When I do come across the 5-10% of poets who know how to illuminate their poems at a reading, without getting in their own way…I’m grateful to have been a witness. Creeley was an amazing between-poem talker, and Will’s mantle, functioning as sage-storyteller…showed me another side to the fine art of settling into your work. I felt it was a master class in astral projection, in accepting density as lineage. The operative parable for me, how poetry is a difficult art form to listen to, maybe related to his particular work and its wealth of trajectories…(the word-scapes in his new book, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the seepage that drenches the poet during the poem’s genesis, is incredibly rich)…but I imagine he meant poetry in general. 

 And so he says, his solution at a reading is to contain the work. To frame/re-frame its context without giving it away. To sort of create a buffer between the intensity of the work by talking about the one plane of reality, before diving into the next.  Aware of each plane equally, the challenging one, shifting…depending on alignment.

 And I realized that’s something I attempt when I spend hours preparing for a reading, choosing the trajectory within my time slot, the vibration of material being the dynamic that drives the reading. But a speaker in touch with his many hemispheres can perform that sort of delicate dance without losing focus. I felt he was determined to impart on us a deeper, fluid note beneath his tone. His drive, mesmerizing, as poem gave way to filter.

 But maybe this cushioning relates to a more mystical writing, one that knows body as vehicle more than witness. Anyway, just a thought about getting lost in preparation when the work tells you what you need…and when the need speaks louder.

Like many people, my interest in poetry grew out of my interest in music. As a listener, I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Joe Henry, Rennie Sparks from The Handsome Family, Chuck D, Gershwin. Regardless of the song-genre, great lyrics hit me first.  My interest in reading poetry came about in a much sneakier way. I took voice classes in college and unwittingly sang art songs derived from poems. (One teacher marveled — in what I’m still not sure was a compliment — at my “gift” at turning any art song into a country tune). I had no idea that the German songs I loved were actually poems by Schiller and Goethe, nor that one of my favorite folk songs was a Yeats poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.  Here’s my audio version of this last song, Down By the Salley Gardens.

Interestingly, though, the work I did as a singer then is exactly the sort of work I dream of my students doing with poems today.  Where I breathed, how I read punctuation and phrases all clearly mattered because it affected the way I sang the poem.

Here is a copy of the poem:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Since the poem features two stanzas of equal length, and since so many of the sentence structures appear in both stanzas, the differences practically jump off the page.  My challenge as a singer was the same one facing any good reader — and so, in rehearsal, I really did the work of a literary critic.  What is the significance of the two locations?  What is the difference between meeting and standing?  What move has occurred between feet and hand?  What is the difference between love and life?  (This move was also key for me in memorizing the lyrics).  How does the move from tree to grass indicate the speaker’s emotional state?  What is the significance of the tense shift from being to was?  After that all I needed to think about how I might convey these ideas with my voice — a new challenge every time I sing the song!  This process, though, informs every poem reading I do, even when I don’t end up singing the poem.

I know my current series of posts (#1 | #2) on indie publishing isn’t garnering heaps of Harriet comments, which is fine, because I do know these posts are generating good conversation, and that others about small presses and independent publishing are happening elsewhere in poet e-world.

Over at HTMLGIANT, Rauan Klassnik asks, “What’s Right and What’s Wrong with the Small Press World?” Read responses from Reb Livingston and Justin Marks.

Reb Livingston discusses, among many things, the gift economy:

I like that much of the indie publishing community supports one another.  I love how individuals freely share information on the how-tos of publishing, like Shanna Compton’s DIY Publishing Cooperative (currently on hiatus) or how Mathias Svalina started a blog-store, Press Press Press for indie publishers to announce their new titles. Blog magazines like PANK, What to Wear During an Orange Alert and of course HTMLGIANT bring attention to all kinds of things going on in indie publishing. There are indie publishers starting book review sites like Eileen Tabios’ Galatea Resurrects. Countless individuals generously contributing to this gift economy.

Marks distinguishes between “independent publisher” and “small press,” a distinction I hadn’t previously made (I tend to use the terms interchangeably). More importantly, he talks about community:

This is all just my personal experience, but in the small press world I see a really amazing sense of community. Small presses are often being run by one or two people. When they have the opportunity to get together, they form friendships. They help each other out. Team up for readings. Divvy up the work of organizing somewhat larger events that draw much deserved attention to their poets and their presses.

