Reay Jespersen

Human life givers,
Women make the world go ’round.
Some are also hot.

Place of solitude.
All is well with the world now.
The morning shower.

Coffee: “A lifeline.”
“The creativity juice.”
I’ll have a tea, thanks.

One day it’s nice out.
The next, snow and freezing rain.
March in Toronto.

I discovered the classic form of Japanese poetry called Haiku many years back, and have thoroughly enjoyed using it time and again since. Alex Truman and Mike Walker, two long-time friends of mine, began getting into it as well, and it has played at least two key roles in our collective lives since then. Mike was Alex’s Best Man and I was a groomsman, and the notion was put forth for each of us manly men to do a haiku as part of our speech during the reception dinner. It went over very well.

Cut to several years later, when my (now) wife and I were having our own wedding, and decided that in order to get us to kiss at the reception, guests would have to write and recite a haiku. They ranged from heartwarming to hilarious, and we were pleasantly surprised at how well the idea was received and, clearly, enjoyed.

I’ve been toying with the idea for some time of writing a haiku-a-day-type desk calendar, which has always gone under the working title of “Haiku - Gesundheit!” Problems with the idea coming to fruition ranged from not being able to hit on the right tone for it (should all of them be off-beat? Funny? Serious? A mix? Would someone really want a funny haiku one day and one proverbially singing the blues the next?) to not being able to focus on it enough to get any significant volume of material produced. Let me tell you, folks, a year can seem to go by pretty quickly, but not when you’re trying to crank out 365 quality poems for one.

In any case, I opted just this morning to add a new category on this new site, which would bear the name of the (umpteenth) backburner project. Should anything ever come of it in the wide world of publishing, all the better. But I figured that either way, there’s no reason the idea shouldn’t see the light of day in the mean time.

I intend, for the time being, to simply number them as I post them. More than anything, that’s simply in lieu of a proper title, which for whatever reason I don’t think haiku should be expected to have. Giving a haiku a title seems to me to almost be adding another line to the traditional (English) three, which feels like a bit of a cheat. Titles also encapsulate what (or who) the written piece is about, and titling it “The Cherry Blossom Tree In The Backyard” and then writing three lines about the cherry blossom tree in the backyard seems a bit silly. Putting a title on a haiku either states the obvious, or gives information to the reader which they’re intended to discover for themselves through the reading of the poem. Just my take on it, of course.

In any case, to hope you get as much enjoyment out of reading them as I do out of writing them would be entirely too much to expect - I have a lot of fun writing, to say the least - but I certainly hope you like them. And whether you do or not, I encourage you to leave a comment about them, and be brutally honest about your impressions. I won’t get better as a writer unless I know what works, but perhaps even more importantly, what doesn’t.