Once I went running at sunrise and a fox went running with me, keeping my exact easy pace, loping through the backyards of my neighborhood toward the sun as if in pursuit of that red. That was the wildest I’ve ever felt. I sometimes wonder if it was when the fox felt the tamest.
autumn night
the heat
from all my organs
There’s really nothing left to say, but I keep saying it anyway. It’s a habit I’m trying to break, but I probably never will. He’s stopped replying, but that’s okay. The whole thing was stupid, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Next time I’ll know better, I think, but I know I won’t.
autumn sky
only one of us
deciduous
(prose: here, now. haiku: frogpond 37.1.)
.
calculating
the lift required
harvest moon
.
the sound of geese through the crosshairs
.
hunter’s moon
he texts to say
he’s lonely
.
…and it’s not even a full moon. I’m probably going to some kind of kigo hell.
“calculating”: Frogpond 36.1. “the sound” and “hunter’s moon”: Modern Haiku 44.1
.
.
last of October
(a reminder
to make amends
with my ghost)
(or be smashed
like a pumpkin)
.
.
The flowers are hardening, tightening up. You look at them expecting to see their familiar open faces, warm-hearted smiles, but they look back at you stiffly, politely; the entire encounter is awkward. You avert your eyes, hurry by. Just last week you had a friendly conversation, they seemed to approve of you. Now you’re their son’s girlfriend from the other side of the tracks, the salesman who’s about to lose the sale, the kid no one wants to choose for their team. Cold. They’re cold. You can see the future, your future, and they’re not in it.
This whole side of the street–rust. That brick wall–crumbled. All the newspapers–faded. (And no one reads them anymore.)
You feel a pain you’ve never felt before and you know it’s just the first of many.
Andante, adagio, largo, decelerando, decelerando.
first frost
but the key still fits
in the lock
.
~~~~~~~~
In this (extremely belated) edition of the Haikuverse:
Autumn wind:
Everything I see
Is haiku.
— Takahama Kyoshi (tr. Geoffrey Bownas)
_____________________________________________________________________________
.
![this turning of the year (the light fades [slowly] ) to fall... (I'm learning to lean against) I guess there's nothing to stop it (an axis of absence)](https://haikuproject.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/screen-shot-2012-09-22-at-6-42-24-pm.png "this turning of the year")
— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, 3ournals & Frags
.
.
everyone waits
for the light to change–
little chestnut moon
— Angie Werren (haiku and image), feathers
.
You are gathered to go,
Strip-lining phone wires,
Faced to the south,
After all that’s been said,
I wish I was with you.
— Matt Morden, Morden Haiku
.
.
dog days
the universe still
a thrown stick
–Rick Daddario (haiku and artwork), 19 Planets
.
.
approaching autumn
in my pocket
a chain for the black dog
–Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Scented Dust
.
off
looking for paradise–
cicada husk
— Josh Hockensmith, No More Moon Poems
.
my friends say leaf-fall
but I say apple-fall
dull-drubbing the grass
— Marie Marshall, Kvenna Rad
(See also: Marie’s “Fragment 200“)
.
The casualty report,
made into a bag
for ripening an apple.
— Sanki Saito (1939), on R’r Blog
.
taiheiyô nomikomeba aki futto kuru
when I swallow
the Pacific Ocean… unexpectedly
autumn
— Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
an octopus trap
in the pawn shop, still wet—
harvest moon
— Mark Harris, from Sea Bandits, edited by Aubrie Cox, downloadable from Yay Words!
.
Scent of burning leaves
the four chambers
of my heart
— Patrick Sweeney, on Issa’s Untidy Hut
.
invited to feel
the stubble on her legs
autumn rain
—Shawn Lindsay, on ant ant ant ant ant’s blog
.
______________________________________________________
This new venture looks interesting: Bones: Journal for New Haiku. Editors: Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Alan Summers, Sheila Windsor. They are poets whose work and taste I admire, and they have a manifesto that I like a lot. In part it reads: “Haiku that stands on the firm ground of tradition but has internalized it and is now written for today and the future.”
Fall is always a good time to start things, especially things that require a flow of brisk air to the brain. I hope this venture flourishes. I hope we all do. Have a gentle fall.
.
.
.
Japanese maple
my reincarnation
as autumn
.
oak gall
my name misspelled
in his love letter
.
blazing sumac
the fear that my ghost
won’t rest
.
._
Maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t that fewer haiku tend to be written about the summer than about any other season. (I have absolutely no hard data to support this conclusion. But I’ve got a whole theory about it, so work with me here.)
I mentioned this to a friend who is just becoming familiar with haiku.
— Autumn, I told him, that’s the haiku season. It’s more wabi-sabi. [Insert whole discussion about wabi-sabi.]
— Fine, he said, wabi-sabi away, but why autumn? Think outside the box here. Why can’t you be all imperfect and melancholic in the summer?
— Um, because it’s too sunny, I said. People are all warm and happy in the summer. They’re going to the beach, having barbecues. Nothing is dying. There’s nothing to be wistful about.
— Aha (he said triumphantly). But that makes the wistfulness more ironic and unexpected. It’s more interesting that way. You should write more haiku about the summer.
