Yoko's Dogs

 folio : Contemporary Haiku

 

 

 

In Birdland

twilight comes later
the white-throated sparrow’s call
shortens the mountain path 

in Birdland
the singing was never as lovely

lunchtime
nobody in the hammock
but the blue pillow 

you can’t teach a melon
how to be a melon

eight-hooter rain owl
wood owl striped owl hoot owl barred
owl lifts from the trees 

drive and drive
the road goes up and down, to and fro

 

 

Haiku evolved out of Japanese linked verse; originally, they weren’t stand alone poems. What is so interesting about linked verse is the leaping, the lacunae between verses. Haiku is a way of seeing, one of the ways of Zen, and seeks to capture a moment of resonance, whether of harmony or incongruity. The season word keeps haiku and us grounded in the natural world. We have refined the prosody in our rengas to 17 syllables or fewer. This preserves the constraint and can even intensify it. The connecting two-liners we limit to 14 syllables or fewer.

I love Roland Barthes’s metaphor for haiku albeit dated in the digital world: “it is the flash of a photograph one takes very carefully (in the Japanese manner) but having neglected to load the camera with film.” That metaphor captures the effervescence, the ephemerality of the haiku moment. And to paraphrase a Basho poem, haiku is the sudden flash of lightning without commenting that life is brief.

 

 

Yoko's Dogs is a collaborative writing group formed in 2006 by poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis, and Jane Munro. We experiment with a variety of collaborative approaches to poetry, originating in but not limited to the traditional Japanese practice of linked verse or renku. We are perhaps unique in renku in that we remove our individual names from the finished poems we create. Our collections include Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013) and Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016). Visit our website Yoko’s Dogs (yokosdogs.blogspot.com).

Jan Conn is a poet and biologist who writes from Great Barrington, MA. Her most recent book is Tomorrow's Bright White Light, Tightrope, 2016.

Poet and novelist Mary di Michele lives in Montreal. Her latest collection is Bicycle Thieves, ECW, 2017.

Susan Gillis’s most recent book is Yellow Crane (Brick Books, 2018), part love poem to Montreal and part meditation on ecologies of place, writing, and desire. Visit her online at Susan Gillis (susangillispoet.blogspot.com) and Concrete & River (susangillis.blogspot.com).

Jane Munro’s most recent collection is Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Blue Sonoma was awarded the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. More at janemunro.com.