Tag haiku

post-workshop thoughts: my eyes from there

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Thank you to everyone who was able to show up for Wednesday’s virtual workshop, Look / Mira: On Looking as a Way of Writing. I’m grateful for the generosity and attention folks brought to the space as we moved through prompts on inherited ways of looking, the ways looking can be shaped by place and refusal, and, finally, speculative looking.

For that last prompt, I briefly shared Karla Rosas’s painting “Hijas sin padre o patria.” The title translates roughly to “Daughters without father or fatherland,” a phrase that I hear as carrying an intentional critique of gendered language and belonging. To name what one is “without” is also to name the structures that have claimed the power to define us: father, fatherland, nation, lineage, authority.

What moved me in the painting, and what I hoped might open something for the prompt, is the way absence does not remain empty. The figures are not diminished by what the title names as missing. Instead, they meet us through masks, color, pattern, and transformation. The masks suggest to me a necessary vigilance, the kind marginalized folks often practice in order to move through the world. But there is also beauty here: the vivid blue, the monarch wings, the ornate clothing, the bright red background. The painting represents lack while at the same time speculating into what can exist beyond (or despite) the terms of lack.

That was the invitation of the final prompt: to imagine a future self, ancestor, spirit, object, animal, place, or other presence watching over a moment from our lives. What might they see that we could not see then? What language might they use for our seeing? What might their gaze loosen, bless, protect, question, or refuse?

During the session, I found myself writing about the “birdbath” visible from our apartment balcony. I say “birdbath,” but what I really mean is the sizeable dip in the parking lot asphalt that becomes a watering hole after rain. Birds gather there for hours, splashing, pausing, lifting off, returning.

The prompts kept asking us to shift perspective, to let looking move from the self to elsewhere and back again. Here’s a haiku that came from that space:

robin in a puddle
my eyes from there
an afterthought

I like that the poem lets the looking happen away from me. The robin does not need to become symbol, messenger, or metaphor right away. It gets to be there first: in the puddle, in the after-rain, in its own attention. My eyes arrive later, almost beside the point.

That feels like one lesson I’m carrying from the workshop: sometimes looking as a way of writing means letting the self become secondary, decentered long enough for the world to look back.

shout-outs: haiku, flight, & opportunity

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Taking the time this week to do a few shout-outs including some call for submissions and some info on collections I’ve enjoyed and encourage y’all to enjoy.

First up is a shout-out to Goran Gatalica who was kind enough to share with me his haiku collection, Night Jasmine (Stajer Graf) with me. This multilingual translation collection (the haiku are translated from the original Croatian into English, French, Italian, Czech, Hindi, and Japanese) is filled with vivid examples of contemporary haiku navigating traditional themes with a contemporary sensibility.

The book is framed within the cycle of seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter. Here is a selection of four haiku, one from each season:

empty commuter train –
listening to spring drizzle
through an open window
–
August flood –
a softened meadow
reflects the stars
–
mother’s death –
I fold the first autumn rain
in my handkerchief
–
family reunion –
the half-frozen pond
flickering

Across these four haiku, one can get a sense of the sensibility Gatalica works with throughout Night Jasmine. There’s the haiku that frames an immediate sensation, as in the first one here which lingers over a moment of rain.

One sees the theme of rain come up again in the “August flood” and “first autumn rain” of the second and third haiku above. Rain continues to change life, but not suppress it; even in the grief of the third haiku, there is the animation of the folding handkerchief.

No rain in the last one here, but water is present in the “half-frozen pond.” What I love in this last one is the way the animation and presence is implied in the reflections on the pond, of fire, of the reunion itself.

To read more haiku by Gatalica go here. To learn more about Night Jasmine as well as to check out a reading of the collection, go here and here, respectively. Lastly, if you’re interested in a copy the book, reach out to me via my contact form and I’ll put you in touch with the poet.

Sharing about haiku in general had me thinking about my own e-chapbook, The Book of Flight (Essay Press). Check it out for free at the link and, if interested, here’s me answering questions about the process of working on this collection lyric aphorisms and haiku.

Lastly, for folks who are in the Pacific Northwest, Airlie Press has their Open Reading Period, which is free to submit to. Here are some further details:

Airlie Press is a nonprofit poetry collective based in and around Portland, Oregon. We seek manuscripts from Pacific Northwest poets who are willing and able to commit to a three-year term of performing the shared work of running a collective press. As a press, we commit to participate in the ongoing conversation and practice regarding inclusion and equity. To this end, we encourage submissions from underrepresented voices and poets from marginalized communities. Final editorial decisions are made by consensus. Each member’s book is published in the second year of their term. Authors have the final say about the content and presentation of their books. All profits from the sale of books are returned to the collective.

This is a great opportunity to get some hands-on experience with the publishing process as well as to help contribute to a dynamic writing community. To read more about Airlie Press as well as the stipend available to poets from underrepresented communities, go here.

Thank you for reading!

José