by Kelly

Every once in awhile, I go to Amazon and type in the word “haiku.”  I’m always on the look out for a new “haiku” title. Some of them I order; many more I don’t.

Yet when I spotted a book by Bradly Jay Keller named 108 Mala Beads: A Year of Haiku, I immediately dropped the title into my virtual shopping cart. After all, Alison and I started Haiku By Two with the thought that it would be “a year of haiku.” I was curious to see what “a year of haiku” meant to somebody else.

Keller’s take on the idea was different than our own. For starters, he did not begin his year of haiku in January, but in May. The haiku in the book, then, span from May of one year to May of the next.

While the haiku in Keller’s book are organized chronologically, the order is not what one might expect.

Rather, his haiku are divided into several distinct categories and then presented chronologically in each section. A section about cows concentrates on haiku about cows and arranges those haiku from May to May. The next section, all about birds, starts the reader back at the beginning of Keller’s year and works forward again.

This organizational pattern seemed weird to me at first. But as I worked through the poems, it made sense as I got to concentrate on a single image (cows, birds) and see how that one element changed as the seasons progressed.

Here is a haiku that I particularly liked from the section titled “Cow Songs.”

May 28th

In their great absence,

The field in silence waits,

For heavy bovine hoofs.

This haiku, from a section titled “Nature,” also struck me.

February 2nd

Beautiful flowers,

Do not resist the sunlight,

They just surrender.

Beyond Keller’s haiku, though, I was curious about the author’s intent in taking on “a year of haiku.” I knew why Alison and I started: to reconnect and to rekindle our individual artistic flairs. Keller started his year of haiku as a way to put the brakes on technological multitasking. “Yet, what is the price of giving one’s life to automobiles, cell phones, television, computers, email and the internet?” he asks in his introduction.

Because haiku asks the writer to pay attention to nature, the act of writing haiku, Keller goes on to say, can help a writer find grace, which he defines as “the effortless experience of spiritual awakening.”

An “encounter with poetry,” Keller writes, “can serve as a direct portal to the experience of grace.”

I can’t speak for Alison, but I know that Keller’s haiku-grace connection holds true for me. Haiku helps me live mindfully. Granted, I’m not mindful all the time, but my haiku habit has gotten me in the habit of paying attention to my surroundings. And for me that awareness has proven addictive. And that is partly why Haiku By Two is now in it’s third year.

And I’m guessing that Bradly Jay Keller, even though he stopped his book at the one-year mark, didn’t stop penning haiku once that year was done.