haiku ra lurra lurra (Canada and USA Addresses)

                                                author’s preface

When I was in college I had a summer job on the paint crew with a supervisor named “Groundhog” and two older men, one named “Regis” and the other we called “Cookie.” The supervisor was content to drag out certain jobs all summer, and regis was a millworker from Pittsburgh, so it didn’t bother him; but cook was a farmer and he liked to get things done. well that’s another story, but as it was, one summer I was with the crew that was working on the library. it was a hundred degrees outside and sixty inside, so going in and out was kind of painful. often, regis told us to get lost; take a break, a long long break. some slept, but I went to the third floor and indulged in the poetry books, blowing the dust from the top of each one as I pulled it from the shelves, slathering myself in Carl Sandburg, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and gorging on Silvia Plath; though I read widely on the third floor. I also looked through books of paintings in long stretches. I am not sure we ever got the library done to everyone’s satisfaction.

I wrote poetry from when I was very young. My mom never corrected my spelling, and I think my dad gave me a copy of the Slippery Rock University literary journal, Ginger Hill, and that gave me encouragement. Like many artists, I wanted to be good at an art I didn’t do well; like painting; so some poems became like paintings, and I noticed that when I read, the words above and below and around a word “colored” it’s meaning for me; added nuances. I was attracted to concrete poetry, but still felt the words needed to be horizontal to read them mindfully; but so many poems had words and phrases that glowed from the pages. At Penn State I began to appreciate meter and poetic forms, as well as the line-cuts of free verse; Baliban and Weigl were my teachers, you can blame them; but their classes and the interaction with the other students gave me more encouragement.

I had always enjoyed haiku; read a lot; studied about it; Robert Aitken’s “A Zen Wave” fascinated me. But at some point I decided that the form didn’t always fit the way my words were coming. It was a form in Japanese, and forms have their place, but for me, it seemed like the haiku (and poetry in general) needed to ring like a bell inside you after you’d seen it, after you’d heard it. So I decided not to let the form get in the way of that too much. The way it looked on the page mattered as well, so it was not always three lines, not always 5-7-5 syllables, and not always 17 total; though for me it seemed that once it got a bit longer, it didn’t communicate like a haiku; didn’t ring on after. there needed to be silence and it had to be short; so there was still a need for economy. I am calling them “haikus of western pa” in a rebellious spirit.

I often was lead to a poem by an image, not knowing what it meant or caring; but that it needed to be written. The meaning was often just an appreciation or a joy; a peacefulness, or some other event that needed to resonate from the page. Sometimes, it was a deep sadness that I had not brought to the surface; or a deep fear. I learned, painfully, that if I didn’t at least get that image, or line of words down, it would be forgotten; so writing on a scrap of paper, pinned to the steering wheel with my thumb became a dangerous practice. Eventually, I learned to pull over. If it caught my attention, I decided there was some importance to it; though I didn’t always know what that importance was precisely. I still have poems that I think are going to be great, but they are not very good yet; they need to have their significance teased out of them with some late nights of pondering and writing; avoiding the urge to force meanings and rhymes where they don’t really belong, even if they sound nice. Something of me goes into the process of teasing it out, I know, but there is also something not from me there as well. it’s strange.