my caravan
of one
This is more a memory of past winters. What drifting we’ve had here, as in this photo, is just on the windward side of the ridges and easy enough to avoid trudging through (unless one is keen on a photo). The haiku occurred to me just now as I was going back through last week’s photos on my phone.
for hours the sky
unlined
I’m starting to measure my walks in haiku. Today’s had seven! Here’s one of them.
in January
only crows crow
Back with the crows again. I have noticed though that nearly every morning, crows seem to wake up almost exactly at sunrise, even when it’s cloudy.
Initially I had “January daybreak only the crows crow” but that put the semantic break too close to the center, and I do prefer the asymmetry of classic haiku. I might be overthinking it, though.
My latest video haibun. For text and notes (and to browse others in the series), please visit Via Negativa.
I’ve posted a few haiku videos here before, as it occurred to me. I’ll try to make a habit of it from now on. They’re very much of a piece with my still-photo haiga. No less than Jim Kacian, the guy behind Red Moon Press and The Haiku Foundation as well as a brilliant haijin in his own right, prefers to call haiku films video haiga.
of running away
white-tailed deer
If you live in the eastern US or Canada, you know this moment: the white tail goes up in alarm, they turn to run then hesitate, take one more look back.
Found this stump three days ago, moments after the end of a snow squall. I thought I might as well just lean into the humor of the visual metaphor and try to imitate the look of early 20th-century postcards, which often had captions on the front in a font quite like the one I’ve used here.
the easy chair’s
mountain
A few evenings ago, I was sitting on the folded-up futon reading when I looked over and noticed the chair in the corner piled high with trail maps, also looking very settled in and cozy. After a few overly verbose attempts I settled on the wording here. The next day I took a snapshot that sort of worked, but I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic — probably because I’d left the house with the intention of finding an image to accompany the haiku. This direct approach rarely works for me in videopoetry either. Then yesterday, just capturing images that spoke to me on their own, I came up with what would, I realized this morning, make a much better haiga.
I just love the long shadows this time of year. (Those are gray squirrel tracks, by the way.)
whiter
oak
From this morning’s walk, an exercise in extreme minimalism. White oak (Quercus alba) is named for its pale bark.
I’m not sure it’s possible for a haiku to get this short without relying on some kind of double meaning. Snow White works for me as a resonance here both because of the fairy-tale quality of a wet snowfall and because the trees are in a kind of deathless coma.
I’m hoping that the self-reflexivity of type that’s white than the snow rescues the text-image combo from humdrum literalism.
to a single wing
old spiderweb
And now for something completely different. Someone shared this image on Twitter last night, and for some reason I was transfixed and saved it to my hard drive. It turns out to be the central panel from a 15th-century triptych by Hans Memling, Christ with Singing and Music-Making Angels. (Click through and check out all the cool Renaissance instruments!)
Sure, this is a photoblog, but my recent dabbling in haiga makes me want to branch out a little. This morning I opened the image on my laptop in GIMP (which has lots of fonts but a pretty awkward text-editing tool), tilted my head back, and gazed up at the corner of the ceiling. Good thing I’m not big on housecleaning.
swallowed by forest
horned moon
Photo followed by the haiku ten minutes later, on a walk where I was given only rare glimpses of the crescent moon.
stripes on trees
nothing’s private
Purple stripes on property-line trees in Pennsylvania mean “private property – keep out.” An earlier version of this haiga shared on Instagram had the line “stripes on the trees,” but I thought it really doesn’t need the definitive article.
In making haiga, as in videopoetry, there’s a struggle to avoid merely illustrative images and create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Here’s one attempt to do that with a photo and haiku that arrived nearly simultaneously. Too clever? Possibly, but haiku is supposed to be light. Obviously there’s a great deal of disagreement on what lightness means, but all the masters wrote funny haiku at one time or another. And of course science has shown that neighboring trees do in fact communicate, so while cartoonish it’s not completely outlandish.
