Haiku North America, Day 1

I’m back in the garden of the Inn at Queen Anne. Taking a break. Writing to you. My brain is too full not to dump a little of it out onto the page. So here’s the story of yesterday.

On my way to register for HNA at the Seattle Center, I met Susan Diridoni in the courtyard…

We talked one-line haiku and infuriating politicians. Two of our favorite subjects.

monomania the cure for wildflowers

First on the agenda after registration was a walk to the Olympic Sculpture Park down by the harbor. Michael Dylan Welch had a camera permanently attached to his face so the only picture of him I was able to get was one I took while he was taking a picture of me.

Debbie Kolodji and I found ourselves reflected in one of the sculptures….

I’m not sure if our reflections count as “touching” in the eyes of those who wrote this warning sign. I also find it interesting to ponder the difference between visual art, which can indeed be harmed by indiscriminate touching, and haiku, which haiku poets encourage our readers to put their grubby little hands all over, knowing that will only make it more interesting.

It’s Fleet Week in Seattle, so there were ominous-looking ships mulling around the harbor. On the plus side, they interacted well with the sculpture.

These flowers were everywhere, growing low all over the ground. I love them. Somebody tell me what they are.

This was my favorite sculpture. Anyone under the age of 35 who knows what it is gets a prize.

Debbie Kolodji and Carlos Colon were hard to keep up with sometimes. Especially when they were trying to avoid having their pictures taken.

We went in the Viviarium, where they keep a big dead tree trunk that has living stuff growing all over it (very symbolic) and where they have mushroom tiles on the walls, which made me happy.

This metal-plated tree enchanted me, if only because I don’t like to let well enough alone where nature is concerned.

Back at the Seattle Center, Michael showed us this stone with a haiku of Basho’s engraved on it. (Rhyming couplet, awesome.)

Went out for a late lunch/early dinner with a few people, then back to the hotel, where Charlie Trumbull and Jim Kacian were scheming in the courtyard. (All their schemes were legal and ethical. I checked.)

Then to a dessert reception and open mic reading at the Seattle Center, where I met people at a ferocious rate.

… Wonderful people.

(Lidia Rozmus [my wonderful roommate], Wanda Cook, Carlos Colon, Don Wentworth, Marjorie Buettner, Sarah and Gene Myers, Marilyn Hazelton)

(David Lanoue, Susan Diridoni, Richard Gilbert, Carolyn Hall, Jim Kacian, Carlos Colon, Carmen Sterba, Penny Harter)

I talked until my throat got sore, and then I went off to a gendai haiku writing workshop and talked a whole bunch more.

Here we all (okay, about half of us) are listening to Emiko Miyashita telling us about gendai haiku in Japanese. (That’s Charlie Trumbull, Garry Gay, Kathy Munro, Billie Dee, Sheila Sondik, Jim Westenhaver, Emiko Miyashita)

At the end we all tried our hand at writing more gendai, and I finally managed to get a picture of Michael without a camera in front of his face.

It was past eleven by the time we finished. Wild and crazy haiku poets, that’s us.

A few of us had a late-night snack, and by the time I got to bed it was about three in the morning in Wisconsin. Which is the time that counts, after all.

I’ll write about today tomorrow. See how that works?

Hope you’re all having a great time whether you’re in Seattle or not.

Yorick in Moscow

(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)

The cemetery is full of trees. How do they dig the graves? You couldn’t get a backhoe between the trunks. Are there still gravediggers here, men with shovels making dark jokes about the things they unearth in the course of their work? I think about dying here and what it would be like to lie with my head against one set of roots and my feet against another. With a rock over my chest that told everyone my foreign name. People would walk back and forth over me, murmuring, in a tongue not my own, the first and last years I was alive. For decades I would dream my life, until the gravediggers retrieved me, held me up to the light, let the sun shine through my skull.

last frost
my footprint melted
into the soil

Contemporary Haibun Online, July 2011

We interrupt this broadcast…

… for some brief self-promotion. You can do like I always do and just hit mute while the commercial is running if you want, though. I won’t be offended.

Okay: Tomorrow (July 16) is the last day to get your registration in to Haiku North America in order to be eligible for reduced rate registration. (You can still register after this, it will just cost a little more.) HNA is a huge haiku bash that will be happening in Seattle from August 3rd to 7th. All kinds of fun things will be happening there, as you can see from this schedule.

