Every Indiana Sunset Has At Least One Admirer

into the gloaminga cottontail leaps— pink nimbus clouds

No-Man's Bridge in Utah

newly formed clouds

rock carved for millennia

raven coasts between

Deer Season

mid-afternoon 
pond catches light—                              
the stillness of deer                       

Here's a quote from writer Jane Reichhold. 

"So that is what haiku is all about. How to build the cage of words to hold the miracle safe and full of sound until the images in a reader’s mind open the door to the wonderment and delight the author found in one part of the world. It is the cage that will attract and intrigue the reader, but it must also be well-built enough to bring the experience intact far across time and space."

I love the idea of the "cage" as something that both captures a moment in the natural world and then holds it until it's released to the reader. But how hard it is to build those small cages. And how can they hold wildness, stillness, and time passing?

Fawn Season in B-Town

doe and fawn

stride down the city street--

pulse of firefly light

In an earlier post,  I talked about Japanese poet Shiki's philosophy of haiku. What he termed shasei or "sketching from life." Critic and writer Lee Gurga reports that this is only the first of what Shiki considered a three part process.

  The new writer would sketch from life or as Gurga phrases it, "simply record what he or she sees,  hears, smells, tastes or touches. The goal is to develop perceptual abilities, understand how to keep thoughts and feelings from intruding, and develop the craft of translating perception into language." All  tasks that are increasingly devalued in our modern techy world.

    If you are curious about the other two stages,  Shiki also advocated for "selective realism" and "truthfulness" in haiku.  "Selective realism" means that you choose one or two of the things that you are perceiving, but pick the ones that most capture the entire experience. Gurga writes that Shiki's "Truthfulness" refers to "when a poet is able to use images from the exterior world to express his or her interior reality." These quotes are from Gurga's excellent manual Haiku: a Poet's Guide. As you can see each level gets more and more complex until the last one when the poet tries to capture in just a few words both the internal and exterior worlds.

   Regarding the doe and fawn haiku. It stems from three mama and fawn sightings that I experienced,

one during each of the last three days. The first was two nights ago just when true dark had finally arrived on our street where deer seldom appear. We live just one block from the busy traffic roar of Third Street.  I heard a rustling off to my right, and then a moment later saw two deer march down the center of the street. I wished them safe travel.

    Last night returning from a play in Greene County I came upon a threesome, a doe, a fawn, and another one--perhaps an older offspring?  Since it was late, they made no effort to hide. They moved slowly, surely across the lawns stopping to taste the shrubbery and even nibble some flowers carefully grown by someone's mailbox.

   Then this morning while biking to the Y, I saw another mama and fawn pair in someone's front yard in the neighborhood across from Kroeger's. This fawn was very young. She sidled under her mother and nursed. That's my report from deer nursery season in B-town.

Fireflies Adazzling!

fireflies

some so high some so low--

toddler reaches up

For me, June is firefly month. When I lived out west, California and Alaska, there were no fireflies. I missed them, those blips of green or yellow light pulsing on and off in the warm evening air. I've never seen the famous Smokies display in North Carolina and Tennessee, but once we camped tentless in Arkansas in the early summer, and I woke to this fabulous display of thousands and thousands of fireflies lighting on and off in the inky blackness. Even though I felt tired after a day's hiking and swimming, I stayed up for an hour or more, breathing slowly deeply, feeling within me the pulse of the firefly world.

Ghost Range, Abiquiu, New Mexico

 


   
    on Kitchen Mesa
    hiker breathes his last--
    butterfly rises








There's a story behind this haiku. It concerns a man named Ted, who hiked his last mountain last Thursday at Ghost Ranch, the lovely  country where Georgia O'Keeffe painted.

I happened to be hiking the same trail that day, and it was a steep uphill climb to Kitchen Mesa where there were spectacular views.

When I reached the top, a wide table-top with cliffs offering viewpoints in all directions, a white-haired man was walking about 70 yards away. His friend was sitting and I heard the sitting man ask the other, "Are you OK?" The tall man's answer was lost to the wind.

I wandered on the white paths on the top checking out the spectacular views and headed back on the path where the two men were. Now the tall one was lying across the path. "Is something wrong?" I asked. The sitting man said, "My friend's having chest pains. Can you go for help? A burro, whatever."

I gave them my water and a snack because I did not know how long it would take for help to arrive. The man needing aid was named Ted and his friend, Bill.

I raced down as fast as I could (especially over the rocky, steep sections), ran where the path was sandy, and kept hoping some fleet young'un would approach so I could send him or her back to the ranch. Only an older couple approached.  I told them what was going on and asked them to hurry to the top.

At the bottom, I found a sheriff at the edge of the ranch. He drove me to the office and they called 911 for a helicopter rescue.

Alas, the man did not make it. Later, I saw the couple that I had passed racing down.  They told me Ted had died 10 or 15 minutes before they got there--in other words shortly after I had left. The woman said, "Don't worry. He died doing what he loved in the most beautiful place."

Ted's daughter was at Ghost Ranch as well, painting in the field, and she later told the coroner that she did not want his body shipped home, but instead wanted him cremated so they could release his ashes on the top of Kitchen Mesa.

You never know what you will witness in the course of a day. The occasion was both sad and life-affirming.

Rad Haiku

I have no haiku to post today, but I wanted to talk some about gendai haiku. In Japanese gendai means modern. In fact, contemporary Japanese haiku is less tradition-bound and more innovative than Amercan haiku. By that I mean gendai haiku incorporates surrealism, symbolism, urbanism and many other tenets we deny as really being part of haiku.  Where do I stand on this issue? Flexibility and free-thinking matter. As Virginia Woolf once said the world changed for good during WW 1--all the arts no longer tried to duplicate reality but used different methods to stretch, bend, and cause us to examine the world in a radically new way.

Here's what haiku writer,  Richard Gilbert, who lives and teaches in Japan, said about gendai haiku:

“During the war, over 40 New Rising Haiku poets were persecuted; they were imprisoned and tortured, and some died in prison. … [The director of a haiku society associated with the government stated:] ‘I will not allow haiku even from the most honorable person, from left-wing, or progressive, or anti-war, groups to exist. If such people are found in the haiku world, we had better persecute them, and they should be punished. [B]y the 1920s … the ‘New Rising Haiku movement’ (shinkô haiku undô) wished to compose haiku on new subjects, and utilize techniques and topics related to contemporary social life. These poets frequently wrote haiku without kigo (muki-teki haiku), and explored non-traditional subjects, such as social inequity, utilizing avant‑garde styles including surrealism, etc. …

(Kigo are words that point to a particular season, to set the poem during a certain part of the natural cycle of life and change. Examples include, mist, frost, frogs, wisteria, cicada, etc.)

Wow, to persecute and punish haiku writers? For having a rabbit leap over the moon? On the plus side, it's wonderful that words have power.

As British politician Pearl Strachan said, "Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs."

If you're curious about gendai haiku, check out this link. If you follow the link under each author, you will find some selected haiku that has been translated into English. Here's the link: http://gendaihaiku.com/