
my soul free to repeat itself
indefinitely

 

 

or

 

1.

spending time the way the wind spends breath

2.

this catalog of breezes making a distinction between the air

3.

don’t stop blowing wind keep turning my pages

4.

my lips chafed by the wind I stop trying to explain myself

5.

inside the cyclone my soul free to repeat itself indefinitely

 

 

_______________________________

 

The world here has been trying to turn itself inside out the last couple of days. It’s a little frightening and a little beautiful. Everything, including the people, is torn between resisting the wind and yielding to it. This is me, yielding.

I’m not sure what these want to be, or how much space they want to occupy. They’re mutable, it seems. They could be haiku. They could be some kind of meditation. They could stay with me, or they could take the next gust out of town.

The sun and the leaves and the wind are almost enough to live on today. But I ate breakfast anyway. I believe in eating a good breakfast, even when the world is blowing away.

 

October 25: My father’s birthday, and a brief discourse on ambiguity

if my father were here —
dawn colors
over green fields

— Issa, translated by David Lanoue

It’s my father’s birthday, the first since he died in February. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that I discovered this haiku of Issa’s yesterday.

It’s also interesting to try to decide what Issa meant by “if my father were here.” First of all, is his father dead or just not present with Issa at this moment? (I happen to know, biographically, that he was dead, but not everyone who reads this haiku would know that.)

And secondly — if his father were here, then what? If his father were here he would appreciate the dawn colors? If his father were here he would tell Issa to stop mooning around writing poetry about sunrises and get a real job? If his father were here — full stop: painful (or otherwise) train of thought interrupted by sight of lovely landscape?

Maybe the meaning is more clear in the Japanese. Maybe it’s not. Maybe the haiku is meant to open the mind of the reader to thoughts of his or her father, not tell them anything in particular about Issa’s.

Overall the haiku gives the impression both of being deeply personal and also of belonging not just to Issa but to everyone who reads it. Everyone has a father and everyone has been separated from him at some point. But that experience doesn’t have the same meaning to everyone.

This ambiguity, this refusal of the poet to constrain the imaginative options of the reader, is really central to haiku. They are short. You can’t say much in them, and you’re not supposed to. If you find yourself getting frustrated while writing haiku because you can’t say enough (never happens to me, nuh-uh, no way), you need to start thinking about what you’re trying to say that doesn’t need to be said. There is a lot that doesn’t need to be said.

Haiku should be full of space, at least as full of space as words. The reader should be able to sit in them for a while, and breathe, and hear herself think.

my father’s disappointment —
the first frost
melts beneath my finger

 

 

 

in memoriam david allen 10/25/1939 – 2/12/2010

October 24: You and only you

So here we are again, exhibiting the peculiar human fascination with round numbers by celebrating my 300th blog post. It’s only fair that I should do this by letting some of you get a word in edgewise for a change — after all, without you there wouldn’t be a me. Or rather, there would, of course. I think. Or is it like the tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it?

Anyway. You’re all such great listeners. And responders. The comments on this blog are like food and drink to me, and I say that as a person with more than a passing interest in food and drink. I have a suspicion I might have given up this whole crazy enterprise long ago if it weren’t for all of you, jollying me along, telling me politely what’s what, suggesting I might want to rethink one or two things, and just generally making me feel like I knew something but not too much, which is the right attitude to encourage in a blatant newcomer to any enterprise. There is some kind of charmed atmosphere around this blog which I can only attribute to the kind, thoughtful, and intelligent way all of you have received me, and each other.

These contributions were all so wonderful to read and made me feel luckier than ever. I loved seeing tanka and haiga among the contributions as well as haiku — I can’t do those things, or at least I haven’t tried yet, so it’s nice to have readers who can and are willing to share. I’ve posted all the contributions in the order they arrived in my email inbox. I hope you all enjoy.

Note: There were four haikuists who took up my (tongue-in-cheek) challenge to use the number 300 in their haiku in some way. They earn the promised bonus points, though I’m not quite sure yet what those can be redeemed for. 🙂 Congrats to Alan Summers, Steve Mitchell (tricky, that one), Max Stites, and Rick Daddario.

