Friends in Poetry,
This will be the last gathering of poems in my term as Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. I’ll try to post as many of these haiku-ish things as possible. They make a wonderful mix. I feel, at the end of my term, a desire to say “Yes” as much as possible. So, “Yes” to all who submitted.
I thought I might say a word or two about how the traditional haiku works. It is a form full of confidence in the image. It asserts that to say large things, one does not need large language. Let me illustrate this by my favorite poem from Basho:
Dirty bathwater
where can I throw you?
Insects singing in the grass.
In a poem like this, one must enter the dramatic situation with your imagination, find oneself in 17th-century Japan just having taken a bath in a kind of portable tub. So there you stand with this tub in your hands needing to dispose of the water, and, as you’re about to give it a heave, you hear crickets singing beneath your feet, right where you’re going to throw your bathwater. It will not be a happy moment for the crickets, and yet you need to get rid of your bathwater. So you stand there for a moment aware of your separation from the natural world. An elephant stomping around in a mud hole would not pause in its squirtings at the sound of a bug, nor feel guilty. That is reserved for human consciousness. And then you throw the water. Or, maybe, if you are a really good person or a guilt-ridden one, you’ll carry your water to the stream where it will only slightly pollute.
And the poem grows, for it is a symbol, a pattern of thought, where many particulars can find a home. I remember once teaching a class in which a student said the poem is about the problems in disposing atomic waste, and that is in its way right, though clearly Basho didn’t have it in mind.
This is the miracle of the haiku, so much in so little. You can see how heavy Latinate words don’t fit in so well. (They take up lots of syllables too.) Nor does valuing the language of thinking over the language of seeing (or hearing). But these offerings are haiku-ish things, and we make our own rules.
I have two suggestions. First, as you read these poems during the following month, see which ones you like in particular. Pay attention. You’ll learn something about your own relationship to poetry. The second is for those who would like to learn something more about haiku. I recommend The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States.
Let me thank all of you for your entries, and also the warm welcomes so many of you have given me during my tenure as Laureate.
Sincerely, Nils Peterson
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