Tag Archives: challenge

Some Haiku

I’m always a bit worried about posting poetry because it’s not really a poetry blog. It seems a little unfair to force people to read poetry if they haven’t signed up for it, particularly as people feel obliged to be nice. That’s why I rarely post poetry that hasn’t been published elsewhere first. At least that way, it has been filtered by a proper editor and should be OK.

However, a while ago I did say that I would post a few, so here are a few haiku and senryu to start.

Three lines and a web of rules/definitions/restrictions don’t really suit me. I’d love to be a competent writer of haiku, but I’m locked in a circular system with them. I find them difficult so I don’t write many, and because I don’t write many I don’t improve. It’s also why I struggle with haibun too, as I can write the prose, but can’t nail the haiku. They are, as I say in an unpublished essay on writing haiku, slippery. Give me a tanka, with five lines and freedom from restrictions and I find it a lot easier. The same goes for Tanka Prose, the clumsy name for the Haibun equivalent that uses a tanka in place of the haibun.

I suppose if I were a serious poet, I would accept the challenge of haiku but I actually write for the pleasure of seeing words do things, not because I like difficulty.

Here are a few with a vaguely Christmas/Winter theme. The first has been adapted from a senryu that originally had the first line “Birthday” but it still works.

Christmas
bright paper packages
-the disappointment of socks

Failed Haiku April 2022

melting snow
rooks stalk
the dappled field

Presence Issue 69

a robin
sings from the blackthorn
—we queue for the shop

Wales Haiku Journal Spring 2021

lighter nights
the bus passenger smiles
on his way home

Presence Issue 72

I put them in two columns to make the layout slightly more interesting, but it has the effect of altering the formatting for the ones that are in the second row. Many people do centre their poems so I think I can get away with it. I tried using three columns but that involves right hand justification and that definitely looks odd. I’m sure there’s another way to do it but I’m not sure I have the spare thought capacity to devote to it at the moment. I have ten poems to submit before in the next 38 hours and they aren’t cooperating.

Robin of Sherwood

Titles seem so hard . . .

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I’m currently watching a programme about art. In this episode they are researching a wall painting on the plaster of a bedroom in a house in Surrey. Ben Nicholson was a friend of the one-time owner and is supposedly the painter of the piece. If it is by Nicholson it will be valuable enough to justify preserving it (which probably involves removing a piece of the wall). If not, I fear it may just be destroyed. It all comes down to money. Conserving paintings and removing sections of wall is not a cheap undertaking. However, I like the detective work and the technology.

The question of attribution was finally solved by the art experts (though it was an opinion, of course, rather than fact). They believe that the painting is a joint effort between Nicholson and his mate, This brings the estimated value down from £200,000 to about £50 – 100,000. Nobody is quite sure what a joint work is worth because this is the only one known. This, fortunately, is enough to justify removing the painting.

To do this they paste tissue on the surface (using special glue and tissue), sandwich the wall between two pieces of thick plywood and cut round it. The strange thing is that although I’ve never seen it done before I could (with the exception of the special tissue) have worked out the method. All those years of messing about in poultry sheds seems to have paid off. I miss the days spent with tools and practicality – life as a shop assistant with a computer lacks an element of challenge. It’s OK trying to use sales techniques on eBay, but you never know if something sells because of your skill and knowledge or because it’s too cheap. Or just through blind chance.

Running Like a Hamster

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It seems like I’ve been writing all day, and all I’ve done so far is catch up on work that I’d allowed to get behind last week. This morning’s post doesn’t really count because it had mostly been written and was just lying in drafts waiting for me to press the button. I did have a short break for lunch, but having learnt from past experience, I got back to work before a nap attack had time to occur.

I’ve not done a lot of reading recently, so I apologise for neglecting you all but things have been quite hectic. I’ve slept a little too much time away in front of the TV and I’ve put in four submissions in the last four days and I’m trying to do a fifth, though I’m not doing well on that one as I still haven’t touched it today. This is all made more time-consuming by my poor time management abilities.

I’ve also being doing another Buson 100. I did one before, and tried another which I didn’t complete. I’m now four weeks into the new one. I looked at links for the Buson 100, and you’ll never guess what – one of my posts was the fifth. Embarrassingly, it’s from my second attempt, which petered out. I know other people have done it, because I’ve seen it mentioned on several occasions, but very few people seem to want to admit it.

