Carruth Haiku

A few haiku from Hayden Carruth ...

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.


Ah, you beast of love,
my cat, my dove, my spider
-- too late I'm natured.


A hard journey. Yes,
it must be. At the end they
all fall asleep.


Your tears, Niobe,
are your children now. See how
we have multiplied.


So be it. I am
a wholeness I'll never know.
Maybe that's the best.

Big Long Haiku Sequence

I ended up in the jury pool yesterday for most of the day and didn't get around to posting any haiku - soooo - he is a little make up for yesterday. Pretty nice. Special for Bill.

Gabriel Rosenstock Farrera (2003)

A gunsaku (haiku sequence)written in the Catalonian Pyrenees, April 2003


dying winds –
faint mountain path
to a disused church


surrounded
by so many buttercups
how sober – the horse


April sunshine –
the raven announces
the end of the snows


with each call
the cuckoo
melts the snow


as though tomorrow
may never dawn –
all day, the swallows


an old fortress?
cow dung baking
in the sun


how sweet the grass!
the mountain horse
not yet slaughtered


mountain stream
hurrying, hurrying
where to?


somewhere in the fog
the little bell
around the horse’s neck

the cuckoo –
listen!
is she counting syllables?

old man singing in the field
drawing down the sun
all over the valley


the patient mule, standing,
what does he think
of the sparrows?


feeding time –
the old man
singing to the rabbits

one crisp sound –
voices of sparrows
dripping of melting snow


thin mountain air
everywhere: rock crevices
empty walnut shell

snowcapped hills –
the foal’s mouth
flecked with mare’s milk

old tower-bell
in Farrera de Pallars –
when will you speak again?

the squirrel
(on a tree I do not know)
has a brother in my land


the woodpecker –
first thing at morning –
is a master

you are out there,
somewhere, on silent feet,
wily fox


why look to the left,
the right? – impossible to say,
the simple sparrow


clothes left on the line
have been revived -
pure mountain rain

dark clouds leaving
for the next valley –
aroma of strong coffee

facing a blank page
and the snows of Farrera –
Pure Land is clear


talking literature all night
the wine in the glass
becomes still


creaking of floor boards –
reports of a war
far away

midnight –
no sound
from the horse’s bell


chilly morning
an eagle’s talon
nailed to the door


a lone lamb bleating
the sound carried
from mountain to mountain

3 Haiku by June Jordan

I gathered these together from JJ's Collected Poems (Copper Canyon).

Black men sleep homeless
Freeze far away from Iraq
still sleeping still men

Bay waters rolling
birds glide above broken rocks
I am not alone

Trumpet wine sneaks in
dressing up the window screen
tendrils wreck the wall

Haiku Week

Great news, I finally got Have You Never Been Mellow by Olivia Newton John on my iPod. Even better news, all this week (promises promises) I am going to be putting up haiku or Approximations as Robert Hayden calls his:

Approximations

i
In dead of winter
wept beside your open grave.
Falling snow.

ii
Darkness, darkness.
I grope and falter. Flare
of a match.

iii
Not sunflowers, not
roses, but rocks in patterned
sand grow here. And bloom.

iv
On the platform at
dawn, grey mailbags waiting;
a crated coffin.

Jane-ku

I really love the revision process, re-versioning, etc. So I was drawn to this interview excerpt from Jane Reichhold on one of her haiku ...

Then, one day while throwing a pot on a kick wheel outdoors under a huge pine tree, I had a deep shock. Just as I was pressing my thumbs into the spinning ball of wet, slippery clay, as the walls were just beginning to rise up by pressing against my palms, a mockingbird gave a long, clear whistle. In that second, the ball of clay moved into being a walled vessel. I recognized that I was capable of experiencing one of these profound moments these Japanese masters had evidently felt, and now all I had to do was to put that moment into a haiku. I am still doing it and still not happy with any of my many, many versions. Just last week, during a sleepless night, I was working with the latest version: -

spinning clay
the mocking bird whistles
up a pot

or

spinning clay
the mocking bird whistles up
sides of a bowl

or

centered
the mocking bird whistles up
a clay bowl

Green Mountains x 2

Two translations of the same haiku by Santoka Taneda.

