hosts : Sanjuktaa Asopa & Vandana Parashar
twilight
me slowly pouring
into the not-me
---- Jim Kacian
(roadrunner 7.3 (2007), the poet's chapbook orbis tertius (2007), a full-length collection long/after (2017), and in Haiku 21 (ed. Gurga & Metz, 2021))
Thank you so much. I still need some reference to explain
'me slowly pouring into the not-me'
This has got to be very deep. For me, "twilight" is the first hint. It's neither day, nor night. But it represents a process of change of something into its opposite. As I see it, from light to darkness. Going over to L2, we have "me" and then in L3, it's "not me". If "me" represents light, then it may be identified as self-understanding. "not me" probably stands for the turmoil of not being able to grapple with oneself. I am associating this with phenomenological ontology as in Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
Asked about the making of the poem, Jim Kacian says,
there is really no original story to the poem, other than it was written well after i had begun the habit of being a haiku poet
the impetus was an actual twilight, and for some reason my thoughts moved in this direction
as kurt vonnegut would say, the moment was structured that way
what might be of interest, though, is that i have used this haiku as the basis for a haiga, which i’m happy to share with our readers (you’ll see i changed the order a bit for the haiga)
and should any questions arise i’d be happy to try to answer them.
This reads like a line out of the Gita!
Wonderful! So palpable