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The Haiku Moment© 2001 GT <gt@dreamsmith.org> I recently bumped into an old friend. I was visiting another website that happened to include user-submitted Haiku on the front page. I used to write Haiku from time to time, but it had been many years since I had tried. I suspect this is mostly because I remember not being very good at it. Nevertheless, not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought about a recent pleasant moment and "penned" (typed, actually) a quick Haiku in the traditional 5-7-5 form.
It was no great masterpiece. There are any number of cherished rules of Haiku it breaks. Some might not even consider it proper Haiku. But I liked it all the same. I liked the feeling it had generated, just by writing it. I liked the way reading it helped to recall a pleasant moment in time. And I was suddenly regretful that I had given up writing Haiku, so long ago. What had I been thinking? "I suck." That's what I had been thinking. I gave it up because it made me feel bad. Why do something that only frustrates you, if you get nothing out of it? Why keep torturing yourself? So I stopped. People often link Haiku with Zen. "The Haiku Moment" is a moment of Zen-like awareness. We all have them from time to time. We suddenly see the world with great clarity. We see details that we don't normally notice. And if we're lucky, we note some special significance in the "insignificant" details we usually ignore. The moment passes, but we're left with something special. We then capture that moment in a short poem, preserving it and (we hope) its special message. Had I been incapable of doing this? Looking back, I remember my frustrations being of an entirely different nature. I was all too keenly aware that I wasn't writing "good Haiku". What was bad about it? I had a rather large laundry list of flaws, and I could find one in any poem: it referenced the author ("me"), it didn't stick to concrete images, it used metaphor, it was a run-on sentence, it was a list, it was full of gerunds, it had too many modifiers, it wasn't simple enough, it wasn't "Ah-ha!" enough, the list went on a on. If you're familiar with writing Haiku, you probably already know the whole list. If you're not, you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with doing that thing I described above as the essence of Haiku: capturing the special moment. The answer, of course, is "not much." One might argue, for example, that by sticking to concrete images, we stick to the moment, but can we not have moments of clear and distinct awareness of a thought, a feeling, an abstraction, or a memory? I know I can. Such moments are doubly special. These things are not accessible to the five senses, and thus are often more indistinct, harder to "experience" -- when a moment comes along where one experiences them with such distinctness and clarity, it is a truly special moment indeed. There is probably some reason for each of the rules Haiku writers often cite. The problem is, these should not be considered rules. They are guidelines to aid in satisfying the one thing Haiku is supposed to do: capture the moment. If the Haiku does this, it satisfies the one and only true rule there is, no matter what other "rules" it breaks. I didn't understand that then. I just knew my Haiku was "bad Haiku", that those who knew the difference been "good" and "bad" Haiku would see me for the talentless amateur that I was. Better to hide away my pathetic failed attempts and give up before I made a fool of myself. Today I realized what an idiot I was. It helps that as I've grown older, I've gotten closer to that ideal of just not giving a fuck what other people think. But it's more than that. I realized today that I enjoy writing the little buggers. It doesn't matter what others think of them, because it doesn't even matter if I show them to anyone else. I should just write them because I like to, because I like the feelings they generated when I write them, or when I read them later and recall the moment. Some of them won't mean anything to others, it'll be a case of "you just had to be there" and no words I can write will be able to bring that moment to life for someone else. On the other hand, some of them will be meaningful to others, and these I can show. Some will appreciate the moment, and some will criticize the form. Some may not recognize the moment I speak of but will connect to it in a different way. In any case, I'm back to writing Haiku. I'm sure most people would find the vast majority of it to be drivel. I don't care, I'm not writing it for them. I'm writing it for me. And when I do decide to share ones I feel others might appreciate, I promise to evaluate them in terms of how well they evoke the feeling of the moment, and not on any stupid criteria like how many personal pronouns are used. Today I saw the world reflect some of the "Autumn loneliness" I feel inside, and, unafraid, I wrote a poem about it...
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