There are times I have become so frustrated with writing haiku that I have stopped for months, but I feel now that this frustration has evaporated. I no longer wish for a bigger space in which to say more, for what is left unsaid says just as much as what is said!
If you want these haiku explained, then you are not yet on the haiku wavelength. I’m not adverse to imaginative interpretations – they can enrich the enjoyment of haiku – the best of them are usually haiku themselves! Try to enjoy what you don’t understand as least as much as what you do understand!
One of the great beauties of haiku is that it doesn’t provide the writer with the room that would be needed to explain him/herself. I have never asked a tree to explain itself – not because I think I wouldn’t get an answer, but because I think a tree must be better at being itself than it is at engaging in self-justification.
Writing and reading haiku has had a profound on my view of writing: I buy fewer books, for so much literature now strikes me as too wordy. An example of someone who I have grown to appreciate more and more is the Egyptian mystic Edmund Jabes, because even though he doesn’t write haiku as such, he is, in spirit, a haiku poet.
All good writing is full of haiku. You might think it strange that, given my love of short poems I keep by my bed a copy of Edmund Spenser’s 800 page poem "The Faerie Queene," but this Elizabethan epic is a land teeming with haiku!
More than anything, I hope you enjoy this book. I’ve worked long and hard in my alchemical kitchen, using only the freshest and best organic ingredients so that I might serve you these tidbits. May you receive them as both delight and nourishment! |
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