.
.
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Easter morning…
three silos
on the horizon
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.
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The Heron’s Nest, June 2011
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.
.
holidays
(bass drum)
.
.
.
my heart
encased in a bass drum
Independence Day
.
.
.
Memorial Day
May Day: One Year
.
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May Day
every nest
has a voice
.
anniversary new cells in my writing hand
.
Beltane
in the rear-view mirror
a faraway fire
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.
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A year ago today I started this blog. I’d written a few haiku over the previous few days — something I’d practically never done before — and for some reason felt that they needed to be inflicted on the world. And that I needed to write more — every day, in fact — and inflict all those on the world as well.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe it was something to do with it being May Day, which has always seemed like one of the year’s pivotal days to me. Well, it is, of course. In the Japanese conception of the seasons, this is approximately the day that summer begins. (It ends, of course, in early August, when you first begin to sense that melancholy in the air. You know that melancholy? The Japanese love that. They call it autumn and get all weepy and happy. Me too.)
This was also true of European cultures until fairly recent times, which is why we call the summer solstice midsummer. The first of May went by a variety of names for the pre-modern Europeans: Beltane, Walpurgisnacht. It was about purification, fertility, all that useful stuff. There were bonfires to symbolically cleanse things, and dancing to get sexy. The harvest was going in, the thaw was finally complete, the layers of clothes were coming off…time for a party.
Here in southern Wisconsin, and also in southern New England, where I was raised, May is the month when you finally feel like you can breathe easy, because now there’s practically no chance that there will be any more significant snowfall or lengthy cold spells until November. (Practically no chance, I said. This year, I wouldn’t put it past May to dump a blizzard on us or something.)
So for those of us around here who spend most of the winter weeping quietly in a corner, the beginning of May is the time when we creep out of our corners and put away the boxes of Kleenex and admit that, just possibly, life might be worth living. New projects start to seem as enticing as new clothes.
Hence, I suspect, my more or less insane undertaking of last May 1. I remember feeling a sense of great satisfaction at seeing my first post go up, with that big “1 May” on it. It made the whole thing seem much more real than all the previous times I’d started blogs, on whatever forgettable days I started them on. And right from the beginning, this blog felt different than all those other blogs, which lasted only until I figured out that I didn’t actually have anything to say, typically after three or four days.
Writing haiku, I found, especially once I started to figure out what haiku actually were, made me feel like I did in fact have something to say, that there was actually an infinite universe of things to say, because, of course, there is an infinite universe — and if you keep your eyes open you will always be able to observe something worth observing, and worth telling someone else about.
I still feel like that. I sometimes go crazy, in fact, from the number of things there are to say about the world in haiku. Not that I have really figured out how to say them well most of the time, but that challenge is always there. Those possibilities delight me. The whole world, passing by in a predictable but novel-seeming cycle year after year, trip after trip around the sun — how could that ever not be enough for anyone to write about?
Haiku can be thought of as time-tellers or time-markers — a large part of their original function was to announce the season that a particular string of linked verse was beginning in — and now that I have spent an entire year with haiku, have written all the obligatory leaf-falling and snow-falling and blossom-falling verses, have marked all the changes of the moon, and come back around to the beginning, that aspect of their nature is beginning to intrigue me more than ever.
The year is a cycle; it’s good to know when you are in it. It’s also good to know when you are in your life. When was before this? When’s after it? Most importantly — when is now? Writing haiku — I won’t say always, because I never say always, and I reserve the right to change my mind about everything — is a way of saying: I was here, then. That was now. And since time keeps flowing, there is always another now to write about. I feel very lucky about that.
*
Thanks for hanging around with me this past year and listening politely while I wandered around babbling incoherently. I appreciate it immensely. I mean, no matter how great I thought haiku were, I doubt I would have kept writing a blog that no one ever read or commented on. Or one of those blogs where people are always arguing and yelling at each other.
