<b>Blog150</b>
Daily Notes on Poetry

30 June 2004. I lost the entry for this date, who knows how. I also lost the one for the next day. Very discouraging. Fortunately, I know I only posted haiku of mine, with comments, so should have much trouble creating close proximities of the lost texts (as if it were important). I remember for sure posting the following two from Dragonfly:


                              threat of rain:
                              a skyful of seagulls reduced
                              to just half a small beachful

                                             October 1975


                              behind the empty house
                              in a patch of morning sun--
                              the doll's smile

                                             July 1979

The first of these is special to me because it was the first haiku I got published. It's the first poem of any kind I got published outside of college magazines, in fact. I still like it though it's not up there with my red kite or forsythia haiku. It's based on actual seagulls I observed during a dark day when I was hiking along the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica.

The other one I'm posting as an example of a horrible haiku. I completely manufactured it, basing it on the many standard haiku of pathos I'd read. At the time, I had gotten haiku into every issue of Dragonfly for around four years and didn't want to miss an issue. Hence, I panicked, embarrassingly willing to go to any length to continue being published! It is definitely my worst haiku. It will probably be the first to be anthologized in a mainstream anthology.

Two more from Dragonfly follow to make up for the doll's smile. Both are about undisturbed water, apparently a vital theme of mine (I like shadows, too):


                              A summer night's rain;
                              unruffled, the bridge's shadow
                              on the river

                                             April 1979  



                              party still noisy--
                              but the swimming pool's moon
                              is whole again

                                             July 1979  

Can't think of anything to say about these. Fair-to-middling, I'd call them.












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