Category: Poetry

	Probably the most well-known haiku is Basho’s poem about a frog and a pond. See Rexroth’s translation at right or 31 translations on the Bureau of Public Secrets or Chad Sweeny’s 33 translations.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been collecting haiku resources on the web, and, since hearing this talk, haiga as well. Here are some recent finds:

• Daily Haiku, “a print and online literary publication that exists to promote and preserve the written art of haiku.” One haiku is published every day on their website.
  
• John Hockensmith, like me, tries to write a haiku every day. His blog is no more moon poems. He also suggested Issa’s Untidy Hut, a blog by Don Wentworth, who publishes a small-poetry magazine called The Lilliput Review.

• Lidia Rozmus’ haiga, with brush strokes and caligraphy.
  
• Lastly, because I like found poetry: I recently found Haiku DB, which scours the internet for unintentional haikus. The about page says

  take lots of data
  look for five seven and five
  use a cursive font

  and here’s an example:
  

​One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change is a worldwide poetry gathering and reading — happening today (Sep 24). 700 events in 95 countries are planned. The organizers say

The first order of change is for poets, writers, artists, anybody, to actually get together to create and perform, educate and demonstrate, simultaneously, with other communities around the world. This will change how we see our local community and the global community. We have all become incredibly alienated in recent years. We hardly know our neighbors down the street let alone our creative allies who live and share our concerns in other countries. We need to feel this kind of global solidarity. I think it will be empowering.

Look here to see if there’s an event in your city.

Haiku seems to be popping up all around me this summer and keeping me on track with my off-again-on-again practice of writing a haiku a day. Most of the ones I wrote through the end of July were about the lack of rainfall here in New Mexico & my very dry garden.

the sky grows dark.
thunder. lightning.
not a raindrop falls.

Once I got to Vermont, where it is very wet (rain every other day, and my sister’s house is surrounded by lakes and ponds), water became the recurring theme.

far across the lake
a loon’s cry.
cattails at attention.

While in Vermont, I attended a reading given by David Budbill, whose poetry is very haiku-like. Then last week I went to the opening of From a Distant Road, an exhibit at the Museum of New Mexico that includes John Brandi’s contemporary haiga (haiku poems accompanied by brush art work). That’s an example above, and click on it to see more of his pieces from the exhibit.
Brandi gave a talk before the reception, introducing us to the history of haiga. But most interesting to me were his comments on his practice of writing haiku — that it was often about encapsulating an “aha” moment or that he sat outside and wrote about what was happening around him. I usually write at the end of the day and use it to reflect back on what took place that day, with my generally imperfect memory.

One of the walking trails near my sister’s house in Vermont has a series of sign posts with a changing collection of local poetry. I liked that the posts, like the one pictured to the left, are off the path a bit, so you have to look for them. And I especially enjoyed the poem below, contrasting the east and west coasts.

New England Winter
Paul Mariani

To hell with John Greenleaf Whittier
and his chirpy snowfall odes. Snow.
We’ve had our share: 18 storms thus far,
ice layered like so much sandstone shale.
A regular archaeologist’s dig.
All the television graphics show
this at least: a winter made in hell.
Each day now proud old records fall,

to be replaced by miserable new ones.
What fun it is to sit here counting
off minus 30 mornings, these glittering
kitchen pipes festooned with ice.

On the upside, take the Angelinos after
last month’s quake, fear mounting
with the mounting Richter Sale,
the decibels revised upward. Twice.

“Maybe, but I’ll still take the quake’s
twenty seconds to your hundred-day
glacial siege. Anytime.” Thus my
California sister, who can be tough.
What hours, days, I have spent
reading the West Coast fault lines from L.A.
on up, all the way to the Aleutian chain.
“At least we’re built on firmer stuff.”

I feel myself edging to a crushing
rejoinder, this once vindicated. But by then
she’s off the phone, no doubt
outdoors already, tanning on that delicious
cedar-toasted deck of hers which gazes
so serenely out over the Pacific Ocean.
While here am I, iced-over & snowed under,
blinking out this frozen glass. At this.