Fortunately, instead of one of those sad, dysfunctional-family kinds of blogs, I have the kind of happy-family blog that is constantly filled with the pleasant voices of many kind visitors. It never feels like work to hang out here. Practically everything else feels like work, but not this. (She says, staring gloomily at the pile of end-of-term projects that she’s way, way behind on.)
I have some vague thoughts for fun things we can do together this summer. But right now, I’m a little too busy and sleep-deprived to form these thoughts into coherent ideas, let alone coherent words. Give me a couple of weeks, okay?
Happy May Day. Go build a fire. And do a little dance. Come on, you know you want to.
April 29 (Arbor Day)
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.
.
Arbor Day
we carry the tree back out
of the house
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.
___________________________________________________________________________________
NaHaiWriMo prompt (for Arbor Day): Trees
Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 30th (last prompt!)
Really small things
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.)
April 28 (White Night)
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.
.
white night
car doors slamming
everywhere
.
.
___________________________________________________________________________________
NaHaiWriMo prompt: Doors
Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 29th (in honor of Arbor Day):
Trees
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.)
April 24 (Easter Sunrise)
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.
.
Easter sunrise
all the dyed eggs
regain their colors
.
.
(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Eggs)
.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 25th (in honor of World Penguin Day):
Black and/or white
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.)
April 21 (Spring Moon)
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.
.
spring moon —
at the foot of our bed
the cat shuts half an eye
.
.
(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Eyes)
.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 22nd, in honor of Earth Day:
Dirt, soil
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.)
April 17 (House of Blues)
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house of blues
the temptation
to join in
.
.
(NaHaiWriMo topic: Houses)
.
.
Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 18th (in honor of Patriots Day in the U.S.):
History
_____________________________
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.)
February 14 (Your Kiss)
your kiss
the last chocolate
in the box
_______________________
This first appeared on Gillena Cox’s blog Lunch Break a few days ago. It was her birthday, and she very sensibly solicited haiku about chocolate to make her life delicious during the first couple of weeks of February.
Gillena is a lovely person and poet (well, she’s an Aquarius, what do you expect?), go over there and wish her a happy Valentine’s Day and a belated happy birthday.
NaHaiWriMo, Week One
1 hailstones dreaming of semiautomatic weapons
2 blizzard so many ways to fly
3 lunar new year stamps so that’s what persimmons look like
4 stone wall the gaps in what you tell me about yourself
5 honeybee sting the desperation of the search for sweetness
6 environmentally conscious recycling your love letters
7 fiddleheads the family I never see anymore
_________________
I wasn’t going to do NaHaiWriMo, because I figured, I already write a haiku (or two, or ten, or thirty) every day, why should I make a special event of it?
But then I got carried away by all the fun everyone else seemed to be having doing it (man, over on Facebook people are partying it up), and then I thought of a theme, or a gimmick, or something, that got me more interested in it. I decided to write only one-liners. So many of my ku already start out as one-liners (and then get rewritten into whatever number of lines seems to work best for them) that I thought this couldn’t be too painful.
I also decided not to put too much pressure on myself to make these brilliant, and I also also decided not to post them on the blog or Facebook every day. I’ve been tweeting them instead (@myyozh, in case you’re interested). For some reason I am more laid-back on Twitter. It’s a pretty laid-back place. Not that this blog is exactly known for its uptight vibe, but, you know. I don’t like to let you guys down.
I don’t completely hate the way all of these are turning out, though. So I decided to put them up one week at a time. That way the effect of the really mediocre ones is mitigated somewhat. Also I kind of like the juxtaposition of the varied subjects I’m coming up with.
A couple notes:
- Yes, there is a little snow here. But not the actual word snow. That would be wrong, wrong, wrong. And if you have an actual blizzard, how can you not write a haiku about it? That would be wrong too.
