my rich neighbor —
late at night
he slowly
peels
an orange
.
(a handful of stones, 3/30/2011; pay attention: a river of stones, 2011)
_______________
neighbors
January 29: First Snow (again)
.
.
.
one
empty barn
first snow
.
first snow
the footprints of the neighbors
we’ve never seen
.
first snow
and again
the owl
_____________________________
First published in LYNX, XXVI:1, February 2011
Why do I say “again” in the post title? Because there are also these here.
Also, for a stunning graphic interpretation of the final haiku in this sequence, go take a look at Kuniharu Shimizu’s haiga at see haiku here: http://seehaikuhere.blogspot.com/2011/02/haiga-491-mellisa-allen-haiku-3.html
January 5 (Dirty Snow)
dirty snow
my neighbor’s
cigarette
smoke
drifting
______________
Two tanka in one week? What is this? Am I losing my knack for brevity?
Actually, as with the last one I wrote, this is plenty brief enough to be a haiku — twelve syllables. It just seems to work better as a five-liner, because of what it says and what it alludes to. I’m actually still not sure what to call things like this, haiku or tanka or gogyoghka or micropoems … but it probably doesn’t matter, except to obsessive-compulsive types like me.
Across the Haikuverse, No. 5: Too Much Homework Edition
Dear Fellow Travelers,
Some weeks the Haikuverse seems to stir up a lot of Deep Thoughts in me, but not this week. This week I was too busy for Thinking Deeply. (I can hear you sighing in relief. Stop that.)
So what have I got for you? Well, a lot of really great haiku (other people’s, natch), snatched out of the ether during moments stolen from homework, fiction writing, Thanksgiving dinner, and sleep. For some reason, most of them seem to relate to one of two themes: astronomical phenomena or snow.
(It’s snowing in a lot of places these days, apparently. So interesting, the sense you can get of world weather patterns by following the world’s daily haiku output.)
Anyway. To start off our journey … here are some of my favorite responses to a polite request that The Haiku Foundation’s Facebook page recently made of its followers: “Please share a haiku inspired by the onset of cold weather.” (They frequently make interesting requests like this. You should go over and oblige them occasionally. It’s nice to share.)
premières gelées blanches –
une envie soudaine
de carrot cake
.
…first white frosts –
…a sudden urge
for a carrot cake— Vincent Hoarau
first snow
she pockets a large carrot
for later use— Laura Sherman
(Yes, two carrot haiku, right next to each other. It freaked me out too.)
closure…
a ring around
the moon— George O Hawkins
listening to myself
on the walk home
fresh snow— Michael Rehling
Twitter was all cold this week too. And for some reason (okay, maybe my foreign-language fetish), it seemed very polyglot.
First of all, my Twitter friend Polona Oblak, or one cloud, whose username is cirrusdream, overheard me raving in a tweet about how much I liked foreign-language haiku and generously offered to translate some of her haiku into Slovenian, her first language. (Great quotation from Polona: “the problem is, although i’m not a native english speaker, my muse appears to be.”)
There are SO many things I love about this — first of all the fact that Slovenian is a Slavic language, so I can actually semi-follow what’s going on here. (All Slavic languages are alike, but some are more alike than others. [Whoa — Tolstoy/Orwell mashup! Didn’t see that coming.])
Secondly the fact that in Slovenian, this haiku is so highly alliterative and even rhymes a little. English haiku needs more of that. Remind me to do some of that some time soon.
first chill
a spider weaves its web
under a neon light
.
prvi mraz
pajek plete mrežo
pod neonsko lučjo— Polona Oblak (cirrusdream)
Then, I believe the very same day, I had the incredibly thrilling experience of discovering a Twitterer who writes haiku in Esperanto. Not just any haiku. Good haiku. (Excuse me: hajko.) I am still in shock that there is a person like this in the world. I like the world better now.
pelas norda vent’ unuopajn neĝerojn… sonoriladon
.
north wind drives snowflakes one by one… a bell rings and rings.