Perhaps most importantly he says, “If there were more presses, we’d have more books, and that can only be a good thing.” Absolutely. Again with “filtering,” who gets to filter, and what criteria is used to filter poetry for publication.

Over at the Tinfish Editor blog, Susan Schultz discusses publishing as forming communities of destination, in addition to communities of origin:

Filling gaps in rather than accusing others of failing to do so is one way to acknowledge that the future is as important as the past, that origins are no more sacred than are the places we want to get to from here. Hence, the forging of connections between (overly) carefully delineated groups of writers strikes me as necessary. “It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination,” Bourriaud writes. Later he writes of the importance of the “itinerary, the path” (55), and the need for movement. Now history, too, is a kind of movement. We need not let the past go in order to imagine a future.

Finally, three more indie/small press founders and editors weigh in.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

Answer (Brent E. Beltrán and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán, Calaca Press): Calaca Press was founded in 1997 by husband and wife team Brent E. Beltrán and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán to help provide publishing opportunities for progressive, bilingual, Chicano/a and Latino/a writers. Recognizing a lack of venues for bilingual authors to get published we decided to create our own. I wanted to publish material that helps raise the social and political consciousness of my community whereas Consuelo wanted to produce relevant literature that her middle school students could relate to. With a background in community activism we modeled ourselves after the literary presses of the Chicano Movement era of the 1960’s and 1970’s: Bilingual Review Press, Arte Publico Press, M&A Editions, TQS, Maize Press, etc.

Calaca Press is a grassroots labor of love. There are no paid staff. No professional editors or book designers. The owners make no profit from the publication of Calaca titles. We do it because of our love for our community and the need to have our stories told.

Answer (Patrick Durgin, Kenning Editions): I founded my press (Kenning Editions) for several reasons. It began in 1998 as a journal, or “newsletter” as I called it. The first goal was publish at least three generations of authors working from, in my curatorial zeal I envisioned as, a resonant set of impulses, without reinforcing generational hierarchies that form within practices that are similarly motivated. The second goal was to challenge these authors to publish their writing under the sign of “progressive social discourse,” taking, initially, Williams’ statement regarding finding (or not) “the news” in poems, “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” The third goal was to transgress geographic boundaries (as I had hoped to defang hierarchical/generational boundaries and also those of staid discourses). To some extent I wanted to transgress linguistic boundaries by publishing work in translation. Since 2006, the press has devoted itself to publishing single volumes (paperback books, occasional chapbooks), essentially under the same premises. I know personally I felt alienated by the creative writing industry’s lockdown on certain circuits of literary legacy-making, and wished to remain resolutely independent of this industry, to circumvent it knowing that doing so would expedite the fulfillment of these particular goals.

I saw some of this happening elsewhere, and continue to, but not often in this specific combination. At the time, Tinfish, Situation, Tripwire, Chain, and others were treading this ground, often with much better results. With the move to producing books instead of a newsletter, I felt existing presses were doing rather poorly by the criteria I had set myself (and against which it is unfair and absurd to evaluate them). The most vivid exception might be Tinfish. I’m interested in how Chain has done something similar with their Chain Links series, though, again, their goals are only comparable, not identical. In any event, the needs to be met are set by the actor-participant, which is a defining structural principle of independent literary publishing, if “independent” has any meaning left. And on that count, most every small press I know is a beacon.

Answer (Willie Perdomo, Cypher Books): Cypher Books was created out of necessity. In her essay,”The Function of the Small Press,” Cynthia Ozick says that the value of small presses is that they “concentrate on making room.” We make room for voices that are ignored, marginalized out of ignorance, fear and comfortable marketing, or excluded from the general publishing conversation.  When I presented the idea for an imprint to Rattapallax, I knew that I wanted to attract poets who had not been published (in Suheir Hammad’s case it had been almost a decade since she published) but had dedicated readerships and audiences, who were original and fearless. My first thought was to call Lisa Simmons, who I have received most of my professional publishing knowledge from (as well as from the literary agent, Marie D. Brown) and who I asked to be our Publisher.  Lisa is passionate about our mission and as you can see from the absolutely brilliant production of our titles, she’s doing a great job.

