Morning Haiku, Sonia Sanchez (poetry/haiku)

Sonia Sanchez is a prolific and award-winning poet, distinguished by the originality and range of her voice. But she is not a poet who comes to mind when I think of haiku.

And were they my own, I probably would not call the sequences in her recent collection haiku. These are human-centered fragments, in which kigo rarely appear. Few can stand outside the context of their sequences. Their power is in their layering.

They reminded me of a conversation I have had many times with my husband. Frustrated in my efforts to acquire rudimentary Japanese, I keep searching for the secret to fluency. His response, as a linguist and as someone who moves easily between languages: "At some point, you have to claim it and make it your own."

In her brief introduction, Sanchez writes of discovering haiku as a young woman and knowing immediately it offered something both ordinary and extraordinary, a connection to her true nature and to that which is greater than self, and she cites Patricia Donegan's Haiku Mind to elucidate. So, this is not a casual grabbing of a label. She has claimed this form and makes it her own. A few excerpts:

11.
to be born
to be raped
each journey a sudden wave
--from "sister haiku (for Pat)"

5.
("Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald")

Nose. mouth. eyes.
green. orange.
yellow voice spinning....
--from "6 haiku (for Beauford Delaney)"

10.
your hands
shimmering on the
legs of rain
--from "10 haiku (for Max Roach)"

This last sequence in honor of American jazz drummer Max Roach is stunning, especially in performance. You can hear Sanchez reading it at NPR in an April 2009 recording.

Morning Haiku is a praise song of a different sort. These are activist haiku, embracing humanity and celebrating connection to family, friends and those who came before us.

In Praise of Falling, Cheryl Dumesnil (poetry)

Sneaker-clad clerks racing for the commuter train, a boy named Jackpot, Karen Carpenter and Led Zeppelin, a child's Mr. Potato Head with eyes where arms should be, a two-year old's prized word collection — Cheryl Dumesnil's poems flash with telling details. Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, her collection of narratives celebrates the risks we take in living.

For example, in "Bernal Heights" (featured on Verse Daily) we hear Jackpot's "song of luck."

In "A Soldier's Home, Hughes, Arkansas, 1970," Dumesnil writes about a photograph taken long ago:

...the solder's creased shoulders
wait to grow chevrons, inverted V's

flying upward, out of this place.

And the title poem can be read in its entirety on the author's website.

But it was the structure of the collection that intrigued me. She divides her poems into four sections, an organizing strategy that can make it seem predictable. But as the title states, this is a book about falling. And there is a suggestion of call and response; falls are always succeeded by getting back up. This is a praise song for resilience.

The Collaborative Habit, Twyla Tharp (nonfiction)

Twyla Tharp opens The Collaborative Habit, her follow-up to the 2003 triumph, The Creative Habit, noting that as a choreographer she is also a "career collaborator," and the lessons she has learned apply to any discipline. And therein lies the problem. Unlike her earlier work with its myriad exercises that left me invigorated and inspired, The Collaborative Habit is about work, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, day-in/day-out process of getting the job done. The creative process prompts us to take flight; collaborations require that our feet remain solidly on the ground.

But if the process is less magical, Tharp's insights are no less relevant. She understands that the best partnerships both challenge us and change us, and when successful, they produce something greater and different than either partner could have achieved independently.

I found especially interesting her point that the less well you know a partner, the more advance work you must do, including building in protection against failure. And yet despite her contractual escape clauses — specifying deadlines that must be met, milestones that must be marked — she has never walked away from a project. It is that work ethic I admired so much in The Creative Habit. Twyla Tharp believes in working to make it work.

And if new partnerships prompt a flurry of due diligence, collaborations with friends give her even greater pause. She understands the siren call of wanting to work with people you like, who share your values and your dreams. But she cautions against it, detailing the great risks working together brings and questioning how losing a friend could possibly be worth it.

If The Collaborative Habit does not have the juice of The Creative Habit, it is just as generous, offering a front row seat on all that Tharp has learned in four decades of practice.

Heavenly Maiden Tanka, Akiko Baba (poetry/tanka)

older now
than my mother when she died
I put my hair up!
as if this morning I am leaving
alone for a strange country

haha no yowai
harukani koete
yuu kami ya
ryuuri ni mukau
asa no gotoki ka

Akiko Baba's work is simultaneously reflective and daring, personal and universal. This tanka is a good example: it is a coming of age poem, capturing that moment in a woman's life when she realizes she is in uncharted territory. She will have to find her own way.

For more than half a century, Akiko Baba wrote tanka, the traditional Japanese form comprised of 31 syllables divided into lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Baba's work is well-known and highly regarded in Japan, but little known in the U.S. Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold, her translators and fellow tanka poets, have done us a great service by sharing 100 of her poems selected from 16 collections. I was especially pleased that they included the original Japanese, both in Romaji (shown in this post) and the original Kanji/kana.

The Romaji allows non-Japanese readers to appreciate the lyricism of the originals, and through her imagery, Baba lets the natural world speak to human concerns. She sounds many themes in these tanka: loss, loneliness, fierce independence, understanding that the universe is much bigger than we know.

coming from afar
from another galaxy
some souls
are faintly white
dogwood flowers

ginkan no
kanata yori kishi
tamashii no
honokani shiroki
yamabooshi no hana

Emily Dickinson wrote that the test of a good poem is whether it takes the top of your head off. Baba's tanka can generate that kind of visceral response. This one takes my breath away.

like snow
like leaves of a tree
as light as
the click click of collecting
the bones of my mother

yuki no yooni
konoha no yooni
awakereba
sakuri sakuri to
haha wo sukueri

In Japan cremation is customary. But fire is not absolute, as Baba reminds us. She shows us ashes in the snow, the leaves, both images of regeneration. And with the click click sound of chopsticks, we understand it is for the survivors to retrieve what remains, to honor and remember. It is an extraordinary tanka.

To Hear the Rain, Peggy Lyles (poetry/haiku)

for her mother
bluets
roots and all

This haiku – with its echoes of 'oo' in bluets and roots and suggestion of bluesy longing – is among my favorites from this collection of Peggy Lyles' haiku. Lyles has long been recognized for her prize-winning haiku and currently serves as one of four associate editors for The Heron's Nest.

At its best, her haiku serve up surprises from the natural world and are evocative of the complexities of human interaction and emotion. Other favorites in this collection:

reaching for green pears —
the pull
of an old scar

The hint of inexperience and immaturity suggested in 'green' gives deeper resonance to the pull of the old scar. And the immediacy of:

piano lesson
her braids outdo
the metronome

I am captivated by the image of those braids beating time, and the play of outdo with its suggestion of hairdo gone wild.

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life, Cami Walker (nonfiction)

Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a month after her marriage. Understandably devastated, within the first two years of diagnosis she was sinking into a psychological abyss as the disease changed how she saw herself and what she was able to do. At her lowest point, a friend -- a medicine woman and spiritual adviser named Mbali -- suggested she give 29 gifts over 29 days.

This book about giving was a gift from my sister, so it is fitting that I begin my year of reading women with it. As I followed Cami Walker on her journey -- how she came to it reluctantly, how it transformed her days so she looked beyond her losses to others and discovered what she had to offer -- I admired her fortitude and her struggle to be open to the small blessings of life. It is a cautionary tale on the transience of life, but I found myself wanting less memoir and more reflection on giving. Nonetheless as her website and many television appearances attest, many have been inspired to give more of him or herself as a result. And that's a gift.