_____________________________________

at the cafe . . .
caught in the firing line
of the poetry slam

(Previously published, Modern Haiku, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Winter-Spring, 1999)

— Charlotte Digregorio, charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com

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Prince’s 1999
was played on that New Year’s Eve
300 seconds
that’s all that was needed
to fall in love

(unpublished)

300 klicks
from my home to Hull
a renga love verse

(unpublished)

 

warm evening
goodnight to the needlemouse*
as I check the stars

(Previously published, Presence magazine [September 2010] ISSN 1366-5367)

—

*Linguistic notes on the word “needlemouse”:

Kanji: 針鼠 or 蝟

Kana: ハリネズミ

Rōmaji: harinezumi

English: hedgehog

Combination Meaning: needle ( ハリ) mouse (ネズミ)

— Alan Summers, area17.blogspot.com/

_____________

obituary notice
the last of his regulars
died yesterday

— Stacey Wilson, theoddinkwell.com and inkwellwhispers.com

_____________

acorn
buried among fall debris–
the waiting

(unpublished, inspired by the post “acorn time”)

symmetry
in the bare willows —
the shape of longing

 

 

— Alegria Imperial, jornales.wordpress.com

_____________

Down this road – alone
silent, solitary, still
watching autumn fall.

(after Basho’s Kono michi ya!)

— Margaret Dornaus, haikudoodle.wordpress.com

_____________

sunlit garden
when did my father grow
an old man’s neck?

(Previously published, Frogpond, Fall 2006)

sprinkling her ashes
on the rocks at high tide
the long walk back

(From the haibun, In the Air [Planet, The Welsh Internationalist Spring 2007])

 

 

— Lynne Rees, www.lynnerees.com

_____________

october roses
the last but the most vivid
than ever

faded petals
the scent of their soft touch
on my cheek

 

— Claire

_____________

first serial publication
grandma asks
when I started drinking

(Previously published, bottle rockets #22)

haiku history lecture
doodling
paper lanterns

(Previously published, tinywords 9.1)

— Aubrie Cox, aubriecox.wordpress.com

_____________

Rivers Fast

Rivers fast!
Strongest
Clean…
Refreshing

 

Flower Waits

Flower waits
For bee
You see,
Bird told me

 

— Laz Freedman, lazfreedman.wordpress.com

_____________

crow lands on post
carries a grasshopper
can’t talk now

 

 

soft breeze
I regard nature, but wait —
I am nature

 

— Steve Mitchell, heednotsteve.wordpress.com

_____________

February wind
I want to believe
the crocus

early thaw––
the earth tugging
at my footsteps

 

(These two both took first place in the Shiki Kukai for the months in which they were submitted. I regard the first of them as my “signature haiku.”)

— Bill Kenney, haiku-usa.blogspot.com

_____________

reading history
seagulls gather on the beach
then fly away

(From Poems from Oostburg, Wisconsin: ellenolinger.wordpress.com)

turning the page
of a new book
branch of gold leaves

(From New Poems: Inspired by the Psalms and Nature: elingrace.wordpress.com)

 

— Ellen Olinger

_____________

the photo booth
becomes a grave-marker
our snapshots

how nice to see the sun
again, despite
returning spiders

 

— Ashley Capes, ashleycapes.wordpress.com/

_____________

who needs
three hundred facebook friends when
haiku are three lines

three fluttering notes
drift through the passage to find
the player and score

 

— Max Stites, outspokenomphaloskeptic.wordpress.com

_____________

a solitary bird calls to the space between lightning and thunder

(Previously published, http://tinywords.com/2010/08/11/2175/)

— Angie Werren, triflings.wordpress.com/

_____________

— Rick Daddario, www.rickdaddario.com/, 19planets.wordpress.com/, wrick.gather.com, www.cafeshops.com/19planets

_____________

spider song

eight syllables only
to tap your haiku
across my wall

— Lawrence Congdon, novaheart.wordpress.com

_____________

sharing full moon
with all the world’s
haiku poets

 

summer’s meadow
flowers too
inspire each other

— Kerstin Neumann

 

_____________

 

 

overcast midday sky-
her shrill voice calling
the ducks home

— Devika Jyothi

_______________________________________

September 17: Boundary Waters

arguing over the route —
the red squirrel scolds
our departure

northern light leaks between the birch trunks

last summer light
sunning on a log
turtle guts

after crashing into the rocks strange and beautiful mushrooms

filtering lake water
sediment collected
in my throat

into the wind she never looks like she’s trying

*

I finally got some kind of ku mileage out of my canoe trip. I think this may be about the end of it, though. Unless in a few years I’m sitting around bored and a sudden memory of northern lakes inspires me …

September 8 (Evening wind): What is natural?

evening wind
a cicada shell rattles
on our doorstep

*
Wow … this feels incredibly traditional for me. I mean, I think it’s reasonably successful as a haiku, if a little boring, but it makes me a little nervous because it’s so … haiku-ish. Is that weird?