— Steven D. Brewer (limako)
David Serjeant, over at distant lightning, had a great snow moment this week too. I caught a whiff of Issa drifting from this haiku. (I’m very sensitive to that scent.)
midnight snowfall
my neighbour
coughing away— David Serjeant
I caught even more of a whiff of Issa, maybe even something more like a deliberate (and extremely successful) tribute, coming from Elissa’s recent snow haiku, “who’s counting,” at the haiku diary:
Watching the first one,
two, three . . . four, five, six . . . seven
snowflakes fall outside.— Elissa
(And okay … I got a little sidetracked here. I have a huge weakness, for some reason, for haiku with numbers in them. In fact, one of my favorites among my own haiku is still this one that I wrote way back in, like, the first week I ever wrote haiku. I went looking for more information about these number-haiku things and ended up, naturally enough, on Gabi Greve’s territory, reading this amazing essay-full-of-inspiring-examples. I have to read it again, when I can spend more time on it.)
(And another slight detour, this one possibly even verging on Deep Thought. This quotation, from a very famous Japanese haiku poet, got in my face when I read it on someone’s Facebook page this week — I’m sorry, Facebook person, I don’t remember who you are, but thanks for posting this! It reminded me of the essay by Aubrie Cox I wrote about a couple of weeks ago:
“The reader of a haiku is indispensable to the working of ma. This person must notice the ma and sense the kokoro of the poet. A haiku is not completed by the poet. The poet creates half of the haiku, while the remaining half must wait for…the appearance of a superior reader. Haiku is literature created jointly by the poet and the reader. A Western poem is the product of the poet alone, and thus here also the way of thinking about haiku is different.”
— Hasegawa Kai
I must say, I feel very fortunate to have had the occasional “superior reader” show up here to complete my haiku, because God knows they [my haiku, that is] need all the help they can get…)
This haiku from David Marshall, at haiku streak, is an exception to this week’s astronomy-and-snow theme, but it does seem somehow to complement Hasegawa’s words. It’s called Old Friends, and don’t tell me haiku aren’t supposed to have titles. They can if they want to. It’s a free country.
Silence that ripens,
silence that stays green, silence
fallen and sere— David Marshall
I’ll finish up with the astronomical phenomena, since this is, after all, a voyage across the Haikuverse…
Here’s one from Terri L. French’s recent week as the featured poet on the Daily Haiku blog — I love this image:
long road trip —
Orion’s belt rests
on the dashboard— Terri L. French
And here’s one I like a lot from the blog of extra special bitter:
November sky —
I used to remember
which planet that was— extra special bitter
As I recently mentioned to someone, I sometimes have difficulty myself even in recalling exactly which planet we are supposed to be on, so I can relate to this sentiment. You know — keeping track of where you are can get to be a challenge when you spend as much time wandering the Haikuverse as I do …
Have a great week, and don’t get lost in space.
_______________________________
The Haikuverse in the fourth dimension:
October 4 (Frost Warning)
frost warning —
the neighbor’s television
suddenly muted
September 23: Halfway/haibun
Halfway
Broad daylight, the last day of summer. A tortoiseshell with a chipmunk in her mouth trots up the road. The body of the victim is summer-fattened and makes a mouthful. The cat is quick and purposeful, still in hunting mode. She pauses at the entrance to our driveway, examining the possibilities, then turns decisively and starts marching up it. For a minute I wonder if we’re about to receive a gift. But she goes only as far as the hedge between us and the neighbor and then slips into it and away.
fall equinox
standing on one foot
shivering
July 27: Full moon last night
full moon
once again I forget
to look up
city haze obscures the moon uncertain dogs barking
moon caught in the trees
the neighbors gather
to watch it escape
milk and the moon stirred into our tea
clean plates
the conversation
drifts to the moon
the moon adds layers soon he’ll be convinced I’m right
sleepless night
the sheets as white
as the moon
July’s full moon the fan blows away its heat
full moon
behind me in the mirror
such whiteness
June 26: 2-10: The Technique of Mixing It Up
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
“What I mean here is mixing up the action so the reader does not know if nature is doing the acting or if a human is doing it. … Very often when I use a gerund in a haiku I am basically saying, ‘I am. . .’ making an action but leaving unsaid the ‘I am.’ … It is a good way to combine humanity’s action with nature in a way that minimizes the impact of the author but allows an interaction between humanity and nature.
