I spend a minute excitedly pointing out Cassiopeia to him–look, there’s the W, can’t you see it ??–until he interrupts me. “You’re looking at the Big Dipper.” Oh. So I am.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?” he asks. No. No, I don’t.
sleepless night
the moon encourages
my delusions
.
summer night
a gunshot
interrupts the heat
.
first star
cell phone glowing
at the end of the dock
.
Presence 47
.
I thought it was time to haul out some of the warm-weather ku that I felt dumb posting during the winter. Yeah, I know that forty-five doesn’t really count as “warmer” to most people, but welcome to Wisconsin.
.
.
I check my email again
four light years
from the nearest star
,
Deneb my lost century
.
starlight
the unidentified
weapon
.
.
one astronaut
takes another’s place…
summer stars
.
Presence 46, June 2012
.
snow falls on the cold frame distant stars
(Feb. 6: frame)
.
lake ice growing thinner
I count my money
again
(Feb. 9: ice)
.
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I don’t have time to do NaHaiWriMo this month, so I’m doing it. There is something about that innocent little prompt that has the mysterious power to jar me out of writer’s block, even if temporarily. And once I’ve written my one haiku for the day I feel absolved of all guilt for not writing for another 24 hours, which I believe actually saves me time in the end.
Michael Dylan Welch is setting the prompts again this year (this whole thing was his idea) and they’re alphabetical this time (a is for apple, you know the drill). That’s kind of satisfying too, especially to organization freaks like me.
This is all I have right now that I can stand to show people. I’ll try to post another update later in the month.
.
winter sky
snipping out stars
for the children
.
see haiku here, 8 January 2012
.
(This haiga is a lot bigger and more impressive-looking at Kuniharu Shimizu’s blog, so click on that link up there to see it there. That way you can also see the whole sequence of haiga Kuni san did about children, and the related sequence he’s working on now, about toys.)
.
.
American Tanka 20: A Few Feet Away
.
.
Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.
four stars form something that isn’t quite square winter clarity
.
I’ve been sick with a few different things over the last few weeks. Spent a lot of time lollygagging around in bed. Seem to be getting better now. Still don’t feel much like writing.
Somebody want to comment and let me know what you’re writing these days? It might make me feel better to know that someone in the world is not experiencing a creative slump.
Of course, there are all those people I quote down below. They seem to be doing just fine. Terrific, in fact. There are some spectacular images here. Some precise and lovely language. Some mind-altering revelations.
All of these poems are ones that made me step back when I saw them and go, “Whoa.” And then just breathe for a while, and read the poem again a few times, and feel really thankful I’d seen it.
In case you were wondering what my criteria were for choosing poems for this feature…that’s pretty much it. If a poem seems to me to be saying something that no one else in the world ever had or could say better…it’s going in.
It’s interesting to me, now that I’ve been reading haiku for a while, and have become familiar with the work of so many poets, how even in a form as short and relatively prescribed in form and content as the haiku (or tanka), there is such a wild and woolly assortment of styles possible and extant.
Reading the poems of people whose work you know and love is a little bit like looking at the faces of people you know and love: so familiar, and utterly unique, and the uniqueness makes you love them even more. You smile when you see them and say, “Oh, yes, that couldn’t possibly be anyone but [for instance] John Martone.”
Yes, I’m feeling much better now. Thanks.
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Poetry To Which Attention Must Be Paid
.
.
yes, this one,
gently close the humidor
– the smell of cedar
both dogs whining in the hall
eager to join me outside
—Steve Mitchell, Heed Not Steve
.
.
sun between clouds
the flies on a dead bird
flash blue
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
grandma’s well
the water tasted like iron
and cold—
that darkness
from which I’m made
— Charles Easter, Tinywords
.
.
物容るゝ壜も物言ふ壜も夏 中村安伸
mono iruru bin mo mono iu bin mo natsu
.
a jar to keep things
and a jar which speaks
summer
— Yasunobu Nakamura, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
wishing on the first star for the last time … mockingbird’s song
— Terri L. French, The Mulling Muse (Please go check out Terri’s wonderful haiga associated with this poem)
.
