For my birthday a few years ago, my friend Molly gave me a slim book called the haiku year. It changed not only the way I thought about haiku but also about postcards.
In the book’s preface, Tom Gilroy explains that the friends pledged to write a haiku a day and send them to each other. (Also, it doesn’t hurt that one of these friends is Michael Stipe from R.E.M.)
The book is a graceful collection of a year’s worth of verse and some black-and-white ephemera like labels and ticket stubs. Gilroy notes the haiku challenge’s effects: “Suddenly each day seemed bejeweled, often at the oddest moments. The way the screen was ripped in a filthy gas station restroom suddenly mirrored some aspect of your life, and was beautiful. Or hilarious.”
And in case you associate haiku with clapping out syllables and scrawling tortured verse on construction paper, fear not. Gilroy & Co. adopted the “Western haiku,” sticking to three lines but relaxing the syllable count. They lean on the spirit rather than the letter of the law, keeping in place the references to, in Gilroy’s words, ” seasonal references,” “the moment seized and rendered purely,” and “reflections of a particular consciousness, or point of view of the author, his or her loneliness, or comedy, or anger.”
In earlier posts, I’ve already confessed my love for postcards. Their modest block of white space both removes pressure (I can’t say too much) and adds pressure (my few words should count). A daily haiku is a handy fit.
You can open the haiku year anywhere and drop into a moment: “Snowstorm dog / happier / than his owner.” Heck, even the index is fun to read and makes a poem in its own right: “Man stutters bank talk,” “The map on my bed,” “median wildflower project,” “Mid-afternoon subway,” “middle of a blizzard,” “The Midwest,” “Midwesterners,” “milk drips, a big balloon, tied,” “mistaking this loneliness,” “moonlit pumpkins.”
The project behind the haiku year isn’t just a mutual admiration society, either. They like to spread the good news and have us go and do likewise.
Gilroy explains that “[t]his book surely will have succeeded if mail carriers begin to notice an increase in postcards with three lines scribbled on them.
“Then slowly but surely the amount of poetry in the mail would increase, and cut in on the junk mail we get….People would have such a stockpile of precious moments they would no longer allow bombs to be made, wars to be declared, or people to walk around homeless or hungry.
“The person who tells you this is the person you should start a haiku challenge with.”
Preach it!
Photo credits:
Papa Hemingway: http://takecarezines.org/
Cover photo of The Haiku Year: http://theliteraryoctogon.blogspot.com/2009/03/haiku-year.html
Postcard visual haiku: http://www.attorneymarketing.com/tag/taglines-examples/
Joey’s haiku: http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2007/08/