end of winter
covering the first row
of lettuce seeds“
– Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
*
Me:
Three yellow birds
riffing on an old song
in the garden
Up the hill,
the iPod strapped to my arm,
playing it cool
Everything I know
seething in my mind
the dream begins
The fire next door
burning marshmallows
the boys trade equations
Bearing the pain —
the tree laid low with snow —
ready to snap
The empty porch
waiting for the UPS guy
to leap up the stairs
Hunting for a home —
the birds perched on the roof —
pausing to consider
Dancing to James Brown
the ants we can’t get rid of
track our steps
Yellow light —
hesitating as we approach —
hoping to move forward
*
Okay, I basically could have gone on with these forever, but I have about a million other things to do so I forced myself to stop. But I will be writing more. The ambiguity really appeals to me. You may have noticed that I am interpreting “nature” in Jane’s explanation as meaning “all inanimate objects” (so iPods and yellow lights are fair game).
I also was playing around with using actual punctuation and capitalization, which will probably get me thrown out of the Proper Haiku Writers’ Society. I apologize if I have horrified anyone, but I have been wanting to do this for a long time and only hesitated out of cowardice, not wanting to buck the trend and alienate the Powers That Be. But that’s kind of silly.
It’s fine with me if other haiku writers don’t want to punctuate or capitalize, but I think the arguments about that being the Only Way to write haiku are seriously overblown. I don’t really have time to write a treatise about this today, but suffice it to say that I think writers in English should be able to use all the tools that written English offers to convey their meaning and give aid and comfort to the reader. That being said, I tried very hard not to let the punctuation here erase the ambiguity or favor one interpretation of the haiku over another. And who knows, maybe I’ll go back to the minimalist look myself. I just really need to experiment with this to see how it works for me.
May 25: 3 (Wall Between Our Houses)
the wall
between our houses
unattended peonies
May 25: 1 (Boys Take Off)
boys take off swinging
the danger
summer wind
May 23: 1-30: My father
1.
freeze after thaw
cell phone ring
makes me slip on the ice
2.
colder than yesterday
my sister’s voice
on the phone
3.
on my back on the ice
clouds torn open
reveal more clouds
4.
cell phone ring
the airport
vanishes
5.
a stranger’s car
roads darker than I’m used to
curve toward home
6.
snow on dark steps
inside
the family waits
7.
pancakes heavy
in my stomach
throwing out his painkillers
8.
the day after his death
the death of the neighbor’s dog
we sympathize
9.
cold draft in his room
the cards
we used to play with
10.
knocking with cold hands
at the wrong door
of the funeral home
11.
list of funeral expenses
scratches on
the polished table
12.
early dark
white sheet pulled away
from his surprised face
13.
snow on a low wall
choosing between
two burial places
14.
PowerPoint slides
of gravestones
chairs with hard seats
15.
stack of Sunday papers
can’t stop reading
the obituary
16.
morning fog
running up the hills
I left behind
17.
trying on dresses
my sister’s
opinion
18.
Olympic snowboarding
I blow my nose
on his handkerchiefs
19.
thin pajamas
Googling the words of
his favorite hymn
20.
steam from my mother’s tea
showing her
Facebook condolences
21.
day of the funeral
rust from the leaky
faucet
22.
unheated waiting room
one by one
we put coats back on
23.
my father’s funeral
truth
and lies
24.
standing for a hymn
memory of my head
reaching his elbow
25.
minister’s hug
his sympathy card
will regret my unbelief
26.
frost on the windowpane
unfamiliar
relatives
27.
their sympathy
taste of
sweet red punch
28.
snow in the cemetery
wrong kind
of shoes
29.
fresh snow on his car
another
dead battery
30.
my inheritance
a car to drive
a thousand miles home
*
My father died in February. I’d made no effort whatsoever to write about his death before. Or speak about it, really. Or think about it, come to think about it.
Something about haiku makes it easier, by forcing you to remember and concentrate on the tiny physical details of the experience. Writing these has been like compiling a mental photo album of the week of his death. It’s allowed both distance and immediacy. I approach the experience, come close enough to touch it, then draw back quickly, as soon as I start to feel it burn.
May 21: 3 (My Neighbor’s Irises)
my neighbor’s irises
casting long purple shadows
over mine
May 7: 3 (Halfway Through Spring)
halfway through spring
window open,
neighbors singing
Red Dragonfly 