Month: February 2020

chirping

a trilling chirp high
from the still-leafless treetops –
I’ve been duly warned.

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

living

which “the rest
of my life”
will I now lead?

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

his birds

finches and sparrows
alight on perches, gazing
at absent feeders

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

evenings

while I was napping
daylight turns again to the
dark night of the soul

 

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

Parents

east towards the sunrise
in their sunset years
hand in hand

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

Migdalia Loughlin RIP

Amherst MA – Early yesterday morning my mother died. I missed her by a few hours, as I had traveled from home to Amherst when I heard her condition had seriously worsened. I was sleeping in the condo she and my father had bought in 2010, and was going to go to my brother’s house early the next morning. But she passed quietly in the night and had been removed by the funeral home by the time I woke up as my brother called me.

I’ve not much to say at this very moment. All I would like to do right now is share a photo I took of her in September 2017 during a family week at Cape Cod. She is standing on the shoreline, at the edge of land and sea, looking out across the vast horizon of the sky. It says all I need to say today.  -twl

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, North of Sixty

Two for today

Snowflakes so tiny
invisible to the eye
pile up nonetheless

Whistling in the dark,
death has her dancing to its
eternal music

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

A Defensive Compromise

Dunkirk NY – My son is very good with sabermetrics. Whenever we discuss baseball together, eventually it gets down to him pulling out some new metric that I hadn’t heard of yet to make his case. Two days ago it was the Pythagorean W-L record, which is a measure of how well or poorly a team is doing based on statistical expectations (how much luck a team is having, good or bad). I’d never heard of it, but there it was. It turns out that the Yankees had enough luck going for them in 2019 that, statistically, they should have been the 4th-best team in baseball, when they were actually the third-best team; they won four extra games due to good luck. So he does not like the idea I am about to propose, sabermetrically speaking. I got this idea from watching cricket, and while I think it’s an interesting idea, it certainly would shape the flavor of the modern game a bit. Continue reading →

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, The Joy of Baseball

Flurries

slowly, one by one,
from beneath the new snowfall
fresh sidewalks emerge

Posted by poorplayer in All Posts, Haiku

Decision

Dunkirk NY – After thinking through yesterday’s dilemma, I decided that there really isn’t that much at stake. So what I will do is continue to post some haiku through February, but not worry all that much about any frogpond submissions, nor whether I get a haiku written each day. The larger question is one of publication in general. There seems to be a great deal of insistence on making sure that submissions are original and have never been published elsewhere, especially electronically. Perhaps this is a prompt for another essay in the near future – the presumed value of originality. I think I shall just continue what I have been doing all along, occasionally posting a haiku or two on this site. Perhaps ignoring journals is a better choice for me.

To that end, I have decided to use a Creative Commons License for my blog. The license grants permission for anyone to share or re-post my work, but only for non-commercial purposes. It also does not allow for re-purposing of the work as part of a larger work. This allows me to consider my blog, not as a publishing platform, but as a sharing platform. If you see something you like and want to share it with others, you are free to do so.

I’ve also developed a new graphic for my 5-7-5 campaign:

So when I write a 5-7-5 haiku, this will appear with it. 5-7-5 is OK!

Lastly, since I paid for a year’s membership to HSA, I shall continue to see how that goes. I have no regional group that’s nearby. The closest one seems to be in Cuyahoga Falls, OH, which is about two hours away. Right now I don’t have the luxury to attend their meetings, but if the opportunity arises I shall give one a try and see how it flies. The HSA seems to be full of contests, prizes and whatnot, which is not for me. I have always been opposed to creating art for the purpose of entering contests or winning awards. It doesn’t seem to fit my temperament. And perhaps my greatest fear is getting critiques of my work from a collection of strangers. One of the things that happened to me just before my retirement was the stunning realization that, as a teacher of acting, a good deal of the time I probably was full of bullshit. It was one of the reasons I retired – I was tired of hearing myself talk, and I came to believe that most of what I knew about acting (if I ever knew anything at all) was no longer applicable. So many times I’ve been in situations where people merely want to demonstrate to others how intelligent and knowledgeable they are, and I don’t really want to get involved in these situations any more. It might just be best for me to sit here quietly in my office, content myself with my own writing (such as it is), and leave it be at that. My preference would be for a one-on-one mentor whose work I admire, but that seems rather far-fetched at the moment.

Zen philosophy speaks of non-attachment to things, and so perhaps the best course for me is to write haiku with an unattached mind. They should be free to float where they wish to go, unencumbered by my ego. Let me see where this path takes me.  -twl

Posted by poorplayer in Haiku, North of Sixty