Cypher authors either do away with the restrictions of performance and spoken poetry definitions or completely own them.  They have been recognized and acclaimed on each end of the reductive spectrum that is the page/stage debate.  They are risk takers, unique in voice, personal and political, formalistic and free, but refuse to be pinned into a corner. breaking poems by Suheir Hammad was a big book for us.  It was a poet’s departure in style and the ultimate artistic risk, the ultimate “cypher,” if you will.  It won the Arab-American Book Award and the American Book Award (yes, we rock on both ends of the hyphen).

First books are hard to get published–we have three first books on our list of five titles. Cypher takes chances on new voices. We published Tarnish & Masquerade by Roger Bonair-Agard and we sold out before we could reach the bookstore. (We plan on publishing his sophomore effort, Gully, in Fall 2010 as part of our fifth anniversary). Rachel McKibbens is as hardcore as it gets. Her work personifies Truth and Beauty and her first book, Pink Elephant, just made the SPD Bestseller List. Then we have Up Jump the Boogie (Spring 2010) by John Murillo who has made the smooth transition from slam stage to academy hall, and is just as comfortable and confident in each camp. John’s book is epic. It comes with a foreword by Martín Espada and glowing endorsements from Junot Díaz, Yusef Koumanyakaa and Kimiko Hahn. Again, the necessary voices are what count at Cypher Books.

Most presses seem to have discriminating tastes and are very exclusive. We have a mission, of course, but we wouldn’t turn our back on a poet just because she comes from the Language Poets, is fond of writing flarf, or is a sonneteer. Yusef recently asked us to take a look at the work of a famous street poet from Chicago.  I told him to send the manuscript.  If said poet has the grits, Cypher Books will try to serve them. When I came up with the name for the press I did a brief survey of friends and fellow writers and asked them, “What comes to your mind when you hear Cypher Books?” Paul Beatty, poet and novelist, had the following reply, “A clandestine room where people with 190 IQs are decoding government secrets and rapping during the lunch break.”  Word. That’s what I had in mind, sin government secrets, but you get the drift.

That said, I would like to build on the conversation that gathered a few angles in the comments on Douglas Oliver’s letter. My feeling is that prosody in performance (and taking off on Doug’s sense of this we can include public performance and private readings both aloud and internally of a poem under this umbrella), if it’s unchained from any particular polemic or prejudice, can be a connective thread of discussion across poetries that might be radically different. The difficulty is often in finding a solid opening question, so I’ll try one with the understanding (and hope!) that most answers will by necessity be various: how do you – you being anyone reading this who reads or writes – begin to hear in your practice of reading and/or writing? Or how do you think you begin to hear?  My own angle on this is slanted towards the writing side of the question, but I’m interested in any possible take. For my part I often, but not always, look for a single sound, usually a consonant or two, to begin writing with or against. That listening for a sound might be something like an attempt to get near Doug’s “smallest possible unit” of the poem-in-formation (though what I hear to begin with isn’t necessarily a stress point), but I also understand it as part of a working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice. This is when I am looking for a way to begin and don’t have an idea, a subject, a line, a text, a work in progress, etc., to be clear about it. And I’m not assuming that hearing begins when writing begins. In fact, there are many times when I’m quite conscious that I’m listening before I begin writing. Anyway, this is a different kind of attempt at beginning, so please take it from here and change it as you like……

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry.  And yet…This ignores the fact that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.”  In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.”  So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

“Poetry, that is, survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings?  Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself?  In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now.  But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.  The question of hope and vision remains timely.  There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world each day as I write this.  And this very week we note such landmarks as the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency – and the passing (at the age of 100) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote, in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

The literati are like aliens. Some are cute. Some are hostile. All talk funny, and all require diplomatic outreach. (Daniel Nester recently described this phenomenon in his riotous, depressing takedown of the New York poetry scene, “Goodbye to All Them.”)

I here present the strategies I have observed and developed at literary gatherings, in hopes that you, reader, will not someday find yourself lying on a couch in a grungily chic neighborhood of San Francisco at 4 a.m., claiming, along with a bald, 13-year-old Norwegian you’ve just met, to be a Macarthur Fellow.

1. Describe a poet as “entirely disreputable.” Utter the judgment with sorrowful certainty. Utter it knowing full well that your interlocutor adores this poet. Observe her grow dubious—is anyone “entirely disreputable”?—and then uncomfortable—what does it mean for her to adore an entirely disreputable poet?—and then tragically determined—she understands her mission will be restoring faith in aforementioned disreputable poet. Express your solidarity with her cause. Then get her number.

