Pushing myself

Week 3 of the Haiku-a-day project

Welcome back to the end of week three for returning readers and a 初めましてどうぞよろしく(pleased to meet you) to any new readers.

As the title of the post might suggest, this week I pushed myself a little, both physically and poetically. As a consequence I spent most of Saturday in bed feeling like an elephant was crushing my chest and the haiku were harder in arriving.

Three books arrived this week, but I’ll briefly mention the two which had direct impact on my writing. First was The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda Japan's Beloved Modern Haiku Poet, from Tuttle. The second was, The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Approach to English-Language Haiku by Richard L. Gilbert.

Satoka Taneda was one of the proponents of Free Haiku, free in that he and others sought to break from the tradition of Kigo and strict syllable¹ counts (and probably a few other restrictions I’m not aware of). It’s an interesting book and one of my poems this week makes an allusion to Santoka (Can you tell which one?).

The Disjunctive Dragonfly is compact and packed full of meaty discussion on the writing and classification of English Language Haiku. I am still working through the implications of this work. In short, it gives us some critical terminology with which to critique modern English haiku, to work out why some haiku that break most of the guidelines can still rightly be called haiku and for haiku poets, some explanations of craft that will challenge you in good ways.

But on to the poems

This week the poems fall almost entirely in the short, long, short arrangement, except for the last which is both visually and syllabically short, long, long. The average syllable count was just shy of 13, which makes this week the shortest on average. There were no outliers either. I took posession of The Disjunctive Dragonfly midweek and I think the reading of it pushed my composition in interesting directions. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s haiku can be read in reverse or bottom up, for example.

torn shoji

the gecko and I hunt

mosquitoes

An entirely fictional (desk or bed ku in my case) haiku. I love Issa’s poetry about insects and this one has that sort of flavour. Geckos and mosquitoes are both common here. Not so much Shoji screens. So this one is quite free in the Free Haiku movement sense, no Kigo. Still I love the image.

expressing truth

a green milk thistle

in dry grass

This haiku is referencing Santoka. In his diary, Santoka writes,”Those who don’t know the meaning of weeds, do not know the mind of nature. Weeds grasp their own essence and express it’s truth.”

What’s the truth? I’ll let you ponder. So another desk(this time it was a car) ku. You’ll note that this Haiku could be read backwards without losing meaning. Is it a phrase/fragment or fragment/phrase?

through damp leaves

the shingleback’s slow walk

cool night rain

Likewise with this haiku, which was the result of a ginko after the cool change and associated rain, it can be read fowrards and backwards. Though my intention here was to deliberately try and place the phrase in the last line. Looking at it now though it’s almost phrase, fragment, phrase.

silence

between old telegraph poles

a whisper of wind

Here is my first concious attempt to implement some of the knowledge I’d gleaned from The Disjunctive Drsgonfly. I was trying to employ misreading as meaning. That is to create some abiguity in what I was meaning. Is the silence refereing to the telegraph poles no longer transmitting, or is there a physical location silence? At least until the last line, the silence is potentially both. I also like the tangible feeling of loneliness, and the wabi/sabi that’s inherent in the image created. I’ll note that this one can be read backwards as well.

overhead

the glide of the white ibis

long drive home

Thank you Mx Ibis for this one. I was on the second leg of a 5 hour roundtrip when the graceful ibis rescued me. A straight sketch from life and another reversable haiku.

Imari bell

in between my bouts

of breathlessness

Amoung other gifts that arrived this week were an Imari (porcelain) bell and some spare Tanzaku or paper windcatchers. I could barely get out of bed Saturday and hanging the new bell and the writing of this haiku was my output for the day. for obvious reasons I didn’t try anything fancy. I really like the alliteration in this one though.

new tanzaku

the old temple bell

remembers its voice

The trick with today’s poem was to write another bell haiku without sounding too repatative. Personification and focus on the Tanzaku did the trick.

Final thoughts

Looking back over the week, I note that there is really only one haiku that could be said to reference the season. Is that a reflection of reading Santoka or something else? My concerns going forward are how to manage this project with work starting tommorrow.

My favourite work(s) this week? silence and expressing truth, becasue I was pushing a little harder on those too and the effort hasn’t destroyed my enjoyment. Your thoughts?

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1. For ease of reading I use syllable counts. In Japanese they’d be considered Morae or onji, sound units that are roughly equivalent in length to English syllables, but not really.