- Also, U.S. readers may feel tempted to point out to me that the fruit on this year’s Lunar New Year stamps is kumquats, not persimmons. Geez. Picky, picky, picky. I mean, the whole point of the poem is that I don’t know what persimmons look like, right? I’ve been so baffled the last couple of months trying to understand all these persimmon haiku that everyone writes. No persimmons in Wisconsin. I’m sure you can buy them somewhere but what can I say, I’m a little afraid of strange fruit. I also could just Google to see what they look like but what fun would that be? Sometimes you just have to say no to Google. (Hi, my name is Melissa and I go to library school.)
Tune in next week, same time, same place, for seven more of these.
January 31 (The Calendar)
January
not knowing what to do
with the old calendar
_________________
Caribbean Kigo Kukai, January 2011 (kigo: calendar)
January 21: Belated Rabbits
new year
a new friend becomes
an old friend
.
folding
away the year
paper rabbit
.
new year
opening the door
for a friend
.
new year
friends multiply
like rabbits
.
Year of the Rabbit
I give away
the litter
.
New Year
last year’s mistakes mended
with snow patches
_______________
.
Yes, New Year’s was three weeks ago. But frankly, classes and work started this week for me and I haven’t had a lot of time to write so once again I’m plagiarizing from myself, in this case from the haiku that I included with the book that I sent to the winner of my present giveaway in December, Alegria Imperial, which just arrived at her home in Canada even though I sent it several weeks ago. I think the customs officials took the book out and read it before sending it on to Alegria, personally. I commend their literary taste.
I think the theme(s) here are pretty obvious. But in case you’re unsure, Alegria was kind enough to take pictures of the contents of her package and post them on her lovely blog, jornales, so if you’re interested in visuals, hop on over there and take a look.
I hope the Year of the Rabbit has been a lucky one for you so far.
January 20: Different Melodies
New Year’s Eve —
the fiddler tries out
an unfamiliar tune
.
birdsong
from the pine branches
evergreen
.
mountain snow
trying to sing loud enough
for you to hear me
______________________
These were my entries in Origa Olga Hooper’s recent “Calico Cat” contest, in which she asked haiku writers to use this sumi-e painting of hers as a prompt.
I really enjoy Origa’s sumi-e, but I was primarily attracted to this contest because of its bilingual nature: Origa accepted entries in both English and Russian and translated all of them into the other language. Then all the haiku appeared in both languages on her website for several days for everyone to read and discuss before the contest results were announced.
Russian geek that I am, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have some of my haiku translated into Russian by a native speaker. You can see the translations of my entries on this page (they’re entries number 173 to 175). They’re very clear, natural, faithful translations.
The contest produced a lot of great haiku and reading them all in two languages was a fun field trip for my brain. I learned a lot about both Russian and haiku this way.
If you know any other languages, I highly recommend that you try to find haiku written in them. The structure of other languages often makes possible different poetic effects than are available to us in English, or at least different than we normally employ. Forcing your brain out of its well-worn language ruts can help you find new ways to think about and express ideas. And that makes for more exciting poetry.
Across the Haikuverse, No. 10: Bleak Midwinter Edition
One of my favorite Christmas songs (I remembered recently, when I was part of a hastily-thrown-together chorus that sang it for a New Year’s Eve celebration) is “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which is a setting of a poem by Christina Rossetti. The first verse, in particular, is really a masterpiece of English poetry, full of humble but strong Anglo-Saxon words, not a single one unnecessary and no necessary one left out:
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long, long ago.— Christina Rossetti
There are obviously too many words and too much meter and rhyme and too many metaphors in this for it to be a haiku, though it does have the requisite elements of simplicity and clear, evocative images, and I think there’s some wabi-sabi and yugen going on here as well. And I see possibilities in that third line for some kind of avant-garde haiku:
snow had fallen snow on snow snow on snow
Really, I think probably someone could rewrite this verse, or part of it, into an effective haiku, though I’ve been trying and not finding it so easy. Any of you like to give it a shot? Let me know what you come up with.