Hmmm. I suppose I should.
.
summer night
a gunshot separates
light from dark
.
the surgeon questions
my need to be awake —
summer downpour
.
slanted sunlight…
I say “I do”
in divorce court
.
glaring sun ::
his flawed logic
convinces me
.
across the lawn
a hose stretched taut–
summer dusk
..
a room full of mosquitoes in and out of love
.
.
.
.
_____________________________________________________________________
credits: spring rain, Modern Haiku 42.3; summer rain, Frogpond 35.1; autumn rain, Modern Haiku 43.1; winter rain, bottle rockets 26
..
.
.
haiku: Frogpond 34.3
.
(Photo: Jay Otto)
.
.
.
.
harvest moon –
wishing for it to fall
butter side up
.
Haiku Bandit Society, September Moon Viewing Party
.
My kindergarten teacher was worried about me because I liked to read. In those days kindergarteners were supposed to occupy themselves only with playing, and socializing, and coloring in the letters of the alphabet on worksheets just to familiarize themselves with the shapes that they would be introduced to more thoroughly in first grade. But I could already read and I was tantalized by the books on the shelves behind the teacher’s desk, which she read aloud to us before naptime. When the teacher’s back was turned I scrambled up on a stepstool and grabbed books and ran off with them to a corner to devour them before she could find me and take the books away and scold me for reading and send me back to play with dolls or something else I had no interest in. I felt like a criminal. I felt like a rebel. I felt like a five-year-old who was sick with love for stories and kept having her heart broken, day after day, by never being able to find out what the ending was.
Sometimes I dreamed the endings. Sometimes I wonder whether my own endings or the real ones were more satisfying.
first day of school —
out of time to decipher
the cicada’s drone
_________________________________________________________________________________
Haiku, Tanka, Haiga From All Over
I broke one of my own unwritten rules this edition. I usually try not to feature more than one poem per poet per edition, but I nearly went mad deciding which of the below three haiku by Johannes S.H. Bjerg I should include, so in the end I said the hell with it and decided to inflict them all on you. Please address any complaints to my alter ego, Ms. I.N. DeCision.
.
still air –
will a dead butterfly
become a butterfly?
stille luft –
vil en død sommerfugl
blive til en sommerfugl?
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
swallows leaving youshouldhavesaidsomething
svalerne forsvinder duskullehavesagtnoget
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
yoshino cherry tree—
it was never a question
of if
— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Tinywords
.
high heat index–
my mosquito bite
the size of a fat raindrop
— Kathy Nguyen, Origami Lotus Stones
.
off key crooning
in the darkness:
a neighbor braces for fall
— Gene Myers, genemyers.com
.
All I can do
most days
is point and say
this
this
— Kris Lindbeck, haiku etc.
.
pale moon—
sugar crystals travelling
south
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
.
eastern daylight time
she leaves
another voicemail
(this is a wonderful haiga; please go check it out)
— Angie Werren, feathers
.
from the beginning —
the moon &
love note after love note
— Patricia Nelson, Moon Viewing Party, Haiku Bandit Society
.
広島や卵食ふとき口ひらく 西東三鬼
hiroshima ya tamago kû toki kuchi hiraku
Hiroshima—
to eat an egg
I open my mouth
— Sanki Saito, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
Fay’s Note: This haiku does not have a kigo, but it is one of 8 haiku titled ‘Famous City’ by Sanki Saito (1900-1962). Soon after an atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Sanki visited the city. When he started to eat a boiled egg for lunch, he noticed that was the first time he opened his mouth that day. He had been speechless with what he saw.
.
wet rain . . .
you keep telling me things
i already know
[Modern Haiku 40.1]
— David Caruso, DavidHaiku.com
________________________________________________________________________________
Web Wide World
I’m just going to snap a bunch of links at you real quick like a bunny with a minimum of commentary because, you know, school’s starting soon and I should be doing stuff like buying textbooks and notebooks and sharpening my pencils and polishing shiny red apples to put on the desks of all my professors on the first day so they will be favorably disposed toward me and hopefully forgive me for scribbling haiku in the margins of all my notebooks around my notes on Electronic Resource Management. Ready? Here we go.
.
A Brief Survey of Senryu by Women, by Hiroaki Sato
This essay, published in Modern Haiku 34.1 in spring 2003, first makes a quick stab at trying to define how senryu differs from haiku, with a note that “the senryû is expected to deal with matters of human and social nature, often in a playful, satirical, or knowing manner” but also acknowledging that the line between haiku and senryu these days can be blurry in the extreme. Most of the piece, however, is taken up by samples of modern (mainly twentieth century) senryu by Japanese women, which are absolutely fascinating — not least because many of them make no attempt to be funny at all, in fact can be quite serious, and I suspect would not be considered senryu by most American haiku poets. They are powerful, compelling poetry, however, and I keep coming back to read them over and over. They seem to me to painfully and eloquently express the difficulties and limitations of many women’s lives.
.
The moment it blooms with full force it’s cut
— Inoue Noboku
.
The snow’s falling the snow’s falling these two breasts
— Kuwano Akiko
.
