Welcome Haiku Year 24. This is the sixteenth week of my project to document the 24th year of my life through photography and poetry. I’m going to cover the days between September 25th and October 1st in this post. Happy October everyone!
Week 13 of Haiku Year 24 is here. We’re going to cover haiku numbers 85-91, which were written for September 4th to September 10th respectively.
If you want to check out my post for the whole month of August, click here.
Still can’t get my microphone to work with the new Windows 10 webcam app. That is frustrating. I don’t really have the time to research alternatives. My headset microphone works fine for the haiku recitation, which is the important part to me. If that didn’t work, I’d put in more effort to find a fix.
I’d like to point out that my 91st haiku brings me to the 1/4 completion goalpost. 91 multiplied by four is 364. That isn’t quite a year, but 91 is the largest whole number that, multiplied by four, is not greater than 365. But this is a poetry project, not a math project.
A change I’ve undertaken: removing the “…st” “…th” “…nd” and “…rd” from after the (hashtag)(Month)(Day #) entry when posting to Twitter. My tweets very often come very close or exceed the character limit for Twitter posts, so I’m streamlining where I can. Additionally, I’ve removed the # from before the (haiku number)/365 because it is superfluous, and the characters are needed elsewhere to make it fit. “July” is shorter than “August” which is shorter than “September” so that necessarily means I have more or less space to work with depending on how many letters are in the name of the month. Details, details.
This week’s haiku were written in two sittings. I’m still taking a photograph every day, but not always writing the haiku for that day on that day, which was the plan from the start. I’m adapting to my new schedule, and that schedule often puts me days behind my quota… nevertheless, there is an entry for every day.
I want to say a couple words about September 10th haiku about the monarch butterfly. It isn’t a great photograph. I say the butterfly flying around me as I was walking to class, and brought out my phone to take some pictures. I couldn’t get close to it, and did my best to take some kind of picture. What I got is this blurry shot. It was flying around me, so I was turning with it to get the shot, thus explaining the blur. It isn’t great. However… this project was meant to capture my life as I lived it, not as I think it should have been. September 10th was the day I tried taking a picture of a monarch butterfly as it flew around me. I made the haiku about barely seeing the butterfly, which, after all, is the feel of what I managed to capture at that moment. I decided to tailor the haiku to the style of the photograph.
I’m still dehydrating apple slices from the apple we harvested on the 5th. Yum!
Its been another full month of Haiku Year 24, so I am collecting all the postings from the month of August and putting them in one place with a new recording.
I upgraded to Windows 10, and somehow someone at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to not let their users choose with which microphone their Camera App uses to take video recordings. I could choose in the settings of Windows 8’s Camera App to use my Logitech headset’s microphone, which is why I wear it in the videos. That was something I didn’t know earlier on, so one of the first videos I made for this project has the same poor quality sound recording as this one’s intros and outros. Even though I’m smarter about video recording and editing, Windows 10 is somehow not smarter about these things than Windows 8 was. I cannot comprehend it. I don’t want to have to downgrade for something so dumb. That’s more effort than I need to be spending right now. Windows Movie Maker, however, does give me the option of choosing which microphone I use. The haiku readings are done with a higher quality recording because I use the Movie Maker program to “narrate” the pictures after I upload them in order and set their duration to 15 seconds each.
Anyways. I’m really busy with school and work, so I’m just trying to get this AND week 12’s video out this extra long weekend. Week 12 traverses the border between August and September, so there will be some overlap between this monthly recitation and the weekly one.
Changes in social media visitations from End of July to End of August:
Twitter followers: from 40 to 43
YouTube Channel Views: from 168 to 226
Blog stats in August: 57 visitors, 130 views, 24 likes
I’ve now been working on this project for ten weeks! August 14-17 were pictures taken on my trip to Maine to be there for my cousin’s wedding. I couldn’t resist adding photos from the flights. The 16th was taken from my Aunt’s back porch- the same Aunt that suggested I begin adding photos to go along with these little poems. I love all my family and friends.
I’m trying to make my videos shorter and more to the point, while still providing enough information to let a viewer know what I’m doing. A week may be going by between posts for me, but for posterity, the intros and outros may become wearisome if they’re watching these back to back.
I’ve thought about the differences between recording indoors and recording outdoors. Outdoors is full of distracting noised but also captures the moment in time. Cicadas in August! I will not be doing it outdoors during the winter. I figure I’ll do what I can, when I can.
Here are seven fresh pieces, ending with August 10th and the 70th haiku!
