A mixed bag but mostly snow…. yuk!
Welcome to episode 8 of the Haiku Pea podcast all about Haiku. I’m Patricia, your host and I hope over time to share some of my daily haiku, submissions from you my wonderful listener and tips for writing that I glean along my journey.
This is the first podcast after the Christmas break. If you remember, I was looking forward to welcoming my family home again for the holidays and maybe getting them to write with me. Well, home they came, complete with flu, which I managed to catch and still have, so apologies for the voice if it breaks.
We spent a couple of lovely weeks together despite being ill, but my plan to galvanise them into writing didn’t come off. Maybe they will be home for Easter, without bugs, and we can try again.
I said to you last time that I had some great submissions and this week we are going to kick off with Devin Harrison. He submitted some really terrific work and will be featured throughout the year. He also sent me some thoughts on haiku that I think are worth exploring further, so I hope he and I will get a chance to talk further and I can share the results of these conversations with you. For this week though you will find out a little bit about him.
I want to change the format slightly this week and see what you think. You can read all this week’s daily haiku, a mixed bag but mostly about one of my least favourite things…. snow. and also Devin’s guest haiku on the poetrypea website, so what I thought I would do is share the evolution or otherwise of some of my haiku with you, As well as Devin’s haiku and some information about him, and recommendations from Devin and I for reading.
So let’s crack on:
I’ve chosen two of week eights haikus to have a look at. The first incarnation of Tuesdays haiku:
icicles dangle
from the window ledge…
smoke from the chimney
I’m not going to explain it. Other than to say I was trying for a theme that was used by many of the old Japanese masters> that of a comparison between, north/south, east / west, up/down.
For example
Blowing from the west
Fallen leaves gather
In the east.
Yosa Buso
As to it’s meaning of my haiku, well, I think it’s better when you read or listen to it a couple of times and feel for yourself what it means to you. What I want to look at is it’s evolution. If you look at the website you will see it currently reads:
icicles dangle
from the window ledge…
chimney smoke rises
But in the latest incarnation I prefer:
icicles dangle
from the window ledge…
smoke rises
You can see/ hear the up/down comparison, but how have I come to the final edit?
I was inspired by Jane Reichhold in the book “Writing and enjoying haiku, a hands on guide.” In which she suggests lto use as few words as possible to set the signpost which lead the reader to follow the inspiration of the author.” So my process at the moment is to write my first draft and then pare down the words, enough, I hope to have a coherent haiku, and enough to leave that white space for you to interpret your meaning of the work.
- Tell me what do you think?
- How do you edit your haiku?
The other haiku is this:
a couple
walk through the snow…
empty footprints
Now, quite rightly someone read this and wondered why I chose walk rather than walks. A couple suggests singular after all. As far as I know, there are no fast rules for collective nouns and for the purposes of this haiku I want to leave it as walk. Perhaps it jars, but there is a reason behind it.
What do you think it could be?
This week I would like to offer a couple of reading recommendations:
Haiku in English The First Hundred Years – Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland and Allan Burns. I recommend in particular the introduction by Billy Collins. If you remember from the last podcast I was having problems with the syllable count. This introduction helped me with a number of things but in particular the counting issue. “whether they are the counting all the non-counting type,” he says, “poets are likely to agree that at the heart of the haiku lies something beyond counting, that is, it’s revelatory effect on the reader, that eye-opening moment of insight that occurs whenever a haiku succeeds in drawing us through the keyhole of its details into the infinite,”
And
Writing and Enjoying Haiku a hands on guide by Jane Reichhold
The Guest haiku
memories
boxed and moved into storage
dream clutter
Our guest today is Devin Harrison, a Canadian, originally from Montreal, Québec, who is now living on Vancouver Island.
Devin studied East Asian Studies at the U of T in Toronto (emphasis Japanese studies) and of course, came in touch with haiku at that time, but it was only much later before he started to write it. He has spent much of his life as a school teacher, working in the USA Texas and California, and later in Mexico, Thailand and Colombia. He is retired now.
Devin has been published in numerous journals, as a regular poet, but in the last 5 years, he has got into haiku. He has have never turned back.You can find his book, published in 2017: Meeting Myself at the Gate on Amazon.
He writes haiku because there is an immediacy about it. It focuses on what is essential. “We tend to write ourselves to death,” he says, “but so much can be expressed in a few words. It is a meditation of sorts. It’s focused in the now.”
Much like myself he loves the outdoors, and whilst I hike here in Switzerland, I think of him hiking along the west coast. Maybe one day I can join him!
We will be hearing more from Devin throughout the year. He has some beautiful Haiku to share and many thoughts on Haiku that I want to explore with him.
He has some recommended reading for us too:
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa by Robert Hass.
The Haiku Handbook by William J. Higginson an Penny Harter. A classic in Devin’s opinion.
Lastly a very useful getting-down-to-it book by Jane Reichhold: . Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide.
I’m currently reading the Jane Reichhold with the Higginson on my book stand too.
Thanks Devin, I look forward to discussing Haiku with you, over the year…
Thanks for the music:
“Truth in the Stones” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