I don’t think I quite realized until now how much I try to avoid writing what is the “traditional” English-language type of haiku with only nature imagery and nicely balanced lines and seasonal indicators and all that jazz. I tend to like better, and to write, haiku with something a little more … unexpected about them. Or maybe I just mean haiku that are a little more … authentic, or contemporary, than this. I don’t say I necessarily succeed, just that that’s what I’m aiming for. (Insofar as I’m able to articulate what I mean at this time of the morning, in a state of sleep deprivation.)

I think maybe the reason the nature-imagery thing seems so stilted and played out now is that, as a society, we’re pretty far removed from nature; for most of us, a manufactured environment and human technologies are more prominent in our daily lives than the rhythms of seasons and weather and plant and animal life cycles.

So, unless we’re naturalists or dedicated country dwellers who spend most of the day outdoors, it does feel kind of fake to be constantly writing about birdsong and drifting clouds and rustling leaves, at least without some kind of human context to put these things in what is their proper place for most of us — concerns secondary to whether the furnace or air conditioner is doing its job, or how many emails we got this morning, or how the traffic is aiding or impeding us in our daily journeys.

It feels like we know that haiku is supposed to be about nature, so we glanced out the window and saw a pretty bird and said, “Oh — haiku material!”, ignoring the fact that we’re not quite sure what the bird is called or what it eats or how it sings or makes its nest or how far it flies when the seasons change. We’re not bird experts any more (apologies to those of you who are, but I have never been a bird enthusiast); we’re experts on minivans — We’re not experts on wildflowers, we’re experts on wall-to-wall carpeting — We’re not experts on mountain springs, we’re experts on running water from the tap.

Lots of people have the same concerns as I do, of course, and there is lots and lots of great haiku being written now that does feel real and contemporary and still respects the haiku idea of placing the writer (and reader) in a specific time and place and making a very specific observation or two. I must say that I often have the same sense of anxiety about haiku that don’t mention nature at all, maybe because I do respect the power of haiku to force us to regard ourselves as what we properly are, which is part of nature, despite how thoroughly unnatural most of our surroundings are these days.

I really like the tension (not just in haiku but really in all art, literature and painting and photography and even architecture) between the natural and the human-made. I remember seeing a series of photographs at an exhibition several years ago of what were very clearly human artifacts, often in brilliant unnatural colors, placed in more muted natural surroundings — the effect, to me, was to highlight the beauty and interest of both object and setting.

Another time, our local botanical garden hosted an amazing art installation of long chains of large round scavenged things (like bowling balls and weathered plastic Halloween pumpkins and giant ball bearings) hung from very tall trees — like tree jewelry, I suppose. I could have stared at those things all day; they seemed so completely in harmony with their surroundings despite being so very artificial. [New! Pictures!]

And really, that is a very Japanese aesthetic too — the art of mingling the human with the natural in such a way that both are enhanced. Think of a Japanese garden with its neatly raked stone beds and small water bridges and carefully planned views of carefully arranged plantings (and if you’ve never been to a good Japanese garden, you should go to one, preferably today), or a traditional Japanese house with its natural materials and minimal furniture and openness to the elements.  [And more pictures!]

I think that that same aesthetic is or properly should be at work in haiku — the tension or perhaps, the reconciling of tension between the works of human beings and their natural environments. When I imagine a classical haiku poet I see him sitting in a house or just outside one, or walking through a village or riding a boat down a river, looking around him with a gimlet eye at everything in his surroundings — the plants and animals and earth and sky and people and buildings and tools and vehicles — and connecting a couple of those elements in his mind, without particular regard to whether they were “natural” or not.

So maybe that should be our ideal, as haiku poets. Really being wherever we are, and seeing whatever we see, and being aware, yes, of the weather and what the sky looks like and whatever is blooming or singing within our purview, but also mindful of the indoor weather, of the smells and textures of the things we have bought and handle every day, of the moods and wardrobe and habits and speech of our fellow human beings. And making of, or seeing, something real in all that stew.

