Haiku Not Bombs intro

This is the intro to Haiku Not Bombs. Not sure if it's hitting the mark yet.

INTRODUCTION

When I first met Tom Gilroy at The MacDowell Colony in Spring 2003, Tom was working on the screenplay for his film Location which goes into shooting later this May. Coming from a small and cloistered poetry-centered community in Boston at the time, I had not come across Tom’s work as either a filmmaker or a haiku poet. Unusual books by authors I had never heard of –– Hosai Ozaki and Jim McKay –– started showing up in my mailbox at Colony Hall and lively conversations ensued. I learned about The Haiku Year (Soft Skull Press, 1998), a project that Tom had organized with a group of friends which involved each person writing a haiku for every day of the year and sending these poems to one another in the mail.

One restless afternoon I hit a rut in my work; I took a drive with Tom and two other colonists to a used bookstore in the adjoining town of Dublin. The New England countryside was shrouded in fog and the roads were covered in snow. Tom noticed me white-knuckle gripping the arm of the door and slowed down the ancient jeep. We arrived at the bookstore and scoured the shelves for hardcover books and secondhand poetry. Tom’s enviable find that day near the checkout counter was a vintage series of stereoscopic photographs of old Japan – images in duplicate of kimono-clad geisha and Mt. Fuji looming in the distance.

After completing my residency and returning to Boston, I came home to find a handful of postcards and envelopes filled with haiku scrawled on random scraps of paper waiting for me. The one that struck me most was written on half of an antique stereoscopic photograph that had been torn from its mate –– the image: a beautiful young woman clothed in a golden yellow dress. On the back of this image, Tom had scrawled:

morning dove coos
drowned out
by jackhammers

Over the years, I have written and sent countless haiku dispatched into the world via postcard and other mailings and made haiku writing a regular part of my writing practice. When Tom asked me at the end of 2004 if I would be interested in being a part of a reincarnation of The Haiku Year in digital/blog format, I enthusiastically signed on the project. New friends enlisted, and the challenge was adjusted so that each participant was asked to write one poem for each week of 2005, a total of 52 poems. The new format was not without its computing challenges, but in the end, we had a digital, chronological archive of a year’s worth of poems encompassing birth, death, work, life and love.

We decided to call this collection “Haiku Not Bombs” after a line in a sequence of linked haiku which was inspired by a newspaper story that Tom sent me in 2005. The news story detailed how the government of Thailand was responding to civil unrest and the threat of war among its provinces.


over Narathiwat, Thailand
one hundred million
paper cranes

missives of peace ––
war is over
if you believe

haiku
not bombs
origami art of war


The authors of this haiku collection are a doctor, two filmmakers, an activist, a musician, a playwright, and a poet from diverse backgrounds. But what we all share in common is a belief and understanding that community and change comes about through compassionate dialogue and collaboration.


Shin Yu Pai
Taipei, Taiwan
February 2006