He leaves and I put away the lonesome sound
— Saigo Kanojo
.
Okay, so here’s something that’s genuinely funny. One workshop I was sorry I had to miss at Haiku North America was Jessica Tremblay’s session about her well-known “Old Pond” comics based on haiku. The next best thing, though, was discovering that Jessica had drawn a series of strips about her experiences at HNA. I laughed and laughed with recognition at so many of these and if you were there, or have read my reports from the conference, I guarantee you will get at least a chuckle out of them as well.
.
Another HNA connection: After I saw Eve Luckring’s amazing presentation on video renku at HNA I came home and Googled her straight off because I had to know more about her work, and discovered her astounding website, filled with her photography, short films, art, and poetry, which are often combined in wildly imaginative and original ways. Please go explore, you’ll be happy you did.
.
A funny and fascinating article by Marlene Mountain on English haiku poetics vis-a-vis Japanese haiku poetics made the rounds of Facebook a couple of weeks ago, provoking lots of interesting discussion: The Japanese Haiku and So On, first published at Paul Conneally’s haikumania (which is worth a look around) in 2004.
.
re zen. whatever.
— Marlene Mountain
.
If you haven’t discovered the “Montage” archive at The Haiku Foundation website, you need to run right over there and check it out…for about nine months in 2009 Allan Burns put together this fascinating weekly gallery of haiku, each week featuring haiku by three different poets on a different theme. The whole thing has been turned into a book now which can be yours for a $50 donation to The Haiku Foundation, but while you’re saving up for that, you can download each week’s gallery as a PDF and enjoy yourself mightily reading some amazing poetry.
.
Charlotte DiGregorio is the Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, which is my region and so I get to benefit from her energy and organizational ability as she organizes so many enjoyable and successful events for us here in flyover land. She also has a blog on which she posts many interesting musings about haiku. Quite often she invites audience participation and recently she sent out an email soliciting answers to the question, “Why do you write haiku?” The answers she got back were thoughtful, often funny, usually thought-provoking, and all over the map: well worth reading. Check them out.
.
Roadrunner published a new issue a couple of weeks ago, which besides being, as usual, one of the most thought-provoking reads in the Haikuverse, is also graphically appealing this time around. Every ku is enclosed in a box with a background of a different color and with a different typeface, and with the author’s name left off — only to appear at the end of the issue in a box matching the color and typeface of his or her contribution(s). (Full disclosure: I have a ku in this issue, in a highly appropriate color, but I’m not gonna tell you what it is.)
I don’t usually think of myself as someone who is overly influenced by the famous “fourth line” in haiku, but I was amazed at how different an experience it was to read these poems without knowing who had written them. I had to force myself not to keep scrolling to the end to read those names. But I ended up wishing that more journals would do something similar. See how you feel.
.
And finally, here’s an announcement for what promises to be an exciting new online journal, A Hundred Gourds:
The editorial team of ‘A Hundred Gourds’ welcomes your submissions to our first issue, which will be published online in December, 2011. ’A Hundred Gourds’ is a new journal featuring haiku, haibun, haiga, tanka, resources (articles, commentaries, reviews and interviews) and special artwork. ’A Hundred Gourds’ is managed by its editorial team: Lorin Ford, Melinda Hipple, John MacManus, Gene Murtha and Ray Rasmussen. Ron Moss will continue to support us in his valuable role of contributing and consulting artist. We are dedicated to producing a high quality journal, and look forward to your submissions. Books for review (hard copy only) may be sent to John McManus or the haiku, tanka, haiga or haibun editor respectively.
Submissions for the first issue of ‘A Hundred Gourds’ close on September 15th, 2011. Submissions and enquires may be addressed to : Lorin Ford, Haiku Editor: haikugourds@gmail.com ; Melinda Hipple, Haiga Editor: haigagourds@gmail.com ; John McManus, Resources Editor: jmac.ahgjournal@gmail.com ; Gene Murtha, Tanka Editor: tankagourds@gmail.com ; Ray Rasmussen, Haibun Editor: haibungourds@gmail.com, ray@raysweb.net
________________________________________________________________________________
Dead Tree News
Once again, lots of print, little time.
.
Journals: Bottle Rockets, Ribbons
I love both these journals and you should too and here are some examples of why:
.
From Bottle Rockets 25:
.
was it the dark
we shared
or the candle
— Susan Marie La Vallee
.
wet bike seat
not everything
must be a poem
— Lucas Stensland
.
here with me distant train
— John Hawk
.
a low stone wall
neatly topped with snow
this happiness
— Bruce Ross
.
sitting out
on the concrete path
that summer
very still with ants crawling
over my skin I did feel loved
— Joey Jenkins
.
And also in this issue of Bottle Rockets, you must read the wonderful anthology/essay by Michael Fessler, Remarkable Haiku, a collection of the author’s favorite haiku with trenchant commentary on what makes them so memorable for him.
.
From Ribbons 7:2, Summer 2011:
.
outside, the crickets
continue to sing,
though they would
never think of it
as singing
— Rosemary Wahtola Trommer
.
oh the places
we’ll go
rather than go
straight to the place
we’re all going
— John Stevenson
.
snow melt —
watching the world
shrink back
to its
usual proportions
— Paul Smith
.