One of the fun things is a panel discussion on haiku blogging, which will be conducted by Fay Aoyagi (Blue Willow Haiku World), Gene Myers (genemyers.com), Don Wentworth (Issa’s Untidy Hut), and me. What are we going to say? You know, I don’t have the faintest idea. It’s a surprise. You’ll have to show up to find out. (Evil laugh.)

I will say that those other three people are kind of, like, blogger superheroes. If you’ve spent any time around here at all you’ve heard me quote Fay and Don over and over again. I am not quite sure what the world of haiku blogging would be like without them but I don’t want to find out. And although Gene’s blog focuses less exclusively on haiku and thus has gotten less air time here, it is also fascinating and extremely rewarding. So I’m very flattered to be included in their company.

I hope to see a bunch of you there. I think what I’m most looking forward to about this conference is being able to meet people in the flesh who have previously been only disembodied names. Make sure to say hi if you see me, if I don’t say it first.

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One more quick public service announcement: Tomorrow is also the last day to get your haiku/tanka/haiga about mushrooms to me if you want them included in my super-mega mushroom blowout post next week. Saturday midnight. Don’t forget.

Babushkas

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Old women everywhere, like crones out of fairy tales, sweep dirt from and onto the streets with bundles of twigs. I think about stopping one of them to ask for three wishes. But they stare at me suspiciously from under their kerchiefs and mutter when they hear me speak. “She doesn’t even know Russian. Her coat isn’t warm enough. What is going to become of all of us?” All I really want, I think, is one of those brooms.

new moon
the once upon a time
of my life

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.Contemporary Haibun Online 7:2, July 2011

illustration: Rick Daddario, 19 Planets

The Rainbow Cafe

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We like to visit a co-op cafe in our Moscow neighborhood, one of the new private enterprises that Gorbachev has encouraged; they have more and better food than most of the state restaurants, and are never “Closed for Repairs” when the employees feel like taking a day off, never display “No Vacancy” signs when the place is empty. The staff are solicitous and polite, and apologetic if something on the menu doesn’t happen to be available, instead of incredulous that you might ever have expected it would be.

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winter flea market —
a wind-up doll
that’s already broken

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It drives the staff crazy if I order for myself instead of letting my boyfriend do it for me. For this reason, I make a point of always ordering for myself, and always before he does. They stare ferociously at him while I speak, and only after he gives a slight nod do they write down my order. Even after I’ve been doing this for months, they don’t yield on their principles. No one there ever asks me what I want.

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I eat my chicken Kiev watching them as they bustle from table to table with worried lines in their foreheads, as if they’re calculating profit margins in their heads. Butter drips down my chin. My boyfriend reaches over and wipes it off with a napkin.

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meteor shower
the wishes I make
in another language

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.— Haibun Today 5:2, June 2011

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(intensive care)

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intensive care —
confirming the status
of the apple blossoms

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.Notes from the Gean 3:1, June 2011
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Memorial Day

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Memorial Day
he asks to sit down
for a while

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(another birthday)

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another birthday
a hawk comes to live
in the neighborhood

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.DailyHaiku, 4/23/2011

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Incidentally, my haiku are being featured on DailyHaiku all week this week again, starting today. Feel free to hop over there and see what’s going on.

Cities of Green Leaves Ginko-no-Kukai

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As a blogger-inspired initiative to honor
the spirit and sacrifices of the people
in Japan’s stricken Tohoku region,
we are pleased to announce

Cities of Green Leaves Ginko-no-Kukai, May 14 and 15, 2011

We encourage everyone
to join in an international nature walk
to be held May 14 and 15
followed by an international haiku contest.

We invite you to walk with us on those days, collaborating with like-minded poets and bloggers in combining their skills and talents, enter your haiku in a peer judged contest, and take the opportunity to offer aid and support to our friends in Japan in a consensus of thought, well wishes and kinetic energies to occur simultaneously around the globe.

It’s no surprise the kukai’s topic will take its cue from Sendai, Japan’s annual Aoba Matsuri Festival, an event held originally to honor the city’s founder, Date Masamune. The date has now become an annual celebration with thousands of visitors, a parade, sparrow dance and tree lined streets as part of the festival each year to rejoice in the arrival of spring’s new greenery and rebirth.

