Mostly Haiku

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Now that the last thing
Which smelled of you has gone, for
Ever has begun.

15 April 2007

This cld actually apply to a bereavement too, where the writer misses the other person.

Posted by Shieh Jen Li at 8:22 AM

Shieh Jen Li: I'm a time-rich/money poor, single mother. I mostly write haiku, because I like the discipline of the form. I had hardly written anything for years, and it took some terrible events in April 2007, which led to the end of my marriage, to start me writing again. That was the start of a sequence of poems about my divorce, which I have called "Separate Ways". I think each poem can stand on its own, but it is also an unfolding (and as yet, unfinished) story. I have found the haiku form stops me from getting over-emotional and "gushy". It took several months before I wrote about anything else, but when I did ("Summer Solstice"), it felt like a really big step. I think the style and subject matter of my "non-divorce poems" are also influenced by the fact that I am quite a keen photographer, so a lot of them are purely observational, and are about things that caught my eye, because they were quirky or ironic. I believe that my poems are carefully crafted, and I think very hard about every single word (well, you have to, when most of them are only 17 syllables long!). By the way, the photo was taken, while I was actually writing the poems on 8 October 2008!