More Silence

I write this as the Bloomington sanitation guys vacuum the leaves of summer that stood sodden and crusty in yesterday's snow. Not only that but roofers are pounding and scraping my neighbor's roof: bang, bang, scrip, scrape.

Maybe that's why haiku is such a difficult 21st century art to engage in for it's truly hard to slow down and really experience what you are thinking and feeling in our noisy, brash, far too-busy world. This short poetic form, I believe, requires both emotion and thought.

In researching the aspect of silence in relation to haiku, I discovered Canadian doctor and haikuist Eric Amman who wrote an essay in 1978 called "The Wordless Poem." Amman brought both his medical practice and training and his belief in Zen Buddhism into his poems and said in this essay that "The haiku is a point of intersection between man and nature."

In her analysis of Amman's work, critic Kathrin Walsch said that "Haiku poetry, like Zen, transcends words." Of course for someone whose bread and butter--take that back--soul food are words that's a hard concept to master, but she goes on the say, "Haiku focuses not on what the words mean in an abstract sense but rather the image the words are able to create... Zen practices hold that words are limiting and can be a distraction from which one should detach oneself."

And this discussion leads me to night, especially these long late-autumn nights when one is more likely to experience quiet and to reconnect with both nature and oneself:

night sky
the flaming silence
of stars

Haiku Silence

abandoned parking lot
perched on the barbed wire
one sparrow


OK, to be honest, I don't understand the role of silence in a haiku. I know it should be an integral element, but how to incorporate silence within a haiku is a difficult art to learn. Does it occur in the pauses between lines, in the interstices between words?

Or does silence resonate from the time before the poem existed to the time after? Is it the hidden stitching behind the haiku?

Seeing in the Land of Leaning Trees

leafless woods

wearing dark green again

rifle shots boom

We've been traveling this past week--back to the East Coast to visit family for Thanksgiving--and as we drive the clogged highways, discover new towns, I think often of seeing. Not only about imprinting Pennsylvania mountain shapes on memory and watching the wide Ohio and Monongahela rivers float past but about noticing and really experiencing this lovely world. It's really hard to do--to see deeply, taking it all in--not in our casual everyday way where sense impressions zoom by often without us noticing them.

Yesterday, I walked down to the bay here in Rhode Island and watched swans float regally past. The sun glinted on the water, the swans circled in wide loops, the trail to the fishing jetty was covered in deep black mud. The dried grasses were bent and broken by walkers. A lone fisherman spent Thanksgiving morning giving thanks in the best way for him enjoying solitude and the thrill of tugs on his line.

Here's a few quotes about seeing. As the new year rapidly approaches, my goal is to really notice the world around me.

Painter Paul Klee said, "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather it makes us see."

Teilhard De Chardin wrote, "The whole of life lies in the verb seeing."

Finally, I love this quote by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It really shows the effect of this deep seeing on the body, "We are a landscape of all that we've seen."

Perched in the Land of Trees

tree leaning into tree--
an old couple negotiate
the rainy sidewalk

In Speculation #241, American haikuist Robert Spiess said that one of the 'lesser reasons' haiku are so brief is that in them inheres the truth that if words are good, words nevertheless are a rupture of silence which is better still."

Of course, all writing--drama, novels, songs--involves the breaking and returning to silence, but in poems as short as haiku, the silences weigh so much more than in longer pieces.

I love the vivid word rupture; it originally meant to break but from a bursting inside. And it's related to the words abrupt, corrupt and interrupt. However, interrupting the silence does not convey the abrupt change from silence to sound that rupture gives.

Leaf Sink

dachshund
sinking under the leaves—
squirrel titters

Brown on brown on a grey sky/grey cloud day, a day of fierce winds that warns and warns winter's on it's way.



wailing 24-hour wind
how small we are
against the sky

Fetch

dog leaps
toward the falling stick—
drops color the sand


Admit it, none of us can live in the moment like our dog, Mr. Darcy is doing in this combined photo. Leaping, stretching, cannoning toward some crummy bark-peeling stick in the great Ohio River. What you can't see in the picture is a lone tugboat pulling six empty barges upriver toward Louisville, or perhaps even Pittsburgh, PA. These last few days, the solitary tugboat captain has plowed hundreds of miles up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, pulling over to the bank at night and sleeping to the lapping of the gentle river waves. It's a peaceful scene, dusk coming on, the moon veiling and unveiling herself with clouds, and the far bank--low-lying farmland--empty and quiet. Behind us large Cave-in-Rock pours out darkness and gathers its secrets. A few hundred yards west, past the bend in the river, a car ferry has just set off for Kentucky.

But Mr. Darcy lives forever in the moment, the way we should be in haiku, experiencing to the hilt this one precious moment which is really all that we have.

Here and Now

As we hurtle into deep fall with Thanksgiving rapidly approaching and a mix of crystalline blue-sky days and long days of rain, I’ve compiled a seasonal word list for fall in Indiana. I’m sure I’ve left many good words or phrases out. Perhaps you have a few favorites of your own.

Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons. The return of cool weather always energizes me; the temporality of autumn’s beauty: its dazzling leaves, intense blue sky, luminous sunlight, and geese v-ing south always remind me how fleeting the best things in life are, barely grasped, barely noticed, barely meditated upon, when suddenly puff -- like a pile of atomized leaves— they’re gone!

Here’s my quick, jotted list.

Indiana Fall Season Words

pumpkin / persimmon/ squash / apples / nuts / Halloween / leaf crunch / piles of leaves/ wind / rain / first frost / first freeze/ harvest moon / coats / gloves / hats / bushy tailed squirrels/ acorns/ maple leaves / red leaves /gold / aurora / mums / chrysanthemums / cranberries / Thanksgiving / time change / early darkness / dark mornings / smoke / bonfires / Orion / bright stars / aurora borealis / grey days / clouds /overcast / morning chill / blustery / trails / woods/bales / hay / rake / football /plowed-over fields /geese flying / crows

Finally, here’s a quote from Tom Clausen’s article “A Haiku Way of Life,” “Haiku for me is the perfect record of my simply existing here and now. Each haiku, in a way, can be thought of as a farewell poem - an acceptance of the transitory nature of everything.”

A Cornucopia of Pumpkins

pumpkins capture
late afternoon sun—
the shortness of days

The news reported that we were short of pumpkins this year--an erratic weather year ruined a lot of crops, but in B-town the round and ovoid squashes appear quite numerous. Besides their striking color, they are so individual in size and shape and texture. I love wandering past them, finding joy in their bright shapes and their endless variety.

Here's a quote from an article called "Feathering the Moment" by New Zealand poet Christopher Herold: "One thing haiku teaches us is that we don't have to go somewhere other than where we are to discover value in things. And we don't have to wait for something worthy to come to us either... Living the 'haiku life' necessitates an ongoing process of waking up to where we are now, accepting that we are where we are, and feeling grateful for this."