Anyway. It is definitely bleak midwinter here. Snow on snow indeed. It’s nice that it’s not for so many of you — you dwellers in the tropics and subtropics and summery Southern Hemisphere. I like to imagine your lives, walking outside barefoot, wearing short sleeves, smelling flowers. (Well, those of you who aren’t flooded. I’m sorry about the flooded part. I hope no one has floated away.) I’m not really jealous, it will be our turn soon enough. And though I complain bitterly about the cold and can never seem to get really warm, there is something about this downtime, for both the earth and me, that I grudgingly appreciate. Cycles. The world is full of them, and best just to accept them.
Which reminds me. Aren’t we supposed to be taking a spin around the Haikuverse? Best get started on that before you get bored with my waxing philosophical and wander away, never to return.
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Haiku of the Week
That’s haiku, plural. As in, the haiku I saw on the Internet this week that most struck me as interesting for whatever reason (could be my discerning literary taste, could be the state of my digestion) and that I actually managed to remember to bookmark. (This whole process is an art, not a science.)
*
Mark Holloway over at Beachcombing For the Landlocked has been on a roll this week. You should really just go over there and read everything he’s written lately because I had a hard time choosing just one. I settled on this one in the end:
moss growing on the roof tiles unsuspected metastasis
— Mark Holloway
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This wonderful piece from a handful of stones isn’t a haiku, I suppose. Do I care? Not really.
A mushroom sprouts
from the base of the locust tree,
and it will not be distracted
from its small brown task.— Tamra Hays
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In this piece Angie Werren from feathers did a nice job responding to the same ku on this prompt that I did this morning:
sometimes the rain
I stand behind this window
counting trees— Angie Werren
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This wonderful offering at Jars of Stars was originally posted on Twitter by @cirrusdream, otherwise known as Polona:
winter thaw
i ignore
his white lie— Polona (@cirrusdream)
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Another one of Bill Kenney’s “afters” appeared at haiku-usa (maybe I appreciated this one because I’ve been having weird dreams lately myself):
piercing cold
I kiss a plum blossom
in my dream— Soseki 1867-1916
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Also at haiku-usa, Bill points us to a collection of his “urban haiku” recently featured on Gabi Greve’s Haiku Topics and Keywords blog. Gabi also links to works by many other authors of such “urban haiku” (i.e., haiku that reflects the reality of the lives of most modern writers of haiku, who live not in pastoral Japan or pastoral anywhere, but in bustling outposts of the global economy). An example from Alan Summers:
Waterloo sunset
the Thames disappears
from the Tube map— Alan Summers
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Every week there’s at least one something at Blue Willow Haiku World that I feel like reading over and over — usually several somethings. This week my favorite was this one:
月の汚れやすくてかなしき手 黒田杏子
ichigatsu no yogoreyasukute kanashiki teJanuary
hands that are easy
to get dirty and sad
— Momoko Kuroda, translated by Fay Aoyagi
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And while we’re on the topic of Fay Aoyagi (I never mind being on the topic of Fay Aoyagi), someone on Facebook (MDW — was that you?) recently reminded me about the wonderful series of essays she wrote several years ago for Frogpond about non-traditional use of kigo in haiku. I could swear I’ve read this entire series on the Interwebs, either on Frogpond’s site or Fay’s own, but I can’t seem to find any of them now except this one: “Haiku Traditions: Flowers and Plants.” But just this one will take you a long way. Fay discusses how traditional Japanese kigo like “cherry blossoms,” which are so evocative in their own culture, have given way in her own poetry to seasonal terms or keywords that are more meaningful to the American culture she now inhabits:
While cherry blossoms symbolize where I came from, roses represent Western culture and where I am now. I think roses demand a lot of care. To have a gorgeous, perfect flower, one has to tend them with water, fertilizers and pesticides. Roses are somewhat the manifestation of my borrowed culture. “Rose” itself is a summer kigo, but I prefer to use it in a winter setting. I can put contradictory feelings or images together in this way.