.
Books: Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks (Fay Aoyagi); Where I Leave Off/Waar Ik Ophoud (Jim Kacian); Penguins/Pingviner (Johannes S.H. Bjerg)
I’m slowly working my way through the stacks of haiku books I bought this summer: first at Gayle Bull’s amazing bookshop in Mineral Point, Wis., The Foundry Books, which may have the best haiku book selection in the United States and is, terrifyingly, located only an hour from my house; second at Haiku North America. I’ll start with a couple of little books (little only in the physical sense) because somehow that makes them seem less intimidating, although on the inside they are as big as any haiku book ever written.
.
Fay Aoyagi’s third collection of poetry, Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks, is as thrilling as her first two, Chrysanthemum Love (2003) and In Borrowed Shoes (2006), and is even more thrilling for the fact that it includes extensive excerpts from both these books as well as a large selection of new poetry. Fay manages to employ fairly traditional haiku aesthetics — kigo, kire — in the service of extremely striking and original images and ideas, often funny and subversive.
.
cauliflower —
another day without
an adventure
forced hyacinth
a congresswoman
steals my pen
July Fourth
he criticizes my graceless use
of chopsticks
in the pool
she sheds everything
she wants to shed
soft rain
a plum tree
in its third trimester
— Fay Aoyagi
.
Jim Kacian’s Where I Leave Off is both a collection of one-line haiku and an examination of the poetics of one-line haiku: When and why do they work? He briefly describes various one-line techniques (these were also the subject of the talk by Jim I attended at HNA) and gives numerous striking examples from his own work.
1. “One-line one-thought”: “Rather than a piling up of images upon the imagination, a single image is extended or elaborated into a second context, stated or implied.”
reading the time-travel novel into the next day
— Jim Kacian
2. “Sheer speed”: “The rushing of image past the imagination results in a breathless taking in of the whole…”
in this way coming to love that one
— Jim Kacian
3. “Multiple kire”: “The advantage of one-line poems is that any of several stops can be made by the reader, and a different stop each time.”
where the smoke from a chimney ends infinity
— Jim Kacian
4. And then there’s “one-bun”: “a haibun where the prose element must be contained in a single line.”
the second week
traveling by myself i cross the continental divide, and everything that once ran in one way now runs in another, down and down
on the surface of dark water my face
— Jim Kacian
.
When Johannes S.H. Bjerg’s (yes, him again) new chapbook, Penguins/Pingviner, appeared in our mailbox last week, there was much rejoicing in our household, since we are all both rabid penguin fans (no, not fans of rabid penguins, for goodness’ sake) and also staunch Johannes fans. So we sat around the kitchen table reading and laughing and musing philosophically. Go ahead, try it.
.
on the backside
of the moon
lurking penguins
.
penguins walking
the need for bridges
of chrome and sugar
.
penguins —
no respect for
top brands
.
sleeping
in softdrink vending machines
guerilla penguins
.
hole in the sky
penguins knead a blue scarf
into a human
.
penguins
believe willingly
in all things flying
.
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg
_________________________________________________________________________________
.
And on that note… I think I’m going to drift off to sleep now, off to the far reaches of the Haikuverse, where the penguins fly and no one ever makes you stop reading just when you get to the good part. You’re welcome to join me, that is, when you’ve finished reading everything I tell you to. What, you thought you were gonna get out of doing your homework? Think again, kids.
.
Did I have any idea what I was getting myself into when I announced this topic? No, I did not. I had no idea that so many people would send me so much varied and amazing poetry about dragonflies. Just as I had no idea there were so many kinds of dragonflies until I started doing a little (okay, a lot) of research…
I’ll launch into the poetry in a minute, but first off, for those among you who like me have to know every. single. thing. there is to know. about something before you can possibly just enjoy reading about it (yes, we are annoying)… here is the Wikipedia article on dragonflies (which fascinatingly contains an entire section on the role dragonflies play in Japanese culture and even references haiku) and here is the page on dragonfly kigo from Gabi Greve’s World Kigo Database.
Okay, I’ll shut up now and let you enjoy this dream of dragonflies.
_________________________________________________________________________
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
aki no ki no akatombo ni sadamarinu
The beginning of autumn,
Decided
By the red dragon-fly.
— Shirao, translated by R.H. Blyth
.
toogarashi hane o tsukereba akatonbo
red pepper
put wings on it
red dragonfly
— Basho, translated by Patricia Donegan
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
a dragonfly lands
on a stranded paper boat…
summer’s end
— Polona Oblak, Crows and Daisies
.
within his armful
of raked leaves
this lifeless dragonfly
— Kirsten Cliff, Swimming in Lines of Haiku
.
(Artwork and poetry by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)
dragonflies
the soft blur of time
in another land
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
out of myself just briefly dragonfly
.
adding a touch
of blue to the breeze –
dragonfly
(Magnapoets Issue 4 July 2009)
.
fading light –
everything the dragonfly
has to say
— Paul Smith, Paper Moon
.
