See Me There: Kuniharu Shimizu and Me (Times Two)

An inspiring story of faith, hope, and survival! Tune in to hear one woman’s testimony of how her lousy day was transformed by the power of Art …

So I was having kind of a blah day yesterday, feeling sorry for myself for no good reason (I like to do this, instead of, you know, drinking or something — everyone needs a vice). Hadn’t slept well the night before. Came home from a kind of wearying family event (love my family, but it was a five-year-old’s birthday party, enough said) and passed out on the couch for a two-hour nap without even checking my email (I normally check my email ninety-seven times a day). Had weird dreams of birds flying around and people speaking strange languages. Woke up feeling remarkably refreshed. Immediately checked my email.

The name of the sender of one of the messages was in Japanese characters. Intriguing. The name of the sender in English, when said message was opened, turned out to be Kuniharu Shimizu. Kuniharu is one of my favorite haiga artists and is the proprietor of one of my favorite blogs, see haiku here. A few days ago, I sent him some of my haiku because he had mentioned on his blog that he was sick of looking around himself for haiku to illustrate and wanted people to send him some. He replied thanking me for sending them but letting me know that he had a large backlog of haiku to work on so it would probably be a while before he decided on these.

But YESTERDAY (he wrote me to say) he posted his haiga of one of my haiku on his site! Me! Mine! My haiku! Kuniharu Shimizu! [Incomprehensible joyful babbling.] So much for feeling sorry for myself. It TOTALLY made my day, even before I actually looked at the haiga and realized how unbelievably beautiful it was.

In case you missed the link above, here’s the haiga:

http://seehaikuhere.blogspot.com/2011/01/haiga-476-melissa-allen-haiku.html

The haiku (which, unusually for me, is a pretty exact description of my son’s reaction to Comet Hale-Bopp back in 1997) is a rewritten version of a haiku that appeared on this blog back in June. Back then I wrote:

slash of a comet
the two-year-old’s
finger

The version I sent Kuniharu was:

comet
the slash of the two-year-old’s
finger

And I know you have already clicked on the link and gone to look at the haiga yourself so you know this already (right? right?) but he did an amazing job interpreting this haiku. I love the colors. I love the shapes. It looks like something out of  a dream. It reminds me a little of Chagall, who is one of my favorite painters. Also, I love what Kuni had to say about his inspiration for this image. It is a poem all on its own.

In my imagination, a comet is like a swallow swishing in the sky…

— Kuniharu Shimizu

So now I have resolved never to feel sorry for myself ever again. Let me know if you catch me at it.

Thanks again, Kuni san.

_____

Addendum, 1/17, 9:00 p.m.: He did it again!

http://seehaikuhere.blogspot.com/2011/01/haiga-478-melissa-allen-haiku-2.html

I love this one too. Kuni! You are spoiling me!

The haiku is another rewritten one, from this post. Originally it was:

the year’s hottest day
her dress
is made of bees

but it became

the year’s hottest day
she dreams that her dress
is made of bees

Slightly less surreal, I suppose. But surrealism and I only occasionally get along.

We’re having a snowstorm here today, the idea of dreaming about heat and bees is very appealing to me. I might have to go to bed soon and do that.

June 8: 2 (Slash of a comet)

slash of a comet
the two-year-old’s
finger

Found haiku: Gerard Manley Hopkins

I’m still feeling under the weather from semi-collapsing at the end of a half-marathon I ran on Sunday in 88-degree weather (it’s Wisconsin, and it’s been a cold spring, so no snickering from you Southwesterners). Pretty much confined to the couch, since standing up for more than a few minutes makes me dizzy. There are worse things, I guess. I’m surrounded by all the books and magazines I put off reading all semester, not to mention the omnipresent, time-sucking Interweb.

I’m having a hard time following a train of thought even long enough to write a sub-seventeen-syllable poem, though. So at the moment I’m taking it easy on my fried brain by resorting to found haiku, mostly from prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, better known as a poet — one of my all-time favorites. The first couple haiku are from poems. The rest are from his journals, which every aspiring poet should read. The man minutely observed and described everything he saw; whole paragraphs read like poems. I can’t help thinking that if he had known about haiku, he would have tried his hand at it.

I may repeat this experiment at intervals, mining the works of other poets and prose writers for haiku-like material (full credit to the original authors, of course). I agonized briefly over whether this exercise was a) cheating, or b) meaningful, but then decided I didn’t care. I enjoy it and it’s my blog. And I do think I’m learning something from this about what writing is haiku-like and what isn’t.

I’ve taken the liberty of haiku-izing Hopkins’s words by arranging them in three lines and removing some punctuation, but otherwise these are direct quotations, with no words removed or added.

So…here’s Gerard:

the moon, dwindled and thinned

to the fringe of a fingernail

held to the candle

*

this air I gather

and I release

he lived on

*

mealy clouds

with a not

brilliant moon

*

blunt buds

of the ash, pencil buds

of the beech

*

almost think you can hear

the lisp

of the swallows’ wings

*

over the green water

of the river passing

the slums of the town

*

oaks

the organization

of this tree is difficult

*

putting my hand up

against the sky

whilst we lay on the grass

*

silver mottled clouding

and clearer;

else like yesterday

*

Basel at night!

with a full moon

waking the river

*

the river runs so strong

that it keeps the bridge

shaking

*

some great star

whether Capella or not

I am not sure

*

two boys came down

the mountain yodelling

we saw the snow

*

the mountain summits

are not the place

for mountain views

*

the winter was called severe

there were three spells

of frost with skating

*

the next morning

a heavy fall

of snow

*

at the beginning of March

they were felling

some of the ashes in our grove

*

ground sheeted

with taut tattered streaks

of crisp gritty snow

*

thunderstorm in the evening

first booming in gong-sounds

as at Aosta

*

I noticed the smell

of the big cedar

not just in passing

*

the comet —

I have seen it at bedtime

in the west

*

as we came home

the stars came out thick

I leaned back to look at them

*

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W.H. Gardner