I don’t really like poetry all that much. It confuses me and makes me feel dumb. Why not just say what you mean without all the obscuring subterfuge? This may, admittedly, sound strange coming from Westport’s inaugural Poet Laureate. I certainly didn’t put it on my application for the post. But I can explain.
Poetry runs in my family. My autodidactic Greek grandfather (Papoo to me) fancied himself a latter-day Lord Byron and wrote extensive verses to everyone in his family to express love and commemorate special occasions. Who needed Hallmark when he had pen and paper? I followed his lead when sequestered for ten weeks on a container ship the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. Inspired by the salt air, expansive sea, and mistrust of my shipmates (26 German sailors), I spent countless hours in my cabin (when I wasn’t swabbing decks or mending linens) waxing sea-sickeningly poetic about the Atlantic, the Pacific, Panama Canal, Australia, and New Zealand.
My oldest son picked up the ink-filled baton from an early age (the other picked up a paintbrush) and started spewing poetry prolifically. His deep, often dark, often obtuse work both amazed and frustrated me. I always felt like I was missing something, and maybe that was the point. I felt like I could not accomplish such profound inscrutability.
I am not a fan of subtlety (stop smirking), so I usually write pretty straightforward creative nonfiction. I like a metaphor as much as the next person, and don’t necessarily like to have symbols shoved down my throat, but I prefer a novel I have to work at to unfold like I do the New York Times crossword puzzle – challenging, but doable. I don’t want to read a poem that makes me feel like I am doing a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded and gloved in the dark.
Still, I felt as an avid reader of literature and an avid writer, I could write poetry, and moreover, should write poetry. I did so, and sent a few to my son the poet to read. “Mom,” he very diplomatically said, “stick to nonfiction.”
Gutted but determined, I found haiku. This ancient Japanese art form felt custom made for me: short and sweet (again, stop smirking). Surely, I could manage seventeen syllables. This thought itself represents something I love about haiku. It is deceptively simple. 5-7-5. Anybody could do that, right? On one level, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”. In my role as Poet Laureate, I have had the pleasure of teaching Haiku Workshops to elementary and high school students and senior citizens. As we begin, I hear a common lament: “I can’t write poetry!”. I know the feeling! But as we progress, we tease out humor and dolor, joy and grief, silliness and gravity. The brave readers at the end of each session elicit laughter and tears. I have heard poems about everything from a third grader’s father taking too long to poop in the morning to a teen’s crippling anxiety revealed for the first time – and a whole spectrum in between. And each is sublime; everyone is a poet.
On the other hand, not so much. Poetry, but especially haiku, is about distillation and concentration. I view them as snapshots of feelings or observations that I want to make comprehensible and resonant with readers – and above all, I want the words and word combination to be beautiful – sometimes dissonant, sometimes concordant – but always beautiful. And therein lies the complex challenge of getting it just right.
I write a haiku poem and pair and post it with a photograph every day and have done so for so many years that I have well over 2,300 out there in the ether. The fact is, I compose many more each day, because at this point, I have this strange habit of a) translating everything I think about into Spanish (that’s another essay), and b) reacting to everything that impacts me in seventeen syllables. I may concoct ten or twelve a day in my head; one makes it to the post. I have never skipped a day since I began the practice, and I cannot imagine doing so. It has become therapy for me. It is my way of journaling. They don’t always reflect something I’ve experienced personally. Often, I will photograph something that evokes a story or imagined emotion and write about that. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they, too, are opaque. Sometimes they’re quite in your face. They often reflect the current state of affairs – there were many about the former-President-who-will-not-be-named, and a slew about Covid-19.
Students in workshops often ask, “do they have to be exactly 5-7-5?” In general, the answer is no – as the aforementioned son mentioned, there are no rules in contemporary poetry. For me, the answer is yes. The discipline and structure of sticking to that scaffolding is a really good practice. Haiku are not simply short poems. The challenge of condensing a complex thought into seventeen syllables, further constrained by the 5-7-5 format makes each final product a triumph.
It flatters me that some have won awards, some have been chosen to appear in anthologies in print and online and have even been published in volumes on their own. But what gratifies me the most is having found a means of expression that seems to touch and inspire others as well. I have no illusions about how good they are. Of the 2,300+, I (my own worst critic) feel that maybe a dozen really merit notice. But as I tell my workshop attendees, it does not matter. What matters is the taking of the time to reflect on observations and express them in a concise and harmonious way. And for the record, my son the poet approves of my habit.
Happily, this practice has deepened my appreciation for poetry in general. I revisited Shakespeare’s sonnets and T.S. Eliot’s verse with a new level of admiration and curiosity. For me, poetry simply expresses universal feelings in a succinct and artful way. I hope my haiku does that too.