(Artwork by Amy Smith, The Spider Tribe’s Blog)
.
a crimson darter
skims the mirror-lake…
your lips on mine
tomorrow
may never come
.
twisting and turning
a dragonfly splits
a ray of light …
he says he loves me
in his own way
(Simply Haiku Winter 2011)
.
catching
the blue eye of the breeze
dragonfly
(Simply Haiku Spring 2011)
.
— Claire Everett, At the Edge of Dreams
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
on the water lily
remains of a dragonfly
morning stillness
(Evergreen English Haiku, 1995)
.
from sedge
to sedge to sedge
dragonfly
.
with a few brushstrokes the dragonfly comes alive
.
autumn dragonfly
waning
like the moon
a few scarlet leaves
silently fall
.
— Pamela A. Babusci
.
(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)
.
Dragonfly rising
everything shining
in the wind
.
Gold dragonflies
crisscross the air in silence:
summer sunset
.
A cirrus sky
one hundred dark dragonflies
with golden wings
.
— Kris Lindbeck, Haiku Etc.
.
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
The dragon-fly,
It tried in vain to settle
On a blade of grass.
— Basho, translated by R.H. Blyth
.
The dragon-fly
Perches on the stick
That strikes at him.
— Kohyo, translated by R.H. Blyth
.
the instant it flies up
a dragonfly
loses its shadow
— Inahata Teiko (1931-), translated by Makoto Ueda
.
(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)
.
red dragonfly
on my shoulder, what
rank do I have?
.
spiderweb down,
a damselfly touches
my lips
— Michael Nickels-Wisdom
.
born in the year
of the dragon-
fly!
— Mary Ahearn
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
sunset
from the tip of my shoe
the red dragonfly
(South by Southeast 18:2)
dew on grasses
the dragonflies
are gone
.
in a wrinkle
of light
dragonfly
.
— Donna Fleischer, word pond
.
(Poetry by Melissa Allen; illustration clip art)
.
.
through and through the gate dragonfly
— Melissa Allen
.
.
coupling dragonflies
at break-neck speed—
HOT!
(Modern Haiku 35.1)
— Susan Diridoni
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
on the dried husk
that was an iris blossom
black dragonfly
.
we came here
seeking solitude
the loon
the dragonfly
and the speedboat
— Christina Nguyen, A wish for the sky…
.
(Artwork by Kitagawa Utamaro: “Red Dragonfly and Locust [Aka tonbo and Inago]”, from Picture Book of Selected Insects with Crazy Poems [Ehon Mushi Erabi]). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.)
.
this brief life a dragonfly
.
dragonfly
where there is water
a path
.
— angie werren, feathers
.
tombô ya ni shaku tonde wa mata ni shaku
dragonfly–
flying two feet
then two feet more
— Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
a break in the rain…
the stillness
of the dragonfly
— sanjuktaa, wild berries
.
dragonfly—
how much of me
do you see?
— Alegria Imperial, jornales
.
noonday heat
dragonflies slice
the still air
(South by Southeast Vol. 12 #1)
— T.D. Ingram, @haikujots (on twitter)
.
.
evening breeze
teetering on its perch
a red dragonfly
(Haiku Pix Review, summer 2011)
.— G.R. LeBlanc, Berry Blue Haiku
.
high notes
a red dragonfly skims
across the sound
— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-Doodle
.
(Haiga by Polona Oblak, Crows and Daisies)
.
the heat
between downpours
blue dragonflies
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
Steel blue flash
flies wing
drifts
— Robert Mullen
.
.
dragonfly dreams
the hospital intercom
repeats her name
.
with the password
to her sanity
darting dragonfly
.
iridescent dragonfly
hard to see
how her Ph.D. matters
.
tell me the old stories
one last time
convalescent dragonfly
.
discharge papers
the dragonfly returns home
on new meds
.
letting go of her walker
she lifts into the night sky
dragonfly
.
— Susan Antolin, Artichoke Season
.
Multimedia Interlude:
Sick of everything around here being flat and quiet? I found some moving stuff that makes noise for you too.
.
and on this general theme…
.
perched on bamboo grass
the low notes
of a dragonfly
(Haiku inspired by Tif Holmes’s Photo-Haiku Project: http://tifholmesphotography.com/cphp/2011/07/july-2011-series-entry-11/)
— Kathy Nguyen (A~Lotus), Poetry by Lotus
.
for when even
the music stops—
dragonfly wings
— Aubrie Cox, Yay words!
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
.
mid-morning
a dragonfly and I
bound for Mississippi
.
in and out of view
the computer-drawn dragonfly
on the web page
— Tzetzka Ilieva
.
dragonfly
at 60 miles per hour
those giant eyes
— Johnny Baranski
.
(Photo by Jay Otto)
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first impressions
a dragonfly hovers
before landing
— Cara Holman, Prose Posies
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— Linda Papanicolaou, Haiga Online
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In this forest glade
The snail gone, a dragonfly lights
On the mushroom cap
— P. Allen
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‘Oh! Catch it!’
‘I heard they eat their own tails’
When I was a child, living on an Air Force base in Okinawa, it was a common belief, among the elementary school set, a dragonfly would eat itself if you caught it and fed it its own tail. I looked online and didn’t find any references to this notion so maybe we were all sniffing the good Japanese glue.