Cicada shells do rattle, on doorsteps and sidewalks and driveways, in the autumn — much more resonantly on those artificially hard surfaces, I imagine, than they would rattle in a loamy forest or on a mountain path — and the sound is both chilling, like the autumn wind, and oddly comforting, especially to those of us who live in houses and can shelter there from the elements, unlike the poor departed cicadas …

September 3: A lament, and a lot of pictures

summer sky
what a picture
is worth

I’m back in the office and feeling a little downcast. I had high hopes for the haiku-writing potential of my vacation. After all, traditionally, haiku are nature poems, right? (Yeah, I know we could have a really long debate about that, and I would happily join in on either or both sides, but let’s just go with it for now.) And I was going on a canoeing and camping trip in the wilderness! It was going to be nothing but nature! Surely I would be so inspired that haiku would pour from me like … well, like haiku from an inspired person.

It didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, canoeing? Portaging? All day? Really exhausting. After eight or ten hours of that you have about enough energy to set up your tent, make and eat food, sit around staring at a campfire for a couple of hours, and then crawl into your sleeping bag and curse the tree root underneath you for a minute or two before passing out. Wielding a pen? Not on the agenda.

Also, I think — for me, anyway — being surrounded by nature is not the state most conducive to writing poetry. Or maybe it’s being in novel surroundings that is not the state most conducive to writing poetry. At any rate, I found myself so absorbed in just trying to take in and process all the new things I was seeing on a basic level that processing them on a higher intellectual level, making the kind of interesting connections that good haiku requires, was nearly impossible. I could write one or two lines of straight observation — but making the cognitive leap to turning observations into poetry was beyond me.

I’m hoping that after a few weeks home those observations will have marinated, or composted, or whatever it is they have to do, long enough that I will be able to turn them into haiku. Because really, it was an amazing trip, and there were plenty of connections to be made.

But right now I’m still sleep-deprived and my lower back is killing me. And after two days of grad school I’m already behind on my homework. So you’ll have to pardon me if for a few more days I keep resorting to posting haiku that I wrote last month when I had a more functional brain.

And in the meantime … here are some pictures to make up for my lack of verbal adroitness.

August 19: Saturdays, 11 to 5

*

on the birthday of a childhood friend, of which I was reminded by Facebook but had never really forgotten

*

the dog greeted me first
she was sienna
by name and color

my friend next
and then her mother
jeans and long hair

the kitchen
and its massive fireplace
big enough to roast a pig

the house was old
and felt more like my own
than my own

the past and the present
lived there together
without argument

jazz records on the shelves
classical music on the piano
above the Chiquita Banana stickers

paintings on the walls
with tilted points of view
and flower-gaudy colors

both parents painters
two studios to peek in
and feel small and colorless

an old, gray, small cat
wandering from room to room
like a fragile ghost

books I’d never seen before
and wanted
the minute I touched them

two sets of stairs
narrow and wide
so many ways to get everywhere

but in the summer
the house was no match
for the brook

paper bags of lunch
the sienna dog
following us across the fields

I didn’t always like
the sandwiches,
or not until I tasted them

I never remembered the way
but my friend led
as if there were signposts

after sun-filled fields, the wood
sometimes brambly
dark and disconcerting

and then, after a period
of  approaching its sound
the brook

the brook
a swift, wide, cold, dark path
in a hot world

glacial rocks lined the streambed
the debate was always
shoes or no shoes

no shoes always won
despite the pain of the rocks
I was the less brave one

I whined as we walked
on the water
thrilled and aching

sneakers tied around my neck
I vowed to wear shoes next time
but I never did

I always chose the pain
over the inconvenience
of wet sneakers

to travel the road of the brook
to the paved road
took forever and no time

when we climbed out
and put our sneakers back on
the world seemed heavier

it was hard to believe
there would ever again
be adventures

we were tired of each other
and our feet hurt
and it was almost five o’clock

time to go home
where the water was a pool
with a smooth lined bottom

chlorine kept the water clear
and a filter removed
everything undesirable

only sometimes in the night
a possum drowned, or
some other unfilterable animal

my father would remove
the dead things with a pole
before we saw them

that was what it was like
at our house, that was what
it was like at my friend’s

thirty years ago
in the hills of Connecticut
ten miles apart

August 11: 1-7: Roy G. Biv

1. a red wheelbarrow    this time there’s no significance

2. that last shriveled orange        those last two drops of juice

3. he never trusted yellow until he tasted lemonade

4. asking for green and being given an uncertain shade of blue

5. there will always be more blue than anything else

6. the indigo pods that shake in the autumn wind        beetles dying

7. trying to revive her        the child holds violets to her nose

August 2: Found haiku: Macbeth

In the last ten days I’ve seen five performances of “Macbeth” with four different casts. So many lines of the play have become earworms for me, especially those (and there are so many in this play) that use either sound or imagery (or both) to gorgeous effect. For instance (in no particular order):