This is the ninth week of Haiku Year 24, my project to document the 24th year of my life through daily poetry and photography…
From May 10th to August 7th, I was intern for the Farm at Olney Friends School, a Quaker boarding school for 9th-12th graders in Barnesville, Ohio. I had an excellent experience helping to grow organic food for the school’s kitchens, working with and around exceptional people. I’m thankful to the school for welcoming me into the Olney family and taking such good care of me this summer. I left on the morning of August 8th, and virtually every photo in this project to that date had been in or around the school’s campus and farm.
Check them out, especially if you’re a parent with children of high school age. Here are links to their website, their Facebook page, and their Twitter account where you can find out more.
So I went to my cousin’s wedding last weekend and I wasn’t spending the time to do this project while I was there, so I’m currently working through the largest backlog of haiku yet experienced in this project.
I’m not always satisfied with the photographs I take, but I think it is more important that they be taken on the day of the haiku than that they be really great pictures. I’m starting classes again in about a week, which I imagine will make this project more difficult. I’ll be busy all day every day, and the challenge will be to remember to take some sort of nature photograph each 24 hour period. Meeting this challenge can be a boon to my physical and mental well-being, as my dedication to this project will obligate me to take at least some time out of every day to slow down and observe something in the natural world worth commenting on.
My typical schedule has been to write and upload the haiku to Twitter shortly before I fall asleep for the night because writing haiku about a picture I’ve taken on that day often means I don’t have a good candidate photo until closer to nighttime. Also, work and school. I will be getting home shortly before midnight on a certain number of days of the week, and it will be a struggle to make anything of quality in the time I have left for that day. I’m toying with the idea of a 1-2 day grace period for the writing of the haiku.
This is the eighth week of Haiku Year 24, my project to document the 24th year of my life through daily poetry and photography. As usual, I will post the recitation video below, and then the haiku and photographs below that.
The Haiku:
July 31st #50/365
Floral hilltop crown-
Dedicated observers
Of morning’s glory.
August 1st #51/365
Preparing themselves
Milkweed seed pods fattening
For diaspora.
August 2nd #51/365
The sun of August
Ninety three million miles
Blazing into view.
August 3rd #53/365
The Norway Spruce cone
tells me about growing pains
as it opens up.
August 4th #54/365
Hand hewn wooden beams
Warm breeze sighs through an old barn
Aroma of hay.
August 5th #55/365
The Pokeberry bush
Green from white and black from red
Swelling by the day.
August 6th #56/365
Overfilled baskets
The leek and onion harvest
Yields many soup bowls
…
That is all for this week! You can see my post for the whole month of July here. Thanks for reading.
Welcome to Haiku Year 24, where I attempt to capture the 24th year of my life through a daily photograph and haiku. This post is for the seventh week of my project, covering the days between July 24th and July 30th. The video below is the recitation.
The Haiku:
July 24th #43/365
Aided by a breeze,
July sun bakes gravel road;
Grows gravelly grass.
July 26th #45/365
Mushrooms in the grass
Are yurts for tiny fairies
Seen with eyes half-closed.
July 27th #46/365
Summer morning sun
Pulls fog bed-sheets away from
A tree by the lake.
July 28th #47/365
To cut fresh flowers-
Catching the sun in a jar
Will preserve the rays.
July 29th #48/365
The black eyed Susans
Together by the hundred
Gossiping loudly.
July30th #49/365
The old and the new-
Pickling cucumber harvest
Save the best for last.
I’ve covered all of July through the lens of this project, so be sure to check out my first monthly post: July! I put all 31 haiku into one place and recorded a fresh video for it. Happy August, everyone.
Hello and welcome to Haiku Year 24. This is the fifth recitation and discussion of my project to document my 24th year of life through haiku. Last time I added original photographs to the recitation for the video, and I liked how that turned out so I will do it again. Without further ado, Here are the haiku written for the days between July 10th and July 16th.
The Haiku:
July 10th #29/365
Awaiting suitors-
The lakeside Queen Anne’s lace bides,
Sipping cool water.
July 11th #30/365
Cries splitting the air
Young goats taken to auction;
Morning departure.
July 12th #31/365
The lights of the school
Will hum reassuringly
To those who listen.
July 13th #32/365
Japanese beetle
Unwittingly advertised
A treat for sharp eyes.
July 14th #33/365
That first cicada…
The onset of summertime
Is conspicuous.
July 15th #34/365
High rise apartments
Overlooking the suburbs-
Mullein towering.