Anyhow, even though we constantly snagged lizards and grasshoppers and cicadas, I never saw any one ever catch a dragonfly, as common as they were.
dragonfly
we play in the puddles
afraid to get close
— Steve Mitchell, Heed Not Steve
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(Photo by Jay Otto)
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dragonfly—
wings vibrating
on the rock face
(From the sequence “Ten Haiku: For the Dodge Tenth Anniversary Hike” in The Monkey’s Face)
dragonfly
on my fingernail
looks at me
(From Wind in the Long Grass, edited by William J. Higginson [Simon & Schuster, Books for Young Readers, 1991])
— Penny Harter, Penny Harter homepage, A Poet’s Alphabestiary, Etc.
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An old tree
No bud and no leaf
full of dragonflies.
— @vonguyenphong22 (on Twitter)
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neti neti
a dragonfly hums
raga Megh
(raga Megh(a)=a raga for the monsoon season. Neti neti= a key expression from the Upanishads: “not this nor this” or “not this nor that” alluding to the essence of things.)
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”the sky’s gone out”
on the radio – and then
a dragonfly
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dragonfly –
I mark an unpaid bill
“later”
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
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(Photo by Melissa Allen)
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in and out the reeds
a blue dragonfly
mother keeps sewing
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stitching
water and sky together
– damselflies
— Paganini Jones, http://www.pathetic.org/library/5644
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boys playing games
stones miss the darning needle
— Jim Sullivan, haiku and commentary and tales
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dragonfly heading to the lemon hanging in the sun
— Gene Myers, genemyers.com, @myersgene (on Twitter)
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(Artwork by Kitagawa Utamaro, “Dragonfly and Butterfly,” from A Selection of Insects)
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bluetail damselfly
escapes the empty cottage
where children once played
(1st place Kiyoshi Tokutomi Memorial Haiku Contest 2009)
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on the bus
to the children’s museum
first dragonfly
— Roberta Beary, Roberta Beary
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flitting idly
from flower to flower
a blue damsel
lights upon the lotus
unfolding iridescence
— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-Doodle
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(Photo by Jay Otto)
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dark waters
a dragonfly dreaming
its reflection
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iridescent wings
the flying parts of
the dragon
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
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silhouetted dragonfly
reeds pierce the moon
(The Mainichi Daily News, May 30, 2009)
— Martin Gottlieb Cohen
So. It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. (That’s a line from some song we sang at our third-grade choral concert. Amazing that I still remember it.)
This is how long it was: Have you ever had one of those dreams where the whole time you knew something really great was about to happen, something really fantastic you could hardly wait for, and the dream went on and on and all kinds of other humdrum, boring things happened, and you were thinking, “Okay, isn’t it about time the really great thing happened now?”, and then it was just about to happen, oh man, and … you woke up. And it never happened.
Yeah. I was seriously afraid this winter was going to turn out to be like one of those dreams. There was the cold. And the snow. And the more cold. And the unrelenting brownness and grayness. … Did I mention the cold? All through March. All through April. Into May. May!
Everyone else in the world (it seemed) was writing these cheerful blossom haiku and I kept looking out my window wondering if this was one of those dreams after all. Cold rain. Bare branches. Me shivering in my sweaters and occasionally even long underwear still, the grass like straw, the cold! so painful it felt like some kind of bone disease! (Should I go to the doctor?)
Well. So okay, it was still only about fifty degrees today with a stiff breeze. But there was sun! There’s supposed to be sun all week. And there are flowers everywhere. There are blossoms! There are lilacs! The grass is green, the leaves are green. …It finally happened!
Not only that, but I handed in my last assignments of the semester last week. Another thing I thought would never happen. And my son finally got his driver’s license, which means I don’t have to drive him everywhere anymore. [Though he will kill me if I don’t mention that he’s been getting himself practically everywhere on his bike since he was like ten, so it’s not like I’ve been a slave to his transportation.]
And my husband finally got over whatever microbial infestation had him in its death grip for the last month, so he can do something besides sit around making exploding-lung noises. Like take me to the Arboretum to look at apple blossoms. And wait patiently while I scribble illegible things about them in a notebook. Cold and lonely no more. So glad that dream is over.
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falling in love with a memory apple blossoms
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Haiku of the Month: All Spring and Summer, All the Time
I’ve mentioned before how you can follow the world’s weather patterns by observing the haiku that is posted on the Internet. Well, I was looking through all the haiku I had collected over the last three weeks and noticed that not a single one referred to autumn or winter. (I must not have been hanging out on enough southern hemisphere blogs or something. I apologize to that half of the globe.)
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river sunrise
a girl’s shadow
swims from my ankles— Lorin Ford, Mann Library’s Daily Haiku
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as it lands
the mallard shatters the house
in the river— Polona Oblak, Crows & Daisies
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migrating geese
the shapes of chins
in a crowd— an’ya, DailyHaiga
(Please go visit this very lovely haiga.)
