(twi)
one-line haiku
any … fins
.
anywhereifwecouldonlybeadjacent
.
rose red
my heart
repeats itself
.
scrapes me off the ocean floor (gives me fins)
.
(finer)
.
early spring sun I grate him finer and finer
.
Frogpond 35.3
.
.
(beating back)
.
beating back god every morning a new forest fire
.
thistledown as far as light can bend
.
every windfall a different frequency into the night
.
(an egg)
.
an egg implanting itself without interference from art
.
sea water conducting my breasts across the moon
.
her vulva unentranced by singing weapons
.
(bittersweet)
.
.
bittersweet our talk of stamen and pistil
.
Modern Haiku 43.3
.
.
The new issue of Modern Haiku came in the mail the other day, so that was basically all anyone heard from me for the rest of the night. Among other good things there was an essay by Jim Kacian about haiku that are not three lines long. It’s interesting to think about why three lines sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. It’s interesting that it works so often. The question is whether it works because we make it work — because we think of ourselves as writing three-line poems — or because there is something intrinsically haiku-ish about three lines. I haven’t answered that question to my satisfaction yet.
There’s so much good stuff in Modern Haiku. I gave a little talk this week at the university here about the history of English-language haiku (which was a blast, partly because I had a great audience), and I ended up talking a lot about Modern Haiku, because you can’t talk about the history of English-language haiku without talking a lot about Modern Haiku. They’ve been around almost the same amount of time. Pretty much everything that is in English-language haiku shows up in Modern Haiku at some point.
Here’s some of what I liked the most this time around.
.
morning light
the little pile of snow
before the keyhole
— Marilyn Appl Walker
.
new moon
someone else will hear
my words for you
— Petar Tchouhov
.
midnight
the gender gap
closed
— Dietmar Tauchner
.
my home burning down in the curve of her hips autumn night
— Mike Spikes
.
an oak living that long without a center
— Neil Moylan
.
dead of winter
making stock
from the bones
— Jayne Miller
.
in tune with its obstacles, rain
— Eve Luckring
.
leaves on the river bank beginning dialysis
— Scott Glander
.
dawn crows the scuffle of nomenclature
— Cherie Hunter Day
.
last words: four myths
1.
Contrary to rumor, there are many boxes that I haven’t opened. It’s no harder for me to resist temptation than for anyone else. And honestly, I’m still not sure I’m sorry.
leaf skeleton key to an unlocked door
2.
I never expected to look back until I did. My fingers fumbled on the strings; I was suddenly afraid that she had fumbled too. Those last few sour notes still ring in my ears.
long winter evening a song in every shattering
3.
Yesterday we flew pretty close to the sun, but today we’ll fly even closer. The wax is hardening in the molds. We pace restlessly, raising and lowering our arms like fledglings who know they have wings for a reason.
in a sky full of clouds only one cloud white enough
4.
He measures out six seeds for me, six small poison pills, six ways to forget my life, six small deaths for me to die.
…and the last hum of the cicada the same as the first
.
questions
.
rain begins—
a question sprouts
in a red china pot
.
drapes a question over a chair without folding it moonless
.
in
small
shoes
a
question
scrambles
up
to
the
water’s
edge
.
(the smallest bone)
.
the smallest bone in my body breaks winter reeds
.
Acorn 28
.
(prairie)
rain, rain (rain, rain)
.
spring rain backwards until the beginning
.
summer rain
some of you in
some of me
.
autumn rain preparing the palimpsest
.
forgot water could be so heavy winter rain
.
_____________________________________________________________________
credits: spring rain, Modern Haiku 42.3; summer rain, Frogpond 35.1; autumn rain, Modern Haiku 43.1; winter rain, bottle rockets 26
..
(Appalachians)
.
artwork by Aubrie Cox
.
A Hundred Gourds 1.2, March 2012
.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
May I direct you to Aubrie Cox’s collaborative Doodleku project? This month she’s posting one of her doodles (see above for example) every day on her blog, Yay Words!, and inviting poetic responses from her readers. And here I thought I would be free of obligatory daily poetry after the official NaHaiWriMo month ended. Ha. You are never free of obligatory daily poetry. Just so you know.
.
NaHaiWriMo: the end
.
first date
nacho stains
on her blue dress
.
(Feb. 14: nachos. Also: Valentine’s Day.)
.
sun setting
one foot
on a rocky slope
.
(Feb. 20: talus)
.
shaking off
all the rain
that didn’t touch me
.
(Feb. 21: umbrella)
.
________________________________________________________________________________
.
