This season. This day. This darkness. This rain. This sky. This unspoken agreement. This repeated pattern. This internal quarrel. This blown litter. This temporary solitude. This empty box. These restless legs. These unwashed hands. This bent twig. This spent coin. This borrowed time. This vague memory. This dry leaf. This discarded assumption. This long pause. This interrupted stillness. This dark house. This hard fall.
.
tilted axis
I continue
to surprise myself
.
.___________________________________________________________________________
Haiku to Read Again
.
just because
the sky is navigable –
thistledown
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
山を出るときどんぐりはみな捨てる 北 登猛
yama o deru toki donguri wa mina suteru
when I leave the mountain
I throw away
all acorns
— Tomo Kita, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
things that can wait and a dying wasp ::: autumn darkness
ting der kan vente og en døende hveps ::: efterårsmørke
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
the difference
a sparrow makes –
bare branches
— Bill Kenney, haiku-usa
.
.
somehow
our shrinking shadows touch
harvest moon
— Alegria Imperial, jornales
.
.
banging about
inside my ribs
cherry blossom
— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
With every step into
the lake, the water touches
me in a new place.
— Elissa, The Haiku Diary
matchpoint…
the distance between
this moon and that
— sanjuktaa, wild berries
.
this pumpkin
as full as that, harvest
moon
— Angie Werren, feathers
.
Essayed
“Haiku as Poetic Spell”
I’m very grateful to Lynne Rees for republishing on her blog an open field this essay by Martin Lucas, which also appeared in evolution: the Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2010.
It’s a challenging, exciting essay, well worth reading in full, that contrasts what Lucas calls the “Internationally Accepted Formula” for haiku —
seasonal ref’rence—
then two lines of contrasting
foreground imagery
with a haiku aesthetic that he considers “an ideal that is poetic as opposed to prosaic, and secondly, an expression that is more akin to a magical utterance than a mere report of an incident, however consequential or inconsequential.”
Of the “Internationally Accepted Formula,” Lucas points out, “It’s an intriguing mix, but almost all the interest is in this content, and almost none in the expression.” Using many striking examples, he argues for (or rather urges) a greater emphasis in haiku on an effective use of language to create a “poetic spell”:
“Words that chime; words that beat; words that flow. … words have power. They are not dead and scribbled on a page, they are spoken like a charm; and they aren’t read, they’re heard. This is what I want from haiku: something primitive; something rare; something essential; not some tired iteration of patterns so familiar most of us can produce them in our sleep. It’s not the information content that counts, it’s the way that information is formed, cooked and combined.”
— Martin Lucas, “Haiku as Poetic Spell”
.
Journaled
the zen zpace, Autumn 2011 Showcase
Marie Marshall, who also has a blog called kvenna ráð, put together this fine collection of haiku by seven poets. She’s calling for submissions for her next edition. A couple of samples:
.
the last leaf of all
it will be picked up
by hand
— David Cobb
.
the earliest of mornings
Substance presents itself
as an apple
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg
.
If you have any interest in haibun you should hustle over and read the recently released October issue of cho, especially my favorites: Sonam Chhoki’s “Last Journey“; Susan Diridoni’s “awakening in ‘The City'”; Peter Newton’s “The Goal”; and Carol Pearce-Worthington’s “I Read Everything”.
.
Applied
The Haiku Foundation, with their release of THF Haiku, their haiku app for the iPhone, has recently made waiting in line a task that is no longer fearful to me. I just pull out my phone, punch at the screen a bit to make the soothing THF Haiku backdrop appear, and then spend a relaxing few minutes shaking my phone (really, you just need to tilt it a little, so you won’t look completely insane in public) to see a new haiku with every shake. There’s a wonderful variety — 365 of them so far, with more promised for the future. Some I tilted into recently:
.
midsummer solstice
the bonfire luring me back
to my maiden name
— an’ya
.
the shadow in the folded napkin
— Cor van den Heuvel
.
Every second, a tree, a bird, a chimney, a woman
— James Kirkup
.
