March 17: Autumn Wind (in Wet Cement)

This looks like it’s from a printed page because it is. It’s from Wet Cement, which is a lovely little conference anthology from the “Cradle of American Haiku” Haiku Society of America conference back in September. Mike Montreuil edited it, Aubrie Cox laid it out (check out her beloved Optima typeface) and Lidia Rozmus did some understated, beautiful artwork (in her usual style) for it. It was a delight to get it in the mail last week and be reminded of that wonderful weekend and so many of the wonderful poets I met.

The title comes from a haiku by Gayle Bull, the proprietress of Foundry Books, where part of the conference was held (and where I really need to get back to, soon, to check out the mind-blowing haiku section, because, ha ha, I don’t have enough to read). It is, fittingly, written in concrete on the ledge of a window in her shop. (Also in ink, on page 24 of the anthology.)

wet cement —
kids hide in the bushes
giggling

— Gayle Bull

“Cradle”: Winding down …

Okay. This will be my last bulletin from the Cradle of American Haiku Festival. I hope my coverage hasn’t been too exhaustive (or exhausting). I’ve just found the whole experience so much fun and so fascinating that I wanted to give everyone who’s never been to a haiku conference some sense of what it’s all about. Also, I learned so much that I didn’t want to forget and that I thought was worth sharing.

So. We’ve reached the end of the “mostly educational” phase of the conference and are moving on to the “mostly social” phase. By this point I had met enough people and felt comfortable enough in the group that instead of cowering in a corner, I actually found myself having lots of lively conversations and making new friends. It was an amazing feeling to be in the presence of so many other people who were passionate about haiku, especially since before this weekend I’d never met another haiku poet in person. Now I know so many I can’t even remember all their names.

While sitting on the porch of Foundry Books, reviving myself after a long day of lectures and workshops by scarfing down several more of the fantastic chocolate chip cookies that I had developed a serious addiction to the day before, I had a nice conversation with Gayle Bull about her amazing garden, songbirds, and life in a hundred-and-sixty-year-old house in Mineral Point (tip: dress warmly in winter). Gayle also invited me to meet with her haiku group in Mineral Point — I may take her up on that (although I am still thinking of starting a group in Madison, if that doesn’t require too insane a time commitment).

At cocktail hour and the picnic following, Charlie Trumbull and I discovered that we had shared an undergraduate university and major and compared notes on the one professor in our department who was there at the same time as both of us. I talked to a guy from Madison whom I’d known in another context many years ago and got caught up. I had a lot of fun talking to a librarian — my current subject of graduate study — and her husband who is in (more or less) the same line of work as my husband. I got to know Lidia Rozmus, a wonderful haiga artist who is originally from Poland, and bonded with her over discussions of life behind the Iron Curtain (I spent a semester studying in Moscow before the collapse of the Soviet Union).

A haiku reading ended the evening once again. One of the highlights of this for me was Jerome Cushman’s sign language interpretations of haiku — I have a special interest in this since my sister works at a school for the deaf and is a fluent signer. He started by signing Basho’s famous frogpond haiku, asking us to guess what we thought it was (I got it — the hop of the frog into the pond and the splash were unmistakable).

Randy Brooks’s undergraduate student Aubrie (apologies to Aubrie, I don’t remember her last name*) entertained us with her haiku:

haiku conference
I’m everyone’s
granddaughter†

Some of us indignantly retorted that we were only old enough to be her mother, not her grandmother! But it’s true that Aubrie was the youngest person there by probably at least fifteen years. I’m still trying to ponder the significance of this — is haiku something that people generally come to later in life? Or does the younger generation mostly have no interest in haiku? Are we dying out, like the classical music audience?

I read my “Seasonal Mathematics” sequence, which I thought got a slightly warmer reception than my full moon sequence of the night before. (It turns out that Lee Gurga was an undergraduate math major, so he appreciated it.) Still, I felt kind of like the freshman on the team, trying with limited success to hit the ball the way the upperclassmen do.