.
white sky –
the absent wind
with a girl’s name
.
hvid himmel –
den fraværende vind
med et pigenavn
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
.
feeling it
not feeling it
the grasshopper
between my hands
— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
.
.
wind
thru
pines
thru
sleep
— John Martone, originally published in Lilliput Review and quoted on Don Wentworth’s Issa’s Untidy Hut
.
.
everything I see
I am…
autumn moon
— Paul Smith, winner of the 2011 Haiku Pen Contest sponsored by Lyrical Passion E-Zine
.
Delicious Bloggy Goodness
Since I am giving this talk next week about blogging I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good blog and which blogs I am devoutly grateful for (there are a lot of them). I mentioned a few in the last Haikuverse and here are a few more.
1. Kuniharu Shimizu, whose haiga on see haiku here are a marvel of nature most of the time anyway, has been posting some mind-blowing “linked haiga” lately. They’re like haiku sequences, except…they’re haiga sequences, and they are linked not only thematically but graphically. I’m just gonna stop trying to describe them now and order you to go look at them. My favorites are:
Haiku by A.C. Missias, Joann Klontz, and paul m.
Haiku by Cor van den Heuvel and Taneda Santoka
Haiku by Michael McClintock and Taneda Santoka
2. The fascinating people over at Icebox recently took a poll about which characteristics participants considered essential to haiku. Of a long list of possibilities, you were allowed to choose three. Now they have revealed and analyzed the results of some 104 responses, and it’s a fascinating read, especially if like me you find numbers a welcome break at times from all those words we’re always bandying about.
Full disclosure: I participated in this poll, and I am (I guess?) relieved to find out that my top three choices are identical to the top three vote-getters in the poll. Either I have a vague idea what I’m doing, or I just like to be exactly like everyone else. I haven’t decided yet.
3. Over at Morden Haiku, Matt Morden’s long haibun about his cycling tour of Scotland with his 18-year-old daughter (it was a school-leaving present) had me captivated every step of the way, which surprised me because I normally have very little interest in travelogue haibun. But Matt is so good at painting images in both prose and poetry. And he managed to capture the nature of the bond between him and his daughter without any overt description of it or any sentimentality.
at the end of a day
when I could not ask for more
wild orchids
— Matt Morden, Morden Haiku
4. At La Calebasse, Vincent Hoarau has written a moving and perceptive essay about the work of Svetlana Marisova, an excellent haiku poet from New Zealand. Unfortunately for many of you, it’s in French; fortunately for those same people, he quotes Svetlana’s haiku in English (as well as in his own French translation), so at least you can read those, and Svetlana’s haiku are must-reads.
I can’t really translate French so I wouldn’t inflict my garbled version of Vincent’s essay on you, but I will briefly quote one of his descriptions of Svetlana’s characteristic style, which “depends on the juxtaposition of images, on allusion, suggestion, and concision.” This might be a description of all or most good haiku, but it is true that there is more of a sense of mystery and a deeper resonance to Svetlana’s haiku than to most.
This makes it all the more painful to have to report that Svetlana has an aggressive form of brain cancer, for which she is currently being treated in Russia. I think it’s safe to say that everyone who knows Svetlana and her work is keeping her in their thoughts these days.
wintry sky …
these dark tumours
draining light
.
ciel hivernal … / ces tumeurs noires / drainant la lumière
— Svetlana Marisova, French translation by Vincent Hoarau
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Essaying: Words, Words, Words
The last few weeks I kept stumbling across, or getting pointed toward, thought-provoking essays about haiku, many of which I kept constantly open as tabs in my browser so I could reread them or bits of them at stray moments when, say, Facebook was failing to completely capture my attention. After a while (sometimes I’m slow) I started to notice a common theme between several of these essays: Words.
No, I don’t mean that they all contain words. I mean that they all deal in one way or another with the inadequacy of mere words to convey the meaning of haiku, with the fact that in haiku it is just as often what is not said that is important. That space, wordlessness, ma … there are so many ways people have tried to explain this notion of the open-endedness of haiku, the sense of possibility it offers the reader. But these three essays have a lot to contribute to this conversation.
