I don’t get out much. Living where I do, there’s nowhere to go, and my big jaunt is usually from the little farmstead I inhabit to one of the nearby tiny towns, a distance of 10 or 15 miles depending on which way I go.
This is why so many of my haiku are about the dogs, or coyotes, or the weather. There’s not much going on around here. Someone more keenly attuned to the natural world than I am would find enough haiku moments to fill a calendar. As it is, I have to look pretty sharp and then hope a coyote howls at a different kind of moon than I wrote about last time. Needless to say, I’m missing a lot.
But seeking the constellations of life is a valuable thing in itself; writing a good haiku after making the discovery is the cherry on top. As one looks more, it becomes a habit. With diligent practice, the constellations become more numerous, more sharply defined, more richly patterned.
Jeanne Emrich has written about getting into the haiku habit. This is in many ways a primer, but it also reminds those of us who have written haiku for years what it is we’re looking for and what to do with it once we see it. Jeanne has illustrated her essay with some excellent haiku.
That’s one of the best metaphorical applications of the word “constellation” I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of a definition of “myth” by Paul Avis in God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology: “numinous symbols constellated in narrative form.” I tell my literature students, by way of explaining how I can get away with referring to “the creation myth” or “the resurrection myth,” that in a constellation — a “bringing together of stars” into a dipper or a bear by connecting them with lines — the lines are from the imagination, but the stars are real. In your application, it seems the events around you are real, and their association in the haiku is created by the imagination.
Greg, I remembered your telling me about Avis’s wonderful definition and use of “constellated” and had it firmly in mind when I wrote this. That metaphor is one of the most regularly useful ones I’ve encountered, whether I’m writing haiku or just thinking about things.