This online haiku journal is currently running my last week-long set of poems. I had the opportunity to contribute to both the 1st cycle in 2006, and the 6th cycle which ends in March of 2009. With the spring will come a whole new group of writers, with a new cycle of haiku. I want to write a note of thanks here to the editors of DailyHaiku, for all their hard work.
Archive for February, 2009
Daily Haiku, revisited
Friday, February 27th, 2009woodpeckers
Monday, February 23rd, 2009Another Saturday morning hike on Bulamsan: sunshine, dry leaves, bare trees and boulders. Always new trails to explore, including a rocky ravine with clean, cold spring water.
Excellent day for birdwatching! Noisy Brown-eared Bulbuls (Hypsipetes amaurotis), which I see every day both on the mountain and off. Also the common Great Tits (Parus major) and Marsh Tits (Parus palustris), in large mixed feeding groups. Varied Tits (Parus varius) and Long-tailed Tits (Aegithalos caudatus), both of which which I’ve seen before, but not often. Beautiful, colorful, quick little birds. And woodpeckers: one Great Spotted (Denrocopos major) and several Grey-headed Woodpeckers (Picus canus), both lifetime firsts for me. These pictures are of the Grey-headed.
Messy, chaotic structures of twigs and branches high in the trees: Black-billed Magpie (Pica pica) nests.
the hidden curriculum
Friday, February 20th, 2009. . .
Violence is not just about bombing or shooting or hitting people. Violence is any way we have of violating the integrity of the other. Racism and sexism are violence. Derogatory labeling of any sort constitutes violence. Rendering other people invisible or irrelevant is an act of violence. So is manipulating people towards our ends as if they were objects that existed only to serve our purposes.
. . .
The irony is that the university explicitly promotes authentic inquiry and genuine discourse, both non-violent ways of being in the world. Violence in the university comes not from our explicit mission but from our “hidden curriculum.” Imagine a political science professor teaching a course on the values of democracy, but teaching it in a way that essentially says to students, “Listen to what I say, sit down, shut up, make notes on it and feed it back to me at the end of the term.” What students are learning is not the values of democracy but the habits that keep you safe in a totalitarian society. The hidden curriculum is inculcating a completely contradictory set of values via pedagogical violence.
Another part of our hidden curriculum is the notion that competition is the best way to induce learning and elicit truth. That’s the theory–I call it a myth. I have been in many situations where the intellectual competition was fierce. But what I observed there was not the generation of new ideas, not the pursuit of truth, but people reaching for old ideas that they knew how to wield as weapons, so that they could protect their flank, fend off the opposition, and emerge unbloodied and unbowed. Nothing in my experience says that fierce interpersonal competition will bring us closer to new truth. Rather, it drives us back to ideas with which we are well-acquainted, because with them we’re not vulnerable: we know all the possible criticisms that we might hear and we are prepared to defend ourselves on every front.
. . .
excerpted from The Violence of Our Knowledge: On Higher Education and Peace Making by Parker J. Palmer
. . .
imagine
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009imagine no oceans
we’d build churches that look like old people’s memories of boats
imagine no land
we’d live in floating houses and build churches that look like old people’s memories of mountains
imagine no vegetables, except those eaten first by cows
imagine a cow’s eyes
imagine no cows
imagine no cars or trucks
imagine no asphalt, no highways, no parking lots
imagine no restaurants or gas stations
imagine never leaving the small community in which you were born
imagine wanting to, but not being allowed
imagine never even realizing that leaving was a possibility
imagine never regretting that you stayed where you were
imagine no countries
imagine if the lines on maps portraying the borders between countries had to be painted on the ground
imagine if those lines had always been there
imagine tubes of clean fresh air that you could buy in little cardboard packs instead of cigarettes
imagine not being addicted to them
imagine no children
only old people growing older and writing books and painting pictures of when they were children
imagine every one of them forgetting that they were ever children
imagine their eyes
imagine being the only child in a world of adults
imagine no adults, only children
a condition which would only last a few years
unless, like Peter Pan, someone killed the kids who grew too old
imagine no Walt Disney
imagine the light bulb had never been invented
everyone would die earlier from inhaling kerosene- or oil-lantern fumes
imagine more eyeglasses or less books or both
imagine large breeds of fireflies replacing budgies and canaries as pets
imagine even larger and more intelligent breeds of fireflies replacing cats and dogs
imagine a dog-sized intelligent firefly’s eyes
imagine no trees
imagine the animal, bird, and insect habitat loss
imagine trees with axes posing for pictures in front of heaps of dead human beings
imagine trees benefitting from the nutrients of our bodies’ decomposing
imagine no color
imagine no black and white
imagine no eyes, imagine no light
imagine every living thing changing color like a chameleon
imagine that being a contagious condition:
everything would change its color to blend in with everything else but those things would also be trying to do the same thing
imagine the world around you blinking like an electronic Christmas tree
imagine the world around you not blinking like an electronic Christmas tree
imagine no clouds
imagine no reason to lie on your back in the grass
imagine no rain
imagine no reason not to lie on your back in the grass
imagine no mirrors
imagine no definition of beauty or ugliness
imagine literature without these definitions
imagine open roads and crisp, cold air
imagine a gas station beside the highway
imagine its parking lot
imagine a raven flapping by, slowly over the snow-tinged trees
it sees you, and maybe it wants to steal the sandwich you’re eating:
it does a perfect barrel-roll in midair then lands on your truck’s rear-view mirror
imagine that raven’s eyes
discrimination
Monday, February 16th, 2009At the Edmonton Poetry Festival a couple of years ago, I worked with a woman from Pakistan on the Poets Across Borders translation project. In this project, writers and artists from different cultures and communities, and in particular, recent immigrant communities in the city, were paired up to collaborate and perform. Khalida was a fascinating person to work with, a deeply spiritual person, as well as an educator and a multilingual (5 languages!) scholar. It was a little intimidating to work with someone so accomplished and well-traveled.
