This week my guest haiku comes from a Japanese poet, another first thank you Mineko Takahashi.
This week my haiku were garden related. I woke up on Monday to find that the garden was covered in snow again and despite the sun coming out during the week it was so cold that the level of crunchy snow remained until Friday, when it rained cats and dogs and the snow went. I didn’t have a great night’s sleep that night and got up for a wander round my tiny garden and wrote this afterwards,
night walk
grey snow
full moon
Yes the snow was back.
But as to the attempt at Haiku, it was not so good. Firstly as someone pointed out it was like a shopping list. Hurtful, but true. It really needed articles.
so
a night walk
in the grey snow
full moon
…does improve it.
But is there enough negative space, or is it a “so what” haiku? It’s difficult to say. Even this improved version doesn’t say what I wanted to say. I was trying to capture the ethereal, ghostly quality of the light in the garden in the middle of the night. More work needed.
When the snow temporarily disappeared, I was inspired to write this:
a mouse
darts across the garden
cat’s paw
An Australian friend pointed out that cat’s paw is a plant, which I didn’t know. I looked it up and it is lovely, shame we don’t have it here in Switzerland.
Anyway, what’s the story behind this?
We don’t have a pet. We’ve had fish and dogs in the past but once the last dog died I didn’t want another. However, in the last few years we have been adopted by the most beautiful multicoloured cat. It wanders around the houses in our village and seems to particularly like us and our neighbour. We give it food and drinks and a little bit of love. So, anyway, this week it decided to return the love. When I went out on the patio in the afternoon, I found a dead mouse, courtesy of the cat. It seems we have very different ideas of expressing love.
Submit your Haiku
Firstly, the Haiku micro zine The Cicada’s Cry: are accepting submissions until the end of February So you need to get a wiggle on to submit there.
and
The Wales Haiku Journal are looking for submissions:
email: waleshaikujournal@gmail.com
The submissions guidelines are fairly general at the moment, as the journal is in its infancy. They are specifically looking for haiku, haiga, and haibun, and are also very open to proposals for special features, which could take the form of essays, reviews, interviews, or anything else that poets would like to suggest. They are looking for unpublished work only, but if poems have appeared on social media then we will still consider them. The journal will be updated with new content regularly, rather than having set publication dates, so there aren’t any deadlines and submissions will be read and considered on a rolling basis
Don’t forget, we take submissions of Haiku for the Podcast and the poetrypea website.
Today’s Guest haiku is from Mineko Takahashi, from Japan. She is an early-retired linguist who used to teach at universities. Now she teaches Japanese to foreigners living and working in Tokyo, so that they can pursue their career purposes.
Like many of us Mineko writes Haiku to express her observations and finds it really useful to attend meetings with other Haiku writers and get their thoughts and comments on her work. Her Haiku group is MIHC, which is scheduled to hold an international conference and publication of haikus and haiku related articles in 2018 commemorating it’s 25th anniversary,
Mineko invites all of us to participate in the 1-week conference in Tokyo in March or April 2019. She says it would be great if we submit our haikus to their monthly meetings via email. Apparently they have quite a few participants from abroad every month and for the international anniversary conference but would be happy to receive more participation.
Check out these links:
http://www.geocities.jp/yix04102/
http://www.association-francophone-de-haiku.com/afh/2019/Sakura_Haiku_Festival_2019.pdf
If you are a French speaker Mineko recommends the French language Haiku Magazine “Gong”
Where can you find Mineko?
She has Instagram accounts: “your_private_japanese_tutor” and “ur_japanese_tutor” which teach Japanese characters
At FB @yourjapanesetutor which discusses many facets of the language from the viewpoint of a foreign learner
Now for her Haiku.
What’s the background, the inspiration for this work?
She told me that at the “turn of the year I spent a week alone as my husband visited his mother in a hospice, now blind due to cancer.
So, it was a solitary end of the year and a beginning of the new year.”
She was alone and felt the year turning very quietly. This made her think about others, some people always have this quiet experience at this time, some people never have others around and would this change them?
She was driven to write this because of the surreal eerie fear of being alone at this time of year.
And so:
silently
changing years
man also
Mineko, that was lovely, really moving. Thank you.
And so we end.Thank you for your support and participation. I look forward to receiving more submissions from you, I still have two slots in March…
See you next week, keep writing and I look forward to reading your work on an episode of the Haiku Chronicle Podcast.
