“Your room’s not going to clean itself”. When we have privileges taken away when we are younger from parents showing us good governance, when we’re older and become successful, we learn to govern ourselves well or we either wind up in jail or the hospital. I’m thinking of Johnny Knoxville or any of the mafia leading lives of excess.
To end the winter well this Easter I thought of my time in Asia visiting different Zen and Seon Buddhist Temples in South Korea and Japan. I also thought of my time in a Catholic Monastery in the United States. I’ve been happily reminiscing about my inwardly formative times there.
Back in the 1980s David McCann, now a professor of linguistics at Harvard University began his studies into the Korean Sijo poetic form. While similar to a haiku, a sijo poem is slightly more complicated. In his article found here on JSTOR, he outlines the structure in full.
In writing haiku poems, at times, one may employ a kigo or word or phrase that signifies a particular season. Certain kigo that are obvious to us westerners would be snow, freezing rain, falling leaves etc.
In Japanese haiku there are also many very specific kigo that one may employ in their English haiku. One excellent source of Japanese kigo is the Japanese Tea Master's Almanac pictured below.
I'd have to check my notes: it was either in 1999 or 2000 when I wrote this. I copied it from one of my small portable notebooks into my more durable hardcover notebook of selected fair poems, (Opposed to those that are either crass, garbly, indescernable or unfinished).
On http://www.abebooks.com/ I ordered several issues of the English journal Sijo West from which these two sijo poems come. If you can get your hands on any of these old issues I highly recommend them. For 3-4 years poets from across North America (many of them haiku poets) were writing sijo poems and sending them in to the journal. There are quite a few gems. Here's just two I dug up:
I've been busy studying over the last several months back here in Canada. I have also been writing brief zen poems in Chinese along with reading lots of haiku. I do indeed enjoy the non-traditional haiku that are shorter than the standard 5-7-5. Often times those with the shortest closing lines are the ones that prove to be most striking in the impact of their imagery. I shall post some of my seasonal zen poems for autumn and winter later.
Rainy season is coming along with the exciting typhoons. According to the KMA weather website the first typhoon of the season will miss us, hitting Osaka instead.
With rainy season upon us these days I've been spending my leisure time back here in Thunder Bay Canada reading and drinking tea. Lapsang Souchong with milk is usually my rainy day tea, most especially when it's a bit on the cool side out.
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