Yours portly is brainstorming some book ideas. Right now, there are two in the hopper: the long-anticipated poetry collection Offensive Poems: With Pictures, which will include a collection of haiku with hot takes on the dystopian nightmare of modernity; and a collection of my writings about fast food.
Somewhere amid all the boxes rests my sketchbook, full of detailed doodles that will make it into Offensive Poems. Much of the poetry is written on the backs of those pictures. Once I find that bad boy, I’m firing up the scanner and getting those pictures uploaded.
In the meantime, I’ve been tinkering with some haiku here and there. I’m drawn to the form because, in my midwittery, it’s the easiest poetic form to remember: three lines in a five-seven-five syllabic pattern. No keeping track of iambic pentameter or the like (I was never good with the stress-unstressed thing, even though as a musician I possess a good sense of rhythm) or the like.
Of course, haiku, like all poetic forms of any quality, is more than just following a syllabic pattern. The form in its purest sense also calls for subject matter that reflects its naturalistic feel. The haiku in Offensive Poems won’t really follow the spirit of the form, but today’s little poem hopefully will.
The poem, “Wabi-Sabi,” is based on the Japanese concept of the same name. The concept broadly refers to an imperfect beauty; imperfections are, like a beauty spot on a woman, what paradoxically make something beautiful even more so.
In the poem below, I frame the concept of wabi-sabi in contrast to the Platonic theory of Forms, in which Plato proposed that all things aspire to be the ideal “Form” of what they are. A tree, for example, strives to be like the Platonic Form of a “tree,” which only exists on a higher plane of existence (or, for Christians or Neo-Platonists [not the same thing], exists only in Heaven and/or God’s Mind). Another way to think of Forms is the inability of the artist to capture perfectly what is in his mind’s eye (which, as an unskilled, untrained doodler, I experience frequently.
I’m also fascinated by the Japanese process in ceramics of kintsugi, in which cracks or breaks are repaired with gold, creating a (very wabi-sabi) piece that is even more beautiful because it’s been broken and repaired. There is something beautiful and even profoundly Christian about that concept: God Fills our cracks and Heals our brokenness through the Blood of His Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; an idea to develop further, perhaps, another time.
Well, I’ve done what bad artists always do: written an essay to explain a work that should be able to speak for itself. So, with that, here is “Wabi-Sabi”:
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