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tommyhousworth's review against another edition
4.0
A breezy, quick read, this collection of western haikus was a happy accident, a fluke. Seven friends from the Athens, GA area agreed to stay in touch via daily haikus sent on postcards for the entirety of a year. REM frontman Michael Stipe and somewhat lesser-known musicians, filmmakers, and writers make up the group of friends. I don't think they ever intended for these to be shared in a public forum, but the result is a delightfully entertaining glance at a year through the lens of a handful of misfit friends: cynics, artists on the brink, romantics, idealists, and ironists.
The group agreed - either intentionally or tacitly - to abandon the traditional 5-7-5 syllable cadence of Haiku and went with a combination of classical Eastern form (seasonal reference, a moment seized purely, and a unique point-of-view) and Western beat poet looseness, something Kerouac referred to as "pops", little spontaneous poems that offer a burst of energy or enlightenment. The result is funny, touching, illustrative, snarky, and affirming.
Don't think too much, just find a copy and read a few daily. The poems are only attributed through an appendix in the back of the book, which keeps it delightfully anonymous and allows the reader to start to see patterns that might point to the author of some of the haikus, but that's beside the point. This is what happens when friends lean into art as a tool for loving, playful communication.
NOTE: I found the book on a whim, walking away from the poetry section at a used bookstore, the title caught my eye and I doubled-back to pick it up, thumbed through it, and decided i would buy it. I was in the checkout line before I realized Stipe and other Georgia artists were the authors, which only sealed the deal for me. Even finding the book felt like a haiku: spontaneous, epiphanic, fateful.
The group agreed - either intentionally or tacitly - to abandon the traditional 5-7-5 syllable cadence of Haiku and went with a combination of classical Eastern form (seasonal reference, a moment seized purely, and a unique point-of-view) and Western beat poet looseness, something Kerouac referred to as "pops", little spontaneous poems that offer a burst of energy or enlightenment. The result is funny, touching, illustrative, snarky, and affirming.
Don't think too much, just find a copy and read a few daily. The poems are only attributed through an appendix in the back of the book, which keeps it delightfully anonymous and allows the reader to start to see patterns that might point to the author of some of the haikus, but that's beside the point. This is what happens when friends lean into art as a tool for loving, playful communication.
NOTE: I found the book on a whim, walking away from the poetry section at a used bookstore, the title caught my eye and I doubled-back to pick it up, thumbed through it, and decided i would buy it. I was in the checkout line before I realized Stipe and other Georgia artists were the authors, which only sealed the deal for me. Even finding the book felt like a haiku: spontaneous, epiphanic, fateful.
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