Field like a valley / cradled between corporate / –whim and hard-earned sweat.
~Super Bowl Haiku.

 Writing about the everyday, putting pen to page and watching a snapshot of living, a moment unfolding like a developing Polaroid, appear in front to me—this is how I describe the paractice of haiku. Years ago, I went to Taos, New Mexico, and studied with the writer Natalie Goldberg. I’d found her book, WRITING DOWN THE BONES, and had begun a daily writing practice, something revolutionary for me in its simplicity. Write about the barely-noticed aspects of your life, drop down into the details of it, the life you are in now. In that book, Goldberg credits writer and poet Erica Jong‘s FRUITS AND VEGETABLES as being a catalyst for her own work. When she first came across Jong’s book, Goldberg was working in a restaurant:

“One day I was cooking ratatouille, and I was cutting up eggplant and onions all day. At the end of the day, I went to the bookstore and I saw a thin volume of poetry by Erica Jong called Fruits and Vegetables. The first poem I read was about cooking an onion. I didn’t know you could write a poem about something that ordinary. It was what I’d been doing all day. And with that, I was ready.” *

So my own life, my interests, my obsessions, my daily actions can be the way into a very personal, sustained writing practice. Haiku, with its twisting third line, its brevity, its spiritual slant of nature, works well for me as one aspect of that writing practice. Things move fast in New York City. I notice and I write. And having been an athlete, the Super Bowl is poetry. For writers—everything is really.

*Quote from the blog, Reflection’s Edge.