Author: Ray Rasmussen

Ray lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He's a writer and photographer. He's been editor of a number of haiku and Haibun journals. He enjoys wilderness hiking and canoeing. His collection "Landmarks: A Haibun Collection" is available on Amazon.

Best Intentions

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ 8 Comments

| Recently Published Haibun by Ray Rasmussen |

image credit: unknown

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions:
it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
~ Aldous Huxley

We’re dining on ginger beef and cod in black bean sauce, flavored with catch-up chat. My friend Kathy, leans toward me and says, “I think you’re just about to have an important birthday. Yes?”

I tell her my age and, excited now, she says: “I thought so. Why don’t I organize a party to celebrate your milestone?”

Milestone? The word was coined for the stone obelisks placed by those great builders, the Romans, to mark distances along the many roads branching out from Rome.

age-worn stone 
the emperor’s name 
unreadable

“If you set up a milestone gathering, have a good time and say hello to everyone for me,” I reply.

“What – you wouldn’t want to celebrate with your friends?” she asks.

“It’s the idea that I’ve done something extraordinary to reach my present age, like conquering a new territory, and thus deserve a tribute where I parade my army, plunder, and slaves through streets lined with cheering citizens. A milestone party would invite congratulatory comments like ‘You’ve made it to a magic age,” lead to questions like ‘What’s on your bucket list – going sky diving?”

“Do you mean you think they’d not be sincere?” she asks.

“When I look at someone my age, even when they’re still mentally and physically active, I feel a sadness about their diminishment. On my last hiking trip, a middle-aged companion said, ‘Ray, I sure hope I can be as active as you when I’m your age.’ Tongue in cheek, and secretly irritated, I replied, “I’m confused. I’m only 35.” I knew it was intended as a compliment, but I was thinking, There are downsides to reaching my age, the small infirmities that, like weathered milestones, ruthlessly mark diminishment’s path.

“Okay,” she replies, “no milestone-theme party, but I’d like to do something.”

“Agreed. I’d enjoy a gathering celebrating everyone, each person who wants sharing what’s going on in their own lives”

my winter is just this – 
a pair of goldfinches 
still visiting the feeder*

“You’d not want any comments on your birthday?” she asks.

“If people feel they must say something, I’d prefer honesty, preferably with humor, like Hal’s greeting the other day when I met him for coffee: ‘Damn, but you look grizzled, shaggy white beard, wild hair. Looks like you’ve been in a wind storm.’”

She laughs. “I’ll bet it was you looking in the mirror talking to yourself.”

You’re right, I looked and said: “I’m happy to be here and yet I feel guilty about having my cosmic dice roll so many 7s.”

awaiting cremation –
birthday cards line
the fireplace mantel

Notes:

Published in Presence, 2020.

* The second haiku is after after Issa’s: my spring is just this – / a single bamboo shoot / a willow branch

Strings Tied in Knots

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| Recently Published Haibun by Ray Rasmussen |

In her poem “The Flaw,” Molly Peacock writes, “The best thing about a hand-made pattern in a weaving is the flaw.” She suggests that a red string standing out in a blue-toned carpet weave could be likened to a red bird flying into a blue sky.

My partner is a talented fabric artist, and so I read Peacock’s poem to her and ask, “What do you see as my red strings, if any?”

After a long pause, she replies, “Your swearing – when you get frustrated and curse at something like your computer when it’s not working. No one in my family ever swore.”

“Is there a way you could turn my rarely exercised flaw into a red bird soaring into a blue sky?” I suggest.

“No, for me it’s more like a screeching Bald Eagle with talons extended as it swoops down on a lamb,” she says.

I mention that Peacock wrote that a flaw can be thought of as a reaching out, as the string saying, in effect, “I’m alive, discovered by your eye.”

“Oh, I do know you’re alive when you shout and swear,” she replies.

“What if I tell you that the ancient Persians deliberately put a flaw in their carpets because only God is entitled to be perfect and it would be arrogant for a mortal to aspire to perfection?”

 “I’d not worry too much about being close to perfection.”

couples counseling –
picking strings from
my frayed sweater

This is a revision of a piece published in Frogpond.

Molly Peacock’s wonderful poem, “The Flaw,” can be found here -> link

The Ask. A haibun by Ray Rasmussen

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| Recently Published Haibun by Ray Rasmussen |

image by r. rasmussen

The Ask

My lover asks me:
"What is the difference
between me and the sky?"
          ~ Nizar Qabbani

After reading Qabbani’s poem together, my lover smiles and asks: “What’s the difference between me and the sky?”

The difference, my love, is when in spring, you guide me to view the purple crocus poking above winter’s leaf litter.

And when in summer, you put your canoe paddle aside to pick up your camera, and my eyes follow your gaze to a tiny bonsai-shaped spruce growing from a sawn stump in an Algonquin Lake.

And when in fall, you see ATV tracks that have scoured the forest path we love to walk, and I see your eyes flood with pain.

And when in winter you hush me and stop to gaze at deer tracks in the snow.

And when today, you gasp and your face lights up when a red fox gracefully crosses Moss Stone creek on an inches-wide log that no human would dare walk.

And when minutes later, a second fox follows, bark-yips, receives a bark-yip in return, and together they cavort in spring’s warming sun.

