I'm a University Lecturer in English and the author of a novel, The Secret of Hurricanes (MacAdam/Cage 2002). My life is summed up by Rumi, who said: "My story gets told in various ways: a romance, a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy." Rumi's quote is the epigraph to Hurricanes. The purpose of this journal is to explore creativity and the writing life.
Pages
▼
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Haiku #244
late summer crickets make perfect sound of December sleigh bells just listen
I like your letter writing blog. It's a neat idea. It looks like you've had any number of creative responses. Before I married my wife, I wrote her one letter a day over the course of a summer.
The sheer exuberance of your website is infectious. Wow! I checked out your WordPress "writer's Laboratory". Not sure I understand what it is. I strongly prefer WordPress to Blogger by the way. I started out at Blogger and switched over.
(I wish that I could teach at the university level. I'm jealous of your resume. : )
Let's see... your Haiku. Every once in a while you come very close to the kind of Hokku the old Japanese masters would have recognized. In general though, they are not what the Japanese would consider classical haiku. They impress me as being very Western - Westernized versions of haiku. Which is to say: They reflect a Western literary tradition rather than the Eastern tradition.
The Western tradition is far more explanatory and sententious than the Eastern literary tradition, and this is reflected in the way your write haiku.
All of this may be your intention. Plenty of modern poets have taken haiku to strange new lands.
By the way, I notice you have written some on James Wright. I grew up in Woodsfield, Ohio (for the most part), then Vermont once high school started. I grew up very close to Wright's home and some of his relatives were my playmates. Whenever I read Wright, it's like read the poetry of an old friend. I know all the landmarks he knows. His landscape is in my blood, as it were.
I too love Ikku, by the way.
It seems that we share a lot of interests, including fables and fairy tales.
I like your letter writing blog. It's a neat idea. It looks like you've had any number of creative responses. Before I married my wife, I wrote her one letter a day over the course of a summer.
ReplyDeleteThe sheer exuberance of your website is infectious. Wow! I checked out your WordPress "writer's Laboratory". Not sure I understand what it is. I strongly prefer WordPress to Blogger by the way. I started out at Blogger and switched over.
(I wish that I could teach at the university level. I'm jealous of your resume. : )
Let's see... your Haiku. Every once in a while you come very close to the kind of Hokku the old Japanese masters would have recognized. In general though, they are not what the Japanese would consider classical haiku. They impress me as being very Western - Westernized versions of haiku. Which is to say: They reflect a Western literary tradition rather than the Eastern tradition.
The Western tradition is far more explanatory and sententious than the Eastern literary tradition, and this is reflected in the way your write haiku.
All of this may be your intention. Plenty of modern poets have taken haiku to strange new lands.
By the way, I notice you have written some on James Wright. I grew up in Woodsfield, Ohio (for the most part), then Vermont once high school started. I grew up very close to Wright's home and some of his relatives were my playmates. Whenever I read Wright, it's like read the poetry of an old friend. I know all the landmarks he knows. His landscape is in my blood, as it were.
I too love Ikku, by the way.
It seems that we share a lot of interests, including fables and fairy tales.