Shhhhh!!! I feel like maybe we’re supposed to be covert and quiet like up in here. You may have noticed that many of my fellow WordPressians blog pages have gone dark in protest against SOPA. And rightly so, SOPA deserves to be protested. It probably had good intentions but it has the ability to go horribly wrong. Bloggers are impacted because we write, and when we write we may link. What if we link to a blacklisted site. Could that spell trouble for us? What if our beloved WordPress itself is blacklisted? I’m really not familiar with all of the fine print but it just feels like SOPA is doing too much.
All that said I didn’t have the heart to totally go dark for a few days. Although I’m all about solidarity (see the black ribbon I’m sportin? Upper righthand corner?) I just couldn’t shut up for a a whole week! I hafta keep chugging along or I’ll come to a complete stop and go cold. Can’t do that. Just getting warmed up!
So with out further ado…
Day 10!
Bibliographic Info:
The Classic Tradition of Haiku : An anthology
Bowers, Faubion
Mineola, NY : Dover Publications, 1996
ommmmmmmmmm........
Summary (library website):
Unique collection spans over 400 years (1488–1902) of haiku history by the greatest masters: Basho, Issa, Shiki and many more, in translations by top-flight scholars in the field. Editor Faubion Bowers provides Foreword and many informative notes to the poems.
My reaction:
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Confession. I couldn’t hunt this book and physically hold it in my loving hands because our branch didn’t have a copy. So I headed over to books.google.com (great resource!) where I was able to find a digitized version of the book. Sure its not the entire text but there was enough there to inspire me.
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An excerpt from the book (that I had to manually transcribe because of course, copy/paste is not allowed. See how hard I work for yall?! :D):
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“Haiku lovers look for specific words and images to help reveal the deeper layers of meaning that expand the layers of each poem. These fall into three categories : What, Where and When. (pg. ix )” Hey! Didja know that haiku are songs “meant to be uttered in one breath(pg. ix)”? Cool huh?
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A haiku from a poet by the name of Iio Sogi (1421-1502):
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everything that was
has vanished from my aged heart
leaving not a trace
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My humble attempt*:
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to remember You
is respite from injury
harbor from myself
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*I’m kicking myself for offering any type of explanation as art should require none but in my haiku You=The Creator/GOD and myself=ego
life on tuesday 