All that, my love, is how you are of the Earth, and different from the sky.

warming sun –
her hand slips
into mine

Epigraph is from Nizar Qabbani’s poem, “My Lover Asks Me,” translated by B. Frangieh & C. Brown.

Published in Cattails: The Journal of the United Haiku and Tanka Society, April 2020

Published Haibun by Ray Rasmussen

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ 3 Comments
canoe & cloud, Lake Edith, Jasper National Park : r. rasmussen

I don’t intend this blog to be a showcase for my published work. However, in case you want to see writing by the guy who’s pontificating about haibun and haiku on this blog, here are some my haibun published at a variety of venues:

Commentary: Glen Coats’ Witness

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| Haibun Exemplars | Haibun Commentaries | Haibun Close Reading Guide |

from the film “Witness”

Commentary by Ray Rasmussen

This commentary is one of several on the Haibun Exemplars I’ve selected for viewing. It follows well-known poet Robert Pinsky’s idea that to know poetry, in our case haibun, is to do close readings, at least on occasion of writers whose work you enjoy, and that close readings will help improve the reader’s range of writing styles and the quality of his or her writing. -> read more

If you want to learn about poetry — if you want to “access” it — what you need to do is find great poems you like, figure out which are worth rereading and then reread them.
 ~ Robert Pinsky

Haibun Exemplars

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| Haibun Exemplars | Haibun Commentaries | Haibun Close Reading Guide |

Exemplars: What are they? Why are they here?

The Rogue River falls shown above is, in my estimation, nature’s exemplar of a waterfall. I’d also like to say that it’s a photographic exemplar, aka an excellent photograph, but for that it’s my own shot of the falls. Thus someone else will have to praise it or buy it or publish it for it to approach the lofty rank of exemplar.

On this page, over time, I’ll post a number of haibun by writers other than myself that in my view are both well done and help to show the variety of styles that represent contemporary English-language haibun.

For some of these exemplars, I’ll offer commentaries – close readings to explore what makes them work well enough to have been published by a journal editor.

Of course, my tastes in this selection are showing, which is why I think it’s important to post published works where an editor independent of the writer saw fit to select the piece for the enjoyment of his or her readers.

If you read any of these, please use the comments window where they appear to tell me what you think of them and a bit about why.

China’s Shakespeare, the Poet Du Fu (712-770)

~ Ray Rasmussen ~ 6 Comments

In Brief:

painting of Du Fu
painting of Du Fu

This post explores Du Fu’s poem “Day’s End” in terms of the key characteristics of contemporary English-language haibun composition. It also explores the value of modelling the work of writers whose poetry touches you as a way of expanding your writing repertoire.

Introduction

Some years ago, I was interested in expanding my reading from Japanese Masters (Basho and Issa) to Chinese Masters and somehow found my way to Du Fu’s poems. It was frustrating that it was so difficult to find the work of Du Fu and other Asian masters in online sources, particularly in light of Harvard professor Stephen Owen’s comment: “We have Dante, Shakespeare and Du Fu (712-770). These poets create the very values by which poetry is judged.” If Du Fu is so highly regarded by the world’s literary scholars, why is it that the Chinese poet-sage Du Fu . . . an immortal in the East Asian cultural sphere, still remains largely unknown in the Western world, and particularly unknown by poetry enthusiasts?

I liked what I found in Du Fu’s writing. As with Basho and Issa, it warmed me to think I could relate to the experiences and poetic sensibilities of a person writing in 8th century China to my own experiences in 21st century Canada. He’d communicated not just from another country, but across a gap 1300 years. Perhaps it’s because the joys and sorrows of the lived life, despite all our luxuries, hasn’t changed that much.

Continue reading here -> https://rays-blog.ca/exploring-the-writing-chinas-shakespeare-the-poet-du-fu-712-770/

How to Read Haiku

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With The Heron’s Nest Editor Fay Aoyagi and Haijin Chad Lee Robinson

Kitagawa Utamaro, circa 1790s

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |

Early on in my haiku and haibun journey, editors rejected my haibun and several advised me to read haiku, saying that I’d not be able to write a good haibun until I had mastered the haiku part of haibun’s prose-haiku partnership. I had already looked at the many definitions of the two related genres (haiku and haibun), but found definitions lacking in specifics and mostly useless except as a rough guide, particularly the formulaic definitions like number of lines and syllable counts.

So I read a lot of haiku, both those of the Japanese masters and of the published works contemporary haijin and learned I simply didn’t get much out of them except that most didn’t follow the 5-7-5, 3-line, short-long-short structure learned in English classes.

And I mostly wondered why the editors picked the haiku featured in their journals. I concluded that haiku are not only difficult to write, but they are also difficult to read and understand, to “get the poetic spark,” so to speak. A problem was that I had a tendency to read them once quickly and to read too many at a time. In short, I was merely glancing at them, expecting a spark to jump out at me. I wasn’t engaging in what might be called “deep reading.”

I decided that in order to better understand haiku and thus, to be better able to write a worthy haiku and haibun, I had to first hone my haiku reading skills. In this way, I might be able to appreciate and understand why the editors selected some and not others, and particularly why they didn’t accept mine. And that’s what this three-part series is about – How to do a deep reading of haiku for better understanding of the nature of haiku.

Continue reading -> Part 1