You may choose any place to hold your ginko walk, as long as it holds the attributes to inspire many to compassionate action in the beauty of poetry, and the celebration of the renewing power of nature’s seasons.

The address to submit your poems will be posted here this third weekend of May. Please return often until then for further updates and poetry. We look forward to walking with you!

Charitable Donations

Architecture for Humanity

Ngo Jen Official Website

Salvation Army in Japan

Participating Blogs

Area 17

Green Tea and Bird Song

Haiku Bandit Society

Red Dragonfly (that’s right here, folks…)
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Please join us!

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So here’s the deal. A few weeks ago I was hanging out on my friend Willie Sorlien’s amazing blog, Haiku Bandit Society, which is where he likes to hang out when he isn’t hanging out on his other amazing blog, Green Tea and Bird Song, or in the real world in the Upper Midwest not too terribly far from where I hang out in the real world. And the conversation turned to Japanese gardens, which are awesome, and I said, “Hey, Willie, how about when you and I are done with our horrible school semesters we invite a bunch of upper Midwestern haiku poets to join us at this fantastic Japanese garden in Rockford, Illinois, which I have been meaning to visit for like ten years now and have somehow managed not to do even though Japanese gardens are one of my favorite things in the world and I only live an hour and a half away from this one?” And he said, “Yeah, sounds great!” and I said, “Really? Okay, let’s do it!”

And then I wandered away all happy thinking about what a nice time we would all have hanging out together in Rockford in May, little knowing that I had let loose an unstoppable avalanche of saving-the-world in Willie’s brain. He started sending me emails with these incomprehensible words in them like “ginko-no-kukai” and “Date Masamune” and talking about how everyone in the world was going to somehow be joining us on our little nature outing and we would all write poetry together and it would all tie in with a festival in Japan that I’d never heard of and it would cheer up basically the entire world population, especially the part of it that lives in Japan.

And being me, I started to whine and complain that I didn’t know what he was talking about and I didn’t have time to organize an international poetry festival to help save the world and he could just plan the whole thing himself and then send me the announcement about it to put up on my blog, because that’s all I felt like doing. I’m gracious and helpful like that sometimes. And he just put his head down and kept steamrolling ahead and waved his hand at me and said, “No problem, have fun, I’m on it.” Then he went off and started emailing people on four continents to rope them into his plan, and since most of them were a lot more gracious and helpful than I am, this is what has come of it my mild-mannered suggestion, no thanks whatsoever to me. I stand abashed and amazed.

So my suggestion is, have a little more gumption than I did. Just do what Willie says, because he has good ideas. Find someplace nice to take a walk in a couple of weeks, meet some friends, write a little poetry, think good thoughts about Japan, send them some money to help clean up the mess they’re in … really, is it that complicated? Do you have to whine so much? Oh, wait, that’s me. Sorry.

Anyway…stay tuned for more announcements…

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blossoms
we fall through a hole
to Japan

April 28: Post Office

The main post office on Gorky Street in Moscow. A line of squat beige phones —  a line of people in thick coats to their ankles standing beside them. Staring at them like half-boiled pots, waiting for them to ring. Waiting to hear the voice of someone from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

You’ve filled in the required forms. When do you want to talk? Whom do you want to talk to? For how long would you like this conversation to continue? Be careful: they’ll give you exactly the amount of time you ask for, no more and no less. But the phones are ringing, your mind is buzzing, you can only make awkward, half-thought-through calculations.

Not long after our phones ring and we lift the receivers to our ears like stones, we realize we answered all the questions wrong. The conversations should have been earlier or later, longer or shorter. The people we are talking to are not people we really know. We’ve forgotten the languages they’re speaking. We live in different countries for what we now know is forever, though we meant it to be temporary. “Wait —” we say. “It’s about to end —”

The phone makes a noise that means my life has returned to me. Everything goes silent until it’s the next person’s turn. Down the line, feet shuffle, stirring the hems of coats.

