pi & anne

woodland rill
it takes along
a nutshell

Sometimes I write a haiku and I know it is not intellectual, using interesting, impressive words, or fireworks. It’s very simple and the juxtaposition soft and vague to interpret. But these are often those which I sat with for very long.

Am I the woodland rill?

Does the rill take along the nutshell?

Does the nutshell take along me?

Do I follow or do my eyes follow? Do I follow with my thoughts, in my thoughts?

Why is the nutshell there? Which core has been taken out? The cracks in the ground, the cracks in the shell, the cracks in me.

I loooooove the mingling of perspectives.This is how I write haiku. I sit with the emotions until they bleed into the images. Could I be more concrete? Is it a certain nutshell? Maybe, but not naming it gives a hint of which perspective one cannot take in… the nutshell is small, I see it from the distance. I am not close enough to see it.

Just my two cents about if haiku always require very concrete images. It does win by those, but sometimes I need a less concrete one on purpose to paint the picture the way I need it to appear. A painter will control sharpness and blur by the way they paint background, foreground, centre… I ask myself…. what is the focus?

The woodland rill is very sharp here, it is easy to notice, also the movement of it taking along things that have fallen inside. But we focus on a very small thing, looking on it from the distance, which is a nutshell. Is hard to make out.

I could say now how we all have our own rills and erosions in our minds and lives… And that things float away in them.

Haiku need the reader to engage. It is a delicate balance between getting the reader excited (so they want to) and offering enough to let them wonder. That depth which should not be daunting but anyway fascinating. A juxtaposition of concrete images can do that, but do we always need two very concrete ones together? Two things: we poets are the directors of our poems, and a) we must be clear what we want to express and use phrasing and vocabulary which reflects that, and b) sometimes we need less concrete images to do so.

Also: less concrete does not mean totally abstract. Before I use the word ‘loss’ in a poem I will ask myself how I can express loss without saying it out loud. And sometimes I WILL use the word loss, but it has to make sense, there must be a good reason and purpose in doing so.