Ian Marshall and Megan Simpson, in an often dense discussion of the literary theory of deconstructionism as it pertains (or doesn’t pertain) to haiku, spend a lot of time trying to decide whether the words in haiku can be trusted: whether they are revealing some kind of absolute truth or faithful depiction of the world, or whether they are saying more about the mind of their author than about any objective reality.
“What I’m getting at, what I’ve been getting at, is that the supposed ideal of ‘wordlessness’ of haiku, meaning that its language can represent the natural world in such a way that it becomes fully present in language, in seventeen syllables or less, is a fiction. But the best haiku are aware of the fiction and of the difficulty or impossibility of using words to achieve no-mind, or selflessness, or wordlessness. Bringing deconstruction to bear on haiku reveals that even haiku to some extent concern themselves with the problematics of representation, and recognizing this enriches our readings of haiku.”
— Ian Marshall and Megan Simpson, “Deconstructing Haiku: A Dialogue“
Randy Brooks, in a long and rich interview with Robert Wilson in the most recent issue of the journal Simply Haiku, elaborates on his vision of haiku poetics, which considers the reader to be “co-creator” with the writer of the meaning of the haiku.
“Haiku is not a closed form of verse with three lines of five-seven-five syllables, self-contained and finished by the author. Haiku is an open form of poetry in which the silences before, within and after the haiku resonate with surplus meaning. Basho called this surplus of meaning ‘yojô.’ These unfinished silences are deliberately left open to the reader, so that the reader can enter into the imagined space of the haiku as a co-creator with the author to discover the feelings, thoughts, insights, and overall significance of the haiku. This surplus meaning is shared by the writer and reader, with a playful variety of unpredictable responses. In my opinion, this is the primary joy of haiku—the writer has crafted a haiku as a creative response to nature, reality, dreams, art, imagination, or to other haiku, and the reader gets to enter into that playful haiku with his or her own creative response and imagination.”
— Randy Brooks, interviewed by Robert Wilson in Simply Haiku
And Fay Aoyagi, in a fascinating essay about the history of the moon in haiku, talks about the necessity for subtlety and ambiguity in haiku, the need to leave things out. (The first paragraph of her essay is not specifically about this idea, but it was too wonderful not to quote here.)
“If somebody asked me to choose between the sun and the moon as a place to live, I would choose the moon. In my mind, there are highways with 10 lanes on the sun, but the moon has alleys and narrow streets I can explore on foot. For me, the sun is a destination, but the moon is a gateway and a peep-hole to an unknown world. …
“One of my Japanese friends told me that she did not understand how people write haiku in English. According to her, Japanese culture, including haiku, is very subtle. She said Japanese is a more ambiguous language than English; it is a more suitable language to express feelings. Writing in Japanese, a poet can avoid too much explicitness. I am not sure I totally agree. I think English haiku can be very suggestive, as well. … Haiku is a poetry form which requires reading between the lines. I strongly believe that we can achieve subtlety in English.”— Fay Aoyagi, “Moon in the Haiku Tradition“
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Well. I think in this edition I’ve had more of a sense than most of actually going somewhere, of making some kind of journey.
I can’t help thinking back to when I first started this blog, with a light-hearted, innocent notion that I would be spending a few minutes every day composing these charming little poems. And then…the deluge.
After just a few days of surfing erratically around the Interwebs, I began to realize that the well I had fallen into was deeper and had far more at the bottom of it than I had dreamed.
I was stunned by the richness of so much of the haiku I had found, by how different it was than the haiku I had previously seen or imagined.
I was amazed by the amount and variety of writing about haiku that I discovered, and by the amount of disagreement that existed about what exactly haiku was anyway, and by the quality and profundity of thought that so many poets and scholars poured into these tiny poems.
I had a sense of having found another country. And I knew almost immediately that it was one I wanted to emigrate to permanently, and spend a lifetime exploring.
