February
you bake me a sweet cake
in a sugarless country
.
skiing in Gorky Park—
suddenly realizing
where we’re going
.
March
a snowstorm
settles it
.
April
babushkas chiding us
for our warmth
.
May
blossoming
at last
.
_________________________________
Happy birthday, honey.
“To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” (New York Times)
..
seven or eight sparrows count them again
..
This haiku appeared on this blog last May, and on Haiku News last week (with the headline above).
For some reason, even though I wrote it in pretty much my first week of writing haiku, it is still one of my favorites of my own poems. Beginner’s luck, I guess.
Why do I like it so much? (You don’t have to ask so incredulously.) Well…first of all, there’s the whole “it’s true” thing. It’s impossible to count birds. (Impossible for me, anyway; maybe you’ve had better luck.) They keep moving. They’re transient, they’re transitory.
So many things in life are. You can’t pin them down. You look one minute and things look one way; the next minute they look entirely different. Don’t even ask about the differences between years.
But for some reason we (and by “we” I mean “I”) keep trying to get some kind of firm fix on the situation, whatever the situation is. Seven or eight sparrows? Well, does it matter? Rationally, no … but so much of life is spent trying to count those damn sparrows.
Also, I like numbers. I like numbers in general; I like arithmetic; I count things and add and subtract and multiply things all the time, just for the hell of it. Give me your phone number and I’ll tell you something interesting about the digits in, like, four seconds. “The sum of the first three digits is the product of the last two digits!” Or something. It’s a little weird. Kind of Junior Rain Man. (I do know the difference between the price of a car and the price of a candy bar, though. So your longstanding suspicion that I really should be institutionalized has not yet been entirely confirmed.)
I like numbers in poetry because they are so specific. Other things being equal, generally the more specific a poem is the more powerful it is, so numbers to me seem like high-octane gas or something for poetry.
Gabi Greve, on her mindblowingly complete haiku website, has a great page about numbers in haiku. Here are a couple of my favorites of the examples she gives:
咲花をまつ一に梅二は櫻
saku hana o matsu ichi ni umi ni wa sakurawaiting for the cherry blossoms
one is the sea
two is the cherry tree— Ishihara 石原重方
.
ビタミン剤一日二錠瀧凍る
bitamiinzai ichi nichi ni joo taki kooruvitamin pills
each day two of them –
the waterfall freezes— Ono Shuka (Oono Shuka) 大野朱香
Also, Issa is great at haiku that feature numbers. (Does this surprise you? I thought not.) A few examples, all translated by David Lanoue (and if you want more you should go over to David’s spectacular database of Issa translations and type your favorite number in the search box):
three raindrops
and three or four
fireflies.
houses here and there
fly kites, three…four…
two.
three or five stars
by the time I fold it…
futon.
rainstorm–
two drops for the rice cake tub
three drops for the winnow.
lightning flash–
suddenly three people
face to face.
mid-river
on three or four stools…
evening cool.
cool air–
out of four gates
entering just one.
on four or five
slender blades of grass
autumn rain.
a five or six inch
red mandarin orange…
winter moon
and one of my favorites of all time —
first snowfall
one, two, three, four
five, six people
Interesting how many of these involve the kind of uncertainty about exact count that my own haiku does. I don’t remember whether I had read any Issa at the time I wrote it. I might have been shamelessly imitating him, or I might just have been trying to count sparrows. You try it. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
.
for my birthday
I suppose
the moon
.
_____________________________________________________________
.
For my birthday (yes, it’s today), I gave myself permission to write another haiku about the moon (despite their currency being even more debased than that of haiku about snow). Or rather, to post another haiku about the moon that I wrote a while ago and saved up for my birthday.
I’m giving myself another present, too. I decided to do this last weekend, when I had been sitting at my kitchen table staring at my computer for about nine hours, mostly performing various haiku-related chores delightful activities (no, seriously) like writing the Haikuverse and preparing journal submissions and replying to fascinating blog comments and visiting everybody else’s fascinating blogs and figuring out what tanka were all about anyway. Finally I realized it was going to be dark soon and I quickly stood up on my wobbly legs and put on my running shoes and headed outside.
