Hi haiku folk,

This is the beginning of National Library Week in the U.S. I don’t care where you live, you are going to be celebrating this with me, because in case it hadn’t registered with you before, I am studying to be a librarian when I grow up. (In case, you know, the whole fame-and-fortune-through-haiku thing doesn’t pan out for me.)

So here’s my obligatory public service announcement: Please do your part to support libraries ~~so that I will be able to find a job when I graduate from library school~~ so that we can facilitate the free flow of information that is necessary to the health of a democratic society. Or something.

… No, seriously. I know you all probably love libraries already, but in case you didn’t know, a lot of politicians don’t. They think libraries are frivolous institutions that exist only to provide a lot of namby-pamby middle-class people with books of poetry (honestly, could anything be more…irrelevant…than poetry?) and the latest romance novels. They don’t see any relationship between the health of libraries and the health of the economy. They think everyone gets their information from the Internet these days anyway. They’d rather spend the cash on bombers.

Guess what? More people use libraries now than ever before. In America, a huge percentage of the population has access to the Internet only through their public library. Librarians help them look for jobs, figure out how to pay their taxes (did you hear that, politicians?), study to become more qualified for jobs, determine whether those emails from the nice Nigerian businessman are actually legitimate, and yes, occasionally even obtain print and audiovisual materials that improve their lives in a myriad of ways. And that’s just public libraries. Don’t get me started on all the other kinds.

So if you haven’t been to the library in a while, why not make a trip this week? And say something nice to the librarian. And if you happen to run into your local legislator somewhere, tell him or her about all the stuff I said. Forget the bombs…bring on the books.

(Note: Because this blog believes in truth in advertising, all the blatant public service announcements promoting libraries in today’s column will be printed in bold. Enjoy.)

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Haiku of the Week

A couple of great red dragonfly haiku showed up in my feed reader this week. Because I am shamelessly self-centered, they get to go first.

From Lunch Break:

water aerobics-
the red dragonfly
flitting past

— gillena cox 2011

From see haiku here (as always, includes a haiga that must be seen):

red dragonfly —
I am now alive
admiring the height of sky

— Natsume, Soseki (with haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu)

Next in order of priority are the cherry blossom haiku. Japanese cherry blossom haiku. Need I say more? Both of these are from Blue Willow Haiku World.

From March 31:

花冷えの鍵は鍵穴にて響く冨田拓也
hanabie no kagi wa kagiana nite hibiku
.
cherry blossom chill
a key resonates
in the key hole

— Takuya Tomita, translated by Fay Aoyagi

.
From April 2:

文字は手を覚えてゐたり花の昼鴇田智哉
moji wa te o oboete itari hana no hiru
.
characters remember
who wrote them
cherry blossom afternoon

— Tomoya Tokita, translated by Fay Aoyagi

Okay, the rest of you can be seated now.

From La Calebasse (sorry, no translation today, but French really isn’t a difficult language to learn — run along now and pick up some instructional tapes from your local library):

la première abeille
jusqu’au quatrième étage
pour la première fleur

— Vincent Hoarau

From old pajamas: from the dirt hut:

Hurry, children we could not have // Come cross the lotus bridge //
Play with mother under the plum tree

— Alan Segal

From Mann Library’s Daily Haiku:

spring plowing
a flock of blackbirds
turns inside out

— Tom Painting

From Crows & Daisies:

a housefly
on the tax form…
all day rain

— Polona Oblak

From jornales:

magnolia petals
in the wind—
the rush at my wedding

— Alegria Imperial

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From Morden Haiku — a great echo of Basho’s famous haiku:

day after day
on the inspector’s face
the inspector’s mask

— Matt Morden

From Beachcombing for the Landlocked:

following their directions i find myself in someone else’s lost

— Matt Holloway

From haiku-usa:

long afternoon

a squirrel’s leap

from tree to tree

— Bill Kenney

(Bill’s helpful kigo note: “Like ‘long day,’ ‘long afternoon’ is a traditional spring kigo. To be sure, summer days are longer still, but our awareness that the days are growing longer is a phenomenon of spring.”)

From Haiku Bandit Society:

the queue come full stop
a stolen glance
at the nape of her neck

— William Sorlien

From Daily Haiga (with, naturally, a haiga…go look, pretty please)

summer solstice
i touch it
four times

— Brendan Slater

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Wonders of the Web

Springtime with Issa

Tom Clark of Beyond the Pale gives us an explosion of Issa spring haiku, accompanied by amazing photography. Just go read it and look at it and breathe. We made it through again. (This link courtesy of Don Wentworth . He always knows about the coolest stuff. Probably because he’s a librarian.)

Asahi Haikuist Network

Sheesh. Somebody should have told me about this a while ago…a whole column in a Japanese newspaper featuring English-language haiku. There’s a different theme for every biweekly issue, which includes commentary by the editor, David McMurray. (You can send him your own haiku — see the directions at the bottom of every column.)

Stacking firewood
my son wants to know
all about tsunami

–Ralf Broker (Germany)

“Chances”

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On the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page the other day, Alan Summers shared a link to an amazing animated haiku presentation by Jeffrey Winke, and now I have to go there every single day and stare at it. Very moving haiku. In both senses of the word “moving.”

cooling grasses
tears that start in her eyes
run down my face

— Jeffrey Winke

At the Border of Silver and Tacky: Meet Ed Baker

Ed Baker is a sui generis poet whose poetry sometimes looks like haiku and sometimes like itself; he likes to call a lot of what he writes “shorties,” which works for me. He’s also a painter and a sculptor. You should get to know him a little bit, which you can do by going to visit him with Geof Huth of dbqp: visualizing poetics. Geof spent a day with Ed a few years ago and has the photos to prove it. (Thanks to Joseph Hutchison over at The Perpetual Bird for sharing this link.)

