super underdog

I always root for the underdog. And with a name like Barack Obama, what can I say? It's time to shake up America.

3 essential components of HK

1. nature sketching
2. objective description
3. juxtaposition

Hafez

Didn't do it for me. Maybe I am not romantic enough for him. Or maybe it's really because of the translations. Really hate reading the translated versions of stuff, especially poetry, where the language plays a huge part in understanding what the poet is trying to convey. But then there is no solution to this, unless I can manage to master the language sufficiently to fully appreciate the poetry.

End of Oil

Energy efficiency, conservation, whatever you choose to call it, is the way to go. Totally agree.

Dying the Japanese way

Dying has never been so melodramatic. Only the Japanese can die like that. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that the Zen monks can muster enough life to craft poetry and have it written down before keeling over. It's as if they could control life and death and hold the button until their pearls of wisdom are recorded before letting life pass out of them. Bizarre. Who did they think they were, that they could actually master Death? Even more strange is the way they characterise death as "quitting the world", like they, as human beings, can choose to quit or not. I guess in the suicidal sense, one can do so but these monks certainly didn't seem like they committed harakiri or seppuku or something like that. A lot of them, according to this book, just dropped dead right after they uttered their poetic pieces.

Untouched

Didn't do it for me

Don't know why

Maybe the translations

Simply haiku

In genuine haiku, we live as if for the first time, fresh and innocent, knowing reality through deep feeling. Haiku employ a now-moment's material phenomena as a point of departure for reverberations reaching into interior modes of existence. Haiku are written best and appreciated best through the intelligence of the heart. A haiku is not meant to convince the intellect but to engender what may be termed as an "affirmation" in the very ground of one's being. The greatest pleasure given by an authentic haiku's object-perception as such is always less than the least of joys offered by its spirit. - Robert Speiss

Snow on Water: Red Moon Anthology 1998

Wind lifting
the quail tracks
with the snow
Nasira Alma

frosty moon –
silver of a possum’s back
parting the ivy
Robert Gilliland

Estate auction –
can’t get my hand back out
of the cookie jar
Randy Brooks

long wait over –
his thigh prints dissolving
on the lobby sofa
Don McLeod

Wall Street gym –
Junior execs
run in place
Anthony Pupello