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melting snow —
letting go
of what I meant to say

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(Chrysanthemum 9, April 2011)

April 26 (Swing)

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swing—
we take turns
pushing each other

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Playgrounds, playground equipment)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 27th:

Fire

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 25: Black and White

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black light
poems appear
in the rocks

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white butterflies unbreathable atmosphere

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horsetail sky
another story about you
in the newspaper

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Black and white)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 26th:

Playgrounds and playground equipment

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 23 (Amphitheater)

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amphitheater among the words a whippoorwill

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Theater, plays)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 24th:

Eggs

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 22 (Spring Mud)

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spring mud
the sound of rain
falling into it

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Dirt, soil)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 23rd, in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday:

Theater, plays

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

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Eyes)
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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 20: Punk Rock Haiku (Wildflowers in Progress)

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abandoned building site wildflowers in progress

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Daily Haiku, 4/18/2011

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A couple of months ago, my old friend John, whom I used to hang out with while he played guitar in his parents’ basement when we were still young enough to live with our parents (because, you know, we were still in school), sent me an MP3 file (“a what?” my 1988 self asks) of a song he had recorded in the basement of the house he lives in now with his wife and daughter and makes mortgage payments on. How does time pass like this?

Anyway, if you must know, it was a cover of Robyn Hitchcock’s “Arms of Love,” done all Phil Spector-ish and Wall-of-Sound-y, with sleigh bells, no less. It was awesome. But that’s not the point here.

The point is that when I opened this file in iTunes, I noticed that in the “album” field it said “Wildflowers in Progress.” A small firecracker went off in my brain and I emailed him and said, “What is this thing it says for the album name?” and he wrote back and said (I quote), “It’s going to be the eventual title of the solo record I’ve been compiling tunes for for the last couple of years (got the name from an enclosure of flowers I saw on an off-ramp on I-81 on the way to New Jersey a few years back).”

Well, that was all very nice, but I wrote back and informed him that what it really was, was part of a haiku. And the next day I carried out my threat. See above.

Yes, that’s right: this is a six-word poem and I only wrote half of it. The less interesting half, needless to say. I mean, a phrase like “wildflowers in progress” is pretty close to being a haiku on its own — to get it all the way there you just need someone to pull some kind of workmanlike juxtaposition out of the air and tack it on somewhere, and that’s all I did.

I’m extremely grateful to John for tossing his amazing found poetry to me and letting me run away with it. (He still gets to use it as his album title, in case you were wondering.) And I’m even more grateful to him for tossing me, around the same time, this music-geek-worthy aphorism, which I have added to the lengthy file I am amassing of the seemingly infinite definitions of haiku:

“Haiku is kind of the punk rock of poetry. Three chords and the truth.”

Truth. It’s good to see someone identifying this as the key characteristic of haiku, rather than the number of syllables, or the presence of a seasonal reference, or some kind of structural requirement like juxtaposition or kireji, or the presence of a difficult-to-define quality like ma or yugen or karumi.

For the record, I find all those things really interesting to think about and work with, and recognize that in a poem as short as a haiku, the ability to surprise and enlighten the reader is greatly enhanced by the use of these time-honored techniques and concepts, which are vital to understand and master.

But that’s what haiku are, not what they’re about. What they’re about is the truth. If you don’t have some kind of truth to work with to begin with, nothing in your technique will conjure it into existence, and your haiku will be dead on the page.

Now I’m starting to sound all pompous and truthier-than-thou. I think I’ll have to let John save me from myself again. This is what else he says about writing haiku: It’s “deceptively simple. But insanely hard to do well. The difference between The Clash and some run-of-the-mill hardcore band, if you will.”

Well, okay. I have to admit it never occurred to me before to compare, say, Basho’s frogpond haiku to London Calling. But it works for me.

So my revised haiku-writing advice: Be true. But also: be punk. And pay attention the next time you’re driving through New Jersey. You never know what you’ll find.

April 19 (West Wind)

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west wind
the rain arrives
without you

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Wind)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 20th:

Walls

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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 16 (Property Line)

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property line
the hawk’s head swivels
from house to house

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(NaHaiWriMo topic: Birds of prey)
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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 17th:

Houses and other dwellings

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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 10: 1-2: Books and libraries

wild nights —
Emily Dickinson asleep
on my nightstand

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library hush
he reads my mind
a little

 

(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Books and libraries)

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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 11th

Really big things (it’s all relative, of course)

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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 9 (Cicada Trill)

cicada trill
when did I last play
the harmonica

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(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Music)

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Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 1oth (the start of National Library Week)

Books and libraries

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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.)