Storm A-Coming: Leap Year Night

so many grey clouds
piloted by great winds—
I want to go too!


Feb. 29th always (well, every four years) seems like a bonus day, an extra gift. And the extra that really good haiku give you is a resonating thought and/or emotion that continues long after the brief poem has ended. Think of Basho's leaping frog or his crow in autumn lingering on a bare branch.

leap year night
so many ways to spend it--
early sleep, more dreams

When I think of haiku, I imagine a gong in a very quiet place, struck forcibly, and how its reverberations continue to sound for a few minutes until afterwards even the silence feels charged.

A Cloud, a Spark, a Star

lone cumulus
swallows a star,
spits it out again


Critic and haiku writer, Lee Gurga, once said that haiku "is composed of two parts--perception and imagination. If we can keep the two in balance, perhaps we can create contemporary haiku."

On the other hand, Shiki, considered to be the great modernizer of Japanese haiku, recommended shasie or "stretching from life." He liked to record what he saw without necessarily leaping beyond the descriptive. But how descriptive were his descriptions. And what a painterly eye he had.

For myself, I like to set off in search of a spark, an idea. I get most of my haiku wandering and observing, being both part of nature yet removed enough to notice the unexpected among the expected or usual.

From Small to Spacious

the surprise
of the library patron’s
toothless smile



Just reading the latest issue of Ripples, the Haiku Society of America Newsletter, where I came across an interesting quote by Rita Gray, who writes haiku, teaches, and also is a play therapist in NY City. She said that she is drawn to the form because "it is the poetry of the senses, rooted in nature and the seasons." She also speaks about the form being compact "which gives such nuance to every word."

I particularly like the quality she brings up next. "Haiku are also spacious. They provide the writer, and the reader, with room for big human experiences."

So much world for seventeen syllables to encompass. So much life for one small poem to celebrate or describe.

Presidents' Day

another mountain
I wish I could climb--
only the birds can

McCormick's Creek: Nesting Available

nesting tree
empty in winter—
beachtown in rain





Couldn't resist snapping a photo of this interesting tree. Imagine its history. Its past denizens.

It's on the cave trail at McCormick's Creek State Park. When we went recently, two woodpeckers were assiduously filling the forest with their hammering sounds. And the creeks were overflowing. Good practice day for jumping from rock to rock.

Math Haiku Minus Birds

birdhouses in sun
fifty oval entryways:
occupants zero





One of the haiku newsletters sent out a notice about a math haiku contest happening this month. The deadline is leap-year day, Feb. 29th, kind of a math-centric day on its own (every four years adding up quarter days to make a new one)--and the date being celebrated "March 14(3.14) is the Day of Mathematics because π=3.1415・・・"

Check out the examples they offer on their flyer. They are not straight math problems, for instance a coin toss was used to show probability and a mountain climb proved the existence of angles. And subtraction was exhibited by a spoiled son at a casino.

A chance (get-it, improbable!) conversation I had while walking through IU campus yesterday fits right in with this topic. I'd never heard about the Fibonacci Sequence, but a friend mentioned that his wife had just completed a print based on it. All kinds of flowers and shells exhibit this pattern, so there's lots of room to incorporate one of these patterns into a math haiku. As for me, I'll stay fascinated by null and zero.

My friend, Dennis Walsh, who is a statistics professor sent me this haiku:

the numbers crumble
as I hike across the slopes
of mathematics.

Here's the address to the PDF announcing the contest with some sample haiku: http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1106162827962-4/Math+Haiku+Competition.pdf

Get integral--start composing some haiku using both sides of your brain!

Line-Wrestling or How to Tame the Alligator

golf course in snow
piercing the white softness
deer antlers

In every kind of poem, the line is central to the poem's structure and movement. And because there are so few lines in haiku, the line becomes even more important scaffolding than it does in longer poems. Recently, I read an essay in the December 2011 Poetry where Dan Beachy-Quick said the following about the line:

My thinking about the nature of the line has been for many years guided by Emerson’s suggestion that every line of a poem must be a poem. I find in that claim some sense of poetic truth I have never been wholly able to comprehend, an intuitive trust that never clarifies itself into certainty. What I mean...is that the line is anything but a unifying force in the poem. There seems to be a curious way in which the line as a singular unit of poetic perception resists being tamed into the poem’s entire structure...

