lullaby
drowning out the voice
of the owl
(NaHaiWriMo topic: Sleep)
.
Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 13th
Chemical elements (from the periodic table)
_____________________________
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
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
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.
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.
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
half asleep
in the windshield
half a moon
*
There should be a photo to go with this, I will nag my husband until he gives it to me.
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
“What I mean here is mixing up the action so the reader does not know if nature is doing the acting or if a human is doing it. … Very often when I use a gerund in a haiku I am basically saying, ‘I am. . .’ making an action but leaving unsaid the ‘I am.’ … It is a good way to combine humanity’s action with nature in a way that minimizes the impact of the author but allows an interaction between humanity and nature.
end of winter
covering the first row
of lettuce seeds“
– Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
*
Me:
Three yellow birds
riffing on an old song
in the garden
Up the hill,
the iPod strapped to my arm,
playing it cool
Everything I know
seething in my mind
the dream begins
The fire next door
burning marshmallows
the boys trade equations
Bearing the pain —
the tree laid low with snow —
ready to snap
The empty porch
waiting for the UPS guy
to leap up the stairs
Hunting for a home —
the birds perched on the roof —
pausing to consider
Dancing to James Brown
the ants we can’t get rid of
track our steps
Yellow light —
hesitating as we approach —
hoping to move forward
*
Okay, I basically could have gone on with these forever, but I have about a million other things to do so I forced myself to stop. But I will be writing more. The ambiguity really appeals to me. You may have noticed that I am interpreting “nature” in Jane’s explanation as meaning “all inanimate objects” (so iPods and yellow lights are fair game).
I also was playing around with using actual punctuation and capitalization, which will probably get me thrown out of the Proper Haiku Writers’ Society. I apologize if I have horrified anyone, but I have been wanting to do this for a long time and only hesitated out of cowardice, not wanting to buck the trend and alienate the Powers That Be. But that’s kind of silly.
It’s fine with me if other haiku writers don’t want to punctuate or capitalize, but I think the arguments about that being the Only Way to write haiku are seriously overblown. I don’t really have time to write a treatise about this today, but suffice it to say that I think writers in English should be able to use all the tools that written English offers to convey their meaning and give aid and comfort to the reader. That being said, I tried very hard not to let the punctuation here erase the ambiguity or favor one interpretation of the haiku over another. And who knows, maybe I’ll go back to the minimalist look myself. I just really need to experiment with this to see how it works for me.
(not a narrative)
four a.m. bitterly spitting sleep out of my mouth
the speeds of light and sound meet in the storm
dying wind
where they were left
the dolls sleep
at the end of the storm the birds begin again
the newspaper brought
by the car in the night
the crane cries
light reorganizes itself around the edges of the leaves
dawn
the cat crows
in my ear
morning juice
a green bug climbs up
the broom handle
*
You’re not going crazy. I’ve revised a bunch of these since the last time you read them.
the owl
and the keyboard
syncopation
the owl and the keyboard
singing to each other
time to brush my teeth
too busy
to write a haiku about the owl
she flies away
sun hanging low
long line for Cuban
oranges
zoo in midwinter
the boy in heavy clothes
cries, “Eagle!”
spring tram journey
high-rises hemmed in
by birch forest
frost on the window
blini
with coarse sugar
laundromat steam
the breath
of sleeping cats
sick from lack of sun
a lemon drop from
a fur-hatted woman
blooming bulbs
children play
near the famous prison
warm riverbank
smell of fish
from the store called “Ocean”
melted snow
reveals worn lettering:
Faster, Higher, Stronger
*
I’ve been wanting to try to experiment with writing haiku from very old memories. Do haiku moments need to be captured when fresh, or can you let them mellow for a while? Might the moments that you still remember after so long actually be better candidates for poetry than the fleeting glimpses of things that briefly move you today?
Twenty years ago I spent a semester in Moscow, then the capital of the Soviet Union. It was a life-changing time in many ways — for one thing, I met my husband there. (He’s an American, in case you were wondering.) For another, it was a world so different from the one I was used to that I got used to staring at things and noticing them, which is good practice for a writer. There are still so many tiny moments of astonishment that flash across my brain from that time.
I will say, though — I don’t think most of them really fit themselves well to haiku, maybe because my mind was relentlessly prosy then. I keep wanting to write whole essays about them, describing the whole surrounding scene and pretentiously analyzing cultural differences. Or maybe it really is futile to write haiku about things that happened so long ago; maybe you need to seize on haiku moments the moment you see them.
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
“…most of the surprises of life are the contrasts, and therefore this technique is a major one for haiku.
“long hard rain
hanging in the willows
tender new leaves”— Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
Me:
warning cries of birds
hot clearing in the grass
we lie unspeaking
smell of cut grass —
on the flowerbed
dogshit
before the storm
white sky turns black
flight of cardinal
rain in the night
waking alone
skin dry
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
“In the words of Betty Drevniok: ‘In haiku the SOMETHING and the SOMETHING ELSE are set down together in clearly stated images. Together they complete and fulfill each other as ONE PARTICULAR EVENT.’
“a spring nap
downstream cherry trees
in bud”
— Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
Me:
yellow water lilies
on gray water
sun through the clouds
bouquet of tulips
messenger in
tie-dyed T-shirt
boys juggling
leaves set free
by the wind
the crying far away
of someone left behind
sandhill cranes at dawn
faint pencil marks
in the margins
the book you left behind
I “wrote” both of these in bed this morning, in my head, while I was barely awake. I could hear the cranes, the mournful bass underlying the rest of the dawn chorus. I don’t know where the pencil marks came from, maybe a dream. After I got up and wrote them down, the two haiku seemed connected to me and I couldn’t figure out why; then I realized they both contain the phrase “left behind.” My conscious will be interrogating my subconscious about that for the rest of the day.
full moon
the clock that ticks
so loudly
full moon
the dream I can’t
remember
full moon
listening to you
breathe
full moon
tapping your shoulder
to wake you
full moon
unsure whose legs
are whose
full moon
asleep
at last
Red Dragonfly 