Night Thoughts
Leave it to me to write something like this and consider it a haibun. It has two poems in it few would consider legitimate haiku, and it's about an internal series of events, not about a stroll through a park, dinnertime with the family, a parade, or some other quotidian external event the way every haibun I've seen is. Nevertheless, I think it expresses a haiku/haibun mood, and it does have two genuine haiku in it. Moreover, I favor letting "intellectuality" into both the haiku and the haibun. So, I'll continue thinking of this as a haibun.
It first occurred to me to write it last night around 3 A.M. when I woke up and couldn't get right back to sleep. I had gone to bed feeling lousy: headache, and queasy stomach, the latter due, probably, to the ibuprofen I had taken for the headache a couple of hours previously, without much effect. I began thinking about various writing projects I want to get it, or am already working on. They included a handful of short poems for a book HULLpress had volunteered to do. I had no ideas for these poems, just knew they should only be a page-long, at most, and that I wanted them entirely verbal, as a change from the very graphic stuff I've been concentrating on for the past many months. Cid Corman's 5 Poems was surely an influence, too.
For some reason, I thought of a simple sequence of ten poems, the division of 2 into each of the ten digits. I worked out two, one of which was the following:
I expect to make a better copy of this. What you see is adequate, though. The poem is a mathemaku, or part-haiku making the simple point that "1" is "one" reduced by cold. Nature, except in the possible form of a cold winter day (or night), is absent, so it's not very haikuish. In an earlier version (and I thought through a half-dozen or more while I was awake) had a version of the following attached as the remainder, though:
Beerbar Haiku
the crude loudnesses
through which a stripper ascends
into be'er
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The idea was that being drunk intensifies an experience through constriction of one's attention to something that is to ordinary experience as "1" is to "one." That is, "one" as a word is "overwritten"; only as a digit does it reveal its final essence. What happened was that I liked my haiku too much to leave it as a mere part of something else--which I thought it put out of balance. I like the simple "5 degrees Fahrenheit" better, too. It seems to me much more directly to help the poem say what I want it to.
I hope the infraverbal cleverness of the apostrophe needs no explanation. Note that I give my haiku a title, another practice frowned on by haiku traditionalists. I understand their point: concision should be a foremost concern of a person making a haiku. But I want my poems to be easy to refer to. So I plan to give all of them titles. In the case of haiku, my preference is for titles that give away as little about what their titles for as possible. They should identify, and do hardly anthing else.
The following haiku occurred to me last night, as well:
A Midnight Accomplishment
continuing rain,
2 midnight aspirins for a headache,
this haiku
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Not much to it, but maybe a few people will enjoy it. Before it tumbled out of my head, I remembered the Corman poem I posted yesterday into:
Poem for Cid Corman
How can I
die
holding so many unopened
song-hued ideas
violently straining to be
everybody's?
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One thing I have to say about this is that it is Very Sincere. A thought I've had frequently the past couple of years. I continue to be mildly amazed that my brain, despite my age, seems to teem with ideas at times, exactly as it always has. At times, I almost prefer it didn't. The new ideas compete with the unfinished old ideas. Right now, though, I'm happy about it, ready again to show the world!
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