Summer Haiku

The measure of a moment is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a variable thing.  I remember watching the rickety wall clock in our elementary school classroom on the final day before summer vacation. The device had no second hand – and the minute hand would tremble interminably, emitting a dry ratchety sound as we stared, before it suddenly leaped ahead.  I could feel my life aging between one minute and the next.  Of course, all I have to do now is bring to mind any experience of great joy – playing with our grandson at the beach, for example, watching the waves marching endlessly toward shore – and the hours seem to speed past much quicker than those old schoolroom minutes.

Perhaps the manipulation of time is an essential purpose for all poems, but surely it’s at the core of the Japanese haiku, the world’s most popular form of poetry – as well as the Korean sijo, which preceded it by a few centuries, and of course the grandfather of all short-form poems, the Chinese jintishi, which was born a thousand years earlier.  To keep a moment from escaping, even if only temporarily.  To stretch a minute’s worth of living so wide, our minds are able to play inside it, explore its borders, savor the way meaning feels inextricably wedded to the sense-impressions flickering around us.  To begin comprehending how powerfully our mindset alters the experience of even the most mundane of events – which leads us to realize how much beauty we routinely overlook.  These are the tasks of the haiku devotee.  Through deep study, diligent practice, and decades of commitment to exploring that relationship between mind and moment, Brad Bennett has made himself a haiku master (though, more modestly, he’d likely call himself simply a student of the art form.)   For years, Brad taught third grade and – as is the tradition in Japan – ably demonstrated that you can never start too young in exploring this art form.  As for himself, he began writing haiku in college but, over the last two decades, has developed real mastery in the form, making its practice central to his daily life.  His poems have appeared in most of the important haiku journals like Modern Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly and Acorn, and have been awarded honors too numerous to mention.  He’s published two collections – a drop of pond (which won a 2016 Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from The Haiku Foundation) and a turn in the river – both published by Red Moon Press.  In the summer of 2021, he was the Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park, and was recently appointed as haiku and senryu editor for Frogpond magazine.  Here, as our own summer is racing past (and a part of the New England mind is already contemplating the arrival of a first frost), it’s an appropriate time to slow the clock down for a bit, to appreciate what is actually taking place around us.  Brad’s poems tick past quicker than a minute hand, but linger in the mind all day.