I’m still feeling under the weather from semi-collapsing at the end of a half-marathon I ran on Sunday in 88-degree weather (it’s Wisconsin, and it’s been a cold spring, so no snickering from you Southwesterners). Pretty much confined to the couch, since standing up for more than a few minutes makes me dizzy. There are worse things, I guess. I’m surrounded by all the books and magazines I put off reading all semester, not to mention the omnipresent, time-sucking Interweb.
I’m having a hard time following a train of thought even long enough to write a sub-seventeen-syllable poem, though. So at the moment I’m taking it easy on my fried brain by resorting to found haiku, mostly from prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, better known as a poet — one of my all-time favorites. The first couple haiku are from poems. The rest are from his journals, which every aspiring poet should read. The man minutely observed and described everything he saw; whole paragraphs read like poems. I can’t help thinking that if he had known about haiku, he would have tried his hand at it.
I may repeat this experiment at intervals, mining the works of other poets and prose writers for haiku-like material (full credit to the original authors, of course). I agonized briefly over whether this exercise was a) cheating, or b) meaningful, but then decided I didn’t care. I enjoy it and it’s my blog. And I do think I’m learning something from this about what writing is haiku-like and what isn’t.
I’ve taken the liberty of haiku-izing Hopkins’s words by arranging them in three lines and removing some punctuation, but otherwise these are direct quotations, with no words removed or added.
So…here’s Gerard:
the moon, dwindled and thinned
to the fringe of a fingernail
held to the candle
*
this air I gather
and I release
he lived on
*
mealy clouds
with a not
brilliant moon
*
blunt buds
of the ash, pencil buds
of the beech
*
almost think you can hear
the lisp
of the swallows’ wings
*
over the green water
of the river passing
the slums of the town
*
oaks
the organization
of this tree is difficult
*
putting my hand up
against the sky
whilst we lay on the grass
*
silver mottled clouding
and clearer;
else like yesterday
*
Basel at night!
with a full moon
waking the river
*
the river runs so strong
that it keeps the bridge
shaking
*
some great star
whether Capella or not
I am not sure
*
two boys came down
the mountain yodelling
we saw the snow
*
the mountain summits
are not the place
for mountain views
*
the winter was called severe
there were three spells
of frost with skating
*
the next morning
a heavy fall
of snow
*
at the beginning of March
they were felling
some of the ashes in our grove
*
ground sheeted
with taut tattered streaks
of crisp gritty snow
*
thunderstorm in the evening
first booming in gong-sounds
as at Aosta
*
I noticed the smell
of the big cedar
not just in passing
*
the comet —
I have seen it at bedtime
in the west
*
as we came home
the stars came out thick
I leaned back to look at them
*
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W.H. Gardner
Red Dragonfly 