2. Demand whether something even EXISTS anymore. This trick works equally well for concepts (i.e., patriotism) and objects (i.e., peanuts).

3. Variation: Demand whether something—patriotism or peanuts would be appropriate here—isn’t just BEGINNING, whether what we’ve seen thus far isn’t just the PROTOTYPE of what we THINK we’ve been seeing.

4. Clarify that you’re totally ignorant of something. Just make sure it’s nothing important. Declare your ignorance in a confident manner, so as to seem rakish.

5. Shock and allure interlocutor from (1) by quoting an entire sonnet from the supposedly disreputable poet. Quote it really loudly, so that the entire party pauses to observe you.

6. Err in your quotation. Err in an embarrassing yet metrically impeccable fashion. This will disorient your audience such that no one will dare correct you. Consider replacing two consecutive syllables with “pizza” (“My heart leaps up when I behold / A pizza in the sky”), four consecutive syllables with “hurdy-gurdy” (”I think that I shall never see / A hurdy-gurdy, or a tree”), etc.

7. At some point in the recitation—a point no sane person would consider touching—start weeping. Be sure interlocutor from (1) is standing nearby so she can comfort you if she is so inclined.

8. Exit, very slowly. Continue weeping for the duration of your exit, even if you must utter uncharacteristically banal comments (”Is it still raining?”).

9. Leave an ethereal reminder of your presence. A skull will do.

It’s a 60-second spot that uses a wax-cylinder recording of Whitman reciting the poem, black & white footage, jittery camera-work, and synthed-operatic soundtrack to create a manifesto-themed gauntlet thrown at America’s youth with the phrase “Go Forth” emblazoned as a nicely designed logo on a flapping banner at the end. The spot is basically a poetry video, using beautifully filmed images of the disenfranchised reflecting the poem’s tone without literal interpretation, but as soon as the logo appears, I feel sort of duped. And here’s where I get lost, because for an ad at least it’s trying to say something, right…but why do I feel poetry getting re-appropriated once again, right…but how great to have poetry on television, right? (”Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity” a nugget from T.S. Eliot, which leads to my mommie dearest moment, slapped left and right…it’s a poem—an ad—a poem—an ad—a pair of jeans…sob sob).

Selling religion and seeking converts — advertising is all about creating a world for the brand. A belief system with a personality to attract the right demographic. The followers whose lives will be affirmed if they drink the leader’s lemonade. How different is Walt Whitman from Joe Camel now? If I saw a poem entitled ‘My Nose My Self’ written by one, Joe Camel, in an anthology of Amercian rebels…I’d be curious, but I couldn’t get past that name. A brand-world atheist has no brand loyalty. When you buy a pair of Levi’s, you are changing your pants, not the world. But when you go on the campaign’s website, you feel change is in the air (how timely, eh) because you can leave your own thoughts in the infinite declaration gallery…like casting off a poem in a bottle, hoping it reaches shore. But how cool to have a forum to leave your thoughts for the world, but isn’t that what Twitter’s for? And then there’s a giveaway that uses a scratchy-voiced response to Whitman as a call to action to find buried treasure. Which is better than their previous Spike Jonze-directed spot, but not as original as this Michel Gondry-directed spot.

At least both of those make no bones about being ads, and are still filmic. The Go Forth campaign has a patina of self-seriousness in its, “getting a platform to sound out,” …very Rebel Without A Cause. Expertly designed in a massive campaign around a unifying theme: to be heard and seen, not even understood, just acknowledged so that you may go forth and discover your voice. Core values in America’s heartland of equal chances, right? To re-imagine America as a teen. To use language in the reinvention of American youth that reflects each generation’s media-drenched libido. Giving us an implied retro-hooligan under the layers of a smoothed-over-DIY-aesthetic is what obscures the poem that tries to mix rebellion with business.

And this is how you talk to an impressionable, unformed consumer from across class, gender and racial territories. You reach for a bottom line; rebellion. You jump on the raging hormones that scream: I want to be different. And how do you propose different to an indifferent youth in an over-saturated America? By using that common difference: America. Let’s make it cool to be an American rebel by showing one that won’t offend the parents who have the cash. Make America the brand and give her a makeover for the kids. Like a radio hit, give the vocals a processed sound using static noise effects (scratchy wax cylinder) which is very noise-core. (Here you go, make your own noise cocktail, hit the loop button and play a few of these at the same time for your own brand-world jingle.)

