I wanted to let you know that I will be leading a poetry writing workshop at Lexington Community Education with optional exercises in writing haiku. The workshop starts February 2, 2011. Details follow.
Each week, I will give a voluntary assignment in writing haiku. We'll be studying the haiku of the masters, Basho, Buson, and Issa (in English translation) and some contemporary practitioners of the form. I have included a sample exercise below.
You may bring in whatever you are working on--the haiku exercises are optional.
Here are the times, dates, and other information:
Poetry writing workshop at Lexington Community Education
led by Tom Daley
Seven Wednesdays 6:15-8:15 pm
Dates: February 2, 9, and 16, March 2, 9, 16, and 23, 2011
cost: $125/95 seniors
workshop held at Lexington High School, 251 Waltham Street, Lexington, MA
To register call 781-862-8043 or go online http://lexingtoncommunityed.org/
Here is a sample exercise:
Writing a series of haiku illustrating a series of guidelines, practical steps, or philosophical, artistic, scientific, literary, mechanical categories, mnemonics, or types: Learning from the poetry of Kobayashi Issa (translated by Robert Hass)
Optional poetry writing exercise
Poetry writing workshop, Tom Daley instructor
After studying the haiku of Kobayashi Issa, especially the six haiku he wrote to illustrate or comment on “The Six Ways” one is reincarnated after death in the “Pure Land” sect of Buddhism, write a series of haiku that illuminate the essence of or comment, perhaps ironically on, a set number of guidelines, practical steps, or philosophical, artistic, scientific, literary, mechanical categories, mnemonics, or types.
You might write a haiku that presents a practical consequence to each of the Ten Commandments. Twelve haiku to accompany the difficulty of following the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Five haiku to delineate the five principles of Islam. Or the five principles in Dalton’s atomic theory. Four haiku to commemorate or ironize the “four freedoms” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Seven haiku that concretize the seven pillars with which Wisdom build her house in The Book of Proverbs. That give an antidote to the seven deadly sins. Or to illustrate the seven component layers of the scalp which are offered in the mnemonic “SCALP.” Or that trace the etymology of the names of the nerves involved in the innervation of the scalp that can be remembered using the mnemonic, "Z-GLASS.” Or examine the thirteen reasons why Hannah Baker ultimately took pills and committed suicide in the juvenile fiction book, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. In this case, I would provide the name of the thing you are referencing in the haiku as a “headnote” (not a title) as Issa does with his haiku on “The Six Ways.”
Below are six haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) that concern “The Six Ways” one is reincarnated after death in the “Pure Land” sect of Buddhism. They are all translated by Robert Hass from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1994). Note how he uses humor and concrete detail. Do read the other haiku I have included in this exercise to get a sense of the profound sense of comedy Issa employs in his poetry and his concern with things ordinarily eschewed by more skittish poets such as flies, fleas, fleabites, tads, mosquitoes, and bedbugs.
Here is Robert Hass in his introduction to Issa:
“ISSA—his name means ‘a cup of tea’ or ‘a single bubble in steeping tea’—is a much-loved poet. He has been described as a Whitman or Neruda in miniature, probably because his poems teem with creaturely life, especially the life of the smallest creatures. He wrote hundreds of poems about flies, fleas, crickets, bedbugs, lice. His main English translator, a Scot, compares him to Robert Burns, who was almost his exact contemporary. There is something very like Issa in the tone of Burns's poem to the field mouse he turned up plowing: ‘Wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim'rous beastie, / O, what a panic's in thy breastie.’ And in other ways Issa's sensibility resembles that of Charles Dickens—the humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice. Issa wrote thousands of poems, many of them quite bad, flatly didactic and sentimental, but in his best work he is—for all the comparisons—quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense, as if the accuracy and openness of his observation left him with a thinness of the mind's skin, with no defenses against the suffering in the world.”
The Six Ways:
Hell
Bright autumn moon—
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.
The Hungry Ghosts
Flowers scattering—
the water we thirst for far off,
in the mist.
Animals
In the falling of petals
they see no Buddha,
no Law.
Malignant Spirits
In the shadow of blossoms,
voice against voice,
the gamblers.
Men
We humans—
squirming around
among the blossoming flowers.
The Heaven Dwellers
A hazy day—
even the gods
must feel listless.
Other haiku by Issa (translated by Robert Hass, op. cit.)
New Year’s Day
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
Casually.
Goes out,
comes back
the loves of a cat.
Climb Mount Fuki,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.
Mosquito at my ear—
does it think
I’m deaf?
Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants.
A quiet life:
Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists.
What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.
Deer licking
first frost
from each other’s coats.
Asked how old he was,
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.
A dry riverbed
Glimpsed
by lightning.
O flea! Whatever you do,
don’t jump;
that way is the river.
In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers.
Naked
on a naked horse
in pouring rain.
Don’t kill that fly!
Look—it’s wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.
My cat,
frisking in the scale,
records its weight.
I’m going out,
flies, so relax,
make love.
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