Well, why not? The scenery is astounding, the population is warm and welcoming, the cultural traditions … well, I need say no more. But sometimes I just kind of look around and think, Wow. I am so lucky to be here.
Thank you for being here too.
.
.
The first day of summer, and already I’m wondering where the summer went. It was a day that skittered between sunshine and rain, not fulfilling any promises. In the evening the sky turned green for a while and we kept an ear out for the tornado siren. Some lazy thunder rumbled by. I remembered later that I’d forgotten to eat for most of the day. It hadn’t seemed necessary, the way it never seems necessary in dreams. Around bedtime I finally got around to asking my husband where the rosebush that had suddenly appeared on our doorstep a couple days earlier had come from.
.
that shade of pink
I wonder if I’m
blushing too
.
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Haikai That Caught My Eye
Wow, people were writing haiku on a wide variety of subjects the last couple of weeks. Underwear and the universe and tomatoes and dinosaurs…maybe I am dreaming after all.
.
.
I am alone
for week-long Spring rains
singing loudly to
the computer screen just how much
you are my sunshine
— Donna Fleischer, word pond
.
.
housework
an old song in my head
over and over
— Catherine J.S. Lee, Mann Library Daily Haiku
.
.
森のごときをんなが眠る夏電車 平井照敏
mori no gotoki on’na ga nemuru natsu-densha
.
a woman looking like
a forest sleeps
summer train
— Shobin Hirai, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
universe
a collection of numbers
that rhyme
— Rick Daddario, 19 Planets (this is a great haiga, go take a look)
.
— Aditya Bahl, dipping butterflies
.
.
tomato—
sometimes even stars are not
enough
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
.
temporary relief –
while the pears ripen
I’m stuck on Earth
midlertidig lettelse .
mens pærerne modnes
sidder jeg fast på Jorden
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
.
January thaw—
the garden exposed
to my dreaming
— Adelaide B. Shaw, DailyHaiku
.
.
what they tell us
about the war
ornamental poppies
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
step back into the fragrance our histories mingling
— Susan Diridoni, Issa’s Untidy Hut, Wednesday Haiku
.
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not awake enough
to turn the swifts’ chitterings
into a haiku
— Patti Niehoff, a night kitchen
.
.
incessant rain
falling on ferns and dinosaurs and
on my eyelids
— Taro Kunugi, quoted on Donna Fleischer’s word pond
.
.
cicada song
the cat stalks
fat robins
— Angie Werren, feathers
The epigram to this haiku: ““There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
This is part of Angie’s unbelievably cool project this month to combine NaHaiWriMo prompts with random Shakespeare quotations…what? How does she think of these things? Who cares — just go check it out, it will blow your mind.
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Journaled
.
A bunch of journals came out this week that I hadn’t seen before and was mightily impressed with, like for instance…
Lishanu: an interlingual haiku journal
Online journal, full of, oh joy, oh bliss, haiku in multiple languages, all translated into English. Or vice versa. You know what I mean.
.
ripe moon –
my pale hands
in the berry bushes
зрела месечина –
моите бледи дланки
во малините— Elena Naskova, English/Macedonian
.
lumière d’aube –
rien d’autre
dans la toile d’araignée
.
dawn light –
nothing else
in the spider’s web— Damien Gabriels, French/English
.
Another online journal. Very minimalist, but very high quality. Twenty tanka, one to a page, click on through and enjoy yourself.
.
years of buttons
in a glass Ball jar
the blue one on the top
so far from the blue one
on the bottom
.
.
This also counts as Dead Tree News, because it’s a print journal only. And a really nicely done one — glossy covers and paper, and lovely ink illustrations. More journals should have illustrations. In my humble opinion. Someone get on that.
(Oh, it’s all tanka, did I mention? And Australian. But you probably could have guessed that from the name.)
.
when what might happen
happens
the earth is turned
as if the planting
might begin again— Kath Abela Wilson
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.
The shortest night of the year has started. I’m tempted to see it through. Skip the dreams for once. Try making my own.