•    If the assassination could trammel up the consequence, and catch, with its surcease, success …
•    Weary sennights nine times nine shall he dwindle, peak, and pine …
•    Tonight we hold a solemn supper, sir …
•    Stars, hold your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires …
•    There’s husbandry in heaven; their candles are all out.
•    It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak …
•    By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, whoever knocks.
•    Safe in a ditch he lies, with twenty trenched gashes in his head.

Some of the lines echoed in my head in the same way that some haiku does, which made me wonder if you could pummel iambic pentameter into haiku. I’m not sure how well these meet the technical definition of haiku (whatever that is), but they do seem to have something of the haiku spirit in them. And Shakespeare and Basho were (rough) contemporaries … so that must mean something.

*

the earth hath bubbles as the water has
(I.iii)

the moon is down
I have not heard
the clock
(II.i)

the obscure bird
clamor’d
the livelong night
(II.iii)

the shard-borne beetle
with his drowsy hums …
night’s yawning peal
(III.ii)

light thickens …
the crow makes wing
to th’ rooky wood
(III.ii)

untie the winds
and let them fight
against the churches
(IV.i)

I have words      that would be howl’d out in the desert air
(IV.iii)

July 30: 1-4: The Technique of Above as Below

(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)

Jane:

“… Some say one should be able to read the first line and the third line to find it makes a complete thought. Sometimes one does not know in which order to place the images in a haiku. When the images in the first and third lines have the strongest relationship, the haiku usually feels ‘complete.’ For exercise, take any haiku and switch the lines around to see how this factor works, or try reading the haiku without the second line.

holding the day
between my hands
a clay pot”

– Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques

*

Me:

This was way harder than it looked. And it looked hard.

I think part of the problem was that I really loved Jane’s example and none of my efforts came anywhere near her standard. I even resorted to breaking down her ku into parts of speech hoping that would provide some sort of formula for success:

gerund, noun object
prepositional phrase
modifier, noun

It didn’t.

But now I am a little bit obsessed with making one of these work, somehow, sometime. Anyone else got anything?

*

summer rain
one leftover cloud
frustrates

watching your eyes
by moonlight
the summer stars

a tree full
squirrels making lists
of supplies

night sheltering
from sunrise
our dark words

July 28: 1-3: American Sentences, sort of

A few weeks ago Angie Werren, in one of her comments, pointed me to a fascinating essay about American sentences, which she writes a lot of on her wonderful blog feathers. I don’t know if these strictly qualify, but I’ve been enjoying writing some as a break from haiku — sometimes trying to think in three carefully balanced lines is more than I can handle when my brain is especially fried. I just want some nice, normal English syntax. But, you know, poetic…or at least as close as I can get on four hours of sleep.

*

1.

The birds have stopped calling warnings now that the fledglings are gone.

2.

My sense of wonder is growing again — is this middle age?

3.

Waiting for my son, I see that he’s dancing to a song I don’t know.

July 27: Full moon last night

full moon
once again I forget
to look up

city haze obscures the moon           uncertain dogs barking

moon caught in the trees
the neighbors gather
to watch it escape

milk and the moon stirred into our tea

clean plates
the conversation
drifts to the moon

the moon adds layers      soon he’ll be convinced I’m right

sleepless night
the sheets as white
as the moon

July’s full moon        the fan blows away its heat

full moon
behind me in the mirror
such whiteness

July 17: 1-3 (Heat)

the heat index
the argument
subsides

July heat
wishing the grass
had a cool side

phlox droops
over the sidewalk
heat rises

July 9: 1-3: One-liners

1.

waiting for someone to speak first        the moon deflates

2.

ankle deep     the conversation turns    to drowning

3.

the sting of raspberry brambles        ask me again