storm ended
a walk
through what’s left
walking
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 4: 1-5: Times two
I do lots of three-liners, I frequently do one-liners. But for some reason today, when I sat down to write haiku, feeling tired and hot and grumpy, the ku all split into two lines and refused to consider any other configuration. Feel free to psychoanalyze this turn of events.
*
yellow warbler —
clothes line full of black clothes
the funeral —
his dog walking proudly down the street
watermelon —
in the kitchen discussing their options
new potatoes —
a boy and girl trade shy compliments
river currents —
swimming with her glasses on
13 Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens: Found haiku, and a poetic tribute
Make sure you make it to the bottom of this post. There is a delicious candy surprise waiting for you. Or, um, a pile of Brussels sprouts, depending on your opinion of derivative, semi-parodical poetry.
The other day somebody compared some of my work to Wallace Stevens’s. This was hugely flattering to me because, although I don’t really believe in picking favorites when it comes to poetry (or really anything else), if someone held a gun to my head and said, “Name your favorite poet or else,” I would have to say (or rather, probably, shriek in desperation), “Wallace Stevens! Wallace Stevens!”
Like everyone else who knows a fair amount about both Wallace Stevens and haiku, I’d noticed the resemblance between haiku and probably his best-known poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” William J. Higginson and Penny Harter, in The Haiku Handbook (great book! read it!), quote the first stanza as an example of the influence of the haiku on early-2oth-century poetry:
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
I could probably go on for a while about what Stevens’s theory of poetics was and why he’s so great and everyone should love him, but you don’t really care and if you do you can go read about him on Wikipedia or even better, pick up a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind from someplace and just read his poetry until you fall over in a dead faint.
What you are really looking for here is some pseudo-haiku culled from Stevens’s work. And although I have some reservations about this exercise because I don’t think it gives all that accurate an impression of what his highly metaphorical, dense, intellectual poetry is about, I can oblige you, forthwith:
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the falling leaves
(“Domination of Black”)
the grackles crack
their throats of bone
in the smooth air
(“Banal Sojourn”)
The white cock’s tail
Streams to the moon.
Water in the fields.
(“Ploughing on Sunday”)
The skreak and skritter
of evening gone
and grackles gone
(“Autumn Refrain”)
A bridge above the … water
And the same bridge
when the river is frozen
(“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”)
Long autumn sheens
and pittering sounds like sounds
on pattering leaves
(“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue”)
The grass in in seed.
The young birds are flying.
Yet the house is not built
(“Ghosts as Cocoons”)
Slowly the ivy
on the stones
becomes the stones
(“The Man with the Blue Guitar”)
A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter
when afternoons return
(“The Poems of Our Climate”)
a bough in the electric light…
so little to indicate
the total leaflessness
(“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”)
— All selections from Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
*
Did you make it all the way through that? Okay…as either a reward or a punishment (you decide), I am now going to inflict on you a rare example of my non-haiku poetry. It is of course haiku-ish (being modeled on a haiku-ish poem), so it’s not too terrible. I don’t think. Oh — be sure you’ve actually read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” before you read it, or the full effect will be lost on you.
Something else you need to know to fully appreciate this is that Wallace Stevens famously had a day job as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut.
Thirteen Ways of Looking At Wallace Stevens
I.
The view from the window
Of the poet’s office:
Thin clouds spread
Over a hazy sky.
II.
I drive down the avenues of Hartford
Looking for Wallace Stevens
Or for what he has left behind.
III.
Precision, quiddity, and fancy,
The shape of Wallace Stevens’ mind.
IV.
A man sits at a mahogany desk
Holding his pen completely still over
An empty ledger book.
V.
The black marks on an actuarial table
Look much like the black marks
On a page of poetry.
VI.
Wallace Stevens walks to work
Down streets blackbirds have flown along.
VII.
What will you pay me, Wallace Stevens,
Not to finish this poem?
VIII.
I wake from a strange dream
Through which Wallace Stevens was flying.
IX.
The shadowy quality of a day in the mountains
Spent reading Wallace Stevens.
X.
Unassimilable,
Like the thing and the image of the thing,
Like the two parts of Wallace Stevens’ life:
The doing, and the being.
XI.
Wallace Stevens leaves the office,
Carrying an umbrella,
His briefcase swinging
At the end of the arm he writes with.
XII.
The two eyes of the poet,
Seeing in two directions.
XIII.
I sit down to write a poem.
I look up, and there is Wallace Stevens.
He casts his shadow over the paper.