I knew you would all be curious about how I handled “nachos” and “talus.” There is no point in pretending that I have an easier time writing haiku (or senryu) about nachos than anyone else, or that I had the faintest idea what “talus” was before this prompt was set. Also, who else thinks that Michael Dylan Welch opened the dictionary at random to find that prompt? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
It was an interesting month. (Okay, technically it’s not over yet. Can we just pretend it is? In a normal year it would be.) I never felt especially inspired. (Well, I came up with a couple of interesting things about apples, I think. That was then, this is now.) I didn’t like most of what I wrote at all. But there is value in writing things that you don’t like at all. Generally, you have to write a whole lot of things that you don’t like at all in order to write a few things that you like a lot. It’s hard to figure out what you like until you figure out what you don’t.
But I can’t say I’m sorry February is over. Forward, March!
.
(as a doll)
as a doll I speculate about the tops of things
.
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!
.
_________________________________________________________________________________
.
Haiku
.
brittle moonlight
self-immolations
drawn on a map
— William Sorlien, Haiku Bandit Society
.
hiding their faces well snowflakes
.
de skjuler deres ansigter godt snefuggene
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
change of seasons
I catch myself talking
to the wind
— Margaret Dornaus, Haiku-doodle
.
a break
in the clouds
how small we are
— Alegria Imperial, jornales
.
in the second-hand book shop, the purr of the three-legged cat
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
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
.
one thousand trajectories
of one thousand arrows—
December sky
Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World (her blog’s 1000th post)
.
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
.
taking off a sweater
with eyes closed
I am a stuffed specimen
— Yoko Watabe, tr. Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
platelets—
the trip we were planning
to plan
— Roberta Beary, Tinywords
.
itallcomestogether in the darkness for the owl
— Johnny Baranski, Monostich
.
longue recherche
des lunettes pour mieux voir
le brouillard
.
a long search
for glasses, the better to see
the fog
— Vincent Hoarau, La Calebasse (dubious translation by me)
.
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
.
Haiga
Kindly click on the links to see the haiga that are not posted here.
.
mouth of the cave
we enter as eagles
exit as sparrows
— an’ya, DailyHaiga
.
opening emergency door,
head-on spring moon
— Kikko Yokoyama, with haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
.
— 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.
.
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”
.
__________________________________________________________________________________
.
Hey, thanks for indulging me. I feel better now.
.
bitter night
I keep reminding myself
I’m a poet
.
mooning around
moonlight I finally listen
.
the light we save by being dark
.
coming and going spirit moon
.
(particles)
Haiku North America, Day 2
For some reason I didn’t have quite as much energy on Day Two of HNA as I did on Day One. Which might account for why when I went to download my photos from my phone, I realized I hadn’t actually taken any pictures. Well, okay, a few. But this post will be a little less visual than yesterday’s. I’ll try to make up for it by annoyingly sticking my camera in everyone’s face all day long today. You’re welcome.
We started the day with a reading by the authors of the HNA anthology, Standing Still, which is a thing of beauty.
That wonderful drawing on the cover is by Dejah Leger, who also did the wonderful illustrations inside, such as this one…
There was a choice of activities after this and I chose to attend Jim Kacian‘s lecture on one-line haiku, which he is trying to get us all to call “monoku.” Hmmm. Aside from that, though, the lecture was dense with interesting information. Although I got a bit lost during his lengthy comparison of the history of tennis strokes and the history of English-language haiku, since on the few occasions I have attempted to wield a tennis racket…let’s just say that I don’t play tennis. (Jim is a tennis pro in his money-making life.)
He examined haiku with many other line lengths and then a wide variety of one-line haiku, and tried to identify the elements that make a particular haiku work as a one-liner. I won’t give you a precis of the lecture, I’m sure it will be published at some point. It worked to make me go out to the book fair and buy Jim’s book of monoku, though.
Naturally I bought a ton of other books as well (who buys only one book at a time?), but the one I would most like to show you is this one by my roommate here, Lidia Rozmus, the transcendent beauty of whose art (stunning, minimalist ink brush painting) and writing (haiku and haibun) are in direct proportion to the transcendent beauty of her kindness and generosity. This is a book about her emigration to the United States from Poland and her adjustment to life here.
Here’s Lidia herself in the courtyard of the Inn at Queen Anne, where I retreated after the morning activities with a chicken salad sandwich and a bottle of hard cider to gather some energy for a busy afternoon (read: keep from fainting with exhaustion).
And here are some other poets who sat with us and chatted over lunch: Wanda Cook and Marilyn Hazelton.
Another excursion in the afternoon: On the monorail downtown to (your choice) Pike Place Market or the Seattle Art Museum. I’ve been to the Market. I went to the museum. This may not have been a good idea, since as I think I have mentioned before, I have a severe mouse phobia and this was one of the first things I saw there.
There was other art that made up for it, though. They were having a special exhibition of American landscape painting. One thing I noticed that many of the artists had in common was that they would incorporate a splash or two of something bright red (usually something man-made) into a landscape that was otherwise more drab in color.
