Across the Haikuverse, No. 27: Okay, So I Lied Edition

I know, I know. I said I wasn’t going to do this again for a while. But I’m so used to it! I keep reading haiku I love! And then I cut and paste them to a document and then I paste them into WordPress and then I fiddle with the formatting a little and then I press “Publish” and you get to read them. It’s not really that hard. No, really! It’s not! I totally can do it… at least one more time. Right? Please?

…Thanks!

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Haiku

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brittle moonlight
self-immolations
drawn on a map

— William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society

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hiding their faces well snowflakes
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de skjuler deres ansigter godt snefuggene

— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger

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change of seasons
I catch myself talking
to the wind

— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-doodle

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a break
in the clouds
how small we are

— Alegria Imperial, jornales

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in the second-hand book shop, the purr of the three-legged cat

— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked

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千の矢の描く千の弧師走空　　青柳　飛

sen no ya no egaku sen no ko shiwazu-zora
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one thousand trajectories
of one thousand arrows—
December sky

Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World  (her blog’s 1000^th post)

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目をつむりセーター脱げば剥製です　　　渡部陽子

me o tsumuri seitaa nugeba hakusei desu
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taking off a sweater
with eyes closed
I am a stuffed specimen

— Yoko Watabe, tr. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World

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platelets—
the trip we were planning
to plan

— Roberta Beary, Tinywords

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itallcomestogether in the darkness for the owl

— Johnny Baranski, Monostich

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longue recherche
des lunettes pour mieux voir
le brouillard

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a long search
for glasses, the better to see
the fog

— Vincent Hoarau, La Calebasse (dubious translation by me)

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Haibun

she envies her her boyfriend that never fools around and her cherry-red convertible that never needs repairs and her outfits (complete with shoes and accessories) that can be had for less than ten dollars and the perpetually-shining plastic sun outside her practically-immaculate plastic house but most of all she envies her her god-damn nearly-perfect never-faltering ability-to-smile . . .

she says
“we can’t help who we love”
to no one
in particular
“all guys are assholes”

— Eric L. Houck Jr., haiku

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Haiga

Kindly click on the links to see the haiga that are not posted here.

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mouth of the cave
we enter as eagles
exit as sparrows

— an’ya, DailyHaiga

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opening emergency door,
head-on spring moon

— Kikko Yokoyama, with haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here

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— Aubrie Cox, Yay Words! (Click on the image [or the link to Aubrie’s blog] for a larger, more legible version)

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Essayed

Chen-ou Liu posted a great essay recently on his blog Poetry in the Moment (originally published in A Hundred Gourds 1.1) about the phenomenon of “deja-ku”: “Read It Slowly, Repeatedly, and Communally.” Here’s a sample, but please go read the whole thing, it’s fascinating and there are lots of great examples.

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Today, high poetic value placed upon originality remains ingrained in the Western literary culture. This fear of unknowingly writing similar haiku or the reluctance or disuse of allusion proves that Thomas Mallon’s remark still holds true: the poets live under the “fearful legacy of the Romantics.” Could those poets or editors who are constantly worried about “not being original or fresh” imagine that a poet deliberately using a direct quote as the first two lines of his haiku can achieve a great poem?

— Chen-ou Liu, “Read It Slowly, Repeatedly, and Communally”

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Hey, thanks for indulging me. I feel better now.

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bitter night
I keep reminding myself
I’m a poet

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Monostich, revisited

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If you were a one-line poem, where would you be? Well, frankly, you could be just about anywhere these days, they’re getting to be all the rage, but a lot of them, as I’ve mentioned before, hang out on this blog called Monostich that fourteen of us collaborate on. I try to post something there every few weeks, although since my memory is more or less shot, sometimes it’s not that often.

Below is most of what I’ve posted on Monostich since the last time I wrote about it. Be merciful, this whole thing is a grand and beautiful and sometimes disastrously failed experiment. Like most of life. You should go over and see what some of my co-conspirators have posted if you want a better sense of the possibilities of the form.

(By the way, the sound at the end of “monostich” is “k,” not “ch.” And there’s no “t” in it. It’s not a monostitch-in-time, although that would be very poetic.)

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suspecting rain in everything he does

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luna moth her see-through skirt

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individually wrapped pieces of rain

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solar flares fireflies shift allegiance

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bees buzzing my dread of namelessness

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after the haiku about fireflies the fireflies

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old pond its acoustic properties

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snowandthenithappens

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Monostich

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wolves howling no obstacle to finding the words

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the moons of Jupiter this is a life I didn’t know existed

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between your words the last few stars disappear

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not without a last look back salt lick

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There’s a new blog in town that may appeal to those of you who have always felt that three lines was about three times as long as a poem should be. It’s called Monostich (http://monostich.blogspot.com), which is a fancy word for a one-line poem. Depending on what your definition of haiku is, you may think some or all of the poems on this site are haiku and then again you may not. It doesn’t really matter. We’re having a great time writing them anyway.

Did I say “we”? Oh right…maybe I forgot to mention that this new blog has (currently) ten authors and I am one of them. The nine others are Johannes S.H. Bjerg (whose brainchild this was and who hounded, um, encouraged the rest of us to participate, which I think we’re now all very glad he did), Costis Demos, Claire Everett, Mark Holloway, Angie LaPaglia McNeill, Polona Oblak, Paul Smith, Alan Summers, and Liam Wilkinson. In case you’re not familiar with any of these poets … well, you should be, trust me.

It’s a lot of fun to share a blog, I’ve decided. Less pressure, more variety. We don’t have a formal arrangement or schedule or anything for who posts when, we all just post when and if we feel like it. Each of us, obviously, has a different style but we have enough of a shared aesthetic that the blog feels like a coherent artistic effort. I like it a lot. But then I might be biased. Let me know what you think.