The first comes from John Stevens' Mountain Tasting,

Going deeper
and still deeper—
the green mountains

the second from For All My Walking, Burton Watson.

the deeper I go
the deeper I go
green mountains


I read the second version as a little too explicit with its elbow nudge .. get it, get it? Deeper into the mountain, deeper into myself. JS's version pushes the idea to the same place with more subtle language methinks. Both wonderful books, bringing more (and different) Taneda poems into English.

Sexy-ku

Reading Blyth's wonderful haiku series, ordered so nicely by theme, I recall the one subject that the books are lean on is sex/eros -- besides the famous one about burning smoke to keep the mosquitos away. Not sure who wrote that one. I imagine there are more than I remember, but in general I think bugs, weather, landscape, etc., get far more ink. As they should, being time honored themes of the haiku tradition. That said, I was happy to come across this book.

Reading through much of the Ameri-ku that gets into print, sex is a frequent theme. Jane Reichold has many available online. I did read the collection below by Chiyo-ni a while back and recall that it had many very sensuous haiku.

I have tried to write my fair share of haiku on sexual themes. One or two turned out. When I save up a few pennies I think I'll order the Erotic Haiku book and try a few more. If I had the heart of Rexroth I might write long erotic poems, but I am into understatement where sexuality is concerned. Haiku fit my libido just fine.


Here are a few that I found in a review of Erotic Haiku:

darkness
doing nothing
but feel
— Stanley Pelter


Without clothes
it's a different
conversation
— John Brandi

she leaves —
a curled hair
in my soap
— David Walker

on the car seat beside me
the sun
light on her thighs
— James Tipton

memories
lingering
on these finger
tips

— Giovanni Malito

The Great Enigma - Transtromer

The title of Transtromer's new Collected poems comes from the last line of the last poem of the book. A haiku that goes like this:


Birds in human shape.
The apple trees in blossom.
The great enigma.

Haiku

A few of my own haiku for a change.

Great sites and dedicated writers like Bill K and Matt Morden have me scrounging around for something to post. Since I have not written anything new for a long time now (shame shame) these oldies will have to do.

for a moment
the new kitten
half in half out


odor of
blown out candles --
moonlight entering


finishing your letter
again--
morning glories closed


dry spell--
the hard nests of mud wasps
that began as rain

George Seferis: Haiku

Here’s a quick take from the journal of George Seferis. Interesting enough read. Much about his work as a diplomat. And a few entries on Mrs. Zen - this curious little figurine he made out of a walnut shell.

Kikakou, one of Basho’s pupils, presented this haiku to his master:

Look, a dragonfly,
remove its wings—
a pepper tree.

“We mustn’t abuse nature,” Basho scolded and told him to reverse the haiku if he wanted to make it better:

Look, a pepper tree
add wings –
a dragonfly.

Cid Corman, Sam Hamill, Haiku

I think this Clayton Eshelman bit is a great extension of something I read in an Alice Oswald interview, how she works toward experience in the process of formation as opposed to experience "remembered" in her poems. Language as enactment vs. language of interpretation in Eshelman's case.

"Two American poets translating haiku by Basho. Corman: language as enactment, the reader interprets. Hamill: language as interpretation, the reader abandoned. Corman is deft where Hamill is pleonastic and inaccurate (crickets don’t sing; cicadas don’t cry)."

C
wild seas (ya
to Sado shoring up
the great star stream

H
High over wild seas,
surrounding Sado Island:
the river of heaven

C
summer grass
warriors
dream ruins

H
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams

C
cruel!
under the helmet
cricket

H
Ungraciously, under
a great soldier’s empty helmet,
a cricket sings

C
quiet
into absorbing
cicada sounds

H
Lonely silence,
a single cicada cry
sinking into stone

In a haiku-like poem of his own, Corman writes:

The cicada
isn’t singing;
that sound’s its life

Thoughts, preferences? Agree, disagree with Eshelman.