Maybe there was something about this in the interpretive signs, I don’t know. I’m not very good about reading museum signs. It seemed to me that perhaps this was one way of asserting man’s dominion over nature: your eye was naturally drawn to that bright red, making it seem like the most important thing in the picture.
Sometimes I wonder if haiku does something similar to our experience of nature, by focusing our attention on one tiny aspect of it that a human being has noticed.
After the museum a bunch of us stumbled around looking for a place to eat, finally giving up on the tourist traps of the Market and heading back to our home base of the Queen Anne neighborhood for some Thai food. As we prepared to board the monorail, a man noticed the excellent NaHaiWriMo-inspired T-shirt (see sample below) that Michael Dylan Welch was wearing and asked him, “So you must not like haiku?”
…Oh. You have never seen a man so happy as Michael was at that moment. The (gentle) lecture that followed started with, “Actually, I’m the first vice-president of the Haiku Society of America, and I love haiku!” and ended with the poor questioner walking away with his eyes glazed over, trying to grasp that everything he had ever thought he knew about haiku was wrong. Or else that he had just run into a pack of lunatics.
At the restaurant, Michael first tried to get us all to write haiku individually, and met with some pretty stiff resistance because we were all, you know, completely wiped out. But then Carlos Colon suggested the much more palatable idea of writing renku, so that’s what we did. This is one of those occasions that I really wish I had been alert enough to think of getting a picture of.
Renku participants: Katharine Hawkinson, Michael Dylan Welch, me, Carlos Colon, Marilyn Hazelton, Garry Gay. Present, but malingering: Carolyn Hall, Susan Antolin. Result: A summer junicho entitled “Racha Renku” (Racha was the name of the restaurant we were in.)
.
a single cloud
the baby points at the sky
— me, verse 10 of “Racha Renku”
.
The first event of the evening was a reading of haibun by featured reader Cor van den Heuvel and anyone else who cared to read haibun. I have to admit that since I was feeling utterly exhausted, I went back to my room for a quick nap and didn’t make it to this reading until quite late, but I really regret it now because I love haibun so much and the few readers that I did hear presented some outstanding examples.
Also, here is where I am going to cheat and show you a picture of Cor reading at Haiku Circle, which I attended in Northfield, Massachusetts in June. Because (naturally) I didn’t get a picture of Cor reading last night, but actually the picture of him reading outside in June is better than any picture I could have taken under the Seattle Center’s fluorescent lights.
The final event of the night (at least that I attended) was a panel on haiku publishing moderated by Michael Dylan Welch and featuring Don Wentworth, Ce Rosenow, Jim Kacian, and Charlie Trumbull, all of whom run presses ranging in size from teeny-tiny to small. (Unstartling revelation of the evening: Small haiku publishers do not make any money from publishing haiku.)
There was a lot of discussion of various ways to structure manuscripts of haiku, including by subject, season, tone. And also discussion of how to submit manuscripts to publishers. (Some want you to send them a zillion haiku and let them pick out which ones they want to put in the book. Some just want you to send them a few poems and tell them what the rest of the book will be like. So ask them, I guess is the lesson.)
After that panel I threw in the towel and went to bed early last night. Well…I guess it’s more accurate to say I went back to the hotel early. Then Lidia and I spent a while talking, partly about how much we love haiku poets and how happy we are to be here. There is so much talking here. You can’t get any of us to shut up. It’s as if seventeen syllables really weren’t enough to say everything after all.
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.
Across the Haikuverse, No. 18: Here Comes the Sun Edition
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.
.
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.)
.
.
.
river sunrise
a girl’s shadow
swims from my ankles— Lorin Ford, Mann Library’s Daily Haiku
.
.
.
.
as it lands
the mallard shatters the house
in the river— Polona Oblak, Crows & Daisies
.
.
.
migrating geese
the shapes of chins
in a crowd— an’ya, DailyHaiga
(Please go visit this very lovely haiga.)
.
.
.
.
spring dusk –
the river pauses
for a moment
to take the weight
of a swan— Paul Smith, Paper Moon
.
.
.
.
twilight
settling on all
the unfound eggs— Pearl Nelson, Pearl Nelson
.
.
.
.
Palm Sunday
a card game called
‘doubt’— Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
.
.
summer rain I’m still a fool around gravity
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, scented dust
.
.
.
.
.
a careless butterfly:
lost among thousands
of heavy raindrops— Vladimir Devide/haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
.
“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
.
.
.
.
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
.
.
.
.
it has to end:
the wind
to cherry blossoms— Alegria Imperial, jornales
.
.
.
.
in tranquility
cherry petals are falling
abyssal fish
— Taro Kunugi, from Donna Fleischer’s Word Pond
.
.
.
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.)
.
.
.
between tour groups
the garden
just the garden— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
.
.
.
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
.
.
.
.
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
.
(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…
***
.
“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
***
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)
***
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.
***
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.)
***
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.)
***
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
.
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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Red Dragonfly 