Dead Tree News
Beyond My View, by Joyce Clement. Endionpress, 2011
My Journey, by Lidia Rozmus. Deep North Press, 2004
Twenty Views from Mole Hill, by Lidia Rozmus. Deep North Press, 1999
I am overdue to talk about these books. I bought the three of them this summer, one at each of the communal haiku events I attended. Joyce’s book I picked up at the Haiku Circle in Massachusetts in June, where she gave a wonderful reading and I enjoyed getting to know her. Twenty Views of Mole Hill I bought at Foundry Books in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, when I attended a Haiku Retreat there in June. Lidia was not in attendance there, but she was, as I have mentioned, my roommate at Haiku North America in Seattle in August, where I bought My Journey. So these books have bracketed my summer and followed me through it. I’ve read them each several times, because somehow they make me feel a little bit more like myself every time I read them.
.
Beyond My View
Joyce does things with language and images that only she can do — the best writers are like that — but that make you feel like what she said was just on the tip of your tongue, because the best writers are like that too.
.
age 88
all the whatchamacallits
in the spring wind
That’s what I was going to say.
.
rolls over again
the earth, us with it
spring mud
This one I keep reading over and over again to see if I can see how she did it. The syntax seems awkward and garbled at first and then you see — oh! that’s the point! And then you see that there’s no other way to say it. And you feel like lying down and rolling in some warm mud.
.
the
pine
grove
when
I
exhale
Yes, that’s it. I keep trying to do this kind of thing all the time. It’s not as easy as it looks.
.
used to think
I’d want a gravestone
falling leaves
I still do want a gravestone, but something about this makes me think that maybe I won’t always.
.
deep winter
their weight
milkless breasts
There are not enough haiku about the way women’s bodies feel — maybe there aren’t enough about the way anyone’s body feels. This one is perfect. Thanks, Joyce.
.
Twenty Views of Mole Hill
Lidia calls the work she does that combines haibun and sumi-e painting “haibun-ga,” and the title page of Twenty Views … proclaims tongue-in-cheek that it is “The Last Haibun-ga of the Twentieth Century.” What is also is, is a meditation on place, a place seen in every season with the especially careful seeing of someone who is both an exemplary visual artist and a particularly sensitive poet.
Mole Hill is a hill, a small Illinois hill, that can be seen from Lidia’s apartment, and so she sees it.
.
first snow
I turn the lights off —
……………..to see
.
The seeing continues from December to December. The book takes the form of a series of unbound square cards, on each of which there is a haibun or a solitary haiku, as well as an evocative sumi-e painting. These are not illustrations of Mole Hill; they are minimalist evocations of a state of mind, a shape of thought, a unique vision. Lidia stays in one place; the world turns around her, and her mind travels. It’s as if these cards fall, one by one, into place as the seasons change.
.
late afternoon
mosquito and I —
same blood type
(This is one, I think, that Issa would have written if he’d known about blood type.)
.
.My Journey
In contrast to Twenty Views…, My Journey roams all over the world, from Poland and other locales in Eastern Europe, to North America, Western Europe, Japan. It also roams in time, or rather ventures through it, over fifty years of Lidia’s life, beginning with the first memory of a toddler. Again, the form of the book is important: it’s folded like an accordion, and the hinge point — the place where you turn the book over to begin folding through the pages on the reverse side — is Lidia’s immigration to the United States as a young adult.
.
immigration office
seeing my fingerprints
for the first time
Like so many of Lidia’s haiku this one says so much more than it says.
.
This book, too, contains both haibun and standalone haiku, illustrated with small black-and-white photographs — they read more as illustrations than as photos; you can’t see much detail, just enough to evoke a feeling or sense of place, so the overall effect is very similar to that of Lidia’s sumi-e. There is also an ink wash traced through with a wavy ink line that runs continuously along the bottom of the entire book, which of course is all in one uninterrupted piece, like a life. One continuous stretch of time, but paradoxically remembered by us in discrete chunks of episodic memory — pages, if you will.
geographical atlas
on one page
the whole world
As usual, Lidia said it better than I could. This is the last haiku in the book. Lidia’s life goes on, though, fortunately for us all.
___________________________________________
.
As for me, I’m standing with my back to the wind these days. It seems to help. I wish I’d thought of it before.
.
.
.
Red Dragonfly 