That is, of course, another reason why I’ve been short of time. I’m writing 70 haiku a week and trying to do a few diary notes each day to put them in context. Some days it takes twenty minutes, some days I don’t get them done. What tends to happen is that I write them down, but don’t get round to typing them up, which can be a problem on days like today, when I have fifty or sixty haiku to type plus some back-dated diary notes. Actually, I’m writing over 70 a week because I often do a few extra and when I’m typing them I often have a couple of ideas for new ones. Some of them are OK, so it’s not a waste. I will tell you more about it in another post. Meanwhile, if you don’t see me about as much as usual, it’s all part of the process. I have just about sorted it out now and am hoping to get back into the swing of things by the end of next week.

Crepuscular rays at Rufford Park

A Few Notes

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For those of you who wanted to know more about the wooden figures at Carsington Water here is a link. It’s unlikely I will see more, as I’m no longer able to walk eight miles to see them all, so you will have to make do with these pictures.

Theer are more details here, and here. They all have a slightly different take on the sculptures, and different photographs.

Seeing that they cost £20,000, I am once again struck by regret that I didn’t know quite how much money was available for Arts Grants in the days I was active and self-employed. This isn’t a snide comment about art, in case you think my Phillistine side is showing, I’m equally envious of people who set up perfectly legal charities to allow them to run nice cars and indulge in foreign travel.

The Water Vole is an older carving, set up before the others. I think there were several others in the past, but they have now rotted, as they tend to do.

Wooden Water Vole at Carsington

This is, if my counting is correct, my ninth day of attempting to write two posts a day. So far the average of two posts a day is holding up, even if it hasn’t been an exact two a day. This post plus one other will see me through the day and will leave me with just 40% of the challenge to complete. Or less, I think I actually said a fortnight, though I’ve been calculating based on fifteen.

After that I really should get back to writing haibun. I’ve drifted away from them recently and need to get back to writing. There’s a fine line between recharging your batteries and losing impetus. That has happened to me many times in the past, a new project slows to a stop as an even newer project comes to the front. I don’t consciously stop doing things I just move on to something else.

It’s like this challenge – two posts a day for two weeks. It was meant to get my numbers up after the week locked out of WP, get me back into practise and use up the backlog of material I was accumulating, like the Gairsoppa story.

I’m getting the numbers back, I’m feeling the flow return, but I have written about new stuff like shopping lists and wooden carvings and still have a lot of the backlog left.

I should do less and finish more.

Another 100 Day Challenge – Haiku

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It’s Day 100 of the Haiku Challenge.

I now have over 1,000 haiku of indeterminate quality. Some of them aren’t haiku, some are senyru. Some are more like fragments, or notes. And many of them are merely bad.

Having taken all that into consideration, was it worth it?

Undoubtedly. I’ve learned a lot from the experience, including that in any 100 day challenge you are going to come to hate what you are doing. Whether this holds true for my new challenge remains to be seen.

I first came up with the idea from reading this this post whilst browsing the net for haiku-related posts. I then moved on to reading this article, which is a lot more ambitious.

My “rules”, garnered from the article, were simple. Ten haiku a day for 100 days, avoiding too much censorship and writing extra to catch up if I couldn’t manage ten one day. As the article admitted that experienced writers were only getting one good haiku out of ten or twenty attempts I felt justified in taking a laid back attitude.

So, what did I learn?

Well, I became more fluent in my writing and found ideas came more easily.

I became addicted to writing and couldn’t rest if I didn’t write at least ten a day. Apart from the days I needed a rest, because there were several days where I hated haiku so badly that I couldn’t write one. That did happen a couple of times, but I soon got over it after a day off.

I also ran out of nature several times. Despite becoming more observant and making better notes as time went on, I found I was struggling with enough nature observations to keep myself going. You don’t see much nature when you are just driving through town to work and back, and magpies and bare branches are simply not enough to feed a heavy haiku habit.

Towards the end of the time I noticed I was writing three line poems with the rhythms and vocabulary of haiku.

That last point is quite important. I started with a lot of long words and details which aren’t really needed in haiku. A three syllable word in a haiku, remember, is three thirteenths of the syllables needed for a modern haiku (seventeen is now considered old-fashioned). Three thirteenths of a sonnet is near enough three lines, so you can see how condensed a haiku is, and why you can’t waste a single syllable.

That was probably the most important thing I learned.

Now, it’s time to take Number Two Son to work.

Over the next few weeks I will do some rewriting and may show you a few poems.

Another last minute post!