I was sad not to be able to attend any of Sunday’s events, which included a ginko walk and the results of the haiku kukai that was held over the weekend. It was hard to say goodbye to everyone. (Though I got lots of email addresses, so I’m hoping to keep in touch with some.) But I’m already making plans to attend the Haiku North America conference that the Brookses are holding in Decatur next summer … it’s just too much fun to be surrounded by real live haikuists.

Not that I don’t love you guys … why don’t you come too, so I can finally meet some of you?

autumn beer —
haiku poets
can’t stop talking

__________________

*Cox! Her last name is Cox! I knew that, really I did.

†Revised to remove the word “first” from the beginning of the ku, since Aubrie tells me I imagined that part.

On Hats and Haibun

So. Lunch is over. (It was very pleasant — I hiked across the street to the Red Rooster, where I always go when I’m in Mineral Point, to eat Cornish pasty. [Big Cornish population in Mineral Point.] Randy Brooks, his wife Shirley, and his student Aubrie saw me when they came in and invited me to eat with them. The conversation ranged from iPads to haiku poetry slams.)

We’re back at the Opera House for the afternoon’s workshops. The first one was fascinatingly titled “Hat Haiku.” I had no idea what that was all about. It turned out to be a small-group haiku critique session, in which everyone anonymously puts a haiku they’ve written into a hat and then draws out someone else’s for the group to discuss.

Francine Banwarth led this session — she is a well-known haiku poet from Dubuque, Iowa, which is even nearer to Mineral Point than Madison is. She was one of the co-coordinators of the conference and is an extremely kind person. (Dubuque has an active haiku group and Francine very nicely invited me to meet with them — there is already another Madisonian who drives over there once a month. I don’t really think that I’m up for four hours of driving even for the sake of haiku, but I appreciated the invitation.)

One thing that didn’t really appeal to me about this workshop was the emphasis Francine placed on getting your haiku published. It does seem that just about everybody there except me seemed to see this as an important goal. Most of them are published already, in fact. (I know because Francine asked for a show of hands.)

I don’t know, maybe it’s just sour grapes or something (though I’ve barely even tried to get published and I’ve only been writing haiku for four months so I’m hardly offended that editors are not falling over themselves to publish my stuff), but I get very nervous when I think about trying to shape my haiku to meet an editor’s preferences or expectations. I feel like I am really still trying to find my voice as a haiku poet and I don’t want to be trying to write like everyone else in every other journal (not that there is not wonderful haiku being published in the journals).

What’s interesting is that Francine talked about how important it was to have your own voice to “stay true to our art and to ourselves” and to keep haiku from dying out over time, and at the same time talked about reading journals and studying what editors want, which seems to me to be somewhat antithetical to the ideal of finding your own voice. At one point she asked how many of us knew when we’d written a good haiku, and her criteria for a “good haiku” seemed to be one that an editor would accept.

I guess I just feel like at this point I want to experiment as wildly as I can, and not get overly bogged down in whether my haiku are “good” by an editor’s definition — I want to find my own standard of “good haiku.” Which isn’t to say that I don’t feel I can learn by reading the haiku of others or talking to other poets. I was seriously inspired by the wonderful haiku I encountered this weekend, and the critique session that followed Francine’s introduction was wonderful. The discussion was lively, intelligent, sometimes contentious but always respectful.

I learned an immense amount, not least because both Lee Gurga and Randy Brooks were in my group — both wonderful poets, though with somewhat different approaches; both, I believe, with more years of haiku writing experience than I have years of life — and they kept bringing up subtle points about word arrangement and vocabulary choice that had never crossed my mind. It was extremely humbling, but I felt very honored to have the opportunity to sit there and have a discussion with them.

*

The second workshop was led by Roberta Beary, another wonderful poet from Washington, D.C. The topic was haibun, something that frustrates me immensely. I always feel like it should be a natural fit for me — I write prose, I write haiku, why can’t I write a combination of prose and haiku? But every time I’ve tried I’ve known I was very wide of the mark. I was hoping this workshop could show me where I was going wrong.

