Life, Writing, Weirdness

And here’s the score.

More than usual, and whether or not I’ll be able to carry it forward as a habit, there comes a time each evening when the screens all go off and if I want to write, it’s in a notebook of some kind. That usually means poetry.

I’ve also been trying to get back into a haiku-a-day habit, something I’ve managed for a few periods of several months or more in the past few years. Whether it’s a cliché or not, quantity doesn’t mean quality on its own, but producing quantity will improve your quality when it comes to creative work. You almost have to get better at something you’re doing a lot. So January contained 32 haiku, and I hope a couple of them are actually worth reading, but considering it’s the first time we’ve had a real winter in a few years, too many of them are focused on cold and snow.

Haiku fit into what I think of as structured poetry, though it’s not the only structure poetry I write. But, and I think I’ve said it before, I work mostly in rhyme and metre. I don’t practice free verse and don’t really consider it poetry and haven’t for a very long time. The rest of the month took in seven more poems:

• One containing 3 quatrains of iambic-ish tetrameter
• One in a single 8-line verse of 6-syllable lines
• One with 4 stanzas in 6-syllable lines
• Thee playing with variations of the Fibonacci form (lines with syllable counts of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8)
• One Minute Poem (a total of 60 syllables in 3 stanzas of 4 lines, syllable counts 8-4-4-4 and an aabb ccdd eeff rhyme scheme

Primary poetic themes for the month seem to be a mix of winter (since haiku are generally expected to involve nature and have a seasonal reference; things about human nature or events without that natural or seasonal tie are more strictly called senryu, but I’m not making that distinction every time I talk about them) and fascism is bad. Neither of those should really be surprising considering the dumpster fire to the south of the country I live in and some of its tendrils trying to ensnare the rest of the world, including Canada.

And, if there’s curiosity about the word count across these 39 poems, remembering that haiku are pretty short (the 17-syllable standard not giving room for a big word count), it comes it at737, which certainly needed a lot more time than building that amount of prose.

There is a poem goal in my goals for 2026, the openly stated goal of 40 (which is less than the full goal, but the secret part depends on the year going well for writing overall) but I’m not including haiku so January puts me at 7, which is certainly more than the 3-4 I’d need for a proper pace, so this goal is looking good in early days.

Until next time, be well, everyone.