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We had 12 parcels to pack this morning, including seven of bulk coins. It wasn’t one of my favourite days because bulk coins are fiddly to pack. You have to pack them tight so they don’t rattle like coins, but you also have to pack them so they are flat enough to go through the post as a large letter. It would be a lot easier to pack them as rolls, but more expensive, and customers want to buy coins, not stamps.

During that time we discussed what we’d done on Sunday, which wasn’t exciting, and what we had planned for the afternoon. This wasn’t exciting either.

I went to McDonald’s in Arnold for lunch, but there was a long queue so my healthy eating resolution survived a little longer. Then I thought about fish and chips, but there was nowhere I could think of that allowed me to park close enough (let’s be honest, I make a sloth look industrious). Finally, I bought a chicken sandwich from Wilko.

That, to be honest, wasn’t a great decision, as it was on white bread, but it was next to the stationery, which is what I’d gone in for. They are fixing the surface of the rooftop car park at Wilko. I include this detail not because it is interesting, but because someone reading this blog in 100 years may find it to be a valuable historical nugget.

You never know. A child doing a school project in the next century might want to know about Arnold, or car parking or 21st century diets. Whether they will benefit from an insight into my life is another question.

Back home I made a fish pie and a vegetable curry – one for tea tonight and one for tea on Wednesday. The Tuesday evening meal will be the warmed up stew from Sunday, one bowl for me and one for Number Two Son. Julia is going out with her coven of friends for a meal and will escape the leftovers.

It’s taken a long time to write this, and I’m left with just nine minutes to post before midnight – please forgive any ragged edges but I have a deadline to meet and a challenge to face.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse…

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I unlocked, turned off the alarm and went through to the back room to switch on the lights and computers…

Nothing.

A lot of the sockets were dead and a look at the fuseboard showed one of the two power circuits had tripped. We couldn’t reset it but we did manage to arrange a couple of extension leads to run the phones, a computer and the credit card machine.

It’s likely that the heavy rain has been getting in again. The electrician is coming on Monday and we will find out then.

Apart from that, my watch broke. Just as I found the power was out one of the spring-loaded bars in my watch strap broke and the watch fell off.

It never rains but it pours…

That may not be an appropriate expression if it turns out to be an electrical fault caused by water. I have had experience of that before and ended up with a surprise and a sooty burn mark on my hand.

In the evening I went to collect my tablets, using the prescription I picked up yesterday. I noticed, when reading the prescription, that I have the normal slew of threatening messages about reviews and appointments and, this time, a demand that I book an appointment for epilepsy screening.

This is why I don’t normally bother reading notes and letters from the doctor – I’m now worried what they know that I don’t.

Haiku Challenge – Day 27 – Ups and Downs

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I was going to post a couple of days ago when it was day 25. This would have been quarter of the way through, but I was diverted and didn’t get on with it.

However, if I had updated at that time I wouldn’t have been able to include details of my latest rejection, as mentioned yesterday. Nor would I have been able to contrast reality with my comment in the previous report. I said:

“However, I’m not going to make any boastful claims just now. I’m going to send some of the new haiku off over the next few weeks and see if any editors like them.”

It’s fortunate that I didn’t make any boastful claims, as I did send some off to an editor, and the editor returned them. It’s difficult to tell, but I suspect this indicates my haiku writing hasn’t improved as much as I thought.

Set against that, there is the Autumn edition of Wales Haiku Journal. Near the bottom of the page is my first published haiku. It’s under the name of Simon Wilson rather than Quercus, but it is me. If I was going to lie about it I’d have chosen a better one…

A Drive in Derbyshire

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1st November and, by coincidence, it’s Day 25 of the 100 Posts/100 Days Challenge. So far, so good, with posts on 25 successive days.

I’m cutting a few corners to keep to the target but it’s not too bad – I’ve always done that, even when I wasn’t trying to keep to a target. It’s not as if the written version is ever as good as the version I have in my head when I sit down to type.

We went to Derbyshire today – looking for autumn colour and fresh air. The air was certainly fresh, but most of the colour seemed to be either dull or, as we got further North, lacking. At the top of the county only the beech trees seemed to be showing any coloured leaves. The rest of the trees were bare.The header picture shows Wingfield Manor, one of the places Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned.

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Some Photographs

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This is what happens whe you are on a mission to post every day, when your wife is going mad looking for something and you can’t concentrate because of the noise and bustle. Yes, twenty four days into the 100 day self-imposed challenge and I’m sticking in three photos to make sure I don’tmiss a day.

I really should do better.

Silver Birch Clumber Park

Clumber Park

Dead Trees – Clumber Park

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm