MiddHaiku

The spoken word event last Thursday, Night Kite Revival, was phenomenal. Listening to Taylor Mali turn Microsoft Word into spoken music was inspiring, and when I walked out of McCullough there were so many things I suddenly had to accomplish. I wanted to write five poems, change the life of an impressionable youth, fall in love and do something stupid that would become profound 10 years later. Instead, I had to write this column.

I refused to be deterred. There needed to be some way to fit poetry into my column. Translating spoken word into written spoken word sounded like a bad idea. So did appealing to the Opinions editors to get one of those sound things you put in birthday cards for my column this week. Inspiration finally came, when I looked at the website HaikuLeaks, which collected the 65 coincidental haikus found in the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks. Poetry constructed with vision and passion undoubtedly makes us feel, makes us think, makes us sigh when we read the last of the carefully chosen words. HaikuLeaks reminded me that the accidental placement of words into a poetic rhythm can be beautiful, but most of the time it probably won’t make any sense. I was on a mission to find poetry that inadvertently enters our lives without us noticing.

The Middlebury College Course Catalog 2010-2011 is surprisingly lyrical. The course description for PHYS 155: An Introduction to the Universe has a very profound haiku hidden in its details of course requirements:

How did it begin?
Will it expand forever,
or how may it end?

Wow. Deep. The course description of Professor Stanger’s The Politics of Virtual Realities also features an inadvertent haiku:

How can we uphold
the ideals of liberty
and equality?

Other accidental poems would not be recognized as poetry in their native prose form, but open up to literary interpretation when reorganized into haiku. For example,

Equivalent work
in other media is
also possible.

and

Thesis or essay
prospectus is the final
product of this course.

Is “course” a metaphor for life? And when they say the thesis is the “final product” does that mean we die after we turn it in? Right now, that interpretation doesn’t seem too far-fetched. The College Handbook has some poems waiting behind the academic policies and toneless descriptions of how to transfer course credit.

Two credits can be
earned by participation
in two different sports.

and

checking procedures
are followed consistently
throughout the party.

These two “poems” are ripe with possibility as for how to interpret them, and I’m going to avoid giving any analysis so I don’t taint your understanding of these poems. Let’s just say that last haiku might have changed my life when I realized that the poem is most likely an allusion to Anna Karenina and “checking procedures” is an allegory for class struggle. Out of all the haiku I found lurking on the College website, my favorite was one from a commencement speech given at Breadloaf by John Elder in 2007:

They were to be called,
and I’m not making this up,
Edith and Gertrude.

I was amused by the mostly nonsensical poetry produced by the faculty and staff of Middlebury College, and was thirsty to find poetry elsewhere. One of the slam poets equated poets and politicians on Thursday, so I went on a search to see if he was correct. Turns out politicians are poets, if only accidentally. In the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Barack Obama rose to the national spotlight, and produced a few clever haiku:

They must be pursued
and they must be defeated.
John Kerry knows this.

and

We coach Little League
in the Blue States and have gay
friends in the Red States.

Obama continues sprinkling his speeches with haiku in the White House, but they aren’t as heart-stirring … or melodic. For example,

It is great to see
all of you here for our first
White House science fair.

The United States Constitution has symbolic importance and lyrical moments without being organized into a series of haiku, and it had its moment in the limelight the same day Night Kite Revival performed in Middlebury. For the first time in our history, the Constitution was read on the House floor, but the document was not read in its entirety. When there were places in the text where the changes made in amendments superceded the original text, the original text was removed. For example, the three-fifths compromise, an important, if uncomfortable reminder that the United States has made many mistakes, was not read because of the subsequently ratified 13th and 14th Amendments.

The Constitution should have been read in its entirety. Life isn’t always poetic, and it shouldn’t always be poetic either. Without the context, the reasons for why the changes to our Constitution are important evaporate from our consciousness and all we are left with is the sunny afterthought, or a nonsensical, if well-rhythmed sentence. As the accidental haiku I found littered throughout dry documents show, when poetry is stumbled upon or forcefully built out of boring sentences, it can sometimes be brilliant, but most of the time it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe poetry is best left to those with the vision and passion to bring it to life.