Robert’s emphasis was on taking risks in haibun, journeying to the “back of beyond” (a reference to Basho’s famous long haibun, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”). By taking risks she meant exposing yourself, talking about personal matters, exploring your feelings and memories. Her haibun are very autobiographical. Right away I was beginning to sense where my problem might lie with haibun. I don’t really like to write autobiographically. I don’t like to expose myself! I don’t want to be personal!

I was cheered a bit by a couple of haibun that Lee Gurga wrote, because even though they definitely were personal, they had a more intellectual stance and didn’t take quite the same risks in terms of personal exposure that Roberta’s did. I could, sort of, begin to see myself writing something like those.

I did also find a lot of Roberta’s specific advice about composition useful — I wrote a lot of it down verbatim so I’ll share it:

“I try to keep it very short and get rid of unnecessary words. I also like stream of consciousness because I like haibun when it takes you to this place, ‘the back of beyond.’ You’re not confined by the rules of grammar.

“I try to use an experience that’s deeply affected me, either in a good or bad way. I’ll try to get a handle on it by writing about it.

“It’s important to keep a flow going so that you draw the reader in and that it also be able to be a spoken form so you can get up in front of an audience and read your haibun.

“I know people that start with the haiku but when I write I do the prose part, I do the haiku, and then I do the title. The title is really important in haibun. You don’t want something that is telling you the whole thing in the title. I want the reader to do some work. I don’t want to give it away. You can also use the title to bring in another texture or dimension to the haibun. It’s another element of risk-taking. Sometimes I make the title the first sentence of the haibun prose.”

Roberta has a strong antipathy to flowery language in haibun (me too), dislikes the “travelogue” kind of haiku that is just a description of a place or situation with no real emotional impact, and almost without exception prefers the present tense (she feels it lends more immediacy and draws the reader in more effectively). She thinks haibun should be quite short, a couple paragraphs at most.

She made the interesting observation that writing haibun is “an effective way to get into mainstream poetry publications,” most of which are not interested in haiku.

I left definitely feeling like I was ready to give haibun another try, but still with some trepidation about whether I could really do it. But after seven hours of lectures and workshops I felt I needed to give my brain a rest. Back to Gayle’s flowery porch!

Reception, remembrances, readings

Highlights of last night’s festival events (which I was way too dead on my feet to post about last night):

The reception that opened the festival took place in Gayle Bull’s home, which is attached to the back of her store. It’s almost as full of books as the store.

I, unfortunately, am not the ideal person to report on reception-type events, because despite the impression you may get from this blog that I am the kind of person who never shuts up, I am actually paralyzingly shy in large crowds of people. Three at a time is about my maximum. Several dozen? None of whom I’ve ever met before? Most of whom seem to know each other? Not so much.

This is not to say that people weren’t friendly. Everyone I actually managed to meet and talk to was extremely welcoming and warm. Charlotte DiGregorio, the Midwest Regional Coordinator of the Haiku Society of America, with whom I corresponded earlier this summer about the conference, gave me some great tips about starting my own haiku group in Madison, and also some pointers about submitting my haiku to journals (which I have just recently, and very tentatively, started doing). Charlie Trumbull, a wonderful haiku poet and the venerable editor of what is probably the most prominent haiku journal in America, Modern Haiku, was kind enough to endure the gushing admiration of a newbie haikuist without throwing up.

(There was also really good chocolate at the reception, including one designed for the conference (by whom? must find out) called “Haiku.” It was in the shape of a leaf and was spicy and why didn’t I get a picture of it?)

During the reception Charlie was running around handing out sheets of haiku by Robert Spiess, the late editor of Modern Haiku whom the conference was commemorating. Everyone was meant to pick two from their sheet to read in the next phase of the evening …

We moved outside to take over the microphone of the singer-guitarist who had been quietly playing country and soft-rock standards all evening in order to present remembrances of Bob Spiess. I knew pretty much nothing about Bob at the start of the evening but by the end I almost felt I’d known him personally. Everyone emphasized his kindness and generosity, including Gayle’s two daughters who remembered his frequent visits to their home and the way he doled out quarters to them (at a time when a quarter would have been a much bigger deal to a kid than it is now).