July 16th #35/365
Brilliance and shadows
In an oft-repeated dance
Dewy morning grass.
In adhering to my desire to capture the year’s natural phenomena as I encounter them, July 14th’s haiku is a picture I took of the actual place in the trees where I heard a cicada singing. I strongly associate cicadas with the summer, and it is beginning to warm up. It has been a very wet late spring and early summer.
…
So upon reading the haiku for July 13th, it came to my attention that the first and third lines ought to have been switched. When I’m writing the haiku, I often switch the first and third lines because they both have five syllables and usually one sounds better than the other does in the respective place, and vice versa.
Here is the poem as I wrote it:
Japanese beetle Unwittingly advertised A treat for sharp eyes.
and the poem as I think it should have been instead:
A treat for sharp eyes Unwittingly advertised Japanese beetle.
Part of what makes a poem a haiku is a split in the stream of thought called cutting, or “Kiru” which uses a cutting word, or “Kireji,” about which you can read more here. As I understand, in traditional haiku these are a method by which to give the poem structure, emphasis, or closure. Haiku verse is complicated and I don’t pretend to know how to write a really good haiku, but part of what makes it authentic is this cutting. I’m under the impression that using “Japanese beetle” as the third line instead of the first line makes it more authentic, but it may be that leaving it in the first line works just as well. What I’m doing is abruptly stopping the poem in one place and starting it in another, or, cutting it. Let me use a horizontal line to show you what I mean.
A treat for sharp eyes Unwittingly advertised
Japanese beetle.
To compare, take another look when written how I originally wrote it, and read it in the video:
Japanese beetle
Unwittingly advertised A treat for sharp eyes.
It just looks like a sentence: Japanese beetle unwittingly advertised a treat for sharp eyes. I hope that makes sense to my readers.
Can anyone can enlighten me as to whether the haiku really is “better” one way or the other? Is it less authentic to place the Kiru at the start of the poem, or is that just some false intuition I have? I would appreciate some feedback.
It was only a coincidence that “Japanese beetle” was the phrase had me thinking so hard about how to write Japanese poetry.
Thanks for following along, and consider joining me next week for another exciting edition of Haiku Year 24.
Hello and welcome to Haiku Year 24. Today I will read the haiku written for the days between July 3rd and July 9th of the 24th year of my life, but this time I’m going to do something a little different.
You can follow me on Twitter where I post these haiku daily.
This is the fourth recitation and discussion of my project to write a haiku every day until June 12th, 2016. You can find the introduction and first recitation here, the second one here, and the third one here.
The Haiku:
July 3rd #22/365
Of interest to birds:
Cascading sunflower seeds-
An invitation to birds.
July 4th #23/365
Heavy pall of smoke-
Familial explosives
Prompting memories.
July 5th #24/365
Milkweed in dress clothes-
Fritillary epaulets-
A natural look.
July6th #25/365
Fickle summer skies Rain on distant hillsides but
On us the sun shines.
July 8th #27/365
Beaded diamonds-
An opulent sense of taste-
Fennel in the mist.
July 9th #28/365
How does one cope with
The sad end of an orchard?
Dusty apple crates.
Over the July 4th holiday weekend I shared this project with some of my family. My Aunt Amber suggested that I superimpose images over the video while I read the haiku. I take photos almost every day with my phone, and I thought that I could use an original photograph, ideally taken on that relevant day, of the relevant material to be used in conjunction with my haiku. That is what I did this week. I had to download and learn how to use video editing software to make it happen.
Some of the photos were taken first and the haiku written for them, and some of photos were taken for haiku that had already been written. Some photos will be clearly better than others, for example, the photograph with the butterflies feeding on the milkweed is pretty great (and an example of me writing a haiku for a photo I took that day) but the photo of the shadow in the grass, and the one of the handful of sunflower seeds were both staged. July sixth’s haiku was inspired by an actual view of rain in the distance on hillsides while I was in the sun, but it would be nigh on impossible to capture that, at least with my means and skill. I’ve considered using creative commons photos that show what I want to express, but then it would not be of my own experience. I’m wondering what the pros and cons of this methodology are, how closely this can stay to the ideals of what I wanted Haiku Year 24 to be.
Listening to someone read a haiku is something different from watching someone read a haiku, and I think that removing the reader allows for the haiku to stand for itself more effectively. In what format is a haiku best presented? Maybe you can help enlighten me by leaving some feedback.
Consider joining me next time for week five of Haiku Year 24, and thanks for reading!
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