Afterwards (or beforehand, I suppose, might be even better), you should go over to Ed’s own site and read what he writes. Like this:

far beyond___frog___moon leaps

— Ed Baker, from Neighbor Book 6 Afterwards

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How To Get Rid Of Your Money

An anonymous haiku fan who apparently has some spare cash (I knew there had to be at least one!) has offered to triple any donations given to The Haiku Foundation in the month of April. So if you got a bigger tax refund than you expected and you have all the groceries you need for a while, you could send them some money to fund, you know…haiku stuff.

(Then if you have any more spare money? There’s this deserving not-quite-young-anymore haiku poet and blogger who’s accepting donations to fund her lavish haiku-writing lifestyle. Contact me for details about where to mail the check…)

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Dead Tree News

I really hope I’ve mentioned this before, but all the women out there in the Haikuverse need to think about submitting your best haiku (and senryu) to Aubrie Cox for her groundbreaking anthology of women’s English-language haiku. The deadline is April 15th. The relevant email address is paperlanternhaiku AT gmail DOT com and you should include 5 to 15 poems, your name, country, a brief bio of 150 words or less, and any applicable publication credits of submitted poems.

When Aubrie started this project she mentioned that although no anthology of women’s English-language haiku had yet been assembled, Makoto Ueda had put together a fine one of Japanese women’s haiku, called Far Beyond the Field. So I got it and I’ve been wandering through it delightedly for the last month or so. It’s a physically lovely object, tall and narrow and outwardly dressed in spring green, with lots of white space inside to create room for thought around every haiku. There’s lots of space for thought around every poet, too; Ueda has created a substantial section for each woman with a preceding brief critical and biographical essay.

I don’t want to blather on about this too much because the haiku stand on their own, and if you’re interested you should find yourself a copy of the book. (This is a link to the WorldCat library catalog, which will help you find a copy of this book at a library near you.) I’ll just throw out a few of my favorites to make your mouth water and then run away and leave you hanging, because I’m heartless that way.

the butterfly
behind, before, behind
a woman on the road
— Chiyojo
.

lost in the woods —
only the sound of a leaf
falling on my hat
— Tagami Kikusha
.

no longer seeking
the sun, a magnificent
sunflower
— Takeshita Shizunojo
.

home from blossom viewing —
as I disrobe, many straps
cling to my body
— Sugita Hisajo [1919]

[Ueda’s note: “Kyoshi said at the time that this was a woman’s haiku that no man could imitate.”]

the baby carriage
and the wild waves
side by side in summer
— Hashimoto Takako

up on a hydro pole
the electrician turns
into a cicada
— Mitsuhashi Takajo

their lives last
only while aflame —

a woman and a pepper-pod
— Mitsuhashi Takajo

at spring dawn
something I’ve spat out
gleams serenely
— Ishibashi Hideno

a man enters
the room, disturbing the scent
of daffodils
— Yoshino Yoshiko

the instant it flies up
a dragonfly
loses its shadow
— Inahata Teiko

saffron in bloom—
the movie yesterday
murdered a man
— Uda Kitoko

each fresh day
inflicting new wounds
on a white peony
— Kuroda Momoko

with a pencil
I torture an ant
on the desk at night
— Katayama Yumiko

choosing a swimsuit —
when did his eyes
replace mine?
— Mayuzumi Madoka

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Thanks for your attention, folks…Hey, where did everybody go? Oh, to the library? That’s all right, then.

September 3: A lament, and a lot of pictures

September 3, 2010September 7, 2010 / Melissa Allen / 12 Comments

summer sky
what a picture
is worth

I’m back in the office and feeling a little downcast. I had high hopes for the haiku-writing potential of my vacation. After all, traditionally, haiku are nature poems, right? (Yeah, I know we could have a really long debate about that, and I would happily join in on either or both sides, but let’s just go with it for now.) And I was going on a canoeing and camping trip in the wilderness! It was going to be nothing but nature! Surely I would be so inspired that haiku would pour from me like … well, like haiku from an inspired person.

It didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, canoeing? Portaging? All day? Really exhausting. After eight or ten hours of that you have about enough energy to set up your tent, make and eat food, sit around staring at a campfire for a couple of hours, and then crawl into your sleeping bag and curse the tree root underneath you for a minute or two before passing out. Wielding a pen? Not on the agenda.

Also, I think — for me, anyway — being surrounded by nature is not the state most conducive to writing poetry. Or maybe it’s being in novel surroundings that is not the state most conducive to writing poetry. At any rate, I found myself so absorbed in just trying to take in and process all the new things I was seeing on a basic level that processing them on a higher intellectual level, making the kind of interesting connections that good haiku requires, was nearly impossible. I could write one or two lines of straight observation — but making the cognitive leap to turning observations into poetry was beyond me.

I’m hoping that after a few weeks home those observations will have marinated, or composted, or whatever it is they have to do, long enough that I will be able to turn them into haiku. Because really, it was an amazing trip, and there were plenty of connections to be made.

But right now I’m still sleep-deprived and my lower back is killing me. And after two days of grad school I’m already behind on my homework. So you’ll have to pardon me if for a few more days I keep resorting to posting haiku that I wrote last month when I had a more functional brain.

And in the meantime … here are some pictures to make up for my lack of verbal adroitness.