The summer of 1982 found me washing dishes, not writing but drinking heavily & living in a basement bachelor in downtown Toronto. Often, in the evenings, I would sit on the steps of the apartment building, drinking cheap wine & rediscovering the works of Jack Kerouac. In the ramblings of Kerouac & Gary Snyder (as recorded in The Dharma Bums) I found a direction out of my current sense of emptiness – zen buddhism & the composition of haiku. While my experiments with zen philosophy & meditation proved futile, my interest in haiku was enriched by a wide reading of traditional & contemporary Japanese haiku in translation. That same summer I enrolled in a haiku workshop given by George Swede at Ryerson. For the next few months I dedicated myself to the writing of haiku, documenting within the structures of the English haiku tradition certain high & low moments of my tired existence in a large & varied metropolis.
That autumn I somehow found myself in the role of secretary of the Haiku Society of Canada. I spent the next several months organizing a massive reading of haiku which would take place at Harbourfront & which would feature the best-known writers of haiku from across Canada. During this period I met with & read the work of many prominent north American haikuists. Rather than encouraging me, this brought about my complete disillusionment with haiku. What I discovered was a mass of hobbyists imitating translations of centuries-old Japanese haiku. Everywhere the subject matter was foreign to that of contemporary north American existence. Clearly most of the poets I read had not even discovered the modernism of contemporary Japanese haiku. The few haikuists who were doing anything original were completely bogged down in lifeless explorations of form & linguistics.
When it was my turn to take the stage at Harbourfront the following spring, I drunkenly & somewhat pathetically lashed out at the audience: Do you really want to hear this crap? Some people I know remember my performance fondly; I’m sure that many of the haikuists present remember it otherwise. I’ve never written a haiku since nor read one nor had any intercourse with other Canadian haikuists. The haiku selected for this book are the best of those which I wrote in that period of approximately one year. Take ’em or leave ’em.
When it was my turn to take the stage at Harbourfront the following spring, I drunkenly & somewhat pathetically lashed out at the audience: Do you really want to hear this crap? Some people I know remember my performance fondly; I’m sure that many of the haikuists present remember it otherwise. I’ve never written a haiku since nor read one nor had any intercourse with other Canadian haikuists. The haiku selected for this book are the best of those which I wrote in that period of approximately one year. Take ’em or leave ’em.
When it was my turn to take the stage at Harbourfront the following spring, I drunkenly & somewhat pathetically lashed out at the audience: Do you really want to hear this crap? Some people I know remember my performance fondly; I’m sure that many of the haikuists present remember it otherwise. I’ve never written a haiku since nor read one nor had any intercourse with other Canadian haikuists. The haiku selected for this book are the best of those which I wrote in that period of approximately one year. Take ’em or leave ’em.
When it was my turn to take the stage at Harbourfront the following spring, I drunkenly & somewhat pathetically lashed out at the audience: Do you really want to hear this crap? Some people I know remember my performance fondly; I’m sure that many of the haikuists present remember it otherwise. I’ve never written a haiku since nor read one nor had any intercourse with other Canadian haikuists. The haiku selected for this book are the best of those which I wrote in that period of approximately one year. Take ’em or leave ’em.
Jones
College Street, Toronto, 1984