Foreword
Jim and I used to paint houses for Rick while we were students in Boston, about the same time we met Michael, around 1982. Rick would occasionally engage us in a postcard challenge, where each participant had to send the others one classic 50's chrome card a day for, say, two weeks. During those challenges, each day had a beautiful little spin to it, like an extra cherry on a slice of cake or finding ten bucks in an old pair of pants. Jim and I moved on to other cities and Michael started to tour a lot, and the postcard challenges somehow stumbled into haiku challenges. They were a shorthand way to stay in touch with where each others heads were at, far more poetically and accurately than a four page letter could. In addition to the actual haiku, the entire missive itself carried important details: the matchbook the poem was written on, or the smell of the torn hotel stationery, or the coffee stain, or the postmark, even the choice of stamps. It was all part of the thrill. Fifteen years later, Jim, Michael, Grant and I were sitting with the lights off, listening to Clara Rockmores beautiful Theremin CD, in Michaels hotel room in DC on a R.E.M/Grant Lee Buffalo tour. We made a pact to do a haiku challenge with each other (and Douglas, back in Athens, who later roped in Anna) for an entire year. To seal the deal we each wrote our inaugural haiku in pencil on the underside of the desk drawer in Michaels room. We were off.
Within a week the haiku year challenge was inspiring and changing what we noticed in our everyday lives. Suddenly each day seemed bejeweled, often at the oddest moments. The way the screen was ripped in a filthy gas station restroom suddenly mirrored some aspect of your life, and was beautiful. Or hilarious. Rick (who took up the challenge the second he heard about it) described it best, It changed my life. We were each supposed to write one haiku a day, but of course we all cheated once in a while. Even your guilt about the cheating taught you something about how you saw your life, your priorities, how you felt about poetry and your friends and how they felt about you. Any excuse for slacking was lame and inside we all knew it. Grant was the worst. Michael came next, then Jim, then Anna and me, then Doug and Rick. The days had extra cherries anyway. Jack Kerouac and Michael McClure and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance started the concept of Western haiku, which is what the haiku in this book are. Kerouac called them pops little three-line poems aiming towards a kind of Zen Enlightenment. The Beat Generation was the right time to make a transition to a new kind of haiku, with all that pot-smoking and coffee-drinking and scatting everywhere and Japanese haiku books laying on couches next to Whitman and William Carlos Williams. A kind of combustion. So they dubbed their haiku Western and chucked the 5-7-5 syllabic requirements of the three lines, but tried to stick to the thematic guidelines of the Japanese haiku as mastered by Basho, Buson, and Issa, namely:
1. Seasonal references (kigo) to establish time and place.
2. The moment seized and rendered purely, captured in an instant of Buddhist (or Zen) enlightenment.
3. Reflections of the particular consciousness, or point of view of the author, his or her loneliness, or comedy, or anger.
We never intended for these to be published, they were just little gifts to one another across space. Hopefully you will accept these gifts with the love in which they were given. Take that love and go on to give your own most precious moments to the people you love. This book surely will have succeeded if mail carriers begin to notice an increase in postcards with three lines scribbled on them. Then, slowly but surely the amount of poetry in the mail would increase, and cut in on the amount of junk mail we get. The evening news would have to start delivering a Poem of the Day instead of one more celebrity profile. People would have such a stockpile of precious moments they would no longer allow bombs to be made, wars to be declared, or people to walk around homeless or hungry. The person who tells you this is impossible is the person you should start a haiku challenge with.
Tom Gilroy, October 1997
THE first FOUR
Washington, D.C.Michael Stipe
Gingervodka lavender tea
Life is good beyond this
Grant Lee Phillips
Leon ThereminsAshes Being blown from the speakers
sparks from a broken conductor
Tom Gilroy
The radiolandscape colors
the room like fog
Jim McKay
Stale smoky sweatshirtcovers the lampshade
like a finished party
Mirror Image,
Inc. Problems to report about this web site?