Hi Iris! I actually bought the book because Steve wrote the intro, but was so blown away by the book after I read it... it is so inspiring, and I actually wrote 20 haiku poems already. Once you start writing, it's hard to stop! This intro that Steve wrote reveals his sensitive side, and gives us a very personal look into the brilliant mind of our favorite poor boy. As always, Steve has something REAL to say, and that's what I love about him. Hope y'all enjoy! Jenny xx
From the book "the haiku year" (1998-2004 Soft Skull Press, Inc.)
Introduction by Steve Earle
"Like most poetry readers
of my generation, I discovered haiku through a process of regression,
backtracking from Jack Kerouac and Michael McClure’s experiments with the
Japanese form in the 1950s to the poems of the great masters themselves, Basho,
Buson, and Issa. Nowadays, American kids write haiku in elementary school,
where they are taught that haiku are nature poems composed of three lines and
seventeen syllables, five in the first and third lines and seven in the middle.
As is the case in most Western interpretations of an Eastern idea, the truth is
simultaneously more complicated and much simpler than all that. Most modern
poets have abandoned the classical form altogether, choosing instead to serve
natural aesthetics and spiritual intent over mechanics and producing poems of
as many as five lines and as few as one line. Translating haiku from Japanese
into an unwieldy, phonetically inconsistent language such as English is just as
problematic. Reducing any art form to mere arithmetic has always made me more
than a little nervous, so I find it somewhat ironic when I finally decided to
try my hand at haiku that I not only elected to adhere to the five-seven-five
format (in deference to my belief that flight begins with two feet firmly
planted on solid ground), but I resolved to write a poem a day, every day for a
year.
I began on February 22 of
2000, writing in pen or pencil in a small notebook that I bought specifically
for my haiku, beginning each entry with the date and my location on the planet
that day. I wrote my first poem as I sat aboard an L.A.-bound 777 awaiting
takeoff at Chicago O-Hare:
Frozen winter sky
The airplane poised and ready
To rise above it
It was a beginning, if
less than auspicious.
That year I traveled from
one end of this country to the other and across the Atlantic three times, and
keeping up with my notebook and adhering to the commitment I had made to myself
became somewhat of an obsession. I wrote on airplanes, on buses and ferries, in
hotels, nightclubs, concert halls, and television studios. I even wrote one on
the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court while fasting to
protest the death penalty. It was there that my friend and fellow activist Abe
Bonowitz, after asking what I was writing in my little book, mentioned a
website called The Haiku Year. The site’s homepage told me that in 1996 seven
friends had made a pact to write a haiku a day for a year, and invited everyone
and anyone to write their own poems and post them on the Web. A-ha! Maybe I
wasn’t crazy after all. There were others out there who had discovered that to
content oneself with merely reading haiku was to miss the point entirely, and
that the only way to truly appreciate haiku was to write haiku. I have come to
believe with all my heart that even the poems of the masters, as beautifully as
they fall on paper, were, first and foremost, a spiritual endeavor on the part
of the authors themselves, and that the world might just be a better place to
live in if EVERYONE wrote haiku.
A few months later, on a
tour stop in Boston, I even met Rick Roth, one of the seven friends who made
and kept the promise that would eventually grow up to be the book that you hold
in your hands. As the year wound on, I visited a handful of places that I’d
never been before and I saw all of the old places with a new clarity, focusing
my attention outward (but not too far outward) at least once a day just long
enough to get in my seventeen syllables. Some days it was effortless. Others it
was a chore, an exercise of pure will, like going to the gym or taking out the
garbage:
Minneapolis
That’s seventeen syllables
Right there – hah!
Some of my favorites were
written closest to home in the familiar places that I had taken for granted:
Lazy little cloud
Rest on another mountain
I’ve fishing to do
I wrote the 366th
and final poem (2000’s being a leap year) on another mountaintop, in West
Virginia early on the morning of Feb 29th, 2001:
Some city slicker
Left this mountain naked and
Humiliated
And it was done. I had
seen it through. I stashed my little book away in my sock drawer and forgot
about it. After all, I had a play and a novel to finish, songs to write,
deadlines to meet, and bills to pay. No time for fooling around with pint-sized
Japanese-beatnik-nature poems.
Then, a year later, Rick
e-mailed me and asked if I’d like to write an introduction for this edition of
The Haiku Year. I got my little notebook out, opened it up, began to read.
Some of the haiku I had
written made me very proud. Some of them weren’t so hot. All brought back
memories more vivid than any snapshot or home video. Every mile I traveled,
every place I visited, every single day of an entire year of my life rendered
in macroscopic detail and preserved forever, frozen in time and space. Scenes
that, before my haiku awakening, would have slipped by my window unnoticed as I
rushed headlong through the world on my way to wherever the hell it is that I’m
going. But not that year. Not February 2000 through February 2001. It’s all
there in my little notebook. There are no gaps. There are no omissions. For
that was my haiku year. The best year of my life."
-Steve Earle
Durham, North Carolina
November 2003
"love is a prison" but no one really wants to be free....