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29 June 2004. I began my blog with discussions of haiku. They are pretty central to my career as a poet and critic, so I thought I'd return to the form today with a showcase of some of some traditional ones I've done--mostly in the seventies. The first two are among my favorites. They're from a short-lived but excellent haiku periodical called Bonsai:
pale-yellowly
(its neighbors still more mist than green):
forsythia!
oncoming stepfuls
of dry-leaf noise
and a cold sky's red kite!
19 January 1976
The date is the publication date. The top one won a prize--$2, I believe. (Jan Streif, where are you? I lost track of him after he and his wife split up and Bonsai died, mostly, I gather, as a result. He, as the editor of Bonsai, was the one who chose the poem for the prize.) The bottom one is about the only one of my poems I've committed to memory. I'm quite proud of its getting color, sound (aside from word-sounds), and temperature all into its three short lines. Dryness, too, I guess! It all grew out of the single word, "stepfuls," a variation on "handfuls." Making up off-words may be my main verbal technique as a poet. As I have always felt it was with one of my idols, Dylan Thomas. "Handfuls" led to my trying to figure out what a step could be full of. Noise. What kind? The answer brought in autumn, wind and kite. (Add the implicit feel of wind to the sensory constituents of the poem.) The kite's color is supposed to suddenly brighten a previously bleak scene. I like the f-sounds in the context. There are a lot of other effective melodations in it, too.
The other haiku is all visual--except for the ploy of the verbless adverb, which I thought pretty great when I pulled it off.
I have 41 haiku that I composed from late 1975 until the end of 1979. I just printed them out from a computer file because I wanted to use one as an example in some answers to a questionnaire about poetry work habits I'm working on. When I read them, they surprised me: they seemed less minor than I remembered them as. Here's one more, this one from April 1976:
above two stones
sharing its shadow
an oakleaf floats
I abruptly wonder if I'd made any progress since I made these. Well, not seriously. But I can't say I've deepened any since I made them, just mangled my way into greater, less previously-pathed-to intricacies.
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