Haiku Hijinks and Utter Stupidity

I am an idiot…

One particularly cold and snowy day in early March last year, I was out in my garden, taking in the various elements of the frigid wasteland surrounding me, when I was inspired to wax poetic.  There was a Japanese pieris bush in my field of vision, responding to the cold in typical Japanese pieris bush fashion, with its leaves arching downward, as if it were curling itself into a ball in an effort to keep warm.  This immediately struck me as quite poignant.  I felt sorry for the little bush.

This tableau of natural phenomenon and resulting emotion, presented to me in such unexpected, quietly profound fashion should have inspired in me the writing of a plaintive, achingly beautiful poetic work.  At the very least, it should have given me pause for contemplation of the natural world’s wondrous workings, and humankind’s obligation to honor, and marvel at them.  Instead, I jumped on Twitter and did the following (this was my exact tweet – gonna quote it word for word):

“Haiku, a profoundly sensory poetic form, often invokes the beauty of nature to inform its subtle power.  My garden currently provides a fitting milieu for my own offering…

Twenty-two degrees.

Shrub is freezing its ass off.

I am, too.  Shit.  Shit!!“

I surprised myself with my effectiveness.  In just 17 syllables (not counting my patronizing, ridiculous introduction), I managed to indict a sacred and time-honored form of poetry, I completely corrupted the purity of that special moment in time when I felt pity for a non-human life form that happened to be exhibiting a piteous, human-like behavior in silent, frozen desolation, and I confirmed to all who saw the tweet the fact that I am a puerile, low-aiming moron.

And I didn’t stop there.  After coming inside and sending the tweet, I went back outside to clean snow from my truck.  And while I was brushing off the windshield, I happened to see a clump of snow slide off an arching branch of one of our oak trees and land in a clump on the already snow-covered ground.  Since my haiku-writing skills had been recently honed by the gem I’d just written and tweeted, and my creative juices were really flowing, I decided to come up with another brilliant haiku.  This one focused, pejoratively, on the plopping sound the clump of snow made when it hit the ground.  Enough said.

The good news, at this point, was that my idiocy startled even me.  I did not make my fetid little work known.  In fact, I deleted it from my phone almost immediately after I finished writing it, along with the snappy intro I wrote for it.

Here’s the thing.  Haiku is low-hanging fruit for wannabe lampooners like me because of its evident simplicity.  These works, by virtue of their specific, defined syllabic structure, offer a ready-made template for any wiseass to use in an attempt at humor.  (I know this from personal experience – my little anecdote here identifies me as one of those wiseasses.)  Not only is the form’s structure simple and well-defined, its subject matter is gentle and guileless, and those who have mastered its writing are inspired and motivated by the grace and gentility of the natural world.  As far as I know, there is no angry haiku, and there are no militants out there hell-bent on creating any.  Haiku is a gentle, sacred art form.  Easy pickin’s for wiseasses.

I’ll also tell you right here that I do know a number of incredibly skilled writers of haiku.  These are wonderfully inspired and talented people who honor haiku with their respect and love for its nature and form.  I have the great pleasure of reading their work on social media and/or in published form.  A number them follow me here on The Renaissance Garden Guy.  In the hands of these masters, haiku transcends its ostensible simplicity and fulfills its deceptively complex imperative.  A haiku reconciles seemingly disparate natural occurrences, and it immerses its creator in the moment of its genesis while simultaneously emanating from her or his hyper-perceptive and creative core.  Beautifully written haiku manages to be both simple and complex at the same time.

I have no business trying to write haiku, and even less business using its beauty and simplicity/complexity as a vehicle for displaying my own vacuity.  I won’t ever again pollute this beautiful art form’s sacred waters by sticking my foot in them.  What I will do, however, is offer here my own poem, of an entirely different compositional nature (a sonnet, in fact), in an effort to describe the idiocy of trying to use haiku for yuks.  Here you go.