Beachy-Quick goes on to say that he thinks that the line often overwhelms or tries to destroy the unity of the poem of which it is a part. An interesting theory. I love what he says next:

As strange as it is to say, I wanted each line to discover within itself some intent I couldn’t discover for it, or without it. I thought of each line as some sort of antenna that ventures forth to see what ground there is to be crossed, and then the poem comes groping bodily after it…The lines bring the poem wildly forth and then succumb mysteriously to the poem’s unifying power.

I think anyone who writes poetry (or anything else for that matter) finds some difficulty in having all the parts of the piece flow smoothly. I love how he talks about the line as a kind of antenna roaming over the ground, exploring, then leading the poem after it.

Haiku require a kind of antennae too, waving for sound, for the right word meaning, the right juxtaposition, for some connection to the world of the seasons, antennae that the reader can feel too resonating after reading.

In haiku, I think, it's the individual words, that I wrestle more with: uncooperative, unmelodious, stubborn heifers of vocabulary refusing to be roped in. Each word requiring its own special lasso, cowgirl wrangling.

A Dollop of Winter

how silent ice is
forming--
waiting for night to return




In the late seventies, we spent a winter in the arctic in Kivalina, Alaska. Check it out on the map, it's on the Chukchi Sea about halfway between Kotzebue and Point Hope. Other than the Inupiat culture and the truly fantastic Aurora Borealis, what most fascinated me that year was ice--its myriad varieties. I think everyone has heard that the Inuit and Yupik languages possess more than a hundred words for snow, but the same must be true for ice. I can't give you the names in Inupiat but some of the terms for ice I know are grease (yep!), pancake, shuga, frazil, and nilas. All of these describe new sea ice.

And yes though "grease" sounds truly icky, it's what the roaming sea really looks like when it starts to be slowed by ice. We lived just a few hundred feet from the ocean (in front) and on our left a channel connected the Chukchi with a huge lagoon. In November, the water by the channel opening and in the channel itself slowed first, transforming into a black oily mass. What happened was that small particles of sea ice had frozen and were slowly connecting with other ones. It's an amazing process considering the currents and winds. Pancake ice looks like white round circles of ice--curled on the outer edges from bumping into each other. Think little bumper cars of ice that finally all get stuck together. I can't remember how long the process took, but I think the whole channel froze solid in only two weeks.

After that the sea itself froze. Of course, this took a lot longer. And the color of the ice and water also changed often. Not until January did I notice that everywhere in view the sea was totally frozen. But it did not appear as a flat plane of ice often seen in lakes. The immense currents and winds caused it to freeze into ridges and hills. In some places it looked like a statuary garden. Some of the ridges were 20 or 30 feet high.

In February, I took one long walk on the sea ice. Something not very sensible when you consider the stories I'd read about the sea ice breaking free and stranding people upon bergs that were whisked away toward the pole, toward Greenland. Luckily for me everything held firm and I had an extremely magical hike. Just the colors were breathtaking: white, blue, turquoise, lavender, pale green. Also the statues glimmered in refracted light. I hiked nearly all the way to a smoky surprise world, that I later learned was called a polynya (a small section of sea water kept open by the currents). A fog hung over this clear water. I didn't get close.

Since that time, I have always appreciated ice, how it transforms liquid into solid, how it is carved, how it changes our view of the everyday.

Fog--Hiding First then Revealing

driving in morning fog
deer leaps past the windshield


Last week, we had several mornings of early fog. Driving in fog makes a good metaphor for writing haiku. You start out, turn the lights on, open the eyes wide and try to see where the heck you are going, noticing parts of a bush there, a tree trunk there, negotiating the lines on the haiku highway and suddenly out of the white mist, you see a deer rising in majestic flight right outside your windshield. And luckily the moving Scion and the flying deer do not meet, just share a moment of startled recognition.

Animals in Winter

grizzled old cat
and sleek young dog
sleep through winter


Rereading Lee Gurga's Haiku: a Poet's Guide and these words struck me, “Another principle associated with classical Japanese haiku is hosomi (“slenderness”). Slenderness allows the poet to paint the scene, then disappear."

That's one technique that I find personally hard to master. I think what Gurga means by his sentence is that the writer's ego--mine--gets in the way of the haiku's direction to the point of derailing it. But could it also be a cultural thing? I believe the Japanese are much more connected to nature than many Westeners are, so when they paint the scene they already feel a part of it whereas we often just observe what is happening and then think we need to direct and stage manage the elements.

So for my little experiment. Does this version exhibit more hosomi? What do you think?

old cat sleeping
with sleek young dog--
winter passes