.
what dreams may come…
black ink dripping
from rain-soaked leaves.
.
.
.
.
.
.
firefly
a small shadow
on the star chart.
.— Notes from the Gean 3:1, June 2011
.
.
.Addendum, 6/21/11:
I was thrilled when the following French translation of this haiku appeared on my Facebook page, courtesy of the marvelous Vincent Hoarau:
.
luciole
une petite ombre
sur la carte des étoiles.
Merci beaucoup, Vincent!
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
summer stars
even brighter
through the moon roof
.
.
.
.
Hi all,
Forgive me if this edition is a little light. I’m running around getting ready to drag my son on a week-long two-thousand-mile college tour, because apparently while I wasn’t looking he outgrew his footie pajamas and learned to drive and do calculus and now he’s ready to light out for the territories. But I didn’t want to leave you hanging without any news from the Haikuverse until I get back.
While I’m out and about I’m planning to briefly abandon my family and drop in on the annual Haiku Circle gathering in Northfield, Massachusetts. I’m really excited about this because I’ll get to meet a whole new set of haiku poets than the wonderful Midwestern set I already know. I love being able to put faces and voices and personalities to the names of the poets I read, and I love that the haiku community is so small that it is actually possible to meet and hang out with most of the poets whose poetry makes your heart skip several beats when you read it. Maybe I’ll drop you a line from the action on Saturday.
Okay, let’s get on with it. I still have maps to print out and stuff…although not sure why I bother, I’m gonna get lost anyway.
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Haikai of Note
What’s everyone been writing lately? Anything good? Is the coming of warmer weather inspiring to you or does it just make you want to go to the beach and read stupid novels and forget about subtle Japanese poetry for a while? Personally, I think I tend to write more in the winter, when it’s dark and cold and there’s nothing else to do. All this bright light is distracting.
There’s still plenty of good poetry appearing every day on the Interwebs, though, so apparently everyone isn’t affected in the same way I am. Here are some of my favorites that have showed up since the last edition.
.
.
Milky Way . . .
the way the cow path
rings a hill— Michele Harvey, DailyHaiku
.
.
mare’s tail
yeah, sometimes
i still think of you— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
.
水飲んで天上くらき夏あした 酒井弘司
mizu nonde tenjyõ kuraki natsu ashita
.
drinking water
a dark ceiling
of a summer morning— Hiroshi Sakai, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
.
shooting star –
between dreams
reality— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
.
.
white and purple –
the scent of lilacs
is a ladder too— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, scented dust
.
.
.
pear blossoms . . .
which one of these houses
was yours?— Laura Garrison, DailyHaiku
.
.
.
interlocking tiles
two mockingbirds
share a worm— Gillena Cox, Lunch Break (This is a wonderful haiga, check it out.)
.
.
.
strip-lit
in the headache
of a high-rise
I poke a gummed nib
into Keats’s Nightingale— Liam Wilkinson, nearaway
.
.
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.
Journaled
Haibun Today just released a really great issue for June, and I swear I am not saying that just because I am in it. Some of my favorite from this issue: Colin Stewart Jones, “Should Rules Be Broken“; Steven Carter, “Montana“; Glenn G. Coats, “Expectations“; Katherine Cudney, “This World of Dew“; Bob Lucky, “Butter-Less in Ethiopia.”
Mu
There are so many haiku journals now that even people like me who actively seek them out and spend way too much time looking at haiku on the web anyway keep stumbling over journals that have existed, in some cases, for years, but that they (meaning me) never even heard of before. The terrifying thing is that most of these seemingly invisible journals are full of really good haiku, which makes you wonder if there is an alternate dimension that opens up periodically and releases clouds of haiku … or maybe there are just a lot of really good haiku poets in the world.