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spring dusk –
the river pauses
for a moment
to take the weight
of a swan— Paul Smith, Paper Moon
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twilight
settling on all
the unfound eggs— Pearl Nelson, Pearl Nelson
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Palm Sunday
a card game called
‘doubt’— Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
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summer rain I’m still a fool around gravity
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, scented dust
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a careless butterfly:
lost among thousands
of heavy raindrops— Vladimir Devide/haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
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“The typhoon rain seems to have stopped this morning here, but the clouds are still pretty heavy. People walking on the street are taking umbrella along. Small insects, however, are sometimes careless and venture into the pouring rain only to be slapped down on the ground.
I heard that when the tsunami was approaching, quite a few people actually went out to the pier or seaside to watch the wave. How careless I thought, but I guess that is what happens when one underestimates the real power of the nature. Being curious and being careful are both the working of the mind. It makes a big difference which working one chooses in time of danger. I certainly choose not to be a careless butterfly.”
— Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
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春寒の山のひとつがはぐれけり 齋藤愼爾
harusamu no yama no hitotsu ga hagurekeri.
spring chill
one of the mountains
goes astray— Shinji Saito, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
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it has to end:
the wind
to cherry blossoms— Alegria Imperial, jornales
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in tranquility
cherry petals are falling
abyssal fish
— Taro Kunugi, from Donna Fleischer’s Word Pond
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secretly
still expecting
the living
that life owes me
– lupins !— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
(I had a hard time choosing between this tanka and several others Mark posted this week that were equally wonderful. You should really go over there and decide for yourself which is your favorite.)
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between tour groups
the garden
just the garden— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
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open scissors beside a vase of water
— Eve Luckring, from A New Resonance [6]: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku, Red Moon Press, 2009, quoted on Basho’s Road
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This is the toy theatre room. You’ll notice the wooden Lawyer. Took forty-two hours to get his jaw right. We’re staging Visions on Wednesday. You should come.— Ben Pullar, a handful of stones
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(You’re right, this is not a haiku. It’s a small stone, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes not. You should let Fiona Robyn tell you about them if you don’t already know. And this reminds me — Fiona and her fiance Kaspalita, who are getting married on June 18, are asking for a wedding present of small stones written on their wedding day. They are lovely people and if you write them a poem I promise you’ll get some good karma. Shhhh. Don’t tell them I told you.)
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Web Wide World
So much fun stuff to read this month, so little time…
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“Understanding Modern English-Language Haiku” from Winning Writers, April 2010
This is a fascinating essay that features the editors of five haiku journals speaking about the process they go through when writing haiku in general and one specific haiku in particular. The introductory remarks feature a discussion of one of my pet peeves, how profoundly haiku is marginalized in the wider world of poetry and the serious ignorance and misunderstanding of what haiku is among mainstream poets.
It’s encouraging that this essay appears on a mainstream poetry website. I hope that the remarks of Jane Reichhold, John Stevenson, George Swede, Linda Papanicolau, and Colin Stewart Jones do something to enlighten at least a few writers about the real nature and potential of haiku.
cold night
the dashboard lights
of another car— John Stevenson
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Serendipiku
Speaking of Colin Stewart Jones…I got the link to that last essay off his blog, serendipiku, which is very interesting, as is his static website, also, slightly confusingly, called serendipiku. (It’s called branding, I guess. I must get with the times. Nice work, Col.)
Colin is a wonderful poet and artist. His one-word bird haiga are really fun, and I especially like his graphic haibun, which are unlike any other haibun you’ve ever seen. I recommend in particular “Menu” and “Burberry” and “Midsummer Moon.” The last, about insomnia, contains one of my favorite poetic lines of the month: “Can’t even conjure up a pathetic fallacy.”A possibly crippling ailment for some writers of haiku, probably including me.
secret promise…
almost thirty years now
since I was
the twelve-year-old boy
looking over a high wall— Colin Stewart Jones (originally published in Muse India 37, May/June 2011)
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Insect Haiku From the Shiki-School
You can download this unpublished manuscript from 1959, by Harold J. Isaacson and Helen Shigeko Isaacson, from the Internet Archive (an amazing collection of online texts, images, and audio which if you aren’t careful will suck you into its orbit and never let you go).
It’s an excellent collection of classical haiku about insects, with commentary. What makes it really interesting, though (to me, anyway, big geek that I am), is that the translations incorporate (untranslated, because they have no real translation) the kireji or cutting words (ya, kana, and keri) that the Japanese employ in many of their haiku for emphasis and/or as a way of marking a pause between the two parts of the poem.
Here are a couple of examples:
Ownerless
the helmet on which sleeps
a butterfly kana— Choi, tr. Isaacson
.Golden flies ya
Where on the ground has spilled
a melon’s entrails— Chikuba, tr. Isaacson
At first I thought this manner of translation was very strange and awkward and disliked it. But now I kind of like the rhythm it gives and feel that in some ways it helps me understand better what these poems must be like in the original. I wouldn’t want these to be the only translations I read of these haiku, but I think there’s definitely a place for them in the world. That’s my final answer.
