Summer leaves and summer light. (In the forest near Davis, CA)An assignment at the beginning of September for one of my required courses was to choose an arts practice to work with throughout the upcoming year. This was a difficult choice for me... There are many expressive arts that I could choose: Pottery, photography, collage, drawing, writing (poetry, creative non-fiction, etc.), and others. It was also a possibility to start something completely new like ukulele or modern dance.
I chose poetry, and shared my decision with the class. But then I got stuck. There are poems in me that want to be written and spoken, but I don't know how to begin this project. So I've decided to write one haiku each day. This form has a small, manageable size – and the more I work with it, the more I'm drawn to its possibilities and limits. This framework is helpful, especially as I begin.
I read an essay about haiku poetry by Patricia Donegan in an anthology called Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology. She writes, "If you want to learn about the pine, become one with the pine; if you want to learn about the bamboo, go to the bamboo. One must be able to forget the small self and open up to what is there in order to see clearly whatever is. Basho came from a deeper level of communion with nature than previous haiku poets and stressed hosomi, or slenderness. It is not just sparsity in words and style that slenderness refers to. It emphasizes that the mind must become so thin it can enter the thing itself becoming one with it" (199).
I want to really experiment with practicing hosomi – this subtle slenderness. Keen and sparse.
Here are two poems from last week. The season is changing...
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Friday, September 23, 2011
equinox journey.
can we be patient, brave and
open to beauty?
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Monday, September 26, 2011
sun setting early
so I want to gather up
tendrils of summer
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More poems to come...
3 comments:
thanks for sharing your poe-hems :). i really like the image of gathering the 'tendrils of summer'.
I like the idea of 'hosomi'. i didn't know this term before. i think your 'tendrils of summer' really exemplifies it -- you have the sparse and central image of the sun that really anchors it. it's perfect! the other has a nice rhythm and prosody, but i found myself wanting another potent nature-image...
allo jenanne. thank you for your comments. as i work with the haiku form in a more disciplined way, i find that a lot can be communicated in a short poem. (more than i thought.) and now that i have almost a month's worth i can start putting them in pairs and groups... finding out how they go together, and what they need from each other. so interesting. i also hadn't edited/revised haikus before, but now i'm starting to do that too. it feels good to take these wee poems seriously.
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