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Editor’s note: Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collections Work & Days, The Forage House and most recently Rift Zone and Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange. The views expressed in this commentary are hers alone. Read more opinion pieces from CNN.
CNN
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As 2022 rolls by and 2023 begins, you may be wondering what practices to start and what intentions to set in the new year. Some intentions may manifest themselves as a desire to exercise more, have a dry January, or lose weight. Some may be motivated to develop or engage in new habits.
I would like to introduce some practices that have helped me as a writer. It is to write haiku, or loose haiku, every day. For me, this habit started in the dark ages and I found myself not getting much creative time. I was exhausted. The pandemic started, my kids needed a lot and I felt fragile and distant from my heart.
Once upon a time, I had a poetry teacher on 92nd Street Y in New York City in Marie Ponsot. As a single mother she raised nine children and had not published her poetry book in years. She was a great poet and very wise. She encouraged everyone she met to cultivate her own creative practice every day.”You can always write a line of poetry,” she said. “You can always write a line”
Her words came back to me during this strange and painful year, and I resolved to mark each day from birthday to birthday with a one-line version of it, a rough haiku.
By “rough” I mean, my haiku didn’t have to be exactly 17 syllables. It didn’t have to be 5/7/5 as people sometimes teach others how to write haiku.
Instead, I tried to follow the guidelines that the poet Robert Huss described as working in the haiku of the wise practitioner Basho Matsuo. Include images that share a moment in time and images that inform the seasons of the year. .
Basho’s poetry moves between broad perspectives and specific images such as:
A cool autumn night
eat a peeled dinner
Eggplant, cucumber.
or this:
many nights on the street
Not dead yet:
end of autumn.
I love how early autumn is precisely embodied in the season’s eggplant and cucumber in the first verse. In the second verse, many nights on a rough road become a picture of the late autumn feeling of needing to stay home. love. I decided to model my rough haiku after them. Each day you will find the exact image of the day and a wider range of moon or season images. This practice keeps me grounded.
This resolution caused me to step away and take notes. What surprised me was how this little game unleashed curiosity and energy in the weeks that followed. Maybe a little poem worms in between meetings. Maybe you’ll notice birds, dogs, children, or spiders. You might record shimmering puddles after the first rain in California.
Whatever it was, I felt more buoyant and more observant.
Slowly, I made 365 rough haiku, 365 poems. One day, suddenly I was full of energy. Some days I had more poetry in me, like a letter to a friend or a little essay. Other days I found myself in a hazy death, convinced I had absolutely no inner life beyond spreadsheets, groceries, logistics, deadlines, family illnesses, and after-school plans for my kids. But haiku helps keep me centered. Scratch a few lines to send a plumb line to your heart.
Below are two articles I wrote on December 1st.
Early morning alarm clock.
my dream legs
Hurry like a spider.
or:
Midnight, halfway through, it’s raining
Crackling, crackling.
And then quickly: an all-nighter of applause.
When my year of haiku was over, I stopped writing haiku for a while. But I soon realized that I had missed the way the practice inspired me. I missed the attentiveness of trying to record some of the busiest of days. It’s full of stuff here. Our whole family got Covid-19. Her husband underwent surgery. The days passed like waves.
So I started again. Here are my first two haiku of him:
sick child in my bed
camp outside
stay healthy on the couch
When
where did they go
gone horse
A giant cloudy tail in this winter sky?
When I started talking to my friends about daily haiku, I realized I wasn’t alone. Poet Suzanne Buffam, who teaches at the University of Chicago, connected me with her executive, Luke Rodehorst, on her Google account in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lordhorst is also a poet and shares his weekly email newsletter with his haikus to his wide network of family and friends.
Over the past 10 years, he has written more than 4,440 haiku. For him, his practice also started as a New Year’s resolution. That’s how you get yourself started writing. “Even if you can’t write poetry, you can remember at least 17 syllables,” he told me.
He explained how his haiku practice was literally anchored by a deep wound. Two years ago, on the eve of his 33rd birthday, while playing with his 1-year-old daughter, he felt a searing pain. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Malformations between certain brain cells led to dangerous bleeding. Rodehorst survived, but his injuries cost him his job and his path to treatment is long, uncertain and still unfinished.
Over the last few years, Rohdehorst has found the practice of haiku to be useful every day. He can do it no matter what is happening to him, good or bad, in the hospital or not, sick or not. “It helps with mapping,” he told me. “No matter what moment you pick, there’s always something interesting about trying to make sense of it.” Turning it on for a second is like “it’s own immune system”.
He explained everything in detail for me. In other words, when we meet our lives with curiosity and a desire to perceive, change, notice and savor, we nourish ourselves and build our own inner resilience.
Below are some of Luke’s haiku, often bittersweet.
in a hospital bed
Lily curled up next to me
And all these wires.
Through my pinched eyes, I
Watch the spinning world and joy
unstable.
cerebral blood, but
It’s the IV of all things
It makes me nauseous.
And this is also fun:
Through the kitchen window –
you laugh, i laughtea kettle
along with the whistle.
As we begin the new year, we begin 2023 by continuing to reflect on Luke’s thoughts on practicing art as a way to build a sort of immune system. I love the vision of haiku as a way to divert our attention just a little bit in a world that wants to use our attention for other purposes. It’s good to connect with who you want to be and who you want to give to others. Luke says of his own writings: That’s how you control your pleasure. ”
I love the idea of having more awareness and more joy. I love the idea of finding more space, even in the messy world we have, to find the beauty that is already around us.There is always time to write a line. With 365 of his one-sentence poems, you might even get a little closer to your own heart.
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