“For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Like everyone else, I was taught in grade school that haiku are just syllable-counting exercises, composed in three lines of 5-7-5. But when I started to attend the Boston Haiku Society, I found out that real haiku are about a moment of perception: seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. That's what allows the poet to pack a complete work of art into such a tiny space.
If you'd like to see some samples of my poetry and prose, read on.
For a chronological (and complete) list, here are all of my published haiku and senryu — so far.
If you're interested in learning more about haikai (haiku and related forms), here are some of my favorite print and online haikai resources.
My Western poems were first published, and reprinted, nationally in 1983. Here's my "breakthrough" poem, "To Ariadne." It's written in what's generally known as "free verse." (Though Denise Levertov made a convincing case for the term "organic verse," in which the form and content develop together, organically, like a plant or animal.)
I've also written in more traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, etc.). The technical demands of those forms provide an opportunity for the poet to wrestle with — and in the process come to a deeper understanding of — the content of a poem. Unfortunately, not everyone takes that opportunity, though they may write in exact rhyme and meter. But as Yeats said, "everything that is personal soon rots: it must be packed in ice or salt."
Some time ago I developed a JavaScript tool to help my fellow poets "sustain a sestina." It keeps track of the complicated pattern of end-words for you as you compose your poem. Check it out, and let me know what you think.
With my instructor's permission, I wrote an online paper detailing the shift from oral culture to illumination to animation, complete with multimedia files (audio, video, and Flash animation).
My second language is German, and I've attempted some rough translations of the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke. I've also studied Old English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon), French, and Japanese, but I'm not fluent enough yet to translate more than a menu. One of these days.
In 1986 and 1987 I wrote two articles for the Minneapolis arts weekly City Pages: one on the first Doctor Who convention to come to the Twin Cities, and one on the annual science fiction convention Minicon.
At the same time I sold a photo to Starlog from an interview I conducted with the British actor Peter Davison, who played the fifth Doctor. (Starlog didn't buy my interview, just the photo.)
But all things must pass. In 1992 I commemorated the end of our Doctor Who fan club's newsletter — and of the club itself.
For more recent work, here's a feature article on haiku, and reviews of three books which appeared in the Harvard Book Review (Winter 2007), and a review of The Unworn Necklace in Modern Haiku (39.2, Summer 2008).
In the late 1980s my Doctor Who fan club made about a dozen videos. Eventually I wrote — and directed, produced, edited, etc. — my own, a parody of The Blues Brothers called The Blues Cousins. I followed that with two shorts: a trailer for a non-existent monster movie, and a fictional perfume commercial. All were done with the same group of friends. In a tragic twist of fate, they're now available on the Internet. ;-)
Every so often I get an idea for another video, and am seized by the urge to work again with my fellow MUMsters. But after a couple of days it passes. Usually.
In grade school and high school I wrote short stories which my teachers loved, though I knew they were little more than tributes to my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes. I invented a Holmsian hero, "Artimus Cauldon," named after Artemis Gordon (the smart one from the TV show The Wild Wild West) and a cauldron (where mysterious things are always bubbling). If you really want to see some of my early fiction, here's the first page from "The Hall of Fathers".
If you'd like to see some of my later fiction (and early Web development), you can find them at the site I set up for my former fiction teacher, Ian Leask.
Copyright 2008 by Keith Heiberg