haiku

spring rain
the ducks that haven't
been cooked quack
haiku by Issa

"A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition."
David Lanoue's webpage

for those who are getting worried about my recent interests in blossoms and japanese poetry - both sakuramania and haiku actually speak of the same thing: the experience of seasonal change, unavoidably present in a daily life in japan, right under tokyo's neon surface. kana told me that up to today, every japanese letter is opened with a reference to the season - “as we are eagerly awaiting the cherry trees to bloom, ...”

the big horse
rubs his butt
on cherry blossoms
haiku by Issa

issa kobayashi, one of japan’s most famous haiku MCs, crossed the country two centuries ago, producing thousands of haiku poems. the funny associations, direct imaginative language, and fascination for animals that ring through issa’s poems come very close to “the sheer excitement and unaffected honesty about every cultural phenomenon” I like in the songs of wesley willis. both issa (°1763) and wesley (°1963) are truly original rock and rollers, impossible to imitate in their joyful celebration of the ordinary.

The electric eel shocked the hell out of me
He also blew me out of the water
He did, thanks to his ass
Wesley Willis

"The haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily. The haiku wakens desire: how many Western readers have dreamed of strolling through life, notebook in hand, jotting down ‘impressions’ whose brevity would guarantee their perfection, whose simplicity would attest to their profundity (by virtue of a double myth, one classical, that makes concision a proof of art, the other romantic, which attributes a premium of truth to improvisation)."
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

sake drinken
en haiku schrijven
geliefde zonden
gevonden op wikipedia

join me and download hundreds of haiku to your iPod. here you can find some of wesley’s lyrics.
and through a recent movie called Koi wa Go Shichi Go (love is five seven five), high-school haiku is on its way to become cool again.