THE RESULTS OF IRIS – A LITTLE HAIKU CONTEST, THEME: INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL 2017
IRIS – A LITTLE HAIKU CONTEST, THEME: INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL
By Jim Kacian
If seeing the daily routine with new eyes is the inspiration for haiku, then surely travel is its antithesis. In a foreign setting, everything is new, and even when we hew to our personal routines, we are beset by unaccustomed images every moment. Hence the challenge of writing cogently to the theme of this contest: much of the reason we travel abroad is just for such new stimulation, and most of us will take months, not to say years, to process this newness into something like understanding, where it might become available for our haiku.
It will come as no surprise, then, that the best of the poems on this topic seem not to dwell on the new sights, but rather the old routine that insists upon itself even in new surroundings. Another strategy is to imagine our new experience through the eyes of another to whom it is not new. However we arrive at it, travel haiku need some combination of old and new to come home to us. The very best of these do exactly that.
My top prize winner is this modern conundrum:
home of my ancestors
I download an app
that speaks their language
[Ann Magyar, MA, USA]
The travel here is virtual: whether the poet makes an actual trip to his homeland is indeterminate, but s/he recognizes that the journey will be foreign. The fact that it is “their” language suggests the felt distance between heritage and present circumstance. And the fact that the intermediary is equally foreign — a machine that will do the “interpreting” — recognizes the true strangeness of the situation. Sounding out the way people speak their language is an important physical clue to the way people are, but that won’t even be attempted here. And so the contemporary traveler remains “other,” even if it were possible to go home again . . .
My second choice is this bit of historical reminiscence:
the mountains
Santōka never saw again —
closed saké shop
[Engin Gülez, Turkey]
Those mountains never again seen are certainly the physical barriers that the poet crossed to arrive at his final abode on the Inland Sea, but they also possess a spiritual dimension. The fact that Santoka did not see them again testifies not …