I found out this week that the person I think writes the best, freshest and most interesting haiku now going has a web presence! It features some of her own haiku, as well as her frequent translations of samples of the best contemporary haiku being written in Japan today. Fay is awesomely bilingual, having been educated in Japan and having lived in the USA for many years while making her living as a much-sought-after simultaneous translator.
If you have any interest in haiku or tanka at all (or even if you don't think you do, having only seen the boring kind) check out Fay Aoyagi's website and click around for samples of her work and her English translations of contemporary Japanese haiku and tanka. If you read Japanese, you can read it here, too!
This is a photo of Fay reading haiku at our Yuki Teikei Haiku Society Christmas party in 2006. The photographer in the lower right is noted haiku author Paul O. Williams.
Showing posts with label haiku. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haiku. Show all posts
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, July 07, 2008
It's just too much!
Well, I have to put up the last one! Right now, I am looking for the picture I want to use with a poem from Gu Cheng. Many years ago when the "Misty Poets" were touring with Carolyn Kizer, I heard him read at San Jose State with Shu Ting and Bei Dao, and another Misty Poet whose name I can't pull up right now.
Gu Cheng was wearing a hat which looked like it might have been made from one of the starched and cut off legs of a pair of jeans. The part over his forehead was fringed by pulling away the indigo threads and revealing the white ones. I didn't really pay too much attention to it until a young person in the audience asked if he could ger one like it.
The moment of his answer was emotionally striking far beyond what this bald recital of it sounds like. Gu Cheng told him that he had made his hat, that he would not make one for the student and that the student should make his own. This struck me with force, I still cannot really explain why.
I mulled this over, and have never forgotten it. Last year I wrote this haiku based on that brief exchange I heard on a evening so long ago.
insect eggs on a leaf—
Gu Cheng said: I made my hat
you must make your own
I just got the book Sea of Dreams; the selected writings of Gu Cheng in the mail today. The image on the front cover is of Gu Cheng IN HIS HAT! If I get the poem up tonight this will be some kind of posting record for me . . .
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Egret
This fellow was at the Japanese Friendship Garden scoring morsels in the pond for a long time today. We had our annual haiku reading, a haiku workshop and a really good visit with people who came from Southern California, Walnut Creek, Livermore and all over. I read some of the prose pieces I have been working on, that are lightly studded with haiku. Three other people were featured readers and we had a round-the-circle open reading afterwards. These prose pieces interspersed with related (but not containing the same information) haiku are called haibun, a word from Japan formed from the word haiku the same way as the word haiga, which means artwork with haiku as part of the art.
More and more, my respect for the haiku tradition--and the possibilties of expression in this simple-seeming art form-- is growing. And so to bed.
More and more, my respect for the haiku tradition--and the possibilties of expression in this simple-seeming art form-- is growing. And so to bed.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Shiki, himself
At Shiki's haiku museum in Matsuyama, his almost-lifesize cardboard likeness shocked me as I came around a corner. His watercolors of persimmons, which he loved, and some of his belongings and other writings are in this museum, and their small paper frailty brings forth the man who died such a young and slow painful death from spinal tuberculosis.. It hasn't been that long ago, really, maybe slightly more than 100 years that he lived here and wrote so many astonishing haiku. Here are two of them in English versions.
an iris
whiter at twilight
in spring
A carp leaps up
crinkling
the autumn moonlight
Look around, something womdeful is happening where you are, something of the grass, the birds or the trees. Walk down by the creek and look.
Last night on TV we watched a show about Kit Carson, whose Arapahoe wife's name, Waa-Nibe, translates as Singing Grass. Right now in California, after the rains, grass spears spring up everywhere. Maybe they are singing . . .
an iris
whiter at twilight
in spring
A carp leaps up
crinkling
the autumn moonlight
Look around, something womdeful is happening where you are, something of the grass, the birds or the trees. Walk down by the creek and look.
Last night on TV we watched a show about Kit Carson, whose Arapahoe wife's name, Waa-Nibe, translates as Singing Grass. Right now in California, after the rains, grass spears spring up everywhere. Maybe they are singing . . .
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Center
Longing for the beautiful flowers of spring and early summer during the cold and gloomy short days.
suncast shadow
on pink petals
screech of a scrub jay
Just watched Simon Shama talking about Rembrant, about whom he knows as much as anybody. Gorgeous views and closeups of the paintings--I just wish we could have seen more. I keep saying I cannot waste any more of my remaining time watching television, and then I see something like this.
Today we began our Solving Print Problems Class, the printmaking class that goes wherever you want it to go. Endlessly fascinating, and a continual reminder of Cannot Draw and Usually Doesn't Even Try. I'm trying not to give up before starting, but as Scarlett said, "After all, tomorrow is another day."
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Wash your hands
This is what you should do before you have lunch! Someone whose blog is in Polish has been commenting on my blog, but, aside from the fact that this person likes haiku, I can't think how to comment back! Perhaps with a haiku:
goldfish swim in circles—
his stock certificates
have lost half their worth
jhh
Tonight on Book TV, the author of the splendid map book, Cartographia, took us thorugh the seven years that the research for the book took him and through the Library of Congress Map Collections. Later, looking at the Library website, I saw two paintings and this description: Two pendentive [Architecture. A triangular section of vaulting between the rim of a dome and each adjacent pair of the arches that support it.] paintings by Edward J. Holslag are displayed from the Librarian's Room (Librarian's Ceremonial Office) located in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. On the left, "Efficiunt clarum studio" (Study, the watchword of fame); on the right, "Dulce ante omnia musae" (The Muses, above all things, delightful).
This is so wonderfully true and so far from our age (or even from the age of Elvis!) that it pleased me very much. I was glad to learn the word for the little pieces of triangular real estate in a dome, I agree that studying is good, even if you don['t make it to fame (or maybe better if you do not) and I will definitely vote for the Muses who support both poetry and haiku, and I am sure would support photography, too, had it been invented in Ancient Greece. Good night.
goldfish swim in circles—
his stock certificates
have lost half their worth
jhh
Tonight on Book TV, the author of the splendid map book, Cartographia, took us thorugh the seven years that the research for the book took him and through the Library of Congress Map Collections. Later, looking at the Library website, I saw two paintings and this description: Two pendentive [Architecture. A triangular section of vaulting between the rim of a dome and each adjacent pair of the arches that support it.] paintings by Edward J. Holslag are displayed from the Librarian's Room (Librarian's Ceremonial Office) located in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. On the left, "Efficiunt clarum studio" (Study, the watchword of fame); on the right, "Dulce ante omnia musae" (The Muses, above all things, delightful).
This is so wonderfully true and so far from our age (or even from the age of Elvis!) that it pleased me very much. I was glad to learn the word for the little pieces of triangular real estate in a dome, I agree that studying is good, even if you don['t make it to fame (or maybe better if you do not) and I will definitely vote for the Muses who support both poetry and haiku, and I am sure would support photography, too, had it been invented in Ancient Greece. Good night.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)