One of the pieces we worked on was a sort of meditation written by her grandfather, a well-known Urdu poet, on his travels to Mecca. She and I met numerous times after the project itself was finished, to talk and write together. I learned a lot about Pakistan and about Islam (which was the point of the project in the first place, after all). As for writing, there were many more ideas and schemes that never got off the ground. Several of the poems and speeches that arose out of those meetings, though, are still around. One of them has just been printed in the latest issue of Speak News, the University of Alberta’s Journalists for Human Rights e-newsletter.
the city will protect us
Saturday, February 7th, 2009. . . Bolts of Silk has just posted one of my trickster poems . . .
weekend walking
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
Saturday: a Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker (Dendrocopos kizuki) on Bulamsan. Rather poor photos, I’m afraid. The trees were full of these small, well-camouflaged birds - and also magpies, brown-eared bulbuls, sparrows - so that the whole forest was twitching and chirping and fluttering. Note the tree trunk hangers-on: everywhere you look you can see these spiralling, climbing vines and creepers. Hikers in colorful outdoors gear, people of all ages and sometimes whole families, calling across the gorges. No snow, but thick veins and columns of ice in the shade under boulders.
The next day: a sunny Sunday afternoon walk to a new part of town (click to see photo album), close to my neighborhood but this time I went straight instead of taking my usual left turn. Wandering aimlessly, I saw some of the things that fascinate me the most about Korea. That help me to remember why I’m here. These are so profound and interesting to me because they are examples of unbroken traditions that literally reach back through history. To those of us from the “New World,” whose traditions are often two or three generations old at most, this is significant.
Street vendors, for one. Korean people have been selling their wares in this fashion for hundreds, maybe for thousands of years. The same kinds of goods, and in many cases the same locations. One of the obvious differences being that instead of ox-cart tracks, now they set up shop beside multi-lane highways. To someone from the West, where we make a big fuss about once-a-week farmers’ markets or sidewalk sales, the streets of Korea always have a sort of festive air.
Another interesting thing is the existence of village-style urban districts everywhere - you just have to walk for a while, in any direction in any city in Korea, and you’ll find yourself in one. Small communities that are definitely inefficient, old, and unsightly, but have somehow been given dignity and respect (or perhaps they’ve been forgotten) and have been allowed to remain standing. They are built around, rather than torn down and built over. Always chaotic, bewildering profusions of old-meets-new: mixed architecture, narrow pre-automobile streets, urban gardening and open-air markets, even the houses of shamans open for business.
Irish haiku
Sunday, February 1st, 2009Haiku from Ireland: even though I’m barely Irish – and not remotely Japanese - something about this resonates very deeply with me. A coming-together of two worlds. Granted, they’re both little more than worlds of make-believe, to me; I’ve never visited either country, and have little to go on but books and my own imaginings. I do know that both are small island nations (small compared to Canada at least), with long and prestigious literary histories…
Shamrock Haiku, the international Haiku Journal of the Irish Haiku Society, will keep you reading for a long time. Wonderful stuff. It also has an excellent page of guidelines and inspirations, rules and recommendations for the [potentially] enlightened writing and appreciation of haiku. It includes, among other things, some suggestions for both English grammar and Japanese poetics. Some examples:
- Don’t follow good dead poets but search for what they searched for.
- Hokku can’t be assembled from component parts. Poet’s work is similar to that of a goldsmith.
- Haiku are always set in the present moment. Nevertheless, listen out for history breathing behind our contemporaries’ backs.
Haiku has become a truly international form of poetry. Print and online journals abound with translations to and from English, and dozens of other languages. The existance of the World Kigo Database (kigo are the seasonal reference-words, essential to formal Japanese haiku) that alone seems ample evidence that haiku is a growing and evolving worldwide phenomena. Korea, too, has its own unique haiku – as well as its own unique haiku-related problems.