Contest 2

Mu

Thom Williams

Memorial Contest

Mu First

scattered ashes—

the things

I don’t remember

— Seren Fargo

Bellingham, WA

Author’s Statement: For me, haiku offer a poetic format that captures the way I often experience the world, whether the external natural world or the internal psychological one. It is especially satisfying to write a haiku that reflects how an observed moment can resonate well beyond the observation and the moment.

All that can follow the moment of death is memory. Thus, in a way, have we created the idea of death within our ability to continue a thing’s existence after that existence is no longer active in the “living world.” There’s a great deal of beauty and devastation of the world in this consequence. What Fargo has done uniquely with the extensive tradition of death haiku is create a wholesome experience of death not arrived at by memory. In this manner, Fargo allows death to be truly present by removing the speaker’s ability to transcend the moment of death with any ruminations of the past. This haiku also embodies our contest’s aim, and what we see as the poignant and principle purpose for modern haiku at large: say something large, small. Haiku does not require universal empathy; it promotes it, which is what Fargo’s haiku accomplishes, as does death itself.

Mu Second

all thoughts

becoming cicada thoughts

relentless heat

— Eric L. Houck J.

Deltona, FL

“all thoughts becoming / cicada thoughts” is simply one of the most graceful and affecting phrases we have ever read in the realms of modern haiku. There’s every sense and offshoot of oneness in this phrase that is arrived at time and time again in the many centuries of haiku’s various arts. The influence of summer, and its reigning natures, only adds to the feeling and fruition of inevitable oneness. There seems to be all of life on the brink in this haiku, with the pulse and limitations of life juxtaposed against the brief and regarded unfulfilled life of the cicada—all mortalities understood at once, even the ones affecting seemingly immortal things, like said, thoughts.

Mu Third

before

we had words

plum blossoms

— Cara Holman

Portland, OR

Author’s Statement: I like to think of haiku as a moment crystallized in time. The challenge of writing haiku is thus to distill a single moment down to its essence, using a mere handful of words. My best haiku come to me when I am able to be receptive to the world around me, and pay attention properly.

Often, with words, we forget all other natural languages. Haiku is the attempt at natural languages. Cara accomplishes not just the core of our contest’s aim with this haiku, but also the core of what William Carlos Williams once said, “no ideas but in things,” which, unquestionably, came from the influence of Eastern art. Cara accomplishes this “idea,” and her own idea without committing herself to the traditional path in haiku of emulating natural language through present images. Rather, Cara lets the image of plum blossoms speak for themselves, which is what lets the reader and the author alike come to this realization that the plum blossoms are, themselves, enough of language that there is seemingly no need for words. This brings to mind Hamlet’s answer to Polonius of “words, words, words” when asked what he is reading. Who does not look forward to the ceasing of words so that the plum blossoms will, once again, return?

The idea for the contest, the 7s, arose from a conversation with our late founder, Thom Williams, over our joint love for Basho’s indelible titan of a haiku, “I go, / you stay; / two autumns,” Cor van den Veuvel’s one word wallop, “Tundra,” and generally the whole body of Eastern literature that teases meaning out of economy. Our love of the minimal doesn’t stop there, though. We’ve also turned plenty of times to John Cage’s maxim of, “no such thing as silence,” Molly Bloom’s many “yeses,” and lastly Estragon’s recurrent motto of “nothing to be done” in Waiting For Godot. Our fervor for haiku was born and is sustained by the feeling it gives us through its brevity. Feelings, themselves, are brief; it is by thinking that we increase them; thus, as readers, do we admire the haiku that we find the easiest to translate the silence of our feelings into the volumes of our thoughts with. We all want to read what we know, or better yet, experience knowing something, we once knew, new again. Thus, so it was by staying true to ourselves and staying true to what we believe in that we’ve created the 7s contest.

As this contest is in memory of Thom Williams, we must say that we know he would have been proud of the turnout, the selections, and the idea that Mu is as much of us, the editors, as it is of the readers, and by that convergence does the real success and beauty of Mu come. We are in debt to the wealth of submissions that we received from all around the globe and honored to announce that we received more than double the submissions that we did for our first contest. As simple as the heart can get, thank you!

Now let’s get to it! We believe real haikuists immortalize their voice in what they do not say, so we are grateful to be able to share this quietude with you. One can say everything in silence, so if words must be used, they should be used to say those silences. Here are the many ideas of great silence that we’ve found: