And more haiku.

[wombat1138]

The last leaf lies still,
Half-curled like a dead sparrow.
No one notices.

Plum blossoms: white silk
Splashed with thin red streaks, outward
From the bee's soft kiss.

They found robins' eggs.
A half-cabochon of sky
Spills a broken sun.

Warm as bare skin, mud
Breathes out its own fragrance: loam,
Buds, sleepy earthworms.

The last one is the aftermath of an extremely frivolous discussion I had with the wombat-consort a few weekends ago about what the heck is supposed to make for good haiku. "If it's mainly about seasonal markers and the impermanence of earthly delights," one of us said, "why do cherry blossoms and snowdrifts get all the glory? What about the thaw-out of the first spring mud?" And then we went into weird interactive fugues for the rest of the hike about having reverent mud-viewing gatherings, or alternately, boisterous street parties in which the loincloth-clad multitudes jostle around with ceremonial mud floats (or perhaps ceremonial mud splats).

I still have to jot down the name of that festival-music CD I borrowed from the library at some point-- wonderfully thwappy, percussive chants that're nothing like the usual "plink plink twang" (with or without thin pentatonic wailing) of most of the formal Asian music I've heard, and I say that as someone who was occasionally lugged to performances of the Peking Opera as an urchin. I think they were at the Kennedy Center, where the Nutcracker usually was. Sadly, the bulk of my relevant childhood memories involve deliberately scuffing across as long a stretch of plush red foyer I could manage before the plush red lint stopped fluffing onto my patent-leather shoes, at which point I'd explode it all off by discharging my accumulation of static electricity onto the nearest shiny brass railing. Or my brother. (I only got him once. It was glorious.)

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I like this batch rather more than the last one. More vivid painting, I suppose.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Well, if you don't know why you like something, I sure don't :)

I think of poetry as weird little puzzles in which the goal is to (somehow) optimize a combination of allusion, polysemy, and direct sensory impact while avoiding cliches and fitting into the formal structure. (It's more fun with formal structure.) And then there's the whole separate issue of aesthetics via imagery/prosody or whatever. Perhaps I shall go lie down.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

I think part of the reason I don't write much poetry anymore is that I never really had a solid picture of what it was for me, exactly, other than generalizing about how "It's painting, only with words!" which isn't terribly useful. Whatever it was, there's a sense involved that I think I used to have, or at least thought I did, and don't so much anymore. I can still look at poems and pick out what I think works or doesn't work about them, but I can't get too specific (or, generally, plan them out in any systematic way).

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

For me, there isn't a specific "why" (as opposed to the above "how") for writing poetry or pretty much anything else. I am reduced to the metaphor of Donaldson's "wild magic"-- sometimes it just happens, though I'm pretty sure I enjoy it more than Thomas Covenant. (Yes, both parses are valid, though I suspect that using "parse" as a noun is not.) More often, it doesn't, but hey.

At least the polysemy angle tells me why I was so dissatisfied with the terzanelles (http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/villanelle.html) I tried writing as a moody/bored teen; at the time, I wasn't entirely conscious that the repeated lines were just shuffling around indigestibly piecemeal, but I knew *something* just wasn't right.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

It's true that when I did write poetry, it mostly "just happened," even if I sat down specifically for the purpose. Sometime a few unrelated bits written over days would suddenly turn out to fit together--kinda like some lifelong recurrent dreams I've had, but that's another topic--but aside from the maybe two or three rhyme-structured poems I've ever written, can't say there's been any greater premeditation than that.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

For me, there isn't a specific "why" (as opposed to the above "how") for writing poetry or pretty much anything else. I am reduced to the metaphor of Donaldson's "wild magic"-- sometimes it just happens, though I'm pretty sure I enjoy it more than Thomas Covenant.

I am increasingly forced to agree, i.e. that anything (of mine) approaching *real* creativity seems to just sort of bubble into being. Likewise in almost any other form of interaction, really. I can and do plan, but not as successfully.

Pardon the necromancy; the loa demanded it.

[(Anonymous)]

Very beautiful!