Anyway, my latest stunned discovery is the online journal Mu, which has its very first issue out, filled with great poetry like this:
fence line —
the flowers belong
to themselves— Jennifer Gomoli Popolis
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Web Wide World
Um, so I only have one article to share with you this week, but I think it should count for, like, ten. It’s a more-or-less mind-blowing article by Charlie Trumbull (current editor of Modern Haiku), published in Simply Haiku in 2004, called “An Analysis of Haiku in 12-Dimensional Space.” If the title makes your head hurt you should probably skip the article, but if you think it sounds like the coolest thing ever you should probably read it, because it more or less is. Set aside a little time though. And a little space in your brain. You’ll need it.
Basically, it’s what amounts to a mathematical or scientific analysis of the vast array of definitions of haiku that have been given by various commentators, owing a heavy debt to the work of research-biologist-cum-haiku-poet A.C. Missias, and incorporating several diagrams labeled “Highly Technical Figures.” But don’t let that scare you away. It’s also moving and thoughtful and funny, and I promise you don’t need any advanced scientific degrees to enjoy it, especially if you skip to the end where Charlie describes the relevant “12 dimensions” of haiku. What is your “Haiku ID”? Read and find out.
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Dead Tree News
Just a little word from R.H. Blyth again this week. (I am gonna get through all four volumes of Haiku this summer if it kills me.)
One thing I desperately love about Blyth is that, unlike most commentators on haiku, he is utterly unafraid to compare and contrast haiku with Western poetry or even Western prose. People generally tend to emphasize how different haiku is from most Western writing, and of course in many ways it is quite different, but after all, Basho and Wordsworth (to name two of Blyth’s favorite writers) are members of the same species — it’s not like they have nothing in common. I think it can be too easy to get caught up in the myth that the Mystic East is a whole different world that runs according to alternate laws of nature or something. Blyth (although, yes, he does romanticize haiku in some ways) doesn’t fall prey to this particular myth.
I love this commentary of Blyth’s on a haiku of Issa’s, for instance, which has us all looking at the same sky:
assari to haru wa ki ni keri asagi-zora
Spring has come
In all simplicity:
A light yellow sky.— Issa, translated by R.H. Blyth
.
“We are constantly astounded at the simplicity and complexity of Nature. An infinite number of phenomena, and we call it by a single word, spring. Spring, in all its variety, is contained in a single phenomenon, the thinness of the colour of the yellow sky. This colour is commonly found in the evening sky; it is to be seen in a well-known colour-print by Hiroshige, small billowing clouds on the horizon. This ‘yellow’ is probably the ‘green’ of Coleridge’s verse:
The green light that lingers in the west.”
— R.H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 2, p. 38
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.
Okay. The oil’s been changed in the car, we’ve got someone to feed the cats…what am I forgetting? Oh yeah! (Waves frantically) Bye everyone, see you next week!
.
.
.
evening star
the blacksmith shows me
how to judge the heat
.
.
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NaHaiWriMo prompt: Fire
Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 28th:
Doors
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
.
.
.
Glitter becomes you:
inspired, you spread a thin layer
of glue on arms and other rounded parts,
and upturn upon them the elegant jar of gold dust,
rapturously letting it describe and delimit, as it descends,
your ghostly form, previously so vague, and white, and un-wish-for-able.
You say, Get a load of this!, making muscles, inclining to accentuate curves,
giddy with the blindness you can see that you’re inflicting.
Startled, I stare, grown tired of selflessness,
wanting to own everything you possess;
I grasp your flesh, sweeping off grit in showers
of electric sparks, gravity stripping you once more bare:
grains of wheat, pearls of rice, gratings of savory cheese,
and you, goddess, just you now, and the memory of
glitter.
.
.
stars falling
more and more
I wonder why
.
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..
First published in Contemporary Haibun Online 7:1, April 2011
Everyone have a nice Valentine’s Day? Looking forward to warmer weather? (Or cooler, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere?) Great. Glad to hear it.
Okay, got the chitchat out of the way. No time. Must be fast. Short. Abbreviated. Abridged. Yes, that’s it. This is the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books of haiku columns. Don’t let that put you off, though. It’s just my boring words that are abridged, not the haiku.
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Haiku (Etc.) of the Week
(Poems I found and liked the last couple of weeks.)
.
