My new other blog

I've started playing with a second blog, devoted strictly to haibun. Partly as a result of the preparation I've been doing for my 'Haibun for Beginners' workshop at Haiku Aotearoa 2008. But also because I was having an idle flick through some of the kazillions (technical term) of photos we have from our three years in the UK, and realized that I was starting to forget a lot of the things we did/saw/experienced. Some have already become haibun – I know I swore I wouldn't write any travel poems, but didn't say anything about haibun did I? Heh heh heh.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: I'm going to use the other site as an online workbook. Create a haibun sequence (or possibly series; I've never been too sure about the difference between them) of things to do with our travels. Post photos. Jot. Edit. Compose. Post work-in-progress as well as relevant completed haibun.

Should be fun. Or possibly just another distraction. I've called it The Long Road Home, as a kind of reference to Basho's Oku no hosomichi. Feel free to drop in, it's right here.

poem in progress – Burning

I thought it was probably time to post a work-in-progress.

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Haibun – Burning


Winter, and I’m burning tree-stumps. This one, deep in the cattle-camp of scribbly gums, sticking out a metre, with a sharp point like the one that bled the broodmare dry.


Build the twig-pile around the base, burn the wood-witch at the stake. Bullgrass and bark-pith tucked under. The match flares like a curse, like a hole ripped open into another world. Friend and enemy, servant perpetually on the point of rebellion. Blessings laid at the foot of the mountain. I lean close, give it my own breath.



first light –
a dusting of ash
against frost

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I started writing this haibun about a week ago. It's made up of lots of different memories, but is loosely based on a particular event. I've been toying with the length a fair bit - the first draft was much longer, and covered a couple of days. But pared back feels better. I know the haiku is still not right – it's verging on being a recapitulation, rather than an extension of the ideas.

As seems to be the case quite often these days, the poem was prompted by reading some new haibun by Jeffrey Harpeng. It's a collaboration between four poets – Jeff, Patricia Prime, Diana Webb and Jeffrey Woodward – called "Quartet: a string of haibun in four voices". Wonderful stuff. I think they're looking to publish it as a chapbook, funding permitting.

Suggestions? Comments? (Be nice! Or at least interesting!)

Current work in progress

Part of the trouble at the moment is that I have about a dozen poems that I'm semi-writing. Which sounds good, but isn't. They start to interfere with each other – ideas jumping poem mid-stanza, emotional tone blurring across, etc etc. I have no known upper limit for self-sabotage. My writing friends are very kind about it all, but still make the odd "well there's an idea for a poem!" comment.

Enough complaining. On with it.

There's a poem I've been working on for a while now, loosely in response to Ted Hughes's October Salmon. The seed comes from a night when I was on my own at home. It was when we were living in The Parlour, high up Curly Hill, across from Ilkley Moor. Sometimes cloud would fill the valley (Wharfedale) and hide the town from us completely. Just the lights from the Cow and Calf pub, opposite.
A couple of times the clouds seemed to swirl down the valley as though it was under water. Very strange. 

I was in bed, reading the anthology Wild Reckoning (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004), and I'd just started the Hughes poem when a plane passed overhead. 

It was so loud, I genuinely thought it must be crashing. I was out of the bed and across the room without even thinking. Waiting for it to tear into the roof – I could actually hear the air screaming through the landing gear.

And it really was close. Close enough that I could see individual faces in the porthole windows. The pilot must have been coming in to land at LBA, and somehow started his descent too soon. They didn't crash, but it looked (and sounded and felt) for one of those endless moments like they must do.

I kept watching from the doorway, until it rose over the edge of the valley and dropped down the other side. It looked for all the world like a huge fish, launching itself out of the water. I made a note of it in my journal, meaning to come back to it later. 

Which ended up being two years later, when we'd returned to NZ.

The date in my journal was September 11th, 2004.