Poet's year in haiku (From Streatham Guardian)

Poet's year in haiku

9:53am Friday 29th January 2010

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On January 1, 2005, Teddington poet Hamish Ironside set himself a tough task – to write a haiku every day for the entire year.

He put in the kind of effort that a poetically-minded Hercules would have been proud of to ensure he ended the twelve months with 365 three-line poems.

These haiku have now been whittled down to 120 and published in an impressive new volume, Our Sweet Little Time.

Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry and, for students of the genre, a strict set of rules usually apply, including its three-line form with a five-seven-five syllable structure.

Yet Ironside says he was not afraid to thwart convention when coming up with his own collection of poems.

“It was an eventful year because I got married at the end of January and my wife gave birth in July to our daughter, Aspen,” he explains.

“There are lots of views about how formal English haiku should be – I have written some about the traditional haiku subject of the changing seasons but I didn’t want to impose rules on myself.

“I wanted to experiment with the form – I was reading writers like Kerouac at the time, who was shooting from the hip with his haiku, and they were all the better because of it.

“Some people will tell you haiku should never rhyme, but I wanted to write a few that did.

“I wanted the book to appeal to anyone who could pick up the book in a shop and immediately get what was going on.”

Plenty of the haiku in Our Sweet Little Time are off the cuff gags and, far from being a po-faced poet, Ironside says if he raises a laugh with his verses then all the better.

“I wanted some to be very immediate and, if someone tells me I made them laugh, then that is almost the best reaction you can get,” he adds.

Ironside, who works for a publisher of environmental books, says his regular runs along the Thames helped inspire many of the haiku and a few of our local feathered friends may well be recognisable to readers.

“I lived in Putney at the time but I still go running along the same stretch of the river,” he says.

“That is really when I gauge what is going on in the natural world.

“As I live in an urban area and work in the centre of London, it is hard to get a sense of the changing seasons and it is great to escape onto the river.

“The parrots you get all over the place offer a magic to the area and they pop up in a number of the poems – you have this very English scene, but then you get these exotic birds flying about all over the place.

“It might seem odd to someone reading the book in the north of England but, if you live locally, you know what that is all about.”

Our Sweet Little Time, published by haiku specialists Iron Press, is split into 12 chapters, each representing a different month of the year, with each month introduced with a black and white illustration, by Barnaby Richards, many featuring Ironside himself. Since his daughter was born, he says writing in a shorter form has been perfect as he has found his spare time to be at a premium, but he says he has every intention of returning to writing longer poems eventually.

When he does return to that discipline he can rest assured he has, with Our Sweet Little Time, created the perfect record of his year in haiku.

Our Sweet Little Time is available from Waterstone’s branches in Richmond, Teddington and Twickenham.

For more information, visit ironpress.co.uk

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