I am giving pride of place this week to Amy Claire Rose Smith, the 13-year-old winner of the youth haiku contest at The Secret Lives of Poets. This haiku is not just “good for a thirteen-year-old.” I would be proud of having written it. Amy is the co-proprietor of The Spider Tribe Blog and Skimming the Water along with her mother, Claire Everett, also a fine haiku and tanka poet (I mean, she’s okay for a grownup, you know?) who has been featured in this space previously.
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listeningto the brook’s riddlesa moorhen and I.— Amy Claire Rose Smith
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.
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pearl diver
a full breath,
a full moon
.
.
From Crows & Daisies:
.
sleet shower
plum blossoms
on flickr— Polona Oblak
.
.
From Via Negativa:
.
moon in eclipse
I remember every place
I’ve seen that ember— Dave Bonta
.
(The first line links to a spectacular photo by Dave, take a look.)
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From Morden Haiku:
.
stretching out
the peloton
a hint of spring— Matt Morden
.
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From scented dust:
.
still winter –
a heavy book about
nutritional supplements— Johannes S.H. Bjerg
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(Johannes has also been writing a lengthy series of haiku about penguins that are delighting my son and me. A few of them are at his blog, linked above, and he’s also been tweeting a lot of them (@jshb32). Both in English and in Danish, because I asked nicely. 🙂 Thanks, Johannes.)
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the auld fushwife
sits steekin –
her siller needle dertin.the old fishwife
sits sewing –
her silver needle darting.— John McDonald
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From Yay words! :
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late winter cold
I suckle
a honey drop— Aubrie Cox
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From The Haiku Diary:
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Ripeness Is All
In the produce section:
A very pregnant woman,
smelling a grapefruit.— Elissa
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From a handful of stones:
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Joyfulness Keeps Pushing Through
I’m reading
T. S. EliotGoethe
and the Old TestamentBut I can’t help it
— Carl-Henrik Björck
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From haiku-usa:
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returning spring
in the dawn light she looks like
my first love— Bill Kenney
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have you thought
of your effect on us?
full moon.— Stella Pierides.
a bit of paradefrom the sparrow …first flakes, last snow.— Ricky Barnes
まどろむの活用形に春の雪 小川楓子madoromu no katsuyôkei ni haru no yuki.
conjugation
of ‘doze’
spring snow.— Fuko Ogawa, translated by Fay Aoyagi
“Class Warfare in Wisconsin: 10 Things You Should Know” (Tikkun Daily)
a long day…
field laborers
fasten stars
to the under belly of
a snail shaped moon.— Robert D. Wilson
(Normally I try to keep this blog a politics-free zone, but can I help it if Robert wrote a great tanka and Haiku News connected it to a headline about the protests in my state against the governor’s budget bill? I’m all for art for art’s sake, but if art happens to intersect with politics in an artistically pleasing way, I’m all for that too.)
The white gold moon: A Japanese haiku experience
Or how a hole in the sky turned into a pair of wings in my heart.
Mutsumi and I did meet over spare egg sandwiches and coconut muffins at the 411 Seniors Centre Cafeteria. … I laid the printed sheets out on the table, two pages of ten haiku. I had noticed her wince as she read them and then, she pushed the pages away.
… She pointed to one of them and asked me, or to my mind, accused me, “Where is your heart?”
The haiku she had her forefinger on is this:
hole in dark sky?
but
the white moon… “When you wrote this how did you feel?”
“Well, in the dark night sky on a full moon, I looked up and there was the moon like a white hole in the sky.”
“So…”
“Seeing a hole although it was bright sort of scared me but it also delighted me because I realized it is but the moon.”
“And so…”
“That’s it.”
“That’s why, it can’t be a haiku. It cannot stop there. It has to stop right here,” she tapped her chest with her hand and to mine, finally a gesture which uplifted me, “in the heart, your heart.”
We plumbed the idea deeper. She focused on my delight to see the moon. What did I want to do about it? And how would I have wanted to reach the moon. I said the only I could would be “to fly”. She began to smile and latched on to the image, to the idea of flying. She asked how I would have wanted to fly. And I said with wings, of course.