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Women Poets of Japan from The Green Leaf
“The Green Leaf” has a lot on it, from mainstream poems by contemporary authors to classical haiku in translation to vast quantities of photo haiga to contemporary haiku to…the works of women poets of Japan, which is what I feel like featuring today because I just do, okay? The whole site, though, is well worth rummaging around in, though it feels incomplete and uneven (but who am I to talk) and also it does something which drives me completely out of my mind, which is fail to credit the translator of translated poems.
I hate this because it’s inconsiderate not only to the translator, who has done a very difficult job that deserves to be acknowledged, but to readers who might like to know where they can seek out (or, ahem, avoid) other translations by a particular translator or compare translations between translators. So I was feeling a strange mixture of annoyance and delight as I browsed around here. But then I came upon this tanka and forgave everything.
Gazing across the fields,
at Taketa I hear the cranes
ceaselessly crying:
not a space not a moment
of pause in my longing.— Lady Otomo-no-Sakanoue (8th century)
(There’s a haiga of this poem, too, if you follow the link from the poet’s name above.)
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So Jane Reichhold has done it again. Last year when I was just getting started writing haiku I used Jane’s list of 24 haiku-writing techniques to help me understand what haiku were all about and all the different ways they can be written. You can find her list here on the web and also in her excellent book, Writing and Enjoying Haiku.
Jane is great at explaining how haiku work and breaking down the process of writing them in a way even a more-or-less clueless newbie can understand, as I can attest. She does have her own particular understanding of what haiku are, which is not necessarily everyone’s understanding, but hey, who doesn’t.
Anyway, what she’s done now is create this series of fourteen quite brief lessons that take a beginner through the process of learning what a haiku is, what the various parts of a haiku are, what a good haiku looks and feels and sounds like. You could do way worse as a beginner than start with these lessons and their exercises. I really like this one, for instance:
“Find a haiku that you really admire and write it [down]. It would be kind to the author to record his or her name and where you found the poem.
Then begin to rewrite the poem. Maybe start by just changing one word. Or changing one line. Or take a phrase of image you greatly admire and see how many ways you can make it work with other images.”
— Jane Reichhold, “Bare Bones Haiku, Lesson Two: Before Writing Your Own Haiku“
(Disclaimer: Obviously, this is just an exercise for your own poetic development — you wouldn’t want to try to publish the results of this exercise or pass them off as your own poetry unless they ended up really, really, really different from the originals.)
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The Haiku Foundation Contest Archive
Once again The Haiku Foundation has created a very cool resource for readers and writers of haiku, which is this archive of past winners of most of the major haiku contests. If you are looking for an online collection of excellent contemporary haiku, needless to say this would be a good place to start.
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This is an older (2001) essay by Florence Vilen, discussing when and how repetition makes haiku more effective. Most of the essay is taken up by examples, which really is my favorite kind of essay. And haiku with repetition are some of my favorite kind of haiku, so this made me very happy.
the sound they make
the sound I make
autumn leaves— Gary Hotham
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Dead Tree News
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tea’s aftertaste,
by Aubrie Cox,
graphic design and illustrations by Katie Baird,
published by Bronze Man Books ($12)
(ordering information).
So you wanna see the most adorable haiku book ever published? Do you? Do you? You do? Yay! Okay…here’s the cover:
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Yes…that is a hand-sewn Japanese binding in red thread, thanks for asking. And that is a tiny little sketch of the moon reflected in a teacup. I did say it was adorable, didn’t I?
… Not sold yet? Looking for some more substance? Okay, here are a couple of the inside pages:
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… I know, right? All the pages are like that. Aubrie’s haiku are amazing, and Katie’s illustrations are awesome, and you just keep looking through the book going, “Why don’t more people write more haiku that so movingly combine the personal and the universal, that are filled with such astute and original observations of the concrete world, that are simultaneously mercilessly honest and lovingly generous?… And then why don’t they have an artist with the same rare sensibility draw touching little illustrations to go with their haiku… And then why don’t they put the whole thing together in a lovingly designed package and sew it up with red thread?”
It’s a mystery, really. But I wouldn’t spend too long agonizing over it. Just get the book and enjoy it. You’re welcome.
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Sigh. No matter how much I write it always feels like I’m forgetting something. If you figure out what it is, let me know, okay? I’m getting old, I need help with these things.
what I meant to say
still folded into
unopened blossoms
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This looks like it’s from a printed page because it is. It’s from Wet Cement, which is a lovely little conference anthology from the “Cradle of American Haiku” Haiku Society of America conference back in September. Mike Montreuil edited it, Aubrie Cox laid it out (check out her beloved Optima typeface) and Lidia Rozmus did some understated, beautiful artwork (in her usual style) for it. It was a delight to get it in the mail last week and be reminded of that wonderful weekend and so many of the wonderful poets I met.
The title comes from a haiku by Gayle Bull, the proprietress of Foundry Books, where part of the conference was held (and where I really need to get back to, soon, to check out the mind-blowing haiku section, because, ha ha, I don’t have enough to read). It is, fittingly, written in concrete on the ledge of a window in her shop. (Also in ink, on page 24 of the anthology.)
wet cement —
kids hide in the bushes
giggling— Gayle Bull
Red Dragonfly 