I’m writing a haiku every day for a year.
I want to better understand the form. I want to be good at it. I want to know what I’m talking about. So my plan is simple: do it a lot to get better at it.
As you can see, we’re on Day Twelve already. I started the day after Thanksgiving. That’s the same date that, five years earlier, I proposed to my now-wife. Things I start on that date seem to go well, so.
Some of these haikus are going to be good. Some are going to suck out loud. Some are going to be strict pursuits of the form. Some are going to dangle off the edge of custom, over the rocks below. Some are going to be pretentious, earnest things. Some are going to be blasé or casual, like a hipster at a coffee bar. Most should stand on their own, a few may link together — perhaps with additional pairs of seven-syllable lines to ape the waka style.
Some of these will be ushin (serious) and some mushin (not-so-serious).
My guide in this process, right now, is Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I’m using the Penguin Classics edition translated and introduced by Nobuyuki Yuasa. Other texts may enter into the mix, too, as I Google haiku now and again. This haiku by Billy Collins keeps coming back into mind, like a familiar bird in the backyard:
Mid-winter evening,
alone at the sushi bar —
just me and this eel.
Here’s one that I tell people is a favorite of mine, even though I usually get the author wrong. It’s by Kobayashi Issa:
Bright autumn moon;
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.
Along the way, I’m sure I’ll write a few short and pretentious articles on why this or how-come that, for what those are worth. At the end, I imagine I’ll turn around and see all of these little poems and articles and find the whole thing ridiculous. I hope I do.
On with it, then.
