Tuesday, February 16, 2021
haiku
Lots of things have been happening on the haiku front. First, I decided what to do with all the e pluribus - 2011 through 2018, and now hopelessly dated purely by having a year by them. There is nothing particularly 2015 out of the 2015 version, for example, except that I published it in 2015. But I am going to put them all together. There will be a single volume with over 3400 of them, all in there. That'll fix 'em. It will be a monument to a decade of haiku, or at least eight years.
Meanwhile the world of haiku has changed a little. 5-7-5 is as popular as ever, and increasingly useful in a pandemic. The images sometimes seem to be just what people need. I know that nobody really buys haiku; they don't buy poetry in general. But I'm ok with that overall. I put it out there, and if I put out 3400, it will be even more out there. Maybe it will do it, maybe it won't.
And then, in Hawaii, they turned the Haiku Steps over to the city of Honolulu, in an attempt to get it open again, make it so people can actually get on them. They are spectacular, and look out over a wide valley and the ocean on the windward side. They have been in bad shape for years. But the Haiku Valley has some resonance to me. Hawaii is one of the only states I haven't physically set foot in. So I study it, and learn about things like the Haiku Steps, Stairway to Heaven.
Not that these are related. They are tied together mostly by the name "Haiku," which I am feeling more connected to. That's all.