“But you can’t have wings. Still you can fly with your thoughts, your thoughts of happiness,” she said. “Think of where these come from,” she urged me on.
“In my heart, of course!”
“There you are! There is your haiku!”
She took the piece of paper from my hand and began writing in Japanese, translating the characters into this:
gin-iro* tsuki no hikari*
kurai yoru watashi no kokoro
tsubasaI asked what each word meant and the haiku flowed:
white gold moon
on a dark night in my heart
a pair of wings— Alegria Imperial
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Dead Tree News: Journaled
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Frogpond, the venerable journal of the Haiku Society of America, edited by George Swede, came in the mail last week. First I clasped it to my heart and carried it around with me everywhere for a few days. Then I started making the difficult decisions about which tiny portion of the contents I could share with you guys. Here’s what I came up with:
First of all, I’ll mention right off the bat that there was an essay by Randy Brooks called “Where Do Haiku Come From?” that I am going to have to write a separate post about because I can’t do it justice here. So remind me about that if I haven’t come through in, say, a couple of months.
There were also a couple of interesting and related essays by Ruth Yarrow and David Grayson about bringing current events and economic realities into the writing of haiku. Ruth wrote about the recent/current financial crisis and David about homelessness. Both discussed the importance of not neglecting this aspect of our reality when we look for haiku material; David also discussed how to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality and cliche when dealing with topics that start out with such strong emotional associations. I tend to think that the reality of the urban environment and the modern political and economic climate are seriously neglected in haiku (and I am as guilty as anyone else of neglecting them), so I was happy to see these essays here.
Second of all, here are the titles of some haibun you might want to take a look at if a copy of Frogpond falls into your path (which it will do if you join the Haiku Society of America, hint hint):
Little Changes, by Peter Newton; The First Cold Nights, by Theresa Williams; Not Amused, by Ray Rasmussen; Marry Me, by Genie Nakano; Gail, by Lynn Edge; This Strange Summer, by Aurora Antonovic; Home, by John Stevenson; Looking Back, by Roberta Beary; Koln, by David Grayson.
And lastly … the haiku. Those that particularly struck me for whatever reason:
sunset
warmth from within
the egg
— Johnette Downing
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high beams visit
a small bedroom
my thin cotton life
— Dan Schwerin
coffee house babble
among all the voices
my conscience
— Robert Moyer
pruning
the bonsai…
my knotty life
— Charlotte DiGregorio
if only she had been buried wild crimson cyclamen
— Clare McCotter
Christmas tree
wrong from every angle
trial separation
— Marsh Muirhead
morning obituaries …
there i am
between the lines
— Don Korobkin
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full moon —
all night the howling
of snowmobiles
— John Soules
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the cumulonimbus
full of faces
hiroshima day
— Sheila Windsor
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leaves changing…
the river
………….lets me be who I am
— Francine Banwarth
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Done! Okay, for me, that really wasn’t bad.
Just wanted to say that I will probably not have another Haikuverse update for at least 3 weeks, possibly 4, since in March I will be contending vigorously with midterms, family visits, a new job, and oh, yeah, this haijinx column gig. (Send me news!) I’ll miss droning endlessly on at you guys but at least this will give you a chance to catch up with all the old columns.
15 bicycle light never stopping to let me catch up
16 multiplication tables all the things I can’t forget
17 peace pipe blowing bubbles beside the sea
18 expired passport all the nebulae I kept meaning to visit
19 protest march spring comes anyway
20 microwave platter my food comes from a dying star
21 resisting arrest unidentified weeds in the garden
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Week One is here. Week Two is here.
Am I getting any better? … Never mind, I don’t want to know.
Orion
more than his fair share
of the sky
constellations all the collections I’ve abandoned
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constellations
everything I’ve learned
and forgotten
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constellations it all made sense at the time
stars
as if nothing was ever
any different
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(runner-up, The Haiku Foundation Facebook contest, November 2010)
Red Dragonfly 