comments on haiku...lately i've been doing a lot of haiku, not because i had studied it for years and had always wanted to perfect the genre, but because i've been watching two young children a lot with a little pad in my pocket that i'm sometimes free to use at two-minute intervals. i decided to write first, reflect later. but now is time to reflect.

come to find out, most haiku don't have titles (i think). i'd been using titles, had even come to rely on them. don't know if i can let go of them, or if i should. how do you refer to your own poems? how do you lead others to them? i've started using variable titles; though i may just start leaving them out and referring to my poems by their first line, or better yet, by their first word.

also, classic haiku apparently has reference to a season, or so they say...i'd never thought of that. never had a clue. this is the first day of 'tutored' haiku; before today, all were untutored. might go back and put it in, might not. i'm one for sticking with the ancient ways. but nobody ever said, your reference couldn't be a link, say, to a picture of a blizzard or a summer rain storm.

finally, some people are doing free haiku, i guess, or so it appears. why would you want to change the rules? i don't. seventeen syllables is ok with me. i can see, if you translated it, say, from japanese or something, why this might make sense. but english has plenty of room to work with...

nobody else, that I can see, does link haiku or total link haiku...i may be the first.

also, as far as i know, nobody goes deep into html code and finds poetry...i may be the first to do that also, and the first to actually put it there (look in my template)...

what is appealing about haiku is its conciseness. that's what good writing is anyway. but another thing appeals to me...the actualist nature of it. actualism is by definition, i believe, seeing the divine in the ordinary and mundane...haiku has been there all along. i need to do more research on actualism, maybe. and haiku too. look into what the masters say...

i wrote up the two things i've made, and they appear below. neither can be considered publications, though they are beginning to look that way and i'm beginning to consider self-publication more strongly with everything i write. I do, however, put an awful lot of it on the web...doesn't say much for the business of selling it, huh? oh well...at this point, my focus is to keep creating, keep finding out what's good and what's not; and, find my genre...i keep going back & forth between short story, play, and haiku, though i really want to write a novel...

i have to admit, two projects are, at the moment, dead in the water. One is the history project, where i was reading all i could about the Madison bombing. What happened was I found a book that did what i was hoping to do, and it took the wind out of my sails....now, I can't decide whether to go ahead and do that (write a gripping historical story)...write it in some other form, or what...

the other is the novel; i had started (as I have several novels) one taking place on the el...it was at first a story too but had lots of potential..it too is going nowhere. I just haven't had the mental space. Childcare is just too exhausting...

but i'm not dead yet...and, i have a way of reviving stuff when i get in the right frame of mind. i'm writing another play now; this one about conscientious objectors in WWII. The research is very interesting, and reminds me that there are lots of times in history that I'd really like to research more....besides my usual interests of colonial US, pre-colonial US, 1950's, 1960's (this is a little close to home, one could say), and a few others. i don't really know what to do with these interests, and that's part of the problem...and, it's a little hard mixing history and creativity, because then you start messing with history...and i wouldn't want to be involved in that!!!

More later...

Unloading, and nine other stories is not a publication (yet) as its title story has been entered into a contest. Furthermore, in order to get ten total, I had to throw in a bunch of old ones. My thinking was that even if it wasn't publishable (some of the old ones were done as ESL exercises; some are on the web)...it would at least be a record of some stuff I've written in the last 6 years or so, and also help me figure out what works and what doesn't. To that end I've been giving and sending it to friends and relatives. Well send you one also, for the price of printing & postage (quite reasonable), and the promise to rate them, tell me which ones work and which don't...contact me!

Thou Heardest My Voice, and six other plays is a collection of seven original scripts: they still have the names of the performers on them. They were written for and performed by the young Friends of Southern Illinois Friends Meeting. They have some typos, too, or in some cases, my notes are scrawled on them. This is not a publication, it's a collection; I've decided to clean them up for possible publishing, later, but in the meantime, this represents both what we performed and what could be used in some form or another in any play. From most recent to first, there is Thou Heardest My Voice (2005), a play about the Iraqi war, based on the book of Jonah; Quakers Rock the 17th Century (2004), a play about early Quakers; Turning Point: The story of the bombing of Sterling Hall (2003) (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1970), The Life and Times of Lucretia Coffin Mott (2000), The Life and Times of John Woolman (1999), The Story of Benjamin West, Quaker Artist (1998), and White Feather (1997). The early ones are quite short and reflect the fact that at the time we had very few young Friends in the meeting. More recent ones are longer, more involved, and many are on the web, connected from here. They are available for cost of printing and postage, quite reasonable: Contact me!

carbondale is the kind of town where you can walk around with a black hat with a big white "C" on it and lots of people will ask you what the "C" stands for...I like that in a town...