November 24: Ku-me. Or kill me. Just put me out of my misery already…

Ugh. Blah. Ick. Uninspired mumble all my haiku suck grumble writer’s block mutter whose idea was it to write a whole novel in a month anyway whimper whine moan so sick of writing and so far behind …

 

grains of sand —
no set of chopsticks
small enough

(originally posted on “ku-me” at 19planets.wordpress.com, 11/20/2010, and shamelessly, desperately plagiarized from myself)

______________________

Incidentally, it’s just fine that you are not playing ku-me, the amazing haiku chaining game, over at 19 planets. Because those of us who are, are having way too much fun to want to share. I mean, your brain would probably explode if you had that much fun anyway, so don’t even bother. Really.

(Just kidding. Come play, you’ll be glad you did.)

 

 

Writer’s block

I’ve been telling people a lot lately that I have writer’s block. Then I come here and look at how much I’ve been posting, and laugh at myself. I don’t have writer’s block. I just don’t want to write my damn term paper.

It’s strange to be living part of my life in this haiku-world of stylized poetics and Zen moments, and the rest of it in the considerably more demanding and less dreamlike state required to cope with graduate school, teenage children, a husband with job stress, iffy finances, a house that would probably not withstand a stringent inspection from the local health department, the pace of 21st-century social networking, and a midlife crisis. As you might imagine, at the moment I’m prioritizing haiku over all these other things in my life. Wouldn’t you?

I think that probably to be the kind of haiku poet I would really like to be (not to mention the kind of human being that I can imagine tolerating, if I weren’t her), I will need to better integrate these two parts of my life, starting soon. Preferably before my term paper is due. After all, examined from a Zen standpoint, isn’t a term paper really just a 20-page haiku?

Okay, maybe not. But you see what I’m saying here. Haiku is life, life is haiku. They flow into and out of each other, they aren’t separate rock pools with their own ecosystems. Time to find the current and travel the whole length of the river…

but after I hand in my term paper, I may grab a low-hanging branch and linger around here a bit more again. And report back on what I saw in my travels.