The air was cold and the light was pure and as I walked the air started flowing more freely to my brain, and within about ten minutes I felt a sense of deep peace and I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “I give you permission not to blog every single day anymore. Because this is getting crazy.”
I know. I know I said I would post a haiku every day for a year, and it’s only been nine months and change. But think about it. Nine months is a long time. In nine months I could have created an entire new human being from scratch. (I’m familiar with the technique involved.) Though I did do this, in a way. I created, or rather re-created, myself.
Okay, melodrama. I know. I hate it too. But in this case I don’t feel that this is too strong a statement. Before I started this blog, I had been wandering around aimlessly through most of my adult life with an unfocused desire to write stuff, but not really sure what that stuff was, or what exactly I had to say. I never finished much of anything I started writing. I lost track of it halfway through; it stopped seeming important or interesting. I was starting to think maybe I wasn’t really a writer after all, except that I had an uncomfortable awareness that the only time I ever felt completely aware and fulfilled and alive was when I was writing something.
And then haiku came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and quietly told me to give it a try, and since I wasn’t doing much of anything else at the time I said, “Okay.” On a whim I wrote a few haiku, on a whim I started a blog. As it turned out, this was kind of like going to a party on a whim and meeting the love of your life. Yeah … we’ve been chatting each other up for the last nine months, haiku and I, finding out all the things we have in common, marveling at the similarity of our personal philosophies, sharing our hopes and dreams for the future … at this point, I have to say, it’s pretty much impossible to imagine living without each other.
Which is to say, the reasons for my promising, back in May, to post a haiku every day for a year have essentially been rendered moot. I wanted to make a commitment to a body of writing and not give up on it for a change. I wanted to heal myself of my perfectionism and my reluctance to put any writing out in the world in case someone saw it and laughed at it. Well, none of these things are problems anymore. In fact, the problem I have now is that I would rather write haiku, and read haiku, and write about reading and writing haiku, and communicate with my fellow haiku enthusiasts, than do pretty much anything else. And I have a lot of other things to do. You know, school, and work, and laundry, and interacting with my family more than five minutes a day.
Also, it was fine for a while for me to just write any old haiku and slap it up on the blog without much thought, because I didn’t really know any better. But if I want to grow as a poet I have to not just write a lot of haiku, I have to take the time to live with them, and think about them, and revise them, and make them not just good-enough, but the best they can be. I’m not talking about perfectionism, I’m talking about craftsmanship; I’m talking about artistic integrity … oh God, is this starting to sound pretentious?
You do know what I mean, don’t you? At some point it’s not respectful to your art, or to your audience, to produce too much. To churn out publications just for the sake of publication. I mean, I still write haiku like there’s no tomorrow, but it’s starting to make me slightly sick to post things here that either I think are not really worth anyone’s time to read, or else that I could make even better if I took the time. It’s not that I’m afraid that you’ll laugh at me and point as I walk by and say, “Look, there goes the mediocre haiku poet!” It’s more just that I’m resentful of the time I spend putting up poems on this site that I don’t respect a whole lot instead of writing better poems.
I’m not going away. And the site certainly isn’t going away, it will be here indefinitely as far as I’m concerned. I’ll probably still be posting two or three times a week — you know, when I have something worth saying. I hope you’ll think it’s worth saying, anyway. I hope you’ll keep dropping by. This blog has transformed my life so profoundly — and just writing haiku wouldn’t have done that on its own. The presence of all you fantastic readers, and correspondents, and supporters, and friends is what has made the biggest difference. Not writing in isolation, wondering if I’m crazy. (I mean of course I am crazy, but most of the time you’re nice enough not to point it out.)
Thanks for once again listening to me as I go on and on interminably. (Admit it — you’re a little relieved that you won’t have to deal with that every single day anymore, aren’t you?) Someday, I promise, I am going to learn to pare my prose down the way I pare down haiku.