Possibly the funniest story involved the time Bob visited Japan and was riding the bullet train with some other haikuists, and was very eager to see Mount Fuji. Then he had to use the restroom. The other poets watched in dismay as Mount Fuji flashed by while he was gone. He got a haiku out of it though, a very funny one which I am going to track down and add here.

Several people read Bob’s thoughts about what haiku is or should be. Lee Gurga, another amazing haiku poet who is Bob’s literary executor and took over the editorship of Modern Haiku after his death, read Bob’s list of what annoyed him in haiku, a lot of which are the same things that annoy me in haiku, including the overuse of words like “suddenly” and “silence.”

Someone else read an observation of Bob’s which really struck me (maybe because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately myself): “Haiku is the poetry of the healing of culture by nature.” Bob’s poetry is definitely heavy on nature imagery, which I have recently disparaged, but it feels very natural in his poetry because he has clearly spent a lot of time observing and thinking about it:

around the bend
a log lying in the stream
— the turtle’s ears

Not that he doesn’t closely observe human beings too:

some sticks and pebbles
and a place with mud
a child by himself

a high mountain path
the guide saying that monkey
tastes better than goat

He wrote a whole series of haiku, in fact — Tall River Junction, inspired, obviously, by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology — with titles that were people’s names:

Fr. Augustine Confesso, Paris Priest
Smiles, “The pear you eat,
snitched from the tree, my neighbor boy,
be it doubly sweet.

This last poem illustrates something that I found interesting about Spiess’s haiku, which is how often it employs rhyme — and how well the rhyme works:

drifting in the skiff …
names of all the swallows now:
tree and barn and cliff

The rhyme almost always follows this pattern of the first and third line rhyming.

One of the most touching moments of the evening occurred during the reading of Spiess’s haiku. A Korean woman with a strong accent stood up and announced she was going to read only the shortest poem on her sheet because she knew her accent would be difficult for us to understand:

firefly
wakens
me

Then she added: “I have the pleasure to know Bob Spiess and he was the pure kindness.”

We had a brief break before the next phase of the evening, which was readings from our own (or others’, if we preferred) haiku. Many poets seemed to take this opportunity to further lubricate themselves with the local beer and wine that was for sale. (I don’t drink, not because I have any moral or health objections to alcohol or am a recovering alcoholic or anything, just because I have never acquired a grownup taste for the stuff. Or for coffee, for that matter. Or liver and onions. All equally disgusting as far as I’m concerned.)

Anyway, by the time the readings began, the poets were becoming kind of rowdy. Rowdy haiku poets. Heckling each other. It was quite a scene. Lots of the haiku involved double entendres or just subtle (or frank) references to sex, which all got great reactions.

Most of the haiku that were read were frankly wonderful; I wrote lots of them down thinking I would post some of them here and then realized I really can’t do that without the permission of the authors. If I can get that, I may put some up later.

Lee Gurga read a great haiku by Peter Yovu, and some commentary about it (some of which is reproduced in the link above), and announced he’d give everything he’d ever written to have written it. Everyone was familiar with the ku before he even read it, except, of course, me. But now I am and I also love it.

I really liked the Korean guy who got up and told us about the article he’d just written about how the origins of haiku were in Korea. I believe it’s traditional for the Japanese and Koreans to argue about who invented pretty much every cultural phenomenon they share, so that was entertaining.

I chose to read my “Full Moon” sequence, although, as I announced beforehand, this was completely inappropriate because we are at or near a new moon right now. This was politely, though not wildly enthusiastically, received. We all have to start somewhere.

Which reminds me that I never actually posted a new haiku yesterday. But I did write one! I swear!

new moon
haiku poets can’t forget
when it was full