Jeez, this post sounds bitter…don’t mean to…just question how far poetry has to adapt to be appreciated by the general public. When I see a corporate entity put such an effort, it really is a victory. So then is my actual trouble with today’s smoothed-over youth? Or with advertising’s pliable fingering?

One last thing; Whitman’s reading here is more rebellious than anything else in the spot. More power to Daddy Walt!

Like many people, I was taught that haiku were poems that followed a 5-7-5 syllable count. In fact, I taught haiku that way for years myself. I’ll even own up to the fact that I used haiku as my “special lesson” on days when I was being observed. There was something so satisfyingly tight about the form and my observers (read: my bosses) left the room thinking actual learning had taken place. And, in fairness, maybe a little learning did occur – but a few years later, under the patient tutelage of a kind magazine editor named Robert Speiss, I learned that modern English language haiku is a much richer form than I had ever imagined.

I cracked up when I first heard there was a journal dedicated to haiku – Modern Haiku, in Madison, WI. (Of course it was Madison — the Berkeley of the Midwest!). Having taught 5-7-5 haiku for a few years I thought I was an expert. So, I thought I would do the journal a favor and send out my first ever submissions. When Bob Speiss, the editor, rejected all of my submissions, I took the rejection as a perverse challenge and tried again. But he rejected the next two batches as well. (My students love this story, by the way!) In his extra-ordinary capacity as a teacher-editor, though, Bob always wrote an encouraging comment by hand with each rejection.

Most helpfully, Bob told me to read great haiku poets – Japanese masters (Basho, Issa, Buson), American poets who made forays into the field (Kerouac, Richard Wright, Gary Snyder) and some less celebrated contemporary poets creating some wonderful haiku right now (among my current favorites are Fay Aoyagi, Yu Chang, and Lee Gurga). He also led me to a more meaningful definition of haiku than mere syllable counting. Haiku, he said, are short, unrhymed, poems (usually no more than 17 syllables) that juxtapose two images to capture a moment of insight about the world or about oneself. (Since the haiku “moment” is so key – let me recommend a great little 4-minute video called “Moments” I just watched from WNYC’s Radio Lab).

So, I quickly subscribed to his journal and to other little journals and read as much as I could. When Bob suggested that haiku are not so much written as lived, I thought of Keats’s line that “Poems must come as easily as the leaves to the trees else they had not come at all.” But I really began to understand when I wrote – or should I say became aware of – my first haiku moment:

dawn approaching
the terrier catches a scent
in the hedges

Upon witnessing these two converging images – the new day and the fresh scent – I ran up to my apartment, wrote the poem down and sent it to Bob. He wrote back a week later and said, “Now you’ve got it.” I’ve been writing haiku ever since:

electrical storm
my daughter practicing
the letter “S”

intervention:
my hand shake
too

room full of chairs
the museum guard
stands at attention

I do not offer these examples as proof of my “mastery” (hardly so), but only as indication of how haiku, in the words of Gary Snyder “help us live where we are now.”

P.S. Bob Speiss has since died, but Modern Haiku is now published out of Santa Fe by a terrific editor, Charles Trumbull. I also recommend checking out Frogpond and The Heron’s Nest as examples of contemporary journals that offer stunning haiku in every issue.

So here is, I guess, what I really wanted to share with you all.   Post Halloween New York streets:  They always give me something to look forward to on any walkabout.  I took some photographs this afternoon on my way to get some chicken noodle soup and here’s some of the things I saw:

But the one that got away, the mustache wrapped in a pink garter belt hanging from a bike rack directly outside my apartment… that’s the one I wish I had taken a picture of.  I thought it would be there when I got back.  How stupid of me, that’s like leaving a Snickers in the school sandbox.  I wish you could have seen it in it’s glory- hanging there so candidly, ignored by all the hungover parents running their baby carriages down Essex street to the nearest coffee shop. That garder-stache would have made a great poem piece.  Or centerpiece.  Or hairpiece.  Whatever.  Peace.

Amber

(I need some Dayquil and a nice Scotch.  I love you all.  Even you, Terreson.  Especially you.)