winter roses—
I am tired of reading
between the lines
— Fay Aoyagi
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OtherHais (Haiga, Haibun)
Every week I am amazed at how many cool haiku-related sites I have yet to discover. Since I have been thinking about venturing into haiga territory in collaboration with my amateur photographer husband, I went noodling around this week looking for haiga online and discovered … Haigaonline. (Warning: this link will lead you to a page where there are sounds of sparrows twittering and some music, which is sweet and pretty but if you’re in a quiet place or just not in the mood, you may want to hit the “mute” button.)
The December 2010 issue of this online journal features lots of good stuff, including a feature on “family haiga” — lots of husband-and-wife teams, so I appreciated that. What I really loved, though, was an exhibit of “experimental haiga” by Renee Owen — they’re colorful collages with intriguing haiku, such as:
waiting for God
to finish creation
leftover rocks
— Renee Owen
And yes you MUST go look at the picture! That’s the entire point! Click! Click! I think the link will just bring you to a page of thumbnails, all of which are worth looking at, but the one I’ve quoted above can be found if you click on the picture of columns in the bottom center.
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And I’m always looking for good haibun, so I was excited to stumble on Hortensia Anderson’s site The Plenitude of Emptiness. All haibun, all the time! I’m trying to write more haibun so I will be dropping by here often.
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Tanka Corner
I’ve been making some headway lately in my ongoing quest to get over my fear of tanka. I was helped recently in my endeavor by my discovery of this mind-blower over at Michele Harvey’s site. This is not only one of my favorite tanka I’ve ever read, it’s some of the best poetry I’ve read lately, period.
a fall cricket
sings alone on the porch
I too, wonder
about being born too late
or too soon— Michele Harvey
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Alegria Imperial also published some wonderful trilingual tanka (English, Spanish, and the native Philippine language Iluko) over at qarrtsiluni this week. I have long been a fan of Alegria’s multilingual poetry, it is so amazingly dense with meaning and emotional resonance. And as usual at qarrtsiluni, there is an audio file so you can hear Alegria reading her beautiful words. Please check it out!
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Renku Everywhere
With the new year, the thoughts of many seem to be turning to starting new renku. Over at Issa’s Snail, Ashley Capes has done a nice site redesign and, after a long hiatus, has started up a couple of new junicho, with a third possibly in the works. I think most of these have filled up with participants already but it’s still fun to watch the process of a renku in the making, which you can do by reading the comments on the site. The “sabaki” or renku leader guides the group in choosing subject matter and making sure the poem flows and doesn’t repeat itself in theme or language, which is no easy task, but Ashley (I know from personal experience) is great at doing this. Plus he is just an all-around nice guy who is easy and fun to work with.
The same can be said of Willie Sorlien, who is currently guiding the development of a shisan renku at Green Tea and Bird Song. Again, don’t think they’re looking for new participants, but it might be worthwhile watching how it’s done by the pros before you leap in on your own.
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Haiku in the News
Haiku made an appearance in the mass media this week in the form of a lengthy radio interview on NPR’s “On Point” show with haiku venerables George Swede and Dylan Tweney and an economist named Stephen Ziliak, who wrote an article making a fascinating connection between economic models and haiku. An excerpt from Ziliak’s article:
The typical haiku budget constraint is limited by three lines of seventeen syllables. Basho himself understood well the joyful paradox of haiku economics: less is more, and more is better!
— Stephen Ziliak
This was a fun interview to listen to — I especially enjoyed George Swede’s anecdote about his son, who as a fifth-grader took up a position as a conscientious objector by refusing to do as he was instructed by his teacher and write a haiku in 5-7-5. He wrote some twelve-syllable haiku instead and got them published in Modern Haiku (which at the time accepted haiku from students). Then his teacher was all impressed and wanted to put them in the school yearbook, but the young Swede told her (I’m sure in very well-mannered language) where she could put her yearbook. Go ahead and stream this one while you’re making dinner or something tonight, you won’t be sorry.