_____________________________________________________________
another slice
of birthday cake
and life
There is always something new to learn about yourself, I’ve found — in particular, there are always things you’ve forgotten about yourself that when you remember them, or are reminded of them, you are astounded by. In my case, I was astounded the other day when, rummaging around in an old filing cabinet, I pulled out a small sheaf of paper torn from a 2003 page-a-day diary and discovered that apparently at least once before in my life — in the first week of 2003 — I attempted to write a haiku every day for a year.
I only made it a week, so I guess it’s not surprising that this venture didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I guess it’s also not surprising that all these haiku are 5-7-5 and that none of them are much good, although a few of them are not completely terrible either. What does surprise me is that when I started writing haiku (again) back in May, I honestly thought it was the first time I’d ever seriously considered taking up the form. I mean I knew I’d written the odd haiku in the past because that’s just the kind of odd thing I’m always doing, but I’d had no idea that I’d once spent an entire cold week fixated on them.
I’m glad I didn’t remember, in a way. If I had, I might have been discouraged — “Oh, haiku. Tried that once. Didn’t work out.” It just goes to show that you never know exactly what’s changed in you and in what way you might catch fire next.
I know you’re dying to read some of these. I’ve reproduced them below exactly as I wrote them, punctuation and capitalization and similes and incredibly embarrassing diction and all.
.
January first
Christmas trees like bad habits
discarded at curbs
January cold:
even the seed pods shiver.
Hand me a sweater.
This winter landscape
everything is different
except the stone wall
Down by the duck pond
we trace letters in the snow:
“Please don’t feed the ducks.”
low sun in my eyes
I walk holding my head down
shy until spring comes
a fir tree sideways
beneath the lilac bush —
the corpse of Christmas
.
(I also must share an entertaining piece of commentary from this notebook: “I really wanted to write a haiku about how the garbage men turn the garbage cans upside down after they collect the garbage, but it turns out that’s a really difficult thing to write a haiku about.”
I’m (pretty) sure that was meant to be deadpan humor …)
Coming up on six months into this project, I’ve been revisiting some of my earliest posts. This kind of retrospection is always a little scary for us perfectionists. I tend to do it with only one eye open, stealing a quick glance and then looking away, my heart beating faster, trying to ignore the gall-like taste of humiliation in my mouth. (Yeah, OK: too melodramatic. That’s what perfectionism is all about.)
I’m surprised, actually, that I don’t completely hate every haiku I wrote six months ago. My very first post, in fact? I have a secret fondness for it. I keep looking at it trying to figure out how I would change it, but I keep coming up empty. It works for me, if not for anybody else. Beginner’s luck, I guess.
Things go downhill from there for a while, unfortunately. Reading through the month of May, I kept squirming, going, “That’s not the way you do it! I could do it better than that now!” Okay, not much better, necessarily, but … anyway, the temptation became irresistible. I started to rewrite. Not every haiku, just the ones I really couldn’t bear to let stand as they were, and had some clue what to do to make them better.
Then I started to post the rewrites below the originals. I haven’t gotten very far yet. I’d like to work my way along through the months, slowly, leaving a trail of shattered dreams and broken hearts — I mean, revised haiku — in my wake. I’ll update you, every now and then, on what I’ve done.
For right now, these are the posts that have revisions attached to them. Feel free to let me know whether you think I’ve made them any better, or just botched them up irrevocably, or whether they were beyond redemption anyhow. You can tell me how you would change them too, if you want. I’m interested. This haiku stuff has kind of gotten to me…
Nine ku for my son’s beginning on its sixteenth anniversary
January
1
a positive test field mice breed in the walls2
barely alive you already disagree with me about what to eat
March
3
wind from the west a body shifts in my body4
Ides of March on the ultrasound screen your state of incompletion
May
5
love’s effects visible I read from Corinthians to the wedding
July
6
drawn by heat you try to arrive but they restrain you
September
7
after my water breaks another solitaire loss8
the maze of my bones cracking open too slowly9
I don’t know
anything about you,then you emerge
prairie in May
if not for these pebbles
I would go barefoot
the middle of May
seven eggs become
seven birds
Red Dragonfly 