Found haiku: Thoreau
Eager to procrastinate this morning (this is actually most of what I do every day), I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “I bet Thoreau is full of haiku.” So I pulled Walden off the bookshelf and started looking through it and giggling. (Yes, I know: I’m easily entertained.)
I did have to use some ellipsis to get haiku out of some of Thoreau’s meaty utterances (when you’ve been reading predominantly haiku even Thoreau’s vigorous prose seems a little Victorianly verbose), but in the end I was really happy with these. I stopped looking when I got to the last one, in fact, because it was so perfect I became too happy to sit still anymore and had to get up and go for a walk. It is equal parts Thoreau-ish and haiku-ish, and also is a nice counterpart to the first one below, which was actually the first one I found.
*
gentle rain …
waters my beans …
keeps me in my house today
where a forest was cut down
last winter
another is springing up
hollow and
lichen-covered apple trees
gnawed by rabbits
the house … behind
a dense grove of red maples …
I heard the house-dog bark
the wood thrush
sang around and was heard
from shore to shore
faint hum of a mosquito …
invisible … tour …
at earliest dawn
while I drink I see
the sandy bottom …
how shallow it is
my beans ….
impatient to be hoed…
so many more than I wanted
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Oh please/ like THIS/ is a haiku? (May 24: 1-12)
So the last few days got kind of heavy and I was starting to feel like I never wanted to see another haiku as long as I lived. Instant panic: I can’t be burning out already! Something must be done!
Well…what is the best thing to do when you start taking yourself way, way too seriously? Start acting incredibly silly, of course. Stand on your head. Do a funny dance. Write bad haiku.
Okay, maybe not bad, exactly. But…weird. Different. Not…haiku-like.
Oh! That reminds me of this thing I bookmarked the other day and vowed to come back to when I got a minute!
” ‘Haiku-like haiku aren’t particularly bad. But haiku that don’t seem haiku-like at all—nowadays that’s the kind I’m after.’
—Santoka (trans. Burton Watson)
“…The relatively narrow (and necessarily hybrid) basis of the tradition of haiku in English, with its emphasis on the here and now, can only take us so far; thus many published haiku seem ‘thin.’ Perhaps what’s needed is less striving to perfect the ‘same,’ more writing against the grain.”
–Philip Rowland, The Problem
Yeah, Philip (and Santoka), I know what you mean. Read and write enough haiku, and eventually even the good ones start seeming like parodies of themselves. All that nature! All those tiny exquisite details! All those lower-case letters! All that lack of punctuation! All those moments of enlightenment!
What if for one day I tossed out all those precious little haiku rules (as represented in italics below), and tried to write haiku that seemed un-haiku-like, and yet somehow preserved the spirit of haiku (whatever the hell that is)?
I think it would make me feel better. Though it might make you feel worse.
*
“Use concrete images.” And, “Don’t make direct references to emotion.” (You know, “Show, don’t tell.”) Also, “Slang is so unattractive.”
1.
Yeah,
I’m sad.
Also happy.
*
“Three lines (or even one) are nicer than two. Or four. Five is right out.” Also, “Metaphors are kind of tacky.” Also, “Cliches? Don’t even get me started.”
2.
This cup of tea
isn’t everyone’s.3.
Where I left the
balloon I bought
for your birthday:
On cloud nine4.
Swimming
against the current:
Fish
passes me
like I’m standing still
*
“Don’t shout.” Also, “Don’t swear.”
5.
WHAT THE HELL
IS A FROG
DOING IN THAT TREE?
*
“If seventeenth-century technology was good enough for Basho, it’s good enough for us.” Also, “Write in the present tense. Not the past. Or the future.”
6.
My email vanished
before I hit “Send.”
Will Facebook reject me too?
*
“Please don’t be vulgar.” Also, metaphors, cliches, yadda yadda yadda.
7.
No pot to piss in
when I need to piss.
Which I do.8.
My nose
in your armpit:
your long walk.
*
“Try to make at least a little bit of sense.” Also, “Minimize your syllables.”
9.
Sticky tape, sticky buns
Fine reticulations of burnt toast
Mud sponging over black shoes10.
where it (oh who am I kidding anyway)
stopped (my stomach is growling, when did I have lunch)
Haiku (there is as much in the future as there is in the past)
*
“Rhyme should be used judiciously. If at all.”’
11.
In bed tonight
I know you’re right.
Just turn out the light.
*
“No entitlements.”
12.
The Box
I opened it up.
There you were,
turned into packing peanuts.
May 4: 3 (Lake Walk)
lake walk
what you told me
slows my footsteps
Red Dragonfly 