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The News in Haiku
Is everyone getting psyched up for NaHaiWriMo (remember, that’s the thing where you can sign up to write a haiku a day in the month of February)? Michael Dylan Welch has put together a website for the event so now you don’t need to be on Facebook to sign up (although go ahead and like the Facebook page too if you want). Think about it.
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A call for submissions for a new issue of haijinx has gone out (deadline: March 1), along with the exciting news that Roberta Beary will be their new haibun editor. Roberta is one of the best writers of haibun around so I can’t wait to see what she picks out. Also new on the haijinx website: Richard Krawiec’s latest installment of his column “Shooting My Poetry Mouth Off.” This month he implores us haiku poets not to try to publish everything we write but to be selective and try to recognize our best work, which will not only benefit us personally (since our poetic reputations will not be sullied by inferior work), but also haiku as a genre, since the journals will not be flooded with mediocre work. Worth reading and thinking about.
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Dead Tree News
Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694. The first great master of haikai/haiku. Where on earth did he come from?
It’s a little like asking where Shakespeare (1564-1616) came from, in my opinion. I mean you can see how before and all around Shakespeare, English writers were producing supple, lively, image-rich poems and plays, much of it in a natural and flexible blank verse — really, nobody could do English like the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, at the moment when modern English was brand new and no one had gotten around to inventing rules for it yet so writers had no compunction about bending the language to their will. That was the glorious and fortunate tradition Shakespeare was working in, but nobody else was Shakespeare, before or after.
So pity poor Donald Keene, who in chapters four and five of World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867 has the unenviable job of explaining how the often-pleasant-and-skillful, but usually not much more, haikai of the haijin that preceded Basho produced the unparalleled haikai genius that is Basho. In the end, about all he can do is trace the literary movements that Basho’s work responded to and grew out of, and then throw up his hands and say, “The rest — that’s just Basho.”
As I discussed in Haikuverse No. 8, Basho was influenced by both the careful craftsmanship of the Teitoku school of haikai and the iconoclasm and experimentation of the Danrin school, as well as by his intensive study of Chinese verse and by his interest in Zen Buddhism. But he didn’t just sit around studying and writing poetry; he spent much of his life traveling around Japan, living at various times both in the city and in the country, meeting people, seeing things, gathering material. As Keene points out, “Haikai shared the literary spirit of the great Chinese and Japanese masters, and the Zen quality of … poet … Han Shan, but it had its own domain too, in the familiar and even vulgar activities of contemporary life.”
It’s when Keene discusses Basho’s masterpieces that his efforts to relate Basho’s genius to his poetic predecessors break down. Basho was just Basho; his vision was unique. In his most famous poem, the frog pond haiku furuike ya, Keene points out, “The ancient pond is eternal, but in order for us to become aware of its eternity there must be some momentary disruption…This verse is about stillness, yet only by sound can we know silence.” He contrasts Basho’s first line here (“old pond”) with the well-meaning and not unskillful suggestion of one of his disciples, “the yellow roses”:
[A]lthough the picture of yellow flowers surrounding the frog … is visually appealing, it lacks the eternity of ‘ancient pond.’ … Only by suggesting the age of the pond, its unchanging nature, is the momentary life of the frog evoked. This was the kind of understanding Basho demanded. He believed that the smallest flower or insect if properly seen and understood could suggest all of creation, and each had its reason for existence.
— Donald Keene, World Within Walls
By the end of his life Basho’s poetic ideal was karumi, or “lightness,” “a word used in contrast to technical finish or decorative effects.” Basho was seeing ever deeper into the hearts of things, in a way no haikai poet had done before and few if any have done since. He was going past the words into the essence.
