THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 19 December 2024 — Matthew Caretti, featured poet

hosts: Vidya Shankar & Shalini Pattabiraman

A Thursday Feature.

poet of the month: Matthew Caretti

19 December 2024

Matthew Caretti

Matthew has been influenced in equal parts by his study of German language and literature, by the approach of the Beat writers, by his travels and his Zen monastic training. After leaving the Seo-un Hermitage, Matthew engaged in a pilgrimage through South Asia before returning to Africa, where he had lived and worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He served as Principal at Amitofo Care Centre, an orphanage and school for five hundred children in Malawi, and as director of the same NGO’s centre in Lesotho. Matthew now teaches English and leads a simple life in Pago Pago, American Samoa. His collections include Harvesting Stones (2017, winner of the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award), Africa, Buddha (2022, Red Moon Press) and Ukulele Drift: Poems from a Small Island (2023, Red Moon Press). His prose and poems appear regularly in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, contemporary haibun online, Hedgerow, Cattails, Tiny Moments and several other journals. He is the recipient of a 2024 Touchstone Award for his haibun ‘Deep Water Port’.

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In the two haibun we showcase this week, Matthew sticks to the conventional style of three-line haiku. Even the prose is minimal. Yet very impactful.

By the Sea as My Dog Lay Dying

in the wash

of the wave’s end

its beginning

I hear whale song in that one swathe of sea still in the light. Before the storm in this sheltered silence that follows again the heart sutra.

split and spittle

of tin roof rain

a death rattle

My sand castles crumble at the wrack line. There at the mouth of the swiftlet cave a tumbledown echo of grief. I stumble off into the forest.

how to reconcile

heaven and earth

hornet stings

Then again this flotsam tide of storm petrels walking on water. My hope to find the lost-at-sea returned. Inside the thunder of the drydock, a leaky bulkhead. More tears.

seakeeping

to rescue the bottle

outside the note

—The Haibun Journal, October 2024

Dark Whistling: An Abbreviated Melody

The intention is not to not stay. Nor is it not to not go. An attempt at a Thanksgiving meeting failed, and the ensuing phone conversations would not provide the intimacy necessary for an exchange of such gravity. I convince myself that the trip to Whistler she suggests might work and make the long flight to the West Coast. But already along the windswept banks of Lake Union, I broach our divide, explaining my reasoning and doubts, questioning her motives and choices. And just a few hours later, I quietly walk out of her life. 

word of thanks 

for a long amble 

in the wind

—cho, September 2005

https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/chohtmlarchive/pages053/Caretti_Dark.html

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VS: You mentioned earlier that you first wrote poetry, then veered towards prose and now you are back to writing poetry. How has this journey affected your writing style, especially with regard to haibun? What does haibun allow you to express that straightforward prose does not?  

MC: Well, the push was toward prose, but the pull always toward poetry. So I don’t think there was ever an either-or dynamic. There was instead a fecund waiting, with Basho’s collection then somehow making the end of that period into a new beginning. Before the first pieces were drafted, though, I had to learn to observe. My time in Korea and introduction to Zen were instrumental to the development of that skillset. Everything was novel, which in turn constantly piqued my curiosity. And by extension the lens processing those inputs itself began to be regularly reassessed. It was also a time when I was able to travel often and simply within Asia. With all of that happening seemingly at once, the first haibun I drafted were not particularly good by any standard. They were imitative and exploratory. I was simply feeling my way in the dark toward a door I knew intuitively was there.

Then at some point there was a coalescence of sensation and perception and a rudimentary understanding of the haibun form. I find that this medium allows for a more complex and layered rendering of lived (even imagined) experience. The prose is the movement toward an approaching curve in the road. The haiku the glimpse at what’s around it. But then, of course, another curve lies ahead.

VS: What comes first — prose or haiku? We are keen to know your answer especially because most of your haibun have multiple ku.

MC: Definitely the haiku. As I noted in THG’s August 2024 feature about “Deep Water Port,” “… many, or even these days most, of my haibun emerge as a collection of haiku that fail in some way as individual poems. However, these pieces often contain compelling imagery that interrelates and, when combined, works to create a narrative. My journals are filled with haiku that never see the vetted-and-ready-for-submission file, though they serve as notes on meaningful perceptual experiences calling out for some sort of expression.”

However, there are times, rare as they may be, when I begin with something anecdotal in prose, then work to find in my notebooks haiku that work in terms of enhancing the feeling of the piece and, perhaps if there are multiple prose stanzas, linking and shifting.

Prompt for members:

How would you interpret the phrase, "to rescue the bottle / outside the note"?

I look forward to reading the philosophies that this phrase inspires in you, the imagery that builds up for you, the explicit and implicit commentaries that you demonstrate through your poems.

Haibun outside this prompt can also be posted!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!

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PLEASE NOTE:

1. Only two haibun per poet per prompt. Please put your name and country of residence under your poem, it makes the editors' work easier. Thanks.

2. Share your best-polished pieces.

3. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written.

Let it simmer for a while.

4. When poets give suggestions and if you agree to them - post your final edited version on top of your original version.

5. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished haibun (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly journal.