Reading: Several excellent articles on haiku by Jane Reichhold and others.

Weather: Sunny and beautiful. Less humid than yesterday.

Do You Haiku?

Stephen went to bed last night coughing and complaining of a stuffy nose. This morning he wouldn't eat any breakfast. He was dishrag limp and only wanted to be held. Suspecting he had strep throat, too, I made a doctor's appointment for this afternoon. I was not surprised when his throat culture came back positive. So now we have two bottles of bubblegum pink amoxicillin in the refrigerator.

I have an uncanny knack for getting hooked on online journals that fold a few weeks after I start reading them. Deb's Daily Dose was one of the journals I especially missed. When she converted it to Deb's Daily Haiku, I stopped reading, having, I thought, little interest in haiku.

Recently, in weeding out my old bookmarks, I checked back in at her site and found her haiku I quoted yesterday, "Chocolate Milk Ritual." Suddenly something clicked, and I got it. Up till then all haiku meant to me was either a sixth-grade English class exercise or else a few precious lines about cherry blossom petals dropping in the spring. Nice, but not an art form that spoke to me.

That someone could distill a moment of her life into seventeen syllables and still convey worlds of information was a revelation. I realized that haiku offered both a new way of seeing and a means for capturing images and their associated feelings.

Have you ever pressed your two thumbs and two index fingers together and peered through the opening between them? Your field of vision is reduced to a small, diamond-shaped space but what you see through that space springs into brilliant focus and sharp relief.

Sometimes it is better to see the trees than the forest.

I began looking up information on writing haiku. I remembered the basic 5-7-5 structure but little else. It turns out that the number of syllables is not a hard and fast rule, particularly when it interferes with elegant spareness of the verse. I liked the fact that haiku uses tangible images, with little simile or metaphor. I tend to overdo metaphor in my prose sometimes. Too heavy reliance on simile and metaphor has a distancing effect; haiku forces one to strip the image to its essentials.

In thinking over the events of today, I worked on a haiku to capture one of those fleeting moments. Here is the result:

SICK CHILD

damp shirt clings to skin
hot forehead against my neck
he rests in my arms

Unlike Deb, I won't be writing a haiku a day, but I think I'm going to attempt it once in a while, if only to allow myself to narrow my field of vision occasionally and preserve the diamond-shaped image I see there.

Searching the web for information on the practice of writing haiku, I encountered this line in an article by Jane Reichhold: "Writing haiku is a discipline and if you are interested in haiku you are seeking more discipline in your life."

Bingo.

previous       index       e-mail me       next