What Keene’s discussion made me want to do more than ever was just sit down with Basho himself and engage with him, rather than the ideas about him. So that’s what’s on the agenda for this week. Feel free to join me.
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And thanks again for letting me ramble on at length; special thanks to those of you who actually made it to the end of this post. Love, love, love making these trips with you. It may seem like I’m the guide but I assure you I’m learning the territory as I go. There is still so much more of the Haikuverse left to explore, hope you’ll keep me company as I wander.
Presenting (One Present, and Lots of New Year’s Greetings)
“Happy New Year” in Japanese, as illustrated by a couple of lovely women at the folk-traditions festival I just spent several days at. Those books it’s sitting on are all the haiku- and Japanese-literature-related books I am currently reading. I highly recommend all of them.
So a couple of weeks ago I offered to give one of you a present. And all you had to do in return was cut off the pinky finger on your right hand and mail it to me … wait, was that not your understanding of the deal? Oh, okay, all you really had to do was comment on the blog sometime between then and yesterday, and then hope you got lucky in the present lottery.
This is how the present lottery worked: I made a list of everyone who commented in the appropriate time period, numbered them in the order they commented, and then went to look for the teenager. I found him in his mad-scientist lab in the basement, crouched over a computer hooked up to a number of unidentifiable electronic parts, typing gobbledygook into a little window. (He does this kind of thing a lot. I’m always a little afraid that someday the Interwebs will explode and I’ll find out it was his fault.)
I said to him, “Hey, quit typing your gobbledygook and make me a random-number generator to pick a random number between 1 and 18. Because that’s how many people commented on my blog and I have to give one of them a present and I want this to be a completely scientific, unbiased process.”
He gave me a strange look, but obediently (he is a good boy, really, despite the exploding Interwebs), he opened another little window, typed some different gobbledygook, Googled some stuff real quick, typed more gobbledygook, and then said, “Four.” I am trusting that he did actually create a random number generator and didn’t just pick a number out of his head to make me go away. But whatever, four it is.
And the winner is … Alegria Imperial, whose wonderful blog jornales you must all go take a look at right now. Her New Year haiku there is great — it features a rabbit stole, which I love because I have never read another haiku about a rabbit stole. Also it is a refreshing variation on all the other New Year rabbit haiku floating around out there right now. (2011 is the Year of the Rabbit, in case you had somehow managed not to find this out despite the fact that every single haiku poet in the universe has written a New Year’s haiku with a rabbit reference in it in the last week. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. You can never have too many haiku about rabbits, as far as I’m concerned. I’m just jealous because I haven’t been able to write a good one yet myself.)
So the present, as I mentioned in my original post, is a copy of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which I completely-on-purpose-but-utterly-foolishly purchased a copy of at a used bookstore even though I already own one. The really great thing is that, as she mentioned in her comment, Alegria already owns one too! But it’s one of her favorite books and it’s beginning to get a little decrepit, and she was wanting another copy. So off it goes to sit on the shelf next to its brother. (Email me your snail mail address, Alegria!)
By an amazing coincidence, on Christmas Day Kuniharu Shimizu, at his fantastic haiga site see haiku here, wrote a post featuring a haiga inspired by Snow Country, along with a brief commentary. (I really recommend you visit his site to see the wonderful photo that accompanies the haiku.)
traveling alone
the other end of the tunnel
is a snow country“I can almost hear someone in the car yelling, ” Hey, close the window, shut the cold wind out”.
This photo reminded me of Kawabata, Yasunari’s “Snow Country”. The haiku got a hint from the first sentence of the novel.When I had chance to visit the same snow country, which is in Niigata, I took Jyoetsu Shinkan-sen train. It is the super express train with fixed window so nobody cannot open it. When a long tunnel ended, snow covered fields and mountains of Echigo-Yuzawa sprawled before my eyes. It was so nice to view such a pristine landscape from the warm and comfortable seat of the train.
