Night Haiku

deep summer
only coolness is the grass
and distant stars


Walking back from the strange French flick at the Ryder on campus, I kept thinking of the conference program on the history of Canadian haiku. I had nearly skipped it because it was the last night, and I had developed a kind of hotel insomnia, but I decided to listen to the beginning before going back to the hotel to rest. However, Terry Ann Carter from Ottawa led such a wonderful program that I was sucked in.

Canadian haiku had its roots in World War II, in particular in the Japanese internment camps that we also had here in the states. Such an awful place for haiku to blossom, but blossom it did. But perhaps that's not strange--just as the people's lives were constricted, their words also were constrained and at the same time empowered by this tight small form.

One Canadian haiku writer Kaoru Ikeda kept a diary of the war years and formed a haiku group in the internment camp she lived in. Here's one she wrote about the view from her bunk:

wisteria flowers
but double-decker bed
is in my way

In the postwar years, one musician we are all familiar with also wrote haiku--Leonard Cohen. And Canada has a strong tradition of French language haiku as well.

Here's a nice one by one of Canada's most famous practitioners, George Swede. It describes both the closeness and the distance between our two countries:

passport check
my shadow waits
across the border