— Kuniharu Shimizu
And it’s been so nice over the last eight months to view the landscape of the haiku world from the warm and comfortable seat of this blog, surrounded by so many wonderful traveling companions. I wish I could send you all presents. But I’ll give you what I can: My deepest gratitude to all of you for reading, writing back, and sharing your lives and thoughts and writing with me. I wish you all the happiest of New Years.
January 1: New
New Year
everything
in high resolution
______________
(This was originally posted on The Haiku Foundation Facebook page in response to a request for haiku about the New Year.)
I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, because I have found that doing so is a sure way to make myself feel bad about myself. I have to, you know, really feel the change in order to make it, and I usually am not feeling very change-y this time of year. Too cold. I make resolutions more at other times of the year, when I’m more in the mood.
This year, I did kind of made a resolution, but I have been working up to it for a long time so it’s not as if I just pulled this out of a top hat in time for New Year’s. I resolved to meditate every day. Just a little bit. Five minutes is OK, though if I feel like going longer I can.
I have, in fact, had a meditation practice a couple of times before, at times when I wasn’t sure I would actually survive my life if I didn’t. For a while I meditated for half an hour every day. Then I got lazy and stopped. But the evidence that meditation is really, really good for you, even if you aren’t currently in the throes of a nervous breakdown, is getting too voluminous to ignore. It’s especially good, they say, if you are as attention-challenged as I am. So I’m going to give it another try.
You can play along at home if you want. (Maybe you already are.) Let me know how it works out for you.
December 29: Moon Marathon
nearly full moon not nearly enough
.
I went too far again a slice off the moon
.
and again I apologize for the moon
.
dead broke but there’s the moon
.
with or without you the moon
.
I fail again at trying the moon
.
all the time I’ve spent being someone else the moon
.
don’t kid yourself you’ll never be the moon
_________________
so we were driving out to the East Coast for Christmas (which takes eighteen hours) and as usual I just sat in the car and looked out the window and napped and daydreamed and didn’t read or write or talk or do much of anything else, until suddenly around 10:00 p.m. I decided it would be a good idea to haul out my little all-purpose notebook (it’s a score pad! it’s a grocery list! it’s a sketchbook! it’s a haiku repository!) and write haiku in the dark and hope they would be legible in the morning.
and the moon was incredibly cool, just off full and shooting around in and out of the clouds, so most of what I wrote was about the moon, like fifty-something haiku in just over an hour, and you know what that means? most of them were crap. but that’s okay, it was fun, and a few of them were pretty good, and several were not bad, and a reasonable number were all right in a sort of a limited way for an off night (apologies to Paul Simon), which is mostly the kind I have posted here because the ones that were better I am still trying to make even better and the ones that were worse I wouldn’t inflict on you.
anyway, as you can see, the moon makes me happy even when I am slightly depressed, so I guess it’s good that I’m a haiku poet because then no one blinks twice if I write about the moon constantly and they even patiently read all my tedious little moon poems, or if they don’t they’re too nice to tell me about it.
that’s my story. and I’m sticking to it.
December 25: Nativity
Nativity scene
every year we think we’ve lost
the baby
.
Nativity scene
the shepherds are guarding
flocking
.
Nativity scene
the light in the stable
burned out
.
Nativity scene
folding a crane to replace
the broken angel
.
Nativity scene
the Wise Men never let go
of their gifts
.
Nativity scene
Joseph stares out
of the window
.
Nativity scene
the animals eye the manger
hungrily
.
Nativity scene
Mary hides
from the visitors
.
Nativity scene
packing away the miracle
for next year
.
A very Merry Christmas to all my readers who are celebrating the holiday today. Thanks for all your well-wishes this season and all your support this year. Much joy to you and your families.
December 24:3 (Stockings)
Christmas Eve
the grownups hang their stockings
carelessly
Red Dragonfly 
